Scripting News

Actors and non-actors

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:03:43 GMT

In journalism, there's a big difference between the actors and the non-actors. The actors are trying to create an effect, you're not hearing what they really think, you're hearing what they want you to think they're thinking. Non-actors try to play it straight. They want to communicate their ideas accurately and persuasively, and strive to find better and better ways to do that. It's true in journalism and it's equally true in blogging.

To explain the idea to a journalist friend I thought of two people he would be likely to know, two extreme examples: Scott Rosenberg and John Dvorak.

Rosenberg is the former managing editor of Salon, film critic at the SF Examiner. Dvorak is a longtime tech columnist, I read him 30 years ago in Infoworld, then PC mag. Now he's a blogger and podcaster. Rosenberg and Dvorak are very different sorts of reporters.

In person, Dvorak is a gentleman and really nice thoughtful guy. On the web and in his podcast, he's an actor playing the role of a cranky, thoughtless clown.

In this video Thoughtful Dvorak explains Dvorak the Actor:

Rosenberg on the other hand, if you met him in person, would say the same things he says in his online personna.

That analogy exists in the blogosphere as well.

If you were to meet me in person, like Rosenberg, I would say the same things that I say on the web. There aren't two Daves. This is me, I write more formally here, more thoughtfully, I can revise my writing, but you're getting my actual opinions, not a simulation.

However, some of the people I have interacted on the web with are not playing it straight. I don't want to name anyone specifically, because that would just invite the kind of slapstick they use to build traffic. But they do exist, and they often admit privately, as Dvorak does openly, that they don't really believe what they say in their online writing. Whether they want to declare it or not is their business.

However, I think it's important to understand the difference. An apparent pie fight isn't always what you think it is. Sometimes it's one of the clowns of our medium trying to cover up something real they don't want people to look at.

Dvorak's sleight of hand is harmless, almost everyone knows he's doing it. But the other kind is not so harmless. A good journalist must dig past the surface and figure out who are the actors and who's telling you what they really think.

Why was yesterday a Blue Thursday?

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:19:44 GMT

I know it wasn't just me -- yesterday was a pretty negative day for a lot of people. Nothing seemed right. People picked yesterday to deliver bad news they had been holding on to. To tell others what they really thought of them. Even if nothing specific happened the general mood for some was suppressed if not downright depressed.

In hindsight it would have been better to stay in bed yesterday, call in sick, just sit it out.

Why yesterday?

In the middle of the night I figured it out.

For most of us it's no longer Yes We Can, it's Yes We Did.

It's not Change You Can Believe In, any more -- instead The Change Happened Now Get Back To Your Life.

While we watch from afar, we see people who have great meaning to their lives, who every day have something to do that excites and inspires them, for the rest of us -- we know the feeling, we used to have it, until Thursday morning, when it all came crashing down. Reality reinvoked, our normal humdrum lives reappeared, and we have to live them. There are taxes to pay, appointments to make, charges to answer, etc etc.

And there's Camelot on TV, but that's someone else's life, not ours.

If only we had been lifted out of our lives permanently.

But today's Friday. Thursday is behind us now.

Maybe that was the worst of it.

PS: Think you have it bad? You could be John Kerry.

Something strange and geeky

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:53:46 GMT

I've been working on an app that archives the tweets of the people I follow in OPML. I want to plug this into the Instant Outliner at some point, that's why the format is OPML. So then the question is, how will I know which users have updated and when. I thought about it and thought about it and then it hit me in a flash. I have a format for that. It goes back to 1999, and it scaled up to millions of changes every day.

http://twitter.opml.org/calendar/changes.xml

It works.

Now this is only going to make sense to people who really followed this stuff. There might be 25 such people in the world. But for a few of them it's going to be fairly delicious. (Not del.icio.us.)

This land is your land

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:28:22 GMT

"This land was made for you and me." -- Woodie Guthrie.

"This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." -- Abraham Lincoln.

"We the People of the United States..." -- The Constitution.

Our new President has said repeatedly, and correctly -- we can't wait for someone else to do the job, we must do it ourselves. That is so totally consistent with the philosophy of the country, and perhaps not unremarkably -- the web too.

Go back to the beginning, the web was created in that spirit, and whenever it runs out of juice we go back to the well, draw another bucket of irreverence and gumption, and create something new.

