Scripting News

Why it matters that Twitter is a news platform

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:40:48 GMT

Because here's a second shot that traditional media has at usurping the control of the tech industry over the future of news. They've been like kittens up till now, and of course there's no reason to believe they could get their act together anytime soon. But the major media companies should think of Twitter as another Napster, not as a threat (that was the mistake they made in 2000) rather as a Hulu-like opportunity to build their own platform that's more friendly to news.

What do the media companies do well? Have they innovated even a little in the new electronic media? What right do they have to demand our support if they won't take any chances?

I think it's clear that Twitter-the-Company has proven it doesn't understand news. Do the media companies understand it? If they did, they'd be all over this.

And if I were advising FriendFeed, I'd make a platform for Twitters, make it really easy for a developer with a miniimum of programming, almost all UI coding, to develop something that does exactly what Twitter does. And of course let them add whatever else they like from the FF bag of tricks. Think of a thousand flowers blooming instead of being so vertically integrated.

Is Firefox slower than other browsers?

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:06:18 GMT

In the last few days there's been a discussion in the blogosphere as to the future of browsers, and the continued charm of Firefox, or whether there's any serious movement to Chrome. My original piece basically said that no matter how attractive Chrome might be, I can't switch because so much of what I do depends on plugins that are only available in Firefox.

But part of the the discussion centered around whether or not Firefox is slow relative to the other browsers. David Naylor posted a series of tests that show that, if anything, it's getting more efficient. His numbers are impressive. Less than half a second to launch. I've never measured the performance of Firefox or any other browser, and I don't plan to. But when people talk about the speed of a browser, I don't think of how quickly it launches or even how fast it renders a page right after it launches.

Here's what I do care about -- how slow it gets after it has been running for a number of hours with a full complement of tabs. That's the A-B comparison that we should be looking at. I think that's the subjective measure people use to say whether a browser is fast or slow. Ideally you only launch a browser once every time your machine boots. But how often do you have to quit the browser because it has become so bogged down and is using up so much of the machine's resources? I wonder if most users know that you can make the browser faster by quitting and relaunching?

It's also possible that people who use Chrome fit a different profile and don't load it up with a lot of tabs, or the UI of Chrome discourages lots of tabs -- I don't know since I have only tried Chrome, I have not used it as my daily browser.

I get ideas when I ski

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:24:37 GMT

I'm taking the day off skiing cause my legs hurt and it's snowing like a mofo outside. And I'm writing post after post, finding they're already written. How did this happen? I went skiing yesterday. It's been so long, maybe as much as 15 years -- I don't remember the last time I went skiing. But it all comes back, esp the part about how many new ideas come from the simple act of going up and down the mountain.

I think it's because of the pace of the sport. Going downhill everything is in motion and your brain is processing data at a huge rate. Emotionally it's exhilirating, no matter how you're skiing. If I'm skiing poorly, like the first run of the day, I'm fearful of breaking something or looking terrible and wondering why I even came. But if I'm hitting all the marks, as I was toward the end of the morning, I'm feeling svelte, alive, on top of everything, important, masterful -- all kinds of very positiive stuff.

And then there's the ride up the mountain. The blood is rich with oxygen, the muscles have this incredible sense of well-being, endorphins are flowing, and that's when the ideas come!

I know how long it's been since I've ski'd -- I've never blogged about it. So I stopped skiing right around the time I started blogging. I wonder why.

Anyway tomorrow I'll be back on the mountain, so expect some more good stuff after that.

Me, Amazon, Scoble

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:11:24 GMT

Gosh it's almost as if I work for Amazon. How the heck did that happen. There was a long time I didn't like them, because of the 1-click patent. I was afraid they were going to be a big black hole in the middle of the net, where open ideas went to die. But they haven't seemed to be bullying people with the patent, and then an off-hand comment by Matt Mullenweg about how he was furnishing his whole life with Amazon got me to try them out and I was hooked.

The thing I like best about shopping at Amazon are the user comments. They really are good. And I often base purchasing decisions on what the other users say. It got so bad that when I went shopping at Fry's for some sound equipment I fumbled around until I realized what I was missing was the advice of other shoppers. I did the unfair thing, listened to a bunch of stuff and then went home and bought what I liked and what the others liked, from Amazon.

Now onto Scoble.

