Scripting News

What, if anything, did Microsoft announce?

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:10:20 GMT

This morning, before we recorded the RTN podcast, there was evidence that Microsoft had announced something. Apparently they had briefed the press at some undisclosed location on some date we don't know about some products we don't understand.

Last week I gave Google a ton of grief for announcing an operating system that has been shipping for 17 years and a web browser that had been shipping for about a year as a new product with the same name as the browser that had been shipping for a year.

In the podcast we talked about a river of realtime news. The analogy fits these pseudo-events in the following way. Sometime in the past weeks Microsoft held a private event, trying to build a dam on the river, hoping to blow the dam at a predetermined time earlier today, thereby creating a rush of news that would impress everyone. It didn't work because apparently the dam developed a leak in the middle of the night and the water rushed down the river of news while everyone was sleeping. No one was impressed. Sad Microsoft.

The moral of the story: Companies probably should announce products when they are new, and when ordinary people and the savvy insiders can try it all out and share their opinions. That way if the product is any good it will generate interest. If it's not good, no one need bother get excited.

ReadWriteWeb: Microsoft Office Web Access Not Here Yet.

Marc Canter leaves California

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:19:45 GMT

I remember when Marc came to California in 1988. He got here just in time for the Loma Prieta quake. Two people died outside his office on Townsend. They had just been to visit Marc.

There would be no tech industry South Of Market if Marc hadn't moved his small company here from Chicago in the late 80s. He was young then, he had a purpose, he was going to turn desktop computers into movie machines. He did that.

He was hugely influential, although time has a way of paving that over. Remember that, young people, you may be important now, but there will come a day when no one knows your name. Prepare for that day.

He got rich, very rich -- but he blew through the money like a drunk rock star with an entourage, which he had.

Marc is a wild man. California has captured his wildness for a long time. Now that wildness belongs to the rest of the USA.

Good luck man -- keep blogging so we know what's up with you.

Rebooting The News #16

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:16:43 GMT

Recorded this morning at 9AM Pacific.

Show page here, with notes written by Jay.

More Pubsubhubbub feedback

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:25:09 GMT

When I travel to Europe, I wonder why they couldn't just do electric plugs the same way we do in the US. That way I wouldn't have to carry an adapter and I'd be able to plug in more than one device at a time. I wish their cell phones worked the same way ours do (I gather they do now, somewhat) and that billing worked the same (I'll let you know when the bill from my June trip arrives). When I travel to London I wish they had the good sense to drive on the correct side of the road.

Each of these inconveniences were caused by engineers thinking they didn't "have to" worry about the way things were done before. They were right, they didn't have to, and all future users paid for their insistence. Think how much better it would all have worked if they cared.

And some things are, thankfully, the same. For example -- a wifi router is the same in Europe and the US. The Euro is a way of rolling up currency incompatibilities, although some countries in Europe, Denmark, the UK and Switzerland, aren't on board. But think about all the trouble they've gone to get that compatibility. What if they had been compatible from the start?

Anyway, how does this apply to notification?

Googler DeWitt Clinton asked for Feedback on Friendfeed's proposal for notification, which is different from Google's. I'm already confused! Both of them are different from the weblogs.com method which is now almost ten years old (and deployed in every blogging app and CMS out there).

I make the same suggestion to them that I made to the IETF when they were embarking on Atom. I offered that they should start with RSS 2.0 and change whatever they felt they can't live with, and document their rationales. They didn't take my advice, so now we're in this silly situation where there are two names for everything. What RSS calls an <item>, Atom calls a <froofraw> (or whatever, I can never remember).

2003: Prior art as a design method.

So, if you're working on notification, I suggest starting with weblogs.com pinging with changes.xml as your output, and then change whatever you feel you can't live with, and document your rationales. That way what you end up with will be minimally different from what's already out there, and future implementers won't curse us for not having the sense to have one way to do things. (That's right, they'll curse all of us, they won't know or care who went first.)

