You can't be on Twitter or FriendFeed and not be inundated with comments from and about Scoble. I don't know how he does it, but it's really annoying. I find myself relaxing when he takes a break from Twitter, for example to fly from Europe to the US. Finally I can speak without having everything one-upped by Scoble. Whatever it is, he's done it better, or bigger, or with more important people. It's irritating because I don't believe it. I'd really like it if he just turned down the volume. Or if there were a way to segment the Twittersphere, I'd like to be in the part where Scoble isn't the main topic of conversation 24-by-7.
That said, I heard that Jason Calacanis and Mike Arrington were giving him a hard time on the Gillmor Gang, saying he was dumb to invest so much time in Twitter and FriendFeed. If he were blogging, they say, he'd be working for himself. On Twitter he's working for someone else. I've thought the same thing myself many times, but not about Scoble, since my whole existence does not revolve around Scoble. (I once parodied Scoble, in jest, saying that he was the next Christ, little did I know how prophetic it would turn out.)
So is Scoble a chump, and are all of the rest of us chumps, for not enhancing our own space, rather enhancing Ev's and Biz's and Jack, Fred and Bijan's space? If you don't run ads on your blog, I don't see how it matters. And if you primarily push pointers through Twitter, as I do, it's just a notification system, not where you pour your creativity. Even if you put ads on your blog -- it's like RSS, it feeds traffic to your blog, it isn't replacing your blog. Surely Calacanis and Arrington aren't advising Scoble to get rid of his RSS too?
In a hasty twit last night I said these guys were "ignorant" for this opinion, but maybe that was too harsh. But maybe they aren't being creative enough.
Technology is a process, an evolution -- don't focus on what's here right now today, because a year from now it'll be different. Look at the trend. In the last year Twitter hasn't changed much on its face, but it has changed in substance. I have a lot more followers now, and I follow far more people. There are a lot of PR people there now, where it used to be gossip. There are also a lot more tech entrepreneurs, analysts and carpetbaggers, people who think there might be a business model in here somewhere. They're largely adding clutter and noise, but that's change too.
But I can't imagine that blogging and Twitter won't fully merge, and I expect that to happen soon. Look at services like Posterous and Tumblr for a clue. Browsers have the ability to expand and collapse detail. Expect more of that. Services like Tweetree show that it's possible to include rich content inline with the twitstream. How far are we from having full blog posts? How far from being able to render the content in your own domain? How long until people think of the idea of a site aggregating the work of a handful of analysts as a quaint predictor of the rich world of the next-gen Twitter?
This is why I thought Arrington and Calacanis were missing the big picture -- seriously. Both have major investments in rollups of the pre-Twitter blogosphere. They may be suffering from the same kind of limited vision of their predecessors in the tech and business press, who were caught flat-footed by the generation of editorial content exemplified by their own offerings. Wouldn't be the first time that Generation N of tech failed to anticipate or even acknowledge Generation N+1.
1/1/09; 4:03:49 PM
Happy New Year!
Good morning and welcome to 2009!
Lots of housekeeping...
Last night I saw Benjamin Button. Some people didn't like it, I can see not liking it, but I did like it myself. I'm a sucker for a love story. I empathize with Benjamin, he didn't fit in as a child, but he found people who appreciated him for who he is, not on appearances, and they stayed with him through his life. Something a lot of people want but don't have. I also liked that New Orleans played a role in the story, because I love the city, and it's been through a hard time, just like Benjamin. The last scene, the water rushing in to a basement where a clock that runs backwards is still running, is especially sweet. Not best picture, and if anyone gets a nomination for this movie it'll be Brad Pitt, but I think the real star is Cate Blanchett.
1/1/09; 3:54:17 PM
CradlePoint PHS300 first look
The new router arrived this evening, I charged it up, followed the minimal instructions, and it worked the first time. I'm using the router now to write this blog post.
I'll have unboxing pictures soon, but first the speed test.
People ask why I lusted for this and the answer is the same reason I want one of these. A 3G battery-operated router that fits in a coat pocket, or a pocket on a knapsack, or in the glove box of a car -- very rational idea. A perfect fit for netbooks, and you know how ga-ga I am over those. For a while it looked like netbook "service plans" were going to catch on, hencethe$99 netbook meme, but this is smarter. Why should the netbook have the service plan -- instead I'll use the USB modem I already have, plug it into the CradlePoint, and get on the net using wifi, which all netbooks already have. It's still a little klunkier than the Novatel approach, but this one is shipping, and it's pretty close.
If they had gotten this to me before Thursday I would have said this is the most rational product of the year for 2008, also the one that makes me the most giddy with a living-in-the-future feeling, right up there with the Eee PC. It would be hard to choose between the two. Wish I had had this at the DNC in Denver.
It has a very nice browser-based config system, so there's a web server built into the router. Screen shot of the Dynamic DNS config page.
I've been slow to get to start work on the MediaWiki API.
But today I took the first step, to find out that it is possible to turn off the API, and that the test wikis people have been kind enough to let me play with have it turned off. (It defaults on.)
So to get started I'm going to need a wiki that has its API turned on. Here's a page that explains what's needed. It looks like Perl to me, it's probably easy for a Perl guy to futz with this, but I don't want to hack anyone's server. I want to stay strictly on the workstation side.
I promise to share what I learn programming the wiki once I get the ball rolling.
1/2/09; 4:18:18 PM
NewEgg is hard to get on the phone
I ordered a gadget from NewEgg on December 26, guaranteed 3 day UPS. Today's the day it's supposed to arrive, and I was totally looking forward, but UPS says: THE RECEIVER REQUESTED A HOLD FOR A FUTURE DELIVERY DATE. UPS WILL ATTEMPT DELIVERY ON DATE REQUESTED / DELIVERY RESCHEDULED[X]. That's really funny cause I'm the receiver and I sure didn't request a "hold for a future delivery." Oy.
So now I'm on hold on chat to get an answer from NewEgg, since there's absolutely no way to get to a human on UPS. I figure since NewEgg has my money, they should be able to help me figure out what this means. Stay tuned.
Of course their answer is to call UPS. Don't you love it when a vendor takes responsibility. (Not.)
So NewEgg was no help, so I tried calling UPS for a second time, and this time I said "Representative" repeatedly to every prompt. And it worked. I got to talk to a human being. Maybe it's actually on the truck she said, but they're going to call me from San Pablo at noon to let me know what's going on. Stay tuned.
Then I got an email from the NewEgg rep, who I had suggested should call UPS instead of me doing it, and guess what -- she did it! Amazing. Maybe there's hope. She said the UPS website was mistaken and the package is on the truck out for delivery and I should get it today. Maybe 2009 will be a great year. Stay tuned.
BTW, I gave the NewEgg rep a link to this blog post so there's a chance they may read this or comment.
1/2/09; 2:42:45 PM
Mac at 25
On January 24, 1984 a couple thousand people were present at Flint Center in Cupertino at the birth of something with real lasting value, the Macintosh.
It's corny for sure -- but it was exciting.
Hard as it is to believe -- that was almost 25 years ago!
http://mac25.org/
My company rolled out a product that day too: ThinkTank 128. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki and Mike Boich. Guy was Apple's first evangelist and Mike was the head of their developer program. And there were many other great people involved in the Mac in the early days.
As Archie sang to Edith, those were the days!!
It would be great if, over the next 21 days, we could connect with people who were part of that day. Apple's remembrances have (understandably) focused on the Apple people who made the Mac work. But it would be interesting to know who else got their start then and what they went on to accomplish -- where they are now.
Update: Here's someone selling a shrink-wrap copy of ThinkTank 128.
1/3/09; 1:11:33 PM
Helping FriendFeed?
Louis Gray offers some noble help to FriendFeed, filling in as the marketing department they don't have. Of course it would help if they did do some marketing. They may not be aware of it, but Twitter didn't just wait for people to come to them, they put up displays all over SXSW in 2007 to boot up with that community, who already knew them from Blogger days, to be the first core group of users of the service. I could see it happen, even though I wasn't part of the service then, and I wasn't at SXSW. FriendFeed hasn't done anything like this as far as I know.
Anyway, I think I know what they should do, and it isn't on Louis's list. But I wonder why I should give them the idea. This goes back to the point Arrington made a week ago, and then made again in his scolding of Scoble -- why are you working for these guys for free? It's a good question and one that bothers me, a lot.
Instead, I'd like to ask another question. Does anyone really think that a company-owned platform is going to win here, that it won't be swamped by an open federated system of servers that peer, like email? If so, I'd like to hear why. We went through this exercise repeatedly in the tech industry; the lesson of history is clear -- closed systems have their place and time, at the beginning of a new layer, when users need simplicity over everything else, they serve as training wheels when everyone is a newbie. Eventually we grow out of the need to have our hands held and the freedom of open systems becomes attractive, and we jump. It happened with mail, with the web, maybe not so much with IM (that's probably what they're counting on).
I'd much rather give the idea to the ether, not to a company. Let's have competition.
In the meantime, the clue is in the piece I wrote in early December. (I can't help it, I have to share ideas, it's the way I'm built I guess.)
1/3/09; 2:31:28 PM
MediaWiki API
Well, thanks to Andrew Burton I got access to a MediaWiki installation with the API turned on, and I was able to make a couple of trivial calls successfully, but I hit a wall when it came to doing the thing I set out to do. I have no doubt from reading the docs that it's possible, I just can't figure out what the dance is.
My problem may stem from not being a MediaWiki user. I'm doing this job for Doc Searls, who wrote a passionate plea to be able to edit his wiki with the OPML Editor. From a quick glance at the MediaWiki API docs I was pretty sure I'd be able to put something together. I like writing glue for XML-based APIs, it's fairly rewarding work, cause when I'm done there's another cool thing I can do with my outliner, even though it's not likely that I'll use it, personally.
I had hoped today to be writing a piece about how I got it to work but no luck. It's actually a plea for help. Here goes.
1. What I need is the equivalent of the Metaweblog API. Calls to create a new document (in wiki terms probably a "page"), to get and set the text to an existing document. That's basically it. For bells and whistles there are categories and media objects, but Doc probably doesn't need those so much as he needs to be able create and edit pages on his wiki.
2. I understand that I need to login and get a token. I have the call to login working, so I don't need help there. I probably can figure out how to get a token, but what to do with it? Oy. The docs really assume you know what you're doing before you read them.
3. I think the docs they have get pretty close to getting me going, but I won't be sure until I'm actually going.
If you can shed any light on what's happening here, it would be much appreciated. Assume in advance that I know I'm a pathetic dork with no life, if you skip that part of your advice it would be much appreciated too.
1/3/09; 1:56:01 PM
Why our customers are smart
I often tell stories about companies who treat their customers or developers as if they were idiots. But that's not to say my own company, the one I started, didn't do this too -- it did. It's human nature, but it's bad human nature, it's self-defeating, it's dysfunctional.
When I heard someone say a customer was stupid, I said if that's true we're really fucked.
Here's how I reasoned...
1. We have to believe our customers are the smartest people, because they were smart enough to choose the best product.
2. If they were stupid, then they chose the wrong product and we're dead, so you'd better start looking for a new job
The only logical way to proceed is to:
1. Make the best product.
2. Find the smartest customers.
3. Treat them like the geniuses they are.
4. And earn their respect. (Which they never failed to give us, as long as we did 1, 2 and 3.)
Our customers really were the smartest people -- we made products that you had to be smart to want. But I think every company has to feel their customers are the smartest, or else why bother coming to work?
Further, we don't look for "feedback" from customers, we look to learn from them. Feedback is what you ignore. Learning is how you build.
"cheesecake"
1/5/09; 12:50:00 AM
RSS as the foundation for realtime
Steve Gillmor has been on a campaign to get Feedburner to wake up and make his Feedburner feed more responsive. I support him in this. Now that Feedburner is pwned by Google, there's something kind of sneaky about a big company that prides itself on keeping its servers up and responsive all the time to be asleep on this.
To be fair to Google, it's not 100 percent clear if Steve's website is pinging them on the feed update. This is something we could look into because the protocol for pinging is something we're all pretty familiar with, since its been around for a long time and it's pretty simple. There's an XML-RPC interface, even a REST interface. Google operates a compatible ping server. You don't even have to know the protocol, since Matt Mullenweg kindly put up a server that pings them all. Just tell him what changed and let him make the call for you.
However, it is the very end of the Christmas holiday, so that may be the reason. A wire-trip, and no one is watching the store. That's the danger of centralizing a decentralizing technology like RSS. Like the Internet itself it can route around outages, but only if you let it be distributed. This points out the need for an open source easy to install version of Feedburner. Now with cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft's upcoming Azure, and Google's own AppEngine, it would be a simple matter to put something together in any number of different languages that would provide all the benefits of Feedburner (stats mainly) without the problems of excessive centralization.
Steve called a few minutes ago, and I volunteered to write about this. I also volunteer to help get a Feedburner competitor on the air, whether it's a small independent project or something run by Microsoft.
Jay Rosen asked: "Write a 140 character post that explains what you find Twitter useful for."
DW: "Twitter is my shared notepad. If I want to remember something and I don't mind if everyone else knows it, I just post it here."
Only 126 characters.
1/4/09; 2:31:34 PM
Why Twitter *can't* be conversational for me
I've tried to use it conversationally, but it quickly falls apart.
Consider an example.
Suppose I say the sky is blue.
Someone says: "What do you mean by that?"
Now I have three choices: 1. Ignore it. 2. Ask what they're referring to. 3. Assume they mean my statement that the sky is blue, and explain what it means for the sky to be blue.
Suppose I choose #2. Because I might have said 5 things in the last hour, and how do I know which one my correspondent is referring to. So I respond: "Which item are you referring to?" But before my friend can respond someone else asks "What are you talking about?" Now to that one I have three possible choices, the same ones as before.
Back up a step. I could have chosen #3. How do you explain what it means for the sky to be blue in 140 characters? And if you try, someone else will ask you to explain your explanation. But how will you know which twit they're referring to!
Right around this time someone chimes in with a political objection to something I've said. By trying to cram real conversation into 140 character snippets, you're bound to offend someone, because in order to be politically correct you have to allow for the possibility that you're talking about a man or a woman, someone who is young or old or inbetween, or if you assume they're American you'll get a lecture on how all Americans think everyone is an American or somesuch.
Honestly don't see how anyone gets past the first step in a conversation, but as I've gotten more people following me, the opportunities get narrower. When I try to satisfy everyone, what happens then is someone tells me I'm posting too much and I should STFU or they're going to unsubscribe. Ohhh.
So when someone asks me a question that I want to answer, I DM them. But usually I choose option #1. For me it's not and can't be conversational.
1/4/09; 2:37:01 PM
I'm in heaven
The Internet has many wonderful applications, but I doubt if people think of it as a romance platform, but it is.
Case in point. I was looking for some music to play for my friends on Twitter the other night, and I don't remember how I stumbled on this wonderful recording of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing Gershwin's Cheek To Cheek, but it is something else. I recommend putting aside a bit of time later if you don't have time now, and play it on a nice sound system, and get ready for your heart to go to heaven.
But that's not the end of the story.
I remembered seeing the same song sung by Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers, in the movie Top Hat. Now Fred's not really a singer like Louis & Ella -- but boy can he dance. The yin and yang! Cheek To Cheek reaches places with Fred & Ginger that you're just going to love.
So the Internet is a history and heart machine. It's love and life. Flirting, dancing, swing, and yeah kisses.
1/5/09; 4:44:03 PM
Rethinking authentication
First a caveat, this is going to be a technical post, so if you're not interested in techie stuff, you can skip it. However, I'm going to try to make it understandable to smart users who are willing to scratch their heads and read it two or three times, if you care to.
There's been a persistent problem in the twittersphere when developers have wanted to enhance the service but require access to the user's account. There's no other way than to ask for the user's login info: their username and password. If the developer is ethical, this is not a problem, it's much like giving credit card information to a vendor. But you can get in trouble when the developer isn't trustworthy and uses your information in malicious ways. We got a taste of this, this weekend.
Immediately people in the know say Use OAuth! -- believing that will solve the problem. I understand OAuth, I've implemented Flickr's authentication system which was the inspiration for OAuth. It's a complicated dance for the app developer, but it provides the user with an important ability that's supposedly available no other way. The user can de-authorize one app without de-authorizing all others. It's true, you can do this with OAuth, but it's not the only way to do it, and it's more complicated for users and developers than the other way, which I'm now going to explain.
I got this idea when Twitter rate-limited me yesterday. I was debugging some code, and I guess I made more than 100 calls in an hour. Now I can't make any more calls from my LAN (even though it's been almost 24 hours since the offense). This showed me one very important thing -- Twitter has the ability to block calls by IP address. That's the key.
Okay, so now assume I've given my username/password to Wimpy's App Shop, who has a neat little Twitter add-on gizmo that I love, and everything's going great until one day Wimpy, whose shop is suffering in the recession, decides to make a little extra money by selling my login to Bluto's Greasy Spoon Spamporium, who proceeds to send huge numbers of phishing messages to Chris Brogan, Kevin Marks, Chris Messina and Guy Kawasaki. This is very annoying. We must stop it at once!
Now imagine that Twitter had a page that showed all the IP addresses that have used your login in the last 30 days, with a start date for each and a count of calls made. I bet you could figure out which one was The Greasy Spoon Group, pronto. Further suppose there was a checkbox next to each IP address. You could uncheck that one, click Submit, and voila, no more spam from your account. You just did everything that OAuth promises to let you do, and no one had to implement the dance. It worked with today's simple and klunky worse-is-better authentication system.
Now IP addresses are ugly and not informative, so add a little enhancement, and have Twitter do a reverse DNS lookup for each one. If something simple came back, like appshop.com and not adsl-86-229-2-19.dsl.pltn90.sbcglobal.net, display it instead of the IP address. Now it would be even easier to spot the nasty dude.
That's it, that's the idea. I think this works -- do you see any problems??
Update: Great comments. Over on the Twitter blog, Biz says they're going to release a closed beta of OAuth this month.
1/5/09; 12:16:38 PM
Turning Twitter into my friend-feed
I was doing a little work on a tool I wrote in April 2007 that pushed RSS content to Twitter, and made a simple enhancement: instead of having a Twitter account reflect the content of a single feed, I made it reflect the content of an arbitrary number of feeds.
This let me do something I've been wanting to do for a while, but never thought of using Twitter for -- I set it up to reflect the content of my blogging friends, people like Doc Searls, Scott Rosenberg, Scoble, Sylvia Paull, Andrew Baron, NakedJen, Nicco Mele, Michael Gartenberg, Marc Canter and a few others.
As usual with experiments, I'm not sure if this is going to amount to anything, but I thought it was worth noting. The tool is twitterRiver.root, and the feed it's associated with is friendsofdave:
http://twitter.com/friendsofdave
You may of course choose to follow this feed if you find it interesting, and I will probably release the tool at some point in the future.
PS: Arrington and Calacanis will find it gratifying that this is an aggregation of blog posts not Twitter fire hoses. That's why it's possible to include Scoble alongside Andrew Baron and Scott Rosenberg, without drowning them out.
1/7/09; 12:37:12 AM
Julie and Julia
Just got an email from Andrew Grumet with an amazing story.
He writes: "Julie Powell, who blogged her way through a Julia Child book on blogs.salon.com. Then the blog got her a book deal and some minor celebrity. Now they're making a movie out of it... with Meryl Streep!!! (in the role of Julia Child).
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1135503/
Chris Lydon did a podcast with Julie Powell in his pioneering 2004 series where he interviewed many of the early bloggers.
1/6/09; 6:06:06 PM
How newspapers tried to invent the web
Fascinating Slate article about how Newspapers "tried to invent the web." A lot of it absolutely true -- I thought I was in the "videotext" industry when I started out in tech in the early 80s, so much so that I named my company Living Videotext. I made countless trips back to NY to meet with people at CBS and Dow Jones, to try to anticipate the kinds of authoring tools we'd need, and how news would flow in the new system we were anticipating. That's why I wrote ThinkTank, I thought of it as an environment for authoring and reading news.
I became a netizen on Compuserve's CB radio, and wrote my own bulletin-board software, LBBS, which then became TankCentral, a way for ThinkTank users to share outlines. When we merged with Symantec, I was still hung up on the idea of the outliner as the way of modeling online discourse, that's why I pushed for us to merge with Think Technologies, and also another company which we didn't get a deal with, who went on to become Microsoft Mail. I felt that MORE was the best way to do networking.
Had Sidhu done a halfway decent job with the Mac networking APIs, I am sure the web would have happened on the Macintosh in the mid-late 80s. We spent countless man-months trying to get MORE to network. When it finally happened, Unix was the central OS for our communication future, and low-tech interfaces took the place of Apple's much more sophisticated networking.
You know it would be great to have a conference someday with all the people who tried to make the web happen before it happened. I'd see a lot of old friends there.
1/6/09; 4:06:59 PM
One thing I love about Twitter
Is the way they display individual twits so bold and big.
http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1099906420
The other guys should follow this cue.
1/6/09; 2:35:33 PM
Apple keynote on Twitter?
How are you getting the latest news on the Apple keynote on Twitter?
Chris Pirillo has the audio. What a trip. You get his editorial comment and the applause is deafening. Hilarious!
1/6/09; 1:13:25 PM
Friends Of Dave
A Twitter feed with the blog updates of 15 of my friends.
http://twitter.com/friendsOfDave
A dynamic list of the feeds.
.
This post is basically a test of the dynamic list. Let's see if the sucka works!
Update #1: It works. I have to add that having jkOnTheRun at CES makes it mostly unnecessary for me to be there. I've already learned about a new Netgear 3G router. They pretty much precisely care about the things I care about. Keep up the great work. Speaking of which, I had the opportunity to really use the new Cradlepoint router last night at a dinner party, and it works fantastically. Very fast. Super nice to just put the hotspot in the knapsack, turned on, nothing extraneous hanging off my netbook.
Update #2: I added Betsy Devine. I must add some more people I used to hang out with in Boston. The whole point of this exercise is to keep in touch with people I lose touch with. It's possible to do this if we have blogs, and some of them, like Betsy, do.
There's no other way to test it -- I have to push an item through and see if it makes it over to identi.ca in addition to the Twitter place. Let's see if it works...
http://identi.ca/friendsofdave
It does! Cooool.
1/7/09; 5:22:29 PM
Friends Of Dave for FriendFeed
Just one more service, I promise. A test to see if it works...
http://friendfeed.com/friendsofdave
It works!
1/7/09; 5:59:43 PM
Blog clip art
This is a post I've been meaning to write for some time, but this blog post, reviewing the interesting practices of bloggers finally got me off my butt.
If you've been reading Scripting News for a while surely you've noticed the graphics that often appear in the right margin of stories here. Sometimes they are directly related to the story, and other times only artistically. They are meant to invoke your own thoughts and feelings, to show you something about yourself. Whatever they are you can be sure that I found them interesting. Beyond that, what they mean is up to you. That's what art is about, always -- don't let anyone tell you otherwise. That's why artists cringe when people ask them what the art is about or say that a piece does nothing for them. They'll always come back and ask what it means to you, or say that nothing is something. They're not just saying it to be difficult (although people always think artists are difficult).
Anyway -- the point...
Many times the art I use is commercial, pictures of products. My suggestion is that the companies behind the products should make the clip art easy to find and re-use. Think of it as free brand advertising. Often it's amazingly difficult to find a clippable picture of a product. Examples. Every airline should have an iconic picture of an airplane with their trade dress, on a pure white background. TV sets or laptop computers should come with blank screens, making it easy to superimpose a picture of a dead relative or someone you want to make more interesting by putting them on TV.
The SEO and PR people are all over the place, so guys and gals -- get to work. Every brand should have great clip art for bloggers to use and re-use. It's free advertising. And you guys like free, don't you!
1/7/09; 3:37:34 PM
Some babies are destined for greatness
I met Nicco (center) on my firstday at Dean For America in Burlington, VT at the end of the campaign for Iowa. Since then we've been friends, across generations -- and I've become friends with his lovely Morra, and his puppy Rascal (pictured at the left). I've always expected great things from Nicco, but that's nothing compared to the feeling I get about his newborn son, Asa Archibald Mele (who will be known as Archie, I hear). I've only seen him in pictures, and it's probably only through knowing his family that I sense the greatness in this young man.
Born on January 3 of the New Year, in Boston, a warm welcome to Master Archie!
1/7/09; 12:49:40 PM
Palm Pre a possibility?
I left a comment on jkOnTheRun about the new Palm Pre that was announced today at CES.
Are they going to be as locked down as Apple is with the iPhone?
When and how can I get one to play with?
This morning I couldn't imagine why anyone would even go to a Palm press conference, and now I'm on the edge of wanting one of these to try. I'm ready to get off my iPhone, I'm sick of the locked up mentality. If this thing pairs nicely with a netbook, I might just switch to it for a year or so.
The next step in the evolving netbook is the cellphone that pairs with it. Whatever it is it must be reasonably debugged both in software and philosophy. Apple has the software but their philosophy is totally up a creek.
It appears that it takes FB some amount of time to recognize a feed once its been registered, but that once it does, it's pretty close to perfect at caching a feed for 30 minutes before refreshing its copy from the original.
I looked for docs on how to ping Feedburner, but came up with confusing and contradictory instructions, none of which worked. They all got Java errors from the server. I tried pinging using their form and through pingomatic, neither of which had any effect on the latency.
I tried adding a <ttl> element to the feed, set it to 1 minute to see if that had any effect. I'll let you know.
Update: Apparently Feedburner ignores <ttl>.
Update: I turned the test off for now.
1/8/09; 7:33:57 PM
Measuring Feedburner's latency
Yesterday I listened to a Gillmor Gang podcast that focused on one issue -- how much time does it take Feedburner to reflect the changes in a feed they're hosting. Steve had some evidence that it was taking as much as three hours for it to reflect changes in his feed at techcrunchit.com.
Being an engineer, I wondered what was going on, so I constructed a test with a feed to see what Feedburner would do with it.
Here's what my test does. Every minute it reads the Feedburner version and compares it against the original. If they don't match, it does nothing. When they do match, it notes the time in a log, generates a new version of the test feed and repeats the process.
I'm going to let the test run for a few hours and then make one change -- I'll ping their server when I create the new version.
And of course I'll report the results here when they are available.
A note: I ran the test overnight and got what to me are astonishing results. Feedburner never noticed the change in the original feed. Anyone who was subscribed to it would not have known there had been news. I couldn't believe this, I felt there had to be a bug somewhere in my test, and it could be that there is. That's why I'm re-running it this morning while I'm working and can keep an eye on it.
Update at 11:10AM Pacific: First results after running the experiment for almost 2 hours: It took the following amount of time for Feedburner to reflect a change in the original feed: 24 minutes, 31 minutes and it's still returning old results after 61 minutes. This is without pinging.
Update at 2:20PM Pacific: Here's a table that summarizes the results.
1/8/09; 12:56:36 PM
Harry Truman probably would have liked Twitter
Harry Truman: "I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell."
80 characters, including punctuation.
It occurs to me this morning this is one of the most American ideas out there.
"If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," another Trumanism.
52 characters.
At dinner last night in a discussion about the future of the University of California Journalism School, I figured something out. Journalism has always been about the sources, but somehow we lost our way and focused on the reporters, the conduits, the pipes. Okay, so the way we move news from sources to their destinations is changing, but when it's all done, the news process yields the same result.
So this explains why a 140-character limit in Twitter is so in tune with our times. It teaches us how to summarize, to condense, and it rewards those of us who are good at it by making our ideas go further.
It also levels the playing field. Last night there was a 5.0 earthquake in southern California. Not a big one, but Twitter had the full story within a minute. Was there more to say, for cameras and analysts to pore over? Not this time. 140-characters was plenty.
12/28/05: "One way to do something, no matter how flawed that way is, is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is."
Earlier today I revised a proposal from December for including thumbnail images in HTML. I am now revising that proposal again to be compatible with Digg's (undated) proposal, which I just found out about.
I'm not going to add another format when one exists that differs from mine only by the choice of a name (they call it an image_src, I called it a thumbnail).
Their format doesn't call for a type, or height and width -- I'm going to include that info and hope that Digg ignores it.
You can see an example by viewing source on this page.
To test, I've submitted the example to Digg. They ask if it's an news article, video or image, I chose image. A few steps later and it's submitted, and apparently they picked up the thumbnail. Looks good!
Seems like a done deal!
Update: FriendFeed does support this format in their bookmarklet. I tested it, and it works. Happy! That's already a lot of compatibility for less than an hour's worth of work. My photo site plugs into Digg and FriendFeed.
1/9/09; 5:56:48 PM
Bootstrapping thumbnails, revisited
Update: After posting this, I learned of a Digg-authored format that does the same thing, and I've adopted it. I'm leaving the rest of this here to form a record, but the format it describes is not implemented.
At the very end of last month I started a thread here about adding thumbnails to photo pages in such a way that web apps such as Tweetree, and others that can display graphics inline, can grab info about the thumbnail directly from the HTML of the page that the full image is displayed on. If we're going to have a future of graphics-capable Twitter-like services, or if Twitter itself is going to grok images, then thumbnails are not just nice-to-have but must-have. And a machine-readable way to link to them from the original HTML is needed.
My first impulse was to create a <link> variant, but to do so would have meant adding width and height attributes. I could have omitted them, but that's ridiculous -- all image processing apps have that information at-hand, and if you don't put it in the HTML, then the client has to do an HTTP reference to get the data, and that's a waste of bandwidth. Better to put the info in one place rather than have N clients fetch it for themselves.
However, Zach Beane objected that you can't just invent elements for <link>, so I took a different route and defined an XML namespace for a new thumbnail element. Later, Sam Ruby suggested that HTML allows for arbitrary attributes to be added where they make sense as long as their names begin with "data-". I didn't know about this. So I'm going back to the initial simpler approach and use a <link> element.
You can see an example by viewing source on this page.
Update: Over on FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit, one of FF's founders, says that Digg has a format that does most of what I'm doing here. There are some weird things about it, like why specify the title in a <meta> element when HTML already has a <title> but I think I have to go with the Digg format. The philosophy: "One way to do something, no matter how flawed that way is, is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is." It's a corollary to Postel's Law, being conservative in what you send. I asked Paul if FF is supporting the Digg proposal.
1/9/09; 4:11:28 PM
A better choice for Surgeon General
Our future President (11 days!) is said to be considering a famous TV doctor for Sur-Gen.
Paul Krugman explains why he's not a good choice, and I concur, but something has been bothering me about this, and an email from a friend helped nail it.
If you really want to turn things upside-down for the better, instead of a healthy young doctor, how about an older person who is not a doctor, who has health problems and has been treated by the system, someone who has actual experience being a user of American health care.
Then let the doctors and insurance companies and HMOs listen a bit. There's no doubt the other users would hear what this person says. (There's a scene in the latest Clint Eastwood film that illustrates this principle beautifully.)
I am not suggesting an average or ordinary person, not a Joe The Patient, not a knucklehead or idiot, rather someone with a life of accomplishment, a passion for living, but someone who hasn't lived the perfect life and paid a price, and maybe someone like the future President who saw a relative die sooner or suffer more because of deficiency in the system.
That would signal a very pragmatic change -- from health care defining an ideal most of us won't achieve, to improving or just sustaining the reality we make the best of.
Thanks to Ann Greenberg, a longtime friend and Berkeley neighbor, for the perspective-shifting email.
1/9/09; 12:05:58 PM
How to include a thumbnail in the HTML of a page
If we had a registry for emerging web standards, we would have added one to it yesterday. The emerging format has been proposed by Facebook, supported by Digg and ratified by FriendFeed, and yesterday -- Scripting News. The format allows a photo-oriented web site or individual web page to include a thumbnail, so that when it's referred to by a site such as Digg or FriendFeed the representation may include that thumbnail.
I support this because: 1. I have such a website. 2. And I believe that sites like Digg, FriendFeed, Twitter are more attractive and useful when they include little bits of color graphics. It's the same principle that guided Apple to create the Macintosh in 1984, almost 25 years ago, when the current form of user interface was character-based.
To support this format, include a <link> element like this:
And some other metadata, as explained on the Digg site.
View source on this page to see a real-world example.
I tested it with both Digg and FriendFeed and found that it works, although there at least one place where FriendFeed could support it, but they don't, yet.
Update: James Holderness says this came from Facebook, and Digg says so on their site, but the page they link to doesn't seem to say anything about thumbnails. I searched and found a citation here, but he doesn't link to any Facebook spec. I think it's fair to say Facebook supports it. I'll test now. Result: Yes! Here's a screen shot of how they appear in my Facebook profile. So they must be added to the list, which I will do now.
1/10/09; 3:12:27 PM
How investigative research happens in the blogosphere
One of the common complaints from people in journalism about bloggers is that we just comment on reports in the news, we don't do original reporting. It's so often repeated it's become a cliche, but it's simply not true and I can prove it.
Draw a continuum of different kinds of news, at the left edge put a dot and label it "Event." At the extreme right edge put "Commentary." On the line between those two extremes, somewhere put a circle and label it "Reporting."
No one questions that bloggers produce writing that belongs at the right edge of the continuum, but then so do pros. That's editorial and op-ed pages. People like Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, David Broder, Krugman -- in days gone by James Reston, Russell Baker (my childhood role model). Think of it as shared territory between pros and amateurs.
At the left edge, bloggers win hands-down. We have far more original sources blogging than the pros have writing in their pages. Over time, as the thirst for news goes up and the volume provided by the pros goes down, expect to see more. The thirst to be heard has always been high, and this is fueling the explosion of blogging at this edge.
Now, if you're a regular reader of Scripting News, you see us do investigative reporting all the time. And I'm not using the plural in a regal sense, I very much do mean "us" -- as in me and you and a whole lot of other people. For example, in December, after seeing Tweetree, and having put a lot of work into systematizing thumbnail generation (with the ongoing help of a reader, who lives in Turkey), I wanted to connect the two. So I proposed a way to do that. Immediately a flood of comments probing my decision, and a number of suggestions that I look at work done by others that I hadn't found when I looked. Now this process is not trivial, it's the equivalent of a reporter making dozens of phone calls to experts. Sure, I'm not probing their ethics, looking for malfeasance, whether or not they're bugging Watergate, or stealing funds from taxpayers or widows, instead -- they're doing that to me. Which I've learned to live with, and see as a good thing. I know my heart is pure, but they don't, at least not at first. They are right to be suspicious of a fellow technologist. Many are corrupt. I've writen about that here. (Part of the reason there's so much corruption, btw, is that the professional press including some of the pubs we all revere, have been playing footsy with the industry for a long time. But that's another story, one often told here, btw, which has gotten me a rep with the press for being an "irascible gadfly.")
Anyway, a comment left here by a reader in December bothered me, so I looked into it and found he had something, so I revised my approach, and published the revision here, on Friday. Then another reader suggested I use a format that Digg had proposed, and I agreed, so -- another revision. Now here's a key point, in all the reporting I had done up till this point, I had never stumbled across this. It hadn't been reported on by pros as far as I could tell, and up till that point, none of my readers knew about it either. Is this an investigative process? Absolutely. Is it journalism? I don't see how it's any different from the best journalism done by the pros, except 1. it's done out in the open, that's an essential element, and 2. it's being done by people who do it for reasons other than being paid, directly, for it. To trivialize those reasons is to ignore why people want knowledge, to ignore the motivations of the sources and the readers, both of whom are essential to the news processs (though the journos are often loathe to acknowledge this), and neither of whom are paid for their efforts.
But even then the story is not over. Another reader says there's a mistake, the format wasn't authored by Digg, it was actually authored by Facebook! I did a bit of investigation and couldn't find a claim that they authored it, or a news report, but I did determine that they supported it, by doing a test, that worked. We saw a citation on the Digg site that said that Facebook was the source, so that was good enough for me, and I revised my piece accordingly. (I allow myself that until the day closes, then if I want to revise I have to write another piece, like the one I'm doing now, that's why serious stories on Scripting News tend to come in a series.)
Finally I published a "cap" to the series, and reported on the significance of all this work. A full week of work, with lots of human contact, research, sourcing, fact checking. I'm sure there will be some who say this doesn't belong in the circle in the middle of the continuum above, and I'm sure we'll get ample opportunity to discuss that, and learn from each other.
1/11/09; 1:49:28 PM
Elmer Fudd goes on a Westful We Tweet
1/12/09; 1:04:37 AM
I am not an economist
Even though I'm not an economist, I'm pretty sure that the US government can print money.
So if we have a $1 trillion deficit this year, that does not imply that someone has to lend us $1 trillion and it does not imply therefore that someone will have to pay someone back that money at some date in the future. If there's an economist listening who thinks this is not true, please say so and everyone else ignore what I'm about to say.
So then why does the discussion on Meet The Press and This Week revolve around how much better the private sector could spend the money or how we're passing on the problem to future generations. That seems like hooey. They have these discussions based on a make-believe premise that there are only two ways for the US government to pay for something -- taxation or borrowing. There is a third way, the one they're taking -- they just invent the money.
Now, in normal times you pay for this invention with inflation, but inflation isn't a problem -- quite the opposite, the world economy is having a massive going out of business sale. Prices are going down. Think they're low this week? Wait till next week, they'll be even lower. And wait is what people do, and that drives the prices lower. It's like inflation in reverse. Worrying about inflation now is like a starving man worrying about getting fat if he eats too much. You'll take your calories any way you can get them. Anything that makes people want to buy things now is a good thing for the economy. One way to do that is to give them money by hiring them.
So forgive me for thinking the analysts on TV are either corrupt or idiots, or whatever.
And of course please forgive me if I'm wrong and the government isn't going to print money to get out of this hole.
1/11/09; 7:52:56 PM
Back at the dawn of time
I happened to trip over this Youtube video of John Lennon, Paul Simon and Andy Williams at the Grammies in (I think) 1975. They're announcing the winner of the Best Song, I think -- as usual Lennon is very funny and wry, and Simon is funny too.
Some observations...
1. There's a surprise guest toward the end, I won't spoil the fun by saying who it is, but we might spill the beans in the comments, so if you don't like spoilers watch the video before reading the comments.
2. Either John Lennon was short or Paul Simon is standing on a box. It's weird how a lot of famous people are really short, but you never find out until they stand next to someone who you know is short.
3. I don't get the joke about "dawn" -- Lennon says: "So this is what Dawn does." Dawn of Tony Orlando and Dawn? Hmm.
4. Weren't they both disapponted that Olivia Newton-John won? The competition was so good, Elton John, Roberta Flack, Joni Mitchell, Maria Muldaur.
5. Muldaur's song, her only hit, Midnight At The Oasis, also played a big role in the fabulous movie, Lost In Translation.
6. Unrelated, on NPR yesterday I heard that Enya has sold 70 million albums and lives in a castle in Ireland and is not lonely.
1/11/09; 7:19:15 AM
Two old friends: Twitter status and spewage
It's amazing to me, the Twitter Status Report and Twitter Spewage Report are both still running. You leave those background projects around and they just don't go away.
I wonder sometimes how long after I die will some "Dave Winer code" be running somewhere on this planet? It could be over very quickly, or you never know, maybe some of my code will run a long time. I, of course, won't be around to find out.
Anyhoo, here are the links...
http://twitter.scripting.com/status.html
http://twitter.scripting.com/spewage.html
And here's the blog post in April last year announcing the spew report. It was shortly after this that Twitter started becoming unreliable. Wonder if there's a correlation? Heh. That's supposed to be a joke. Okay sorry.
1/11/09; 7:06:21 AM
friendsOfDave on Twitter
friendsOfDave is list of blogs, like an old-style blogroll, but with a difference. Every time one of the blogs in my list updates, an app on my server sends a link to Twitter, identi.ca and FriendFeed.
http://twitter.com/friendsOfDave
http://identi.ca/friendsOfDave
http://friendfeed.com/friendsofdave
This makes it easy for me to keep up with the blog posts, which come much more slowly than tweets, of people I think of as friends -- in the blogging sense -- people who I want to keep current with.
Here's a list of the people: .
This neatly solved the problem outlined in The First Church of Scoble, where I said I wanted to hear about Scoble, but not the full blast of his Twitter stream. To some extent this isn't even about Scoble the person, because people talking about Scoble (something he actively encourages of course) is all part of the Church effect. Unless he turns his blog into a firehose, we can have just-enough Scoble, along with some Doc, Jen, Betsy, Fred, Jay, Scott, Om, Lance, Rebecca, Gartenberg, et al.
