Scripting News

Rebooting the reboot of rssCloud

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:01:12 GMT

It's been a really rough month for me, personally, and that has stalled some of the forward motion in rssCloudLand. I was able to find a little time between crises to implement both of the proposed changes, and to outline an open discussion page.

Originally I had planned to have four or five days between the implementation and updating the rssCloud walkthrough, but then Father's Day happened, and well, all my cards went up in the air. I'm still not firing on all cylinders, so please check my work carefully, but it is time to clear the space for more deployment of what amounts to a crucial feature for rssCloud implementers.

This morning I updated the walkthrough document to allow for:

1. An optional domain parameter on the REST request for notification.

2. If the notification request included the optional domain parameter, the verification process works differently.

A note about evangelism

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:06:11 GMT

If anyone in the rssCloud community is marketing against PubSubHubBub, we will ask them to stop. My position, and I hope that of the community is that these are non-commercial efforts, no one is going to profit (or lose) based on the success of one or the other protocols.

I see adoption of PubSubHubBub as a win for the Internet, and believe strongly their advocates should see adoption of rssCloud the same way. If they feel pressure from rssCloud, it should result in them more fully embracing RSS, which I felt they weren't doing when I first reviewed their efforts. Once that happens the differences will probably melt away and everyone will be happy.

Personal attacks in furthering advocacy are totally unacceptable and should not be tolerated. I hope this goes without saying, but unfortunately it appears it still needs to be said. Please.

Seeing past Twitter's limits

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:49:06 GMT

When thinking about the future, something I've spent a lifetime training myself to do, I try flipping the classic question around. Instead of asking "Do you think X will happen?" try this -- "Can you imagine X not happening?" It doesn't always yield a breakthrough, but it often does. It helps you see past the limits of today.

Anyway, I'm giving a 10-minute talk to open Jeff Pulver's Twitter conference in LA on the 27th. The title of my talk, suggested by Carla Casilli, is: "How I learned to stop worrying and love the Fail Whale." It's a ripoff of the sub-title of one of the greatest movies of all time, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. In his version, they replace the Fail Whale with The Bomb. In the 50s, 60s and 70s people were as obsessied with nuclear weapons as they are today with Twitter (that's only half a joke).

Anyway, today a tweet is 140 characters with an ever-evolving cadre of metadata marching alongside. And it's about the metadata that I wish to ask the inverted question. But first, I'd ask you to click on the small picture below, and go to Flickr and look at all the metadata that's assembled around a picture of my aunt and uncle taken by my mother sometime in the late 70s or early 80s.

What a rich collection of information there is. Yet you could imagine more, yes? If you read the paragraph that introduces the picture you'll see that there's some data that isn't reflected in the Flickr database. It was taken by my mother, and the two people in the picture are related to both of us. One by blood (the man, my uncle Ken) and one because she is married to the other (my aunt Dot). That data is missing probably because Flickr stopped actively evolving before social networking had fully gained a foothold in online culture. Same with the web itself. Wouldn't it be cool if a pointer could imply a familial relationship? I know that's what TBL has been talking about. Maybe we're getting closer to actually having it.

Anyway, if you go crazy and try to imagine what Twitter might become, you can see that a lot of what it is is in the Flickr metadata without the thing in the middle -- the picture. I've been urging Twitter to support payloads for years now. I can't imagine why they're not doing it. One piece of metadata is all that's needed, minimally, the URL pointing to the picture. Today we have to cram it into the 140 characters. Meanwhile they're advancing, adding geographic data and lists and retweets, all of which add little bits of data to a tweet, but for some reason they won't add the url. Which gets back to the question. Can you imagine that Twitter will never get this feature? No, of course not. It will someday get it. Why not get it over with?

Techmeme curiosity

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:12:03 GMT

First a prediction -- some people are going to say I'm writing this because I want to be on Techmeme. They are entitled to say that, but they are wrong. I am neutral about it. If a story of mine belongs on Techmeme, it should be there, if not, it shouldn't. And it isn't up to me to decide, it's up to the people who run Techmeme.

Also, please read this whole post before commenting, not just one paragraph or phrase, because it's complicated.

