Scripting News

Tech discussions on FriendFeed

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:49:30 GMT

Lately there have been some interesting technical discussions on FriendFeed that I'd like to connect with the technical people in the Scripting News community.

1. Yesterday the question came up why designers of web services reinvent serialization formats instead of reusing existing ones. This is the advantage of XML-RPC. A simple set of types, structs and lists, and a huge set of libraries for all languages. You can write cross network apps at a very high level. An interesting discussion followed, it was nice to close this loop.

2. DeWitt Clinton, a programmer at Google who I've been corresponding with, asked a great question, that I was happy to answer: "Dave, if you could go back in time, would you have used JSON instead of XML for RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, etc, had JSON been popularized at the time?" I think some people will be surprised by my answer, which contained a shout-out to Eric Raymond.

3. I mentioned in one of the discussions and should mention here that I'm thinking about doing a successor to XML-RPC, adding OAuth support. There is some interest, when I mentioned it on Twitter last week I heard back from the people working on WordPress saying they were planning something there. Now that's I've successfully tackled OAuth, it seems it would be a small matter (hah) to take another look at RPC. (It would have a new name, as is the deal with frozen formats like RSS and XML-RPC.) It's now 11 years old, it seems that's enough time to take another look.

What about Sy Hersh?

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:40:25 GMT

At breakfast this morning, Berkeley friend and former journalist John Feld said we need journalists to do impartial investigations into government corruption. I asked if he knew of any and he said Seymour Hersh. I agreed.

When he comes out with a piece, I stop everything and read it, as do many others.

John is right, what Hersh does is important, so we should consider that a real challenge. How do we pay for the work he does, and others who want to follow in his footsteps.

Isn't academia the place for a person like Hersh? Isn't that what we want our tenured faculty to be doing -- digging for the truth, no matter where it leads or who is offended? That's what academic freedom is all about.

It would also be great if such "academic journalists" could teach a course or graduate seminar to share their process, teach students how to do what he or she does.

I think it would be even better than having them work for big media companies, because then they could go after the BMCs, and lord knows they need going-after.

Jon Stewart reviews CNBC

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:56:08 GMT

Maybe Schieffer should Face the nation?

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:49:45 GMT

I tried to listen to Sunday's Face The Nation podcast, an interview with Rahm Emanuel, but I couldn't stand it. I've really gotten out of the habit, and now with fresh ears I know exactly what's wrong. I want the interviews to be grounded in the reality that we, the people, live -- not the make-believe logic that governs the ruling class in DC. Schieffer kept asking questions Republicans would ask to try to make trouble, but I understood they were based on an unstated and unproved premise that earmarks are inherently evil. Emanuel was answering the questions directly -- yes we will have earmarks. Schieffer kept playing the gotcha game, but it was stupid, Emanuel had conceded the point! OMG.

Our economy is crumbling, and these guys are arguing nonsense. We have important business to conduct, saving what we have left of our way of life. But you can't have a realistic conversation without some supposed "journalist" trying to trap you into telling a truth you're willing to stipulate.

The solution is simple -- give Schieffer a script written by real people, and if he won't do it, get someone who will. There's no time to screw around. We need to get real, quickly, without any delay.

Now for the good news, sorta. I listened to a fantastic interview by Terry Gross with Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF. It's both sobering and encouraging. He lays out what we need to do, simply and clearly. It's just common sense, highly recommended.

Archiving your tweets in XML

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:58:57 GMT

When I mentioned that I had a tool that archives my Twitter posts, and those of people I follow, a fair number of people asked that I release the code. I have done so, the app has a user interface and docs, and if you want to try it out or run it, you're welcome to.

The software runs in the OPML Editor, on Mac or Windows. It maintains a folder of folders of OPML files, one for each user, organized in a calendar structure, one for each day; and it keeps an index, also in OPML, and a weblogs.com-compatible changes.xml file for the whole thing. The pointers in this paragraph point into my archive. If you run the software, you will have your own versions.

I also added a feature that automatically (and optionally) synchronizes the folder with a structure on Amazon S3. I want to encourage people to try out S3. You don't need a lot of technical skills to do it. I've included a section in the Howto that walks you through it.

If all this sounds confusing, start here, and follow the instructions, carefully.

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

If you have questions, post them here or as a comment on the Howto.

Good luck and I hope you enjoy it!

PS: There may be some interesting applications that can be built on this structure of folders.

Poor man's email?

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:45:59 GMT

One of my favorite blogsports for the last couple of years is pondering what Twitter is. Here are some of the things I've come up with:

1. Personal notepad.

2. Coral reef.

3. Publishing platform.

4. River of news.

I'm sure there are others, and as I think of them I'll add to the list.

But one thing I never thought of Twitter as was Poor Man's Email, which is how Google CEO Eric Schmidt described it to analysts yesterday.

My first inclination was to shout out something about Schmidt, but I held on to it, instead deciding to give it some thought and let other people go first. Surprisingly, there hasn't been much reaction.

Schmidt has a PhD, and a long track record in the industry before he went to Google. I have a postulate that if very few people do something then it must be hard, and therefore whoever is doing it must be smart. So when people say Steve Ballmer is dumb, I don't buy it. Same with Schmidt. So I wonder how calculated the statement is, or if I'm missing something -- because it never, ever occurred to me that Twitter was any kind of email, rich man's, poor man's or middle class.

I couldn't imagine two things being more different, Twitter and email.

1. Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one.

2. Twitter is by default public, where email is by default private.

3. Could you use email to implement something Twitter-like? Yes. Could you use Twitter to implement something email-like? Yes. But neither is the same as the other.