It's not the nature of the US to wait for someone else to do the job, and it's not the nature of the web.

When I looked at the Clinton whitehouse.gov, I felt no urge to get involved, these were the people who promoted the Communication Decency Act, which failed to extend First Amendment to the web. (And that's being generous.) They were the enemy of freedom, their website was not something I wanted to help.

Same with the Bush whitehouse.gov, although I gotta say, the people who claim the Obama whitehouse.gov is so innovative must not have looked at the Bush website. They had all the technical innovation of the Obama one.

As I said clearly, I supported Obama. So quickly people forget. But that website, until I give up, is mine and yours as much as it is the webmaster's. If they construct it in such a way that that's not true, then they have failed to live up to the promise of the United States and the promise of the web. And since the web is the hub for idea exchange, it means that everything else they try will be crippled, the attempt to restart the economy, to create a spirit of volunteerism, to get health care and education working, to promote our revolution of individual freedom to the rest of the world.

A lot of people who use the web these days don't know how to create a web, they know how to use what was created. In some ways, some times change must come incrementally, and patience is the right course of action. But sometimes, and this is one of those times, it must come in one big discontinuous spurt and then we figure out what happened in subsequent years.

The people who tell themselves and others that they run the world are placeholders, if they urge caution and safety. These are not safe times. Those people are going to be swept away by the change that's on its way. This is not a time for caution, it's a time for courage, intelligence and creativity.

Update: The Washington Post says the Obama team found a White House in the technological dark ages when they arrived on Tuesday.

The White House website

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:23:22 GMT

The new whitehouse.gov is a nice looking site, it's centered around a blog. They promise lots of media, podcasts, videos, etc. In 2001 or 2004 even, it would have been a wonderful breakthrough and I would be singing its praise. But this is 2009, and we know so much more about the web.

Look at it another way. I don't know about you but I gave to Obama, I prayed for his election because we desperately need new approaches to the problems we face. We've postponed this day for too long. We must stop driving gas guzzlers, we have to invest in education, health care. We must prepare for the economy we now live in, not the one we used to. We have wars to end and bridges to build, "political wedges" to undo. All of this will require a very efficient flow of ideas and exchange of perspective. That's where, of course, the web comes in.

But whitehouse.gov violates the most basic rule -- "People come back to places that send them away." The White House should send us to places where our minds will be nourished with new ideas, perspectives, places, points of view, things to do, ways we can make a difference. It must take risks, because that is reality -- we're all at risk now -- hugely.

I don't advocate a blogging host like the Obama campaign website. There are already plenty of places to host blogs. But I do want the White House to be a public space, where new thinking from all over the world meets other new thinking. A flow distributor. A two-way briefing book for the people and the government.

We need the minds of industry, education, health care, government, people from all walks of life, to connect. It doesn't have to be whitehouse.gov, but why not, why wait?

We're all watching the new President very carefully. It makes sense that he's open to ideas from Republican columnists and Republican preachers. I get it. Inclusiveness. But when it comes to the best ideas of the web, the sign on the President's door says "Please wait" instead of "The fierce urgency of now." I think he was right the first time. You need the web Mr. President, now, and we need to get in there and do our work.

Update #1: Der Spiegel piece on whitehouse.gov. (In German.)

Update #2: NYT roundup of reviews of whitehouse.gov.

Today's NY Times front page

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:34:31 GMT

Good morning USA

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 11:36:27 GMT

It's a new morning in America.

The house on the hill.

A thousand points of light.

It's the economy dummy!

Compassionate conservative.

Yes we can!

PS: Yesterday's special home page is archived.

By dawn's early tweet

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:21:51 GMT

My first tweet of the day, unedited: "Really feely unhinged this morning. There was some security in GWB's mediocrity. Now, there won't be an excuse, it' s now -- not later."

It's true. I've had an unsettled feeling. Can't deny it, can't wish it away.

On the radio this morning, while the coffee is brewing, news that the milk market has collapsed and dairy farmers are selling their cows.

China is asking for immediate talks with the new US president, about security and the shape of the world economy. Everything is up for grabs in the latter. This time it's not about the power of the military, but which economy will emerge in what kind of shape after the reshaping that's going on. Profound changes ahead. At stake is the western style of life. The inaugural could be our last great party with all the bells and whistles? I don't know.