I've been reading Scoble for a very long time, but he never wrote a post as insightful as the one he wrote about where Facebook is going. He says the goal of Facebook is to improve on the experience that Amazon provides (he didn't say it that way, but that's how I read it). Not only will I be able to rely on other users to tell me which products are good, but I'll also know what products my friends are buying and liking. Scoble's example was picking a sushi restaurant on University Ave in Palo Alto. I could find Scoble's favorite, and Mike Arrington's, and Steve Jobs's, etc. That would carry extra weight, if I knew who the people doing the recommending are, even though Amazon's reviews are generally so good, I can get by without knowing who the people are.

So this insight led me to wonder if Amazon, being the smart, ambitious, rich company that it is, has already figured this out and is lying in wait to pounce on Facebook, or maybe buy them if the price gets attractive. I can't imagine that they're not on top of this.

The point is this -- if you're not thinking of Amazon as a social networking company, you should.

Poet's Guides

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:47:05 GMT

I'd say EC2 for Poets was an unqualified success.

Its purpose was two-fold: 1. To see if intelligent people who have never put up a server before could do it with EC2. 2. Having given them the experience, they would then see new applications for servers that people who usually put up servers don't see.

There were requests for more Poet's Guides -- one in particular -- OPML Editor for Poets. The suggester realized toward the end of his request that the last person to write a Poet's Guide is the person who is immersed in the details of the thing being written about. The guide has to be someone who, like the reader, is a newbie -- who knows just enough to get it to work, and not a whole lot more.

One thing people were disappointed about was that the instance you start doesn't retain its state when you shut it off. It would be highly desirable to have a hosting service where the image of your virtual server was retained and could be restarted just like you restart your laptop or desktop computer. But you would only pay for the time the server is actually running. This could be a lucrative business, it seems, esp if the launch times could be shorter (say the same speed that a virtual machine launches on a desktop). It would also be nice if there were a way to do this with Mac OS.

How about a Kindle for Poets? As you may know -- I got a Kindle recently, but haven't had a chance to use it for real until I took a plane flight earlier this week. I bought a copy of the NY Times for $0.75 and read it on the 2 hour flight to Salt Lake from SFO. I liked it. In ways it was better than reading the paper Times. Not so unweildy, easier to remember my place if I get distracted. No paper to throw out when I'm done.I didn't have to stand in line at the news stand, or have exact change for the vending box. And it's cheaper than the physical paper. Good deal.

Now what I'd like to do is run a script on my netbook to load up my Kindle with lots of content from bloggers I read, without going through Amazon's servers. I don't want to use their limited web browser. I want the content to be first class, as pleasant as reading the NY Times. In other words, I want it to function like an iPod -- I only use iTunes for the last step in loading content onto my iPod, I manage all my podcast subscriptions myself with my own podcatcher. I want the Kindle to work largely the same way. I bring this question to the Scripting News readership -- how do I get started? And if successful I may well write a Kindle publishing howto, if there isn't already one.

I would, of course, use Scripting News as a guinea pig for the process -- I'd love to make it available to Kindle readers, but I'd want to be able to tinker with the user experience if it's at all possible to do so. I see a new reading device as a learning tool not for me, as a writer, but also as a media hacker.

Also I invite others to write their own Poets howto's for things they're interested in or passionate about. You learn a lot from the process. As they say -- people teach what they most need to learn.

Is Twitter a news system?

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:09:28 GMT

A piece came out in yesterday's LA Times that quoted from my podcasts with Jay Rosen and blog posts here. The piece was a bit all over the map, the author was having trouble coming to grips with a premise that I take for granted. Twitter is a news system, today, it will be more of a news system in the future, and whatever becomes of Twitter the company or their web service, the essentials of what Twitter does is an integral part of the news system of the future.

Let's try turning the question around -- if Twitter isn't a bootstrap of or a dry run at the news system of the future, then what is it? A fad with no significance? People said that about CB radio, something that I never did myself, but it seems vindicated now -- it was a dry run at Twitter. People said the same things about blogging, but I don't think anyone doubts that blogging is part of the news system of today and the future.

An example...