I've always believed that Techmeme was a combination of a bot and human judgement. This was confirmed a few months back when Gabe, the guy who runs the site, hired a human editor.

I've disabled their bot by including a line in my robots.txt file that tells them not to crawl the site. But there is no such thing for the human beings, you can't make it so that a person can't read your site. So I always thought that if one of the humans at Techmeme thought something I wrote was interesting, they would publish a link to it. As far as I know this has never happened. (And I watch pretty carefully.)

Sometimes I take the block out of the robots.txt file to see what will happen. In those cases my pieces often turn up on Techmeme, almost never as a major item, rather as part of the "chorus" -- commenting on one of the major articles. I'm often in the chorus with the story everyone is reacting to, including the guy who got top billing. I don't know how this happens, but it's a large part of why I block their bot. I really dislike the chorus. It's what makes the blogosphere like a mail list. You end up with a lot of people chiming in with nothing to add, who just want the flow from being there.

Anyway, what made me think of it is that today Charles Arthur at the Guardian has a nice piece which is centered on my review of Twitter's lists. It's getting a good run on Techmeme. If Techmeme were doing their job well, they'd flip it around and present it as him commenting on the original piece. I'm saying this in case Gabe and Company think the bit in the robots.txt is a prohibition on their human editors. It is not. Read up on robots.txt if you don't believe me. It's all about robots.

Twitter's lists

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:07:53 GMT

Like a bunch of other people I had the new Twitter lists feature turned on today. Immediately I needed a list to explore and had a bunch of ready-made ideas. I had already done aggregated feeds of the top 100 most followed people on Twitter, the employees of the Twitter company and the NY Times, the Twin Cities and most recently Berkeley Twitterers.

The last one I replicated as a Twitter list.

If you don't yet have the feature turned on, you'll get a blank page on the last link. Here's a screen shot of what it looks like.

Basically you get a flow of all the people I've chosen to put on the Berkeley list.

Depending on what the API looks like we'll probably see all kinds of tools for combining and cloning lists.

It's a new authority system. The number of lists you appear on is a kind of page-rank. So let's hope Twitter does two things: 1. Provides an open API to crawl this data set. 2. Doesn't pollute it by artificially inflating the rank of friendly press and their industry friends. Stay out of the editorial space and let a healthy ecosystem develop. It's another chance to not screw it up.

Some people have said it's somehow related to the Suggested User List but I don't see it at all. This feature is for advanced users, the SUL is for total newbies. Unless Twitter somehow data mines our lists, something they could have done right at the start, it won't have any impact on the newbies' user experience.

Update: As you would expect, Scoble is going crrrazy with this feature!

Uncle Arno's books

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:24:28 GMT

My mother's uncle, Arno Schmidt, was a German author who lived between 1914 and 1979. He left a collection of his work to his sister Lucy, my grandmother, and when she died in 1977, the collection was passed to my mother. Legend has it that he gave the collection to his sister because he wanted a backup of his work in the United States.

Time goes by, and now my mother is thinking about passing on her stuff, and we want to do the right thing with Arno's legacy. There's a museum in Germany that wants the books, but they already have copies, and Arno wanted a copy in the US, so we're going to try to get him his wish.

I've listed our collection of books in a separate post.

We're looking for a university in the United States, probably one with a German Studies Department and a library, to take the whole collection. We're not looking to make money from this donation, it's strictly a gift, but we would like to have the materials accessible to the public. Ideally we'd like to work with a university in NY or the Bay Area because that's where our family is.

I wanted to make this offer publicly, through my blog, because it seems consistent with my efforts to get our electronic work archived. Here's a chance to learn how it's done with writing created in the mid-20th century. If you are at a university that is interested, either post a comment here, or send me an email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com. Thanks!

Friends see things you don't

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:28:38 GMT

This is a very personal time for me, lots of observations, things I'm learning about myself, things you can only see when a big tree falls and light shines on spaces that were previously hidden.

Here's a reason why it's good to have friends (as if one needs a reason) and why you should share your childhood pictures with them as soon as you can. I waited way too long for this.