Now, if forced to make a choice, I'd probably go with Pubsubhubbub for three reasons: 1. It's at least XML, even if it's not RSS. 2. They say they'll support RSS, giving a sense of being in touch with the world they live in. 3. It's Google, so they have a certain amount of sway with users and developers. However, neither of them adopts the prior art method of format design outlined above. If either of them did, I wouldn't even have to make a choice.

A more low-tech approach to ping hubs

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:15:09 GMT

When talking with the Google guys earlier today I told them that there was an even more low-tech approach than the <cloud> element for the kind of notification they were doing. As I was reading their spec, I decided to look into it to refresh my memory. I'm writing it up here, so everyone can compare.

1. Unlike <cloud> this protocol was very widely implemented. Support for this protocol is already baked into almost all blogging software, and (likely) many CMSes.

2. The feed indicates which hub it belongs to using a <category> element. You can see an example looking in the feed for my Radio weblog. I've made a copy of that feed in case the link goes bad (I hear that Radio weblog hosting may end in December.)

This means that if you want to find out if this feed changed, you should monitor the indicated changes.xml file.

3. When the feed updates, it pings the server that maintains that changes.xml file. The coupling here is much looser than the coupling that Google is using. But the changes.xml file can be read once a minute. If your application can handle up-to-the-minute updates instead of up-to-the-second, then this approach works fine.

A neat conference hack?

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:00:17 GMT

Hey I just had an idea for a conference hack you can do at a traditional audience-oriented conference.

I have a theory that you could grab any random person from the audience and put them on stage and they'd give a better talk than the usual conference speaker because they wouldn't have had time to prepare slides or get nervous and plan a speech in their head.

So, why not do exactly that!

Have a "surprise panel" mid-afternoon on the first day, around 3PM. The conference moderator takes the podium and says: "Would the following people please come up on stage." And then he'd name four people chosen at random from the audience. Then they'd have a discussion about the previous panels and speeches, the topics of the day in whatever industry or profession the conference is about.

The only problem with this idea is that by 3PM most of the people would already be out in the hallway schmoozing because the speeches and panels were so boring. Not exactly sure what to do about that.

Google's Pubsubhubbub

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 22:26:55 GMT

It's got a weird name, and I found the spec somewhat hard to understand.

But thanks to Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin from the team at Google that implemented it, I now understand what Pubsubhubbub does.

It allows you to receive updates of RSS feeds without polling.

It makes it possible to build a distributed Twitter-like system with components that are not made by a single company, and with servers not run by a single company.

It makes instant updates possible for RSS.

It makes it possible to build a Twitter without the limitations of Twitter. (For example, no 140-character limit, the ability to handle enclosures, categories without #hashtags.)

The protocol it defines seems reasonable (I'll have to implement one side of it to be sure) and because it has the backing of Google, one of a very small number of companies with the resources to make something like this work, it has a chance of gaining traction and when it does, scaling.

In fact, it's part of one of the components I asked Google to implement in a blog post here on May 28, as Brett pointed out in our phone conversation earlier today. It's nice to see that at least a few people at Google see the possibility of assembling a Twitter-like notification system with the Small Pieces, Loosely Joined approach.

Drilling in one more level, here's how it flows.

1. Any feed that wants to participate in this network must add a bit to the feed that indicates which ping server is handling notifications on its behalf. There can be more than one.

2. When a subscribing application initially parses the feed and notices this bit, it sends a notification to each server saying "I want to be notified when this feed updates."

3. When the feed updates, it pings each of the servers it has registered with saying "I have updated."

4. The server then pings each of the subscribers saying "He updated."

The subscriber must have a known address, therefore must not be behind a firewall or NAT. For client apps, they need some kind of proxy that has a known address. This limit is signficant, but certainly not insurmountable.

I would like to see them understand RSS syntax in addition to Atom syntax, and I understand from the spec that that is forthcoming.

Update: http://superfeedr.com/ has also implemented this protocol.

