Scripting News

Death of Journalism, part 3

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:59:14 GMT

I think I've boiled down what I've been predicting would happen for 15 years, in a single phrase.

When you get it so distilled it's worth repeating.

Why journalism is dead 3.0: The sources got blogs.

Or they're using Twitter...

I read a piece by Karl Rove in the WSJ that said Obama is doing something Rove and the Republicos do all-too-well -- according to Rove he invented someone to disagree with. Here's how you do it:

1. Talk about how there are "those who say" and then say what they say.

2. Explain how you considered the possibility that they were right, but decided in the end, they weren't.

3. So you come off as entirely reasonable and they come off as the loutish pricks you always intended them to be.

I didn't think Obama was actually doing what Rove accused him of. So I said to Rove, in a tweet: "Obama's 'straw man' has a name, it's spelled R-E-A-G-A-N." A few hours later Rove responded with a DM, saying that Obama didn't understand Reagan, or was deliberately misrepresenting him. I got the last word, reminding Rove that Obama is a politician, so -- BFD.

Is this news or journalism? No, it's not either. If it's anything it's meta-news, news about news. But it's still interesting, imho. We've arrived at a place where a political spinmeister, former adviser to the President can get fact-checked by a random blogger, and get a confusing response. That seems a lot like the job that George Stephanopoulos or Bob Schieffer has. Decide for yourself if what they do is news or not.

A tweet I received, one among many, from a reporter who thinks I need to be reminded again that we will miss them when they're gone. It seems like the last final days of journalism in the US are going to be filled with this bile. Instead, we could be booting up the next version of journalism.

Yes we will miss you when you're gone. Now what?

No, we're not going to ask the government to pay your salaries. I'd like the govt to pay me a salary for what I do. I don't see you rushing to my defense. Oh please pay Dave for writing Scripting News. Everyone would like to be paid for their labor of love.

The reporters rush right by the readers in their pleas. Our only job is to miss or not miss them. This, imho, is the fatal bug in the old way of doing journalism, it's wrong, it never was that way. We were always active participants in news, either by creating it or being effected by it. Before they rush around us to take our money from the government, how about a conversation first, ask us what we want from journalism, what we like and don't like -- and don't assume you know the answer. (The journalists' answer is that we want sports, movie stars, bosoms, car crashes. You know that because that's most of what they give us. Maybe that's why no one is rushing to their defense. Just a thought.)

Dear news people -- WE ARE NOT HAPPY WITH THE JOB YOU'RE DOING.

Isn't that the obvious take-away from the downward spiral of the news industry? Isn't it amazing that the last people they think to blame for their problem is themselves? (Totally understandable of course.)

In any case, please consider the possibility that this point of view is valid. Thanks, big hugs, Dave.

Investigative journalism

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:07:42 GMT

The last interview I did with a reporter from MSM was in 2006, pretty sure of that, just before Chris and Ponzi's wedding. It so ridiculous that it was almost a comedic (not the wedding, the interview).

I only did the interview as a favor to Ponzi, otherwise I never would have talked with the reporter. She was doing a story on weird uses of electronic gadgets, or at least that's what I was told. I was to talk with her about the gadgetry that Chris and Ponzi were going to use at their wedding.

I spoke with the reporter for about 45 minutes, most of which she spent grilling me about my conflicts of interest. That what was so funny. I was an unemployed wandering programmer-pundit. I didn't have a job or a company. I owned a bit of Apple stock (which I told her about) and some government bonds. Otherwise I had absolutely no business interests whatsoever. But somehow she thought that, by repeating questions, she'd get me to reveal some secret scandal that would uncover a nest of whatever relating to Ponzi's wedding? You're kidding, I kept saying. This is the biggest joke I've ever seen (and at one point I asked her if this was a prank call, something Ponzi dreamed up to "get" me, in which case I thought she was doing a great job).

I kept saying that I don't care if you quote me. I don't have a product to promote. I'm only doing this interview because my friends are getting married and they asked me to do it as a favor, and how could you say no when they're getting married? Oy.

I wasn't quoted in the piece. Basically the story was that Chris and Ponzi exchanged vows in text messages in front of family and friends. That's basically all they said in the story. I don't know who else they talked to but no one was quoted in the story, so all the investigation apparently turned up nothing.