The other day I was shopping at Target in Berkeley, and noticed that the parking lot was full, and wondered how this could be, if there was a recession going on. I noticed that the parts of the store that sold supermarket-like products were jammed, and the parts that sold durable stuff, clothes, luggage, toys, sporting goods, electronics -- were empty. When I got to Starbucks after my stop at Target, I reported this on Twitter, along with a picture I had uploaded from the parking lot (it goes to Flickr and is automatically pushed to Twitter). Soon after reports came in from around the country about Target parking lots where other people lived. Now here's the point -- that's what network news used to simulate, by sending reporters to all the locations to find out what's going on. Instead we got the reports from the shoppers. Not a whole lot of difference. And Twitter was both the newsroom and the delivery medium.

I'm sure some willl argue that what's going on in the parking lots of shopping centers during a recession isn't really news; then I would point those people to the first reports of the USAir flight that landed in the Hudson, which didn't appear on CNN or ABC -- it appeared on Twitter, with a picture, in much the same way my picture of the Target parking lot did. The technologic channels can report small stuff or sensational stuff, with equal alacrity.

I wonder why press people have trouble seeing that news is what's happening there. Sure there's a lot of other stuff on Twitter -- they focus on that instead. I leave it to the investigative journalists to figure out why.

Gone skiing

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 07:51:43 GMT

Taking some time off!

Click and Clack the Blog Brothers

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:05:33 GMT

Just did the Sunday podcast with Jay Rosen.

Really enjoying this. Today it was more laughs and less serious.

We'll do another next Sunday, Murphy-willing.

Editing the look of a twitter

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:06:05 GMT

If you look at my twitter-like community here on scripting.com, you'll see something interesting.

There's a paragraph of text at the top of the screen. Read it.

Click on the link to the screen shot. Think about it.

It's been a while since we've had a Mind Bomb. I think this one qualifies.

Thanks to Brian Hendrickson for working with me on this.

8/26/00: "What's a Mind Bomb? An idea that's so strange or powerful that it explodes in your mind. And that's a good thing!"

A happy poet!

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:04:31 GMT

Johnr99a writes: "I put up my first EC2 server yesterday in less than an hour. I think I could start it up again in 5 minutes or less. I have been computing personally and professionally since the '80's but have never owned a PC. I depend on work and public (library, school, etc.) machines. This works well today due to Google's cloud and flash drives. But, now I own my own server in the cloud! And, the price of ownership is finally right: $0.125/hour and no software licenses, maintenance, replacement costs, etc. I really feel powerful. I can configure the server as I choose, use it when I want and run it from anywhere. What could be better? It's all due to your efforts, Dave! Huge hugs!"

I am thinking about next steps. This first step seems to have been a success. Yes!

What Firefox should do

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:48:12 GMT

It's likely that this post will provoke another flame from Mozilla-land, so in anticipation, let me explain that my ideas aren't special.

I started writing publicly about ideas I can't implement myself a very long time ago, starting with a piece I wrote for an Apple newsletter in the mid-80s wondering what a computer that was built into a car might look like. Later, I put these ideas on products, like UserLand IAC Toolkit, where I thought it would be great if databases, graphics programs, comm apps, etc all had programming interfaces so we could create scripts that used them as toolkits. I wanted to see the combination of the command line and the GUI, and thought the Macintosh was the place to do it.

I remember very clearly where I was when I realized that I could publish these things on my own, not as part of someone else's newsletter, or waiting for a product to ship, that with just a website, I could share ideas that I couldn't implement, in the hope that they could help move things forward faster. That's where the archive starts, and the first such piece was an outline of how Apple and IBM could cooperate on Mac OS, in 1994. Since then I've done it many times.

This has earned me a lot of ire in the tech world, I never understood why -- my missives are usually ignored, proving that no one has to listen. But I've heard from friendly people inside the BigCos who explain that this is the reason I don't get invited to their conferences or press events. Apparently they're scared of something. Too bad, cause I really am harmless.

Anyway, the pushback I got from Mozilla (and I say it was from Mozilla because no one else from the company said anything publicly to contradict what Mr Dotzler said) was: "We don't want to hear from you." He said it with more vigor and more detail. That's okay Mr. Dotzler but you don't get a say in whether I speak or not, because there are other users, and other browser-makers, and I like to leave milestones so in case I was right I get to gloat (and if I'm wrong others get proof that I'm stupid). I find the discussion itself useful, often when people disagree they show me things I hadn't considered, and that kind of learning is precious. But of course no one has to listen.

Anyway, enough preamble.

Here's the problem not just with Firefox but with browsers in general.

Their evolution was deformed by Microsoft's "strategy tax."