Schmidt talks about software the way I think about it. Once you have a base set of features it's an interesting puzzle to decide how to evolve it. There's no doubt Twitter has a tricky evolution in front of it. No matter what it does, it's likely to upset users, just as every Facebook move inspires an uprising. If Twitter had established a history of quick feature upgrades it would be a different story, but there were no new features in 2008, and so far none in 2009. That's a long time between changes. At some point they're going to add new features, if only to keep even with the competition that is sure to come. What they choose to do will set expectations for what's to come. The longer they wait, the harder it becomes.

So Schmidt laid it out.

The key question is -- does the basic unit of Twitter change and if so, how? Is the 140-character limit sacred (my guess is yes). What metadata will accompany a twit? This is where it gets interesting. It's hard to imagine Twitter passing on the temptation to add location data to each message. What about the URL? Would they consider moving the link out of the 140 character space and making it part of the package? What about incorporating "re-tweets" into the architecture, instead of forcing users to invent new language, and using up another 20 characters of the 140 (by convention). They could make a lot of improvements if they added more structure to a tweet. I'm sure there are people of both minds inside the Twitter company.

Another takeaway from this is that Google is watching. If Google is preparing their own Twitter, what will it look like? Will it have a different, incompatible API? (My guess, probably. Google will make their own play for developers.) Will it have the same limits as Twitter? (Probably not. This is a very easy way to put pressure on Twitter, even when they have the installed base advantage. Users will say "If Google can do it, why can't Twitter?")

In Marketing Warfare, Ries & Trout tell the story of how Pepsi got a slice of Coke's market in the 1930s based on bottle size (page 119). Coke had a huge installed base of machines that could only serve 6.5-ounce nickel bottles, which they thought of as the perfect size for a cola drink. Pepsi thought 12-ounce bottles were better, so they came at Coke with the larger bottle. Coke was wrong, but it took a long time to figure it out. Eventually they threw out their machines and bottles and matched Pepsi.

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot. Twelve full ounces, that's a lot. Twice as much for a nickel, too. Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you!

This is why Google is likely to have a 160 character limit. (People who said Schmidt was in error didn't consider the possibility that it was a deliberate misstatement.) And it seems likely Google's Twitter will be based on GMail. (Paul Bucheit, a founder of FriendFeed, could probably comment on the likelihood of this working.)

Finally, I couldn't help but notice how similar Google's reaction to Twitter is to the reaction of all market leaders to initially successful upstarts. It's the same reaction Alta Vista and Yahoo had to Google when they were young. "Search is only part of a portal," they sniffed. You can make a hugely long list of BigCo's that failed to understand the threat presented by upstarts, and lived to regret it. It's hard to think of a a single example of a BigCo that took a threat seriously when it (based on historical hindsight) needed to. Maybe this is because people like Schmidt, while they are educated, and intelligent, weren't there when their company was the upstart, and neither were most of the people there now. The institutional memory fades, and as it does, it creates the opportunity for the next generation? Perhaps. We'll get a chance to find out soon enough.

Fractional Horsepower Twitters?

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:59:03 GMT

Fractional Horsepower is a very powerful idea. It says that sometimes you can make a new product by taking an old one and scaling it down.

The originator of the concept, in my experience (he may have borrowed it from someone else) is Steve Jobs, who described the Apple II as a fractional horsepower computer. In those days computers were big, Jobs believed and many of us agreed that a lot could be gained from taking the big idea and making it small.

If you look at the history of computers and publishing (the two things I care most about, professionally) you can see that the trend is going, inexorably, that way. Things keep getting smaller, and every time they do, huge power is unleashed. Maybe it's like nuclear fission, there's this huge power holding the nucleus of an atom together, making all those protons stick together, then it's unleashed, boom (another Jobsism) a big explosion.

We like netbooks because they're smaller than laptops. We like iPods because they do what stereos do but fit in a pocket.

I wrote, many times about Fractional Horsepower HTTP Servers, and today they're a reality. Every device that can be configured through a browser has a little HTTP server in it. Each of them has a single user, they sit idling most of the time waiting for you to do something. My printer has one, my receiver has one. Look around, they're everywhere.

The other day I wrote a piece called A billion Twitters. In this environment a lot of people just skim, and I think they didn't read it because it seemed to be saying that there would be billions of Twitter users. I don't doubt this, but that's not what the piece was saying.

I am pretty sure the same logic that led us to personal computers will lead us, inevitably, to personal Twitters. Yes, there are huge advantages to scaling up, not down -- and that was true in the earlier shifts too. We loved our Apple IIs, but banks and airlines needed massive computer resources to do book-keeping and reservations. And we love our search engines, and web apps, all of which are made possible by scaling up.

As a thought exercise, I tried to imagine places I would put a Twitter if I had the power to do so. I would certainly put one here on my website, to enable Twitter-like micro-publishing among members of the community, in a sense to define what it means to be a member of this community. I don't imagine either the blog or the comments going away, in fact I am sure they would be enhanced by our own Twitter. We could try to organize a community on the main Twitter, but the comments that are relevant to this community would scroll off far too fast.

I suggested to Craig Newmark that he consider adding Twitter-like functionality to Craig's List. He asked what that would mean. I said I didn't know. It was part of the thought exercise. I posed the question on Twitter this morning and got back a huge number of comments. I wonder if the same will happen here? We'll see.

It's hard to imagine that Twitter is so unlike everything that came before that it won't go both ways as every other publishing technology has -- both up and down. I'd like to try putting a Twitter on my netbook and see what happens. Probably nothing, but you never know! That's how creativity works, play what-if and relax all the constraints and challenge your mind to make sense of it. Most things never do make sense, but every so often there's a winner. RSS was such a thing, as were blogs and podcasts. What if there were an XML rendering of this blog? What if everyone had their own website? What if radio didn't require air waves? What if everyone could have their own Twitter?

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!