So what do I think of investigative journalism? Well, they had zero chance of uncovering a scandal. If I were doing something unethical, I wouldn't tell the reporter, no matter how many times she asked. And that was the last time I put up with this nonsense. What they do is a joke. Maybe they believe they get stories this way, but I don't.

How will we get our news?

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:56:44 GMT

It looks like journalism is dying.

On Twitter, there are a lot of people arguing, and I wonder why.

Much of the arguing goes like this: We need journalism. How will we do X, Y and Z if there's no journalism? The assumption seems to be that if I, Dave Winer, can't answer that question, then journalism is saved. The papers that are on the brink somehow just need me to be proven incapable of doing what they do, and that's it, crisis averted. It's ridiculously illogical. It makes absolutely no sense. Yet that is what comes back every damned time I approach subject which is -- How are we going to get our news after the newspapers go away?

It's a serious question.

Not an intellectual exercise.

There's nothing really to argue about, is there? If so, I'm missing it.

Dispassionately, please...

1. The Rocky Mountain News, one of two papers in Denver, went under last week.

2. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of two papers in Seattle, is on the edge.

3. The San Francisco Chronicle, the only remaining paper in SF is on the edge.

4. At least seven other papers are in the same place.

5. The NY Times was just bailed out by a shady billionaire from Mexico.

6. If you're thinking the government will bail out the papers, think about what we'd be left with. We'd have to come up with something else.

So -- under what scenario do we have newspapers in, say, a year? I don't see one.

How will we get our news? -- It's not an idle question to be debated after dinner with cigars. It's a critical question.

At some point we will have to have this discussion. Imho, the sooner the better.

A billion Twitters?

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:28:20 GMT

In 1995 I wrote a piece that envisioned billions of websites, one for every person on the Internet. At the time this was considered unlikely by most experts, they believed the web would evolve to become like TV, with three major networks, Yahoo, Lycos and Alta Vista. Google wasn't even born yet, yet many thought it was already over. Having been around the loop several times by then, I was sure the shakeout hadn't happened. Today I am confident that there will be thousands of Twitters, maybe millions. Just as in 1995, there are arguments that say this is wrong. "Everyone's on twitter.com," seems to be the main one, and it's a good argument. But let me argue with it.

1. I was lucky when I was a kid, I grew up within walking distance of Shea Stadium in NYC. On summer afternoons I could go with a friend or my brother and sit in the grandstands for $1.65 and watch the best teams in baseball beat the Mets. Everyone went to Shea Stadium, it was the best place for baseball in Queens, but we also played baseball at the schoolyard down the street. They were different experiences, but both were baseball, and they co-existed perfectly, in fact you could say they helped each other. Other sports worked the same. Every playground had basketball, and you could also go to Madison Square Garden to watch the Knicks.

2. The fact that "Everyone's on twitter.com" in some ways works against twitter.com. It's become the honeypot for all kinds of crackpots and schemers. Some people are calling themselves Twitter Pros now. Social Media Marketing Experts. I got a reply from someone today thanking me for following them; I hadn't followed them. Everyone's getting huge numbers of DMs sent from robots representing people they don't know. They come to Twitter for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks.

3. All Twitters will start at the same place with the same limits, but it will be hard to evolve the mother ship, so innovation will happen more quickly in the smaller communities. Leo Laporte has pioneered here with the TWiT Army community. There will be many others. I totally want to start one for scripting.com to serve as an adjunct to the discussions that take place in the comments on blog posts. This community loves change. A system with tens of millions of users will, necessarily, change much more slowly.

Tomorrow there will be a open hackfest for Laconica, the open source software behind identi.ca and Leo's twitter, in Berkeley, starting at noon. I plan to be there for part of the day, to talk about how to get lots of these systems started in a variety of contexts.

Update: A random idea. Why shouldn't it be possible, using the FriendFeed API, to define a service that's a subset of what FF does, that more or less matches the (smaller) feature set of Twitter, and for a smaller community.

You're being insensitive

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:13:41 GMT

I have 18K followers on Twitter. Probably twice that here on the blog. With that many people tuned in no matter what I say someone will be offended.

If I say the weather is nice, someone will say I'm not being sensitive to people who live where the weather is bad.

I could say I'm getting a cold, people who have cancer say I'm being insensitive.

