Scripting News

Your Berlin correspondent

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:33:49 GMT

I always get a cold at about this point in a Europe trip. The jetlag must weaken me, and all the walking and sweating and temperature changes, and so forth -- I get sick. And I always do the same thing, go right through it. I'll have time to get over it when I get home. Right now I'm spending my first full day in Berlin.

So far I like it.

Two news items caught my eye this morning. One a controversy in the press over whether the President had the right to call on a Huffington reporter second in his last press conference, when it seemed as if the President had an idea what kind of question he might ask. Did anyone breach some ethical requirement.

A much bigger issue, I haven't heard any reporter ask about, yet it is no less incestuous than the previous issue. Did the press do anything wrong in covering up the kidnap of a NY Times reporter by the Taliban? Assuming it wasn't wrong (since no one seems concerned) what is over the line? What kind of person wouldn't receive this kind of favor? And then this morning we learn, from the NY Times, that Wikipedia did the same thing, and it was a much more complex affair. And this raises all kinds of other questions. What about when information on Wikipedia, true or not, hurts people in other ways? Why shouldn't anyone be able to get whatever they want redacted? I don't think there's a bit of difference between news organziations and Wikipedia. And let's hope they're ready with an answer, or are they just making it up as they go along?

My feeling, Wikipedia suffers from the same centralization of authority as Twitter. No one should have the power that Jimmy Wales has, to shut down Wikipedia as a conduit for truth. It appears from the NYT story that, at times, they had verification that the reporter had been kidnapped. At that point, they had no choice but to include it, whether it jeopardized the reporter's life or not. It's a line you can't define, there must be many situations where the presence of information on Wikipedia puts people at risk, just as information on the web puts people at risk. The difference is there is no central authority on what belongs on the web, and there is one on Wikipedia.

Same problem on Twitter. Reading Fred Wilson's interview with John Battelle, I'm horrified at how involved the management of Twitter feels in the flow of information and ideas on Twitter. If it were just the web, it wouldn't matter -- his opinion is just one person's opinion, and it can be balanced by other people's point of view. But in Twitter, some people's opinions are much more important than others' and Fred is one of those most important people. This is unacceptable. There's no other word for it. I have a feeling that when the reporters on Twitter are aware of this they won't like it either, but so far I don't think they are.

Last night, unable to sleep due to jetlag, I watched Lives of Others, a movie set in East Berlin. It was a beautiful movie about the contradictions that come up when thoughtful people are tasked with controlling the lives of other thoughtful people. This is where we're going in Wikipedia and Twitter.

Arrived in Berlin

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:28:25 GMT

Amyloo pointed out that arriving in a new city would have been a blog post three years ago. She's right. I think it deserves a blog post this year as well.

Yesterday I completed my third visit to Copenhagen with a visit to an ancient castle in Helsignor, where Shakespeare set Hamlet.

From there we went to an incredible art museum on the shore of the sound that Copenhagen is on. I took a bunch of pictures.

Finally we went to dinner at a nice restaurant in Christiania, an outlaw community within Copenhagen

Today, after breakfast with Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, I left for Berlin, which I can already tell is a spectacularly beautiful city, even though I've only been here an hour. I'm staying at the Grand, a beautifully restored historic hotel where one of my favorite movies of the 1930s was set. Getting off the elevator, I laughed because I immediately recognized it as a set where Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and John and Lionel Barrymore performed their magic. It's a gorgeous hotel. I can't imagine it looked any nicer in 1932.

I have a very pragmatic reason for wanting to post something on the blog. I am here in a strange city on my own. Reaching out to any readers of this blog, let's have a dinner. I'm here for three nights. I love beer. I hear there's some good beer here!

The myth of perfection

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:37:24 GMT

Myth: Twitter is perfect. If you change even one thing its magic disappears.

Apple products are often thought to be perfect. Steve Jobs had a lot of people convinced that video had no place on the iPod, until he revealed the iPod with video. All of a sudden it was the Number One most sought-after feature.

The myth of perfection is mostly skillful marketing.

The reality: We Make Shitty Software.

Software is a process. It's never done. "Our software is shitty," the honest hard-working developer says. "But watch, we'll make it less shitty." You're buying a process not perfection.

This has practical applications. In the last Rebooting The News podcast, toward the end, the subject of changing Twitter came up. When I was able to convince Jay that Twitter could be changed, he said his #1 most desired feature was to be able to edit a tweet.

Twitter will get more features. Bugs will be fixed. You can be sure of that.

One of the most obvious features it will get, and I'd bet really soon, are groups, which are similar to features already implemented by some of the clients.

What's your number one most desired feature?

PS: This discussion is a continuation to the the piece I wrote earlier this week about the 140-character limit.