Imho, the OPML Editor is not hard

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:04:00 GMT

I've heard people say, here and there, that the OPML Editor is too hard to use, or overkill for certain projects, but honestly -- I don't think it is. I think there may be other problems, and confusion about what it does, because it surely does a lot. But for a specific task, it's not really that hard to set up and use. If it is, I want to work on making it easier.

Let's start with an application that a fair number of people have, that the OPML Editor has a solution for -- backing up your tweets, and those of the people you follow. As Apple likes to say about the iPhone, "There's an app for that."

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

The docs on that page explain how to install the tool.

Installing it is much like installing an Adobe Air application. First you have to install the runtime, I don't think there's anything complicated about that, then install the tool, which requires a little setup, but again it's not complicated. If you were to install an app in .Net or Java it would work the same way.

Then, once you have the runtime installed, installing new tools is even easier. There's a list of tools that are available, it's called the Tool Catalog. There's a menu item in the OPML Editor app that opens the catalog. Next to each tool there's an Install link. If you click on it, guess what, it installs the app. A confirmation dialog appears, making sure that's what you want to do. And if the app requires you to set some prefs, a page where you enter those prefs appears.

Now I'm working to make it easier. And if people hit walls installing this stuff, I want to fix them. There are still some things I can't do. I can't build the OPML Editor kernel on Macintosh, and this may present a problem down the road, but for right now everything is cool. And if more people use it, it'll be easier to get the build process streamlined. It's all chicken and egg.

So when you use the OPML Editor you help make it better and make it easier for me to develop more tools, which I am working on, all the time.

Bad Hair Day #3

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:32:31 GMT

Marshall is buying a new house, so I recruited two guests for this podcast, and they were excellent.

They had really bad hair!

Michael Gartenberg is a Interpret analyst, an expert on mobile devices.

Andrew Baron is a video producer and entrepreneur, founder of Rocketboom and the brand new video aggregator, Mag.ma. At the end of the show he gives out beta access codes for the new service.

We talk about Google's Chrome OS, iPhones, video, realtime stuff and of course Andrew's Mag.ma service.

The feed: http://badhair.us/rss.xml

Find Good Enemies

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:17:56 GMT

Mark Bernstein in a rambling quote-filled piece has one of the nicest descriptions of yours truly. "Dave Winer could be rough if you got athwart his hawse, but he was generally a nice guy who always seemed to want to get a lot of bright people around a big table with plenty of food."

Maybe I'm not the most hated person on the Internet after all?

Re Barger's list playing a central role in the origins of blogging, not sure I accept that the most important thing was a list of blogs, or even a network of them. People who think the task of blogging is to pull people together miss, imho, the important thing about blogging -- that it separates people and gives each individual a place to express themselves, not subject to veto. In that way it is different from a mail list. Blogs emphasize the individual over the group.

The argument continues to this day. People who say Twitter is a conversational medium would agree with those who say Barger was the founder. I see Twitter as a publishing environment, a place to push links, a notification system. Oddly, I think Barger with his linkblog approach (which was the same as the early Scripting News or the News Page of the 24 Hours project) would agree.

Bernstein says many wise things in his post. I thought this one stood out.

"If you wish to shed light on a debate, reply to a weblog post on your own weblog."

Amen.

Hyperlocal bloggers at Cal J-School

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:18:53 GMT

I'm at a meeting of hyperlocal bloggers at Cal J-school.

People are going around the room introducing themselves. The stories are all interesting, the people are very good public speakers. Almost everyone here is doing, not talking about doing.

Really interesting story from Lydia Chavez, managing editor of misionlocal.org.

What I think of Lenny Dykstra

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:36:58 GMT

Lenny Dykstra is bankrupt. For some reason that seems like big news to me.

Dykstra was one of the heroes of the 1986 world champion NY Mets. The same team that Mookie Wilson played for. These two guys, more than anyone else of that era, exemplified, to me, the spirit of the Mets.