Does everyone have to adopt every point of view one hundred percent of the time? Of course not. There are six billion people. Do the math. We'd all blow up if we tried. None of us are god, not even the President of the United States (who btw gave a fantastic speech last night). If I called the President and said "Mr. President great speech but last night you were insensitive to the plight of people like me," do you think I'd get past the White House switchboard? "Send us an email so we can file it with the 100 million others we get every day."

Insensitive! Sure. And necessary.

I've been writing publicly for a long time, so I've had plenty of time to think about being insensitive. People have accused me of it for 15 years. Since I was one of the first to blog, my sin is original, legendary, unique. The reason I hear so much of it, I've concluded, is that I'm accessible. If you send me an email and it doesn't get trapped in a spam filter somewhere (try leaving out the links) I will read it. You can reach me. I'm an icon to enough people, a reason to hate or object or be offended, and unlike other human objects, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, The Dalai Lama, or Pope Benedict -- I will read what you say. They probably get 10000 times more angst than I do, but most of it doesn't reach them.

When I started out I thought -- I'm going to do it differently, I'm really going to say what I think all the time. Bad idea.

Now when I get one of these emails or tweets or blog comments, I've learned not to respond with what I really think.

A friend of a friend runs a major independent film festival. You'd know its name. People ask all the time what he thinks of their movie. He never says. He always waffles, finds something about the movie that's praiseworthy. "I thought the scenery was fantastic!" or "The wardrobe person should win an Oscar" when he really thinks "This thing is a dog." He's learned, as I have, that people don't actually want to know what you think -- they want you to like it, to give them support, time, money, to think like they think, to see the world through their eyes, to give words of encouragement so everyone can see how wonderful they are because this wonderful person thought so.

I've learned if I say nothing that gets me the least angst. So that's what I usually do, say nothing. And every time I do it, my blood pressure goes up a teeny bit, and another hair either falls out or goes gray. Or maybe it goes gray and then falls out.

Last night the President said we need to assume responsibility. People who bought stock in a bank that is now underwater (liabilities greater than assets) have worthless stock. These banks must go into receivership, the worthless assets removed, and a new company launched, probably with the same name, and new stock issued, and sold to the public. That is what must happen for the financial system to reboot. Very little will be lost, since the stock of two main banks, Citi and BofA, are now worth a total of $36 billion. We, you and I, have already spent much more than that to try to get them stabilized and we will have to pay even more. Next time the shareholders get taken out. If they don't want it to happen, quickly find a management team that can make the math work without the people bailing you out. There is no third way.

Insentive to the shareholders? Perhaps. But they're not the only ones who matter. There are the depositors, the voters and taxpayers, other banks that aren't insolvent. Students who need loans to go to school. Hospitals who need credit to make payroll. Etc etc and on and on. On a scale of one to ten being sensitive to the needs of BofA shareholders isn't even on the scale, it's such a small number it's impossible to measure.

When I needed heart surgery in 2002 and the doctor told me my life was over if I didn't get it, you might say he was being insensitive, but he was telling me something that I knew was true that I needed to hear. Three days later after the surgery, recouperating, the surgeon told me if I resumed smoking I would be dead in three years. Again, insensitive (he said it with a smile on his face believe it or not), but I'm glad he said it. The way he said it made it easier to quit. Sometimes the truth hurts. You can't blame people for saying things they believe, even if it hurts you to hear it.

Bottom line: All adults have issues to deal with. These are trying times for everyone, and some more than others, for sure. But your problems are yours and mine are mine and you're not responsible for mine and vice versa.

PS: I liked that the President, up front, referred to us as "the men and women who sent us here." Nothing abstract about that. We're not The American People, or poll numbers, or users (who generate content), all of which are ways of making all of us inhuman. If you want people to be responsible adults, begin the pitch by calling them "men and women." Works for me.

PPS: Reminds me of a moment on Diane Rehm's radio show a few years back. Some pundit said her listeners wouldn't understand some reasonably obvious idea. She interrupted and said basically "Bullshit, my people are smart and educated and that's basic stuff." I yelled out loud to the radio "Right on!" -- I totally understood what the guy was talking about. I am extremely well educated and well-read. You have to try a lot harder if you want to stump me.

I got a Kindle 2

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:45:28 GMT

And it arrived today.

Just beginning to figure it out.

Do I have to pay to read my own blog?

And if so, who gets the money?

I don't recall receiving any checks from Amazon.