Good morning Copenhagen

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:41:53 GMT

I think I must have been Danish in a former life because when I arrive in Copenhagen there's something familiar about it, comfortable, nice. You get a sense that people live well here, don't know what it is, but Copenhagen puts me in a good mood.

Tell you another thing, if you can time your arrival for 7 or 8PM you can do the nicest thing re jetlag -- immediately go to sleep for a full 8 hours and if it's midsummer, almost never have it go dark on you! That way if you get up at 3AM it feels like 6AM back home in California, but that's pretty disorienting because it's actually 6PM.

The right way to think about the trip from SF to Copenhagen: The flight takes 10 hours, real time. Add another 9 hours lost to timezones, and it's at least a 19 hour trip, including the fact that you have to go through somewhere else to get here. Neither city is large enough to have direct flights between them.

Arrived in Frankfurt

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:38:35 GMT

Tim O'Reilly should speak for himself

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:42:32 GMT

Tim O'Reilly says: "At the end of the day, folks like Scoble and Winer are unhappy because they aren't on the list. It doesn't feel fair to them, so they do the next best thing, seeking publicity by complaining about it."

That's not true.It's far more complex than that. O'Reilly should stick to speaking for himself.

I'm writing this on a plane that's boarding now, heading for Frankfurt from San Francisco, so obviously this is not a debate I will be able to take part in, but I did want to clear this up.

PS: Sprint MiFi is wonderful. I left it on in my knapsack which is in the overhead compartment. Scoble called on my iPhone to alert me to this. I whipped out my netbook and launched my editor and quickly wrote a blog post. We live in wonderful times.

Heading to Europe

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:21:29 GMT

I'm leaving tonight for Copenhagen to participate in the Reboot conference. This will be my third Reboot. It's a very nice group of people, very far away from Silicon Valley, and I always have fun. Looking forward to partying with Thomas and his posse and Paolo, Stowe, and everyone else. I'll be leading a talk on Thursday evening on Rebooting the News.

After Copenhagen, I'll spend three days in Berlin, then head back to the US via Chicago on July 1.

See you on the other side of the world, tomorrow night!

PS: I recorded a podcast with Phil Windley of IT Conversations last Monday. A little bit of time has gone by but I think it's pretty good. We talked about the technical side of Rebooting the News.

River of News in CSS, designer's release

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:52:06 GMT

I wrote my first RSS aggregator in 1999.

Believe it or not the core of that aggregator is what's behind the aggregator I've been shipping in the OPML Editor. Since then I've written all kinds of specialized aggregators, and it turns out it's not that much work these days.

Rather than live with all the decisions I've made over the last 10 years, I started over. The result is River2.

I just completed the first version, which I'm calling the "designer's release."

Every design element can be changed through CSS.

You just save your change, refresh the page, see the result.

The web server runs on your desktop, inside the OPML Editor.

To get an idea of what you're working with, my copy of River2 saves its home page to a public server every ten minutes. Yours will look like this too, until you change the design!

So if you're interested in designing the look of a River of News aggregator, it's ready for you to try it out.

http://newsriver.org/river2

If you have questions or comments, leave them here, or in the comment section on the page above.

Be sweet, don't retweet

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:43:15 GMT

That's like Be Kind Rewind.

And of course everyone retweeted this and everyone clicked.

Nothing here. Move along.

Why 140 chars is like 48K

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:51:44 GMT

I love telling stories, especially ones with happy endings.

Once upon a time, way back in the early 80s, a young man (me) had written a program called ThinkTank. It ran on the Apple II, which only had 48K of memory -- not very much when you consider that an average PC today has 1 gigabyte -- or 21,845 times the memory if you can believe that!

That's like comparing a single 140-char tweet to the Library of Congress.

The Apple II had an infintesmally small memory, but its disk was a little larger. So the operating system I used, the UCSD P-System, did "overlays," which allowed big chunks of code to stay on disk until they were needed. When code in an overlay was called, the OS would throw out another chunk of code and replace it with the one you called. So, in the worst case, if a command needed code in two overlays to solve a problem that involved looping, the disk light would stay on for a long time while the computer "thrashed" out the answer.

This isn't unlike the way an Amazon Kindle keeps part of your library on its computer and part of it on the Kindle itself. When you want to read one of the books on their computer it just downloads it again, replacing something you haven't read in a while.

This business of writing code in overlays was very taxing to the developer, because thrashing wasn't very good for the usability of the code, so you're always moving code between overlays, or making a copy of an often-used routine, all to prevent the disk light from coming on and thrashing the app (and its user) to a standstill.