I've had a few days of F-O-D, and I like. It went quiet over the weekend, but now it's Monday morning and things are picking up. Last week was CES so there was a lot of tech stuff, and I was worried there might be too much, but things are more balanced this week. I still need some more political blogs to add to flow, but I want to do that slowly too.
And part of the way I measure success is that the people in the group seem to be following the group. I think this is important. Maybe it will evolve into some kind of meta-publication. Or a conference? I have no idea. I do know they're all creative interesting people who are likely to have some cool ideas if there are any to be had.
Everyone can follow... The more the merrier, as usual.
1/12/09; 11:42:01 AM
A consumer complaint about Consumer Reports
This story just drips with irony!
2.5 years ago I had just signed the papers to buy a house in Berkeley, and based on past experience as a home owner, it was time to become a member of the Consumer Reports website. I figured if I'm going to be spending thousands of dollars on this house, it would make sense to go for the premium service, so I could access all the information on the site. Doing my part to support a non-profit that does good work. I even checked the box that said they should automatically renew me every year without requiring confirmation, that's how sure I was this organization, above all others, could be trusted.
No fault of theirs, my credit card number got out to some bad guys in Malta or Africa, and the credit card company detected it, contacted me as I was checking into a hotel in NY (by declining the charge, thank you very much) and after talking them into approving the charge (while dripping wet from a NY rainstorm) we agreed they should cancel the card and issue a new number.
So, when Consumer Reports tried to charge my annual fee, it was declined. They sent an email, I went to the website, entered the new number, clicked Submit. I then got an email thanking me for subscribing to the print magazine! Which is something I totally did not do, mean to do, want to do, under any circumstance. I am always trying to reduce clutter, and I hate getting magazines I never asked for in the mail, and I certainly don't want to pay for magazine clutter in my mailbox.
So I called their 800 number (hard to find on the website) and asked nicely but firmly that they cancel this subscription that I did not want. I just want the website, thank you. The operator assured me it had been done, when I asked her to confirm what I had asked her to do.
All was good until the latest issue of Consumer Reports magazine arrived in the mail last week. I expect no matter what I do I will continue to receive the magazine, which I have been charged for and no doubt will not be refunded. I could make a case out of it, but it's just $26 and that values my time pretty cheaply. I know there's a recession, but I will have to settle for airing my issue publicly in this blog post.
1/12/09; 9:57:29 AM
How to display a tweet? -- Part II
Last night the wind howled in the hills of Berkeley. It could have been the sound track for the opening scene of a horror movie about global warming. It got me up at 1:30AM with a burning question. What's the best way to display a tweet?
It's not a joke, it actually happened.
So I posed the question with a few examples, and a great discussion ensued, and I think we arrived at an excellent answer.
1. I had assumed that a mini-icon would work the best, but Alexander Horre asked why not use a bit of text, so if someone makes it bigger, the link symbol would grow along with everything else. Good point, and I think that's the way to go. (Many others said the same thing, Alexander was just the first.)
2. Chuck Shotton and Steven Levy both argued for making the links work just like HTML links, but I didn't see how, until Chuck suggested that we use wiki notation, and this is very workable, and if that formatting is detected any software should recognize it and display it accordingly. Example.
3. What software? Well lots of apps display text that came from Twitter. Facebook does, as does FriendFeed and many others. Of course I wouldn't have asked this question if I weren't too.
Pretend you're a time traveler from 2003 and someone told you that a primary software interface was going to include bare naked urls, would you have believed it? I wouldn't. I still don't accept that it's the best way to display a tweet.
These days lots of software displays them, not just Twitter. And they all have the same problem -- how to display the urls. I haven't seen a lot of approaches. I'd like to generate some, to gather different non-raw-url approaches. Here's an example:
Where are the Users at the User Generated Content Expo?
We don't shorten urls just to conserve space within the 140-character limit, shortening urls also makes our writing more legible. For that application we could go the full distance and collapse the url down to an 11-by-11 icon. If so, what should the icon be? Here are someexamples of vast collections of free mini icons.
I'm assuming the best approach is to shrink the url to an icon and store it to the right of the text but if you knew the big ugly url was going to shrink to an icon, you might start putting the urls in the middle of sentences in ur tweets.
Maybe a mini-icon isn't the best way to go, maybe there's another way altogether to neaten up tweets and make them more readable? (And yes, I know some people will say the way Twitter does it now is the best possible way, please assume we're all considering that possibility as well).
I'm interested to know what people think.
1/13/09; 5:08:21 AM
SF-bound with wifi
I just got on the inbound BART from the Berkeley station, and I have wifi through the Cradlepoint but I don't have a net connection because we're underground.
However, in a few minutes, between Ashby and MacArthur, we will emerge and my router should be able to establish a connection. This probably will happen a lot faster than if I had used the software on my laptop to connect cause it's pretty clunky and slow and sometimes takes two or three times to connect. The Cradlepoint seems to do this much better.
And you'll know it's working because you're reading this.
1/13/09; 5:08:21 AM
My heartfelt epic blog post about Steve Jobs
Apple CEO Jobs
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Update: Scoble says you'd be an idiot to sell your AAPL.
1/14/09; 7:24:38 PM
A new way of linking in tweets
Following up on the discussionabout displaying links in tweets.
1. This is what a link looks like, in text:
41 people call this [photo|http:\//bit.ly/DMhr] a favorite.
I've posted a number of tweets in this format, and so far no one has expressed any confusion about it, or even curiosity. I guess they just figure it out? Not sure.
Thanks to Chuck Shotton and Steven Levy for pressing the point.
Update: David Berlind asks "Would the markup syntax eat into the 140 char limit?" -- yes -- there's 3 added characters for each link.
Update: Joey Baker has a great idea. If the stuff betw the pipe and the right square bracket doesn't begin with "http://" the displaying software should add it. That's 7 characters saved. Worth doing, imho.
1/14/09; 2:20:08 PM
A story unfolds on Twitter
Someone I know, not well, who lives far away is going through hell. The story is notable because it's unfolded in real time on Twitter.
I don't want to say who because: 1. It's very heavy. 2. I don't want to burden this person with the decision about how public she wants to be. If she reads this and says it's okay to post a link to the on Twitter, I will. If not, I'll wait.
I wanted to write about it because the story is so powerful.
It begins a few days ago, her mother is sick. She takes her to the hospital. It's obviously pretty bad, but we don't know how bad. Not clear if they do, but her mother is terrified. The sister is there, with neices. They argue about something. The mother gets worse. The doctors do tests. The mother dies.
From there the situation spins out of control. The story is told with a very wet brush, with lots of paint splattering all over the place in 140-character snippets separated by huge gaps of time. It's the unpredictability of it that makes it so compelling.
I can't imagine the pain.
But there it is, shared, in real time, with a few hundred on-lookers.
I feel like I'm witnessing history.
It helps that the protagonist is a great writer.
1/14/09; 12:20:48 PM
Who will prosecute Bush?
Pretty sure someone in the Bush Administration is going to get prosecuted for war crimes. And the lower-downs were smart this time, they made sure the higher-ups were on the hook, at least according an interview on Fresh Air last summer with Phillippe Sands, an international expert on war crimes prosecution.
When I've heard this discussed in the media recently they've been approaching it as if it were an American decision whether or not to prosecute Bush. Obama could just punt, and let the international authorities worry about it. Then the question is would the US protect a former President against prosecution.
Because this is such a touchy subject I feel it's necessary to say that I don't know the answer, I see both sides. If Bush is prosecuted, it could serve as a deterrent to future Presidents against committing war crimes, or it could have a chilling effect and make Presidents fearful of defending the country, knowing that their fate and the country's will be separated after they leave office. (It's hard to imagine a sitting President surrendering to international prosecution.)
I will say this, I thought it was good that Ford pardoned Nixon. The country had other big problems to deal with in the 70s, and we had already paid a terrible price for the Watergate scandal. In many ways the same can be said of the fix we find ourselves in now, in 2009.
1/14/09; 11:22:46 AM
Bad UI
This dialog appears every 10 minutes or so when the SlingPlayer app is running.
The new version doesn't work on my machine. Obviously, there should be a way to tell this dialog to go away and never come back.
Twitter asks What are you doing? the Instant Outliner asks you to Narrate Your Work.
It's a project I developed in parallel with Radio 8, in 2001. We used it internally at UserLand to coordinate work among the people on the team who were in California, Seattle, Boston, Vancouver and Germany. We were spread across a lot of time zones and geography, but our work was remarkably well coordinated because we had what I think is the best management technology ever. As the manager of the team, I can tell you I never had a better read on what my guys were doing. I could see progress on various sub-projects, get feedback from everyone, build consensus, spot problems.
The reason why Radio 8 was such a great release was because we had a great workgroup tool -- the Instant Outliner.
We tried to release it as a product, but it didn't catch on. Partly, I think, because people were using Radio as a web server, and it was confusing that it was also an outliner. The mode flip blew up the suspension of disbelief. You had to really understand the technology to make the switch.
You also had to have a workgroup ready to use it, and that may have been the biggest reason it didn't gain traction. It wasn't hard for us to find individuals who were turned on by the idea, but when they in turn had to convince their co-workers to use the tool, that's when it fell down. It worked at UserLand because: 1. We were all techies. 2. I made it a requirement. 3. I was the boss. 4. But more importantly, I had their respect. And for some people it was impossible for them to get on board, they just weren't that organized or systematic in their work, but that may not have been apparent before we started using the Instant Outliner, it certainly became very apparent when we did. And it helped me, as the manager, know where I had to focus some attention, to help keep the individuals on track. Wouldn't have known it otherwise, esp in such a geographically diverse team.
Anyway, if people are interested, esp now that things like Twitter and FriendFeed are out there, we could try again. I actually have been working on and off on the I/O tool since we started NewsJunk last summer. During the Christmas break I took some time to convert it to run on top of FriendFeed's realtime API, and it make it much more efficient and much faster. They really do some good work down there at FF. Their back-end is a perfect match for the I/O front-end. (Which by the way, runs inside the OPML Editor.)
No matter what it's wonderful to see people discovering this work, and seeing it with new relevance given the state of technology today.
And if you don't sign out first, they include your home address in the URL. Oy. Talk about security leaks. Geez Louise. Someone at Google, please get a clue!
Lady Bird Johnson had a program to beautify America's highways. Google needs someone to beautify their information superhighway.
1/17/09; 10:11:21 AM
I like my sex (and scifi) with mystery!
I think it's true of all literature, media and sex -- that it's not what you say that creates the attraction, it's what you don't say. Or don't show. Or don't know.
The imagination may be the most pleasurable or pleasure-seeking organ in the human body.
A naked woman isn't necessarily as sexy as one wearing clothes, something many visitors to a nude beach are surprised to discover. It's not a turn-on to see the naked bodies, full disclosure isn't sexy. It's the path, how you got there that creates the excitement.
It's something we discovered in the early days of podcasting, something that was known to our parents' generation, that listening to radio programs activates the imagination in ways that television and movies never can. It's almost physiological. The human brain can't help itself, it must fill in unknown detail. So if you tell a story with words and no pictures, the imagination takes over and tells the rest of the story.
Have you ever been shocked to find out what a favorite radio talk show host looks like, how different it was from who you imagined him or her to be? That's the effect.
In this way, the remake of Battlestar Galactica has been one of the most smashing successes of television scifi. Every time they fill in a blank, they reveal five unknowns to take its place, and your mind takes off wondering who or what is behind the next set of doors.
But now the series is in its final run of episodes, and last night was the first installment of that run, and now we know a lot of what we didn't know before. The characters are all depressed, as we are -- because the fun is over? What could possibly be next.
Heather Havrilesky, writing in Salon, says it's always like this. We remember the first Star Wars in 1977 (I sure do, I saw it at a packed theater on Capitol Square in Madison in the middle of a raging snow storm with a half-dozen room mates). "There's an evil guy and a princess (a princess!) and robots and planets with three suns. Suddenly, the whole world feels like it belongs to you!" Three years later I'm in Sunnyvale, watching the next installment with a business associate, but it's just not the same. The magic isn't there.
Maybe the same with Battlestar Galactica. But only maybe. We don't know how this is going to turn out.
But now maybe I'm seeing the wisdom of the finale of The Sopranos. Maybe I don't want resolution of everything, maybe the series should end on the Mother Of All Cliff Hangers, the greatest imaginable, and one that never gets resolved.
We've already got a tease of what that might be, but there's still nine episodes to go, and I plan to watch each with the hope to not know everything, and to be delighted by the mystery.
1/18/09; 3:09:58 PM
The interactive living room of 2009
There's an interesting piece on TechCrunch today that's in part about using laptops while watching TV, something a lot of people do, and more will certainly do in the future.
This is the system I like. I've explained how it works over on Flickr. Click on the pic to go there.
1/19/09; 7:39:51 PM
FriendsOfDave in XML
First, a common request -- people have asked for an OPML subscription list for the FriendsOfDave Twitter/Identi.ca/FriendFeed feed. Done.
But while I was doing this I had a thought that it's a micro-nano version of weblogs.com before it became a ping-server. If you recall, it used to poll for changes among a small set of weblogs. This method became unworkable because there were eventually too many blogs to poll. But FriendsOfDave is, by design, always going to be a small number of blogs. So I thought what the heck, let's have it generate a changes.xml file of its own.
Now, why this is interesting? It's a key feature of the "real time web" that so many of us are thinking about. If every feed had someone watching out for them, along with 100 or so other blogs, then if a subscriber wanted to know if you changed, it would just have to watch the changes file. Of course if only one person they followed was represented in that file, no economy would be achieved, but if you group similar sites, ones that are likely to be followed by the same people, then you do get the economy.
Somehow the feed has to tell followers where their collection point is. Way back in time we used a category element at the top level of the feed to create this linkage. As far as I know no one build features on this, but they could have.
Will anything become of it this time around? Probably not, but it's still kind of interesting, if only for the nostalgic value.
1/19/09; 10:23:04 AM
This Land is Your Land
For me this was the most emotional moment of yesterday's concert at the Lincoln Memorial: Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen leading a chorus of This Land is Your Land.
All those people singing, and Pete Seeger after all these years -- he can still lead a crowd in song.
I've been working on an app that archives the tweets of the people I follow in OPML. I want to plug this into the Instant Outliner at some point, that's why the format is OPML. So then the question is, how will I know which users have updated and when. I thought about it and thought about it and then it hit me in a flash. I have a format for that. It goes back to 1999, and it scaled up to millions of changes every day.
http://twitter.opml.org/calendar/changes.xml
It works.
Now this is only going to make sense to people who really followed this stuff. There might be 25 such people in the world. But for a few of them it's going to be fairly delicious. (Not del.icio.us.)
"This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." -- Abraham Lincoln.
Our new President has said repeatedly, and correctly -- we can't wait for someone else to do the job, we must do it ourselves. That is so totally consistent with the philosophy of the country, and perhaps not unremarkably -- the web too.
Go back to the beginning, the web was created in that spirit, and whenever it runs out of juice we go back to the well, draw another bucket of irreverence and gumption, and create something new.
It's not the nature of the US to wait for someone else to do the job, and it's not the nature of the web.
When I looked at the Clinton whitehouse.gov, I felt no urge to get involved, these were the people who promoted the Communication Decency Act, which failed to extend First Amendment to the web. (And that's being generous.) They were the enemy of freedom, their website was not something I wanted to help.
Same with the Bush whitehouse.gov, although I gotta say, the people who claim the Obama whitehouse.gov is so innovative must not have looked at the Bush website. They had all the technical innovation of the Obama one.
As I said clearly, I supported Obama. So quickly people forget. But that website, until I give up, is mine and yours as much as it is the webmaster's. If they construct it in such a way that that's not true, then they have failed to live up to the promise of the United States and the promise of the web. And since the web is the hub for idea exchange, it means that everything else they try will be crippled, the attempt to restart the economy, to create a spirit of volunteerism, to get health care and education working, to promote our revolution of individual freedom to the rest of the world.
A lot of people who use the web these days don't know how to create a web, they know how to use what was created. In some ways, some times change must come incrementally, and patience is the right course of action. But sometimes, and this is one of those times, it must come in one big discontinuous spurt and then we figure out what happened in subsequent years.
The people who tell themselves and others that they run the world are placeholders, if they urge caution and safety. These are not safe times. Those people are going to be swept away by the change that's on its way. This is not a time for caution, it's a time for courage, intelligence and creativity.
Update: The Washington Post says the Obama team found a White House in the technological dark ages when they arrived on Tuesday.
1/22/09; 12:28:22 PM
Actors and non-actors
In journalism, there's a big difference between the actors and the non-actors. The actors are trying to create an effect, you're not hearing what they really think, you're hearing what they want you to think they're thinking. Non-actors try to play it straight. They want to communicate their ideas accurately and persuasively, and strive to find better and better ways to do that. It's true in journalism and it's equally true in blogging.
To explain the idea to a journalist friend I thought of two people he would be likely to know, two extreme examples: Scott Rosenberg and John Dvorak.
Rosenberg is the former managing editor of Salon, film critic at the SF Examiner. Dvorak is a longtime tech columnist, I read him 30 years ago in Infoworld, then PC mag. Now he's a blogger and podcaster. Rosenberg and Dvorak are very different sorts of reporters.
In person, Dvorak is a gentleman and really nice thoughtful guy. On the web and in his podcast, he's an actor playing the role of a cranky, thoughtless clown.
In this video Thoughtful Dvorak explains Dvorak the Actor:
Rosenberg on the other hand, if you met him in person, would say the same things he says in his online personna.
That analogy exists in the blogosphere as well.
If you were to meet me in person, like Rosenberg, I would say the same things that I say on the web. There aren't two Daves. This is me, I write more formally here, more thoughtfully, I can revise my writing, but you're getting my actual opinions, not a simulation.
However, some of the people I have interacted on the web with are not playing it straight. I don't want to name anyone specifically, because that would just invite the kind of slapstick they use to build traffic. But they do exist, and they often admit privately, as Dvorak does openly, that they don't really believe what they say in their online writing. Whether they want to declare it or not is their business.
However, I think it's important to understand the difference. An apparent pie fight isn't always what you think it is. Sometimes it's one of the clowns of our medium trying to cover up something real they don't want people to look at.
Dvorak's sleight of hand is harmless, almost everyone knows he's doing it. But the other kind is not so harmless. A good journalist must dig past the surface and figure out who are the actors and who's telling you what they really think.
I know it wasn't just me -- yesterday was a pretty negative day for a lot of people. Nothing seemed right. People picked yesterday to deliver bad news they had been holding on to. To tell others what they really thought of them. Even if nothing specific happened the general mood for some was suppressed if not downright depressed.
In hindsight it would have been better to stay in bed yesterday, call in sick, just sit it out.
Why yesterday?
In the middle of the night I figured it out.
For most of us it's no longer Yes We Can, it's Yes We Did.
It's not Change You Can Believe In, any more -- instead The Change Happened Now Get Back To Your Life.
While we watch from afar, we see people who have great meaning to their lives, who every day have something to do that excites and inspires them, for the rest of us -- we know the feeling, we used to have it, until Thursday morning, when it all came crashing down. Reality reinvoked, our normal humdrum lives reappeared, and we have to live them. There are taxes to pay, appointments to make, charges to answer, etc etc.
And there's Camelot on TV, but that's someone else's life, not ours.
If only we had been lifted out of our lives permanently.
But today's Friday. Thursday is behind us now.
Maybe that was the worst of it.
PS: Think you have it bad? You could be John Kerry.
The three FriendsOfDave channels on Twitter, Identi.ca and FriendFeed now have a few podcast feeds. Several of them update on Sundays. Here's the full list of the sources we follow:
.
I highly recommend this feed, there aren't too many updates and all the writers are interesting people who travel the world intellectually, creatively and physically (a few are in Davos this week in Switzerland).
Also the Wired feed on Twitter is powered by F-O-D software.
1/25/09; 2:52:39 PM
My new mission
Ever had this experience?
You think you know someone, you have them typecast as this type or that, and boom out of nowhere they do or say something that makes you wonder.
What do you do then?
There's no right answer to this question, but I think the answer reveals something about the person who answers it. Are you curious, forgiving, flexible, creative, imaginative, sympathetic? Actually I guess there is a right answer.
Yesterday I wrote on Twitter something pretty heavy, but I had just gotten off the phone with a very loving friend, and decided to confront something head-on that's been lurking in the shadows. I keep hoping it'll go away, but it never does.
There's this idea out there that I'm rude and angry and do things to deliberately hurt people. Nothing, I mean nothing, could be further from the truth.
This is what I mean by confronting it head-on.
In order to be a successful communicator, which I am -- you have to have a high degree of empathy. You have to be able to jump out of your own body and into the body of the reader, and imagine what it's like to read the words. The writer already knows what he or she is trying to communicate. The only way to judge writing, and thereby improve it, is to learn from people who are confused by it, who draw the wrong conclusion. You don't assume that they failed, quite the opposite, you try to learn how you failed. And then you incorporate that learning into your process.
The same is true for software design, for getting adoption for ideas like blogging and podcasting, and developer relations -- pushing for RSS, OPML, XML-RPC and SOAP. It's all about communication (at its most mundane) and about empathy. Without empathy, none of this could happen.
Now for their own reasons, there have always been people who try to stand in the way. You can't get something new done without that happening. This is a lesson I never wanted to learn, but I've had to. It started pretty early in my career, but not at the beginning. When I was a grad student, working on my first outliner, everyone at UW was very supportive. They didn't necessarily understand what I was doing (one prof introduced me as the guy who does great error messages) but they thought it was good that I was trying to create new stuff.
The roadblocks first showed up when I shipped my first commercial product. And the second, and so on. In the market, people are always trying to make you stumble. It's called competition. I don't do it much anymore, but I used to do it, a lot. I didn't care if my competitors didn't like me. That's part of the whole thing.
But at UserLand I stopped being so competitive, I think that's part of the problem UserLand had, and why it failed. I was more into the open source philosophy like Rodney King, why can't we all just get along. People thought I was a hypocrite, even though I wasn't competing, I guess people thought I was. Maybe that's the only model they have for human behavior.
So yes, I am one of the most hated people on the Internet, but I honestly don't believe what people hate is me, I believe they hate what people have told them to hate.
And I'm beginning a campaign, a relentless one, to reverse that.
1/25/09; 10:05:09 AM
How Twitter makes you a better writer
Twitter forces you to write concisely, and that makes for crisper, more direct, easier to read copy.
I was reminded of this when reading a piece written by Dan Santow at Edelman PR, who offers a list of phrases that can be replaced by single words without loss of meaning.
I realized you never see these phrases in Twitter-talk because there's no space for flowery prose with only 140 characters to express an idea.
Back in September when the credit freeze was first becoming a matter of public discourse, I listened to a fantastic episode of This American Life that explained in layman's terms, what the crisis was about. This was followed up by a great FreshAirinterview with NY Times financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson. Both highly recommended.
After those two shows I thought I understood, but the other day I had a flash of insight that brought it home in a much more personal way.
I'm lucky in many ways, one of those is that I have a good savings account that basically allowed me to retire at a very young age. Managing this nest egg is super important for me, it's what I live off. So in January I got the willies about the stock market and sold everything, moved it into cash. I did eventually start buying stocks again, slowly, but let's keep it simple and assume everything I own now is either in government bonds or the most conservative money market fund possible.
Turns out I was early, I saved a lot of value by selling in January, because later in 2008 a lot of other people did the same, causing the market to crash. At that point I never once entertained the thought of buying bonds or stocks of any kind. Never mind the explanation of not knowing which banks had a dishonest balance sheet or toxic assets, I was basically keeping my assets in a shoebox under the bed. I was and still am totally risk averse. I won't lend my money to anyone, I'm keeping it all for myself. I don't care if I earn zero interest, or even negative interest. I want to hold, hold, hold. As close as possible. I'm scared, freaked out even by what I see in the financial world.
There you have it. I'm not lending money to anyone. Same with everyone else. That's exactly why the economy is stuck.
You want to go first? I don't.
That smiley is there just so you know that there's still something worth laughing at in this crazy mess we call an economy.
BTW, what made me think of writing this up was an email I got from Citibank this morning offering unprecedented rates on a CD to which I said out loud "Fat chance buddy."
1/26/09; 3:24:03 PM
A special BMUG meeting on Thurs
In the earliest days of the Mac, there were two big stops on every rollout tour, Boston and Berkeley. The two biggest international Mac users groups were in Boston and Berkeley. It made a lot of sense cause the two yearly Mac shows were in Boston and San Francisco and of course Berkeley is just across the bay from SF, and honestly it's even more Mac than SF is.
It's been a long time since the Berkeley group met (the Boston group still appears to be meeting), as far as I know, but on Thursday in Berkeley Raines Cohen, one of the BMUG founders, is hosting a revival of BMUG at the Hillside Club of course, to celebrate 25 years of the Macintosh.
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1516528/
We'll take "A look back, a peek at some Mac history movies, conversation and insights," says Raines. $20 suggested donation, net proceeds benefit Alameda County Computer Resource Center. 6-9PM with a Chinese dinner after.
1/26/09; 2:59:15 PM
Radioshift from Rogue Amoeba
I've been wanting to record some NPR shows that don't have podcasts, and I'd like to record FreshAir as soon as its available, so I've been looking for software that runs on the Mac that will do this, and this evening I stumbled across Radioshift, and installed it.
I decided to go with this app because I use Audio Hijack Pro and really like it, and figured this would have the same fit and finish, and so far it's even nicer that Audio Hijack Pro
I'm curious if anyone else is using this app and if so what do you think of it?
Do you use some other software on the Mac to record Internet radio?
I was able to set up a subscription to FreshAir in a couple of mouse clicks in less than 30 seconds. It's hard to believe it's that easy, but if you think about it, why shouldn't it be that easy? Here's a screen shot of what the subscription looks like. If you choose to edit the subscription this is what you get. Choose Preferences from the File menu.
In other words, if you use AHP, it's exactly what you would expect. Nice work! Now let's see if it does its job tomorrow morning. Maybe I can find something to record in the middle of the night. Yup. I've got it programmed to record three shows, with the first starting at 3AM.
1/28/09; 12:02:26 AM
Today's fortune cookie
Observation: If you can not or will not laugh at yourself, everyone else will.
Wait a minute there's more to it.
If everyone is laughing at you, hard as it may seem you could join in the fun. You'll probably get a really nice hug if you do.
"cheesecake"
1/28/09; 3:43:59 PM
Hugs to Forbes
Big hugs to Forbes for saying I'm one of the 25 nicest people on the web. You guys are the greatest. Love ya all, Dave
1/29/09; 11:32:14 PM
Love on the sidewalk
Big hugs to all the she-geeks gathering in Mtn View!
1/29/09; 9:46:15 PM
New policy on interviews
I've gotten so fed up with reporters that I decline all interviews. I've occasionally made an exception when I was sure I'd be treated fairly, but even those have gone sour.
A new policy: 1. No interviews. 2. No exceptions.
But that doesn't mean I'm giving up because I'm not.
I think many reporters just don't know how awful they are with their sources.
I have a positive suggestion for reporters: Interview each other the way you interview your subjects. Your eyes will open.
He was the CTO at Novell, the leading network company of the PC world in the 80s and 80s. Follow the link from his name and read what you should be thinking about your data and whether and how much you should trust companies to keep it safe.
However, pause when you get to this part: "I am still reeling from the transition to Wordpress. I lost years of data, links, discussions. No thanks to Dave Winer. Dave, I love you, but I think you left a ton of us locked into your silo with no way out."
First, I love you too Craig, but you're totally wrong about that. At UserLand it was our religion not to lock users in. You could download your entire website from our servers, even the ones we hosted for free. We pleaded with people to do it, but most users either didn't understand, or didn't care enough to do it. We also provided a tool to convert those websites to folders of XML files, to make it easy to port it to other blogging tools. The only way we could have made it easier was to write the import routines for our competitors.
Since we were one of the earliest vendors of blogging tools, we hoped to set a high bar for all to come. Unfortunately this didn't turn out, except in RSS aggregators where portable subscription lists are now the norm because Radio 8 taught users the value of being able to switch.
Pay attention to what Craig says, and don't store anything on anyone else's server unless you know how you're going to get it off when you need to. Even better, don't store the original on someone else's server, keep that in your space and share a pointer to the data.
We're headed into tough economic times and a lot of the for-free companies are going to go under. I think that's a virtual certainty. Further, a lot of them are cutting back, so their technical staffs are going to be thinner and more likely to make a mistake that costs you your data. Read the Terms of Service, they're usually not obligated to do anything to help you in times of trouble.
2/1/09; 2:26:45 PM
What happened to NakedJen on Facebook?
NakedJen was a very early Facebook user because she worked for a "sister company" -- one that was funded by the same venture capital firm as Facebook, Inc.
Her account, which was recently deleted by the company for unknown reasons, was non-commercial, it represented simply a person, wasn't excessively large, didn't contain any nudity or other objectionable material. When she asked for an explanation, they told her to read the terms and conditions. When Scoble asked Zuckerberg about it he gave an annoying explanation about how the company would rather have some "false positives" instead of have their system abused.
As a friend of NakedJen's (whose birth name is Jennifer Neal, a name I have never used for her) I don't think of her as anything like a "false positive" -- she's much more of a "true positive" -- and a really cool human being. I named her my Blogger of the Year for 2007. That says it all as far as I'm concerned.
Now I'd like Zuckerberg to get in touch with his true positive -- and get a clue that his users are people who use his system in the most personal way imaginable. If you're going to kill someone's presence on Facebook, please -- give them some idea why you're doing it. And if you screw up, as you certainly did this time, please have the guts to say so and give the user the satisfaction of knowing that you care, just a little, what they think of you.
2/3/09; 11:19:09 PM
Twitter API for the social graph
Twitter just announced two new APIs that should make a host of new applications possible. The two APIs allow applications to navigate the "social graph" defined by Twitter under program control. I'm going to write a few little apps to test it out and report back here.
Kevin Marks: "the api returns numeric IDs, not twitter handles? that seems lame."
I won't go as far as Kevin, but I do wonder how we're supposed to use this data. For example, I follow 828 people. How am I supposed to get the handles for each of those people? Should I make 828 calls? I guess they're assuming I'm storing them in a database using the numeric id as a key. I don't. My databases always use the mnemonic as the key, for example, in my calendar application, I access Kevin's data through this address: config.twitterCalendar.users.kevinmarks which corresponds to a folder on a server.
2/3/09; 9:06:43 PM
Archiving Twitter in OPML
In mid-January I started a project to archive the Twitter posts of the people I follow. At first I experimented with rendering the archives in an XML-compatible form of HTML, but decided the point would largely be lost, so I decided to go with OPML.
You can find the folder of archives here:
http://twitter.opml.org/calendar/
At the top level of each sub-directory is calendar.opml and today.opml. The former links to every OPML file for that user, and the latter contains all the twits from today, or the last day that person posted something to Twitter.
There's also a folder called 2009, and under that two sub-folders: 01 and 02 for January and February. And under each of those is a file for each day. In March there will be a folder called 03, and so on.
I do not archive posts for people whose Twitter accounts are private.
The archive follows the whims of my follows and unfollows. If I started following someone on January 29, their archive would start on that day. If I unfollowed and then followed, there will be a gap in their archive.
The archive is updated once a minute.
The server is in Amazon's EC2 cloud.
No guarantees are made that this service will remain up, I'm doing it entirely as an experiment, to learn what the issues and perhaps what the opportunities are.
2/4/09; 12:23:21 PM
Katrina, USA
I had lunch with an old friend from college, Sandy Wilbourn. We both went to Tulane in the 70s and majored in math. Then a funny thing happened, shortly after I started grad school in computer science at UW-Madison, I ran into Sandy on campus. He was getting a degree in math there. Then a lot of years later I was shopping at Roberts Market in Woodside and saw Sandy. He lived in the Valley too. Earlier this year his uncle left him a house in Berkeley, a few blocks from where I live. Hey it's a good thing we like each other, we seem to be in the same karass.
Anyway, Sandy is the first person I know from New Orleans who I've talked with about my visit after Katrina in 2005. It stirred some memories cause we both know all the same landmarks, where the river bends and where the levees are. But Sands hadn't been back to New Orleans so I told him about places that had been wrecked that, last time he saw them, were fine.
I remembered a lesson from Katrina, the human side of something Krugman keeps saying: once deflation starts it's very hard to pull out.
New Orleans went out of business. One day every business in the city shut down. Some were destroyed, could never return (for example those in neighborhoods that were under water for weeks). But every other business had to restart from a dead stop. It's as if from an economic standpoint the city didn't exist.
The city's recovery will be slow, if it ever fully recovers. Some parts seem likely to come back. The richest parts, the oldest parts, the business parts. But it was all damaged and virtually all the people had gone, and many haven't come back.
Now, huge parts of the world economy have shut down. Some have been shut down for months. Economies don't just start back up once they shut down. They can start back up from a slowdown much more easily. But once a business is gone, it's gone.
2/5/09; 9:25:32 PM
Time for heads to roll at Meet The Press
First some disclaimers, disclosures, etc...
1. I stopped watching the Sunday morning news shows after the election. Now I listen to the podcasts, when I have a chance. I'm fed up with the gotcha crap. Gotcha, gotcha gotcha, that's all they know.
2. I don't like "gotcha" interviewing. I want to hear what the people have to say. I'm very circumspect. I'll form my own opinion on what they say. I know they're all lying and spinning. No one ever gets anyone with a gotcha.
3. Gotchas only interest the reporter and his or her competitors. It's their way of keeping score. No one else cares. And because they all do it all the time, it breeds politicians who are good at saying nothing because the prime gotcha is "I caught you saying something. Gotcha!"
4. Like every other element of the political system this needs reforming. If you believe in the primacy of the network filter (for me it's fading realllly fast) then nothing can get done until they evolve beyond gotcha.
5. Make a list of the reporters who can interview someone and just let them tell their story, help them along as needed, represent the audience, and stop playing the insiders' game. Bill Moyers. Some of the PBS people like Gwen Ifil. Terry Gross except when she's interviewing the terrorist who Obama palled around with. And the guy I like best: Aaron Brown.
Which brings me to the point.
Tom Brokaw was pretty good. He's old enough and senior enough not to really care what the other reporters think of him. Even so, he did play gotcha while he was filling in. But he was the best of the three. Now that he's gone, Stephanopoulos is the best, Gregory is a toad. He's a tiny mind. In way over his head. He says the stupidest gotcha stuff. Here's my favorite -- he pressed Rahm Emanuel to explain how hiring more teachers was going to create jobs. Yeah he actually said that. Several times. Give Rahm some points for not calling him a fucking idiot to his face.
Given a few years maybe Gregory will grow into the job. But we don't have a few years.
If you have to go for another interim host, get Moyers if he'll do it. But if you really want to make news on Sunday morning work, and raise the bar for everyone else, get Aaron Brown to do Meet The Press. Pay him $20 million.
I beg you.
2/5/09; 6:51:25 PM
Don't boycott Kellogg
First, a disclaimer -- I used to smoke pot, but I haven't in many years. I don't smoke anything, or actually take any drugs that get me high. However, I strongly believe that marijuana should be decriminalized, even made legal. I think it's the ultimate in hypocrisy to argue that former members of the excecutive branch of the US govt should not be prosecuted for war crimes because it would be looking backward, while our jails are full of people whose only "crime" is that they smoke pot. It's like we have two legal systems, one for the powerful and one for the rest of us. It's so un-American, I don't know why people can't see that.
Anyway, I remember what it was like to smoke pot, and I definitely remember what it was like after smoking pot. It gives you the munchies, an appetite for anything that's rich and sweet. I think sometimes American industry worked at creating products just for people with munchies, like Krispy Kreme donuts. Kellogg's makes many such products.
Now Kellogg's has droppedMichael Phelps as a spokesmodel because, shudder, he got caught smoking pot. Geez Louise, that's like getting caught having a beer. Yeah it's illegal, so is torture, what are you going to do? Fact is, after winning all those gold medals in Beijing and bringing glory to our country, he's entitled to kick back, smoke some dope, eat some poptarts and rice krispies, and hang out for a bit while he basks in the glow of our admiration. He should get laid too. A lot. (But use protection, you don't want to get a STD.) What's the point of being young and successful if you can't enjoy it!
What a bunch of stinkers they are at Kellogg's. They could score so many points by saying something like this: "We don't encourage pot smoking, but we understand that some people do it. We have so many bigger problems to tackle in this country, and Michael Phelps is such an incredible young man and hero, we decided to be heroic ourselves, and cut him some slack, and keep him on the corn flakes box."
So I don't think we should boycott Kellogg's, let's buy them. And put up ads on our websites explaining why we're buying them. Because we want them to do the right thing, and get the big fat stick out of their butt, and lighten up a bit. Maybe even step out back of the office in Battle Creek and smoke a doobie.
2/6/09; 4:12:54 PM
Instant Outiner bootstrap
I've been quietly working with a small number of users on the next interation on the OPML Editor's instantOutline tool. I wrote about it in January, after Hutch Carpenter discovered its previous incarnations. I was getting a new version ready for a project I was working on in December, so it was pretty easy for me to get it ready for wider use, which I have now done.
The new tool has several prerequesites: 1. You must have the OPML Editor installed on your desktop computer, it's available either for Windows or the Macintosh. 2. You must be a member of FriendFeed and 3. You must be a member of the instant-outline-beta group on FriendFeed. I've built most of the back-end on the excellent realtime updating API in FriendFeed, that's why you have to be a member to use the I/O tool.
I'm monitoring the workgroup. Hopefully this is a next step in something fun and excellent. Look forward to seeing you there.
2/6/09; 3:47:20 PM
One more time -- open the news industry!
As I said in a podcast a few days ago, since the beginning of my career in the early 80s, I've been meeting with people in the news industry to try to play a role in its transition to an electronic medium. But that's only half of it, the easy half. The hard half: I want to be a reporter, but a new kind of reporter. Instead of one of the few, I want to be one of the millions. And I want technology to find a way to do what reporters of the 20th century used to do, to organize all the information from what they used to call "sources" into reports that people like you and me can read and think about and discuss.
Reporting is a connecting art, like a real estate broker, travel agent, stock trader. The writing part of reporting is mundane, you want the reporter to stay out of your way as much as possible, and the good ones do. It's like the other arts -- who wants a real estate broker who sells you on how great it would be to live in a house while you're looking at it. They don't know how you live, their chatter interferes with your dreaming, and it's the dream that buys the house. I once had a travel agent who loved to golf, so I ended up staying at hotels near golf courses. I don't golf. So now I do my own travel agenting. It takes more time, but I stay in places that are a better fit.
The news people talk about paying for news, but the suppliers of news, the sources, are never paid. So if we can find a way to do what reporters do, without paying reporters, then voila, we can have our news for free. Before you rattle off some tired rationale, think about it. What are reporters doing that amateurs and/or software can't do?
Jay Rosen explained this to me once -- the word for what reporters do that machines don't is "authority." Humans convey authority. But -- only until humans teach us how to do it for them.
Here's the idea I would program into the heads of people who run the news corporations if I could turn them upside down and hang them by the feet until all the old wrong ideas ran out of their heads, forming a fetid puddle on the ground beneath them. News people are all around you, anxious to get in there and work, for free, on the news. At first thousands of them, and then once the glitches are worked out, tens of thousands. There's no shortage of people who want to inform others. The challenge is to figure out which ones want to do it for love. And that might not be such a challenge. I can show you a few dozen, and I bet they could show you a few more and so on. In the end you might not be able to make money at news, but you're not making money now, so what else is new?
The manufacturing process for news has radically shifted. The question is, as with the economy, whether we can transition the existing process to become the new one (imho preferable) or does the old system have to collapse before the new one can rise to take its place.
The key is to look at all those empty newsrooms, and to envision, before they completely shut down, filling them with volunteers -- who we can teach to write the news.
One more thought -- as with all post-apolcalyptic thinking, post-Katrina New Orleans provided the testbed, the dry run. Look at what the Times-Picayune did in the days after the hurricane. In my humble opinion a great newspaper rose overnight where a mediocre one had been the day before. The printing presses weren't running, and the normal management structure was heavily disrupted. But they had a story, a great one -- and if you go back to the roots of news, that's when it really happens, not when someone pays you well, but when you have a great story. (Same thing happens in software, when you're shipping a winner, somehow everyone on the team knows, and they put it in an even better performance.)