That is, browsers are not allowed to compete with two Microsoft cash cows: Office and Windows.

Who said this was so? Well, Microsoft did. And since they had a monopoly in browsers for a very important period in the growth of the web, this became an unwritten rule, an assumption that no one challenges. People roll their eyes when you say that the web should evolve to become a spreadsheet, email program, graphics app, or whatever. But that doesn't mean it's wrong. I've seen plenty of people roll their eyes at ideas that eventually became booms. Like PCs, and blogs, and on and on.

But in fact, even though that's the unwritten rule -- the web has evolved in those directions. The problem is, in doing so, the web which was wonderful for its View-Source simplicity, became a Tower of Babel that you need a degree in rocket science to program for. This both wrong and unnecessary.

For an example of how ridiculous it has become, why is it that we have to install a plug-in to view a video on YouTube? Why can't the browser do that on its own?

Another example. I have a two-level expand-collapse display on my blog. I'm one of very few blogs that has this. Why? It was a pain in the ass to program. And it's only two levels. Why isn't this something the browser can do with no programming. Let me mark up my text to indicate a hierarchy and give me (the author) or the user the option to browse it in an outline.

I think you get the idea. We're stuck -- on the one hand simple stuff is still simple, I can produce a 1995-era web page exactly the same way I did in 1995 and it still works. Thank gods for that. But if I want to use the latest UI techniques I either have to master the art, and it's not easy to master, or hire someone to do it and then the idea suffers in translation, and is only open to people who can afford to hire programming help.

Firefox, or any other browser, could blast right through this.

And it is especially important that Firefox hear this, because in my gut -- I have to believe that Google understands this, because they have people whose job it is to make spreadsheets, word processing, mail, maps, calendars, etc work better in the browser. When they meet with people on the Chrome team, I'd bet anything they ask for special features in the browser. And why shouldn't the Chrome guys give them what they want? It would make their apps more efficient and potentially more beautiful and easier to use. This is something every user would love.

So that's my rant for the day.

Asa, have a great time telling everyone that I'm an unappreciative fuck.

The Future News System of the World

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:39:33 GMT

Tomorrow Jay Rosen and I are going to do our third Sunday podcast. These notes are for Jay in prep for the talk. In the spirit of being open and transparent.

Theme: I think Twitter is becoming the News System of the World and that scares the bejesus out of me. Here's why...

1. It's run by the tech industry, and the tech industry is very young and not very good about criticism.

To illustrate.. A comment in a thread on FriendFeed, and unfortunately there's no way to point to a comment in context, so I'll reproduce it here.

"On the other hand, I'm kind of glad that he put this out there in the open. I imagine it's the kind of things people at Google and Microsoft write about me when I criticize their products, except they don't have the guts to put them out there where we can see them. Truth is, the big companies, and Mozilla thinks it's one of them, do have this attitude about their users. This is why the tech industry can't be trusted to run the news networks, which is where it looks like it's going. Jay Rosen take note."

2. It's just a company, single point of failure, no route-around possible. At the same time, Twitter is having technical problems this morning. So even if they weren't just another tech company being fed constant reinforcment for the idea that the world revolves around them, it would still be unwise for the Future News System of the World to centralize on one company's set of servers. A company whose motives we know nothing about.

An aside to Fred and Bijan, this is why people need to know the business model. What are we investing in? There is a public element to what Twitter is, I'd argue the public element is much bigger than the interests of one small tech company.

Why is all this an issue for a professor of journalism? Because we're going to wake up one day, probably very soon, and realize that this is the new News System of the World, it's no longer in the future, and it's going to be owned by one company -- and that is going to suck.

Every netbook needs a sticker

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:00:33 GMT

I put one sticker on each netbook, to give it some character, and to distinguish it from the others.

The first, a white Eee 901, had a sticker from the Democratic Convention in Denver.

The second, a black 1000H, which I got just before the November election, got the "I Voted" sticker I got when I voted.

I just found the sticker for the third, when cleaning out a closet, looking through an old knapsack I carried with me at Berkman, scanned below:

"cheesecake"

EC2 for Poets

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:49:27 GMT

Today's the day -- if you've been wondering if you can set up a server in Amazon's cloud, the answer is Yes You Can.

Here's how: http://howto.opml.org/dave/ec2/

If you're wondering what it's all about, I've recorded a 22-minute podcast that explains. Even if you don't go through the howto, I recommend listening to the podcast.