After dinner the other day, driving down a main street in the East Bay, I asked my date if she thought this street would look more or less the same in a year's time. She said yes. I said was not so sure. I wanted to believe it would.

But for the next few hours it's time to measure all we've accomplished. Aretha will sing America The Beautiful from the steps of the Capitol in a few hours. Do you need any more symbolism than that? We've come of age, my generation. We're running the world now, what's left of it.

This may be the apex, the climax of America, the top of the mountain Martin Luther King dreamed of. Where can we go from here?

It's a potent moment.

Shortly after our previous President took office I wrote: "Now I'm not a Republican, far from it, most of the things Republicans stand for are things I'm against. But there's something satisfying about the Bush Presidency, and for a time I couldn't put my finger on exactly what it is. Now I think I get it. If this guy could be president, anyone could. He bumbles along twisting around his mouth when he speaks, with his Texas accent that I don't believe. I imagine him on the scene of The West Wing, reading his lines, and sipping his coffee saying "Oh this is really good coffee, thanks." He gets his cues from Dick Cheney, but he could just as easily get them from a TV series director. Smile here. Say something nice about America. Good job Dubya. Excellent."

Suffice to say I have higher hopes for his successor.

Test

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:47:57 GMT

The 24-minute news cycle

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:28:48 GMT

I woke up early this morning, about 4AM.

Went downstairs, turned on the radio to KQED-FM. They're interviewing Newt Gingrich, talking about the 24-hour news cycle, a major innovation they're adjusting to in DC.

I went upstairs with my coffee, did a few hours work, came downstairs for a break, turned on the radio, exactly the same bit is playing. Gingrich talking about the 24-hour news cycle.

Then I thought back to a moment, on Wednesday, when Twitter was carrying the instant news of Steve Jobs's leave of absence. At the exact same moment, came news of the death of Ricardo Montalban. I should have taken a screen shot, because there were constant tweets from people saying Did you hear about Steve Jobs. Did you hear about Ricardo Montalban.

I thought at the time, forget about the 24-hour news cycle, we have a new concept -- a news cycle measured in minutes. What made me think of it was in the midst of all this I saw a lonely tweet from a company I know announcing a contest for developers. I thought "too bad, no one's going to notice that."

This is what we're all working on -- have been for a couple of years -- how to make sense of news that flashes by at such a rapid rate that it pushes the envelope on human ability to notice things.

We may be lining up to eat at soup kitchens in 2009, but we'll have the fastest news cycle ever to keep us informed.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

The interactive living room of 2009

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 23:39:51 GMT

There's an interesting piece on TechCrunch today that's in part about using laptops while watching TV, something a lot of people do, and more will certainly do in the future.

This is the system I like. I've explained how it works over on Flickr. Click on the pic to go there.

FriendsOfDave in XML

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:23:04 GMT

First, a common request -- people have asked for an OPML subscription list for the FriendsOfDave Twitter/Identi.ca/FriendFeed feed. Done.

http://static.opml.org/twitterRiver/friendsOfDave.opml

But while I was doing this I had a thought that it's a micro-nano version of weblogs.com before it became a ping-server. If you recall, it used to poll for changes among a small set of weblogs. This method became unworkable because there were eventually too many blogs to poll. But FriendsOfDave is, by design, always going to be a small number of blogs. So I thought what the heck, let's have it generate a changes.xml file of its own.

http://static.opml.org/twitterRiver/friendsOfDaveChanges.xml

An old friend!

Now, why this is interesting? It's a key feature of the "real time web" that so many of us are thinking about. If every feed had someone watching out for them, along with 100 or so other blogs, then if a subscriber wanted to know if you changed, it would just have to watch the changes file. Of course if only one person they followed was represented in that file, no economy would be achieved, but if you group similar sites, ones that are likely to be followed by the same people, then you do get the economy.

Somehow the feed has to tell followers where their collection point is. Way back in time we used a category element at the top level of the feed to create this linkage. As far as I know no one build features on this, but they could have.

Will anything become of it this time around? Probably not, but it's still kind of interesting, if only for the nostalgic value.

This Land is Your Land

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:13:47 GMT

For me this was the most emotional moment of yesterday's concert at the Lincoln Memorial: Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen leading a chorus of This Land is Your Land.