That's what we all want to be part of -- something great. I think that expresses the best of the human spirit. As young people we want to be the greatness, but as we grow we want to be part of greatness. That's much more exciting.
Update: Here's an example of the kind of reporting I find riveting, Pulitzer-worthy, written by an amateur, with passion.
2/6/09; 12:55:51 PM
Kettle Chips
Yummmm!
2/8/09; 7:51:46 PM
Twitter *kills* Google in real-time search
Matt Cutts: "The real-time web is not the threat. Google can index data in seconds.'
He's the head of webspam team at Google, and a man who, obviously, knows a lot about search.
That was 17 hours ago as I write this at almost 2AM, Twitter's real-time search has had a story, a few thousand night owls were up, in LA and around the world, and news was breaking, the kind of sensational prurient goop that Twitter loves, a LA car chase, covered by helicopter. As I write this, Twitter is about 1 hour ahead of Google, that is, Google's latest news is 1 hour behind Twitter's.
Granted, this is not (likely) an earth-shaking story. But if it were, the same technology would apply. It's a good test case, a good dry run.
Also granted, the Twitter result is scattered and disorganized. If you weren't watching the event unfold in realtime you would not be able to piece together the story. However I was watching realtime while it was happening, hitting Twitter's realtime search and watching my incoming twitstream. I follow over 800 people, and a lot of them were fascinated with the story of the slow-speed chase through LA of the police by someone driving a white Bentley. Who is it? Why is it taking so long?
We watched as a helicopter hovered over the scene where the driver was apprehended. Ominously one Twitterer says the driver killed himself on camera on ABC. Now there are some published mainstream reports that say this too.
At 1:57AM, Google has a link to an AP story with an update about the driver being taken away in an ambulance. The story has a post time of 1:34AM, about 25 minutes ago as I write this at 2AM.
Now all this is likely to get washed out in a few hours when the reports are filed and there's been a press conference. My point is that Twitter is doing something new and with all due respect to Google, something that Google isn't. However, there's a lot of room for improvement, and connections between the various parts of the news ecosystem.
Every serious news outlet should have someone monitoring Twitter 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They should be following at least a few hundred people, feel free to clone my follow list, if you like. It got me in the loop on this within minutes. When a story breaks, a reporter should be dispatched to cover the news that the Twitter community uncovers. The first news organization that does this well is going to get a ton of flow and attention and be well-positioned for the new 24-minute news cycle. Google clearly needs to get their hooks into the Twitter flow, but it's not clear that Twitter wants them in there, hence the last part of @mattcutts's quote, which is ominous: "The larger issue is when search engines can't see data." As we often say "Bing!" -- that's the crux of the biscuit.
As happens so often in tech, we're coming up to a repeat of the sitdown scene in The Godfather where the heads of the other families tell Don Corleone that he must share his Senators, which he keeps in his pocket, like so many coins. (I'll look for the exact quote.) Twitter is holding some valuable coins in its pocket. But Google need not sit on the sideline, they're a big force, and they're moving into social networkings like an aircraft carrier, slowly and deliberately, one step at a time.
Another note -- this is a thread we've been following here on scripting.com since 1996. Today we call it "real-time search," back then I called for JIT-SEs or Just-in-time search engines.
One more observation: Sometimes having insomnia pays off.
Update: At 2:25AM, the LA Times has a lot more detail.
Update: The full Godfather quote from the screenplay by Mario Puzo. "Don Corleone is too modest. He had the judges and politicians in his pocket and he refused to share them. His refusal is not the act of a friend. He takes the bread out of the mouths of our families. Times have changed, it's not like the old days where everyone can go his own way. If Don Corleone had all the judges and politicians in New York, then he must share them or let others use them. Certainly he can present a bill for such services, we're not Communists, after all. But he has to let us draw water from the well. It's that simple."
2/10/09; 5:44:49 AM
OAuth hail mary quick code clinic and plea for help
Hi everybody!
As you probably know Twitter is getting ready to support OAuth, and this is a good thing, cause it'll make it easier to trust websites with access to your account cause you won't have to give up your password. But OAuth is hard to implement, it's complicated, and because I'm basically programming the OPML Editor on my own, if I want to support it, I have to write the code. Which is okay cause it's interesting, and it'll mean I'll have a very deep background in OAuth when it's done.
I've been through one of these before. Flickr has a similar authentication system, although it's simpler than OAuth (probably fewer cooks and less compromise in the design). So last night I got coding finally and made a lot of progress, thanks to some help from a tutorial at Hueniverse. But as I was finishing it up I was pretty sure it wouldn't work when I tested it against a server running in Ireland, and sure enough it didn't.
At this point what you do is put up a source listing ahd ask other programmers to have a look. I bet there are a dozen things I'm not doing that I should be. Based on Leah Culver's code, I think I may have to set some headers, but I'm not doing any of that. What else?
Gratitude for any help will be psychically and demonstrably expressed!
Update at 11:50AM: I got signatures working. Here's the updated code listing. How I did it was to fill in the values in the Hueniverse tutorial and step through my code and check my values against theirs. There were differences. Where they disagreed, I made mine match theirs. Once I got them producing the same signature, I tested it against the server in Ireland and it worked. Anyone who's trying to get theirs to work, I recommend doing the same. It takes all the guesswork out of it. Now I have to step through the rest of the dance and see how it goes.
Update at 12:45PM: I'm done with my OAuth library, I've worked through all the levels with the test server in Ireland, and have made arbitrary authenticated calls. I even see roughly how this will plug into Twitter. It means rewriting all my glue code, but should not effect any of the higher-level code. After a break I'll get started testing against twitter.com.
2/12/09; 12:22:00 PM
OAuth update
I'm still stuck where I was last night with getting OAuth to work with Twitter. I've been able to get all the way up to making a call that requires authentication, and I've constructed the query with what I think is correct OAuth credentials, but Twitter says its an "Invalid OAuth Request."
Matt at Twitter posted a note saying that it might be because my app hasn't been turned on, but later he told me it had been turned on but the query still isn't working.
Now I'm going to look for other OAuth services to test against. If you have any suggestions please post a comment. Thanks!
2/13/09; 7:40:55 PM
The best way to read the NY Times
It's amazing how people keep trying to come up with better ways to read news by throwing lots of "new ideas" out there, ones that harken back to the way the news was read when it was printed on paper.
Imho there's a much much simpler way, that uses another ancient model that just happens to work better on today's computer screens -- the teletype.
And of course what I'm talking about, as always (I must sound like a broken record) is the River Of News.
And the NY TImes, because they have excellent RSS 2.0 support, makes it possible for a programmer like myself to cobble it together, which I have of course done.
http://nytimesriver.com/
As it says -- it works great on mobile devices, but I like it on desktops too.
It's plain and simple -- new stories come in on the top, old ones scroll off the bottom. Scan down with the scrollbar till you see something you like and click on the link. You already know how to use it.
2/14/09; 2:46:13 PM
Another day banging my head against OAuth
I thought I had my signature-generating code right, I had it verified by two sources, but it still was being rejected by Twitter. I was looking for another service to test against, when Chris Messina posted a link to a wiki page that in turn pointed to three sites that verified signatures -- and I did a quick check, confident that my signature code would be validated, but it wasn't. They didn't agree. But, that implies that they don't agree with the first two sources I checked against. Which is really seriously troubling if I didn't make a mistake, which is why I'm going to very carefully check my work now. My notes follow, realtime.
1. First result, I tested it with the Google page, and their signature and mine do not agree. I'm going to see if the "signature base strings" agree. They don't. Now to see where they differ and why. They don't differ -- I made a mistake in the test script. Once I corrected it, my signature-generating code and Google's return the same string.
2. Tested against the Netflix page, and they agree as well. Of course had they not agreed then I suppose we'd all be fracked. (Speaking of which did you see BSG last night. I gotta watch that one again, for sure.)
So....
My next plan of attack is to try some other call with Twitter, maybe I happened to hit on the one API they haven't debugged with OAuth yet. And try another OAuth-compatible app to test against. Something simple, one that a lot of people have developed against. Not sure there are any yet. I'll keep you posted.
2/14/09; 1:41:01 PM
Maybe this is the big slowdown?
It's been a lazy few days, in the aftermath of OAuth, which disrupted my flow of development. It was probably a good thing, cause it's giving me some time to reflect, veg out, watch some movies anddocumentaries.
One of the movies I watched was the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. I knew in advance it would be awful, which made it not so awful. After reading the NY Times review, I decided what the hell, it's Keanu Reeves with small roles for John Cleese and Kathy Bates, it's about the end of the world, why not? Exactly. It's about at the "why not" level. Reeves after all is Neo, and I sat through the last two installments of The Matrix, twice, even though they sucked too.
Glad I watched it cause it got me thinking about the end of our civilization.
The end of our civilization. If you believe in global climate change and Al Gore, which I do (both) then as much as Gore doesn't want to say it because it would be counter-productive for him to, our civilization is on the path to self-extinction.
Why should we fight to get our economy growing again? Isn't growth the whole problem? Shouldn't we see the economic downturn as not only inevitable, but as our last hope for salvation? These are fair questions imho.
The inescapable truth that no one wants to speak out loud is that we have too many people, and we're adding more people at too fast a clip. The planet can't sustain what we have now without destroying the climate, yet we haven't done anything to limit growth.
So maybe this isn't the biggest downturn since The Great Depression? Maybe it's bigger than that. Maybe this is a corner-turn for the human race, maybe last September was when it finally occurred to us, collectively, that we couldn't keep going as we were going, and we hit the brakes in the way the Invisible Hand does. Maybe the efforts to "jump start" the economy won't work, and maybe that's as it should be, and maybe that's a good thing?
2/15/09; 7:13:27 PM
BSG races toward a breathtaking conclusion?
I was a skeptic at the beginning of the second half of the last season of Battlestar Galactica, one of my favorite shows of all-time, and a signature favorite of geeks everywhere.
The first couple of shows in the run were depressing, who knew where we were going, certainly not anywhere remotely like we thought we were. That's okay, it turns out because where we were actually going is very science fictiony, which is good because that's what BSG is.
Now what does it all mean? I don't have a clue. But that's the way I like it. I had to watch Friday's episode twice, just so I could hear what the characters were actually saying, because in the first pass all I could absorb was the wonderful weirdness of the arc the story was taking.
Having listened, I'm still really really confused. And that's just fine!! Frack me. Gods damn it. So say we all.
2/15/09; 4:00:22 PM
How to avoid getting run down by drivers
I love walking around Berkeley -- it's one of the reasons I moved here from Palo Alto. You can get around on foot instead of having to drive everywhere. But Berkeley drivers are not much better than anywhere else, it seems. Put a nice socially conscious person behind a steering wheel of a 2 ton hunk of metal and they forget everything they learned in Driver's Ed -- like what a crosswalk means.
A lot of them break the law, almost no one comes to a full stop when a pedestrian (one of those people without a 2 ton hunk of metal around them) is in a crosswalk, and a shocking number just don't want to slow down at all. Every time this happens I wonder how much it would hurt as the 2 tons of metal crushed my poor unprotected bod. There are some streets with so much fast-moving traffic that there's just no safe way to cross them.
However, I've learned that most drivers will slow down enough for you to cross if you hold your arm out with all five fingers extended, the universal symbol for STOP. And yesterday quite by accident I discovered another way, when even that doesn't work. It's been cold so I've been wearing gloves, but after an hour walking up and down the hills I have to take them off to let the heat out. Standing just off the curb in a crosswalk, I was holding the gloves as a sedan sped toward me, ignoring my outstretched hand. So I threw the gloves down in the street in his path with a grand gesture like a football referee throwing a penalty flag. He stopped! Not just a slow-down stop but a full wheels-not-turning stop. Amazing. I picked up the gloves and crossed the street.
The psychology of drivers. Stop to save a $10 pair of used gloves, but play a dangerous game of chicken with a human. Hey I'm a driver too, I know it's a whole other world, but the people walking across the street are just like you except they're even more fragile than a cheap old pair of gloves.
I think I've found the slution -- carry a real bright yellow penalty flag with me, and call every offense. Only $8 at Amazon. :-)
2/15/09; 3:24:37 PM
The Magic Bus
2/16/09; 11:44:44 PM
Where is Twitter's WordPress?
Blogger is a centralized free hosting service created by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. It suffered from many of the same scaling issues in its early days as Twitter, but now that Blogger has been owned by Google for a long time, the scaling issues are gone. But it's not the only blogging service -- there are many others. And I can if I want, host my own blog on my own server, using software like WordPress or Movable Type. I've written my own software for Scripting News.
I use Twitter, but I also remember fondly the days when Twitter was smaller, when I followed 50 people instead of 800. And I knew most of them. I still like Twitter, but it's way different, and I see a role for a smaller blog-sized Twitter, a companion to Scripting News, like Leo's TWiT Army. A clubhouse where we work on stuff that's of interest mainly to this community, where I follow 20 or 30 people and am followed by a hundred. This isn't a job for Yammer, because it's not a private application. But it isn't a job for Twitter either.
This weekend there was a furor about Facebook's terms of service -- people figured out that when they publish stuff on Facebook they lose control of it. Facebook put that in writing in their terms of service, but anyone who follows Technorati knows that our content is spread all over god's creation. People copy and paste whole blog posts, you wish they'd just link to them, but everyone has given up the fight on this, it's completely out of control, and has been for a long time. I think Facebook did the right thing by spelling out in black and white the reality of the Internet. Once you hit publish, it's gone.
No matter what happens, some of us will never be happy with only the centralized service a corporation like Facebook or Twitter provides. Eventually we don't need the training wheels -- it's time to take off down the street in our own car, driving where we want to go, without asking for or waiting for the parent to give it to us. Now, after two years of using Twitter, I know exactly what I want. I've tried to communicate it privately, that hasn't gotten me what I want, so I'll try publicly and see if that works.
1. Ideally, I'd like Amazon to implement a back-end service that does what Twitter does, with a web service API that builds on the S3 API, like SimpleDB (for example). Then I'd spend a little time slapping together a bare-bones user interface and turn it over to my friends here at Scripting News to produce a variety of different interfaces for, browser based and desktop clients. That's the kind of stuff readers of this site love. I think we could bootstrap a community within weeks, and of course everything we create would be open source, so cloning it wouldn't be a problem.
2. Almost as good as #1 would be an EC2 AMI that installs laconi.ca, the software that runs identi.ca. A fair number of programmers already know how to start up an EC2 instance (I do, it's easy -- just took me a few hours and the docs were less than optimal). The idea is that I have to do nothing to have a basic microblogging system running. I want to configure it via web browser. And obviously I need to be able to customize it, but that's not a prob since they already support the Twitter API.
It's time for a thousand Twitters to bloom. The mother ship will do great, but we need a path that's independent of the corporate entity that runs Twitter. We've learned this time and again, let's not learn it one more time.
2/17/09; 1:13:23 PM
OAuth is working here!
Q. Define "working."
A. I made an authenticated call to Twitter and it responded with the correct answer instead of "Invalid OAuth Request."
Q. How did you do it?
A. Joseph Smarr patiently worked through the process with me, first making sure it worked with Plaxo and then coaching me on getting it working with Twitter.
Q. Is there anything you'd like to say to Joseph at this time?
A. Yes! Thank you thank you thank you. Thanks!
Q. Is there anything you'd like to say about OAuth?
A. OAuth isn't so hard once you got it working, but there are too many docs, too heavy on theory, and there is no validator. Everything Joseph did could have been done in software. I offered to help get the process systematized by remembering what it was like to be a newbie, which I still am, totally.
2/17/09; 6:52:57 PM
My work at bit.ly is done
As you may know I participated in the intial design and rollout of the bit.ly URL-shortener. It was one of the most instantly successful projects I've ever participated in, up there with the release of Radio 8 in 2002 and MORE 1.0 in 1986. Sometimes the time is right for a product, and the execution is great and the communication is crisp. Everyone gets it, and it takes off like a rocket. Bit.ly is one of those phenoms.
They're getting ready to grow a real business around it, and I want to go on to do other things. So we worked out a deal that leaves me satisfied with how things turned out and am no longer a shareholder.
I wish the company and the team the very best.
Onward!
2/17/09; 7:07:47 PM
3 questions on Twitter
Over the last two hours I asked a series of 3 questions on Twitter about escapes, physical, intellectual and spiritual, and got back so many great responses, I had to write a script that captures them.
So here's a readout of the last 100 responses I've gotten on Twitter. In a little bit I'll gather them up and organize them into an outline and upload that. Feel free to add your ideas in the comments here.
Great work everybody, big hugs!
2/19/09; 8:20:18 PM
The movies of 2008
The Oscars are this Sunday, so it's time to review the last year, and get on the record.
Of the nominated movies, I loved, without qualification: Frost/Nixon, The Wrestler, Doubt, Rachel Getting Married, Frozen River, Slumdog Millionaire.
Movies I loved things about but didn't go for the whole package.
Australia. The acting was superb, I'll go for Nicole Kidman in anything, and the kid was great, but it was a forgettable movie.
The Dark Knight. Cut out all the scenes that don't have Heath Ledger and you have a great picture. The guy with half a face was disgusting, worth a few shots but a half hour? Embarassing.
Wall-E. The first part was wonderful. Amazing. Fantastic. And then a formula Pixar animation for the kiddies. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but you don't see Bolt on my list of movies worth talking about. Or Kung Fu Panda. Wall-E was half an amazing movie. A Pixar movie that really makes you think hasn't been made yet but Wall-E showed that it could happen.
I didn't see: Revolutionary Road, The Duchess.
Movies I flat out didn't like.
Milk -- Sean Penn was a convincing Harvey Milk, and that was good for five minutes. Otherwise, no suspension of disbelief, the story didn't hang together.
Benjamin Button -- I kept looking at my watch hoping it would be over.
There were many others, but thankfully, none of them were nominated.
Now for my picks.
Best actor: Mickey Rourke.
Best supporting actor: Heath Ledger.
Best actress: Kate Winslet.
Best supporting actress: Marissa Tomei.
Best animated feature: Wall-E.
Best writing (adapted): Doubt.
Best writing (original): Frozen River.
Best picture: The Reader.
I didn't vote in the other categories cause what do I know about editing and directing and costumes. I'm user, just a guy who watches movies and loves great ones.
Final note, best actress was the hardest category. I loved Anne Hathaway in Rebecca Getting Married. Meryl Streep was amazing in Doubt, and Melissa Leo in Frozen River. But Kate Winslet owned me in The Reader.
2/19/09; 2:00:30 PM
Hugs to the NY Times
On my Twitter profile page I've added to Media Hacker another title, Toppler of Paradigms. It's kind of a joke, because just being alive is enough to qualify for the second title. If you doubt me, think about what happened in 2008 and what's happening in 2009.
Some are in the middle of paradigms that are being more heavily toppled than other, like people at the NY Times. Today I offered a virtual hug to all of them. I explained, in twotwits: "Today's 3rd hug goes to the NY Times. The whole place, top to bottom. Everyone gives them [a hard time] cause they're on top of the heap we expect so much, too much -- so at some point you gotta just say 'We appreciate you' and leave it at that."
Hugs really work. They help soothe the feeling of disruption. Kind of like an analgesic for change. I'm not kidding. If you find the world isn't treating you like you want, try giving out some hugs. You'll be amazed at what comes back.
Anyway, back to The Times.
I think it was Alan Kay who said the Macintosh was the first computer worth criticizing. I think that's what the NY Times should understand, that as long as people are telling you what to do, it means they care. When they stop, that's when you need to start worrying!
I also wanted to thank the Times for being the ones who made RSS 2.0 the roaring bonfire of content that it has been for the last half-decade or so. And to the tech people at other pubs who followed the Times' lead, without trying to improve it. Because of all this compatibility it was possible for a market of tools to develop around RSS. That should serve as an example, a template, for future publishing standards.
Which brings us around to the idea that put the Times in the center of today's discussion. They now have an API that looks very much like a social network API, like Twitter or FriendFeed. At first it's a shock, why do we need another, and why is it coming from NY instead of Mountain View, Berkeley, Sunnyvale, San Francisco or Redmond? Well if their paradigms can be toppled why not ours? Indeed. But... Is that really what is needed from the Times? And what chance does it have to succeed? I thought of other successful once-new publishing paradigms -- Aldus, Quark, HTML, blogs, RSS, podcasting. Is the Times like those? No -- it's more like AOL or Compuserve, if it's even that open (I don't think it is).
Here's the key point, the open-ness that counts is not that anyone can develop apps on top of it, though that's nice, it's if anyone can get on the other side -- can I publish behind the API? On all the platforms I listed in the previous paragraph the answer is yes, I can get on the other side, even AOL and Compuserve, but to be really open it has to be open on all sides, in all ways. RSS was so open that it was possible for it to be usurped by Feedburner and they almost completely sucked it in behind their wall, before people started to get wise that maybe that wasn't the best thing for everyone.
Even Twitter, the raging rocket of growth that it is, is not as open as we'd like it to be, not even close. But I can create any number of accounts on Twitter, and build my own little universe there and publish with all the tools available to Ev, Biz and Jack. If the Times wants to play in that game, and I'd like them to -- it needs to be possible for me to compete with my heroes Frank Rich and Paul Krugman, and make the ones I don't like so much (names withheld) look like the asshats they are.
In other words, you want to have some fun, throw some fat on the fire -- let your writers, editors and pundits compete with the wild wooly world of the Internet on completely equal terms. Then you'll have a chance of tapping into the growth on this side of the mike.
Yesterday I posted one in a long series of screeds with a single-minded message to news organizations large and small: Open your newsrooms.
The first time I said this explicitly was over nine years ago in a rambling piece I wrote in Amsterdam after attending Davos for the first and last time. The question I was asked over and over was how would news organizations make money on the Internet. My opinion was widely sought then because the dotcom bubble had not yet burst, we were still in the age of Irrational Exuberance 1.0 (version 2 would come thanks to Craig Cline and Tim O'Reilly). Looking back it was so weird, the people pressing me hardest at the famous Schatzalp Lunch on the closing day were CEOs of major investment banking firms. They also wanted to take UserLand public, which I ignored as a ridiculous concept, but I smiled at the idea, everyone likes to be appreciated. I didn't offer them hugs, but I wish I had.
Back then (and still today) the only things I knew for sure were: 1. People's thirst for news and ideas was going up, not down and 2. The professional news organizations were not expanding to meet the demand, rather they were contracting. Therefore: 3. Something must rise to fill the gap. Beyond that, I could only guess how it would make money. Maybe they will make money by serving lattes to bloggers who work in their newsrooms. Maybe once there's a glut of conflicted points of view out there, the public will re-hire them to act as arbiters. I don't know. But as I said to Jay Rosen in an email yesterday, "Asking about business models now is way premature. First they have to restructure, learn how it works, and then we can figure out where the money comes from."
At least the Times is using the right word these days -- open -- but not in the way that matters. They're willing to give away what we, in tech, have been giving away for a decade. Obviously that's not a disrupter. They need to give away what they have -- authority. The trick is to find a way to give it away without destroying it. If they can do it, then we will have cracked the nut, scale, massively more news, deeper coverage, and with it -- shifted economics.
2/21/09; 1:16:47 PM
Playing with ginx.com
Yesterday I posted a twit saying I'd love to try out ginx.com, and within minutes I had a code and logged on. I was curious because it had been showing up in my referrer log for scripting.com, and when I clicked on one of the links it took me to a framed page with a comment at the top.
Viewed from the other side, Ginx is an alternate UI for Twitter, with some immediately obvious improvements. It understands links better than Twitter does, in addition to displaying the shortened version, it also displays the full URL, the one the short URL points to. In the screen shot, the red arrow points to the long version of a shortened URL, and displays the title of the page being pointed to. Both are nice touches, but not hard to do and at some point, Twitter will certainly do it.
Observation: Products like this have to do something that is either really hard, really niche, or against the philosophy of Twitter -- if they want to have a chance to co-exist.
One thing I would like them to do, which they apparently don't, is show a thumbnail of Flickr pictures when tweets point directly to something on Flickr. For MP3s, show a little MP3 player. These are ideas that are already implemented elsewhere, so it seems a requirement at this point.
When you click on a link from Ginx it takes you to a framed page where you can read the caption the linker added, and reply. Screen shot.
If you're a Ginx user -- what other things should I be looking at??
2/21/09; 12:33:50 PM
A postscript to today's piece
I'd say the chance, today, of some news organization trying the experiment outlined in today's earlier piece is virtually nil.
One commenter said yesterday: "What we need now are small ideas with obvious financial underpinnings that can grow organically to fill any unmet needs of customers."
To paraphrase, as the first passenger, in a bus careening down the steep mountainside, to observe that there's no driver, said: "We need small ideas to fix this problem." Yes, even big ideas are small given the dire circumstances. You won't get an argument from me. No sarcasm.
When they built the first Transcontinental Railroad, the guys heading east from California had a much harder job than the guys heading west from Omaha. Starting in Sacramento it went straight uphill, and didn't get any better when they got to the summit. So if approaching the new reality from the journalism side is so hard, maybe it's more approachable from our side. After all, what do we have to do, other than find a way to glue the experts together in a cohesive whole and give it authority. Not so easy -- that authority thing, but maybe it's easier than asking the professional news organizations to let their sources into their clubroom?
So what then? Well, turns there's a schematic for it, called Hypercamp, which is an awful name -- but it kind of stuck. It's the equivalent of a press room at a conference, with refreshments, excellent networking both technical and human, and accessible to both news reporters and news makers, without making too much of a fuss about which one you are (you're probably both). Two podia, one at either end of the room, rented by people with formal announcements to make, that's how the rent is paid. Otherwise everyone works for no one but themselves. I'd like to give this a try. Anyone in SF want to set one up? I'd be there from time to time, blogging and schmoozing.
There's another related idea, the Flash Conference -- a convention of experts brought together instantly to discuss some breaking news, to exchange ideas and perspectives, and disseminate them quickly while the story is still fresh. This is another approach that can begin before the news industry either: 1. Opens up. 2. Collapses. 3. Something else.
Can-do or no-can-do. There's not a lot of the latter in news these days -- no wonder the news is so depressing. Let's bring some of the former to the problem and see what happens. It's not like anyone gets out of this thing alive, you know.
Big hugs, Uncle Dave...
PS: I was talking with Nicco yesterday (Morra, his wife, had a baby six weeks ago, lovely little Asa, future football player, swimmer and President of the United States) and he tells me his class at KSG has to read this blog every day as part of their assignment. Excellent. So here's a project for you guys. Set one of these newsrooms up at Harvard. I'd come. I bet Berkman would help.
2/22/09; 3:41:58 PM
Opening the newsroom, Step 1
Yesterday's piece ended with: "At least the Times is using the right word these days -- open -- but not in the way that matters. They're willing to give away what we, in tech, have been giving away for a decade. Obviously that's not a disrupter. They need to give away what they have -- authority. The trick is to find a way to give it away without destroying it. If they can do it, then we will have cracked the nut, scale, massively more news, deeper coverage, and with it -- shifted economics."
And that's where we pick it up today.
Here's how you take the first step toward the open newsroom.
Pick a story that you're covering on an ongoing basis, something important enough that you've assigned one or more reporters to it full-time. Have them continue to do what they're doing, we're going to add to that coverage, in an experiment to learn how the newspaper of the future might work.
Now pick two or three experts on the same subject, and invite them into the newsroom. They will not be paid. No benefits. They agree to the same rules governing the integrity of your reporters. For a period of four weeks, they report to the newsroom, the physical one, not a virtual one, every day, and are part of your news team. They file stories every day, just as the reporters do, and they go through the same copy-edit process your reporters' stories go through, however they get final approval on the articles. The words that appear in the publication are their words, the ideas are their ideas. Their job is the same as the reporters' job -- to report the news. To explain what happened.
I don't know what will happen. It could be no one volunteers, then we either give up or formulate a different proposal. I don't know if their coverage will be as good as the reporters. The goal is to find out! Maybe it will be better.
Now, to be clear -- I'm not talking about recruiting idiots or people whose opinions are (in your opinion) worthless. I'm talking about respected experts, the kinds of people your reporters call to get a perspective on the news the people they quote. Instead of having them talk to the readers through the reporter, I want them to go directly. Their writing should be as readable as the reporters' so I would choose experts who express themselves well.
Anticipating another objection, yes the op-ed page already has some people like this, but not enough. I want people who might look at the news organizations as part of the story with a critical eye, something virtually no reporter does. I want to break as many of the rules of the news business without breaking the one sacred rule, that people report what they see, that they not deliberately mislead, or speak from their interest without disclosure.
Let's see if some creative news organization figures out a way to bring the sources into the newsroom.
2/22/09; 1:49:23 PM
You're being insensitive
I have 18K followers on Twitter. Probably twice that here on the blog. With that many people tuned in no matter what I say someone will be offended.
If I say the weather is nice, someone will say I'm not being sensitive to people who live where the weather is bad.
I could say I'm getting a cold, people who have cancer say I'm being insensitive.
Does everyone have to adopt every point of view one hundred percent of the time? Of course not. There are six billion people. Do the math. We'd all blow up if we tried. None of us are god, not even the President of the United States (who btw gave a fantastic speech last night). If I called the President and said "Mr. President great speech but last night you were insensitive to the plight of people like me," do you think I'd get past the White House switchboard? "Send us an email so we can file it with the 100 million others we get every day."
Insensitive! Sure. And necessary.
I've been writing publicly for a long time, so I've had plenty of time to think about being insensitive. People have accused me of it for 15 years. Since I was one of the first to blog, my sin is original, legendary, unique. The reason I hear so much of it, I've concluded, is that I'm accessible. If you send me an email and it doesn't get trapped in a spam filter somewhere (try leaving out the links) I will read it. You can reach me. I'm an icon to enough people, a reason to hate or object or be offended, and unlike other human objects, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, The Dalai Lama, or Pope Benedict -- I will read what you say. They probably get 10000 times more angst than I do, but most of it doesn't reach them.
When I started out I thought -- I'm going to do it differently, I'm really going to say what I think all the time. Bad idea.
Now when I get one of these emails or tweets or blog comments, I've learned not to respond with what I really think.
A friend of a friend runs a major independent film festival. You'd know its name. People ask all the time what he thinks of their movie. He never says. He always waffles, finds something about the movie that's praiseworthy. "I thought the scenery was fantastic!" or "The wardrobe person should win an Oscar" when he really thinks "This thing is a dog." He's learned, as I have, that people don't actually want to know what you think -- they want you to like it, to give them support, time, money, to think like they think, to see the world through their eyes, to give words of encouragement so everyone can see how wonderful they are because this wonderful person thought so.
I've learned if I say nothing that gets me the least angst. So that's what I usually do, say nothing. And every time I do it, my blood pressure goes up a teeny bit, and another hair either falls out or goes gray. Or maybe it goes gray and then falls out.
Last night the President said we need to assume responsibility. People who bought stock in a bank that is now underwater (liabilities greater than assets) have worthless stock. These banks must go into receivership, the worthless assets removed, and a new company launched, probably with the same name, and new stock issued, and sold to the public. That is what must happen for the financial system to reboot. Very little will be lost, since the stock of two main banks, Citi and BofA, are now worth a total of $36 billion. We, you and I, have already spent much more than that to try to get them stabilized and we will have to pay even more. Next time the shareholders get taken out. If they don't want it to happen, quickly find a management team that can make the math work without the people bailing you out. There is no third way.
Insentive to the shareholders? Perhaps. But they're not the only ones who matter. There are the depositors, the voters and taxpayers, other banks that aren't insolvent. Students who need loans to go to school. Hospitals who need credit to make payroll. Etc etc and on and on. On a scale of one to ten being sensitive to the needs of BofA shareholders isn't even on the scale, it's such a small number it's impossible to measure.
When I needed heart surgery in 2002 and the doctor told me my life was over if I didn't get it, you might say he was being insensitive, but he was telling me something that I knew was true that I needed to hear. Three days later after the surgery, recouperating, the surgeon told me if I resumed smoking I would be dead in three years. Again, insensitive (he said it with a smile on his face believe it or not), but I'm glad he said it. The way he said it made it easier to quit. Sometimes the truth hurts. You can't blame people for saying things they believe, even if it hurts you to hear it.
Bottom line: All adults have issues to deal with. These are trying times for everyone, and some more than others, for sure. But your problems are yours and mine are mine and you're not responsible for mine and vice versa.
PS: I liked that the President, up front, referred to us as "the men and women who sent us here." Nothing abstract about that. We're not The American People, or poll numbers, or users (who generate content), all of which are ways of making all of us inhuman. If you want people to be responsible adults, begin the pitch by calling them "men and women." Works for me.
PPS: Reminds me of a moment on Diane Rehm's radio show a few years back. Some pundit said her listeners wouldn't understand some reasonably obvious idea. She interrupted and said basically "Bullshit, my people are smart and educated and that's basic stuff." I yelled out loud to the radio "Right on!" -- I totally understood what the guy was talking about. I am extremely well educated and well-read. You have to try a lot harder if you want to stump me.
2/25/09; 1:13:41 PM
I got a Kindle 2
And it arrived today.
Just beginning to figure it out.
Do I have to pay to read my own blog?
And if so, who gets the money?
I don't recall receiving any checks from Amazon.
I signed up for a 14-day free trial subscription of the NY Times.
When I plugged it into the USB port on my Mac it showed up as a disk drive with 1.4GB free. I copied some Bruce Springsteen MP3s into the music folder. I wonder if there's some way to play them? Can I copy podcasts into it and play them?
Lance reviewed War And Peace, with a caveat: "It truly is annoying reading a 1,300-page book in bed. I regularly wished for a way to cut my volume up into its separate books." The translation he recommends is available for the Kindle for $1.99, With one click I had the first chapter sent to my Kindle, downstairs, for $0.00.
Here's what a NY Times article looks like on the Kindle. It took a long time for it to load, and the navigation interface is klunky. At least on Day One. Also wondering how I can bookmark it in a way that my CMS can find the link. I read on a netbook now and automatically post articles to Twitter. I have a feeling this is a closed system and there's no way to publish outside of it. Actually I can't imagine they view the reader as, in any way, a publisher. Of course I think of everyone as a publisher, even if all they publish are a stream of articles they've read. Ultimately I think in 20 years there will be no such thing as someone who only reads.
Lots of great tips from Josh Bancroft a longtime Kindle user.
Here's a picture of the Kindle next to an iPod and a Canon Elph camera, to give an idea of its size. It's probably a lot smaller than people imagine.
2/25/09; 5:45:28 PM
Publishing voicemail to Twitter, Friendfeed and Identi.ca
A new tool for the OPML Editor, it's what I use to connect voicemail I create using my iPhone to Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca.
http://editor.opml.org/blogTalkRadioTool.html
It's really easy to install, and you don't have to leave it running if you're at the computer when you post the voice message. Or, if you're going out -- just leave the OPML Editor running with the tool installed and when you post something, anywhere you have a cellphone signal, your followers will hear what's going on, in your own voice, with no 140 charcter limit.
This tool comes to you thanks to the Cinch service from BlogTalkRadio. It's an incredibly easy facility, there's no setup. Details on the howto link, above.
2/25/09; 8:38:47 PM
A billion Twitters?
In 1995 I wrote a piece that envisioned billions of websites, one for every person on the Internet. At the time this was considered unlikely by most experts, they believed the web would evolve to become like TV, with three major networks, Yahoo, Lycos and Alta Vista. Google wasn't even born yet, yet many thought it was already over. Having been around the loop several times by then, I was sure the shakeout hadn't happened. Today I am confident that there will be thousands of Twitters, maybe millions. Just as in 1995, there are arguments that say this is wrong. "Everyone's on twitter.com," seems to be the main one, and it's a good argument. But let me argue with it.
1. I was lucky when I was a kid, I grew up within walking distance of Shea Stadium in NYC. On summer afternoons I could go with a friend or my brother and sit in the grandstands for $1.65 and watch the best teams in baseball beat the Mets. Everyone went to Shea Stadium, it was the best place for baseball in Queens, but we also played baseball at the schoolyard down the street. They were different experiences, but both were baseball, and they co-existed perfectly, in fact you could say they helped each other. Other sports worked the same. Every playground had basketball, and you could also go to Madison Square Garden to watch the Knicks.
2. The fact that "Everyone's on twitter.com" in some ways works against twitter.com. It's become the honeypot for all kinds of crackpots and schemers. Some people are calling themselves Twitter Pros now. Social Media Marketing Experts. I got a reply from someone today thanking me for following them; I hadn't followed them. Everyone's getting huge numbers of DMs sent from robots representing people they don't know. They come to Twitter for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks.
3. All Twitters will start at the same place with the same limits, but it will be hard to evolve the mother ship, so innovation will happen more quickly in the smaller communities. Leo Laporte has pioneered here with the TWiT Army community. There will be many others. I totally want to start one for scripting.com to serve as an adjunct to the discussions that take place in the comments on blog posts. This community loves change. A system with tens of millions of users will, necessarily, change much more slowly.
Tomorrow there will be a open hackfest for Laconica, the open source software behind identi.ca and Leo's twitter, in Berkeley, starting at noon. I plan to be there for part of the day, to talk about how to get lots of these systems started in a variety of contexts.
Update: A random idea. Why shouldn't it be possible, using the FriendFeed API, to define a service that's a subset of what FF does, that more or less matches the (smaller) feature set of Twitter, and for a smaller community.
2/27/09; 3:28:20 PM
Death of Journalism, part 3
I think I've boiled down what I've been predicting would happen for 15 years, in a single phrase.
When you get it so distilled it's worth repeating.
I read a piece by Karl Rove in the WSJ that said Obama is doing something Rove and the Republicos do all-too-well -- according to Rove he invented someone to disagree with. Here's how you do it:
1. Talk about how there are "those who say" and then say what they say.
2. Explain how you considered the possibility that they were right, but decided in the end, they weren't.
3. So you come off as entirely reasonable and they come off as the loutish pricks you always intended them to be.
I didn't think Obama was actually doing what Rove accused him of. So I said to Rove, in a tweet: "Obama's 'straw man' has a name, it's spelled R-E-A-G-A-N." A few hours later Rove responded with a DM, saying that Obama didn't understand Reagan, or was deliberately misrepresenting him. I got the last word, reminding Rove that Obama is a politician, so -- BFD.
Is this news or journalism? No, it's not either. If it's anything it's meta-news, news about news. But it's still interesting, imho. We've arrived at a place where a political spinmeister, former adviser to the President can get fact-checked by a random blogger, and get a confusing response. That seems a lot like the job that George Stephanopoulos or Bob Schieffer has. Decide for yourself if what they do is news or not.
A tweet I received, one among many, from a reporter who thinks I need to be reminded again that we will miss them when they're gone. It seems like the last final days of journalism in the US are going to be filled with this bile. Instead, we could be booting up the next version of journalism.
Yes we will miss you when you're gone. Now what?
No, we're not going to ask the government to pay your salaries. I'd like the govt to pay me a salary for what I do. I don't see you rushing to my defense. Oh please pay Dave for writing Scripting News. Everyone would like to be paid for their labor of love.
The reporters rush right by the readers in their pleas. Our only job is to miss or not miss them. This, imho, is the fatal bug in the old way of doing journalism, it's wrong, it never was that way. We were always active participants in news, either by creating it or being effected by it. Before they rush around us to take our money from the government, how about a conversation first, ask us what we want from journalism, what we like and don't like -- and don't assume you know the answer. (The journalists' answer is that we want sports, movie stars, bosoms, car crashes. You know that because that's most of what they give us. Maybe that's why no one is rushing to their defense. Just a thought.)
Dear news people -- WE ARE NOT HAPPY WITH THE JOB YOU'RE DOING.
Isn't that the obvious take-away from the downward spiral of the news industry? Isn't it amazing that the last people they think to blame for their problem is themselves? (Totally understandable of course.)
In any case, please consider the possibility that this point of view is valid. Thanks, big hugs, Dave.
3/2/09; 1:59:14 PM
Investigative journalism
The last interview I did with a reporter from MSM was in 2006, pretty sure of that, just before Chris and Ponzi's wedding. It so ridiculous that it was almost a comedic (not the wedding, the interview).