This clever code-writing is a lot like writing 140-character tweets today. You delete and abbreviate, throw out important ideas, all to fit into that tight little space. And then your readers, like the disk light, thrash with confusion, and think you're a fool, because you have to be a genius and a mind-reader to figure out the gibberish you wrote to fit in 140. Oy!!

So, with the app in the Apple II days, it was often too much trouble to add the feature. With Twitter, it's often easier just to say nothing. And that's not the goal of blogging, macro or micro. The goal is to provide a platform for saying what you have to say, not for not saying what you have to say!

Anyway, the Apple II story had a happy ending. It was called the IBM PC. Instead of 48K it had 640K. So when I recompiled my app for that machine I just threw out the overlays and let all the code reside in memory and the thing ran like a bat out of hell! I was finally able to finish the features I wanted, and instead of thinking the program just had potential, people loved it, and it sold, and we raised money, and everyone was happy.

The End.

Update: If 140 is too little, what's the right number?

If 140 is too little, what's the right number?

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:33:55 GMT

Jonathan Edman tweets: "I deeply understand how crippling 140c is, but what is the right number? Don't you run into the same problem at almost any num?"

Since my answer is too long to fit in 140 chars, I answered here.

Jonathan, I don't know what the "right" number is, but I have some ideas.

First, almost anything above 140 would be seen by power Twitter users as an improvement, and a cause for celebration. It would be a sign that someone is listening. And it would immediately give us relief. It's as if, in 1981, Apple found a way to give us 72K instead of 48K. There would be a burst of creativity like the Summer of Love.

Now, here's what I would do first, to try to come up with the right number.

Read the feeds of the NY Times, BBC, and a few other professional news sources for a few weeks, and count the characters in the <description> elements of each <item>. Average the number. Double it. That's what I would go with.

The theory being, if professional writers can summarize a whole news article in, X characters, then the average person should be able to express an idea in 2X characters.

In my new River of News, I cut the intros off at 280 chars, arbitrarily, and it seems to work pretty well. Previous versions included full posts, and that was a problem, because some sites, like OpenLeft, write whole books in their posts. I also strip out markup. I'm tired of all the huge pictures people are throwing into the river. I see it as a gimmick to try to get more attention. I say let their ideas compete with everyone else's on a level playing field.

Rebooting The News #14

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:35:49 GMT

Show notes here.

MP3 here.

Feed here.

Covering a small city

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:44:12 GMT

For InBerkeley.com.

I was walking on Solano Ave approaching Alameda when I saw a few people looking at an accident scene down the block.

Several fire trucks, a police car blocking traffic. I could see a bicycle and an ambulance. The other people didn't know what had happened beyond that there had been an accident.

I took a picture of course.

So now it's an hour later, I'm at the computer, and poking around the City of Berkeley website, the fire department, police, Alta Bates Hospital, and come up with nothing. There's no record of what happened, or is there?

if there is a log -- where is it?

If not, who do I talk with about getting one going?

It seems this is the most basic beginning to having an effective local website.

Update: There is a public information officer in Berkeley.

Update: Berkeley Crimelog. (!)

Live-blogging at MSM

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:25:11 GMT

It's great that the MSM has adopted blogging tools to cover the Tehran protests, which seem to be ending, perhaps tragically.

I'm watching Andrew Sullivan, the NY Times, the Guardian and Huffington. All are doing a fantastic job.

However, for next time -- can I suggest that they create an RSS feed for each flow where each mini-post is its own <item>. That way we could easily follow multiple flows without having to refresh all those pages.

Scripting News started as a link blog, so you'll find plenty of prior art looking at its archive. Here's a folder that contains the RSS archive for 2003. (View source, today's browsers totally mangle the display of XML, in the name of progress. Oy.)

A screen shot for the 10/13/03 page.

Twitter heading off editorial cliff?

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:19:39 GMT

Great piece yesterday in CNET about how Twitter is no longer young. Paradoxically true and a must-read.

Jesse Stay has an interesting piece on how Twitter is going after people who game Twitter to get more followers. It's a good piece, well worth reading carefully and understanding. And I support what Twitter is doing. But...

The problem is that Twitter is the worst offender here with the Suggested User List.

I'm watching a NY Times columnist, who was added to the list last week, leapfrog his competition. It changed the way he posts. (He openly says that, he may have been joking, but you should watch those jokes, they usually reveal some truth, that's why they're funny.)

Twitter is starting to make a difference in the world of professional poker. They put one of the competitors on the SUL, now he has 329K followers.

NY Times: "A writer with an interest in comic books can become the expert on comic books."

How long before the professional gamers privately start paying people who are on the SUL to point to them? (My guess is that it has already happened.)

What are the editorial guidelines for people on the SUL?