I signed up for a 14-day free trial subscription of the NY Times.

When I plugged it into the USB port on my Mac it showed up as a disk drive with 1.4GB free. I copied some Bruce Springsteen MP3s into the music folder. I wonder if there's some way to play them? Can I copy podcasts into it and play them?

Lance reviewed War And Peace, with a caveat: "It truly is annoying reading a 1,300-page book in bed. I regularly wished for a way to cut my volume up into its separate books." The translation he recommends is available for the Kindle for $1.99, With one click I had the first chapter sent to my Kindle, downstairs, for $0.00.

Here's what a NY Times article looks like on the Kindle. It took a long time for it to load, and the navigation interface is klunky. At least on Day One. Also wondering how I can bookmark it in a way that my CMS can find the link. I read on a netbook now and automatically post articles to Twitter. I have a feeling this is a closed system and there's no way to publish outside of it. Actually I can't imagine they view the reader as, in any way, a publisher. Of course I think of everyone as a publisher, even if all they publish are a stream of articles they've read. Ultimately I think in 20 years there will be no such thing as someone who only reads.

Lots of great tips from Josh Bancroft a longtime Kindle user.

Here's a picture of the Kindle next to an iPod and a Canon Elph camera, to give an idea of its size. It's probably a lot smaller than people imagine.

Publishing voicemail to Twitter, Friendfeed and Identi.ca

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:38:47 GMT

A new tool for the OPML Editor, it's what I use to connect voicemail I create using my iPhone to Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca.

http://editor.opml.org/blogTalkRadioTool.html

It's really easy to install, and you don't have to leave it running if you're at the computer when you post the voice message. Or, if you're going out -- just leave the OPML Editor running with the tool installed and when you post something, anywhere you have a cellphone signal, your followers will hear what's going on, in your own voice, with no 140 charcter limit.

This tool comes to you thanks to the Cinch service from BlogTalkRadio. It's an incredibly easy facility, there's no setup. Details on the howto link, above.

A postscript to today's piece

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:41:58 GMT

I'd say the chance, today, of some news organization trying the experiment outlined in today's earlier piece is virtually nil.

One commenter said yesterday: "What we need now are small ideas with obvious financial underpinnings that can grow organically to fill any unmet needs of customers."

To paraphrase, as the first passenger, in a bus careening down the steep mountainside, to observe that there's no driver, said: "We need small ideas to fix this problem." Yes, even big ideas are small given the dire circumstances. You won't get an argument from me. No sarcasm.

When they built the first Transcontinental Railroad, the guys heading east from California had a much harder job than the guys heading west from Omaha. Starting in Sacramento it went straight uphill, and didn't get any better when they got to the summit. So if approaching the new reality from the journalism side is so hard, maybe it's more approachable from our side. After all, what do we have to do, other than find a way to glue the experts together in a cohesive whole and give it authority. Not so easy -- that authority thing, but maybe it's easier than asking the professional news organizations to let their sources into their clubroom?

So what then? Well, turns there's a schematic for it, called Hypercamp, which is an awful name -- but it kind of stuck. It's the equivalent of a press room at a conference, with refreshments, excellent networking both technical and human, and accessible to both news reporters and news makers, without making too much of a fuss about which one you are (you're probably both). Two podia, one at either end of the room, rented by people with formal announcements to make, that's how the rent is paid. Otherwise everyone works for no one but themselves. I'd like to give this a try. Anyone in SF want to set one up? I'd be there from time to time, blogging and schmoozing.

There's another related idea, the Flash Conference -- a convention of experts brought together instantly to discuss some breaking news, to exchange ideas and perspectives, and disseminate them quickly while the story is still fresh. This is another approach that can begin before the news industry either: 1. Opens up. 2. Collapses. 3. Something else.

Can-do or no-can-do. There's not a lot of the latter in news these days -- no wonder the news is so depressing. Let's bring some of the former to the problem and see what happens. It's not like anyone gets out of this thing alive, you know.

Big hugs, Uncle Dave...

PS: I was talking with Nicco yesterday (Morra, his wife, had a baby six weeks ago, lovely little Asa, future football player, swimmer and President of the United States) and he tells me his class at KSG has to read this blog every day as part of their assignment. Excellent. So here's a project for you guys. Set one of these newsrooms up at Harvard. I'd come. I bet Berkman would help.