When they see pictures of you as a baby and toddler and then as a small child they see something you never see in those pictures --> You!

Doc Searls' comment, as usual, hits the nail square on the head. "That's Dave! Great to see the kid, the son and the big brother, and how they match with the man and the friend."

Francine Hardway sees it too.

What a revelation. I never liked looking at those pictures, and now I know why. I didn't believe it ever happened. I have no memory of it, but friends can see what you can't -- that you were there. Now all of a sudden things your parents say start making sense. They were there too. Of course they have the advantage of remembering.

Some of Dad's pictures are so good they deserve to be called out specially.

That's my grandmother, Lucy Kiesler, on the left, and my mother, Eve Winer, on the right. My brother Peter Winer is sitting with his back to us, and the guy in the loud 70s style coat is me, at age 21. The picture was taken in New Orleans, not sure exactly where (possibly Commander's Palace) just before or after my college graduation. Click on the picture to see the full image. And the full set of pictures, uploaded yesterday, is on my Dad's memorial site.

Another observation. My Dad did a great job of organizing all the pictures. All I had to do was write some scripts to merge the captions, and link the thumbs with the originals. I'm storing all the stuff in Amazon S3 because I think it's the most reliable storage we have right now. Should I die or become incapacitated they will just keep billing my credit card, and hopefully my successors will just let the charges go through. Amazon really ought to allow people (as opposed to companies) purchase perpetual hosting. What a contribution to our culture they would be making if they did so.

What's obvious about netbooks

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:46:57 GMT

Some people in the tech industry believe netbooks are a mistake that will be corrected any day now. Problem is they've been saying that for hundreds of days while the netbook market keeps growing, as the market for more expensive portables stagnates. The trend won't reverse because netbooks represent a far more fundamental shift than they recognize. Far more significant than I've realized until just the other day.

12/17/08: What is a Netbook?

At one level, a netbook is just a new product, something between a notebook and an iPhone. It fits easily into a briefcase or knapsack, has a keyboard and screen that while not exactly spacious, are functional.

The iPhone is a compromise, a good one because of its supreme portability (it fits in a pocket). But netbooks are a good compromise too.

An aside, I know some people use iPhones for their networking. Scoble is my prime example. I can't get him to use my software these days because it runs in a desktop style web browser. Of course what he's doing is a reasonable choice. But it's never worked for me because communicating on an iPhone is too slow. Not just the typing, not just the cramped keyboard, but the actual networking. I had an interesting experience the other day on my mother's new FIOS home network, all of a sudden I could use the iPhone the way Scoble does. For some reason it doesn't work very well on my network at home, and the net connection from AT&T is infinitely too slow to be usable. So it could be that my iPhone experience is much worse than most people's.

As a product a netbook is less expensive, more portable, and has longer battery life than a notebook.

It has a bigger keyboard, bigger screen and is a better reading and writing tool than an iPhone.

It's in the middle -- and there is a middle -- a product between an iPhone and notebooks

But the netbook is not just a new product. It exposes something pretty ugly about the computer industry. They've been controlling prices. There must have been price collusion before netbooks came out. It's clearly possible to build notebooks for much less than they manufacturers are charging.

That's a matter for the Federal Trade Commission to look into, but even that is not what's going on with netbooks. The truly significant thing is this -- the users took over.

Let me say that again: The users took over.

I always say this is the lesson of the tech industry, but the people in the tech industry never believe it, but this is the loop. In the late 70s and early 80s the minicomputer and mainframe guys said the same kinds of things about Apple IIs and IBM PCs that Michael Dell is saying about netbooks. It happens over and over again, I've recited the loops so many times that every reader of this column can recite them from memory. All that has to be said is that it happened again.

Once out, the genie never goes back in the bottle.

This should serve as a lesson to the architects at Twitter and Facebook. The day will come when your users figure out that they can do what you do without the costs you impose. Better to prepare for that day, factor it into your economics, than be surprised by it as Michael Dell appears to have been. He's complaining about netbooks probably because his expense structure can't sustain the business. He's a leading vendor of netbooks, yet is selling against them. This means only one thing, and it's kind of obvious -- he's losing money on each sale. He can't afford to be in the business. Which means he can't afford to be in business at all.