I don't know anything about either person's off-field life, just what they were like as baseball players. Dykstra was the Mets own version of Pete Rose. Charlie Hustle. He'd run when it was okay to jog. There was an admirable intensity to the guy. He was a little guy, but he played big.

I've written about Mookie. The man with the heart of gold.

If someone says that guys like Lenny and Mookie are dumb, I think they don't know the first thing about success. To reach the top of anything, you have to have everything going for you. People used to say President Bush was stupid. He may be a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. You can't get where he got and be stupid. There's too much competition and it's too skilled and smart and ambitious and lucky and so many more things.

I know some people think that I've done nothing to achieve the success I've achieved. But I've actually lived this life, so I have a pretty good idea of the sacrifices I made to accomplish what I have. Not asking for anything, but I'm often amazed at how people think an idiot savant could do anything significant in the tech world.

Forrest Gump is a great story. I've had many moments where I feel like I'm leading his life, somehow as if by luck I end up where the action is. I certainly had that feeling this weekend, in the presence of Valentino Rossi and all those other fantastic athelets. I'm sure a lot of it is luck. But I look at a guy like Lenny Dykstra, out of money, a failure in business, and wonder what he must think we think. I'll tell you what I think. The man is a hero and always will be.

The Java Wars, continued

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:01:24 GMT

For your consideration...

1. Google has been hiring engineers away from Microsoft for years. There was a time when I'd get an email every day from someone I had worked with at Microsoft saying "I'm at Google now."

2. Their CEO, Eric Schmidt, is a veteran of the Java Wars, when he was an exec at Sun Microsystems. So it's no surprise that Schmidt has navigated Google back into position with Microsoft in the ongoing battle of the titans in tech.

Today's Google thinks in terms of industry warfare, and when they look for an adversary to fight, they see Microsoft, looming large.

The only problem with all this war is that it has nothing to do with what computers are used for, or any relevance to the people who use them. All these wars do is simplify the world for the execs and the press, and make it seem like the warring parties and their wars are all that matter. After a while something new comes along from someone new, and the two warring parties are left to dook it out while the attention shifts to the shiny new stuff.

So yesterday Google announced The Chrome OS, which is hailed by the industry press as a surprise middle-of-the-night attack against their arch-rival, Microsoft. But did any of the reporters take a quiet moment to reflect on the basic question: What Just Happened? If they had, they would have been hard-pressed to find anything actually had happened, other than a press release.

Let's be dispassionate. Before yesterday's announcement: 1. Chrome ran on Linux. 2. Linux was an operating system. 3. Linux ran on netbooks.

However, most people want XP on their netbook, not Linux. That was true yesterday and it's still true today.

I'm one of the users who prefers XP. I have two identitcal netbooks, one runs Linux and the other runs XP. I travel with the one that runs XP because it runs my software. And that's the hurdle Linux has, whether or not Google calls it Chrome. Normal people, given a choice, want XP. It's also Microsoft's problem because people aren't wanting Vista or Windows 7 either.

I predict Google will hit the same wall Microsoft has hit. Getting a bunch of pundits happy about the drama of warfare isn't going to make a difference in the user base. It'll just put off the day that both companies deal with the issue -- how to create anything in the OS area that interests people enough to buy something new. Google doesn't have it. Chrome is popular for sure, esp for a browser that's less than a year old. But it runs on XP. Microsoft surely doesn't have it. And I don't think Apple has it either.

Back in user-land, on Planet Earth, I still can't use Chrome because it doesn't synch bookmarks the way Firefox with XMarks does. A much more meaningful announcement, imho, would be that Chrome now runs XMarks and can synch with Firefox. Ironically that would hurt Microsoft much more than any of the michegas they're doing, unless they have a browser that can hook into this network too. Bookmark synchronization is one of the very few new things that users actually want, so what is the tech industry doing about it? Nothing. Of course.