Opening the newsroom, Step 1

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:49:23 GMT

Yesterday's piece ended with: "At least the Times is using the right word these days -- open -- but not in the way that matters. They're willing to give away what we, in tech, have been giving away for a decade. Obviously that's not a disrupter. They need to give away what they have -- authority. The trick is to find a way to give it away without destroying it. If they can do it, then we will have cracked the nut, scale, massively more news, deeper coverage, and with it -- shifted economics."

And that's where we pick it up today.

Here's how you take the first step toward the open newsroom.

Pick a story that you're covering on an ongoing basis, something important enough that you've assigned one or more reporters to it full-time. Have them continue to do what they're doing, we're going to add to that coverage, in an experiment to learn how the newspaper of the future might work.

Now pick two or three experts on the same subject, and invite them into the newsroom. They will not be paid. No benefits. They agree to the same rules governing the integrity of your reporters. For a period of four weeks, they report to the newsroom, the physical one, not a virtual one, every day, and are part of your news team. They file stories every day, just as the reporters do, and they go through the same copy-edit process your reporters' stories go through, however they get final approval on the articles. The words that appear in the publication are their words, the ideas are their ideas. Their job is the same as the reporters' job -- to report the news. To explain what happened.

I don't know what will happen. It could be no one volunteers, then we either give up or formulate a different proposal. I don't know if their coverage will be as good as the reporters. The goal is to find out! Maybe it will be better.

Now, to be clear -- I'm not talking about recruiting idiots or people whose opinions are (in your opinion) worthless. I'm talking about respected experts, the kinds of people your reporters call to get a perspective on the news the people they quote. Instead of having them talk to the readers through the reporter, I want them to go directly. Their writing should be as readable as the reporters' so I would choose experts who express themselves well.

Anticipating another objection, yes the op-ed page already has some people like this, but not enough. I want people who might look at the news organizations as part of the story with a critical eye, something virtually no reporter does. I want to break as many of the rules of the news business without breaking the one sacred rule, that people report what they see, that they not deliberately mislead, or speak from their interest without disclosure.

Let's see if some creative news organization figures out a way to bring the sources into the newsroom.

Irrational Exuberance 1.0

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:16:47 GMT

Yesterday I posted one in a long series of screeds with a single-minded message to news organizations large and small: Open your newsrooms.

The first time I said this explicitly was over nine years ago in a rambling piece I wrote in Amsterdam after attending Davos for the first and last time. The question I was asked over and over was how would news organizations make money on the Internet. My opinion was widely sought then because the dotcom bubble had not yet burst, we were still in the age of Irrational Exuberance 1.0 (version 2 would come thanks to Craig Cline and Tim O'Reilly). Looking back it was so weird, the people pressing me hardest at the famous Schatzalp Lunch on the closing day were CEOs of major investment banking firms. They also wanted to take UserLand public, which I ignored as a ridiculous concept, but I smiled at the idea, everyone likes to be appreciated. I didn't offer them hugs, but I wish I had.

Back then (and still today) the only things I knew for sure were: 1. People's thirst for news and ideas was going up, not down and 2. The professional news organizations were not expanding to meet the demand, rather they were contracting. Therefore: 3. Something must rise to fill the gap. Beyond that, I could only guess how it would make money. Maybe they will make money by serving lattes to bloggers who work in their newsrooms. Maybe once there's a glut of conflicted points of view out there, the public will re-hire them to act as arbiters. I don't know. But as I said to Jay Rosen in an email yesterday, "Asking about business models now is way premature. First they have to restructure, learn how it works, and then we can figure out where the money comes from."

At least the Times is using the right word these days -- open -- but not in the way that matters. They're willing to give away what we, in tech, have been giving away for a decade. Obviously that's not a disrupter. They need to give away what they have -- authority. The trick is to find a way to give it away without destroying it. If they can do it, then we will have cracked the nut, scale, massively more news, deeper coverage, and with it -- shifted economics.

Playing with ginx.com

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:33:50 GMT

Yesterday I posted a twit saying I'd love to try out ginx.com, and within minutes I had a code and logged on. I was curious because it had been showing up in my referrer log for scripting.com, and when I clicked on one of the links it took me to a framed page with a comment at the top.