Windows 7 may be nice, I don't know and I don't care. I like my XP-based netbook just fine with its 10 inch screen, 160GB hard drive and 8-hour battery life. My computer cost $350. I'm not a likely customer for an upsell. Those are the new economics, like it or not.

An open letter to Om

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:26:23 GMT

In a thread about netbooks on his blog, Om asks what he's missing in his analysis of the relationship between the computer industry and users re netbooks. I spent some time thinking of an analogy, and came up with one about the industry we all love to hate -- the airline industry.

So here's the story...

Once upon a time there was an MIT professor who said: "I have an idea, let's design an airline that can get you to a great resort for $100! Then every schoolkid can afford to have a great vacation in Mexico, Italy or Thailand!!"

No matter how hard he tried the professor couldn't come up with a solution. The moguls of the airline industry sighed in relief. Their margins were safe.

Not so fast! A Taiwanese airline named Susa discovered a way to do it for $600, which was still a lot cheaper than the airlines could get you to Italy or Spain for. Huge numbers of people signed up and the airline bustled with new business. People came home from their holidays and told everyone that they had a great trip. And with the new economies of scale Susa was able to get the price down to $350. Not the $100 that the MIT professor promised, but still cheap enough that lots more people could have a vacation, and while some people still went on the more expensive and luxurious airlines, more and more people were flying Susa.

In fact this happened in the airline industry, and it forced a lot of the big airlines to either merge or go out of business. Maybe analysts in the airline industry say that any day the users will tire of the cheap flights, but they'd be just as wrong as the analysts in tech who predict the demise of netbooks.

What I've learned about Hyperlocal

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:01:01 GMT

First, the news -- InBerkeley.com is coming to an end.

Other projects are consuming more of my time. And in the last couple of months, family stuff has taken me away from Berkeley, and I'm not sure where my attention will be in the future. So a big part of my decision to move on is personal.

But I've also learned why sites that we're calling "hyperlocal" are difficult, and why I failed to get the site to grow the way I hoped it would.

I thought we could apply the same approach that worked in bootstrapping weblogs, RSS and podcasting for a local site. One or two people start writing about their personal experiences. A small audience develops. Debates, discussions follow. More perspectives. At every step you invite people to participate. You always ask for the people who used to be called the audience to become full participants. That's how the idea scales. As I said, it worked for blogging and related technologies.

Instead, what happened at InBerkeley.com is that the people thought we were running a news organization, and they did stories the way reporters do them. That can't possibly work, imho -- for the same reason the news industry is in crisis.

An example. Suppose you're writing a story about a parade on Shattuck Ave at noon and you don't happen to be there, you just heard about it from a friend, but feel you have enough information to write a story. Now you want a picture for the story -- in fact, you think that without a picture you can't run the story. The reporter will hold it, but the blogger runs it anyway, and at the end asks if anyone has a picture. It's that little difference that makes the hyperlocal idea scale, and it's what my colleagues at InBerkeley were unwilling to do.

Instead, we got in trouble, twice, for taking copyrighted material from other sites. The first time it happened, I apologized, and nothing terrible happened. The second time, I decided we had to shut the site down, because we were doing it totally wrong. I want to stress, this is my opinion, but as one of the founders, it's my reputation that's out there. I didn't think what we were doing was noble, or even very good. Not something I was prepared to stand behind.

Further, I was sure that at some point I would be giving a talk and there would be a reporter in the crowd who would ask how news can reboot if it's dependent on scarfing copyrighted work from pros. Now if I get asked the question I can say I think it's possible, but we failed to prove it at InBerkeley.com. And I'll be telling the truth.

The other people at the site, including my former partner Lance Knobel, are going to start a new site, and I wish them the best. It's possible at some point I may even contribute, if they want my contribution.

Dave at 17

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:39:01 GMT

The next couple of batches of uploads at my Dad's memorial site.

1971-72 and 1972-74.