There's something that everyone who cares about the net should know about the cloud. Lots of new ideas in the howto and the podcast.

Paolo Valdemarin, my friend in Italy, went through the EC2 howto, and it opened up a lot of ideas for him. Important stuff.

Chrome vs Firefox

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:51:17 GMT

Just read this opinion piece that says that Chrome is much faster than Firefox and that Firefox "lost the plot" and is going in the wrong direction and pretty soon Firefox will die, having been killed by Chrome.

I use Firefox, I've tried Chrome, and it looks nice, but I can't switch to it because:

1. It isn't available for the Mac, and while I do use Windows, my primary environment is Mac.

2. It doesn't run Firefox plug-ins. There are a few must-have plug-ins that I can't live without.

3. Probably it's missing other features I depend on in Firefox but I haven't spent enough time running it to find out.

Okay now to "lost the plot" -- what is Firefox doing? I can't quite figure it out. They do a lot of releases, every time I get a new one it takes me to a page where it says it's the safest way to browse the web. Safety is important, I had forgotten how important until I had a machine get infected a short while back. But what else? I've noticed the latest version of Firefox is pretty crashy. That's not good.

The last thing I want to do is to use Google's browser, I already depend too heavily on them. So there's a lot of resistance here to switching from Firefox.

And I know, as a software developer, that apps start slowing down when they implement all the features they need to be competitive. It's conceivable that the great performance of Chrome is due to the fact that it hasn't matched Firefox in features.

On the other hand, Firefox hasn't shipped a feature that I care about in a long time.

However, neither has Chrome. It's an amazingly boring app for something reconceived from the bottom-up, as they claim it is. Not even one user-facing great new feature? How long has it been since any browser shipped a feature that made a difference to users? Not just safety, which is important as I said, but something fun and empowering??

I think we're at a point where everyone has lost the plot. We're so concerned with malware and who's killing who, we forgot to move forward in interesting and fun ways. Or am I missing something.

Don't become a TechCrunch

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:54:46 GMT

Have you ever not blogged something because it wouldn't be worth the trouble it caused? I have to admit, I do it very often. And about half the time it has to do with TechCrunch.

I feel bad about TechCrunch, since I helped it get started, but I don't have any regrets about it. In the beginning, it was great -- lots of information about new products. By helping it get started, I was helping the entrepreneurs. Not just a two-way win, but a win-win-win. I win because it develops my rep as someone who points to cool stuff. TechCrunch wins because it becomes well-known as a place to find new entrepreneurs, and the entrepreneurs win, because people find out about what they're doing.

But somewhere along the line the people at TechCrunch started hating on me. It happens all too regularly, and it's getting worse. It's worth mentioning, because I don't dislike TechCrunch, quite the opposite, I'm proud of my small role in helping it get going.

I wrote this because I found myself saying to someone who, like the original TechCrunch, is writing fantastic stuff, well-worth pointing out, and I'm happy to do it. He just thanked me, and I said it wasn't necessary cause it was a win-win. And I added, just don't become a TechCrunch when you're rich and famous.

The reboot of journalism

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:01:51 GMT

The last piece on journalism got a lot of reads, but more importantly, unveiled some areas where I need to repeat things I've been saying for a long time. It's my fault -- I get into the habit of being misunderstood, and I expect it will always be so. But two things happen: 1. The world changes and 2. I get better at explaining.

Apparently I am one of the very few who think we're in the middle of the reboot of journalism, not at the start. It's not in the future, it's been happening for a long time. But as all things one is in the middle of, it can hard to see that it exists. Ask the fish to describe water -- he'll say there is no such thing. Ask a mammal to describe air or ask someone who is living through a transformation of journalism to explain, they can't. This is no one's fault, it's just human nature. The closer you are to something, the harder it is to see.

Talking with Jay Rosen on Tuesday, in a conversation we didn't record, he said we don't know the shape of the new journalism, and I agreed -- but that's the only thing we don't know. We know very well the components, the same sources that the old journalism was built on, with one major difference -- they now go direct.

This is what we've been working on in the blogging space for 15 years. I wrote about billions of websites in 1995. And before that, desktop publishing and laser printers made it possible to print newsletters in 1986, 23 years ago. All that time, every time a former source started publishing on their own, the process of new journalism took a step forward.