I only did the interview as a favor to Ponzi, otherwise I never would have talked with the reporter. She was doing a story on weird uses of electronic gadgets, or at least that's what I was told. I was to talk with her about the gadgetry that Chris and Ponzi were going to use at their wedding.
I spoke with the reporter for about 45 minutes, most of which she spent grilling me about my conflicts of interest. That what was so funny. I was an unemployed wandering programmer-pundit. I didn't have a job or a company. I owned a bit of Apple stock (which I told her about) and some government bonds. Otherwise I had absolutely no business interests whatsoever. But somehow she thought that, by repeating questions, she'd get me to reveal some secret scandal that would uncover a nest of whatever relating to Ponzi's wedding? You're kidding, I kept saying. This is the biggest joke I've ever seen (and at one point I asked her if this was a prank call, something Ponzi dreamed up to "get" me, in which case I thought she was doing a great job).
I kept saying that I don't care if you quote me. I don't have a product to promote. I'm only doing this interview because my friends are getting married and they asked me to do it as a favor, and how could you say no when they're getting married? Oy.
I wasn't quoted in the piece. Basically the story was that Chris and Ponzi exchanged vows in text messages in front of family and friends. That's basically all they said in the story. I don't know who else they talked to but no one was quoted in the story, so all the investigation apparently turned up nothing.
So what do I think of investigative journalism? Well, they had zero chance of uncovering a scandal. If I were doing something unethical, I wouldn't tell the reporter, no matter how many times she asked. And that was the last time I put up with this nonsense. What they do is a joke. Maybe they believe they get stories this way, but I don't.
3/2/09; 5:07:42 PM
How will we get our news?
It looks like journalism is dying.
On Twitter, there are a lot of people arguing, and I wonder why.
Much of the arguing goes like this: We need journalism. How will we do X, Y and Z if there's no journalism? The assumption seems to be that if I, Dave Winer, can't answer that question, then journalism is saved. The papers that are on the brink somehow just need me to be proven incapable of doing what they do, and that's it, crisis averted. It's ridiculously illogical. It makes absolutely no sense. Yet that is what comes back every damned time I approach subject which is -- How are we going to get our news after the newspapers go away?
It's a serious question.
Not an intellectual exercise.
There's nothing really to argue about, is there? If so, I'm missing it.
Dispassionately, please...
1. The Rocky Mountain News, one of two papers in Denver, went under last week.
2. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of two papers in Seattle, is on the edge.
3. The San Francisco Chronicle, the only remaining paper in SF is on the edge.
5. The NY Times was just bailed out by a shady billionaire from Mexico.
6. If you're thinking the government will bail out the papers, think about what we'd be left with. We'd have to come up with something else.
So -- under what scenario do we have newspapers in, say, a year? I don't see one.
How will we get our news? -- It's not an idle question to be debated after dinner with cigars. It's a critical question.
At some point we will have to have this discussion. Imho, the sooner the better.
3/2/09; 6:56:44 PM
Fractional Horsepower Twitters?
Fractional Horsepower is a very powerful idea. It says that sometimes you can make a new product by taking an old one and scaling it down.
The originator of the concept, in my experience (he may have borrowed it from someone else) is Steve Jobs, who described the Apple II as a fractional horsepower computer. In those days computers were big, Jobs believed and many of us agreed that a lot could be gained from taking the big idea and making it small.
If you look at the history of computers and publishing (the two things I care most about, professionally) you can see that the trend is going, inexorably, that way. Things keep getting smaller, and every time they do, huge power is unleashed. Maybe it's like nuclear fission, there's this huge power holding the nucleus of an atom together, making all those protons stick together, then it's unleashed, boom (another Jobsism) a big explosion.
We like netbooks because they're smaller than laptops. We like iPods because they do what stereos do but fit in a pocket.
I wrote, many times about Fractional Horsepower HTTP Servers, and today they're a reality. Every device that can be configured through a browser has a little HTTP server in it. Each of them has a single user, they sit idling most of the time waiting for you to do something. My printer has one, my receiver has one. Look around, they're everywhere.
The other day I wrote a piece called A billion Twitters. In this environment a lot of people just skim, and I think they didn't read it because it seemed to be saying that there would be billions of Twitter users. I don't doubt this, but that's not what the piece was saying.
I am pretty sure the same logic that led us to personal computers will lead us, inevitably, to personal Twitters. Yes, there are huge advantages to scaling up, not down -- and that was true in the earlier shifts too. We loved our Apple IIs, but banks and airlines needed massive computer resources to do book-keeping and reservations. And we love our search engines, and web apps, all of which are made possible by scaling up.
As a thought exercise, I tried to imagine places I would put a Twitter if I had the power to do so. I would certainly put one here on my website, to enable Twitter-like micro-publishing among members of the community, in a sense to define what it means to be a member of this community. I don't imagine either the blog or the comments going away, in fact I am sure they would be enhanced by our own Twitter. We could try to organize a community on the main Twitter, but the comments that are relevant to this community would scroll off far too fast.
I suggested to Craig Newmark that he consider adding Twitter-like functionality to Craig's List. He asked what that would mean. I said I didn't know. It was part of the thought exercise. I posed the question on Twitter this morning and got back a huge number of comments. I wonder if the same will happen here? We'll see.
It's hard to imagine that Twitter is so unlike everything that came before that it won't go both ways as every other publishing technology has -- both up and down. I'd like to try putting a Twitter on my netbook and see what happens. Probably nothing, but you never know! That's how creativity works, play what-if and relax all the constraints and challenge your mind to make sense of it. Most things never do make sense, but every so often there's a winner. RSS was such a thing, as were blogs and podcasts. What if there were an XML rendering of this blog? What if everyone had their own website? What if radio didn't require air waves? What if everyone could have their own Twitter?
3/3/09; 5:59:03 PM
Maybe Schieffer should Face the nation?
I tried to listen to Sunday's Face The Nation podcast, an interview with Rahm Emanuel, but I couldn't stand it. I've really gotten out of the habit, and now with fresh ears I know exactly what's wrong. I want the interviews to be grounded in the reality that we, the people, live -- not the make-believe logic that governs the ruling class in DC. Schieffer kept asking questions Republicans would ask to try to make trouble, but I understood they were based on an unstated and unproved premise that earmarks are inherently evil. Emanuel was answering the questions directly -- yes we will have earmarks. Schieffer kept playing the gotcha game, but it was stupid, Emanuel had conceded the point! OMG.
Our economy is crumbling, and these guys are arguing nonsense. We have important business to conduct, saving what we have left of our way of life. But you can't have a realistic conversation without some supposed "journalist" trying to trap you into telling a truth you're willing to stipulate.
The solution is simple -- give Schieffer a script written by real people, and if he won't do it, get someone who will. There's no time to screw around. We need to get real, quickly, without any delay.
Now for the good news, sorta. I listened to a fantastic interview by Terry Gross with Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF. It's both sobering and encouraging. He lays out what we need to do, simply and clearly. It's just common sense, highly recommended.
3/4/09; 10:49:45 PM
Archiving your tweets in XML
When I mentioned that I had a tool that archives my Twitter posts, and those of people I follow, a fair number of people asked that I release the code. I have done so, the app has a user interface and docs, and if you want to try it out or run it, you're welcome to.
The software runs in the OPML Editor, on Mac or Windows. It maintains a folder of folders of OPML files, one for each user, organized in a calendar structure, one for each day; and it keeps an index, also in OPML, and a weblogs.com-compatible changes.xml file for the whole thing. The pointers in this paragraph point into my archive. If you run the software, you will have your own versions.
I also added a feature that automatically (and optionally) synchronizes the folder with a structure on Amazon S3. I want to encourage people to try out S3. You don't need a lot of technical skills to do it. I've included a section in the Howto that walks you through it.
If all this sounds confusing, start here, and follow the instructions, carefully.
http://editor.opml.org/twitterCalendarTool.html
If you have questions, post them here or as a comment on the Howto.
Good luck and I hope you enjoy it!
PS: There may be some interesting applications that can be built on this structure of folders.
3/4/09; 9:58:57 PM
Poor man's email?
One of my favorite blogsports for the last couple of years is pondering what Twitter is. Here are some of the things I've come up with:
1. Personal notepad.
2. Coral reef.
3. Publishing platform.
4. River of news.
I'm sure there are others, and as I think of them I'll add to the list.
But one thing I never thought of Twitter as was Poor Man's Email, which is how Google CEO Eric Schmidt described it to analysts yesterday.
My first inclination was to shout out something about Schmidt, but I held on to it, instead deciding to give it some thought and let other people go first. Surprisingly, there hasn't been much reaction.
Schmidt has a PhD, and a long track record in the industry before he went to Google. I have a postulate that if very few people do something then it must be hard, and therefore whoever is doing it must be smart. So when people say Steve Ballmer is dumb, I don't buy it. Same with Schmidt. So I wonder how calculated the statement is, or if I'm missing something -- because it never, ever occurred to me that Twitter was any kind of email, rich man's, poor man's or middle class.
I couldn't imagine two things being more different, Twitter and email.
1. Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one.
2. Twitter is by default public, where email is by default private.
3. Could you use email to implement something Twitter-like? Yes. Could you use Twitter to implement something email-like? Yes. But neither is the same as the other.
Schmidt talks about software the way I think about it. Once you have a base set of features it's an interesting puzzle to decide how to evolve it. There's no doubt Twitter has a tricky evolution in front of it. No matter what it does, it's likely to upset users, just as every Facebook move inspires an uprising. If Twitter had established a history of quick feature upgrades it would be a different story, but there were no new features in 2008, and so far none in 2009. That's a long time between changes. At some point they're going to add new features, if only to keep even with the competition that is sure to come. What they choose to do will set expectations for what's to come. The longer they wait, the harder it becomes.
So Schmidt laid it out.
The key question is -- does the basic unit of Twitter change and if so, how? Is the 140-character limit sacred (my guess is yes). What metadata will accompany a twit? This is where it gets interesting. It's hard to imagine Twitter passing on the temptation to add location data to each message. What about the URL? Would they consider moving the link out of the 140 character space and making it part of the package? What about incorporating "re-tweets" into the architecture, instead of forcing users to invent new language, and using up another 20 characters of the 140 (by convention). They could make a lot of improvements if they added more structure to a tweet. I'm sure there are people of both minds inside the Twitter company.
Another takeaway from this is that Google is watching. If Google is preparing their own Twitter, what will it look like? Will it have a different, incompatible API? (My guess, probably. Google will make their own play for developers.) Will it have the same limits as Twitter? (Probably not. This is a very easy way to put pressure on Twitter, even when they have the installed base advantage. Users will say "If Google can do it, why can't Twitter?")
In Marketing Warfare, Ries & Trout tell the story of how Pepsi got a slice of Coke's market in the 1930s based on bottle size (page 119). Coke had a huge installed base of machines that could only serve 6.5-ounce nickel bottles, which they thought of as the perfect size for a cola drink. Pepsi thought 12-ounce bottles were better, so they came at Coke with the larger bottle. Coke was wrong, but it took a long time to figure it out. Eventually they threw out their machines and bottles and matched Pepsi.
Pepsi-Cola hits the spot. Twelve full ounces, that's a lot. Twice as much for a nickel, too. Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you!
This is why Google is likely to have a 160 character limit. (People who said Schmidt was in error didn't consider the possibility that it was a deliberate misstatement.) And it seems likely Google's Twitter will be based on GMail. (Paul Bucheit, a founder of FriendFeed, could probably comment on the likelihood of this working.)
Finally, I couldn't help but notice how similar Google's reaction to Twitter is to the reaction of all market leaders to initially successful upstarts. It's the same reaction Alta Vista and Yahoo had to Google when they were young. "Search is only part of a portal," they sniffed. You can make a hugely long list of BigCo's that failed to understand the threat presented by upstarts, and lived to regret it. It's hard to think of a a single example of a BigCo that took a threat seriously when it (based on historical hindsight) needed to. Maybe this is because people like Schmidt, while they are educated, and intelligent, weren't there when their company was the upstart, and neither were most of the people there now. The institutional memory fades, and as it does, it creates the opportunity for the next generation? Perhaps. We'll get a chance to find out soon enough.
3/4/09; 9:45:59 AM
Tech discussions on FriendFeed
Lately there have been some interesting technical discussions on FriendFeed that I'd like to connect with the technical people in the Scripting News community.
1. Yesterday the question came up why designers of web services reinvent serialization formats instead of reusing existing ones. This is the advantage of XML-RPC. A simple set of types, structs and lists, and a huge set of libraries for all languages. You can write cross network apps at a very high level. An interesting discussion followed, it was nice to close this loop.
2. DeWitt Clinton, a programmer at Google who I've been corresponding with, asked a great question, that I was happy to answer: "Dave, if you could go back in time, would you have used JSON instead of XML for RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, etc, had JSON been popularized at the time?" I think some people will be surprised by my answer, which contained a shout-out to Eric Raymond.
3. I mentioned in one of the discussions and should mention here that I'm thinking about doing a successor to XML-RPC, adding OAuth support. There is some interest, when I mentioned it on Twitter last week I heard back from the people working on WordPress saying they were planning something there. Now that's I've successfully tackled OAuth, it seems it would be a small matter (hah) to take another look at RPC. (It would have a new name, as is the deal with frozen formats like RSS and XML-RPC.) It's now 11 years old, it seems that's enough time to take another look.
3/5/09; 8:49:30 PM
What about Sy Hersh?
At breakfast this morning, Berkeley friend and former journalist John Feld said we need journalists to do impartial investigations into government corruption. I asked if he knew of any and he said Seymour Hersh. I agreed.
When he comesoutwith a piece, I stop everything and read it, as do many others.
John is right, what Hersh does is important, so we should consider that a real challenge. How do we pay for the work he does, and others who want to follow in his footsteps.
Isn't academia the place for a person like Hersh? Isn't that what we want our tenured faculty to be doing -- digging for the truth, no matter where it leads or who is offended? That's what academic freedom is all about.
It would also be great if such "academic journalists" could teach a course or graduate seminar to share their process, teach students how to do what he or she does.
I think it would be even better than having them work for big media companies, because then they could go after the BMCs, and lord knows they need going-after.
3/5/09; 3:40:25 PM
Jon Stewart reviews CNBC
3/5/09; 4:56:08 PM
How Battlestar Galactica ends (theory)
Galactica has one jump left before it becomes useless as a starship so they jump back to the home planet that was destroyed by the Cylons at the start of the show.
They arrive, and as predicted the ship is a mess.
They send a landing party down to the planet, but when they come back, they die within hours. Autopsies reveal that the planet no longer supports human life. Only one person from the landing party is unharmed, Kara "Starbuck" Thrace. Now they have to figure out why.
They study her blood and discover by accident that it is identical to the little girl who is half Cylon and half human, the one who saved the President's life with her blood. They send the President down to the planet and sure enough she survives. They send the little girl down and she survives too.
I forgot to mention that the planet kills pure-breed Cylons too.
So they now have a plan. Lots of cross-breeding between Cylons and humans forming a new hybrid race. Kara is the new leader, the prototype, the only adult among them who's healthy (the President is still dying and the kid is too young, everyone else who will survive hasn't even been born yet).
Fade out. Battlestar Galactica is over.
The End.
3/6/09; 8:06:27 PM
A short step in URL-shorteners
Progress in the art of twittering comes incrementally. This suggestion is a very small increment but one that would make the job of a frequent linker, such as myself, a little easier.
I would like my URL-shortener to grab the title of the page I'm linking to and insert it into the typing box, before the shortened URL.
Suppose for example I wanted to link to a post Doc's site. From that page, I'd click on the bookmarklet in the toolbar of my browser, it would take me to the shortener page, and this is what I'd see:
Then I click Submit, and off I go. This is a step I do manually now. Better if it were automatic!
Any URL-shortener could do it. The first is likely to get my business.
3/7/09; 8:04:27 PM
What blogs are for: BMW
One of the reasons everyone should have a blog is that when a company pushes you around, you have a place to post your side of the story, publicly, so future customers have a chance to benefit from your experience. Over the years I have written up experiences with Travelocity, American Airlines, Comcast, a now-defunct ISP, a Bay Area plumber. Now I'd like to tell you about a problem I'm having with BMW.
I bought a new BMW in July of 2007. It's my fourth BMW and I love it. It's powerful and fast, incredibly responsive. I don't drive much, but when I do, it's still a pleasure. That's saying a lot after having a car for almost two years; I still look forward to driving it. BMW makes a fantastic product.
But -- then we've been having all this rain this winter, and it turns out the car leaks. Water is coming into the cabin, the carpets are wet, they're not drying out even though the weather turned nice a few days ago. So I brought it in for service on Wednesday. The dealer said it was my fault the car is leaking, and wanted $800 to fix it. Now this is a car that has a four year warranty that's supposed to cover everything. I've owned a lot of cars over the years, even a rusted-out Wisconsin junker (that I loved anyway) and I've never had a car leak water. I didn't believe for a minute this was my fault. I told them I live on a normal street, not on a hill, with not many trees (but some) and I could check with my neighbors, but I didn't think any of their cars were leaking. He suggested I call BMW of North America customer service to see what they say, and they said the same thing. I should pay for this because it was caused by an "outside influence" (the rain, I guess).
Then at breakfast on Thursday a friend who also has a BMW says Weatherford is notorious for ripping off customers. Once he brought his car in for service, they failed to fix it three times, and each time wanted to charge him for the repair. He paid, cause what are you going to do, they have your car. Meanwhile they were pressuring me to either return the loaner, or agree to the $800 charge. I told them I was waiting for a return call from BMW of North America. (Three days later I still haven't heard from them.) \
So I went back to the dealer, got my car, returned the loaner, got their writeup of the problem (now the estimate was $625), and took it to a local independent BMW repair shop that gets good reviews (deservedly, it turns out). They showed me a BMW-issued service note, from January 2008, explaining that the 5-series has a problem with water leaks.
I scanned and uploaded the service note: p1, p2, p3.
It's so outrageous. They knew the car has this problem, yet they still wanted $800 to fix it.
10:15AM: I have a wet car that smells bad. I have a call into another BMW dealer to see what they want to do about it.
11:15AM: Got a call back. They want to see the service note. I've emailed him a link to this blog post.
3/7/09; 2:27:39 PM
Interview with Jay Rosen
It's a good idea to check in with Jay on where journalism is at every once in a while, which is what I did this morning. I'm going to try to do these more regularly with people who are on the Friends Of Dave channel, like Jay.
We start off talking about curmudgeons, then on to rebooting journalism, Meet The Press, the broken government, and everything related. Jay is really smart, spends a lot of time thinking about things I really care about. I thought the interview came out great. Hope you all listen. 40 minutes.
A follow-up: It might make sense for Jay to offer one or two paragraph critiques of various bits of journalism. For example this story on TechCrunch is interesting, but it might be more believable if we knew who the author was talking to, or why the source wouldn't go on the record.
1. The car is drying out. Nice weather over the last couple of days helped. I guess we'll find out when it starts raining again if it still leaks.
2. The independent repair service, H&B, did great, non-warranty work. $120.
3. BMW wanted $800 for the same work.
4. BMW of North America never got back to me.
5. Weatherford BMW, the dealer that sold me the car is a real piece of work. They completely lost me as a customer. In the future, when my car needs warranty work, I'll drive to San Rafael.
6. Thanks, as always, to the Scripting News readers -- a fountain of knowledge and good will!
3/9/09; 3:11:07 PM
Reminder: Why I switched to Mac in 2005
I switched because I was Mired In Malware.
I got a new EeePC 1000HE last week, and after just a few hours of use, it's infected with a rootkit virus of some kind. Really clever. Spent three hours last night trying to eradicate it, but in the last three or four years, the malware guys have gotten a lot more clever.
Contemplating switching to the Hackintosh flavor of netbook.
Ran Ad-Aware, getting ready to run Spybot. Downloaded Combofix. I'm going to try to resurrect this baby. Also considering doing a fresh install of Windows but that sounds like more work that Leopard. And then you're still using Windows.
You can read all about my trials on Twitter. But this problem is now serious enough to demand its own blog post. I'm going to see the silver lining here, a chance to learn a lot. Albeit stuff I never wanted to learn.
Of course there will be the moralizing and I Told You So's. Thanks in advance for sharing your wisdom. I agree you are superior and wiser and a better person, in every way.
I don't use MSIE. Please no need to tell me not to use IE. I use Firefox.
3/9/09; 1:49:25 PM
Update on the 1000HE
A quick note -- I decided yesterday, that rather than deal with restoring the new netbook that was crippled by malware after just a few hours use, I would instead take advantage of Amazon's generous return policy. I sent the computer back yesterday, and today, before noon, a new one arrived. I spent about half of the day provisioning it, something I'm getting good at.
But this time I've used the new knowledge I have about protection to install various tools that help guard against a reinfection. I promised I'd list those here so others can benefit from the incredible outpouring of information from the members of the community.
First, I declined to update Java and then went to Add-Remove Programs, and took Java out of the system entirely. Perhaps someday this computer will need Java, then I can download it from Sun's website. Until then I don't want to take the chance that it was the opening that the malware got in through. (It's the one thing I updated, and when I went to a perf test site to measure the speed of my connection, the little app was running in Java. It's all I could think of, so it maybe unfair to blame Java, just want to say that.)
Then I installed the following apps: Ad-Aware, Avast, Spybot and Malwarebytes. The last is, according to Stan Krute, a tool that will help if the computer gets infected. Yesterday I learned how important that is. The malware made it impossible for me to get to the Norton site to get a tool that might remove the bad stuff. Same with McAfee and the Microsoft site for defending against malware. It's a good idea to have the removal software already in place when you need it.
Ad-Aware and Spybot are two old friends. In the days of Kazaa (a supposedly nice program that totally ruined a laptop with spyware) they helped get rid of the infections that kept coming back. In those days I was using IE. One of the blessings of this age is Firefox. It may not be the perfect browser, but it isn't full of all the openings of ActiveX and whatever else IE leaves open that the bad guys take advantage of. I will never ever under any circumstances run MSIE again.
Everyone says great things about Avast. I've run it once, it installed easily.
At this point after just a few hours, all the tools say the computer is 100 percent clean. I have the OPML editor running, and uTorrent, Firefox, VLC, SlingPlayer, iTunes and not much more. Ready to kicks some butt I hope.
3/10/09; 7:59:21 PM
Folks, this is, in no way, open
Today the Guardian announced their "Open Platform," much as the NY Times did a couple of weeks ago. It's even less open than the Times was.
If it were actually open they'd announce it to all developers at the same moment, so we could all try it out at the same time on a level playing field, not give an advance to their favorites. In the press release they talk about developers who got an early look. Fine. It wasn't open then, that's for sure. Is it open now?
Well: "API key approvals will be granted on a very limited basis, so please don't be offended if we fail to reply to you or don't approve your request in the short term. You can be assured, however, that we intend to open the service more widely soon."
Okay, but please don't be offended if I don't apply for one.
You gotta wonder if when they get out of beta their competitors will be able to repurpose their content. My guess is not. And how broadly do they view their competition? And why should anyone have to guess if they're "open."
All this begs the question, because even if they were just publishing RSS feeds (btw, they are), to be competitive in the API business, you have to enable other people to publish on your side of the API. That was the flaw of the Times model too.
I have no idea how these guys got the idea that they could save the news industry by becoming the tech industry; I don't think they can. What's the diff betw what they're doing and just adding more metadata to their feeds?
My guess this is the result of some tech guys doing their best to give the higher-ups what they want. Some market analyst or consultant told them that to survive they need an API, so come hell or high water, an API is what they'll have.
Correct me if I'm wrong please. (And if the past is prologue, the Guardian will attack personally, calling me names, in print, as they've done so many times. Not to say there aren't a number of very nice people at the Guardian these days. Maybe they can moderate the response keeping it professional and impersonal.)
Big hugs, your pal in Berkeley, Dave
3/10/09; 12:06:03 PM
Run the OPML Editor on port 80
I always have to reinvent this, every time I want to set up an OPML Editor server on port 80. So now, by posting it here, I can just search for it and I should find the instructions. If you don't understand, don't worry.
It's now incredibly simple to do this.
1. Add this line to opmlStartupCommands.txt:
user.opmlEditor.flServerOnPort80 = true;
2. If the OPML Editor is running, quit and relaunch.
3. As it starts up it asks for your Admin password so it can do a port forward.
Pretty sure I was at the first one, in Monterrey. It was described to me by Tim O'Reilly, who puts it on, as a place where all the open source platforms could come together under one tent. Perl, Python, PHP, Apache and many others.
It's been in Portland for the last few years, and this year it's moving to San Jose.
I had hoped to lead a discussion at this year's OSCON about porting Frontier to Linux. Frontier is the runtime environment that the OPML Editor builds on. It's an object database, scripting language, outline-based editor and database browser, debugger, multi-threaded runtime, verb set, Web CMS, TCP stack, built-in web server. It was the environment that XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS and of course OPML were developed in. All this and the whole download is about 5MB and it installs in a minute. It also has an RSS-based updating mechanism and most updates are "hot" -- meaning you don't even have to relaunch. I love this enviroment, I built it starting in 1988 as the last programming environment I'd use, the one that had everything I wanted, and that's what it is. And because the early development was done so (ahem) early, it was designed to run well on 1Mhz machines with 1MB of memory. As a result it fits really nicely in today's machines.
Now, it runs on Mac and Windows, but I really want it to run on Linux -- so I proposed a session at OSCON to discuss this and see if I couldn't recruit people to work on this. Unfortunately, yesterday I got the rejection email. I kind of expected it, because O'Reilly doesn't seem to like me these days, or whatever -- I don't know and it's not important.
Then someone sent me a pointer to http://opensourcebridge.org/ which is in Portland on June 17-19. Now I have an incentive to see if people want to go there. San Jose is closer to Berkeley, so I'd rather go there, but a really open OSCON would be something that's worth supporting. There are other new projects that don't have space at OSCON, so maybe we could all get together in Portland and see what happens.
3/11/09; 4:58:32 PM
tinyarro.ws
A new URL shortener.
http://tinyarro.ws/
Ho hum.
No -- it's interesting -- seriously.
The URLs are weird. Are they shorter? Not sure.
The web used to be full of weird ideas that stretched your mind.
Not so much these days.
This is one of them.
Let me know what you think!!
PS: Wish I had thought of it.
3/11/09; 1:16:50 PM
What I meant by 'breaking out'
First, thanks for all the interest in today's earlier piece. It's getting a lot of traffic and comments, all of which have been interesting. We've heard from lots of users and two Twitter board members.
A commenter named Jonathan asked what I meant by breaking out of Twitter. Here's what I said.
Thanks for asking -- I was wondering when someone would.
I don't know exactly what it means. If a real competitor came along that would create one possible answer, some of us would move there. Probably everyone would instantly get an account, if it were done right, some large number would stay there. If it had features that Twitter didn't have that were high value then it might suck a lot of the life out of Twitter.
It might mean lots of little Twitters. I'm starting one here on scripting.com, and in the first few hours of use it's already interesting. It wouldn't in any way be a replacement for Twitter. But it offers an alternative. Sort of like the difference between a blog and a big website, when blogs were just booting up in 1999 or so.
Or it could mean that Twitter voluntarily breaks itself up. Again I'm not sure what that means, but it could mean that Twitter stops having anything at all to do with the content of Twitter. Or it could split into two, CelebrityLand and LandOfThePeople. I don't see any of that as likely, but if I were part of their team, I would encourage them to look at doing to themselves what the competition is likely to do it. That can work out better, because then they get to do it on their own terms instead of the rougher treatment a competitor might offer.
Right now though, if Facebook offered a "lite" user interface that did just what Twitter does, plus a few nice extras, it would rule. Or if Google did, they would probably suck a lot of the energy out of Twitter. Not sure who else could do it.
BTW, to people who think Twitter already has too big a head start, I'm not so sure.
Twitter didn't exist to promote Twitter. But it will exist for Twitter 2.0. So whoever does it will have a superior word of mouth network already built, by Twitter.
I saw this effect first hand by being here for the rise of blogging and then the rise of podcasting. The latter grew much more quickly because we had blogs to promote podcasting with. The slow part was the building of the network, once it exists, new ones that build on it boot up much more quickly.
3/12/09; 5:39:29 PM
Why it's time to break out of Twitter
First, so there are no misunderstandings, I am using Twitter, I will continue to use Twitter and I will recommend Twitter to others, as I have been for 2 or so years. This is not me slamming the door on the way out, something I dislike intensely. If you're leaving just go. But I'm not leaving.
There was an event a few weeks back that convinced me that it's time to break out, like jailbreaking an iPhone. I don't like the relationship Twitter-the-service has with Twitter-the-company. Yesterday I was talking with a Twitter board member, Bijan Sabet, someone who is becoming a personal friend, and said that it was good that the phone company wasn't part of the conversation. That's exactly how I feel about the company he is on the board of. Yet they are very much part of the conversation.
I pour a lot of effort into Twitter, and while I wasn't in the top tier of users, I was solidly in the second tier. I wasn't doing the things you have to do to get the most followers, or I didn't have a powerful media presence like Leo or Shaq to get me up there. People like Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Jason Calacanis all viewed being at the top as a competitive thing, so they did what it took. Me, I just poured a lot of energy and creativity into it, and got the number of followers that comes from doing that. It's now approaching 20,000, which I am proud of, but it's not very much compared to the numbers of some people who did nothing other than be friends of Evan Williams to get hundreds of thousands of followers.
I first noticed this when I was on Ana Marie Cox's page on Twitter. All of a sudden she went from 3 or 4 thousand to over 60,000 in less than a week. She had no idea why. A thread opened, there were theories that it was a spam attack, but then Williams jumped in and said it was because she was on the Suggested Users page. The LA Times ran a story on it, and then pretty much everyone knew. Scoble and Leo were openly angry, understandably so. These guys worked really hard to be at the top, I watched them do it, and now they're not even close to the top. (BTW, Cox is no longer in the Suggested Users list.)
I don't have a quarrel with the people who got the boost, I think it's pretty clear none of them asked for it. I do think the company should have done this much more carefully. Now there's no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube. And the people who got the push have a problem if they are members of the press, because this gift they got from Twitter is worth money. It might be worth a lot of money. If one of them posts a pointer on a Twitter account it's going to get a lot of flow. And what if a reporter were critical of Twitter in a piece she wrote, would Twitter revoke her status?
TechCrunch uses their Twitter page to point to articles on their site, and every page has ads on it. So the gift from Twitter is worth dollars to them. It's hard to imagine them pulling punches when it comes to reviewing the company. But are they likely to be more kindly disposed to the company? It's hard to imagine when they're delivering so much free flow that doesn't earn them a warm space in your heart.
And what about Scoble, Leo, Guy and Jason? Did they say something to offend Twitter? Possibly. I can name one thing for each of them that the guys at Twitter probably don't like. But why should I have to even think about this? Until they tilted the table so heavily in favor of these people, I didn't. But it always bothered me that they could.
Why does the NY Times get the gift but the LA Times doesn't?
Why is Tim O'Reilly on the list, but not Jay Rosen?
Why TechCrunch and not GigaOm, PaidContent, SiliconAlley, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc etc.
Think about it this way -- do you know who wrote Apache or PHP? Do any of them have the power to deliver so much flow to an installation of their software? Imho, that's exactly the relationship Twitter should have with its users. Or the phone company and users of phones -- they shouldn't jump into a conversation and say (for example) "We know someone really cool you would probably like to talk to. We're connecting you to them now."
Bijan says that Twitter is the little guy, but to me they look big -- huge -- when they have the power to move people up the ladder so quickly, and introduce doubt about their relationship with individual users. When being in favor with Ev means so much. That's screwing the whole thing up.
Bottom-line: This isn't the way the Internet works. The guys at Twitter should know this. I think they're living in a bubble, and creating one at the same time. No one likes someone who pops the bubble while it's still building. So be it. We need to get that power out of their hands, or they need to disclaim it. They're such a small guy, it's really puzzling why they would do something that alienates so many. Most people won't say it, for the obvious reason that their business interests prevent them from. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be said.
3/12/09; 9:25:17 AM
What will we call a Twitter?
Here's a TechFlash piece where a Google exec talks about a Twitter-like service. "There's relatively little data in Twitter," Bershad said. "I think if you could take a Twitter-like service and combine it with a lot of other data sources about the users, you might be able to come up with something more interesting."
He's thinking about having his own twitter.
Interesting!
Leo Laporte already has one.
http://army.twit.tv/
So do I. (Though far more humble than Leo's.)
http://home.smallpicture.com/
As you read those sentences, does something bother you?
Pause for a moment and think about it before you read on.
We're using the word twitter in a new way.
Up till now it was a company and a service.
Is it a trademark? Curiously there's nothing on the site (that I can find) that indicates that it is.
So here's the question.
If you accept the premise that some day there will be many twitter-like services, that it will be common for blogs to have their own community twitter like Leo and I do. And that corporations will have twitters for coordinating projects (narrating your work). That there will be services that are competitive with the original Twitter, perhaps from Google and Facebook, and others. If you accept some of these premises, then the question is -- what will they be called?
Will they be called microblogging services, which is the current nomenclature among techies, or will people take the shortest path and call a twitter a twitter?
Curious to know what people think.
PS: Unrelated, Paul Andrews just sent a screen shot of his Twitter page with an active search box.
3/13/09; 4:18:53 PM
Where you were when...?
When you learned that JFK had been assassinated?
Okay, most of you aren't old enough to remember that. I am. And thanks to Google Maps I can show you where I was when I heard the news. I was in second grade, they let us out of school early, the parents came to pick us up. On this street corner my mom told me what had happened. I didn't get it. I asked who the President would be now, she said Lyndon Johnson. It didn't make any sense, because the only President I had been aware of up until then was Kennedy.
I got into this mode when I was trying to find the White Castle I used to go to when we lived in Jackson Heights.
Then I found the apartment building we lived in. Of course it's still there. We lived in Apt 5W. I remember that because I thought it was really neat that the apartment had the same last initial as I did and I was 5 years old. How about that -- a memory when I was less than 1/10th my current age.
Another way to get unreconstructed childhood memories is to watch a movie you haven't seen since you were a child. I didn't actually think the Cowardly Lion was a lion, I knew what a lion looked like, but I sure didn't think he was human! What a sweet kid, so smart.
3/14/09; 4:49:56 PM
Trying out the new Facebook
I'm only vaguely aware of Facebook. Not sure why, but I never really got into it.
Even so, some of my Twitter posts make it through to Facebook, so every once in a while I get a comment "over there" -- and that's how it feels to me, far away.
I had a few minutes this morning to check out the changes they've made and found it's much more accomodating from the point of view of a Twitter user.
A few observations.
1. On the home page you have a box. Instead of asking what you are doing, it asks what's on your mind. Small difference, and in fact much of the time what I post on Twitter is what's on my mind, not what I'm doing. I'm not one of those people who posts twits saying "I'm brushing my teeth," or whatever. Most of the time what I'm doing is none of anyone's business.
2. In that box you can type up to 160 characters. Twenty more than Twitter. Someone over there is marketing. If you're coming in second, you need to offer more. At first I wondered if it was unlimited. They must have really sweated over that decision.
3. Now that it behaves like Twitter, the other features come into play, ones I've been begging Twitter for since the beginning. The ability to enclose photos and video is essential. Why no MP3? Don't they love podcasts? I wish they would change that. (Update: Although there is no UI for MP3, if you link to an MP3 it will read its metadata and present it to the author. It doesn't seem to provide an inline player though.)
4. Now I might be interested in developing for Facebook. But their API never interested me as long as I was confined to a little box in their page. This venue is more interesting. Is there an API to post a twit to Facebook? (Update: Seesmic released a version of their Twitter client for Facebook, which sort-of implies that there is a Twitter-like API for Facebook.)
5. People can comment on your Facebook twits without using up twit-space in their own stream? That's a question. Do comments I post show up to my readers?
6. Who can see my posts? My friends? Anyone? I think this is a major difference from Twitter, where everything is by default public. Here, I think everything is by default not public. Or maybe not public in any way. I'd love to see a Facebook for Twitter users howto. Are there enough Twitter users to make that worth doing?
7. Now I see what they mean about how it's a favor to FriendFeed. There's the Like command. They totally need to have that in Twitter. Retweeting is so lame. Like is what we need.
8. I don't like the way they link to things. I linked to this post over there, and there's this huge picture of me next to the link and an extensive quote. No no no. That's wrong. I want a little icon that means "click this to read more." Let me write the intro in the message I post. (Which I did. The excerpt is wrong.) Screen shot.
9. Since (presumably) this text is staying within the Internet (and not being transmitted via SMS) why not allow styling -- bold, italic. Or maybe it is meant to go through SMS (hence the 160 character limit).
10. I really like the way they do pictures. But it should be possible to collapse them, so the picture stops taking up vertical space. That's the problem with media objects, they take up space. If you let the user collapse, then you can have it both ways. Win-win.
11. I know they're tacky but how about some animated smileys.
Summary: I like what they've done! Will I use it? Don't know.
3/14/09; 2:08:31 PM
I'd like to try out Jaiku
I've got a Laconica server up, and a small community has started there -- the very same day Google released Jaiku as open source, and somehow made it able to run (for free?) in AppEngine? I want to try it!
But the instructions assume you want to build the app or check things out or care what libraries it uses. None of that applies to me. I want to see what it's like to sysop one of these systems, and get feedback from people here on scripting.com. So...
Choice #1 is for someone to write a howto that a technical end-user might be able to use to set up a Jaiku on AppEngine. That way I could test the docs and the software, and pave the way for others to follow.
Choice #2 is for someone to set one up for me and give me the keys. Not optimal since I won't be able to help improve the setup process.
I like the way this is shaping up. As a user I want choice, it makes me powerful. If any vendor, open source or not, feels that they have me locked in, they won't listen. If the users are truly independent of the vendors then really interesting things can happen.
So if you like Jaiku and want to help it, let's go!
3/14/09; 2:47:03 PM
Can Twitter save the news?
Jay Rosen, this week the question of Twitter as an environment for journalism came up.
If the outlets of MSM are in trouble and if Twitter is rising, can it fill some of the role vacated by MSM?
What about having a tech company running it? Esp if the company interferes with content? Or do they?
Are any conflicts inherited by publications that Twitter favors with flow? Is the behavior of non-favored pubs altered by the environment. Ideally how should a company such as Twitter behave relative to its community if it wants to foster journalism?
Also mentioned in this Scripting News post. "We've arrived at a place where a political spinmeister, former adviser to the President, can get fact-checked by a random blogger, and get a confusing response. That seems a lot like the job that George Stephanopoulos or Bob Schieffer has."
I'm almost done with my EC2 for Poets labor of love.
The theory is that almost anyone who knows how to use a computer can install and run a server application in the Amazon cloud. We'll find out, I hope. And if it turns out to be easy enough we may be able to boot up a community of applications.
I have one final problem to deal with, and I thought perhaps readers of this blog might be able to help.
I'm bundling a Windows 2003 server with Apache/Win and the OPML Editor. I've got the AMI all bundled up, but there's a problem with the password. Not sure what I'm supposed to do, but when I try to do the Get Administrator Password command from the popup in the AWS dashboard, it comes back saying that it can't get the password because the old admin password is baked into the instance. Pretty confusing.
Trying to find some instructions that explain how you're supposed to clean up so the password can be set by the EC2 system, but not finding it. If anyone has a clue, please post a comment here.
Tomorrow I'm going to release the EC2 for Poets howto, and a podcast roadmap. In the meantime, here's a review by Michael Fidler.
I did it! In addition, I'm sending this from the new Firefox browser that you included. Thank you so much! I have wanted to do this for so long. When they first announced the service I visited Amazon, but there were so many choices that I didn't now where to start. This was such a rewarding first step. What comes next, Dave? Will there be more tutorials possible? Even if there isn't, this one might have been the nudge I needed to get started on my own. This was an extremely thoughtful thing of you to do. Give yourself a big hug for me (or a pat on the back). I think I'll mess around in here for a little while longer:-)
This is exactly what I hoped would happen. Big hugs, Dave
3/19/09; 7:56:20 PM
EC2 for Poets
Today's the day -- if you've been wondering if you can set up a server in Amazon's cloud, the answer is Yes You Can.