All those people singing, and Pete Seeger after all these years -- he can still lead a crowd in song.

I like my sex (and scifi) with mystery!

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:09:58 GMT

I think it's true of all literature, media and sex -- that it's not what you say that creates the attraction, it's what you don't say. Or don't show. Or don't know.

The imagination may be the most pleasurable or pleasure-seeking organ in the human body.

A naked woman isn't necessarily as sexy as one wearing clothes, something many visitors to a nude beach are surprised to discover. It's not a turn-on to see the naked bodies, full disclosure isn't sexy. It's the path, how you got there that creates the excitement.

It's something we discovered in the early days of podcasting, something that was known to our parents' generation, that listening to radio programs activates the imagination in ways that television and movies never can. It's almost physiological. The human brain can't help itself, it must fill in unknown detail. So if you tell a story with words and no pictures, the imagination takes over and tells the rest of the story.

Have you ever been shocked to find out what a favorite radio talk show host looks like, how different it was from who you imagined him or her to be? That's the effect.

In this way, the remake of Battlestar Galactica has been one of the most smashing successes of television scifi. Every time they fill in a blank, they reveal five unknowns to take its place, and your mind takes off wondering who or what is behind the next set of doors.

But now the series is in its final run of episodes, and last night was the first installment of that run, and now we know a lot of what we didn't know before. The characters are all depressed, as we are -- because the fun is over? What could possibly be next.

Heather Havrilesky, writing in Salon, says it's always like this. We remember the first Star Wars in 1977 (I sure do, I saw it at a packed theater on Capitol Square in Madison in the middle of a raging snow storm with a half-dozen room mates). "There's an evil guy and a princess (a princess!) and robots and planets with three suns. Suddenly, the whole world feels like it belongs to you!" Three years later I'm in Sunnyvale, watching the next installment with a business associate, but it's just not the same. The magic isn't there.

Maybe the same with Battlestar Galactica. But only maybe. We don't know how this is going to turn out.

But now maybe I'm seeing the wisdom of the finale of The Sopranos. Maybe I don't want resolution of everything, maybe the series should end on the Mother Of All Cliff Hangers, the greatest imaginable, and one that never gets resolved.

We've already got a tease of what that might be, but there's still nine episodes to go, and I plan to watch each with the hope to not know everything, and to be delighted by the mystery.

A URL Czar for Google?

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 14:11:21 GMT

A simple idea in a twit.

Google should hire someone to beautify their URLs. Seriously would make their products 100 percent more attractive and usable.

I'm always cleaning up their URLs. Why can't they do that for me?

For example -- a Google Map link to the Empire State Building:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Empire+State+Building,+New+York,+NY&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=46.36116,66.708984&ie=UTF8&z=16&iwloc=A

And if you don't sign out first, they include your home address in the URL. Oy. Talk about security leaks. Geez Louise. Someone at Google, please get a clue!

Anyway why shouldn't this be, simply:

http://maps.google.com?q=Empire+State+Building,+New+York,+NY

I just filled out my profile. Its url is:

http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/103628798844723879427

Why not:

http://users.google.com/dave.winer/

And on and on.

Lady Bird Johnson had a program to beautify America's highways. Google needs someone to beautify their information superhighway.

Instant Outlining gets discovered

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:48:00 GMT

This is quite an article. Very gratifying.

Twitter asks What are you doing? the Instant Outliner asks you to Narrate Your Work.

It's a project I developed in parallel with Radio 8, in 2001. We used it internally at UserLand to coordinate work among the people on the team who were in California, Seattle, Boston, Vancouver and Germany. We were spread across a lot of time zones and geography, but our work was remarkably well coordinated because we had what I think is the best management technology ever. As the manager of the team, I can tell you I never had a better read on what my guys were doing. I could see progress on various sub-projects, get feedback from everyone, build consensus, spot problems.

The reason why Radio 8 was such a great release was because we had a great workgroup tool -- the Instant Outliner.

We tried to release it as a product, but it didn't catch on. Partly, I think, because people were using Radio as a web server, and it was confusing that it was also an outliner. The mode flip blew up the suspension of disbelief. You had to really understand the technology to make the switch.