TechCrunch is back on the SUL

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:48:31 GMT

On September 22, I wrote a piece that showed a correlation between the number of followers a tech news site gets, and its position on Twitter's Suggested Users List. One of the two sites used in the example, TechCrunch, had been removed from the SUL in July after running a story based on leaked information about Twitter.

This is a followup to the Sept 22 piece.

TechCrunch is once again on the SUL, and once again their follower count is going up. Here's a screen shot of their new 3-month graph on TwitterCounter:

Compare this to the snapshot taken a month ago:

Not much doubt that the SUL is what's driving new followers to TechCrunch.

Getting ready to Reboot

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:18:00 GMT

It's going to be a slow reboot for my new life, one step at a time.

Frank X. Shaw, who has been through it, says the hole in your heart will never close. I truly believe it.

I've heard from so many people who have lost a parent, it seems the experience opened them up, and if they won't say it, I will -- made them better, stronger, sweeter. There are a dozen people who, next time I see them, will have an interesting and personally warm conversation that wasn't possible before. Another way a big tree falls.

I know my father much better this week than I did last week. So weird. But the barriers he put up, and he was a man with a very high wall around him, come down. Just going through some of the pictures he left behind is an eye-opener.

Yesterday I went through each page of a family photo album. I had seen it before, of course, but had never studied it so closely. I had to this time, to choose a picture from each page for a thumbnail. One thing I can see clearly is that I was me very shortly after birth. Even though I don't remember any of it. The relationships you have with your family form very early and don't really change. And of course those are the relationships you have with the world. I've put my favorite picture of myself in the margin of this post. What a typical Dave expression. And it's funny how relaxed Mom looks, almost as if we had arranged before-hand that I would make the face.

And my father, as a boy of seven or eight, was the same person he was a few days before the end. You can see it in his eyes, and in the tentative smile on his face.

There are a few pictures of my parents where they are truly relaxed. There's one where I'm pretty sure they just did it. For all I know that might have been my moment of conception.

Anyway, this is all good.

Update: Here's the first batch of photos that are not in an album. I'm writing scripts to do the processing. The captions were written by Dad. I'm storing the originals and thumbs on Amazon S3. WordPress is doing the user interface.

Once again, future-safe archives

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:57:56 GMT

Every time a relative passes this issue comes front and center for me. Most other times it's just lurking in the shadows.

We need one or more institutions that can manage electronic trusts over very long periods of time.

The institutions need to be long-lived and have the technical know-how to manage static archives. The organizations should need the service themselves, so they would be likely to advance the art over time. And the cost should be minimized, so that the most people could do it.

I've felt that universities would do the best job, since they already need to maintain the work of their professors, possibly in partnership with technology companies. This could be a huge source of endowments, as wealthy people with a vision for techology compete to build long-lasting monuments to their creativity and generosity.

And of course why not actually have the work be created in the archival form, so there's no pile of work to do when the person passes.

At this point I am managing the content for two relatives. At some point not too far down the road I will pass too. I would like to set aside a bit of money to maintain these archives, and to help inspire others to do so as well. I'm willing to devote a substantial portion of the time I have left to this task.

I don't run an institution that could fill this role. I've suggested it to people I've worked with at Harvard, a university that I think would be perfectly suited for the job, possibly partnering with a technology vendor. Amazon almost has exactly what we need, they just need a partner who does domain registration, and there must be a financial service organization that pays the monthly hosting bills.

My father left a huge number of photos he took over forty years of traveling all over the world. He spent a lot of his time in retirement digitizing the photos. We have purchased leonwiner.com. So we've got a fresh problem right now. My mother, who owns the copyright has given us permission to license the photos under the Creative Commons.

There's a huge amount of work to do to get ready for the future. Who else is interested in working on this?

Let the blogging begin!

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:22:37 GMT

Let's start by saying there's nothing good about losing a parent.

They say it's inevitable, it happens to everyone, but in the dark of night, as you're trying to fall asleep, there's no consolation in that fact. When you die and when you go to sleep it's the same, you're on your own. The only difference is -- well you know what the difference is.

However...

In the waking hours, as you rejoin the human race (which you never really left), you find that you have a new bond with a huge number of people you knew before, but never really knew, because until it happens to you, it's all hypothetical.