Viewed from the other side, Ginx is an alternate UI for Twitter, with some immediately obvious improvements. It understands links better than Twitter does, in addition to displaying the shortened version, it also displays the full URL, the one the short URL points to. In the screen shot, the red arrow points to the long version of a shortened URL, and displays the title of the page being pointed to. Both are nice touches, but not hard to do and at some point, Twitter will certainly do it.

Observation: Products like this have to do something that is either really hard, really niche, or against the philosophy of Twitter -- if they want to have a chance to co-exist.

One thing I would like them to do, which they apparently don't, is show a thumbnail of Flickr pictures when tweets point directly to something on Flickr. For MP3s, show a little MP3 player. These are ideas that are already implemented elsewhere, so it seems a requirement at this point.

When you click on a link from Ginx it takes you to a framed page where you can read the caption the linker added, and reply. Screen shot.

If you're a Ginx user -- what other things should I be looking at??

Hugs to the NY Times

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:01:18 GMT

On my Twitter profile page I've added to Media Hacker another title, Toppler of Paradigms. It's kind of a joke, because just being alive is enough to qualify for the second title. If you doubt me, think about what happened in 2008 and what's happening in 2009.

Some are in the middle of paradigms that are being more heavily toppled than other, like people at the NY Times. Today I offered a virtual hug to all of them. I explained, in two twits: "Today's 3rd hug goes to the NY Times. The whole place, top to bottom. Everyone gives them [a hard time] cause they're on top of the heap we expect so much, too much -- so at some point you gotta just say 'We appreciate you' and leave it at that."

Hugs really work. They help soothe the feeling of disruption. Kind of like an analgesic for change. I'm not kidding. If you find the world isn't treating you like you want, try giving out some hugs. You'll be amazed at what comes back.

Anyway, back to The Times.

I think it was Alan Kay who said the Macintosh was the first computer worth criticizing. I think that's what the NY Times should understand, that as long as people are telling you what to do, it means they care. When they stop, that's when you need to start worrying!

I also wanted to thank the Times for being the ones who made RSS 2.0 the roaring bonfire of content that it has been for the last half-decade or so. And to the tech people at other pubs who followed the Times' lead, without trying to improve it. Because of all this compatibility it was possible for a market of tools to develop around RSS. That should serve as an example, a template, for future publishing standards.

Which brings us around to the idea that put the Times in the center of today's discussion. They now have an API that looks very much like a social network API, like Twitter or FriendFeed. At first it's a shock, why do we need another, and why is it coming from NY instead of Mountain View, Berkeley, Sunnyvale, San Francisco or Redmond? Well if their paradigms can be toppled why not ours? Indeed. But... Is that really what is needed from the Times? And what chance does it have to succeed? I thought of other successful once-new publishing paradigms -- Aldus, Quark, HTML, blogs, RSS, podcasting. Is the Times like those? No -- it's more like AOL or Compuserve, if it's even that open (I don't think it is).

Here's the key point, the open-ness that counts is not that anyone can develop apps on top of it, though that's nice, it's if anyone can get on the other side -- can I publish behind the API? On all the platforms I listed in the previous paragraph the answer is yes, I can get on the other side, even AOL and Compuserve, but to be really open it has to be open on all sides, in all ways. RSS was so open that it was possible for it to be usurped by Feedburner and they almost completely sucked it in behind their wall, before people started to get wise that maybe that wasn't the best thing for everyone.

Even Twitter, the raging rocket of growth that it is, is not as open as we'd like it to be, not even close. But I can create any number of accounts on Twitter, and build my own little universe there and publish with all the tools available to Ev, Biz and Jack. If the Times wants to play in that game, and I'd like them to -- it needs to be possible for me to compete with my heroes Frank Rich and Paul Krugman, and make the ones I don't like so much (names withheld) look like the asshats they are.

In other words, you want to have some fun, throw some fat on the fire -- let your writers, editors and pundits compete with the wild wooly world of the Internet on completely equal terms. Then you'll have a chance of tapping into the growth on this side of the mike.

With much love and more hugs, Dave

PS: The first two hugs went to Tim O'Reilly and John Markoff.

3 questions on Twitter

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:20:18 GMT

Over the last two hours I asked a series of 3 questions on Twitter about escapes, physical, intellectual and spiritual, and got back so many great responses, I had to write a script that captures them.