I warned the news industry about this, starting at the latest in 2000, in a piece I wrote in Amsterdam, asking them to open the doors to the people. Later, in 2002, I urged the NY Times, who I was working with on RSS, to give blogs, under the NYT banner, to anyone who was quoted in a NYT piece. They could have, but didn't, take steps to move forward on new journalism. In my experience, if you participate in the movement that undermines your way of doing business, you have some say in how it evolves. If this were the transport industry, it's as if I were recommending that the NY Central railroad make an investment in Trans World Airlines. Or that UPS invest in FedEx. I still don't think it's too late, but the time is very short, it seems.

There are so many examples of sources that go direct. Jay has been sending me links. I see them everywhere; I stopped looking a long time ago, when blogging seemed to be on solid ground. At Cal on Monday, I talked about judges, attorneys, jurors, defendents and plaintiffs blogging, and was laughed at by the pros, but Scott found a judge that is blogging. (And a judge blogging is the most extreme example, I know it.)

In 2003, when I went to Harvard to bring blogging to a major university, the profs I talked to gave me the blank stare, as if wondering why I would be pitching them on publishing independently. None of them took me up on the offer, because Harvard profs had no trouble getting published. But there are lots of them who blog now, every one an expert, the kind of person news organizations quote. Now they're going direct, wholesale, and realtime with their observations. This is as it should be, and to the hand-wringers who think we're losing something in the transition to the new journalism, it's the other way around -- our horizons are expanding, the bottlenecks aren't just widening, they're being blown up. The new world is much better than the old one.

Jay's comment (about not knowing the shape of the new journalism) got me thinking, as well as a topic we glossed over in last Sunday's podcast, the question of Twitter as an environment for journalism. My claim is they have screwed it up, by gifting some reporters with huge flow while leaving others out. No environment for journalism can do that, without immediately spawning competition. That's how confused the business people of journalism are, because near as I can tell, they are ceding the whole opportunity to a little tech company in SF that has a very weird idea how news works. They appear to think it exists to promote their product. That is far too narrow a definition. Twitter is very important now, but not that important long-term. Twitter is part of the answer to Jay's question about the shape of the new journalism. It might be the backbone, the top level; or the back room, the back channel, the virtual newsroom. Or it might be both.

In math, when you have to prove a hard theorum, first you try to prove elements of the theory, that if true, would prove the whole thing. In software, you may not know what the final user interface looks like, but you know some layers to it, so in either case you can start work right away. In 1994 we didn't know what the new journalism would look like, and we still don't, but we knew some essential elements, perhaps the essential element -- that sources go direct. It's the thing the Internet does to all intermediaries, it disses them. It happened to travel agents, realtors, classified ads, all kinds of shopping, and it has happened to news too.

As with everything new, to see it you have to jump out of your skin and look at the situation from the new body, not the old one. Imagine what news would look like once the limits of the past are erased by the technology of the new. It's been knowable for many years, but some didn't want to look. But if you looked, as millions did, if you weren't one of the gatekeepers; rather you were one of the people the gates were meant to keep out -- there was no problem seeing how it would shape up. Now we're there, we're not at the beginning, we're already far along.

PS: Brent Simmons remembers InternetWorld in 1997 when we met a guy who thought there would be at most 10 websites in 2000. I don't remember his name either.

Rave review for EC24P

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:56:20 GMT

Tomorrow I'm going to release the EC2 for Poets howto, and a podcast roadmap. In the meantime, here's a review by Michael Fidler.

I did it! In addition, I'm sending this from the new Firefox browser that you included. Thank you so much! I have wanted to do this for so long. When they first announced the service I visited Amazon, but there were so many choices that I didn't now where to start. This was such a rewarding first step. What comes next, Dave? Will there be more tutorials possible? Even if there isn't, this one might have been the nudge I needed to get started on my own. This was an extremely thoughtful thing of you to do. Give yourself a big hug for me (or a pat on the back). I think I'll mess around in here for a little while longer:-)

This is exactly what I hoped would happen. Big hugs, Dave

If you don't like the news...