Here's how: http://howto.opml.org/dave/ec2/
If you're wondering what it's all about, I've recorded a 22-minute podcast that explains. Even if you don't go through the howto, I recommend listening to the podcast.
There's something that everyone who cares about the net should know about the cloud. Lots of new ideas in the howto and the podcast.
Paolo Valdemarin, my friend in Italy, went through the EC2 howto, and it opened up a lot of ideas for him. Important stuff.
3/20/09; 1:49:27 PM
Chrome vs Firefox
Just read this opinion piece that says that Chrome is much faster than Firefox and that Firefox "lost the plot" and is going in the wrong direction and pretty soon Firefox will die, having been killed by Chrome.
I use Firefox, I've tried Chrome, and it looks nice, but I can't switch to it because:
1. It isn't available for the Mac, and while I do use Windows, my primary environment is Mac.
2. It doesn't run Firefox plug-ins. There are a few must-have plug-ins that I can't live without.
3. Probably it's missing other features I depend on in Firefox but I haven't spent enough time running it to find out.
Okay now to "lost the plot" -- what is Firefox doing? I can't quite figure it out. They do a lot of releases, every time I get a new one it takes me to a page where it says it's the safest way to browse the web. Safety is important, I had forgotten how important until I had a machine get infected a short while back. But what else? I've noticed the latest version of Firefox is pretty crashy. That's not good.
The last thing I want to do is to use Google's browser, I already depend too heavily on them. So there's a lot of resistance here to switching from Firefox.
And I know, as a software developer, that apps start slowing down when they implement all the features they need to be competitive. It's conceivable that the great performance of Chrome is due to the fact that it hasn't matched Firefox in features.
On the other hand, Firefox hasn't shipped a feature that I care about in a long time.
However, neither has Chrome. It's an amazingly boring app for something reconceived from the bottom-up, as they claim it is. Not even one user-facing great new feature? How long has it been since any browser shipped a feature that made a difference to users? Not just safety, which is important as I said, but something fun and empowering??
I think we're at a point where everyone has lost the plot. We're so concerned with malware and who's killing who, we forgot to move forward in interesting and fun ways. Or am I missing something.
3/20/09; 7:51:17 PM
Don't become a TechCrunch
Have you ever not blogged something because it wouldn't be worth the trouble it caused? I have to admit, I do it very often. And about half the time it has to do with TechCrunch.
I feel bad about TechCrunch, since I helped it get started, but I don't have any regrets about it. In the beginning, it was great -- lots of information about new products. By helping it get started, I was helping the entrepreneurs. Not just a two-way win, but a win-win-win. I win because it develops my rep as someone who points to cool stuff. TechCrunch wins because it becomes well-known as a place to find new entrepreneurs, and the entrepreneurs win, because people find out about what they're doing.
But somewhere along the line the people at TechCrunch started hating on me. It happens all too regularly, and it's getting worse. It's worth mentioning, because I don't dislike TechCrunch, quite the opposite, I'm proud of my small role in helping it get going.
I wrote this because I found myself saying to someone who, like the original TechCrunch, is writing fantastic stuff, well-worth pointing out, and I'm happy to do it. He just thanked me, and I said it wasn't necessary cause it was a win-win. And I added, just don't become a TechCrunch when you're rich and famous.
3/20/09; 3:54:46 PM
Every netbook needs a sticker
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:
Really enjoying this. Today it was more laughs and less serious.
We'll do another next Sunday, Murphy-willing.
3/23/09; 12:05:33 AM
Editing the look of a twitter
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!"
3/22/09; 9:06:05 PM
A happy poet!
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!
3/22/09; 6:04:31 PM
What Firefox should do
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.
3/22/09; 11:48:12 AM
Why it matters that Twitter is a news platform
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.
3/25/09; 6:40:48 PM
Is Firefox slower than other browsers?
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.
3/25/09; 6:06:18 PM
I get ideas when I ski
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.
3/25/09; 2:24:37 PM
Me, Amazon, Scoble
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.
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.
3/25/09; 1:47:05 PM
Is Twitter a news system?
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.
3/25/09; 11:09:28 AM
Gone skiing
Taking some time off!
3/25/09; 3:51:43 AM
Product idea: Digg for ads
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.
3/27/09; 10:25:00 PM
Jay and Dave ride again!
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.
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!
3/29/09; 11:33:53 AM
BSG finale, Coraline, the Wizard of Oz
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.
3/30/09; 11:13:57 PM
Encarta, then and now
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."
3/30/09; 10:04:32 PM
I get ideas driving in snow storms
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.
3/30/09; 12:58:36 PM
It's the little things...
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.
3/31/09; 6:45:44 PM
Deer Valley trail map
When I was skiing last week, I was surprised that there weren't any readable Deer Valley trail maps on the web. I promised when I got home I'd scan one and post it.
According to the authors of Battlestar Galactica, Bob Dylan was tuning into a cosmic song that drives the universe when he wrote All Along The Watchtower. There are so many great scenes in the BSG series that revolve around the song. In the last episode Starbuck has seconds to jump Galactica away from the exploding Cylon death star, she's fumbling at the controls and says "There must be some kind of way out of here" and then proceeds to transport us to a magic place (no spoilers). In the background The Song is playing.
I'm getting that feeling about Twitter.
BookOfJames: "Maybe it's good for Twitter to burn bright and fast. Once the fad is over, things may settle down for the better. Who knows?"
Maybe so.
Maybe Twitter is just a crude child's drawing of the promised land of online communication.
Another step on the Yellow-brick Road? If so, I think we have, for sure, taken a detour into the land of the poppy flowers or the Wicked Witch of the West. For me, the real eye-opener was this tweet from TheEllenShow, promising a treat to all her munchkins if they drove her follower number over 500K. Think about it -- that's asking for people to spam on her behalf. I follow a lot of people (more than Ellen, for example) and that meant I got a lot of people retweeting her pitch. And while it's true I can choose not to follow Ellen, there's no way to not-follow all the spam. And with a half-million followers, that's a lot of spam.
All this predicts what we have to expect when Oprah joins the mess. And when the Congressional elections are fought in Twitterspace. All of a sudden the lovely patch of green, the bright optimistic future we had for it has turned into the key phrase in The Watchtower.
"There must be some way out of here..."
Said the joker to the thief.
Increasingly, I don't think it's Laconica. I think they have the wrong idea about who their potential users are and what they want, and what to expect from them. Their plan came out a few days ago, and if I want to operate a twitter-like service, I'm stuck with limited customization options and I have to pay to bring customers to them. I don't think this works.
No one has figured out how in this space to enable an honest non-spammer type such as myself to build a nice little business off this technology. Even worse, no one has figured out how to sell a service to a mainstream publication that wants to establish a news network without all the crap that's showing up on twitter.com.
I mentioned this briefly in a post a few of days ago. Let me elaborate.
I'm pretty sure the FriendFeed guys have missed the mark, and also pretty sure they know it.
Here's how I'd look at it if I were on their team.
1. Our key strength: We know how to scale systems. (Based on experience at Google with Maps and Mail.)
2. Our big opportunity: People want to start their own twitters. (This is my assumption. Unproven. Risky. Who? A-list bloggers, struggling news organizations, visionary networks of bloggers wanting to form new kinds of groups. AOL. Yahoo. MSN.)
3. Another strength: We know how to design APIs. (They do, the FF API is very nice. Could be better, and from what I've seen they know how to make it better.)
So, in case it isn't obvious by now, I'd counsel them to get into the platform business. Enable guys who have mastered AppEngine and EC2 to build front-ends for their back-end, provide a toolkit for building your own twitter and then let a thousand flowers bloom. I'd also raise more money so I could acquire the winners, suck their features into the platform, and then do it again. I think this is the winning strategy. If Twitter had FF's strengths (don't think they do) I'd counsel them to do the same. And for gods' sakes, stay in the background, don't compete with your users. More on this in the next paragraph.
One of the reasons Twitter is so demoralizing (at least for this Twitter user, ymmv) is something Jean-Louis Gassee once taught me by asking a question.
"David, are you a pimp or are you a whore?"
It was a good question. And one the Twitter owners would do well to answer.
The better business for them is to be pimps not whores. Fade into the background. Let Twitter become infrastructure, a platform for impressarios. Biz and Ev just can't compete with the dazzling personalities they've attracted. Yet geez Luigi, Biz is going on Colbert tonight! That's a bad idea. It's going to make Ellen and Oprah jealous, Leno and Letterman, Barbara, George Will, etc. Wait until there's competiton, and networks own twitters. The stars (whores) are going to get paid big bucks, like Howard Stern, to draw in users. And they're not going to want to compete with you on a personal level. And Ev and Biz just aren't that interesting as celebrities. But as pimps, maybe...
BTW, to answer JLG's question, 25 years later -- I'm a whore and I know it.
Not a big-time one. Just an average one. Nothing special.
Of course that's going to get quoted.
4/2/09; 11:40:57 AM
Digg has a URL-shortener
TechCrunch has a story announcing that Digg's expected URL-shortener is now open for business.
I asked on Twitter if there was an API, and heard back that there is. I quickly write a driver for it for the OPML Editor, and hooked it into my TwitterRiver app, and now the Friends-of-Dave feed and the NY Times River all are running on the Digg shortener. They have, over the last few months been running on a variety of shorteners.
Digg, like BurnUrl, frames the page being linked to through the short URL. An example.
A three-part exchange with Jay Rosen and Lance Knobel, via email, that would make a good blog post.
I began with an observation...
I was listening to the podcast of This Week, and listening to George Stephanopoulos mangle the interview with Geithner, who was doing the usual thing that politicos do when interviewed by politicos, he mouthed platitudes and ignored the questions, which GS just repeated. They were stupid Russert-like questions, basically amounting to: Did you change your mind?
Then Krugman comes on, as part of the panel, more nonsense, Krugman is actually trying to say real things, but the conversation keeps coming back to impressions and gotchas and lies.
Then it hit me -- Krugman should have interviewed Geithner.
Lance responds...
Absolutely, but I suspect Geithner would never agree to it. Major political figures learn pretty quickly that they can bamboozle the supposed professional interviewers. So there's very little downside to going on the Sunday shows, 60 Minutes or whatever. Experts and, even more, complete amateurs, are far more dangerous.
You see this occasionally during campaigns. I remember in one of Tony Blair's campaigns he was asked some absolutely direct, specific question by a woman on the street which completely stumped him. He was absolutely at sea. That never happened with the professional journalists, even though Britain has far tougher inquisitors than the US. (See Jeremy Paxman famously torture then Home Secretary Michael Howard.)
The ease with which politicians evade questions is what led to the idiocy of Russert. Instead it should have/could have led to questioners who bothered to learn a subject in depth and would probe through follow-ups and persistence. What I love about the Paxman interview is that he never allowed himself to be brushed off. Stephanopoulos and the others may repeat a question a second time, but then they'll move on.
Jay responds...
Great idea. Only reason it doesn't happen is the limited imagination of the show's producers. They are masters of a form. They do not want to change that form for all the obvious reasons.
Also, Krugman screws with their "sphere of consensus" mindset. They don't know what he's going to do, or say. That is seriously scarifying to them.
Incidentally, one reason why Rachel Maddow is so good is because she's both very bright and incredibly well-informed on the details of so many issues. Having a doctorate in political science can be an advantage. She hasn't yet sunk into the standard form that Jay identifies.
One more thought from Jay...
You'll notice, as well, that an arched eyebrow and a "flip flop, Mr. Secretary?" question can be asked without running up any bills in knowledge acquisition costs for the particular issues the Secretary knows about. Whereas Krugman is up to speed and does not need to rely on one-size-fits-all questions.
4/2/09; 4:24:39 PM
Hey Sulzberger, there's money over here
I was talking with Scoble on the phone today, and said some things there that bear repeating here.
1. I wasn't happy in the 90s with the way Microsoft reacted to Netscape and the web. I thought they were being too aggressive, great creative stuff was happening -- we didn't need a destructive force. I liked how the web broke away from the tech business, I didn't want it to get sucked back in. Microsoft tried, and for a while it looked like they had quelled the rebellion, but then it broke loose again, for good.
2. But... There is something right about an industry realizing its turf has being invaded, and acting to defend it. Because now we're seeing it another way -- the tech industry is clearly stepping on the turf of the publishing industry, a new company has started that is sniffing at a billion dollar valuation, and with all that money flowing around it, and all the red ink in newspaper publishing, you shouldn't have to be Puzzlemaster Will Shortz to figure it out. But they're talking about closing down the Boston Globe, and the SF Chron, when they should be thinking about ways to grab some of that wonderful PE ratio that Twitter is swimming in. I try to telegraph it every way I can, but they don't seem to get the clue. Hey Sulzberger, there's money over here. Get your head out of the box or cut some holes it in, or whatever.
3. Japan can lay broadband pipe for $20 per houshold and it's much faster than anything we have in the US. It costs us $800 per household. Maybe we should steal a page from Microsoft's playbook and start getting aggressive in ways that would have frightened me in 1995. As a country, we need to be more competitive. Start right there. Bluntly: Why can't we lay broadband pipe for roughly the same price Japan does?
4. Maybe Bill Gates should offer his services as a competitiveness consultant.
4/3/09; 11:13:30 PM
Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky
Right now, these days, URL shorteners are a necessary evil. It's part of the price we're all paying for Twitter's building on SMS, I guess. I hardly use SMS, so this is a price I'm not happy about paying.
Joshua Schachter writes today about their dangers.
We need to prepare for the day when N of the URL shorteners go out of business. When that happens a large part of the web will die. It will not be a good day.
Plan on it, like we should have planned on housing prices turning down, and the economy falling into depression as a result. Plan on it like we should plan on the polar ice caps melting and the oceans rising 100 feet. Let's get used to planning for the obvious failures in our future. We're going to get good at it, or suffer.
One easy way to lower the cost of URL-shortening is to use our own domain names in place of tinyurl.xom, bit.ly, tr.im, et al. Any one of those services could take the lead here by allowing for that. Let me map my own domain onto theirs, easily back up all my data, and give me the ability to switch services when I want, or when I need to.
PS: Twitter could fix this problem right away if they wanted to. Jason Kottke explains how.
4/3/09; 6:46:31 PM
Why people care how Twitter makes money
First a story.. I went to grad school in Madison, which is a great place except in the winter, when it's realllly cold. But it's still great then, if you know what to eat.
You want to fill your stomach with something dense and warm. There was this place down the street from where I lived that served something called a Myles Teddy Wedger. I have no idea how it got its name, but it's a pastry, filled with meat, potatoes and onions, served really hot. You could buy one of these and carry it to class with you, walking even a mile, and when you got there it would still be hot! That's how dense it was.
So as you're walking you can think of the MTW in your knapsack and psychically the thought would keep you warm.
Okay that had nothing to do with why people want to know how Twitter is going to make money.
Another good cold weather food is pizza. But Madison is in the midwest where they don't know how to make pizza. The best pizza you can get comes from a chain, Domino's, and it's actually not that bad. I got in the habit, until someone told me that they used the profits to fight Planned Parenthood, which if you're a heterosexual male grad student, is a really bad thing, not just because you support a woman's right to choose (I did then and still do) but well, you don't want your girlfriend to find a Domino's box in your kitchen, if you understand what I mean.
See, their business model conflicted with our values.
So it's possible for a business to use its profits for evil. And we couldn't buy Domino's pizza and keep a clear conscience. And it could turn out, when Twitter reveals its business model, that it's something we don't like. We won't know where we, the users, fit in -- until they tell us how they're going to make money. And when they tell us, we may not like it.
PS: There's a myth in NY that Ray's makes the best pizza. Which one? Ahh. Practically every pizza place in NY is named Ray's. Then there's Original Ray's. Quite a few of those too.
4/3/09; 3:45:26 PM
My new news page
I have a new publication that I produce in collaboration with the people who follow me on Twitter, and the people who follow them, etc. It's really interesting from a human standpoint and also from a tech standpoint.
But first, here's the end result:
http://twitter.scripting.com/daveTopLinks.html
It's updated every five minutes. The list contains the last 25 links I've pushed through Twitter. How fresh they are is a function of how active I've been. Right now the oldest link was posted 30 hours ago.
They are ranked by the number of times they have been clicked on. So if they are retweeted with the link intact, the clicks on those count. If someone clicks on a link from the toplinks page, that counts too. So it's collaborative, and the ranking tells you something about what people who are in my cloud are interested in. Tech news ranks high. Not sure what other conclusions to draw (too early). A top link gets about 800 hits.
How it works -- I have a little web app behind a bookmarklet that makes it easy for me to post a link to my twitter account. Here's a screen shot. It shortens the URL with tr.im, which has an API that I call every 5 minutes to find out how many clicks each link has received. My app generates the report and saves it to Amazon S3 which is where twitter.scripting.com runs.
I think of it as a "Personal Digg." I nominate the links, everyone determines how they rank. It might just catch on.
4/5/09; 2:29:31 PM
Podcast with Chris Brogan
I did a quick 1/2 hour podcast with Chris Brogan this afternoon about "100 Twitters" -- a topic we have both recentlyposted on.
4/7/09; 5:47:33 PM
Confusing the cause with the effect
I guess I should be flattered that some professional reporters are mistaking my writing for the cause of the problems in their industry, when my work is a reaction to what's happening.
They could also react to the changes, instead of waiting for the wave to roll over them. Don't brace yourself against the wave, that doesn't work -- it's better to be limber and be ready to surf.
I once described the change as jumping out of a plane with no parachute. The chances of a safe landing are virtually nil. The challenge is to prolong the ride, and to have fun while rushing to your demise.
I once wrote: "Fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists."
This didn't in any way put even one reporter out of a job.
The reporters were going to lose their jobs anyway, as people's attention moved to the net and away from papers, and the news organizations braced instead of surfed.
There was an opening, and some of us rushed in to fill it. It meant our ride was more fun and rewarding, but it didn't change the outcome, for us or anyone else.
Same thing happened in my industry, software development, when I was in the middle of my career. Most of the stuff people use now is either free or very inexpensive. I used to earn my living by selling packaged software that costs between $99 and $249 per copy. It was all less capable than the software I give away these days. I give it away because I am a software writer. I can't not write software and feel fulfilled. But I share the frustration of today's writers. I've lived it.
Even so reporters look for scapegoats -- and increasingly I am one of those people. So be it. I started claiming the title of Most Hated Person on the Internets, and life got a lot easier. If hate makes you happy -- enjoy.
I've also put free ideas out there that might help with the aggregation or curation of news, which are now super-hot topics, but areas I have been active in for about 12 years. Maybe if instead of villifying me, you did more listening, we could fly together instead of falling faster? Just a thought.
4/7/09; 1:35:02 PM
Links on Twitter, day 3
When Scripting News started twelve years ago, it was a link blog, the only kind of blog that existed at the time, and of course they weren't even called blogs, a term that wouldn't come along for another three years. Over time I started including "posts" -- longer essays, following the form of other bloggers. Just before I started using Twitter, early in 2007, I made a conscious decision to stop linking from Scripting News, and to make every bit of content here a post. It wasn't doing any good to be the only link blog. When I started using Twitter it provided an outlet for links, I pushed the links I'd normally post on Scripting News.
I tried a lot of experiments with links, but they all came up short. Either I didn't have enough people following to create critical mass, or the attention span of Twitter users is too ephemeral to make it worth the effort. You could see it in the read counts of things I point to on Twitter. In the first few minutes there would be hundreds of hits, then the traffic would fall off immediately. For most people Twitter scrolls fast, it seems a waste to put much thought into linking, because it doesn't seem to generate much thought.
Now I think I've hit the sweet spot, for a variety of reasons:
1. No special feed, the links go out to my main Twitter account, so the most people see them. This means I have to be the only editor. The feed has my name on it, so the links come from me.
2. I have a very sweet editorial tool. It's so simple and effortless I actually look forward to pushing a link cause it's so much fun.
3. The links are not ephemeral, they accumulate on a page of the 25 most recent links ranked by the number of clicks, thanks to the facility of the tr.im API. I find myself going back to that page as part of my rotation, along with GMail, Twitter and FF -- I want to see how each topic is viewed by the people following the flow. There are real differences. A link to me singing Green Acres with Amy Bellinger didn't rank so high (shame cause it's funny) but a Lifehacker article about running Ubuntu in a Window on Windows ranked very high with over 1000 clicks over a long period. Clearly this link was passed around. I think more people are going to tune into this list, esp as I branch out and do it for other prominent Twitter linkers, and it gets included in something bigger I'm playing with.
4/7/09; 6:11:29 AM
Black sky
4/9/09; 1:05:49 AM
What's New Now
In yesterday's piece about the AP fighting last century's battle, the big story is not that AP has missed the Internet opportunity of the 21st century, it's that everyone has.
No one, and I mean no one, has the site that everyone goes to to find out What's New Now.
The holy grail is the What's New Now page for everyone.
The place we go to find out what's happening in the world.
Someone will crack that nut and make the NYT, CNN, Google, Facebook and Twitter look like stepping-stones.
My point yesterday was that, in theory, it could be AP. Too small a point.
Adrian Palacios asks if there will really be a single source. "Yes I think at least for a while there will be one What's New Now site that we will "all" use -- in the same sense that everyone got their news in the early 90s from CNN. Of course there were exceptions, but it had the aura of being the place to tune in when something is happening. Nightline played that role in the early 80s. There is nothing now that does that, there's a void. But people still want news. And the Internet has great potential for news that it hasn't lived up to yet. Probably because people who love news and know it best have been scared or shouted down or some combination of both. I think the shouting is about to stop and I think a consensus will emerge. I think AP and CNN and Twitter will all kick themselves for not having focused on this."
4/9/09; 2:24:29 PM
Progress in the 40-twits app
1. Yesterday was a rough day because the tr.im service had a lot of outages and that made my 40-twits app unreliable. But it's now updating consistently, so I hope the worst is over.
2. I've added a second user, the prolific linker, atul. His report is here. He's an amazing guy, if you're on Twitter and you like tech news you should follow him. He's the source for a lot of the links on TechMeme. He's also a joy to work with.
2a. I call his site AtulMeme. Which led me to call mine DaveMeme. Maybe I should call the software MemeMeme?
3. The fact that I have a second user is kind of a big deal. That means the software has been generalized, so adding the third and fourth user and so on is easier than it was to add the second.
4. I added another column -- RT -- for retweet. When you click on it, no surprise -- it directs you to the Twitter home page with status box pre-populated with a retweet. Easy.
4/10/09; 5:11:54 PM
An apology to Radio users
About a month ago, Mike Arrington ran an article at TechCrunch about a deal we did at UserLand in 2002 with Adam Curry, to include his RSS feed in the set of default feeds for Radio 8.0.
Mike, who used to be my friend and my lawyer, and who believe it or not I still feel affection for, said about me: "Credibility = Shot. Permanently."
When I read that I felt like Mike was aiming an ethical bullet at my head. Luckily I was wearing my bullet-proof helmet that day.
I wanted to let the accusations settle in before responding in detail. This really was between me and the users of my product, and possibly people who read my blog. After giving it some thought, I believe we should have disclosed that Adam paid us for inclusion in the OPML file, and we didn't. I apologize for that.
I explained further in a post on FriendFeed, earlier today.
4/10/09; 3:45:08 PM
Journalists need to learn about bootstraps
New 36-minute podcast explains why New Journalism won't appear in a big bang of epiphany; but will boot up, iteratively.
4/10/09; 11:14:28 AM
This week's podcast with Jay Rosen
I spent 40 minutes this evening talking with Jay about news, tech and the future of journalism. As always it was a great learning experience with the NYU journalism professor.
A frequently asked question -- what feed should I subscribe to to get the flow? The answer -- the feed for Scripting News. When I do a podcast it's included as a standard RSS 2.0 enclosure.
At the end of the show I promised to create a room on FriendFeed to post links to stories we'll discuss on future shows.
4/12/09; 10:42:10 PM
Does Mashable have credibility re Twitter?
This article by Pete Cashmore at Mashable is now the top item on TechMeme.
Cashmore is one of very small number of users who Twitter includes in their Suggested Users List, which has resulted in huge growth in their number of followers.
Three months ago, he had 28,621 followers. Today he has 417,347. In the same timeframe my Twitter feed grew from 16,062 to 21,108, which represents something of a baseline for users not gifted by Twitter with placement on the SUL. (Source: twittercounter.com.)
Did Twitter favor him with this gift because they like what he says about them, or to encourage him to be more favorable in his writing? Or some other reason? Did he pay for this placement? (Note that would, imho, be the ethical thing to do, and the same deal should be offered to everyone.)
Would Cashmore withhold or temper criticism of Twitter because he fears they may cut him off?
Would a reader question his impartiality? (This reader does. I can't see how he can help but be influenced.)
Does this kind of favoritism hurt Twitter as a medium for journalism?
Another question will likely come up at some point -- Will Cashmore have to pay taxes on this gift? It could turn into a pretty big liability, even in a non-ethical sense.
I read Farhad Manjoo's piece in Slate about Twitter. It's the best of a class of commentary that says that Twitter is something you can skip if you aren't interested in periodic 140-character reports on mundane people's lives. As I read the piece it made sense, so I was left wondering why I was and still am attracted to Twitter and use it, daily.
When I took a picture of the shark tank at the NY Aquarium, or the Cyclone at Coney Island or the traffic on the Belt Parkway, I had a background script on my server that automatically published a pointer to each picture to Twitter. I feel the pictures are more interesting because people see them while I'm still there. It's a very small window into my mundane life. I post them not because I think anyone cares about my life, rather because I want to see what ideas it gives me for next steps.
In a way, as a user of Twitter, I have the same business model as the investors in Twitter. I don't know what it is, but I have a feeling there's something here. I look at it this way, if you tried to tell me what we're doing on Twitter has nothing to do with what we'll be doing with networks in the future, I'd be 100 percent sure you were wrong. There's something here. The challenge is to figure out what it is.
However increasingly I'm sure that Twitter itself is not it.
If it were, by now we'd see one killer app built on Twitter that was as game-changing as Twitter itself, if not more so. I think this is because they have put limits on what developers can do, trying to save the good stuff for themselves. The danger in doing that is that you leave nothing juicy for developers. And you leave the door open for a competitor who will take advantage.
Things I'd like to see -- unlimited, open architecture metadata hanging off the 140-character messages, payloads for Twitter. And open access to the firehose by anyone who wants to develop on it. Both these things would guarantee Twitter, Inc. a role in the future. Without giving up control of both, they leave opportunities for others and make it more likely they will be a stepping-stone.
BTW, I was able to finish this post on my 1000HE on the Jetblue flight while it was waiting at the gate. The free wifi from the terminal is strong enough to be accessible on the plane. It's amazing how quickly you can write when you're under deadline!
Update: Early-on I compared Twitter to a coral reef. I think the analogy is more apt than ever.
Update: An example of a competitor completing the promise of a disrupter: Netscape's browser was only sort-of free. They looked the other way when people downloaded it without paying for it. When Microsoft came out with their browser it was totally free. Netscape's complaint that this was unfair rang hollow.
4/14/09; 9:23:52 AM
Marc Canter's vision/nightmare come true
15 years ago Marc Canter was a cashed out ex-founder of a Kleiner Perkins startup, rushing through his money in the lifestyle of a rich and famous rock star Hollywood movie mogul. It was a huge bonfire, built around a spectacular vision of commercialism, entertainment, network technology and physical venues like bars, football stadiums, bowling alleys and restaurants.
Marc turned his house on Potrero Hill into a demo for his vision.
I'm writing this from the JetBlue terminal at JFK which is a total realization of the vision. And I totally hate it!
In front of me is a HD video screen I'm trying hard to ignore, but it won't let me. All around me are similar screens with people sitting around them trying to ignore them. Hanging off the ceiling everywhere are more HD screens showing sports, news, commercials, schedules announcements. Off in the distance is a ruckus of a central hallway, total confusion, people unable to figure out even the most basic things like how to get a coffee and blueberry muffin. I don't dare go into the men's room!
On the monitor in front of me is one of Marc's favorite ideas. I can swipe my credit card and go to a menu where I can choose from all kinds of food that they will bring right to where I'm sitting. I didn't try it.
In a few months I'll probably love this place, but right now -- I'm Mr. Luddite. Give me a plain Jane terminal anyday!
Update: On the other hand, one thing everyone who reads this blog will appreciate -- free wifi, and it's good.
4/14/09; 8:52:24 AM
Random thoughts over morning coffee
I'm writing this sitting in a cafe in Harvard Sq drinking coffee and enjoying the beginnning of the day. No newspaper to read, just my netbook, a net connection and my own thoughts.
Doc Searls likes to say that markets are conversations, but people are conversations too. I have no way of knowing for sure how it is for other people, but inside me is a constant back and forth chatter, with lots of different voices, each expressing opinions of minor and major events that take place all around us (i.e. me).
It's all those different voices that come up with ideas, collaboratively -- we're like a 24 hour group brainstorming session.
The sticker on the back of my computer says MEAN PEOPLE SUCK. Maybe not such a great sticker. I find it attracts attention, but not many comments. I've seen people leer at me, not sure what to make of it. The stupid thing is they all seem, at least to me, to be mean. I imagine the conversation that never actually takes place to go like this: Is that about me? asks the mean person pointing to my sticker. I say "Sure I knew I'd run into you in the cafe or airport even though we've never met and I wanted to be sure I didn't have to talk to you, now go away." I think maybe I'll look for a new sticker!
Had a thought maybe FriendFeed ought to put a layer on their app to make it a blogging tool. They'd still have the UI they have now, but it would be a back-end. Then I could use it to host a blog with comments, sort of an alternative to wordpress.com. If I were them I might go this route if they're getting tired of being compared to the Twitter juggernaut. Maybe they could be seen as breathing new life into the blogging market, making it more "real time" perhaps.
One of the reasons I don't like reading newspapers these days is that they're all about Twitter. I'm so tired of hearing how great Twitter is. It's a sore spot for me, cause they get all the glory, and there's nothing but boredom for me, a two-plus-year tireless Twitterer. I used to feel Twitter was exciting. Now all the news on Twitter is about how much money they're worth, and how many followers some Hollywood asshole has, and isn't it funny that CNN didn't even know they didn't own the CNNBRK account, and isn't it even funnier that they got all those followers from Twitter putting them on the SUL and how much you want to bet they didn't know it wasn't really CNN behind it either.
I shake my head. It's so seat-of-the-pants. They run a nascent media empire like it was Biz's personal blog. Where do I fit into their big plan? Nowhere. Obviously. It totally reminds me of the time when Netscape ruled the browser biz. We need at least a two-party system. This thing is dying. I know it doesn't seem that way to the company and its investors, good for them. But it sure feels that way to me.
You do understand that a blog is a personal thing right? Your mileage may vary and you may have a different opinion. I'm under no obligation to see it your way, and vice versa.
Anyway, I'm having a fine time on this east coast schmoozing trip. The weather is pretty good, kind of cold for mid-April, but it's not raining, and the crispness makes it nice to walk around, and I'm doing lots of that. I met a future President of the United States yesterday (he's still just three months old). I have a few meetings in Cambridge this morning and then I'm on the 3PM train from Boston to Penn Station, and tomorrow night I get to see the Mets play in their new stadium before heading back to Calif on Saturday morning.
4/16/09; 8:58:15 AM
Highdef scoreboard at Citi Field
Click on the pic for more detail, there's lots of pixels.
And compare with this picture of the defunct Shea Stadium's mostly analog scoreboard taken three years ago, before they tore it down.
4/18/09; 4:56:24 PM
What I learned about being rich
Interesting piece in the NY Times magazine about Twitter and how connectivity is for poor people. I learned about this when I made enough money in the late 80s to realize what wealth buys -- distance. Then it took a few years to learn that distance is not what I wanted, in fact I don't think it's human to crave distance. People are built to want to be among others, at least I was.
I bought a house with a 750 foot driveway in the middle of the woods. My neighbors built houses the size of high schools. You couldn't walk anywhere.
Now I live among humanity, much more modestly and I'm happier.
So it may be true that connectivity is for the poor, if so, the rich aren't happy.
Hefernan is right to bring this question to Twitter, because it is the struggle it's going through, as classes emerge. It won't be like other class struggles though, as the rich and powerful strive to make sense of Twitter, they will encounter the contradictions of 21st century decentral communications. Oprah hasn't really come to Twitter yet, it'll be interesting to see if she ever really does.
An interesting experiment for her, if she ever has alone-time, create an account that isn't attached to her media persona and mingle with the common folk, be one. It's got to be the rarest experience for someone so instantly recognizable. A way to collapse all the distance, to communicate with people who aren't employees, who don't want anything from you. Then when she sells the Twitter experience, if that's what she's doing, she'll have some idea what she's selling.
I have a feeling Oprah could be a good rep for Twitter, but not if she does it from inside her bubble. Then she'll miss the whole point. Its value is not only as a promotion machine, I think -- there's value elsewhere.
BTW, Paul Boutin reports that the media backlash against Twitter is beginning. He says it's fake, but everything about the media is fake, so it's as real as it gets. I don't think too many early adopters will come to their defense when the media turns on them. I never wanted to help build a network that would be turned over to the mainstream guys. I heard second-hand that Ev "isn't building a network for Scoble." Too bad. I think someone should. And someone will. Scoble is one of the most real and honest and effective evangelists anywhere. I think Ev will come to regret his snobbery. At least I hope so.
At breakfast this morning I found a way to explain my feelings about this to my mother who is a regular watcher of the Oprah TV show. She reads many of the books and uses products Oprah recommends. My mother was also a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton for President during the primary, and Oprah campaigned for Obama. I said that's how I feel about Twitter. I didn't sign on to help build a network for the big media, just as she hadn't supported Oprah so she could use the power to help Obama against Clinton. That's why Oprah probably came to regret being so vocal during the campaign, and why Twitter the corporation will probably regret that they took sides here. A new kind of media is booting up, and Twiitter should have been a leading proponent of it. Okay if the big media types want to use it, no problem -- but don't go on their shows and support them over the individual users. You're just inviting backlash.
4/18/09; 9:15:13 AM
Citi Field
I had the priviledge of going to the new Mets ballpark in NY last night. The Mets won in an uncharacteristically elegant way. Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, Luis Castillo hits a bullet deep in the pocket betw short and third. The Brewers shortstop makes the play, but it's hit too fast and makes him turn too far. Castillo beats the throw at first and the runner scores from third. The team, excited at the thrilling finish, runs on the field and piles on the baserunners.
Everyone at the new stadium had a nice but uneasy feeling. Too many people greeted us at the entrance. Everyone smiled more than seems right for New Yorkers. Try as hard as they could, no chant of Lets Go Mets took hold in the crowd. At the beginning of the game I was enchanted, by the end -- it didn't gel. No suspension of disbelief.
I've traveled a lot in my life and I've seen the Mets play a lot of away games at foreign ballparks. That's what this felt like.
I felt like a child whose father has a new wife being asked to accept her as my mother. It just doesn't work. In the end I would have much rather gone to a game at the old Shea Stadium, warts and all.
Baseball is all about tradition. It's not an exciting game like basketball or football, it's a game where the past matters. I'm sure the people who run NYC had their reasons for wanting a new ballpark. Maybe it would have worked better if they had put it somewhere else, but with the ruins of Shea still visible from the new stadium, it feels like we haven't had the proper period of mourning, at least, for an old established shrine of our religion.
Would the Boston Red Sox tear down Fenway, could the Cubs exist without Wrigley? These questions have obvious answers to me, as obvious as whether the Catholic Church would tear down the Vatican just to get some skyboxes.
The new park is a beautiful stadium. I'm not saying it will never fill the place of Shea Stadium, but it doesn't now. I miss the old place.
To subscribe, add this address to your podcatcher:
http://scripting.com/rss.xml
A bit of housekeeping -- the podcast now has a name -- Rebooting the News. Perfect name, cause it's got the technical side with rebooting, and boot is the first part of bootstrapping. And News is what it's all about.
I hope you enjoy this show!!
4/19/09; 10:12:28 PM
Notes for tonight's podcast
We're going to start recording our weekly podcast in about 20 minutes at 6PM Pacific, so I have to hurry up and put my notes together! I love a deadline.
I loved this classic exemplar for Jay's Curmudgeon Studies J-school curriculum, esp the part where he says that some (huge) percentage of everything in the world originated in his word processor (I'm exaggerating).
The exact quote: "Several studies have shown that more than three-quarters of the news you see, hear or read anywhere is at least derivative of something that originally appeared in a newspaper." I have a very neat rebuttal -- 100 percent of everything you read in a newspaper originally appeared in the world unless they got it wrong, which happens far too often.
The sources originated everything Mr. Brinkley -- and last time I checked -- we don't get paid bupkis, so that part of the news system should make the transformation pretty well.
I watched Bill Moyers on Friday, he had David SImon from The Wire who is a great writer, but contradicts himself when it comes to the Baltimore reporters. In the first part of the 50-minute interview he says that the reporters never really got the story and were' never effective. But in the second part he says the opposite, and laments their failure, though he doesn't blame bloggers, that's the least of it.
The problem with all the curmudgeons is that they stop at hand-wringing, no one wants to talk about next steps to reboot the news. As you know if you're a regular listener to the podcast, I think we're far along in the reboot.
I want to talk about the 40-twits app, and next steps.
Briefly about my visit at Nieman in Cambridge last week with Josh Benton and Zach Seward.
I want to talk about Oprah joining Twitter, and what might be coming next.
And of course I want to talk about whatever Jay wants to talk about.
On Twitter early this afternoon, Sarah Lacy posted a link to a TechCrunch article she wrote admonishing bloggers to go easy on Twitter. It included a graph called Gartner's Hype Cycle, which I loved, but I think it's complete nonsense, and in no way reflects what's going on with Twitter.
Now this is what I think, not a proven fact in any way. Twitter is the current holder of the baton in a series of social media bootstraps, each of which built on what came before. It is not Google, which is a search engine, rather it is what came after MySpace and captured its growth. Extrapolating, something will come along and do to Twitter what it did to MySpace.
Before all that there was LiveJournal, blogging, podcasting, Flickr, etc. Depending on who you ask different things came first. If you ask me, blogging came first, and it had the longest ramp. I saw podcasting grow at a much faster rate simply because the blogging network already existed and was used to promote podcasting.
It would be foolish to believe that Twitter will not have a successor. And I'm pretty sure it'll grow faster than Twitter because word of its existence will spread on Twitter. That's why all this is a bootstrap. You can use iteration N to spread word of N+1.
Google is a search engine. A completely different beast. I don't buy that Twitter is search. Most of the stuff that you see on Twitter isn't worth finding. Try searching for something in the news and see if you don't agree. It's easy to conduct an experiment.
So what's the relationship betw Google and Twitter? For sure you can put ads on Twitter, just the kind of ads that Google loves to put on email or web pages. They can tell a lot about you by knowing who you follow and maybe who follows you. But Google is also a search engine, and I believe there's a connection there as well, but only when you push links through Twitter. You can view that as contributing to PageRank. Will this make search better? I have no idea. They'll have to try it. Maybe Twitter is working on it. If they'd open the firehose to developers (and not the limited firehose they're promising, the full thing) we could find out without waiting.
But Twitter is definitely leading edge, so it would be silly to predict what it will go through. Maybe Oprah will invest. And we know how much the entertainment industry respects and fears Oprah. Having her on board, in a fiduciary way, would do a lot to protect Twitter from competition in the US entertainment business. Without that, I'd worry about NBC or ABC starting their own Twitter for their programs. Or Comedy Central. And who knows, people in the news biz might figure out that instead of fighting last century's battle with Google they might try to take some of the growth from Twitter in the news system of the 21st century, which probably looks more like Twitter than Google News.
Anyway, just some random thoughts on my first Sunday back in Calif.
PS: It's impossible to take anything TechCrunch says about Twitter seriously. Like Mashable, they are on the Suggested User List and have received a massive influx of new followers as a result. It seems a very likely explanation why they make fun of those who criticize Twitter, or in Lacy's case, urge them to go easy. It's as if they do PR for Twitter.
4/19/09; 4:16:33 PM
A source of inspiration: Jon Postel
I love doing the weekly podcast with Jay, because he's so damned smart and he surprises me with his stories. Not many people do that as well as he does.