PS: I just noticed that XMarks, which was formerly FoxMarks, now has new positioning: "Bookmark-powered web discovery." Ugh. I suspect that's a phrase chosen to make investors happy. To me, I use XMarks as a way to synch bookmarks between the computers I use. I hope they're not going to stray too far from that.

San Francisco pier

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:42:57 GMT

Sarah Palin as Inspiration

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:03:44 GMT

Every week on Rebooting The News, one of us chooses the Inspiration of the Week. Someone or something that inspires the RTN philosophy and process. Mostly they've been thinkers and doers, but Jay once surprised us with a great simple song, written by Nick Lowe and made popular by Elvis Costello.

One week Jay chooses, and the next week I choose.

I think I managed to surprise Jay yesterday when I chose Sarah Palin as the Inspiration for this week. You can hear the story at minute 35:45 in yesterday's podcast. Briefly I said she was a Source Going Direct, someone who was trying to tell a story through the press, but they weren't passing it along.

Jay wasn't buying it.

I admit it's a tenuous choice. She really should have a blog or podcast to qualify. But somehow the story made it to me, despite the best efforts of the press to hide it.

ABC News ran a story this morning with a quote that supports my theory. "She said a major factor in the decision was the mounting legal bills she and the state have had to incur to fight ethics charges from her political adversaries. None of the accusations has been proven but, she said, the costs of fighting them have been enormous."

What I noticed was this -- she had offered a plausible, reasonable explanation for her choice, and imho, it's the only one that makes sense. But none of the analysis I've read or heard until the ABC News piece even passed it on as a possibility. At a gut level, as much as I despise Palin as a politician, as a human with a story to tell, I sympathize. This is one of the times the press ought to be more of a mirror and not such a filter.

New rules for the SUL

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:06:33 GMT

SUL stands for Suggested Users List.

I've written about it many times here on Scripting News.

I think it's finally time to say what I would advise Twitter, Inc to do to clean up the mess. Obviously they don't have to do any of this. But maybe it'll do some good to put the ideas out there anyway.

1. The max period anyone can be on the list is 30 days. Estimate how many followers each person currently on the list had been given, prorate it, and adjust it down to 30 days worth. So if on average, over the last few months, a member of the list would have gotten 100K new followers, but actually received 800K, he or she would lose 700K followers. It's still a gift of 100K followers, nothing to sneeze at. (And if it's true, as Tim O'Reilly says, that they don't matter, then losing some is nothing to complain about.)

2. It's possible that publications receiving the SUL bounty, such as TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm and ReadWriteWeb, may have been witholding criticism of Twitter. They would now be free to express it. So there may be a bunch of bad press about this. Take the hit now while you're on top. Spin it as proof that unwinding the list was a good idea, because every company needs vibrant and unconflicted critics. Thank them for their feedback and take their advice to heart.

3. Sign a 180-day contract with Mr Tweet to manage the new SUL for $0. If they have a competitor, give them the next 180-day period. Allocate this on a rotating basis. It may be possible at some point for this contract to generate revenue for Twitter, Inc, as long as they keep the choice of people on the list an arm's length matter.

4. It may also be possible to do away with the list entirely, to suggest people to follow based on who they already know. Offer another route into the system, at the recommendation of an existing user. Then you have their network to base suggestions on. The incentives are lined up well for that, it encourages people to find new users and to have them encourage them to actually engage with the network. If the people you're following initially are friends, family members, neighbors, co-workers, the experience will mean more. Nothing wrong with following celebrities too, of course.

5. No more random selections for the SUL by TwitterCorp employees. This is a very bad practice for many reasons.

Jay and I discussed this in yesterday's Rebooting the News podcast. Clearly "real-time search" will require something like Page Rank in Google search, a way to determine the authority or relevance of a tweet or a link in a tweet. Microsoft has already encountered this issue when trying to develop real-time search in their Bing search engine.