So here's a readout of the last 100 responses I've gotten on Twitter. In a little bit I'll gather them up and organize them into an outline and upload that. Feel free to add your ideas in the comments here.

Great work everybody, big hugs!

The movies of 2008

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:00:30 GMT

The Oscars are this Sunday, so it's time to review the last year, and get on the record.

Of the nominated movies, I loved, without qualification: Frost/Nixon, The Wrestler, Doubt, Rachel Getting Married, Frozen River, Slumdog Millionaire.

Movies I loved things about but didn't go for the whole package.

Australia. The acting was superb, I'll go for Nicole Kidman in anything, and the kid was great, but it was a forgettable movie.

The Dark Knight. Cut out all the scenes that don't have Heath Ledger and you have a great picture. The guy with half a face was disgusting, worth a few shots but a half hour? Embarassing.

Wall-E. The first part was wonderful. Amazing. Fantastic. And then a formula Pixar animation for the kiddies. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but you don't see Bolt on my list of movies worth talking about. Or Kung Fu Panda. Wall-E was half an amazing movie. A Pixar movie that really makes you think hasn't been made yet but Wall-E showed that it could happen.

I didn't see: Revolutionary Road, The Duchess.

Movies I flat out didn't like.

Milk -- Sean Penn was a convincing Harvey Milk, and that was good for five minutes. Otherwise, no suspension of disbelief, the story didn't hang together.

Benjamin Button -- I kept looking at my watch hoping it would be over.

There were many others, but thankfully, none of them were nominated.

Now for my picks.

Best actor: Mickey Rourke.

Best supporting actor: Heath Ledger.

Best actress: Kate Winslet.

Best supporting actress: Marissa Tomei.

Best animated feature: Wall-E.

Best writing (adapted): Doubt.

Best writing (original): Frozen River.

Best picture: The Reader.

I didn't vote in the other categories cause what do I know about editing and directing and costumes. I'm user, just a guy who watches movies and loves great ones.

Final note, best actress was the hardest category. I loved Anne Hathaway in Rebecca Getting Married. Meryl Streep was amazing in Doubt, and Melissa Leo in Frozen River. But Kate Winslet owned me in The Reader.

Where is Twitter's WordPress?

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:13:23 GMT

Blogger is a centralized free hosting service created by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. It suffered from many of the same scaling issues in its early days as Twitter, but now that Blogger has been owned by Google for a long time, the scaling issues are gone. But it's not the only blogging service -- there are many others. And I can if I want, host my own blog on my own server, using software like WordPress or Movable Type. I've written my own software for Scripting News.

I use Twitter, but I also remember fondly the days when Twitter was smaller, when I followed 50 people instead of 800. And I knew most of them. I still like Twitter, but it's way different, and I see a role for a smaller blog-sized Twitter, a companion to Scripting News, like Leo's TWiT Army. A clubhouse where we work on stuff that's of interest mainly to this community, where I follow 20 or 30 people and am followed by a hundred. This isn't a job for Yammer, because it's not a private application. But it isn't a job for Twitter either.

This weekend there was a furor about Facebook's terms of service -- people figured out that when they publish stuff on Facebook they lose control of it. Facebook put that in writing in their terms of service, but anyone who follows Technorati knows that our content is spread all over god's creation. People copy and paste whole blog posts, you wish they'd just link to them, but everyone has given up the fight on this, it's completely out of control, and has been for a long time. I think Facebook did the right thing by spelling out in black and white the reality of the Internet. Once you hit publish, it's gone.

No matter what happens, some of us will never be happy with only the centralized service a corporation like Facebook or Twitter provides. Eventually we don't need the training wheels -- it's time to take off down the street in our own car, driving where we want to go, without asking for or waiting for the parent to give it to us. Now, after two years of using Twitter, I know exactly what I want. I've tried to communicate it privately, that hasn't gotten me what I want, so I'll try publicly and see if that works.

1. Ideally, I'd like Amazon to implement a back-end service that does what Twitter does, with a web service API that builds on the S3 API, like SimpleDB (for example). Then I'd spend a little time slapping together a bare-bones user interface and turn it over to my friends here at Scripting News to produce a variety of different interfaces for, browser based and desktop clients. That's the kind of stuff readers of this site love. I think we could bootstrap a community within weeks, and of course everything we create would be open source, so cloning it wouldn't be a problem.