You also had to have a workgroup ready to use it, and that may have been the biggest reason it didn't gain traction. It wasn't hard for us to find individuals who were turned on by the idea, but when they in turn had to convince their co-workers to use the tool, that's when it fell down. It worked at UserLand because: 1. We were all techies. 2. I made it a requirement. 3. I was the boss. 4. But more importantly, I had their respect. And for some people it was impossible for them to get on board, they just weren't that organized or systematic in their work, but that may not have been apparent before we started using the Instant Outliner, it certainly became very apparent when we did. And it helped me, as the manager, know where I had to focus some attention, to help keep the individuals on track. Wouldn't have known it otherwise, esp in such a geographically diverse team.

Anyway, if people are interested, esp now that things like Twitter and FriendFeed are out there, we could try again. I actually have been working on and off on the I/O tool since we started NewsJunk last summer. During the Christmas break I took some time to convert it to run on top of FriendFeed's realtime API, and it make it much more efficient and much faster. They really do some good work down there at FF. Their back-end is a perfect match for the I/O front-end. (Which by the way, runs inside the OPML Editor.)

No matter what it's wonderful to see people discovering this work, and seeing it with new relevance given the state of technology today.

My heartfelt epic blog post about Steve Jobs

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:24:38 GMT

Apple CEO Jobs

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Update: Scoble says you'd be an idiot to sell your AAPL.

A new way of linking in tweets

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:20:08 GMT

Following up on the discussion about displaying links in tweets.

1. This is what a link looks like, in text:

41 people call this [photo|http:\//bit.ly/DMhr] a favorite.

2. When rendered:

41 people call this photo a favorite.

I've posted a number of tweets in this format, and so far no one has expressed any confusion about it, or even curiosity. I guess they just figure it out? Not sure.

Thanks to Chuck Shotton and Steven Levy for pressing the point.

Update: David Berlind asks "Would the markup syntax eat into the 140 char limit?" -- yes -- there's 3 added characters for each link.

Update: Joey Baker has a great idea. If the stuff betw the pipe and the right square bracket doesn't begin with "http://" the displaying software should add it. That's 7 characters saved. Worth doing, imho.

A story unfolds on Twitter

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:20:48 GMT

Someone I know, not well, who lives far away is going through hell. The story is notable because it's unfolded in real time on Twitter.

I don't want to say who because: 1. It's very heavy. 2. I don't want to burden this person with the decision about how public she wants to be. If she reads this and says it's okay to post a link to the on Twitter, I will. If not, I'll wait.

I wanted to write about it because the story is so powerful.

It begins a few days ago, her mother is sick. She takes her to the hospital. It's obviously pretty bad, but we don't know how bad. Not clear if they do, but her mother is terrified. The sister is there, with neices. They argue about something. The mother gets worse. The doctors do tests. The mother dies.

From there the situation spins out of control. The story is told with a very wet brush, with lots of paint splattering all over the place in 140-character snippets separated by huge gaps of time. It's the unpredictability of it that makes it so compelling.

I can't imagine the pain.

But there it is, shared, in real time, with a few hundred on-lookers.

I feel like I'm witnessing history.

It helps that the protagonist is a great writer.

Who will prosecute Bush?

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:22:46 GMT

Pretty sure someone in the Bush Administration is going to get prosecuted for war crimes. And the lower-downs were smart this time, they made sure the higher-ups were on the hook, at least according an interview on Fresh Air last summer with Phillippe Sands, an international expert on war crimes prosecution.

When I've heard this discussed in the media recently they've been approaching it as if it were an American decision whether or not to prosecute Bush. Obama could just punt, and let the international authorities worry about it. Then the question is would the US protect a former President against prosecution.

Because this is such a touchy subject I feel it's necessary to say that I don't know the answer, I see both sides. If Bush is prosecuted, it could serve as a deterrent to future Presidents against committing war crimes, or it could have a chilling effect and make Presidents fearful of defending the country, knowing that their fate and the country's will be separated after they leave office. (It's hard to imagine a sitting President surrendering to international prosecution.)

I will say this, I thought it was good that Ford pardoned Nixon. The country had other big problems to deal with in the 70s, and we had already paid a terrible price for the Watergate scandal. In many ways the same can be said of the fix we find ourselves in now, in 2009.