Scripting News

It's the little things...

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:45:44 GMT

Tomorrow is a milestone -- it was on April 1, 1997 that a weblog called Scripting News first appeared at www.scripting.com. It wasn't my first blog, it was the continuation of a stream of writing that began in October 1994. And it doesn't really matter what day it started, because there is a continuing thread that ties it all together. It began with how to romance developers, and how Apple wasn't doing it, and how the leaders of the software industry were missing the big opportunities presented by the Internet. Today not much has changed. Silicon Valley still doesn't understand how its products are used, and doesn't do nearly all it should to be sure its interests are aligned with its users' interests.

But there are exceptions.

Today I got an email from Amazon that said something simple that almost everyone likes to hear: Thank you. It's something that Twitter never says. In fact they seem to go out of their way to chase off the people who helped them build their network into the powerhouse that it now is. Much the same way Apple, in 1994, before Jobs came back, was trying to chase off its developers. Every day Twitter does more to tip the table away from the individual and more toward the media industry. Right now there's not much the users can do because there aren't any realistic choices, but if there ever are any, I'm out of there so fast -- don't blink cause all you'll see is a tiny cloud of dust where I used to be.

Same way I got off Apple's platform as soon as I could.

And who knows, it could happen that Twitter wakes up before they have major competition and decides to do something to glue the users to them. But given the tradition of Silicon Valley of keeping its users at a great distance, I wouldn't bet on it.

BSG finale, Coraline, the Wizard of Oz

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:13:57 GMT

Dear readers, I owe a review of the finale of Battlestar Galactica, but I'm still thinking about it, and I may have to watch the whole series again, from beginning to end, to be able to write my finale about the finale. Suffice to say that I thought it was great. Not profound, but I don't expect or even want profoundness. I like art, and as art -- BSG was first class. I'll have more to say for sure.

Over the weekend I saw a movie that I really loved, enough to want to call out special attention to it while it's still in the theaters so you can see it. The movie -- Coraline.

The plot is Henry Selick's vision of The Wizard of Oz, which coincidentally I have just seen for the first time since I was a child. Both are stories where the central character is a girl who loses her way from home. Both are children's fantasies, and I'm sure Wizard was a marvel of its time, but what a delicious movie Coraline is, for our time. Every morsel is so detailed and filled with satire and irony, yet still taps into the wonder of the child still within all of us.

If you've seen it, let me know what you think. If you haven't -- hurry -- while it's still in the theaters.

Encarta, then and now

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:04:32 GMT

Bill Gates, 1994: "The Internet is a great phenomena. I dont see how the emergence of more information content on a network can be a bad thing for the personal computer industry. Will it cause less personal computers to sell? I think quite the opposite. Less copies of Flight Simulator or Encarta?"

PaidContent, 2009: "Microsoft will discontinue both its MSN Encarta reference Web sites as well as its Encarta software, which have both been surpassed by rising competitors, like Wikipedia."

I get ideas driving in snow storms

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:58:36 GMT

Ideas come when you upset your routine. Your brain, now accustomed to dealing with new places, people, cities, concepts, tries to find the patterns that are familiar, fails to find them, copes anyway, and thus activates your creativity. Once relaxed, that newly stimulated creativity is available for other tasks.

For example -- this morning I left my hotel at 5AM to make a 7AM flight at SLC, to find it had snowed about a foot overnight and my rental car was covered with a huge amount of the stuff. So I wiped off as much as I could with my hands, trying to use the sleeve of my ski jacket as much as possible, but in the process my hands got incredibly cold. Too lazy to dig the gloves out of my ski bag, stuffed with all kinds of stufffff. Now I could see, so I skidded the car across the very wide street to a gas station to fill up, where I used their squeegee to wipe off the remaining snow. Filled up the tank, and drove a few blocks to get on I-80W to the airport. As I was getting on the freeway I realized I didn't have headlights. But I'm now in the middle of a huge cloverleaf, there's no place to pull over, so I decide to risk it, the airport is just a few exits down the highway. As I'm driving I realize now I have a little bit of headlights. Weird! Then a little more and then more, and then finally I realize what happened. When I knocked the snow off, they covered the headlights. This car, a Mercury Marquis, wasn't designed for snow?

Anyway it's been a long time since I had a snow driving adventure. I'm sure this will give me some ideas -- what they are -- don't know yet.

Jay and Dave ride again!