2. Almost as good as #1 would be an EC2 AMI that installs laconi.ca, the software that runs identi.ca. A fair number of programmers already know how to start up an EC2 instance (I do, it's easy -- just took me a few hours and the docs were less than optimal). The idea is that I have to do nothing to have a basic microblogging system running. I want to configure it via web browser. And obviously I need to be able to customize it, but that's not a prob since they already support the Twitter API.

It's time for a thousand Twitters to bloom. The mother ship will do great, but we need a path that's independent of the corporate entity that runs Twitter. We've learned this time and again, let's not learn it one more time.

OAuth is working here!

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:52:57 GMT

Q. Define "working."

A. I made an authenticated call to Twitter and it responded with the correct answer instead of "Invalid OAuth Request."

Q. How did you do it?

A. Joseph Smarr patiently worked through the process with me, first making sure it worked with Plaxo and then coaching me on getting it working with Twitter.

Q. Is there anything you'd like to say to Joseph at this time?

A. Yes! Thank you thank you thank you. Thanks!

Q. Is there anything you'd like to say about OAuth?

A. OAuth isn't so hard once you got it working, but there are too many docs, too heavy on theory, and there is no validator. Everything Joseph did could have been done in software. I offered to help get the process systematized by remembering what it was like to be a newbie, which I still am, totally.

My work at bit.ly is done

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:07:47 GMT

As you may know I participated in the intial design and rollout of the bit.ly URL-shortener. It was one of the most instantly successful projects I've ever participated in, up there with the release of Radio 8 in 2002 and MORE 1.0 in 1986. Sometimes the time is right for a product, and the execution is great and the communication is crisp. Everyone gets it, and it takes off like a rocket. Bit.ly is one of those phenoms.

They're getting ready to grow a real business around it, and I want to go on to do other things. So we worked out a deal that leaves me satisfied with how things turned out and am no longer a shareholder.

I wish the company and the team the very best.

Onward!

The Magic Bus

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 03:44:44 GMT

Maybe this is the big slowdown?

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 23:13:27 GMT

It's been a lazy few days, in the aftermath of OAuth, which disrupted my flow of development. It was probably a good thing, cause it's giving me some time to reflect, veg out, watch some movies and documentaries.

One of the movies I watched was the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. I knew in advance it would be awful, which made it not so awful. After reading the NY Times review, I decided what the hell, it's Keanu Reeves with small roles for John Cleese and Kathy Bates, it's about the end of the world, why not? Exactly. It's about at the "why not" level. Reeves after all is Neo, and I sat through the last two installments of The Matrix, twice, even though they sucked too.

Glad I watched it cause it got me thinking about the end of our civilization.

The end of our civilization. If you believe in global climate change and Al Gore, which I do (both) then as much as Gore doesn't want to say it because it would be counter-productive for him to, our civilization is on the path to self-extinction.

Why should we fight to get our economy growing again? Isn't growth the whole problem? Shouldn't we see the economic downturn as not only inevitable, but as our last hope for salvation? These are fair questions imho.

The inescapable truth that no one wants to speak out loud is that we have too many people, and we're adding more people at too fast a clip. The planet can't sustain what we have now without destroying the climate, yet we haven't done anything to limit growth.

So maybe this isn't the biggest downturn since The Great Depression? Maybe it's bigger than that. Maybe this is a corner-turn for the human race, maybe last September was when it finally occurred to us, collectively, that we couldn't keep going as we were going, and we hit the brakes in the way the Invisible Hand does. Maybe the efforts to "jump start" the economy won't work, and maybe that's as it should be, and maybe that's a good thing?

BSG races toward a breathtaking conclusion?

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:00:22 GMT

I was a skeptic at the beginning of the second half of the last season of Battlestar Galactica, one of my favorite shows of all-time, and a signature favorite of geeks everywhere.

The first couple of shows in the run were depressing, who knew where we were going, certainly not anywhere remotely like we thought we were. That's okay, it turns out because where we were actually going is very science fictiony, which is good because that's what BSG is.

Now what does it all mean? I don't have a clue. But that's the way I like it. I had to watch Friday's episode twice, just so I could hear what the characters were actually saying, because in the first pass all I could absorb was the wonderful weirdness of the arc the story was taking.

Having listened, I'm still really really confused. And that's just fine!! Frack me. Gods damn it. So say we all.