This week his surprise was the idea that we could tell stories of inspiration to help get over the hurdles the future is throwing in our path. His example of Max Headroom was brilliant and new to me, I didn't watch the show in the 80s, I was too busy running my always-on-the-brink startup.
So he's going to bring us inspiration from media, and I expect I'll do some of that too, but I think my first tale of inspiration should come from tech, and I think it's probably going to be Jon Postel and his great law that came from experience in guiding the Internet through its early days. In all of the layers we've built on top of Postel's work, we've never found a situation that wasn't covered by his law, and never really found another law to stand alongside it. Every time I think I've figured out something I want to pass on to future generations it's always turned out to be a variant of Postel's Law. That's the sign of something profound and deep, and it's simple.
"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."
People keep trying to break the law, but when they do, it always ends badly. Maybe someday they'll stop trying.
I suspect when the fullness of the new Land of Journos reveals itself it will also be an instance of Postel's Law.
4/20/09; 2:11:29 PM
Today's Morning Coffee Notes podcast
New podcast: Sidebar to last Sunday's Rebooting The News podcast with Jay Rosen, relating the blogger assignment desk idea to Hypercamp, which is a more comprehensive blueprint for how blogging becomes the backbone of news in the future.
Also a response to Kevin Marks and Steve Gillmor who, in comments, asked me to clarify a blog post about mixing data with Facebook and/or Twitter structures. Mystically they all seem to relate.
Finally, a tribute to the hippie-surfer culture of California.
PS: You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes. It's the second command in the iTunes Advanced menu. Paste this URL into the dialog that appears and click OK.
4/21/09; 12:44:58 PM
Unfair Twitter, Inc backlash
I feel the need to make so many disclaimers here.
1. Yes I have been critical of Twitter.
2. I am not on the Suggested User List.
3. I think they're making really big mistakes in managing the community. (That they are even managing the community at all is a bad sign. They should be trying actively to stay out of managing it.)
4. And about a million other things.
But...
I think some of the criticism of Twitter-the-Company has been over the top in the last few days. They've clearly been fighting some huge fires and the order in which they are 1. Acting and 2. Communicating makes sense to me, because I've been on their side of difficult situations, on a much much smaller scale, and my experience is that users don't treat the server guys fairly, no matter how you try to explain that you're doing the best that you can humanly possibly do. I've seen users do some horrible things while the fires are burning, and I see some of that now.
In the last week they've been fighting security issues, hacking, and a hugeinflux of new users. Any one of these things would be pretty taxing, but all at the same time -- well, it's gotta be hell on their side of the interface.
I've been watching the communication, and I think they're doing a really good job of explaining and their intentions are good.
That doesn't mean I don't think they brought on the stress themselves or that I support other things they're doing. I don't expect to be on the SUL, and I don't want to be. I'm not saying this to kiss up to them. Let's all try to be fair. That's my point.
4/22/09; 7:32:49 PM
The Next Killer App is to Twitter as 1-2-3 was to Visicalc
This post is dedicated to Mitch Kapor, Jonathan Sachs, Dan Fylstra, Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, Ben Rosen, Ev, Biz, Jack, Bijan, Fred et al. A lot of people on that list, and I have had the privilege to know most of them, and I've met all of them.
First a very brief story of what Visicalc was and how it was surpassed by 1-2-3. And please understand this is my version of the story, I'm sure all the principals will have their own versions.
Visicalc was god. It was the Twitter of the early 80s. It was credited with creating the personal computer boom led by the Apple II. The product was created by the two Dans and Bob. Mitch worked for the company. Everyone said Mitch wrote spaghetti code. The two Dans and Bob didn't take him seriously. They were gods after all and Mitch was a mere mortal.
Along comes the IBM PC. It's a private thing, but since Visicalc rules, they got early access. The two Dans and Bob and Mitch all saw it. They started to port Visicalc to it, but didn't do anything special. After all, their software is what made the PC boom. The IBM PC would be just another Visicalc machine. Mitch didn't see it that way. So he got together with a brilliant coder, Jonathan Sachs (so much for the spaghetti code!) and got money from a very smart man in NY, Ben Rosen, and started Lotus to make 1-2-3. The two Dans and Bob knew about it, but they didn't take it seriously, because they were gods and Mitch writes spaghetti code.
But the one thing they didn't figure out about Mitch, that made him such a killer, was that he used the product so he knew what features would be most valuable to other users. Not saying the two Dans and Bob didn't, I'm pretty sure they did, but Mitch was really tuned in and watched users get confused and hung up with Visicalc, so he knew what to focus on for 1-2-3. I don't know for sure, but I bet the Visicalc team didn't really listen to Mitch.
When the IBM PC came out everyone wanted new software for it, and the Visicalc guys just offered the same old stuff, but Mitch's software had a sexy UI (for the day) and ran like a bat out of hell, used all the memory of the PC, and had a macro language, so everyone bought 1-2-3 and that was the end of Visicalc.
So somewhere out there is an idea for Twitter that, like 1-2-3, will represent the future, leaving Twitter to own the past. The challenge for brilliant software designers everywhere is to figure out what that is and to do it!
I've been studying it as long as anyone, I started using Twitter in the summer of 2006, and have been puzzling it out every damned day, waiting for Twitter to give me something new to sink my teeth into, and I'm convinced it's going to come from a Mitch-Jonathan-Ben combo out there, not from the original team. Probably for many of the same reasons Visicalc didn't rise to meet the needs of experienced spreadsheet users.
Here's my wish list:
0. It starts as an exact Twitter clone. Command for command. Then see item #2. I get to completely redesign the UI.
1. I want to start my own Twitter, for free. You host it for me. Anyone can join.
2. I have to be able to edit the template, fully, so I can make it look like my blog. This will allow designers, for the first time, to tinker with the look and feel of a Twitter. They played a big role in the blogging bootstrap, but have mostly been sidelined by the emergence of Twitter.
3. I want to map my domain to it, so it's part of scripting.com.
4. It's gotta be fast!
5. Lots of prefs that determine who can join, what they can do, various editorial roles. If you used Manila, I want to be able to delegate to managing editors and contributing editors.
6. Easy hooks into Disqus (and competitors) so each tweet can be the beginning of a conversation.
7. Plug-ins that hook into the UI so I can add commands to my Twitter, without modifying any source code.
8. The ability to attach a picture, movie, MP3 or any arbitrary data to a tweet, basically the same power as the RSS 2.0 enclosure element.
9. Full data portability. I've got to be able to run a script on my desktop every night to get a complete XML-based backup of my community.
I guess my point is this -- soon there will be enough Twitter users who yearn for something really new, and it seems doubtful that Twitter-the-Company will want to give it to them. With all the new users just getting started, they're going to focus on getting them up the curve. So we're really getting ready for the 1-2-3 of Twitter, the next level of power, so we can build richer and more connected networks.
See, that's what I really think Twitter is -- a Network Construction Kit for Real People. Sort of a Tinker Toys or Lego for networking. We've gone a long way with a few simple pieces. We need some more stuff to play with.
It's always like this, in every layer. At first we need training wheels, and a tech company to provide the whole package. Then we get comfortable with the technology and we want to order a la carte, to design our own meal. You can try to contain the users, lots of companies have -- but it never works. If this blog is about anything, it's about that -- documenting the never-ending cycle of tech booms and busts, bright new days, and endless platform wars, starting in 1994. It's all so predictable, you'd think one of the rising stars would figure it out and plan accordingly, but it seems they never do.
4/24/09; 12:22:21 PM
Why there will be many Twitters
Yesterday I wrote about the Lotus 1-2-3 of twitters, but it may not be obvious why there will be more than one network of networks -- so let me explain.
1. Twitter is growing fast.
2. Its use as a medium for news has become apparent. I've been saying that for a long time. It's both the front room and back room for news. How it's delivered and how it's produced.
3. Umair Haque suggested the NY Times buy Twitter. Of course it's too late for that. Pretty soon Twitter will be able to buy the NY Times.
4. I think it's pretty obvious that Twitter is on a trajectory to become one of the major media networks, a Turner, Fox, NBC, Time-Warner, Viacom, Disney. When it's apparent to more of the heads of these companies, they're going to start wondering why their stars are on Twitter and not on their own network.
5. The thought has probably also popped into the heads of the people at Twitter. They will try to make deals with some or all the media companies. They have a lot of power, and should be able to cut good deals. But as the negotiations go forward, it will become apparent to the execs that these guys are competitors. They will consider Make vs Buy. If they're smart, they'll do their deals with Twitter at the same time doing deals to get their own network going.
6. Luckily for the other media companies, users are portable. I'll explain. Say Ashton Kutcher (someone who I had never heard of until he showed up at a tech industry conference last year) decides to cut a deal with a major studio to head a new twitter-like network. Could happen. They'll get their network built, quietly, then start leaking it with teases on billboards of course, but also (you guessed it) on Twitter. When Oprah sees him do his network, she'll want one. And so will Larry King and Shaq, and all the celebs who have yet to make a splash on Twitter. Brad Pitt and Ed Norton will call theirs The Fight Club. George Clooney's will be Oceans Million. Prince will hang out in Paisley Park. And you think Apple won't have one? It might have a 140-char limit, but it won't just be text.
There's a lot of money to be made in these networks and it costs so little to start one. An average Hollywood film costs two or three times as much as all the money Twitter, Inc. has raised so far. Spiderman 3 cost $258 million. That's just one movie. And over time the cost will come way down. That's why I suggested that FriendFeed get a clone ready, now -- so they can do deals with the media companies when they're ready. Which might happen any week now, if it hasn't already happened.
Remember, it's not Kansas anymore, the house fell on the witch and Ev and Biz are wearing the Ruby-red slippers. Click your heels three times and say "There's no place like home."
Yours truly, over and out, Dave
4/25/09; 5:35:19 PM
Rebooting the News #7
This week's 40-plus minute podcast with Jay Rosen and myself.
To subscribe, add this URL to your podcatcher (or iTunes).
4/26/09; 10:10:56 PM
Sony got it right
The new Walkman is great. Click the pic for comments, a full-size picture, link to the product page.
4/27/09; 12:25:24 AM
Retweet is stupid
Okay I'm going to get crucified for this, but I found myself saying this on the phone today to Andrew Baron. If I was willing to say it to him, I should have the guts to say it publicly.
Now, I'm not saying the people who retweet are stupid, or the impulse to pass on a link to everyone who follows you is stupid, but...
A retweet is the same as voting up something on Digg or Reddit. It's a piece of metadata about the tweet, and should be stored and displayed with the tweet. When you retweet something, none of the 140 characters should be used in saying that it's a retweet and who it came from.
Digg does it right, Twitter --> wrong.
Another app that does it right is FriendFeed.
Look at this post, it's been liked a lot. When I wrote this it had 225 likes! Like is FriendFeed's term for retweet.
Nothing needs to be done, but I'm glad to get this out there, once and for all.
Hope you're having a happy Sunday!
4/26/09; 5:45:59 PM
Adjix has a breakthrough idea in URL shorteners
Sometimes it's funny how you're led to an interesting idea when you're not expecting it. This idea arrived at the end of a chain of events started by inviting Guy Kawasaki to use my 40-tweets app. Here's the story.
1. Guy asked if I could make the app work with his favorite URL shortener, Adjix. I said I'd check it out.
2. Joe Moreno, the CEO of Adjix, emailed me and showed how to get hit stats from his service, in a manner similar to what I was getting from tr.im.
3. When I tried to deref one of his short URLs I found he was using the meta-refresh technique. I was irritated, why isn't he using the HTTP redirect mechanism like everyone else. He said it was so they could use Adsense to track clicks. Some of his users wanted it. I found a way to work around the issue without having to parse the HTML and then forgot it. (Here's the text of the page they return.)
4. A few days later Moreno mentioned in an email that another advantage is their shortener could be served statically from S3. This hit me like a ton of bricks. Say what!
Think about it. When you shorten a URL, what if instead of generating a record in a database that requires a dynamic server to stay up indefinitely, you generated static HTML and saved it somewhere likely to survive the apocalypse. It's not a complete answer to the problempresented by URL shorteners, but it's pretty great half-step. Maybe even a 3-quarters-step.
Jake Jarvis calls this an Apocalypse-proof URL shortener. I like!
4/27/09; 3:26:36 PM
How to get started with Facebook's new API?
I'm reading the docs for Facebook's Open Stream API, with fascination. It sounds like an app can read and write to a user's stream, something like the way one writes an app to access the Twitter status stream. That's something I want to do!
But...
Say I want to write an app to access my own stream. What's the process? How do I give the app permission? What's the endpoint?
I assume FQL is Facebook Query Language? What do I do with that? I don't know.
I have a feeling these docs are written for developers who have been working with Facebook. I have never written any code to call Facebook's API.
If they want to go after Twitter developers (no one is going to like this, but it's the truth) read their developer docs, and make your API work like that.
I say no one is going to like that except Twitter developers of course.
Once again I have some money burning a hole in my pocket and I want to blow some (of course) on electronic gadgetry. And, as always, I turn to the readers of this blog for advice.
1. Is there a Linux or Windows equivalent of the Mac Mini? A headless, keyboardless, mouseless computer that doesn't cost too much, that isn't made by Apple. I already have three Mac Mini's, I love them, but I find myself interested in, even lusting for, an Asus EeeBox. Have you tried it? Do you like it? Any other choices?
2. For the same application, I've been thinking about getting a gamer platform, with a really fast CPU and lots of RAM. (An aside, the application is processing lots of text, which involves relatively little net traffic and doesn't require a persistent IP address. No need to pay Amazon $90 per month when I could buy a cheap computer for $300 and be done with it.)
3. I bought a Panasonic wifi webcam a couple of years ago, and it was pretty good, but it stopped working (maybe dropping it a few times had something to do with that). I want the same functionality without the wifi. I'm looking for Mac software that samples the built-in camera every minute and saves the result to a file. From there, I can write scripts to push it where I want it to go. Surprised to see this functionality isn't something Apple provides, but near as I can tell, they don't.
4. Still thinking about getting the FlipCam. That was the thing I didn't buy last time I tried to kickstart the economy. (Update: I ordered the FlipCam today.)
4/28/09; 11:33:07 AM
DiGiorno pizza is tasty food
We don't have ads on Scripting News, but from time to time I put in a plug for a product I really like.
A few weeks ago I got a fantastic toaster oven, and I've been looking for food it cooks well. I picked up one of these DiGiorno pizzas and man they are some good food.
It's not Ray's, it's not NY pizza, which is still the best. Yeah it's made by Kraft and it probably is junk food. But it tastes soooo good!
However, apparently the "status" param is no longer recognized.
http://twitter.com/home?status=thisusedtowork
That would put "thisusedtowork" in the "What are you doing?" box. URL shorteners redirect to Twitter with the new shortened address in the "status" param.
This change breaks users. Any help would be much appreciated...
Update: Just got a direct message from Twitter, they fixed the breakage. That's excellent turnaround. Thanks!!
4/30/09; 7:49:13 PM
Impressive
Jay Rosen: "I got put on Twitter's official suggested users list last night. I asked them to take me off it today and they did."
4/30/09; 3:44:33 PM
Posting to twitpic and posterous?
I'm having the damndest time figuring out the APIs to these two web services. I just want to post a picture. I already have code that does multipart forms, for Flickr and the now-defunct Pownce. These guys seem to be doing it in a non-standard way. Anyone with a clue?
Update #1: I got it working with Posterous, but I get image not found from Twitpic. Here's the request I'm sending to Twitpic, with the password xxx'd out.
Seeing the first-time Twitter user experience reinforced an idea that's been lurking in the background. Since the magic of Twitter is, theoretically, in its limits, perhaps they should have a limit on who can join and under what circumstances. Perhaps before you can create a new account you have to name 20 people with Twitter accounts who you want to follow. They could be celebrities if you want, or spammers -- then at least the recommended users could be tailored to your interests. The algorithms that suggest new feeds kick in, and they are well understood, once you have a few seeds to get started. The one-size-fits-all approach obviously isn't working.
5/1/09; 4:18:56 PM
What a first-time Twitter user sees
I'm doing some work with a Twitter app that wants my username and password so I needed an account to test with. I created one, and accepted the 20 users that they suggested. This is what I saw:
http://tr.im/keiv
There's a lot of spam in there, and little that's coherent. This is the best they could find? Are they even watching?
Topics: Jay opted out of Twitter's Suggested Users List, he explains why and we discuss. His choice for Inspiration of the Week is Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.
As always, you can subscribe in your podcatcher or iTunes.
5/3/09; 10:56:43 PM
Conflicts of interest in tech
It's Jay's week for the source of inspiration, so I'm bringing a different topic to our weekly potluck of speculation about Rebooting The News.
Obviously we're going to talk about Twitter's suggested users list.
Last week: 1. Jay was put on the list, 2. Got the surge in new followers, then 3. Asked to be taken off, and 4. Was taken off.
You can see the effect on his follower count in this graph. I took a screen shot because it will scroll off over time. It's stunning. Very clearly, being on the SUL has a dramatic effect on your count.
We've talked about conflicts of interest among journalists, but haven't talked about the same thing for tech people. Mike Arrington tried to ignite a scandal around me over something that happened at UserLand in 2002, when I was on the vendor side (and a blogger, which is part of what blogging was and is about). I responded, not with a blanket dismissal such as "Vendors don't have conflicts of interest" -- because I believe they do. They can get themselves out of conflict by divesting and/or disclosing. I guess most people felt that what I did wasn't so bad, because the hatefest never came about, and Mike looked bad, as if he was trying to deflect attention away from an article I had written the day before, about the conflicts that arise from accepting a large gift from a vendor you cover, without disclosing it when you write about them.
Today we'll find out, from Jay, what it means for a professor of journalism, and for an ordinary human being to receive such a gift.
In the course of the public discussion last week, I said that if I were put on the Suggested Users List, I would ask to be removed, and if the request wasn't honored, I would delete the account. I don't want the distortion it causes. I don't see Twitter as an advertising medium, I am not a journalist and could ethically receive a gift from a vendor, even so I would refuse it. I don't believe that Twitter should be getting in the middle of the relationship between users of its service. That's sacred territory. This is a matter of net neutrality. Could someone like Mike, who writes passionately about net neutrality in his TechCrunch column, possibly not see this?
Anyway, all this is a preamble for where I want to take this, because while these ethical issues are central to the trust between writers and readers, the economics of the web are goverened by another conflict, one that is very rarely talked about. I'd like to get it out there.
Here's the story...
1. Google makes a lot of money from advertising.
2. If one were to define advertising, it seems to me you'd have to include the idea of intrusion. An ad intrudes on your experience, it's a sidebar, it's something you wouldn't think of on your own. If you're already humming my jingle, I don't have to pay someone to play it for you. Or so it seems.
3. As search gets better, it will obviate the need for intrusion. A perfectly targeted ad at some point stops being intrusive and starts becoming information. If you get me the commercial fact that I need at precisely the moment I need it, you don't have to impose on me, I will welcome that.
4. Google is in the business of getting you the exact fact or link that you're looking for as quickly as possible.
5. Its advertisers pay money to get you their link before you find one in the search results.
6. But if they're the same link, maybe the advertiser will stop paying? Or if the customer believes that a better link is in the first search results rather than on page 5 or not there at all? The customer, perfectly happy, never has a reason to go where the ads direct them.
Now, I know that there are other forms of advertising, ones that program you to think a certain way, but you don't see those kinds of ads on Google. Maybe they'll have to change, because as the search engine gets better and better, which it should (right?) the ads will play less of a role.
We know that companies don't always play fair.
There was the case of GM sabotaging the public transit system in Los Angeles.
A lot of companies profited from the war in Iraq. If you don't believe they helped get that war going, I have a nice bridge to sell you. Special price. Just for you.
Closer to home, the recent price drop in laptops, the netbooks, show that there was some kind of price fixing going on before that, a collusion between the vendors to keep prices high. So we know that the tech industry is capable of the same dirty economics as other industries.
When Google has to cut its own revenue stream by enhancing search, will they do it? So far the competition has made this easy for them, but just this week Wolfram Research has been wooing the analysts with their new way to do search. Maybe this isn't the challenger that will push Google to seriously upgrade search, if not, surely at some point it will happen.
I don't know how you feel, but it seems to me that search has been pretty constant for the last few years. It's been a long time since the quantum improvement that Google offered over Infoseek, Alta Vista, et al.
5/3/09; 7:25:19 PM
New iPhone
It was raining on Friday, and I went for a long walk up and down the hills, very vigorous -- but I got soaked and so did my iPhone. After taking its last picture and uploading it to Flickr, it died. It wouldn't respond to attempts to revive it, so I took it down to the AT&T Store in downtown Berkeley and bought a replacement for $199.
My old iPhone truly was old, this bright shiny new one is so much nicer -- and faster. And the restore process worked flawlessly. Everything from the old phone was backed up on my Mac, and when I inserted the new one it asked if I wanted to restore it from the old image. I said yes. It took a long time, but I lost nothing, except passwords, which is the right way for it to work.
So now I have a new iPhone and where almost everything was broken on the old one, nothing is broken on this one. So the iPod functions work, and it can play videos -- the old one couldn't do eitehr of these things. All my headphones work with the new one, the old one had a non-standard jack for headphones (yes, I know I could get an adapter, but I can't manage to keep track of things like that, it was pointless).
But I still want to bring a music/video player with me because the iPhone, apparently -- can't multitask! If I'm watching a movie and it's going through a boring spell, or I just want to listen to the dialog, why can't I check my email or Twitter -- or look something up on Google? When I use my laptop I can do all these things and watch a movie.
And I'm reminded how shitty the keyboard is on the iPhone, and think it's a paradox that Apple's COO says netbooks have "cramped" keyboards. The iPod has the worst keyboard. Even if I type something correctly, there's a pretty good chance it'll change it to something ridiculous. When the Newton first came out people used to laugh at how it would mess things up. The iPod really isn't much better, but people stopped laughing. I wonder why? Cook is wrong -- my Eee PC has an infintely better keyboard than the iPhone, and you know something -- it costs less than an iPhone too.
Anyway -- net-net -- it's a nice new toy to have. In a way I'm glad the old one broke.
5/3/09; 3:22:44 PM
Gadget talk with Scoble
I was browsing FriendFeed yesterday and saw Scoble had started a thread on the new Kindle, which was being dismissed by the tech press as a "Hail Mary pass" to save the news industry. I don't see it that way. I like the Kindle, esp for reading the news, but a Kindle with a bigger screen might make the news even more attractive. Do I think it will work? I don't know, but why not give it a try.
So I called BlogTalkRadio, then called Scoble and we did a quick podcast, that started out talking about the Kindle, but turned to gadgets, the iPhone, the MIT Tech Review slam of Clay Shirky and myself, and on to opportunities for the Palm Pre to zig where Apple zags. They could let the software market run without control from the mother ship, see what happens. Maybe there are some great X-rated apps for mobile devices?
As always, you can subscribe to my podcasts using a podcatcher or iTunes.
5/5/09; 11:46:29 AM
Tweeting behind the firewall
I just added a new feature to 100twt.com tonight, with the help of Daniel and Jason at Disqus: You can now comment on the tweets of people in the Top 100. That's just the first toe-dip into commenting on tweets in general, a starting point.
To kick it off I posted a comment on a tweet by @ev, where he talks about a tweetranet at a staff meeting at Twitter HQ today. This is a topic much in the air these days after a blog post by Matt Mullenweg at wordpress.com about a behind-the-firewall Twitter-like system they're using there.
Lots of opportunity here, we did something similar in 2001 at UserLand. It's all coming back around folks.
The cool thing about comments, they're not limited to 140 chars!
5/8/09; 9:27:30 PM
Amazon's new URL-shortener
In March, I observed that Amazon had already done some URL shortening on its own, meaning that a link like this:
http://amazon.com/wii
actually works. Now, apparently they've gone further and have a shorter domain, amzn.com and a huge number of short URLs in that domain that take you to product pages on amazon.com.
Mike Koss wrote a script that worked its way through a dictionary trying all the different words, and published the list. (That's what I call investigative journalism, so much for bloggers being lazy.)
I'd love to see an official word from Amazon on this. How is a user supposed to go from a page on Amazon to a short URL? Even better, suppose they had a bookmarklet that would automatically populate the Twitter "What are you doing?" box with some text and a copy of the short URL? Might be a real money-maker, and we know that Amazon likes to make money! (And Bezos is also an investor in Twitter.)
5/8/09; 4:44:36 PM
Nothing from nothing
5/8/09; 4:44:36 PM
Tweets of the rich and famous
After a week of watching the amalgamation of the 100 most followed twitterers, a few observations, and no conclusions.
1. I still hope that by amalgamating this group it will change it, make the people with all the followers more aware of how they look to their followers, and may inspire some movement.
2. There are a fair number of robot feeds in the top 100, channels that are just pushing links to stories that make money for the owners. Examples: @time, @guardiantech, nytimes, @techcrunch, @mashable.
3. The cutest of the top 100 is @anamariecox. Imho. Ymmv.
4. There's an awful lot of classic What I Had For Lunch type tweeting. The biggest offenders, the three Twitter guys, @ev, @biz and @jack. Same with @aplusk and the rappers and sports stars. They tweet infrequently and when they do they're borrring.
5. @oprah's fans got excited about Twitter for nothing. She's followed by 922K, follows 11 (all of them superstars) and has updated 38 times.
5a. Maybe something the stars aren't aware of or prepared for is how visible and transparent they are. In the non-twitter world we can't tell how much of their fan mail they respond to, or who they talk with and what they say when they're being themselves. On Twitter, we can. This might not be what they intended.
6. @timoreilly wins the prize for effort among the twitter superstars. It's pretty obvious he's doing it himself, or as obvious as it can be (he might pay someone to make it look like he's doing it himself).
7. I think people who tuned into it are as bored as I am. The usage was huge in the first few days, about 50K hits per day, but it's tailed off a lot now.
5/9/09; 4:15:56 PM
Tomorrow's inspiration
For the last couple of months I've done a podcast every Sunday with Jay Rosen. Three Sundays ago he had a great idea, every week let's choose someone to honor as a source of inspiration to the new journalism we see emerging.
We alternate weeks, the first time he chose Edison Carter, the reporter on the Max Headroom TV series of the 80s. Then I chose Jon Postel, the man behind many of the open protocols of the Internet, and the keeper of its spirit, who passed away just as the Internet was becoming a huge societal force. And last week Jay chose Josh Marshall of Talking Point Memo. Now it's my turn.
I gave it a lot of thought. It seems we're doing the Yin and the Yang. Jay comes at it from the journalism side, and I approach from the tech side. This week I will continue in this mode.
Nelson wrote a book called Computer Lib/Dream Machines, in the 1970s, in which he chronicled, in a very bloglike fashion (long before blogs existed of course) the path that computers took to become the ideal tools for thinking and collaboration. This was a very radical idea at the time, I know because I was talking to people about the same concepts, and getting told that computers are not creative tools, by people who supposedly knew better.
There were a small number of hippie computer types, not much like the guys who wore the nerd pocket protectors. We got dates, were gregarious and outgoing, liked to do drugs, and music -- and thought computers fit into the groovy lifestyle. It was kind of a lonely thing. The hippies didn't know what to make of us and neither did the nerds. But when Nelson's book crossed my path, and the paths of people like me, it gave us a sense that others saw it the same way.
Today, few question that computers are used for thinking and collaboration, although the people who say bloggers will never do the work of journalists sound a lot like the people who questioned computers as human tools in the 70s. The venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley don't understand why someone would develop technology without a plan to get rich from it, but the hippie tech guys don't have a problem with that. Changing the world for the better is a good enough cause. Helping people share their knowledge and insight is most of what computers do, most people who use them have no hope of getting rich from using them, but they do it anyway. So while the attention focuses on the people who make the money, the real action is with the people who learn and teach and share with them.
Further, Nelson believed, as I did and still do, that computers were primarily tools to connect up to networks. Later Sun Microsystems would codify this with the slogan "The Network is the Computer."
For those who have read Nelson's book, you must have guessed that at some point I will choose Doug Engelbart, and you would be right. But I first learned of Engelbart's work through Nelson's book. I met Nelson before I met Engelbart. Neither of these heroes are perfect, but then heroes who are real people never are. But Nelson's work is monumental, it gave hope and confidence to a generation of people who did make a huge difference. That's good enough to be my choice for this week.
Jay and Dave talk about paying for the news, Ted Nelson as inspiration, "Giant Pool of Money."
As usual, subscribe to this feed in your podcatcher to get all the shows.
5/10/09; 10:52:30 PM
Door-slams by MSM journos
I've gotten lots of angry emails from mainstream journalists about things I've written here or on Twitter, esp in the last couple of years, as things have spiraled down in newspaper-land. I understand, somebody's got to be to blame for what's happening, and I'm convenient.
But I'm not the problem -- my writing about this stuff may be a symptom, when viewed from the top of the journalist ladder. If so, then what's the problem? The same thing that's happening to all other centralized knowledge-based professions, where there used to be gatekeepers earning a living based on the high cost of distributing information. As the cost has come down, the jobs have disappeared. Journalists are not the first to be hit by this, and as I've said many times, my own short-lived profession, developing shrink-wrap software for PCs, was devastated by this a long time ago. I was lucky to have saved some money, and also have shifted what I do, so I've continued to make money over the years, even though today no one earns a living the way I did at the beginning of my career.
Today I said that journalism needs a cleansing, and I seriously believe it. I've been part of the journalism system for my entire career. When I launched products in the 80s, I did it through that system. I did reasonably well at first, because the journos understood my product. It was designed for people like them. Later I developed products that weren't so easy for a liberal arts major to understand and they didn't fare as well. But by that time I had the ability to write publicly without going through the journalism system, so even though that door was largely closed, I was still able to get the word out -- and in so doing, defined a new kind of writing which came to be known as blogging.
Today's journalists are already an anachronism, and I think they know it, and that's why there's so much anger. For many years they could pretend, like American homeowners, that their value was based on something permanent. I own a home myself, it's worth a lot less than I paid for it. I'm not happy about that, but as an adult I accept it. The same kind of acceptance is required of everyone who earns a living in journalism. And the higher up the ladder you climbed in your career, the harder that must be to accept. I get it.
But I can't help you avoid the truth. My goal actually is to work with everyone else, who has been subject to the journalism system, even victimized by it. I've watched them sell us out over and over to the huge corporations that run the tech business. There's not much love lost here for the journos. If they did the job they say they do, following the truth where ever it leads, we would have avoided a lot of problems. But they don't do that. They avoid risks, like most people. They aren't the swashbuckling and courageous investigators portrayed in the movies. They're gray, average people who feel superior to the rest of us. And that veneer is disappearing now.
When I pushed RSS, my hope was to create a level playing field, so that if journalists wanted to do excellent work and stick their necks out, it could be seen, but not with any advantage over the amateurs, the bloggers, who would have full access to the same distribution system. RSS was a total subversion of the way information used to flow, but only tapped into the power that the Internet gave us, in itself it wasn't revolutionary -- that came from the inexorable lowering of the cost of publishing and the simplification of the process, and the ease of the tools. All of these things together are what is undermining the journalism business.
Some people say I don't understand the economics of journalism, but I think I do. It's the old economics that I don't understand,. No one can understand that, because it no longer works.
5/10/09; 2:40:47 PM
Google this is your wakeup call
I'm reading various reports on Google's announcments about search today, and it sounds scattered and totally uninspiring. And I might add, disappointing.
Google is today a big company, and it seems to lack the resolve to go into middle age with any passion. If ever there was a time to show some exciting new features for search, this was it -- and none of it was in any way exciting.
When Google came along, the CEOs of the existing search companies didn't pay much attention. They probably didn't understand what was so exciting about Google. It was very much like the way the leaders of the minicomputer industry reacted to the early PC, at first dismissive, then with arrogance. Their products seemed to assume they would overcome the challenge, and none of them did. The only one to make the transition was IBM, and then a few years later they would try to lock in the users, and finally lose out to the new companies that had cloned their products.
Twitter is that kind of generational challenge to Google. They have no choice but the same one IBM had with the Apple II, and Microsoft had with Netscape. They must compete, with a respectful product, one that is compatible with Twitter, and gives users a benefit of coming from a strong mature company. The time for this product is passing every week, as Twitter stabilizes and delivers a reliable service. Google's clone should have come out last summer when Twitter was having trouble keeping their servers up.
If I could talk to the management at Google, I would tell them to stop everything, go away for a week, and learn how to use Twitter, yourself. Get an inkling of what is so exciting and different about it. You can't get the gestalt by looking at the features, you have to see how people are using it and who they are. It's not about Oprah or Ashton Kutcher, it's about the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, and a hundred NY Times reporters who are breaking their company's rules by using Twitter the way bloggers were telling them to use the web. Twitter is in many ways the realization of the full promise made by blogging so many years ago. It's really exciting to see it come to fruition, but it's also depressing that it's all happening inside one company's environment. I don't honestly think it can work that way.
Google! You can't afford to stay on the sidelines. It's an urgent issue for your company. And pretty soon it won't be an issue at all.
When Netscape came along in 1994, I wrote a blistering piece about how the Internet had made Microsoft irrelevant. Bill Gates wrote back asking if this meant they'd sell any fewer Flight Simulators or CD-ROM encyclopedias. That wasn't the point. Google's search revenue won't feel the rise of Twitter for many more quarters. But the place people turn to for news is shifting. It never was Google, that wasn't something it ever did well. But it is something Twitter does, and at this point it doesn't do it very well. But the path is very clear, the information they need now flows through their servers. They just have to figure out the user interface. They will eventually figure it out. That's the half of the problem that Google already knows how to solve. But Google doesn't have the users. None of its products have the kind of flow that Twitter has, nor the growth that Twitter has. That's what Google has to get busy building. Once Twitter is delivering the news search that Google can't, it will be way too late. This is probably what the Google management doesn't understand because they aren't using Twitter themselves. And if they're like most other big companies, their employees don't want to tell them what they're missing, assuming they know.
To Gates's credit, a few weeks after his lame excuse, he figured it out, and had his famous December analyst meeting where he outlined how he would attack the Internet. Unfortunately for all of us, but especially Netscape, an attack wasn't what was needed, support and love from a mature leader would have worked much better. But at least he woke up. There's no sign at all that Google is aware of the challenge.
Back in the early days of the net Stewart Alsop would write these open letters to Bill Gates and Jim Manzi telling them what they were missing. I guess for Google in 2009, that job has fallen to me.
5/12/09; 8:49:45 PM
PBS could become a cause for the web
Writing about open formats got me in the heady mood of the 90s. Back then we believed the Internet would be a free speech engine of democracy. I still do, to this day, but it doesn't dominate discourse the way it did back then. Today, money is more important. The purity of the early vision has been tainted by abominations like "user generated content" and "crowd sourcing." In the 90s, our websites had blue ribbons which stood for freedom. One of mine still does, to remind me of those days.
Anyway...
NPR is having its pledge drive, so I gave my money -- $150 for the year, and I encourage you to give what you can. I listen to NPR, and watch PBS. I like FreshAir, All Things Considered, Frontline, Nova, Bill Moyers. And I admit that when there's a new Frontline, I download it via BitTorrent, and I seed it to make sure it's available for others. This adds to my $150 annual contribution. I'm giving some of my bandwidth to make sure people who live outside the US and who may not be near a PBS station, can get this stuff. I want them to know how we see ourselves in the US.
Is this legal? I don't know. Does PBS object? Again, I don't know. Until now, I've never asked.
If they do, I'd encourage them to look again. BitTorrent is a very rational technology. It's a perfect fit for PBS. And it's not well understood by even some tech companies like Apple, who is banning it from the iPhone. And it's being throttled by ISPs, when they can.
Now here's the pitch. If PBS actively promoted the BitTorrent distribution of their programming, the same way it distributes podcasts of the NPR shows, it would become a celebrated cause of the net. I tell people to give, but now I could give them another reason. PBS is embracing the Internet, and helping develop the platform in a way only they can do.
Think about it.
5/12/09; 12:03:14 PM
Mark this day
Mark this day on your calendar.
After years of saying that instead of emulating print newspapers, Internet-based news should present the newest stuff first. I don't want sections, I want flow.
It never seemed to me it should work any other way. Almost exactly 10 years ago, on May 9, 1999, we put up a web app called my.userland.com that ran off the same content flow as my.netscape.com, using a then-new format called RSS. Their aggregator allowed you to lay out your own newspaper on the screen of your Mac or PC. UserLand's aggregator presented it as a flow, which I later called a "river of news" -- last-in-first-out. Want to know what's new? Visit the site and scroll until you're caught up. If something catches your fancy, click and read. When you're done, hit the Back button and resume the scroll.
So this period is important because ten years ago RSS happened.
And today is important because today the NY Times joined the party. They're now presenting their news flow as a flow. Gone is the pretense that news on the Internet works like news on paper. Welcome to the NY Times river of news, as presented by the NY Times.
I've had my own version of this flow for a few years. I knew this was coming, a source at the Times briefed me on it, privately, a few weeks ago. I turned off my flow, and will leave it there for the forseeable future. Go get the river at the Times website so they can get the ad revenue. Seriously. And congrats. Let's go do the other thing now, get the Times to carry news written by people who don't work at the Times. Then we'll be ready for the future.
See the next post for a note on why open formats are so important.
5/12/09; 11:12:56 AM
Why open formats are so important
If you look at the archive of Scripting News for May 1999, ten years ago, you'll see how important open formats are.
At the time, a large company, Netscape, had done deals with major content vendors, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Motley Fool and several others, to provide a flow of news for their new web app, my.netscape.com.
They didn't have to make this information public, they could have done private deals with each of the content sources. But they didn't. The format was documented publicly and the feeds were available to anyone who wanted to build on them.
At the time, I liked the river format, not the newpaper format that Netscape was using. Because the feeds were out there for anyone to use, I didn't have to do deals with the content companies.
They were open in another important way -- anyone could flow their content through my.netscape.com, not just the big pubs. Suppose they had never heard of you, but you wanted your webzine to be part of their system. Because the format was open, and because their web app was too, anyone could join. This was important because at the time something new was happening -- weblogs, and they could be part of the flow because of this openness. If you had to get approval, maybe only the weblogs that Netscape liked could be part of their system. That would be wrong, imho.
And when Netscape was acquired by AOL at roughly this time, all the work could continue, even though their app was gone, and the people who worked on it had moved on. It truly was a coral reef, and for me as a technologist, there is no higher praise.
Today, Facebook is nowhere near as open as Netscape was in 1999. If I had a different vision for Twitter, I'd more or less have to start from scratch. If Apple doesn't like or understand your app, you can't ship it for the iPhone. And if Google failed, we'd all be up a creek without a paddle. Now you might observe that those companies are alive and Netscape is gone. Maybe you can't be open and keep your franchise going. But what's the point of being alive if you're not free? And we don't know the outcome yet for most of these companies.
Regardless, I think it's important to honor the contribution that Netscape made in laying the foundation for all the great stuff that has happened with RSS and is still to come. Thanks Netscape!
Ten years later, we now know how well RSS worked. And let it serve as a lesson for all who follow. Let others compete with you, encourage it even. It's how you stay sharp and it's how you build markets, not just companies.
5/12/09; 11:30:32 AM
The NY Times/Twitter feed
Today I was thinking about what, in an ideal world, to do with the Twitter feed of the NY Times.
It has 852,709 followers. That's potentially quite powerful.
This is what I came up with.
Think about two communities: 1. The people who use Twitter and those who are likely to use it in the near future. 2. The people who use the NY TImes now and in the near future.
The community you're serving with this feed is the intersection between the two.
The feed should be used to push links to stories that would interest someone in this community. But not just stories from the NY Times.
The criteria would be: Would an informed person want to know about this? And does it fit the Twitter lifestyle of short attention span and retweeting.
"All the news that's fit to print" meets "People come back to places that send them away."
Could be very interesting.
5/13/09; 8:34:43 PM
Opting-out of TechMeme
I appreciate all the flow that TechMeme has sent to scripting.com over the years, but it's time to say a tearful goodbye. I think we'll do better independent of the community that TM defines. It has shifted over time, away from the individual and toward the "corporate blog" -- and I feel better just reading the TechMeme sites, and not participating in the discourse.
So long, and thanks for all the fish! It's been fun.
5/13/09; 4:57:25 PM
Lessons from the changes in Twitter
Interesting changes in the Twitter community in the last 24 hours.