Not much more to say except as one who is always looking to bond in deeper ways with others, I'm kind of excited to find out what's coming.

My father said something to me a number of times which is now comforting. He said his life didn't really begin until his father died. I have no idea if this is true or not (for me, I'm not questioning his experience) but it says to me that I have his blessing to have a better life as I grow older.

Anyway, I'm flying back to California today and have a window seat and a camera, so you can follow my progress, cloud-cover-willing, on Flickr.

More notes here as I think of them.

Middle-of-the-week check-in

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:01:12 GMT

Just writing to say that Scripting News is on a hiatus this week. Not sure when I'll be writing again. But I'm still here, doing the best I can.

And thanks to everyone who wrote for the kind wishes.

Live from Virgin America #24

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 01:37:22 GMT

I'm flying back to NY to be with the family.

At first I thought -- sheez no big deal, I'll do the live podcast with Jay at 4PM at the SF Hilton. Then I called Jay and he said I should get to the airport and head home. I gave it a second or two of thought and realized he's right. This is no time to be talking about rebooting the news. It's time to reboot the family.

An aside, if anyone is at ONA09 and can record the event, it would be great. Of course I was going to do that, but I'll be over Wyoming or Nevada when it happens.

I thought of Bruce Sterling's inspirational talk at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen earlier this year. I'll try to paraphrase what he said. 1. If you could travel lighter you'd be happier. 2. Most people know this and wish they could get rid of stuff. 3. But you won't do it until something huge happens to disrupt your life. A divorce, you lose your job. A parent dies. Yup. Sterling goes on to say that you should make a list of things you'll drop when the disruption comes. I don't have a list.

Usually I have a day or more to prepare for a trip, and I usually don't forget anything major. Heck I usually don't forget anything at all. Not this time. I left a bunch of things on the dining room table. And I realizedI left my iPhone in the car about 1/2 hour before the flight was due to start boarding. So I made a dash out to the parking garage, got the phone and went back through security. With plenty of time to spare.

So much for my iPhone divorce.

It still hasn't hit me.

Life still feels pretty normal, even though I'm flying cross country again after returning home two days ago. I got a call from Andrew Baron who lost his father in similar circumstances earlier this year. There's some kind of bond between Andrew and myself. I wonder if his father and my father are hanging out where ever fathers go after they die.

If there is an afterlife, I guess it's timeless. Or time flashes by really fast. In the time it takes us to live a day they live three centuries. So for my dad and Andrew's dad it must be 2300 or something like that. To my father I'm already long-dead. A few days ago he said that soon he'd be pushing up daisies. I told him I'd be there a few days after him. In the virtual sense.

Who knows what comes next. I have a feeling there's a lot of that coming up.

Susan Kitchens and I live parallel lives too. Guess what, her father was born in 1929 too. And he's in hospice, as my father was. And she predicts he won't make it through 2009. There have been other big parallels in our lives.

The person sitting next to me on this flight, a nurse who lost her parents years ago, said it really hits you three months after it happens. Maybe. Right now I'm still standing at the plate with the bat in my hands and the pitch is coming out of the pitcher's hand in super-slow motion and I'm waiting for it to come at me so I can swing. Will I swing and miss, or hit a line drive, or hit it out of the park? Or something we don't even have a word for.

I know this -- when I was a little kid and realized that someday I'd lose a parent, it froze me with fear. Now, decades later it has happened. I'm not frozen at all. I'm in motion. Flying across the country on Virgin America #24.

A Flickr set of photos taken out the window of the flight.

Father's Day

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:04:22 GMT

I spent most of last week in NY, visiting my parents.

My father has been gravely ill, and as it turns out this was my last visit to see him.

This morning he died.

He's had a long decline and plenty of time to prepare for the end. This week we talked honestly and openly about the big things. In June, on his 80th birthday I wrote to him that he was my hero. There was a lot of forgiveness in that statement, over the years, we had focused too much on the bad times, and not enough on the time at the beginning and at the end, which were good, loving, generous and fair.

There's no doubt my father loved the little boy who looked up to him. There's no doubt we both had trouble adjusting to the man who took the little boy's place.