While follower-count isn't perfect, it's the only metric we have anywhere in sight that might support relevance in search. Before the SUL it was actually working fairly well, but the SUL introduced a huge distortion. It may not be too late to unwind this and to solve the problem they were trying to solve without losing follower-count as a meaningful metric.

Rebooting the News #15

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:37:12 GMT

Podcast here.

Show notes here.

RSS feed here.

Laguna Seca

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:32:39 GMT

I'm at Laguna Seca raceway today as the guests of Fiat who sponsor Valentino Rossi, a legend in the motorcycling world.

Rossi's fans are everywhere here. They wear yellow shirts with his number, 46, on them.

Think of 46 as a brand.

They have beautiful girls wearing marketing slogans posting with umbrellas and fans.

2PM: The race has started. It's like a nightmare of speed and sound. Amazing that human beings are on those machines. I have a video to upload. (Someone just wiped out while I was writing that.)

8PM: Here's the set of pictures I uploaded today.

Video shows what the race looked like from the stands.

Valentino Rossi signing autographs before the race.

Is it news if it's not reported?

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:33:36 GMT

A piece I wrote from Berlin has become one of the most-quoted pieces I've ever written. Maybe I should travel more often. Getting out of the country, writing while America sleeps, 120-degrees of jetlag, all seem good for whacking quotable phrases out of my brain.

Yesterday Jeff Jarvis quoted a line from that piece. "The sources never got paid. So the news was always free, it was the reporting of it that cost."

Which inspired a thread by two-time Pulitzer winner Howard Weaver, who I visited by train in Sacramento in June. In that thread Weaver said something that I couldn't respond to in a mere 140 characters. It was that good.

Weaver: "Is it news if it's not reported? I don't think so."

Weaver is the perfect foil because he says things like that. He's not wrong, given his background, where he spent his youth, his level of accomplishment, his justifiable pride, he has to think that.

And equally, given all my experience, I have to think the other way.

I blogged because there was news the press wasn't reporting.

4/5/97: "The press only knows three stories, Apple is dead, Microsoft is evil, and Java is the future."

I understand this is a semantic debate. Weaver chooses to define news as what was reported. I choose to see news everywhere, that it exists before it is reported, that reporting isn't even a necessary part of the news. I see his view as the means by which the press controlled us, but that control is slipping.

An example of the futility.

I was shocked for about 20 seconds to hear that Sarah Palin had resigned as Alaska governor. It was news the instant she made the announcement. I had to rush out to a lunch meeting at the Jupiter in downtown Berkeley. When I got back, it slipped my mind that there was a "breaking story" I could watch on CNN. I noticed some bloggers talking about it. I thought to tune in for about 5 seconds, even got so far as locating the SlingPlayer icon on my desktop. But before I could click, I was already bored.

At least for me, the reporters are as irrelevant as paper delivery of the NYT, WSJ and SJM had become in 1994. I know what they're going to say before they say it. I also don't feel their ability to set an agenda anymore. The only reason Palin has any viability is that the press remembers who she is. For me, and I'd bet a huge chunk of the electorate, she's a fading memory of an election we've put way behind us as we've turned to face our futures. For me the last election was only important in that it got Bush and the Republicans out. Having accomplished that, I don't care what the press thinks is news. I decide that for myself now.

I guess that's the point I'd like to make in response to Howard's excellent quote. I decide what's news. I don't delegate that. Maybe others want to accept the filter of the press, that's their right. But I don't care what they think is news. It's not that I decided not to care, it's that I truly don't care.

PS: To be clear, I do care what Weaver thinks is news. Perhaps that's the subject of another piece, or perhaps something to talk about on Monday's RTN.

Update: Jeff Jarvis advances the discussion.

Just the facts ma'am

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:09:16 GMT

On Twitter I just said I like the Perry White approach to news.

Of course I meant Joe Friday of Dragnet.

A witness would be gabbing opinions about stuff. Friday would humor her a bit and then the camera would focus on him with his notebook and he would say his famous line.

"Just the facts, ma'am."