Here's what happened, from my point of view.
1. At some point yesterday afteroon I logged on and saw a message on the Twitter home page advising of a change in the way Reply works. It pointed to the Twitter blog for more info. I clicked on the link, but there was nothing there about Reply. Refreshed the home page and the advisory was gone. I gather most people did not see the advisory.
2. Started seeing comments about the change.
3. A blog post appeared, explaining in confusing terms what had changed.
5. A reference back to a post by Evan Williams last year, wondering if they shouldn't change the way Reply works.
6. More discussion.
7. It turns out there are technical reasons for the change. We don't know what they are. Biz Stone is surprised at how much interest there is in the change.
Now some comments...
I think the changes are okay, and I don't understand the technical reasons. I inferred that there must be a technical reason for the change, because it would have been simple enough to make it subject to a preference. As was pointed out many times on Twitter, it had been a preference. Therefore the inference.
When communicating with the community, the Twitter folk from now on should assume that every change will be examined in all possible nuance, with all theories explored, very quickly. Therefore, try to say what you know you're going to eventually admit to, as soon as possible. It will help build trust.
None of us outside the company have a clear picture of how the system works behind the user interface, esp since the performance issues were mostly resolved. Why is this feature so expensive? Unknown.
There will be many more problems like this in the future, some not so benign. The danger is that all the functionality of Twitter is centralized.
The centralization problems are in three areas: 1. Technical. 2. Financial. 3. Political.
The technical issues are obvious. If there is no redundancy in their network and a critical component fails, the whole thing goes down. I don't think people really are prepared for how disconnected we all will feel if this happens.
Assume that a change in ownership occurs at some point. What will the new owners change about Twitter. We have some feel for how the current ownership thinks. We obviously have no idea how a potential new owner thinks or what they might choose to sell. They could decide to sell information that we don't want sold.
The political threat is a major concern. Consider the pressure being applied to Craigslist over prostitution by the states attorney generals. What if prostitutes are operating on Twitter? What if a major act of terrorism is organized using Twitter? Would there be pressure to shut it down, or greatly control what it's used for? Remember the atmosphere after 9-11. Not so far-fetched. But it was hard to control the web, it was too diverse. Twitter, which is fully centralized, would be easy for a government to control.
Centralization has its niceties, for sure. They come up every time I warn of its dangers. This change was a very small reminder of what is, if you believe in Murphy's Law, as I do -- certainly in our future if we don't diversify.
Update: A smart look at this by Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW.
Apparently it was the wrong day because I keep getting HTML in response to my write calls that says: "We're making some changes to our infrastructure and certain pages may be unavailable for a few minutes." This has been going on for many hours! Not gooood.
I looked all over the place to see if there were any notes about this, but haven't found anything. So as a last resort I'm asking here if anyone knows anything about this.
Does anyone know anything about this?
5/14/09; 6:38:45 PM
Who are your tech heroes?
This question came up in a conference call earlier today and I thought it would be useful to open it up publicly.
Here's how to decide:
1. Someone who has made largely selfless contributions to open technology -- i.e. tech that people can reuse without limits or fees. Examples would be BitTorrent or HTTP.
2. Someone who you think would "do the right thing" whatever that is, most of the time. That is, someone you trust.
3. Other criteria?
Caveat: No one is perfect. You're not saying your hero is a saint. Their contribution could have been amends for past mistakes. It should be someone who has made a major contribution without asking for much in return.
Yesterday I asked who are your tech heroes. Please read the description for what I mean as a hero. Now today I'd like to ask a slightly different question.
I want to know about people who are active in technology who also blog whose integrity you trust.
I'm not looking for journalists who have a blog who write about technology, so even though I admire Marshall Kirkpatrick or Om Malik (only two examples, there are many more) they're not who I'm looking for.
I'm looking for people who might be thought of as sources for reporters who have gone direct.
This is not an idle question -- it's for a project I'm working on with a few other people. My job is to find some of these sources, people of integrity who write publicly about what they believe. The area I've been assigned to cover is tech.
5/15/09; 11:03:47 AM
Sources go direct
I read this morning that the NY Times will decide by the end of June how to generate more revenue from its online presence.
The two choices, they say, are: 1. Metering and 2. Membership. Metering is complicated, but boils down to a new rule -- you can use the site for free for a while, then you have to pay. Membership is like NPR membership. They ask for donations, if you like the service, you give them money. You might get a coffee mug or tote bag.
My opinion: They shouldn't do #1, it would screw everything up, and they might as well try #2, it will raise some money, but not enough, not until they inspire people with new ideas. (Make note, this inspiration is hugely important, and not impossible.)
I do think I know how this will shake out, but I don't have time this morning to explain in detail why. You'll find plenty of pieces in the archive of scripting.com that back these ideas up. I can't prove that they'll work, but I'm pretty sure they will. But they will require the Times to give up one of its sacred tenets. And that won't go down easy. But I believe the quality and integrity of the product will soar as a result. But change is hard.
First some premises:
1. People want more news, faster.
2. The news industry has been cutting back.
3. Even so, news still happens.
4. Believe it or not, the tech industry doesn't know how to deliver news on the Internet. (Caveat: It's getting there.)
5. This creates a vacuum that is being filled by what some call "User Generated Content." I don't like that term. Instead, I call it "Sources Go Direct." Same idea, but with more respect and emphasis on quality. Sure, some of the stuff you read online is crap, but some of it is the quality stuff we crave.
Now what is the Times? Here's what I think it is.
It's a somewhat tarnished brand that equates in people's minds to "The Best in Journalism." It's not the printing press, the trucks, or even the editors and reporters. It is the logo and the tradition, the history. Whatever the Times does, it must not diminish the value of the brand, it must enhance it. The challenge is to tap into the enormous potential of the Internet as a news creation and delivery system.
Like it or not, and some Times reporters appear not to like it -- much of the value in the Times is captured by its sources. The reporters, when they're doing their best work, are facilitating the flow of ideas and information from sources to readers. And don't miss that the flow works the other way too, from readers back to sources. The newspapers have been complaining wildly about this, they say the bloggers get their ideas from news people. And who do you think the news people get their ideas from? And the truth is that a lot of the bloggers they don't like are also sources.
To understand how news works, you need to visualize a flow diagram that includes all the elements of the news process. All the people, not just the reporters and editors. That's where the growth is going to come from.
So basically the Times must evolve, just a little, to see their sources not just as quotes, but also as reporters with a beat -- their expertise. There's still enough shine in the Times rep that people could be enticed to write for the Times, for a fraction of what a reporter makes. Not for free, they must share in whatever revenue the Times gets from their work. But the Times is entitled to a cut, we want the Times to get a cut, because we want this system to go forward. Remember when I said inspiration was going to be key to it, this is how you build it. By showing people how you are going to lead us to the future. So far, I hate to say it, but the news industry has been a huge stick in the mud when it comes to the future. Just getting rid of the drag would be enough to get us to open our wallets, a bit. But imagine if the news industry decided that news was exciting again! That would do a lot to inspire people.
Basically, we're not going to let you fail if we love what you're doing.
And conversely, we're not going to rush to your aid if you're holding us back.
Now I have to get back to work writing some software for this new world.
PS: One more thing. Of course reporters reading this are going to ask "What about me?" Well, you have to find a job that pays a salary and provides the benefits you need. Today there are some jobs for reporters. What skills do you have that a news org might need in a world where sources go direct?
I read a really interesting article the other day about the 47 people at Twitter, Inc and thought it would make an interesting aggregate. So I used the same code I had to follow the top-100 most followed people and did one for the 47 people of Twitter. Since it starts on a weekend, most people are doing home and family things, or not tweeting at all. It'll be interesting to see how it picks up on Monday.
The New York Times seems to operate at all hours. We aggregate the tweets of the people of the Times -- what they're talking about; as opposed to the stories they've written.
Both of the new feeds are interesting, as is the original:
I screwed up and lost this week's Rebooting The News podcast.
This brief three-minute solo cast explains what happened and expresses apologies to Jay and everyone for this screwup.
Sorry!!
5/17/09; 11:22:54 PM
Neutrality in different contexts
1. In our world we call it net neutrality. It means that all packets are treated equally on the Internet.
2. Among journos, it's the distinction betw editorial and publishing functions, what's often referred to as a Chinese Wall.
In the tech press, back when there was such a thing, they'd sometimes send an ad sales person to visit along with the editor in chief. The editor excuses himself to go to the bathroom, the sales guy says "If you buy an ad he'll review the product." Even if they don't come out and say it, it's often understood. It also becomes obvious to the readers that this is going on, so they stop believing the reviews. It's likely it happens in areas businesses, like movie reviews.
3. In government, it's the separation of church and state. This is one of the ways freedom of religion is guaranteed. If there was a state religion, one which was part of the government, people of different faiths, or ones who don't practice any religion, would have less rights. When someone says the US is a "Christian nation" they're saying they don't believe in this separation.
4. At Microsoft they claimed to keep the systems and apps divisions separate. This became a farce when they claimed that the web browser was part of the system software, when it was clearly an app. This is how they justified their plan to suck the web into Windows.
5. You don't want your Internet Service Provider to also provide your cable TV because they might screw around with BitTorrent to keep you from getting your entertainment on the net, protecting their revenue from cable TV. So they make a promise to keep the two functions separate, and there's a scandal every time they fail to.
6. With Google it means that the search engineers don't talk to the advertising people about fine-tuning their algorithms so the biggest customers get the best results. It's because we believe that Google doesn't screw around that we trust their search.
7. I feel very strongly that this kind of neutrality should be the rule on Twitter, and I also know that it's not the rule. They make no attempt to separate operational and editorial functions. In a way this is very honest of them, but it's also long-term going to be bad for business, as people they don't favor look for other outlets for their creative work.
8. Halliburton got some sweet deals from the Bush Administration because the VP was their CEO until he became VP. Did the VP ever explicitly tell DoD employees to favor Halliburton? He didn't have to, the theory goes, everyone knew where he came from.
This idea that you should keep certain functions separate from others permeates all human activities. It's so important we should have a theory for it, and a name that applies everywhere, so when a new thing comes along, no one need debate whether such separation is necessary or good. Unless somehow humans reinvented human nature, it's always both necessary and good.
This is something I hope to discuss with Jay in this evening's Rebooting The News podcast.
5/17/09; 6:03:05 PM
When will Twitter start for real?
I've got a new way to view Twitter these days, looking at the collected tweets of people who work at two companies: The NY Times and at Twitter itself. I hoped to see cohesion, discussion between people working on projects together. Not yet.
Last night I added an aggregation of the tweets of the Gillmor Gang, a weekly talk-show podcast about the tech industry. And of course there's the first one, the Top 100 most subscribed to twitterers.
Now it's still really early in all of these feeds, but then that's how we think of Twitter itself. It's still early. It hasn't happened yet, whatever it is we feel is going to happen.
If you look at the tweets, dispassionately, what you'll see is a lot of people broadcasting. There is some shared wisdom, but not much of it is all that useful. One twitterer says you can walk into the wrong gender's bathroom by accident if you're reading tweets while leaving the correct bathroom. Another says he used a line from a movie in a meeting but no one knew what he meant. People wait for taxis, get them or don't get them. Yesterday I went to a ballgame and uploaded a picture.
What will it take for Twitter to advance beyond its potential to be great, to realize its potential? It's been in a holding place, in my experience, for a long time. Last summer we thought first Twitter had to stabilize, stop fail-whaling in order for it to realize its potential. I suppose some thought it would get real when the low-level politicos showed up, then the reporters, then mainstream users, celebs, Oprah.
At some point the potential must be realized. What will it look like then?
Meanwhile, even though some have said blogging was killed by Twitter, or RSS -- I still blog (you're reading a blog post right now) and I get most news from my aggregator. If I depended on Twitter for news it would be very haphazard, completely non-systematic. Today the only real use Twitter has is to explore the potential of a new medium. So far that exploration hasn't turned up much gold. There's the potential of value, that we see.
At some point we will finish this sentence: Twitter is... ?
5/17/09; 10:55:15 AM
A policy question about web APIs
Andrew Baron of Rocketboom called earlier today with a question.
He's getting ready to launch a new video aggregation site called Magma. I'll have more about the site when it's ready to launch.
As part of the service they check with several major services to see if they have any information about the videos they're presenting. Today the site is making 30,000 calls a day to each site. As it ramps up it'll make hundreds of thousands of calls, and eventually millions, every day.
Now the question is -- must they contact Digg, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, etc to inform them and/or get permission? At what point will they be throttled? What's the proper way to make contact?
I asked him to post something on this, and he has.
I'll be very interested to hear the answer myself.
Jay asked me to explain why it was so important that the NYT has a River of News.
We're now using the full-blown BlogtalkRadio system, this was just a test to make sure we knew what we were doing after Sunday's disaster.
However the feed stays the same, you can follow us in your podcatcher or iTunes.
5/19/09; 11:21:38 PM
Taking off the training wheels
Technology loops, it follows a pattern that repeats, and we're in one of those loops right now.
Here's how it goes.
1. Something new comes along.
2. We all use one company's product because we need it simplified. I think of this as the "training wheels" phase. Not the full-power version of the technology, but a simplified one, easy to learn on.
3. Two forces oppose each other as the technology becomes familiar and popular. The company tries to build their lockin as the users crave more power. Even if the company didn't try to foreclose, eventually the users would break out because you can only get so much power from one vendor (strategy taxes and conflicts of interests rule, not maximum power for users).
4. Break out! Often explosive. Another huge wave of growth around the technology as the open version permeates the market.
5. Maturity. Back to step #1.
That's the loop. So many things have happened like this. A classic example -- email. In the 80s most people who used email did it on closed company-owned systems like MCI, Compuserve, AppleLink, then AOL and Microsoft's corporate servers. Then along with the rise of the web, email moved to the Internet, and mail servers became commodities. Everyone had one. Companies started out not wanting to operate their own servers, then because they weren't scared of running them, they broke out.
So then the question comes up, as we've been talking about now for years, what does the break-out from Twitter look like? We've tried a lot of theories, but before there's a breakout, everyone has to understand the technology, and to understand it, it seems you must know what it is.
So... What is Twitter? I didn't get any answers when I asked on Sunday. I'm watching all the public twits from people who work at Twitter to see if they have any ideas. If they do, they're not evident in the public twitstream.
I'm thinking now that Twitter is this -- A very low ramp onto blogging, which itself was a low ramp onto publishing. I told a friend today I didn't used to think it could get any lower than blogging, but I was wrong! Twitter is lower. I think for a lot of people the breakthrough in Twitter is that it makes blogging possible for them, both the reading and writing.
For a guy like me, who mastered blogging long ago, Twitter is compelling because of the people. All these new people blogging, I want to read what they write, maybe they'll come up with something! But more and more, sorry to say, I don't think they are coming up with much. I think 140 characters is really very limiting for most people. Esp when you layer all the RT's and @screennames and #hashtags and tinyurls in and on it. It's getting really crowded there in 140-character-land.
Plus if you believe the loop model, the best of the Twitter users, the ones who are doing the most interesting stuff with it, they're going to want more, soon. And they're going to also want their freedom. All of which says the investors in products like Tumblr are really smart, except they ought to offer more freedom than Twitter does and they don't appear to. It also suggests that Facebook, Movable Type and WordPress would be well-served to produce low-end products, ones that did just a little more than Twitter. The key here is to be, in every way, a Twitter clone, but relax some of the limits. I'd bet that the Twitter founders are wrong about 140 characters. It may have been magic at one time, but that's the past. It would be easy to conceive of a UX that was every bit as simple as Twitter's but didn't have that limit.
Earlier today I twitted: "I like the open web so much I'm willing to accept its limits."
Then a few hours later Larry Page hinted at the explosive breakout I'm looking for. If I can write on the web, on my own server, and still have it instantly accessible to people who follow me, whether they use twitter or splitter or donder or vixen, then I've got:
Just one little protocol to implement it. I ping them when I update. They read the document I say changed. If it did, re-index. If it didn't, ignore the ping. That's all. Everything about Twitter reduced to a new search engine from Google, something they're good at, and a small enhancement to my CMS (and to be clear, it's old tech, we've been doing this in the blogging world since 1999).
Oh happy day!
"cheesecake"
5/19/09; 5:39:30 PM
A big idea in a little podcast
It came to me while washing the dishes the other day, I figured out what the NYT should do with their Twitter feed, the one with almost a million followers.
I swear to god I didn't clue Jay in on this, but he asked me the question in yesterday's mini-podcast. I think he knew that I must be working on this puzzle and maybe he sensed I'd have something to say. Jay a really smart mofo, and he and I are developing a kind of mutual ESP. It's funny how often he asks the right question, and it's also funny how often there's a flipside story to tell about evolving media to my story about the evolution of technology. I think basically he and I have been following the same thread through our society but from opposite ends of a tunnel. We see the same thing, but come at it from different points of view.
It's really cool because he gets a chance to talk to tech people, and I get a chance to talk to journalism people. I don't think many people in the tech world knew Jay, and to the extent people in the journalism world knew me, I don't think they considered the possibility that there's much thought behind my conclusions.
Anyway, listen to the podcast if you have 15 minutes. And if you don't want to read the spoiler, stop reading right now, cause I'm going to spoil it. :-)
Here's what the Times should do. They should do what they always do when people are listening to them. Cover whatever it is that those people are saying and doing. News people are mirrors, they show you what you're doing. So if they've got the attention of people on Twitter, they should cover Twitter. Whatever that means. It's a community of hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe as large as the population of Staten Island, certainly as big as an upstate NY county. And they have a surplus of reporters there, and thousands of stringers.
Which leads me to the second part of the recommendation. Let this be the first environment when the Times deliberately includes content from respected amateurs. This is an idea I've been pushing on the Times since 2002. Now it's time finally to do it. Let this be a lab. What you'll see is that, as a result of opening the channel, a lot of new content will spring up. People will be motivated to learn how to write the kind of stuff the Times will carry. And I think everyone will be surprised at how good it is. Don't decide in advance where it goes, let it go where it's supposed to go. News people are just mirrors, not strategists, not economists or entrepreneurs. Just mirrors.
I would add a third part. Try to develop a sense of what people on Twitter are interested in, the way you know that your New York readers are interested in: 1. NY weather. 2. What did the Mets do. 3. Michael Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani, Ed Koch, Bella Abzug, Jackie O, Elton John, Andy Warhol, John Lennon. 4. Etc. You get the idea. Twitter is a community with some cohesion. But it's going to change a lot in the coming months, and maybe years. Get confused along with everyone else, and write about it.
In other words, follow your nose and everything will work out. Too many reporters showing up at Jeff Jarvis confabs pretend they're Larry or Sergey or Steve or Bill. It doesn't matter what Google would do, you're not any of those people, thank god. You're reporters, and what you do is report. So that's what you should do.
If you were meant to make money doing this, as in meant by the Invisible Hand, you will. If not, something else will happen. Even the smartest financial type has no clue how the news will work economically in the future. And reporters are not smart about finance. So just do it and pray it all works out. That's basically all any of us have. So you're just like everyone else. Go figure! :-)
5/20/09; 2:26:11 PM
Ole and Lena jokes never go out of style
Ole and Lena were laying in bed when the phone rang.
Ole answered.
"How should I know, that's over 2000 miles away!"
He slammed down the phone.
Lena says: "Who was that Ole?'"
Ole: "The hell if I know, some weirdo wants to know if the coast is clear."
This one from Jay Bryant, via email...
Ole and Lena were married in St Paul and took a bus up to Duluth for their honeymoon with a bunch of deer hunters who were heading north to catch the last day of deer hunting season.
They got about 2 hours north of St Paul when the bus broke down.
So everyone piled outside the bus for 2 hours while they waited for it to get fixed.
Ole was getting really horny and wanted to consummate the marriage out in the weeds. But Lena told him to wait.
They got back on the bus and made it within 30 minutes of Duluth when it broke down again.
So they piled off the bus and got outside.
Ole told Lena he couldn't wait any longer to have sex.
Lena asked why?
Ole responded.. Did you hear all those hunters on the bus saying:
"The fucking season is almost over!"
5/22/09; 11:14:39 AM
Maureen Dowd
I don't want to make a federal case about it, but I don't think the press did enough checking into Maureen Dowd's explanation of the plagiarism that appeared in her column last week.
Had it been a major political figure, say a Governor or the Speaker of the House, I doubt if a vague explanation about quoting a friend would have stopped the questions. (I'm thinking of Spitzer, McGreevy and Pelosi, just a few recent examples.)
Doesn't it beg the obvious question -- who was the friend? We should know if he or she corroborates Ms. Dowd's explanation. Clearly there was plagiarism, someone committed it. If this friend is a reporter or columnist, don't his or her readers have a right to know who they are?
And by the way, Dowd hasn't admitted to plagiarism. So if we're to forgive her, if this is one-time thing, doesn't she have to say: 1. She did it and 2. She's sorry. She's done neither.
This is all part of the problem with journalism today. Maybe it has always been this way and we haven't had the tools to communicate about them without going through them. Maybe they've always been lifting copy from other writers, and only now do we have the ability to report on them instead of reporting through them.
We haven't gotten the facts from the Times and Ms. Dowd. We ought to press for them, the way a reporter would press a political leader. We, the public, their readers, are entitled to know what happened and what their standards are for columnists. If plagiarism is okay, then who can do it, and how much. Guidelines, public, open and transparent -- are a minimum requirement. Then we can decide for ourselves how much we want to trust the Times and their columnists.
I didn't read a single report from another journal saying that what Dowd did is wrong and that her explanation is unacceptable, and that the Times is stonewalling, all of which seem obvious to me. I don't know about other readers, but it's this casual attitude, the inside-dealing I see both within the press and with the people they cover that makes me unenthusiastic for ideas meant to "save" them. I'm more into reformation. I want a new kind of journalism that sees incidents like this as bugs to fix. An opportunity to make journalism even more excellent, instead of ever more mediocre.
Topics include: Maureen Dowd of course, the Church of the Savvy, One year of Twitter for Jay. Why is user interface so damned hard? 10 years since Edit This Page. And an inspired choice for Inspiration of the week, Elvis Costello's recording of Nick Lowe's classic What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love and Understanding.
One of the best Reboots yet, imho.
PS: As usual subscribe in your podcatcher or iTunes.
5/24/09; 11:51:46 PM
What are reading lists?
First an update on today's earlier blog post. Apparently Google Reader does not support reading lists. I think when I asked the question, the 140-character limit on Twitter made it impossible for an accurate answer.
No matter what, maybe it would be a good idea now to try to give a complete technical explanation of what a reading list is.
1. There are many kinds of "feed consumer" apps, all of them are capable of supporting reading lists, not just feed readers or aggregators. In the rest of this piece I'll use the shorthand "FC" to refer to a feed consumer app.
2. When you subscribe to a feed you're telling the FC that you want it to periodically read the contents of that feed and somehow act on the new items in the feed.
3. A reading list contains a set of feeds. The format of a reading list is exactly the same as the OPML-based subscription list format that's supported by many FCs.
4. When a FC subscribes to a readling list it does not import the feeds.
5. When the FC checks for updates, it checks for new items in the feeds in the reading list. Therefore it must keep a record of the feeds in the reading lists it is subscribed to.
6. If a new feed appears in the reading list, it does whatever it does for a new feed. Many FCs will consider all the items in the feed as "old" the first time the feed is read, esp if it's a podcatcher.
7. If a feed that was in the reading list has been removed, then the feed is not read and all record of the feed is erased from FC database, with the following exception. If a feed appears in two or more reading lists, a reference count must be maintained, and the feed is erased only when the reference count goes to zero.
8. Obviously the user can subscribe to as many reading lists as he or she likes.
9. The behavior I've described is how the NewsRiver aggregator that runs in the OPML Editor works. I suppose it's possible that other FCs work differently. If so, it would be great to hear about them.
I think that pretty much covers it.
5/24/09; 4:44:08 PM
Google's incomplete support of reading lists
Kevin Marks, who works at Google, tells anyone who will listen that Google Reader has a new feature that's exactly like reading lists, and that's a good thing -- because they are powerful and useful, and likely a key to making news reading work for more people.
Reading lists allow you to delegate subscription to feeds to experts. So for example, I could let Lance Knobel, an economist who I trust, choose the feeds I follow in his area of expertise. That way, when a new feed comes along, instead of sending me an email saying "Hey Dave you might want to subscribe to this feed" he can do it for me simply by adding it to his reading list.
Similarly, if a feed is no longer being updated, when Lance unsubs from it, so will I, automatically.
You can think of reading lists as a mutual fund of feeds. Busy people don't have time to research which feeds to follow and unfollow, so they delegate that to experts.
Another application -- the BBC has a large number of feeds, some for special events like the Olympics or elections. They could have a reading list for all their feeds, and when one falls off, they'd remove it, and when a new one comes on, they could add it.
It's an obvious extension to RSS, and to the ability to import and export OPML subscription lists. You can subscribe to a list of feeds in addition to individual feeds.
Now I'd love to provide reading lists for users of Google Reader, but I can't because they're using an incompatible format. This is absolutely the wrong thing to do. When asked to explain why, Marks gives a nonsense answer about the OPML Editor, which this has nothing to do with. It's always a shame when technologists, who have to answer precisely to the computer, use political spin when talking to users.
Further, if Google plans to challenge Twitter, as I've said I hope they do -- they will not get my support if they respond to Twitter's locked trunk with their own locked trunk. They must use RSS, OPML, Atom, everything they can find that there is even a bit of consensus for, including Twitter's API. They must achieve a remarkable level of compatibility to make the barrier to entry as low as it possibly can be and to send a signal that they just want to be a player in the market, not the dominator of the market.
Google's attitude in this area has been very unfortunate -- they've tended to be incompatible with existing formats whenever they can get away with it.
If Google had not invented a new format for reading lists, this would be a very different post. I'd be offering some reading lists of my own for their users to subscribe to, and encouraging my colleagues to do the same. I'd have written a howto that shows people what they need to do to create a reading list for Google Reader if they don't use Google Reader.
It's bad strategy to be gratuitously incompatible. It's also bad manners. Google was given a market for their reader built on open formats. They ought not consume that open-ness, they ought to at least preserve it, if not enhance it.
However, I will sing their praises if they fix their implementation to use the same format we use for their implementation of reading lists. If not, we'll wait to see what their efforts to compete with Twitter look like.
5/24/09; 11:24:00 AM
Twitter as coral reef, cont'd
I've been feverishly experimenting some new ideas this week, the most interesting of which is a mashup between Twitter and Disqus.
This should make Fred Wilson happy, since he is an investor in both companies. But that's not why I did it.
Here's why I did it. The 140-character limit is driving me crazy.
I need a place to express ideas that just don't fit into 140.
There are some, believe it or not.
So here's an example. Early this morning Mike Arrington posted a teaser on his exclusive personal Twitter account. "Get ready for a very, very big news day." Well, Mike ought to know, everyone's telling him stuff they tell no one else.
So I wanted to post a comment asking What's up? What does everyone think this means.
Note the URL. Cute, huh? It's a pre-shortened url. No need to push it through any of the commercial shorteners. New trend started by my friend Andrew Baron with his new superhot beta startup mag.ma.
Anyway. So far there are 11 comments with some very interesting theories about what's up. If nothing else, it's an inventory of ideas out there that people are expecting as announcements any day now. Google's realtime search engine (would be great if it supported RSS both ways and weblogs.com compatible pinging). Microsoft's new search engine Bing (for which expectations are really low, so it should be easy for them to impress). And on and on...
Add your own two cents.
And my next sub-project is to create a bookmarklet that makes it super-easy for anyone to start a comment thread on any Twitter post they like.
So Fred, whatcha think?
PS: Proof again that Twitter is the great coral reef of the latter part of this decade. It's so easy to attach something to it, that might turn into a branch or perhaps an entirely new species!
PPS: I'm working my way through James Burke's fantastic series Connections. Just watched episode 4, which ends with the beginnings of the modern computer. Hollerith, who invented the famous card that many people used to program Fortran and Basic (such as yours truly) decided to make them the same size as the dollar bill of the day. Because there was already so much machinery that existed to process them. Oh yeah. That's the kind of tech I love. Build on what's out there. More coral-reef thinking! Yehi.
Update: The big announcement is Google Wave. How much you want to bet in 5 years it'll be as famous as OpenDoc is today.
5/28/09; 11:03:28 AM
Discussions in Twitter, day 2
Yesterday I soft-launched a little project I'm working on called twdsc.us. Today the service gets a little more real, because now you can create discussions around tweets too, and not just your own tweets, anyone's. In other words, this could get interesting.
For example, I just started a small discussion around a post by WNYC's Brian Lehrer. Apparently they had a power outage, and that's interfering with all kinds of things, including their ability to post a podcast. Maybe someone in the community can help.
And if you look in the right margin of that page, you'll see a very brief HowTo explaining how to create your own discussion pages. If you have any questions, post them here, and I'll build how this blog post and turn it into documentation.
PS: A million thanks to the guys at Disqus who provide a wonderful and flexible tool, and support it like pros.
5/29/09; 12:32:21 PM
Rebooting the News 1-10
A lot of change is coming in the Rebooting The News podcast series.
The last episode was so good, it seemed a shame there wasn't a site specifically for the podcast. So I bought a domain and spent a couple of days creating a site for it. (Along the way creating some interesting new desktop software for managing podcasts.)
So if you've missed any episodes, or would just like to have a complete collection through last week, please go get it. BitTorrent is such a rational way to distribute content, and it's under attack by the entertainment industry. This is a perfect non-infringing application of BT, Jay and I want you to have our recordings, so go get em!
If you're new to BitTorrent, it's really easy. On the Mac, I recommend Transmission and on Windows, I use uTorrent. Just follow the instructions on the site to install, then click on the mininova.org link above and click on OK to the prompts that appear. It may take an hour or two to get all 135MB, so just leave it running in the background. Once it's finished, leave it running a little longer so that the next people can download it from you. It's a peer-to-peer system.
And don't worry -- I'm allowed to do this -- I created the podcasts (along with Jay).
5/30/09; 1:25:01 PM
A question for journalists
I asked a question on Twitter: "An example of a non-monetary gift you couldn't accept from a company you cover? Why?"
Some of the answers...
Michael Calore: "copy of shrink-wrapped software i didn't review, comp tickets to a show/concert sponsored by a company i write about often"
Janet Ginsburg: "at businessweek (a while back) strong rule re no gifts. kept things clean. sm conf swag (pens, bags) but that's it."
Doug Levy: "just as physicians are inadvertently biased by trinkets like drug co pens, reporters need to vigorously avoid potential bias."
Freda Moon: "I was taught to accept no gifts from sources. None. Not tickets. Not a meal. Not even a cup of coffee. That last one can be hard."
Megan Taylor: "Tickets to sporting events. Reporters are supposed to be objective and accepting gifts compromises that."
There seems to be a consensus here.
Now a followup question.
Can you accept placement on Twitter's Suggested Users List if you are a journalist who covers Twitter?
A theme from last week continues this week: Bug catching as a key practice in a re-booted system of news. Jay unfolds an example from this week: the AP's coverage of the Twitter TV show.
The TechGuardian asks How much is it worth to be one of Twitter's suggested users?
Dave discusses BitTorrent and why he put RTN 1-10 on it.
CheckBox News, Dave's mock-up of a re-booted user interface for television news where you can uncheck the streams you don't want and check the ones you do, and program your TV set that way.
For sources of inspiration (it's his turn) Dave returned to three: James Burke's public television series Connections, about the history of science and technology (inventions are usually the result of a synthesis of things created by earlier inventors); the Cluetrain Manifesto (ten years old and great); and VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers-- the demo for which was almost a spiritual experience. With a response from Jay about the common thread: distributing power outward from the insiders to the users.
Two views of the announcement this week that the New York Times had hired a social media editor, Jennifer Preston.
Dave argues that the great news organizations should be the operators and originators of systems like Twitter. It's not too late, but soon it will be, he warns.
We close with a short reading from Barbara Ehrenreich's commencement speech to the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. "A recession won't stop us. A dying industry won't stop us. Even poverty won't stop us because we are all on a mission here."
6/1/09; 10:25:49 AM
How Twitter is not simple
Early-on in the life of Twitter I tried to figure out how it works behind the user interface, and was told I couldn't, that it was very complex, and I shouldn't try. This bothered me then, and it bothers me even more now. After all, I'm an experienced software engineer, with a number of products under my belt, some quite complex. If I can't understand it, who can? And if they say I can't, do they?
We know the networks we're building on Twitter are very fragile things, but they're more fragile than most users have been willing to comprehend, because we can't find out how it works. We have to trust that the company knows, and that they will continue to operate it as they have in the past. However we don't have any right to that service, and if they restricted it or took it away we would have no recourse.
Of course it would be a disaster for them as a company, but such disasters have happened before and they certainly will happen again. And what do we actually know about the people who run Twitter? Not all that much. They don't tweet a lot, and when they do, they tend to be short messages, and often cryptic.
So while Twitter is useful and fascinating, even intriguing, is it simple?
It it not simple.
6/2/09; 11:50:15 AM
Who do the people of the NY Times follow on Twitter?
Yesterday I posted the results of a study of who the people who work at Twitter follow on Twitter. This is important because it is the source of their Suggested Users List, which in turn determines who new users will follow. People and organizations who are placed on this list see a substantial surge in followers, often in the hundreds of thousands. How much this is worth was the subject of a recent Guardian story.
It was easy for me to adapt the crawler to also generate a table for the people of the NY Times. I don't know exactly why this is interesting, but it seems people are curious to know if they make it onto the radar of the people at the Times.
If there's continuing interest I'll refresh both these tables from time to time.
6/2/09; 11:31:44 AM
Why simplicity matters
Jay asked, in a recent RTN podcast, why simplicity is so important. I don't think I had ever been asked this question, and it had been a long time since I considered any other way, so I didn't have an answer prepared. I fumbled.
It has bothered me ever since, but not as a front-burner thing -- I still accept the value of simplicity as a given. As I build layers of software, the simpler I make each layer, the higher I can build. If you don't design to hide complexity behind interfaces, you get overwhelmed by the complexity sooner, and your project can't do as much. Early in my career I often scrapped multiple levels and went down to the roots and rebuilt. Once I understood what the higher levels looked like, it exposed deficiencies in the lower levels. Reworking the lower levels allowed me to build higher. (It happens in other technologies too. For example, the design of office buildings changed radically once elevators had been invented.)
The ultimate interface is where you pass off to another user, and a whole new human brain comes into it. As a designer, I try to present a conceptual model to the user that's as simple and predictable as possible. This allows them to focus on their work without mine getting in their way. In the movies they call this "suspension of disbelief." The user gets so wrapped up in the story they forget it's a movie. It starts feeling like life. Even so, I like to create things that can be explored beneath the surface. If you want to "lift the hood" I know you'll see a puzzle, but I hope it's approachable.
As I discussed in this week's RTN, I'm working my way through Season 1 of James Burke's Connections series. It aired on PBS in 1978. Yesterday I watched the final episode in the series. It was even more fascinating than the previous nine. Its message is so important that it's worth taking time away from the innovations of our day and to talk about the process of innovation itself, and why it's dangerous. Yes, that's right -- dangerous. I've known this all along, and I've tried to publish warnings, but Burke does it with a breadth I've never approached.
There was a time, not too long ago, when anyone who wanted to could understand any invention that our lives depended on. Look around and look past the computer monitors and hard drives. Look at a door, for example, a hinge, a door knob, the door itself. All of this technology is transparently simple, and at one time, not that long ago, it was leading edge. I suppose paint might be hard to understand, but if you really wanted to understand how it was made, you could. It might take some time, and you would have to talk to an expert or read a book, but it wouldn't take much time to understand it.
But why bother understanding it? Burke asks. Isn't it enough to just use it and enjoy it and let it sustain your life? Yes, it is, until you have to make a decision about it. Or until it fails.
If you had asked me a year ago if we would live to see the financial system melt down, I would say yes, it's the one thing I'm most scared of. Like many others, I listened to experts talk about the aftermath of the collapse, reporters from famous newspapers, economists, radio show hosts. One thing I heard over and over was that no one actually understood how the system worked. Yet we had built our economic system, our lives, on it. Let me repeat that so it sinks in. No one understood how it worked.
It's only in its unraveling that we're learning how our economy works.
But that's far from the only system that no one understands.
Think about all the technology you depend on to live that you don't understand, and ask yourself if anyone understands it.
What if you went to the ATM and all your money was gone? What if everyone went to the ATM and all their money was gone? Think it can't happen? It did happen in post-Katrina New Orleans.
That's just one vector. Think about food supply, sewage treatment, water, transportation, education, law enforcement, health care, defense. We're making decisions about all these things every day whether we know it or not, and like the financial system, some people understand parts of these systems, but it's likely that no one understands the whole thing.
At the end of the series Burke lays out a set of choices we faced in the late 70s. We could continue along as we have been through all of history, or we could change course. It's now 30 years later and we didn't change course, and it seems we're not likely to. But if you're an innovator, you have a choice. You can create new things with an emphasis on being understandable to the people who use them, not just at the surface level, but under the hood too. It often takes more work to make it hard to understand. But even if it takes more work, it's worth doing it simply, helping create the sense that technology is understandable, because imho that's the key to moving forward in a way that might just work.
Update: Example of perfect simplicity. View Source in web browsers.
6/2/09; 9:46:42 AM
Older people get to me too
Just read a wonderful post by Jackie Danicki, about how she chokes up in the presence of older people. Me too. I have tears streaming down my face as I read her piece, as I write this one, as I experience the memories it evokes for me.
A few weeks ago I was walking in my neighborhood in Berkeley, a hot day, and I came up behind an old man, all bundled up, walking slowly. The sidewalk was narrow, so I walked around him, and as I passed I said, gently "Excuse me." He jumped, startled and said reflexively -- "I'm sorry." In an instant I felt protective and sorry I hadn't found some other way to handle this. I did the best I could, and said something like Oh no, smiled and continued my pace.
He was skinny and fragile, exposed and vulnerable, and reminded me of my father, who will turn 80 this month. I felt protective for this man as I would if he were my own family. And was instantly reminded of something my father says often, that's worth remembering: Growing old isn't for sissies.
No doubt. But we, whose bodies still work, more or less, as they were designed to, can easily overlook that in every old body is a person who remembers well what it was like to be young. We are at a disadvantage, we don't know their experience, we get little inklings of it when we get sick, but we expect we'll get better. At some point, you no longer have that to depend on, and the quality of life must change.
Why do old people reach my heart this way? It could be their courage, or the inner strength it takes to compensate for the weak body. I don't know why they get to me this way. But they do.
6/4/09; 1:13:07 AM
Greetings to Chinese bloggers!
Twenty years ago today -- the Tiananmen Square Uprising in China. There were no blogs that day, but things have certainly changed.
Now so many blogs and social media sites are blocked in China.
Here's a tool that helps you determine if your site is blocked.
If you discover anything interesting, feel free to report in a comment here.
6/3/09; 9:10:30 PM
Suggested User List, reloaded
When the Guardian ran a piece over the weekend on the Suggested User List, my interest, and others' re-stoked. Then I got an idea from Sarah Delman, pondered it, wrote some code, published the results. Now we know more about the source of the SUL. More back and forth, some of it heated, then it comes together for me -- we lack leadership. I can't provide it, I'm not trying to. I'm trying to be an provocateur, a role I often cast myself into.
As I've said before, I believe Twitter is a chapter in a story that's been playing out for a long time. It's both the best news system and the worst. No pictures, no video, limited metadata, and it has an increasingly confining 140-character limit. But it connects people like no system before has. It's both the backroom for journalism and the delivery mechanism. A lot of power there. But imho it's not the last word.
The remaining news organizations will move onto twitter-like systems over the next few years. The news system of the future is electronic and real-time. The stakes are huge now. If I were in their shoes, I'd be thinking very hard about how I want these systems to evolve as environments for journalism. I'd stop worrying about squeezing Google for a handout and start thinking about how to grab some of the PE-ratio for myself.
But the lions of the news industry lack imagination and chutzpah. Where are the strategists, the bizdev people of the news industry? They're plotting paywalls, when they should be creating and linking new conduits with graphics, sound and movies.
The business model? The same one that served Google in its early years. People are so excited about what you're doing that they pour cash all over you.