And why would Twitter want to enter this space? And are they ready to take an editorial interest in the people who use their system. This is why lines exist in journalism, to keep the publishing interests from having to worry about the editorial interests. Inevitably, the lines get crossed, you can't avoid it, but you try to avoid it. Twitter made a huge mistake by crossing the line with such gusto. Now you can see them approaching the contradiction. They want to stop users from doing what they themselves do so much better. Can't make that work very much longer.

Net-net: They will eventually have to publish guidelines for SUL members. Watch for a rebellion from those now very powerful people, who will neither want to give up their power nor submit to guidelines from Twitter.

This subject came up earlier this week when @anamariecox admitted that the White House treats her with new deference because she has 650K followers. A couple of months ago she had 3K. So the change is significiant and clearly due to the gift from Twitter.

Update: Getting real, we know they already have implicit editorial guidelines for the SUL. It's why people like me, who are unpredictable, will never get on the list. They don't know what I'm going to say, and they might not want to stand behind me. That's the problem, because they don't know what anyone else will say either. Sooner or later someone who they propelled to the top will do something bad. It has to happen. And that's why they needed a really strong separation between the platform and the content, and the problem, for them and the platform, is they have no separation at all. A major oil spill is inevitable.

Update: ZachsMind says "you're just hurting my head." We used to call those "mind bombs."

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!"

Question to professional reporters: If your publication is on the SUL, or were on the SUL, would you submit to editorial guidelines from Twitter, Inc?

CSS in a River of News, progress report

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:03:42 GMT

I've done some more work on the CSS-in-Rivers project.

I'm sticking with the plan. I'm going to have a new tool that makes it really easy to configure the CSS in realtime, without having to change any code, so people can play with a real aggregator and hack up its appearance.

You can see the result in the public page, which is updated every 10 minutes.

http://scripting.com/misc/riverExample.html

I expect to release the tool before the end of the weekend, Murphy-willing.

PS: Yes I know it's ugly! By design. To make you want to change it.

Okay I'm trying iPhone tethering

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:03:34 GMT

Everyone who's tried it says it works, so I'm giving it a go.

Here's how to do it.

0. I have an iPhone 3G, not a 3GS.

1. Visit this site in the browser on the iPhone. Follow the instructions to install the configuration file it needs for the country you're in. (I'm in the US, of course.) Took me about a minute. Most of that was reading the various instructions, warnings and disclaimers.

2. Then I followed the instructions from Apple to turn it on in the iPhone user interface. Easily done.

3. Now I'm going to see if I can pair the iPhone with my netbook using Bluetooth. Back in a few minutes.

4. As with everything on Windows it takes a bit of fussing, doing things a few times, but it works.

5. Now I have a $400 toy that I no longer have any use for? :-(

Bad Hair Day #1

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:44:16 GMT

The first episode of the new podcast ready to go!

And it wouldn't be Bad Hair Day if there wasn't a major glitch in the show, right at the beginning.

Might as well get off to a Bad start!

Yes, as they used to say It's even worse than it appears.

But it was a good show, some might even think it had moments of greatness.

Here's the RSS podcast feed.

http://badhair.us/rss.xml

If you're going to subscribe in iTunes, choose Subscribe to Podcast in the Advanced menu and enter the RSS link above. That's it!

Read the show notes here.

http://badhair.us/2009/06/18/00015.html

Wishing you bad hair, today and in the future!

iPhone 3.0 problem with camera

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:13:32 GMT

I upgraded my iPhone last night to version 3.0. Everything seems to be working but there's no camera icon on the desktop. I'm lost without my camera. Help!

Update: The ultimate fix was to go to the Settings app, General/ Reset/ Reset Home Screen Layout. That brought the camera back.

Bad Hair for Everyone!

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:12:33 GMT

I'm starting a second series of podcasts about tech with Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb. We're recording the first show tonight. You'll be able to listen live, but there will be no call-in. There will be a feed, of course.

Every Thursday at 7PM, Murphy-willing.

We'll follow the model of RTN, the weekly podcast I do with Jay Rosen, but we plan to expand the cast beyond Marshall and myself. But the first show will be a duo.

The name of the show is BadHairDay. As I say in the teaser, that's every day for me. I'm pretty sure Marshall has good hair. So that balances things out.

Here's a list of things I'm interested in talking about in the first show (no way we'll get to it all): iPhone 3.0, tethering, netbooks, Twitter clones, backing up Twitter, Hackintosh, Google Wave, Any hope for Yahoo?, Opera Unite, desktop web servers.

Marshall has his own list.

We'll be doing the show on BlogTalkRadio.

The website for the podcast is http://badhair.us/.

The feed will be here (no shows yet): http://badhair.us/rss.xml.