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:58:50 GMT

Last night I went to a panel discussion at the UC-Berkeley school of journalism. The topic was the San Francisco Chronicle, the last major paper in the Bay Area, and one that seems to be headed for the same fate as the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

I took a picture and a very brief video, to give you a sense of the venue. It was a packed room, in the library at the J-school. The first part of the discussion, about an hour, was pretty reasonable, user-focused, not making excuses for the paper. Bergman even said the Chron hadn't lived up to the potential of the Bay Area, I thought that was a very good way to put it. In my experience these discussions were usually focused on the point of view of the journalist, but the first hour wasn't. But in the second hour, the discussion shifted, got more relaxed and the selfishness came out in all its glory.

The moderator, Susan Rasky, asked the panelists, if they were god what would they do. Hire lots of reporters, one panelist said. Get the new President to pay our salaries, said another. Tax these things, Rasky said, holding up a Macintosh laptop. And the batteries. One panelist said things aren't so bad and the Chronicle will continue to print for the indefinite future. Others said Bill Gates should pay, or Google.

I got the floor very briefly, at the end, after Scott Rosenberg tried to explain that journalism could happen without newspapers (he has posted his own account). I said the sources would take over the news. Not enough reporters covering the courtroom? The judge will report, as will the jurors, the attorneys, the plaintiff, the defendent. It will be messier, I would have said had I had the time to complete the thought, but more truth will come out.

I said that fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists.

A government endowment for the incumbent journalists now would be, imho, as unthinkable as a state religion. It would be wrong, and unconstitutional, read the First Amendment. We the people would challenge it in court, and if they hadn't lost their minds, it would be rejected. We're just beginning to get the attention of the gatekeepers. Of course you want to go back to the other side of the gate where you don't have to listen to us. We don't want you to have that luxury.

Such a session wouldn't be complete without a blanket condemnation of the web, and we sure got one. I would have loved to have shown them Simon Johnson's blog, former chief economist at the IMF, who, in September explained the calamity in clear layman's terms, critical ideas and info you never heard in the Times, Chronicle, WSJ, or any of the television networks, not even on NPR (until Fresh Air had him as a guest in February). Nouriel Roubini called the crash years before anyone else, on the web of course. I was able to find them, a mere blogger, why couldn't the investigative reporters? I would also show them Paul Krugman's blog, someone who is regularly quoted by journalists, but for some reason feels the need to put his ideas on the web without a filter. And Doc Searls, Jay Rosen, and any of dozens of other people I read regularly to inform me with ideas that you will never find anywhere but the Internet.

I would also say to the assembled educators -- you owe it to the next generations, who you serve, to prepare them for the world they will live in as adults, not the world we grew up in. Teach all of them the basics of journalism, no matter what they came to Cal to study. Everyone is now a journalist. You'll see an explosion in your craft, but it will cease to be a profession.

Oh if only I had been given a chance to speak, passionately and carefully, I would have reminded them of the great Bay Area philosopher, Scoop Nisker who wrote the epitaph for the current world of journalism and the anthem for the new -- in a simple sentence of 14 words:

If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own.

"cheesecake"

Update: I was bothered by Clay Shirky's piece about the death of newspapers that got so much play over the last few days, and finally figured out why as I wrote this piece. He says that journalism is being replaced by nothing. This is why the press likes his piece so much, it's been their main theme: You'll miss us when we're gone. The problem with this thesis is that while the press has been declining a new decentralized press has been booting up. I talk about this toward the end of today's piece. The sources who no longer trust the journos, or aren't being called by them when they have something to say, are going direct. This is what replaces journalism. It's happening everywhere (Shirky's piece is a great example of it). Sometimes the thing that's hardest to see is what's right in front of you.

EC2 bundling help?

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:41:58 GMT

I'm almost done with my EC2 for Poets labor of love.

The theory is that almost anyone who knows how to use a computer can install and run a server application in the Amazon cloud. We'll find out, I hope. And if it turns out to be easy enough we may be able to boot up a community of applications.

I have one final problem to deal with, and I thought perhaps readers of this blog might be able to help.

I'm bundling a Windows 2003 server with Apache/Win and the OPML Editor. I've got the AMI all bundled up, but there's a problem with the password. Not sure what I'm supposed to do, but when I try to do the Get Administrator Password command from the popup in the AWS dashboard, it comes back saying that it can't get the password because the old admin password is baked into the instance. Pretty confusing.

Trying to find some instructions that explain how you're supposed to clean up so the password can be set by the EC2 system, but not finding it. If anyone has a clue, please post a comment here.

Update: John Ward provided the answer. Thanks!!