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:01:32 GMT

Four weeks in a row, the clicking and clacking blogging brothers talk about the reboot of journalism, the news of the week, and a new $1.75 million fund for investigative journalism that Jay is advising.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/clickClack09Mar29.mp3

Hope you enjoy!

Spyware Protect 2009 strikes again

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:33:53 GMT

Earlier this month my netbook was infected.

Yesterday, after checking into my Salt Lake City hotel, I wanted to see if their wired Internet was faster than my Sprint EVDO. So I did a Google search for "speed test" and clicked on the first three tests, Speakeasy, Speedtest and CNET. I wasn't expected to get infected, wasn't even thinking about it, so of course I didn't take notes. But a couple of them came up with empty frames after running their tests. I assumed this was because I had Java turned off. I decided the tests weren't worth the trouble so I just used the EVDO. After a bit of putzing around I went out to dinner.

When I came back, there was a familiar malware dialog on the display, warning that my machine had been infected and wanting me to install some software to fix it. Yeah yeah. This time I didn't click any buttons, I just let it keep warning me.

I had Avast installed, but a week or so ago I had turned it off, it was too annoying. At that moment of course I wished I hadn't. I ran its scanner, it found the virus, said I had to reboot, which I did, and when it started back up it did a scan of the hard disk, but found nothing further. Then the malware started acting up again. I ran the Avast scan again, and it found it, recommended I reboot, this time I didn't.

I did a Google search for "spyware protect 2009" found a Yahoo Answers page that suggested doing what I had started doing, plus running one more program, Superantispyware, which I downloaded, but chose not to run. I remembered from last time that this rootkit virus patches the hosts file, and I didn't trust anything I had downloaded after the infection. (Later I found that it had patched the hosts file, but not for this domain, so the download was likely safe, I trashed it anyway and redownloaded.)

I then ran Malwarebytes, it found the virus, asked me to reboot so it could remove it, I did, and this time, no more dialogs. Even so, when I did another scan of Avast, it found the rootkit, and at this point I was beginning to think there was no getting rid of the mess, but it did get rid of it. Another scan by Malwarebytes found nothing, and then Avast found nothing. I ran Superantispyware and it found nothing. So at this point, I'm convinced my machine is clean again, and I have Avast turned on.

Lessons learned:

1. Java is not the root of this problem.

2. Both times my machine got infected I was using a speed test site to evaluate the performance of someone else's network. My guess is that it isn't the speed test site, because Google has a pretty strict policy about malware sites, and it seems pretty unlikely they'd point to an infected site on the first page of hits on something so common and important as a network speed test.

3. Using Firefox is no longer a protection against malware, if it ever was. It's now popular enough that the nasty people target it, in addition to MSIE.

4. While I was fighting this I was thinking this is the last time I travel with Windows. But now that things are working again, I don't feel that urgency. Human nature at work!

Product idea: Digg for ads

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:25:00 GMT

Today was the best day of skiing in Park City. The sky was clear. It wasn't too warm, and it wasn't brutally cold. When you stopped, breathing hard, the air had a refreshing crispness to it. There was packed powder everywhere. No lift lines. The scenery gorgeous and I was skiing beautifully. It was also the last ski day for this trip. Tomorrow and Sunday I'll hang out in Salt Lake with friends and return to SFO on Monday morning.

The ideas kept coming -- one was a meta-idea -- an idea about ideas. It seems we should have an industry retreat at Park City some year, no sessions, no formal meetings, just ski groups, people who ski together, a few hours at a time. It might pump some fresh blood through tech and/or media to do so.

Another idea -- a web service that's all about making money and pleasing users and marketers all at the same time. Pretty sure it doesn't exist, so as you're evaluating the idea, don't assume it's just like something you've already seen.

Imagine a new Digg-like site where marketers submitted ads. The ones that moved to the top would of course get more views. That would encourage advertisers to learn what viewers liked, if getting more views was one of their goals. At first there would be no cost to placing an ad. But after a time advertisers would pay a flat fee to place their ads on the service, say the cost of running an ad on a non-post-season football game. The great ads would make a lot of money because they would get far more viewers than the not-great ones, but all would pay the same.

The people who ran the site would make a fortune, assuming it bootstrapped well.

Have I ever seen an ad I liked, one person on Twitter asks. Yes of course. Many. Have you ever watched the Superbowl?

The thing is that ads don't have to be bad, they can be funny, interesting, informative, inspirational, and sometimes so good you can't help but watch them over and over.

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 minimum 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"