I was lucky that my father lived so long. Yet today there is a huge void, a puzzle, an unknown. How do you fill the space occupied by someone who looms so large.

My father fought for my life when I was young and had a ruptured appendix.

When he discovered the beauty of outliners he said the nicest thing a father can say about a son -- "Every day is father's day."

We searched for my father, lost in the melee after the 9/11 attacks. His picture only appeared that once on Scripting News.

Leon Winer was born on June 17, 1929 and died on October 3, 2009.

He will be missed by his family.

My web site is my space

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:59:52 GMT

ThirdVoice was small and never got large.

As long as very few people used it, it was no threat to free speech, but...

What if Microsoft, who made the dominant web browser at the time, decided to either acquire ThirdVoice or create their own?

Then almost everyone who read my site would see the commentary first. Imho, that most definitely would have changed the web, for the worse.

If we hadn't objected to ThirdVoice that would have provided all the excuse Microsoft needed.

And Microsoft did try to muck around with web content. But they backed down when the web community strenuously objected.

Now fast-forward to Google and its Toolbar and the cutely named SideWiki. Clever trick. Could have named it PuppySidebar. Now we'd be seeming to criticize puppies. Some people must think that Google's neo-ThirdVoice is actually a wiki, but of course it's nothing like a wiki.

And Google has more staying power than ThirdVoice. And they have ambitions to be the leading browser vendor and they have a chance. Then someday soon we may have the ability to annotate any page on the web. Sounds great that way, but do you want everyone viewing the annotated view of your writing? I don't.

Phil Windley, who is (I guess) a libertarian, thinks everyone should have the right to view the web any way they want. Who could argue with that. He says my website is not a place, instead I should look at the components. It's actually a collection of documents that can be transferred from one machine to another over a network. But his bank account, like my website, is just a collection of documents that can be transferred from one machine to another over a network. I doubt if Phil thinks we ought to be able to use his money any way we'd like. Maybe he does. He's surprised me before.

We buy into illusions that virtual things are real all the time. Our way of life depends on it. The pieces of paper in our wallet used to be redeemable for bars of gold. They were virtual then, now they're not even that because the linkage to gold no longer exists. Even the wood, glass and concrete that makes up a "house" is something that is given meaning by a piece of paper that says Phil owns it, and not a poor family in downtown Salt Lake City. Why should he get to live in that collection of wood and concrete, stay warm in the Utah winter, when other people are cold and go hungry? Because we have conventions. And Phil, even though he doesn't trust government, depends on government to keep him in his house. Otherwise he would surely be out on the street. (Not saying that would be right, it just illustrates that the world isn't so harsh as to say that we have no say in how what we own is used.)

I don't mind if a small group of people wants to annotate my writing, off on the side, without effecting how other people read it. But that's not what Google is proposing, long-term, to do here. We have to object at the beginning, or we'll have no standing later. My website expresses my point of view. I get to take risky positions, ones that are complicated to explain because I know that here, unlike almost everywhere else, I get to finish a thought. There are so many places for "conversation" -- virtually everywhere. I like my website because it is not one of those places. And yes Phil it is a place, every bit as much as your collection of wood and concrete is.

This really is my intellectual home. And I think the government should protect it, the same way the government protects my bank account. If Google wants comments, great, put it on their own site. But unless I ask for it, stay out of my space.

Advice on recording tomorrow's podcast?

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:55:48 GMT

Tomorrow we're doing a live Rebooting The News podcast at the SF Hilton. It's going to present an interesting challenge because it will be in a room with a number of people talking, and without spending a lot of money on new equipment, I have to get them all on the recording with a single mike.

Which leads to this: omnidirectional microphone.

I'd like to have the room set up as a big conference room with seats around a table, and a single microphone in the middle of the table.

There will be no time for sound checks, it has to work the first time.

Whatever I buy has to be here by tomorrow mid-day. If it's not here, we'll have to go on without it.

It would also be nice to webcast it through BlogTalkRadio and perhaps Ustream or similar services.

One possibility, admittely low-tech, is to have everyone call in on their cell phones!

Any advice people have would be quite welcome.