Scripting News

Sometimes 140 characters is enough

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:59:02 GMT

Just figured something out.

People confuse passion with anger.

When I get excited I speak loudly and fast.

I'm not angry I'm happy!

Podcasts on FriendsOfDave

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:52:39 GMT

The three FriendsOfDave channels on Twitter, Identi.ca and FriendFeed now have a few podcast feeds. Several of them update on Sundays. Here's the full list of the sources we follow:

.

I highly recommend this feed, there aren't too many updates and all the writers are interesting people who travel the world intellectually, creatively and physically (a few are in Davos this week in Switzerland).

Over 400 people are following on Twitter.

Also the Wired feed on Twitter is powered by F-O-D software.

My new mission

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 14:05:09 GMT

Ever had this experience?

You think you know someone, you have them typecast as this type or that, and boom out of nowhere they do or say something that makes you wonder.

What do you do then?

There's no right answer to this question, but I think the answer reveals something about the person who answers it. Are you curious, forgiving, flexible, creative, imaginative, sympathetic? Actually I guess there is a right answer.

Yesterday I wrote on Twitter something pretty heavy, but I had just gotten off the phone with a very loving friend, and decided to confront something head-on that's been lurking in the shadows. I keep hoping it'll go away, but it never does.

There's this idea out there that I'm rude and angry and do things to deliberately hurt people. Nothing, I mean nothing, could be further from the truth.

This is what I mean by confronting it head-on.

In order to be a successful communicator, which I am -- you have to have a high degree of empathy. You have to be able to jump out of your own body and into the body of the reader, and imagine what it's like to read the words. The writer already knows what he or she is trying to communicate. The only way to judge writing, and thereby improve it, is to learn from people who are confused by it, who draw the wrong conclusion. You don't assume that they failed, quite the opposite, you try to learn how you failed. And then you incorporate that learning into your process.

The same is true for software design, for getting adoption for ideas like blogging and podcasting, and developer relations -- pushing for RSS, OPML, XML-RPC and SOAP. It's all about communication (at its most mundane) and about empathy. Without empathy, none of this could happen.

Now for their own reasons, there have always been people who try to stand in the way. You can't get something new done without that happening. This is a lesson I never wanted to learn, but I've had to. It started pretty early in my career, but not at the beginning. When I was a grad student, working on my first outliner, everyone at UW was very supportive. They didn't necessarily understand what I was doing (one prof introduced me as the guy who does great error messages) but they thought it was good that I was trying to create new stuff.

The roadblocks first showed up when I shipped my first commercial product. And the second, and so on. In the market, people are always trying to make you stumble. It's called competition. I don't do it much anymore, but I used to do it, a lot. I didn't care if my competitors didn't like me. That's part of the whole thing.

But at UserLand I stopped being so competitive, I think that's part of the problem UserLand had, and why it failed. I was more into the open source philosophy like Rodney King, why can't we all just get along. People thought I was a hypocrite, even though I wasn't competing, I guess people thought I was. Maybe that's the only model they have for human behavior.

So yes, I am one of the most hated people on the Internet, but I honestly don't believe what people hate is me, I believe they hate what people have told them to hate.

And I'm beginning a campaign, a relentless one, to reverse that.

How Twitter makes you a better writer

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 13:20:01 GMT

Twitter forces you to write concisely, and that makes for crisper, more direct, easier to read copy.

I was reminded of this ~~when reading a piece written~~ by Dan Santow at Edelman PR, who offers a list of phrases that can be replaced by single words without loss of meaning.

I realized you never see these phrases in Twitter-talk because there's no space for flowery prose with only 140 characters to express an idea.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for the pointer.

What made the Mac different

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 02:38:32 GMT

Rex Hammock: "It's hard to convey to my kids how radically different the Mac was from any consumer-oriented computer that came before."

So here's a list of things, off the top of my head, that made the Mac radically different from any other computer, 25 years ago, from my point of view.

1. Guy Kawasaki. He's going to think I'm stroking him for saying this, but he got me my first look at the Mac, and my first Mac. Up until that point, there had been platform vendors who sought out developers, but they were of a previous generation, and didn't even remotely speak our language. Guy came to us, asked if we would develop for the Mac. Of course we would. We would have begged to, we would have barked like dogs to get a pre-release Mac, but he didn't make us. A proud developer who feels appreciated can make great software. One who has to swallow his pride to get the gig -- not so much.

2. Guy Kawasaki. Now he's really going to think I'm stroking him. Guy not only spoke our language but he spoke Apple's language. When we needed to get things done inside Apple, he managed them on our behalf. Believe me that was necessary, because while a small number of people inside Apple wanted developer support, the company was leaning toward the very big developers, Lotus, Microsoft and Software Publishing. Guy believed in the little guys, like my team, and it turned out he was right and they were wrong. The products that made the Mac were ones no one had heard of: Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, Quark XPress, Filemaker, BBEdit, Macromind Director, 4D, Think C and Pascal. Borland, Ashton-Tate and the other BigCo's, the ones that Apple management courted, with the exception of Microsoft, never shipped anything worthy of the Mac. (Microsoft shipped a number of good products for the Mac: Excel, MSIE/Mac, and eventually Word.)

2a. I almost put Guy here again, so I could say it's like "Location, location, location" -- but I thought that would be too much, even for Guy.

3. A graphic display. Every pixel could be programmed by software. Before this, computers displayed grids of 24 lines with 80 characters each. That was considered a fancy computer! Many of us used computers that displayed 40 characters per line, all upper-case. And we thought they were pretty cooool!!

4. User interface guidelines. At first I thought they were retarded, then I became a believer. There were pros and cons. The pros: Every app interacted with the user the same way. If you learned how the menus worked in one Mac app you knew how they worked in all Mac apps. This is a principle I apply to this day. The cons: They were designed the way word prcessors work. If your app had a different model, as our outliners did, the UI guidelines forced an inconsistent conceptual model on the user. In the end this wasn't as big a problem as I thought it would be.

5. 32-bit linear address space. A very hidden feature, like Guy Kawasaki, users couldn't see this one, but it meant that the Macintosh could grow to support huge graphic apps like Photoshop and Quark without the horrible complexities of memory expansion on IBM-compatibles. I came to believe that this reason alone was the reason the Mac continued to sell through the early-mid 90s. Without this advantage, Apple's famous bozo-osity could have spelled the end.

6. The clipboard. There was a standardized way to move data between apps. I thought this was so important I asked for and got a meeting with Bill Gates in 1985 to urge him to add a clipboard to MS-DOS (it was totally possible). He said they were working on a new operating system that would have one, which turned out to be OS/2. Almost no one used it. The Mac was the first PC to have a clipboard, and the only one for a very long time.

7. It didn't look like a computer. This may be the hardest thing to describe, but I remember the first moment I saw a Mac. I was being led into a conference room on Bandley Drive for a demo and on the way to the room I saw a Mac on a table in another room and was struck. It was upright, where most computers were modular and sort of sloped. It was small. Most computers were white, it was beige. But it just looked strange but really interesting. (Kind of like the reactions I get to my netbook these days.) Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, the French entrepreneur who started Acius, says: "It looked like an appliance made for normal people."

I'm leaving room here for other ideas as the come along, if they do. Feel free to add your own in the comments on this post.

How blogging was born

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:32:36 GMT

Thanks: gapingvoid.

25 years ago today

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 16:06:14 GMT

Update: What made the Mac different.

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.

Update: Actors can be realllly entertaining.

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.