The SUL is a small piece of the big picture, but it's an important one. For all the reasons I've said. No need to repeat it. Now I'm going to let everyone else worry about this for a while.
6/3/09; 10:13:50 AM
Twitter clients could help with backup
I don't know to what extent Twitter archives my posts. For example, here's a blog post from January of this year. It links to a tweet, which is still there. Not sure if it keeps around older stuff, or how I would browse them if I wanted to see what I had written. The search command in Twitter stops at a certain point, exactly where that is -- I don't think anyone knows.
Uncertainty about what's backed up is a sure sign of a problem with backups.
Because I want a record of whatever I post to Twitter, I wrote an app that archives all my posts and those of people I follow. It's a very easy bit of code to write, since Twitter has an API call that returns all the recent tweets of all the people I follow, every client has to make this call regularly, so it has to be efficient, on both ends; and it is. I have shared the code, anyone can download it for free. It runs in the OPML Editor. But I think more developers should add this to their Twitter clients as a service to their users, as a competitive advantage, and as a way of making the work we do safer.
Right now we're all running without a safety net. Or more accurately, only Twitter knows how much of a safety net we have. And as we saw in the financial meltdown, it's not wise to assume that people we depend on to understand how complex systems work actually understand how they work.
In software, it's always a good idea to back up your work. And the people who make the popular Twitter clients could do a lot to help us there.
Discussion:
1. Some environments allow apps to write to local disks, and others don't. I don't know if Air, the platform many of the Twitter clients run on, allows this. If so, then I recommend that the clients simply maintain a calendar-structured folder of XML files containing each days' tweets, one file for each user. If not, then the backup has to be maintained in the cloud.
2. The size of these files is negligable in the age of MP3 and AVI. Text files are tiny and disks are relatively huge. Size isn't an issue.
3. Neither is performance. The file systems of today's computers are incredibly good at saving small text files.
4. It might add a little complexity to the Prefs user interface. At least it would require a panel that allows the user to choose a folder, and to enable or disable the feature. I would have it enabled by default.
5. You might want to allow the user to save his or her backup in Amazon S3 or to use FTP to upload to another server. Again, the overhead is negligable. I have the software running on my desktop system in the background. It's just an ordinary iMac. I don't notice any delays. Honestly.
6. What format to use? The simplest choice would be to use the XML-based format that Twitter itself uses. Other choices include RSS, Atom, OPML, or something of your own invention. I think RSS is the most rational choice, but I used OPML. I'm beginning to think that was a mistake, though I had good reasons for that choice at the time.
7. I also dereference short URLs and store both the long and short version. Wouldn't want to go to all the trouble of backing up the tweets only to find out the URLs broke because tinyurl (or whatever) went away.
8. The most basic reason to do this is backup, and that was the original motivation in my suggestion, in the summer of 2008. I suggested to the client vendors I could reach that they support RSS-based backup. That way, when Twitter went down -- as it was doing regularly then -- their users would not go down. But then Twitter started becoming more reliable so the urgency of this decreased
9. However, storing user backups first on the desktop, then in the cloud, those are the first steps towards an open, low-tech, simple form of federation that doesn't depend on a central node. If for no other reason, we as a community, should start down that road, asap. Murphy's Law says that at some point we will wish we had.
10. I'm sure there are other considerations, please post comments if you think of them, and I'll add to this list as I think of them.
6/4/09; 10:09:13 AM
Netbooks are great XP machines
Just tweeted: "Microsoft's problem, they employ billions of dollars worth of engineers who produce stuff no one wants."
Short version of this post: Microsoft -- Let the netbook guys put whatever they want to in the box, and sell them XP Home for a reasonable price and stop trying to tell us we have to use Vista because people don't want to.
Longer version.
Netbooks are great Windows machines. I remember seeing a $600 pricetag on an Asus last year and thinking "Geez that's cheap!" so I bought one. Now it seems expensive. Same computer now is $280. That's even cheaper. So cool. And it runs Windows XP Home so I can run my software on it. Now I'm totally uninterested in buying an iPhone-like laptop, which Apple almost surely will want to sell me.
You'd think that would be great news for Microsoft! You'd think they'd be running ads on TV saying "Holy Shit People Like Our Stuff Now Man That's So Fucking Cool."
But you'd be wrong.
Because. Because. Well. You tell me why they're not super excited about this. Steve? Ray?
As a user, I'm happy as can be. I love this new stuff. And I'll tell you what. It's found money for them, whatever they get, because I wasn't ever going to buy a Microsoft product. I'm amazed that I like XP. But only because it runs on these coool new netbook computers.
And the netbook market is incredibly competitive. They keep dropping the prices and they want to add features, but Microsoft won't let them. If they add more features, they say, they have to put Vista on the computer. People don't want Vista. And Microsoft must be worried they don't want Windows 7 either.
That's their problem, not mine. Their job is to create software people want.
I recorded a brief podcast about this, but if you've read this post you don't need to listen to it. You've already heard what I have to say.
XP is cool. Sell it and be proud. Create products people want, and all is good. Create products people don't want, go back to the drawing board or find another line of work.
6/7/09; 4:47:16 PM
My Mifi
Just tweeted: "mifi is a battery operated wifi router that fits in your pocket and connects to the net via cellular."
Since I already had a pretty good service plan from Sprint, and switching would be quite expensive, I just got the Sprint version and so far it works really well.
Here's a picture of the Mifi router next to a DVD to give you an idea of how small it is. It really fits in your pocket and runs for hours on battery. Not sure exactly how many hours.
And here it's shown with the Cradlepoint router and EVDO modem it replaced. A fragile bit of tech that worked well, but the new version is much cooler.
Ultimately the Mifi router will be replaced by software running on my iPhone, when Apple and AT&T decide to let us do that. It's probably a question of how much traffic the AT&T cell network can bear. In the meantime the Sprint system seems pretty good.
6/7/09; 4:40:27 PM
How newspapers ought to think of Twitter
Just realized something in a new way.
I've been posting links to new blog posts on Twitter since I started using it two years ago. It's just a natural thing, another step in the publishing process. You can see very clearly where it fits in by looking at the button-bar in my editing window.
Here's the process.
Step 1. Write the initial draft. Organize. Edit.
Step 2. Save. This publishes the piece to scripting.com, both on the home page, and on its own story page. I repeat this step until I'm ready to have the story appear in the RSS feed. (I don't mind if readers see the interim versions, I imagine it's somewhat interesting, if not it doesn't seem to do much harm.)
Step 3. Build RSS. I know that many RSS clients will only read an item once, so I wait to rebuild the RSS that includes the new piece until it's pretty much finished. I might still add some pictures, or links or tweak up some wording, but by the time it goes out in the feed, it's not likely to change much.
Step 4. Twit-It posts the link to Twitter. I get to edit the link text before it goes out, but it does the work of creating a short URL and smashing it together with the headline before presenting it to me in a dialog.
This last step is relatively new, but its import is starting to settle in. In a real way a story isn't published until I've pushed it through Twitter. I expect over time, as more systems hook into Twitter, it will come to mean more. Of course I will, as long as Twitter has a 140-character limit, publish everything on the web and in RSS. This article so far has 2291 characters, or 16 tweets.
Another way of saying the same thing is that Twitter has become the newspaper of record. In a few years what's left of the news industry will call Twitter a parasite and demand royalties. Too bad they don't see this coming, and create an even better news system built around the principles of Twitter and instead of asking for alms they'd get a piece of the PE.
Sidebar to the Twitter bizdev people: Wish I had upside in Twitter, so I could be motivated to make these things work in your company's product. But I'm a greedy capitalist just like you, and with my "stock" in Twitter diminishing in value every day (through dilution), I have to look elsewhere for my upside. You might think of this as a challenge or a puzzle, figure out how to incentivize your users to make you even richer.
6/7/09; 10:21:36 AM
Before the storm
Tomorrow is another big Apple announcement day, and most people expect there to be a new iPhone. Maybe there will be more. But one thing that's likely to come is more of Apple's positioning relative to netbooks. And more sniffing from people who love Macs about how inadequate the current crop are.
I'm typing this blog post on a big iMac running Leopard. I like my Macs, but I also own three netbooks. One I bought early, a 901, it cost $600, sells for $280 now. I took it to the DNC in Denver, and it made a huge difference, blogging in tight spaces and often far away from a power outlet. Then I have a $450 H-series that runs Linux, and the workhorse another H-series that I bought for $350. See what's going on? I'm getting more for less.
People who don't think these are great computers must not have a sense of history. My first personal computer, purchased in 1979, cost $10,000, had two small floppy drives, 64K of memory and ran a very bare-bones OS. It weighed as much as a dorm room refrigerator, and generated as much heat as a dorm room hot plate. Yet it was a marvel -- a computer of my own, in my living room. Amazing.
At the time I would have told you that someday we'd have computers like the EeePC that weigh as much as a small textbook and run on batteries for 6 hours. I might have guessed they'd be as cheap as they are, but it's one thing to predict they'd be here someday, and another to hold one in your hand, to take it with you everywhere. These are machines that can be stamped out in the millions, they're Everyman computers. Yes, Macs are great, but they're great in different ways. People who sniff at the netbooks are missing something important.
6/7/09; 9:48:00 AM
Rebooting The News podcast #12
The latest Jay/Dave podcast, recorded last night at 7PM Pacific.
A little glimpse inside the news industry's mind: the recent recommendations of the American Press Institute. Charge for news, go after the aggregators, police fair use, look to consumers because the advertiser doesn't pay the bills anymore. A suicide pact, Dan Conover says.
The New York Times has a neighborhood blogging experiment, The Local. This week it extended an invitation to users: be the journalist. "Here is your first assignment: We're looking for someone to go to the 88th Precinct Community Council meeting next Wednesday, the 10th."
Three interlocking elements of a new system. The start of our kit for re-booting the news.
1. The pro-am invitation: help The Local cover Ft. Greene. Help us investigate.
2. Posted guidelines: how to cover a meeting for The Local; how to contribute to Chicago Now.
3. Assignment desk: an organized online list of everything we would cover if we had complete coverage of...
The launch and logic of inberkeley.com, a new local news blog that Dave and Lance Knobel have started. "It may not end up being the Berkeley blog. It may be the other thing that starts because people hate what we're doing."
The coral reef method of getting things done online. The Wikipedia stub. Their equivalent in news.
Sources of inspiration (Jay's turn this week.) Andrew Leonard's 1999 article in Salon, Open-source journalism. "This vision is alive."
6/8/09; 11:14:52 AM
In Berkeley
Over the weekend I started a new site with my longtime friend and fellow Berkeleyite, Lance Knobel. The site arose out of a dozen conversations with friends and neighbors. "Does Berkeley have a site that's just about Berkeley?" The answer, always: "I wish there was one." Lately the conversations have been more urgent. Why don't we get off our butts and start one already.
We all agree, we hope, that Berkeley is a great place, but it means different things to everyone who lives here. To some it's a great university town. To others it's a place to live, or a place to work. To others it's a cultural center. There's a huge freeway that passes through town, and a train line that goes to Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Seattle, Canada, probably everywhere else in the country. We have poverty and wealth. A new shopping district and an old one. Manufacturing, a winery, car dealers, biotech and computer firms. Some of the best public transit in the world. We have artists, scientists, great thinkers, journalists, many of the smartest people on the planet are our neighbors. We voted for Obama but we saw some McCain signs on front lawns. We have strong opinions, but we also value tolerance.
For me, Berkeley is a refuge -- it's a place to live because you have to live somewhere. I tried a lot of places. I spent 20-plus years in Silicon Valley, it was the right place for me when I was an ambitious young man determined to prove his worth. I liked living in Cambridge, the people were great, the intellectual life fantastic, but it was cold. I liked Seattle, but people worked so hard. I loved the beach in Florida, and the people were nice, but their politics were too different from mine.
I tried living on the road, but I needed a permanent place to sleep, write, and a consistent set of friends to hang with day in and day out. I could have had that in a variety of places but I chose Berkeley because it's beautiful, the politics are a good match (not in the cliche sense that rightwingers think) and the people who live here are intelligent, friendly, not pretentious and they don't work too hard, as a rule, so they have time to play.
Tom Hunt, a longtime Berkeley resident said it well. If you take out the university, Berkeley is a small place. The day he said it I ran into three people on the street who I knew on my daily walk. But over time I've given it thought and realize that it's not a small place, but it feels that way, it's approachable.
Now there are things not to like about Berkeley. And I suppose each of us has our own list. For me, it's the black hole that downtown is. I don't like going there. I don't understand why a great city like Berkeley doesn't have a thriving and bustling downtown. With the great public transit and the world-class university, located in the middle of one of the most dynamic metropolitan areas of the world, why isn't the downtown a place more people want to come to, not just from within Berkeley but from all around the Bay Area, the state, the country, the world?
To me, having lived here only three years, most of what I know about Berkeley is how much I don't know about Berkeley. But having a blank page to fill in is one of my favorite things. With my good buddy Lance, and hopefully with a lot of help from friends in and around this great place, I hope InBerkeley.com will become a place to learn and share and grow a greater Berkeley.
6/9/09; 4:41:01 PM
URL-shorteners go Amazon
When we started bit.ly, about a year ago, I had a very strong idea of how we'd make money with it. Unfortunately bit.ly never got there. Now a couple of new shorteners are doing it, so I want to tell the story.
Like a lot of other developers I'm hooked on Amazon. It started with their storage system, S3. Now I use EC2, and hope to find an application for SimpleBase. I'm using many of the other smaller features of their cloud. It's great stuff.
However, there are a couple of components I'd like to see added to Amazon's cloud.
1. Internet-level notification. I'd really like them to offer the basic notification facilities of Twitter. See this piece that says that like it or not Twitter is becoming an essential part of the infrastructure. It's true. We need them to have competition, and it should come from Amazon, and many other places.
2. URL-shorteners. They're a fact of life. But I should have my own shortener at my own domain, so I control the future of the URLs. That way if the service I use should go down, I could switch to another. I also want to generate stats from the URLS.
Bit.ly was supposed to do #2. My plan for the developers went like this. When you have a question how to do something, do it the way Amazon does it. I want the API to be like theirs, the docs, and most important -- the pricing.
If Amazon did a URL-shortener, they would charge by the URL, and they would charge for each access. The prices would be very low, but they would add up. The same way they do it for S3 and EC2. Bit.ly was to be the URL-shortener that Amazon would have made.
Now today I learned of two URL-shorteners that are offering to host domains for you. One charges a flat rate of $49 per year and is available today. Another promises to do it for free, but it's available soon.
Watch this area closely, it's important.
6/9/09; 4:16:39 PM
Help I'm trapped inside the Tumblr API
There's something I'm not getting here.
A few weeks ago I tried to get a very simple script working with the Tumblr API. I kept getting a return value that said the API was down. I waited and waited for it to come back up before finally throwing my hands up in frustration. I tried everything I could think of. Turns out this was an error in the proxy server, the API was still up. Tried some more still couldn't get it to work.
Today I started fresh. Got the same result. Here's the URL that I'm POSTing to. (The password is xxx'd out.)
I really would like to get past this, so if anyone has working code could you check to see what I'm doing wrong. TIA.
Update: Finally got it working. The params had to be in the body of the HTTP request, and I had the wrong content type on the request. Their messages could use improvement, they sent me down the wrong path, and a page with some examples would also have saved time and embarassment (I don't mind the embarassment, but I do mind losing all that time.)
6/9/09; 1:26:37 PM
3 Twitter apps you can't live without?
TechCrunch used to do an annual list of Web 2.0 services they couldn't live without. The list wasn't about which apps are cool, but which ones are so useful that you build your online life around them. Products that becomes mainstays, apps you use all the time, tools that would cause panic if they went away.
Examples of Web 2.0 services I can't live without: Flickr, GMail, Twitter, Kayak, (though it pains me to say this) TechMeme, FriendFeed, Mininova, Amazon. I'm sure I'll think of others. But that's about Web 2.0, today I'm asking a different question.
Are there any Twitter apps that you couldn't live without? If so, what are they?
I'm fairly sure most of the apps will be clients, tools that read and post to Twitter from the desktop that in some way work around a limit of the Twitter web app. Tweetie is very popular. Seesmic, TweetDeck, the curiously named Destroy Twitter.
What are the others?
6/9/09; 10:19:20 AM
InBerkeley on Twitter
Latest news -- we were about to get a Charles Hotel, run by the same people who run the Charles in Cambridge -- a truly classy hotel (a great place to wait out a snow storm). At the same time I found out about it, I found it's been cancelled. Oy! It's almost too much to bear.
Lots of new posts on InBerkeley and now you can follow us on Twitter, and never miss an update. I'm having so much fun with this project.
I just posted some pictures from my evening walk. Lately we've been showing newly vacant storefronts. In this walk I show two recently empty stores that have new businesses. One a new restaurant and the other new Internet cafe. Berkeley has plenty of both, but imho there's always room for more. Both are at the intersection of Cedar and Shattuck.
Everyone should start a hyperlocal site. It'll give you fresh eyes for: 1. Blogging and 2. The place you live.
6/11/09; 11:58:00 PM
How to modify RSS
From time to time I get requests from developers who want to modify RSS so it can do something that wasn't forseen when the spec was frozen in 2002. Here's what I wrote to a developer who asked about that today (the specifics are xxx'd out).
Hi xxx -- I think it's a great idea to integrate xxx and RSS.
However.. I don't know enough about xxx to understand the substance of what you want to do.
You can add all the information you want to a feed by defining a namespace or by creating a new format called something other than RSS that shares its properties and adds anything you want, or for that matter, changes anything you want.
RSS 2.0 has been frozen since 2002, and that's absolute. It was necessary to do that to keep it from becoming a moving target. Lots of people had ideas for adapting RSS to their own projects, and that's supported through the two mechanisms I outlined above.
Dave
6/11/09; 3:38:40 PM
The Facebook Saturday night masacree
I admit to being confused by the event that Facebook has planned for Saturday Friday.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald: "At 2PM on Saturday, the social networking site will allow members to register their own user names to make it easier for others to find their pages."
That's 9PM Saturday Friday here in Calif, btw.
What does it mean? Well, I'm sure I won't get dave or davew and there's a fair chance another davewiner will beat me to it. That means I'll have to go for one of my nicknames.
Why don't I have a chance at dave? Well, they're doing the usual Silicon Valley user generated content thing -- playing favorites. According to TechCrunch they're favoring journalists they "work with." Oy. Should we read that as "Journalists who write stories we like?" As if journalists need another reason for readers not to trust them.
But the thing that strikes me as weirdest of all is that after years of insisting that people only use their real names on Facebook, they've now set up a system where it will be virtually impossible for most people to do that, even if they want to.
If I cared more about Facebook, I'd have more to say about this.
I wish this period of the Internet would end, it's so exactly like AOL. I've seen this show before, I know how it ends. Only this time there won't be a Time-Warner to cash them out.
PPS: For some reason Zuckerberg seems like a modern-day P.T. Barnum. You and me, we're either trained seals (the reporters) or fleas (users) in his three-ring circus.
6/11/09; 10:10:55 AM
The end of analog
Still getting a few analog stations.
6/12/09; 9:46:17 PM
An end to the endless cycle?
An interesting discussion over on FriendFeed, spawned from a series of comments I made yesterday on Twitter about the cyclic relationship between the tech press, the tech industry and the users. I think this time around the loop things may change for good, the cycle may just break.
John Blossom: "Journalists stay in business by cultivating relationships with sources - that's a pretty universal fact, not just with the tech press. It's always a dance to avoid getting too close and cushy for the sake of something less than pure motivations. In today's environment, though, the multiplicity of online channels in any market segment in conjunction with purely social media buffers us against this kind of corruption. As soon as someone spoons too lovingly for something they get outed."
My response: "John, that's why blogging took off -- because the tech press was so rotten with the vendors, they'd never say anything negative about them. So when you wanted to find out if a product really worked, you'd do what we do now -- listen to other users. Amazon built an empire on that idea. Of all the Web 2.0 companies they may be the only ones who get that the press doesn't control what users know anymore, that the users are getting it for themselves."
The cycle of users taking control of the tech industry and press goes back a long, long way. My first experience was in the late 70s, as a grad student in comp sci. I'd go to the student library, a quiet reading room where they left copies of the computer industry publications. I remember leafing through them thinking that this stuff seemed overly complex and irrelevant. When my generation went out into the world, we started over. That's the cycle.
It has always seemed possible to me that a company could make the transition from one generation to the next without getting caught in the gears, but I've yet to see it happen. Maybe the closest is Apple, but they went through hell between the advent of the web which overturned a lot of their assumptions and the rebirth of Apple under Steve Jobs 2.0.
These days the press can reform itself very quickly because the printing presses are very cheap. It cost News.com millions of dollars to start up in the 90s. TechCrunch started four years ago with nothing but a Wordpress installation and an entrepreneur with a little extra time. So when the press gets too cozy with industry, the next layer of the press forms in an instant. When users want to know if the products really work they just inform each other.
BTW, much of the press now calls themselves bloggers. They can do that, no one owns the trademark. But that doesn't mean they are immune to being routed around by bloggers. It's as if you changed the name of "rain" to "sunshine." You'd still need an umbrella.
"Twitter has become a kingmaker of sorts, conferring online stardom to a mix of writers, gadget geeks, political commentators and entrepreneurs."
"...an actor like LaVar Burton, decades away from his glory days as a star of the TV drama 'Roots,' has a personal audience of 635,000."
"A writer with an interest in comic books can become the expert on comic books..."
"Did he realize he was helping to create an arbiter of popularity? 'We didn't think that far ahead,' [Biz Stone] said."
"The list is cobbled together by a team of employees whose identities were withheld"
"Ms. Sampson said 'there's sort of a criteria' for the list 'but not really.'"
Finally here are some comments and background that led to this.
6/14/09; 12:33:39 PM
Comments on the NY Times piece
A lot of people told me to stop writing about it, but Twitter's Suggested User List was just plain wrong, and I was sure that it would become more evident over time, and it has. Here's a brief recap.
1. Until early this year, follower-count was evolving as a user-developed way for Twitter users to give authority to each other. Like all things in Twitter, it was crude, a better version could have been designed, but that's the way things work in Twitter.
2. People like Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte, and to a lesser extent myself, brought authority with us from other places. In this way we were investing in Twitter, every bit as much as Union Square or Spark Capital.
3. The major tech pubs (Mashable, Om, TechCrunch) mostly ignored Twitter. They had much lower follower counts than the people above. Same with the celebs, Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, etc who weren't present at all until early this year.
4. Follower-count worked very much the way eBay users rate each other, same with Amazon.
5. The reason follower-count was so big was its huge visibility in the user interface. It was the biggest number you'd see when you clicked on someone's profile. In FriendFeed, where follower-count is visible but fairly buried, it isn't a big part of the culture. (I don't have any idea what my own follower count is in FF, in Twitter it's about 23K.)
6. Then Twitter adds the Suggested User List to the mix. The way I discovered it was noticing that @anamariecox's follower count, which had been around 3000, had jumped to 40,000 then 50,000 then 60,000, all in a matter of days. No one could figure out why until @ev posted a comment on a blog explaining. Then we could see the effect all over the place. All kinds of random people were jumping in follower counts only because they were on the SUL.
7. I wrote a piece on March 12 asking if a reporter could accept so much extra juice, for free, without disclosing.
8. Then the celebs come. Kutcher's campaign. Oprah. Cover of Time. Etc. Twitter explodes. Good for them. In the meantime, our investment is swamped, more or less lost. I don't begrudge celebs for their followers, as long as they earned them, as long as they brought users in as we did in step #2 above. What I object to, what anyone would object to, is Twitter gaming the system to favor people who did nothing to earn their follower count.
9. That's where it stayed until this morning when the NY Times ran a piece that more or less lays it out the way I've told the story. They add things I wasn't willing to add -- the utter incompetence and lazyness, lack of thought, lack of caring in any way about the users of Twitter. It's time for some sobriety. People don't like being pushed around like this. I've looked into the thought behind the SUL and found the same thing that the Times did. There is none. It's insiders doing favors for other insiders. It's newly rich and powerful entrepreneurs throwing their weight around, rewarding people and publications that do their bidding, and punishing those who are independent.
10. What is so frustrating about this is that Twitter has this incredible promise as a platform for journalism. How ironic that the NYT piece comes out as the people of Tehran are using Twitter, putting their lives on the line, to route around a corrupt government.
11. At some point there must be a way for users to convey authority for other users that isn't spoiled and polluted like Twitter's follower-count is. PageRank for people. We were bootstrapping a way to do that until the company blew it up. This opens the door for Twitter's competitors to take advantage, and come up with a way to convey authority that isn't subject to gaming. No vendor should put their finger on the scale to favor one person or organization over another. I want a level playing field, I want as much of a chance as anyone else. When I find out someone else is cutting in line, I lose all interest. I have lost that kind of interest in follower-count. Give me another field to play on, this one is spoiled. I don't see any way for them to fix it. We're going to have to start over from scratch to do that. Shame. We had a really good thing going.
6/14/09; 12:04:27 PM
Rebooting the News #13
Thirteen is a lucky number when it comes to revolutions!
Go get it! (And it's in the scripting.com feed, too, as always.)
Update: Dan Conover transcribed one of the funnier moments from the podcast.
6/16/09; 8:05:09 AM
Twitter. Needs. Competition.
Never has it been more clear -- we are building a dangerously precarious centralized system that will, given everything we know about computer networks, at some point, fail. It's so important now that the US State Department got in the loop in the last couple of days.
Meanwhile there's an incredibly vibrant competition in the Twitter client space. At least three leading apps: Twitterdeck, Seesmic and Tweetie, are slugging it out. Each with strengths, waves of new versions, users comparing products, always something new to look forward to. The kind of rapid evolution we desperately need in the back-end.
There's a little bit of Facebook in the mix (it has a lot of users, but not many of them use these clients, I think) and yes there is Identi.ca, but it has a very small user base compared to Twitter and Facebook.
In a thread that was spawned from a Twitter post earlier today, we talk about the possibility of a competitor to Twitter coming from Google or Facebook. Not sure who else could launch a back-end that would find enough support among users to gain critical mass. And I agree, totally, with Don Park, that if Facebook wants to play, they must start from scratch, with a totally simple system that matches Twitter, and adds stability, performance, beauty, or a few sought-after features.
Google would compete by building a system out of components of the open web, the small-pieces-loosely-joined approach. I outlined how this would work in an earlier blog post.
6/17/09; 1:07:33 AM
Fresh Air interviews Woody Allen
I love Woody Allen movies, more so over time, as I grow older, they seem to get better. A couple of years ago I went through them all, Annie Hall, Manhattan -- classics, but there were also some surprises, some great movies that I didn't remember as being great. I pretty much liked them all.
This weekend, I finally saw Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which got mixed reviews, but I loved it. On Twitter someone said it's just a beautiful postcard of Barcelona. Agreed, and what's wrong with that! People who love art somehow can't forgive a movie for not being heavy on story, but rather leaving an impression. Those are some of my favorite movies, they're more like paintings or postcards. Here, look at this scene and now look at this one. If it's beautifully done, if the acting is superb and the story convincing, as it is in VCB, what's not to like?
So, when I saw that Woody Allen was the guest on Fresh Air, I savored it. He doesn't do many interviews, and this one was disappointing.
Terry Gross went for the scoop. She wanted him to slip up and confess something about his personal life, so she repeatedly asked probing questions, which he skillfully and for me, painfully, dodged. This is the interviewer interfering, getting between the subject and the listener -- preventing the subject from talking about what the listener is most interested in. With Woody Allen, that would be movies! Who would be a better person to just let ramble about the art of movies. To remember his favorites, or what it was like to work with the writers and actors he's worked with.
There are little bits of this -- the script of his new movie was originally written for Zero Mostel, but he died before they could make the movie. You get a little peek behind the scenes, how he works, his craft, and how it relates to Mostel's.
Gross often nails it, where other interviewers are selfish, she lets the subject be the story. But not this time, unfortunately.
6/16/09; 10:37:04 PM
Yet another ode to the NYT
Oh the NYT. They do such a great job with the news, but they do such a terrible job of running the business.
In the last few days while CNN et al completely dropped the ball on the Iran story, they were right there, on top of it. Great stuff.
Everyone else in the news business missed the Twitter SUL story, but the Times nailed it. I was so happy I can't tell you.
But in the meantime they're cutting the pay of Boston Globe reporters, and have no idea how or if their business will operate next year or the year after.
All this at a time when their product is in high demand. People love news, and we love the way the NYT does the news. So why is there a problem?
Oddly enough, I know, and I can tell you.
Get your coffee, have a seat, let me tell you a story...
Three years ago I got a Blackberry and fell in love. I was riding all over the place on the BART system and I could take the news with me. It didn't take me five minutes to realize it was the perfect River of News device, so I adapted my NYT and BBC rivers to work in their browser.
Unlike most developers I have the phone number of the CEO of the NY Times Digital, so I rang him up and told him how wonderful the Times was on my Blackberry and please please let's tell the world about it. After all he had an incredible communication system for doing exactly that. I wanted to fly to NY to show it off, but he said we should have a phone conference first. I thought this was a bad idea, but I did it. I shouldn't have.
I have no idea who was at the meeting, but the first thing they did was tell me about their upcoming mobile version of the Times that they had spent millions developing. Right off the bat I knew it had to be terrible. The only way to spend that much money on a mobile news site is to put all kinds of hurdles between the reader and the news. I said I had a totally simple way to do it that I had developed in a couple of days, by myself. (I lied, it actually took about an hour.) Then they asked what I wanted. I knew we were headed off a cliff. I said that isn't important, they pressed, I said yes -- I probably did want to be paid for my work. That was the end of the meeting. They were off the phone in less than a minute. I'm sure their version of the story will be different. But the net result was indisputable. They waited over three years before they had a reasonable way to deliver news to mobile users.
Yes I know they have millions of people reading their mobile site. But I'm talking about something else. I'm talking about the backbone of news delivery, and today that's indisputably Twitter. The stupid thing about our meeting, the lose-lose about it, is that right then and there we were on the edge of inventing it. And because I didn't get on a plane (my mistake) and because they had so much invested in doing it the wrong way (their mistake) we didn't do it.
So the first-level problem for the Times is they now are authors for Twitter, doing great work, and not being paid for it. Once again, they're going to be complaining, soon, that the tech industry is pocketing the profits while they do the work. (They'll be wrong, a lot of other people are working for free too.) The higher-level problem is they aren't competing. They're just sitting there. Spending money in obvious and wasteful Dilbert-like ways, and letting the small nimble competiton run circles around them.
I would, if I were them, ask their Twitter users (and they have quite a few) what was so wonderful about Twitter as it covered the Iran story. Ask them to explain the role the NYT played in it, and if it was generally appreciated (they were great, and in general it wasn't appreciated). And then, and this is the key question, ask them how it could have been better.
There's still an opportunity to create the news system of the future. But only if you're very smart about it.
6/16/09; 8:24:39 AM
CSS in a River of News, part II
This morning I posted a query about CSS that would make my River of News aggregator look beautiful. It was hard to communicate what I was looking for. So I've decided to take a new approach.
1. I'm going to use tables. This really is an application for tables. That was made clear in the discussion. If, when we're done, someone can show me how to do the same thing without tables, I'll change to do it that way.
2. I'm going to provide a style sheet in the app, but I'll make it very easy to have it use your own. That way people can tinker with the real live working app while it's running and share the results for others to see.
3. If anyone comes up with a really fantastic way of displaying the River of News with CSS, I will use their CSS, with full attribution and accolades, and release the result under the GPL, including the aggregator. Then we'll have a beautiful River of News aggregator that's available in open source.
I've started to work on this approach, and will post when I have something you can install.
I'm looking for examples that do something similar, in CSS. All pointers are appreciated. Help me get this right and I'll publish the results, as an OPML Editor tool, open source.
Update: Thanks for all the ideas! Based on the discussion, I've got a new plan.
6/17/09; 12:56:03 PM
iPhone 3.0 problem with camera
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.
6/18/09; 12:13:32 PM
Bad Hair for Everyone!
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.
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.
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.
6/19/09; 8:03:42 PM
Okay I'm trying iPhone tethering
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? :-(
6/19/09; 1:03:34 PM
Bad Hair Day #1
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.
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.)
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.
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.
6/23/09; 9:42:32 PM
Heading to Europe
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.
6/23/09; 5:21:29 PM
River of News in CSS, designer's release
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.
If you have questions or comments, leave them here, or in the comment section on the page above.
6/23/09; 12:52:06 PM
Be sweet, don't retweet
That's like Be Kind Rewind.
And of course everyone retweeted this and everyone clicked.
Nothing here. Move along.
6/23/09; 2:43:15 PM
Why 140 chars is like 48K
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.
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.
6/23/09; 10:33:55 AM
Good morning Copenhagen
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.
6/24/09; 10:41:53 PM
Arrived in Frankfurt
6/24/09; 10:38:35 AM
The myth of perfection
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.
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.
6/25/09; 5:37:24 AM
Your Berlin correspondent
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.
6/29/09; 4:33:49 AM
What of Woodstein in the Rebooted World
Every time I write about Sources Go Direct, like clockwork, someone asks how will we get Woodward & Bernstein reporting without great reporters sniffing around for stories that bring down Presidents.
Never mind that it only happened once and hasn't happened since. Only Richard Nixon has been forced from office by the press (or anyone) and it turns out that had W&B not been sleuthing, the NYT had the story too, but they blew it. So it's possible that without W&B, Nixon would have remained in office. However it's hard to imagine that he could have been worse than Bush II, who the press of today did not bring down. (A fact the defenders of projournos never address.)
Anyway...
In the rebooted world, Deep Throat, the source, might go direct -- anonymously, using a proxy server, possibly -- and a Twitter account created for just such a purpose. BTW, I don't assume there won't be reporters in the rebooted world, but I do assume the sources will be able to go direct if they choose to. And in this case I don't see why they wouldn't.
If we're lucky enough to have a Woodstein out there digging, let's hope we have the sense to listen to them. And if we don't get blessed or if the economics of projourno crumbles, and Deep Throat wants us all to know how screwed the President is, let's make sure that anonymous pathways exist so they can say what they know and stay in place to keep reporting.
I write this from Berlin, a place that has seen huge change, many times, in the last 100 years. The kind of change that would make Americans weep with fear.
6/30/09; 9:16:05 AM
The longest day
Europe sleeps while I write this.
I arrived in Chicago a short while ago, it's 6:30PM here and 1:30AM back where I came from. In about four hours I will have been up for 24 hours. Given my state of burnout I'll avoid saying anything challenging. Simply: It's always good to be back in the USA.
At this moment in an overseas trip I always play California Girls by the Beach Boys.
Also: All my gadgets work here. MyFi, and data roaming on my iPhone.
The neatest thing on the SAS flight from Copenhagen -- they have cameras pointing out the cockpit and toward the ground from under the plane. Pretty neat for takeoff and landing. Unfortunately there were clouds almost the whole way up over Sweden into Iceland and Greenland and northern Canada.
One more flight, a sprint from Chicago to SFO and then a cab to Berkeley. I get in so late that BART isn't running that late. Yeah I know, it isn't really a mass transit system. Rub it in.
7/1/09; 7:30:33 PM
While you were asleep, from Copenhagen
Another in a continuing series of overnight dispatches from your faithful European correspondent, me!
This time I'm coming to you from the SAS business class lounge at CPH, a real treat. Often on my European travels I end up exiting through Amsterdam or London with time to kill at Schipol or Heathrow, and they are completely chaotic toon-town messes. In comparison, the pace at CPH is leisurely and the Danish of course are great designers, so the place is super-comfortable and pleasing to the eye.
While you, in the US, were asleep -- I left Berlin, and created some memories in a set of photos on Flickr. Click on the picture below to see the set.
In two days in Berlin you can do nothing but scratch the surface of one of its many surfaces.
Berlin is to Germany what New York and Washington are to the US. It's both the capital and the cultural and business center. The place is bathing in history, and change. Just 20 years ago when the wall came down, the place was very different. Now what remains of the division is in photographs and video. I stayed in what used to be the eastern sector, but you couldn't tell. It was hard to imagine how the plush surroundings had been transformed so quickly. Perhaps the Soviet system wasn't so austere?
I spent all of yesterday afternoon at the German History Museum, listening to the official story of the war and the wall from their point of view. There were some not-so-surprising surprises. They talk about losing the war. Where I come from, we talk about winning. They don't present their soldiers as heroes. How can a society survive that, I wonder. I did see one statue of a WWII era German soldier, just one. It left me with a sick feeling. The memorial to victims of the Holocaust also was very moving.
Berlin is indeed where it happened. I don't have any special insights, nothing to offer that hasn't been said a million times before. The only difference is to feel it you have to put yourself inside it.
I followed a Russian tour group for a few minutes yesterday as they soaked in the history of their WWII victory. Some of them seemed old enough to remember. There were many Americans and British and French accents. Seems a lot of other people are curious to see what's in Berlin.
Everywhere you go in Berlin they're rebuilding. Many of the big tourist spots I saw just re-opened three or four years ago. The Brandenberg Gate and part of the plaza behind it were in the middle of the dead zone between the East and the West.
Maybe there will be more conclusions, this all seems quite rough right now.
PS: On a less heavy note, I had a delicious currywurst and last night there was a beautiful sunset.
7/1/09; 4:31:10 AM
There's a missing product
There's a missing product in the social networking space. I'm going to try to describe it, but I think it may be hard. But I'm willing to give it a go.
A little over a week ago I got an email from a very good friend in Europe asking if it was true that I was going to Reboot. I replied with an email saying it was. And I thought to myself, I thought by posting that fact to Twitter four or five times that I would have informed him of this. It is not his fault. There's a missing product.
Yesterday, I was trying to figure out what to do with the four hours downtime between flights in CPH, so I posted a note to Twitter hoping someone with some time to spare that was interesting would respond. I got two responses to my blog post, when it was two hours into the downtime. It's not their fault. There's a missing product.
Here's what I think the missing product would do.
It would allow me to make announcements the way companies make announcements. The announcements would have good metadata attached, and would be stored in a database. People who follow me in this system are saying "I want to know everything Dave announces." Key words in that sentence: Know and Dave. I don't just want these facts to stream by in a river. I want Dave's name to go bold in a short list of people I choose to follow. Unlike a river, where I want volume and don't care about missing an item, in this product the oppositie is true. I place high value on not missing anything. I want to know literally everything Dave announces. (Or Paolo or Karin or you get the idea.)
I started to get a clue that such a product was needed when I started the FOD feed on Twitter. It monitors the blogs of people who are so important to me that I never want to miss one of their posts. People like NakedJen, Jay Rosen, Sylvia Paull, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Fred Wilson and Michael Gartenberg, and people I don't even know personally like Paul Krugman and Nate Silver. It was a success. It has kept me in these people's loops, and it required them to do nothing special. Now I'm thinking about what comes next when I want other people to do something similar with me.
It may be that just monitoring blog posts is enough. Tweets are too cheap, but keeping track of people through blogs may be just right.
Still thinking about it.
7/1/09; 5:28:01 AM
New features in FF and Twitter
Yesterday while my poor addled brain struggled to cope with jetlag, Twitter released a small feature with potentially wide implication, and FriendFeed released something new related to search that I thought they had already released. I don't think my confusion in the latter case had anything to do with jetlag.
New Twitter feature: It now hots-up hashtags.
So when you refer to #iranelection in a tweet it links to a search page with the results of a search for that string in the twitstream. I've hotted it up the way Twitter would have. Nice to have for sure, seems it should have always worked that way. They probably didn't do it earlier to lessen the load on the search servers.
And FriendFeed now has real-time search. Maybe the feature is totally new. It seems I've seen it before. But I still don't get it. Let me try to explain.
FF has a lot of stuff flowing through it, including part of the Twitter firehose. I think they just get the tweets of Twitter users who are followed on FF. So if I have it search for "davewiner" it returns a subset of all the occurences of my Twitter handle. Steve Gillmor says that they've now got his much-fabled feature -- Track -- implemented. How so? Unless they're getting the whole firehose from Twitter.
It's nice that they track sources other than Twitter, like this blog's RSS feed. But apparently they don't poll very often, and they don't support weblogs.com-compatible pings (I know they invented a more complicated protocol, why am I not excited about that) so you can hardly call that "real-time." (BTW, this item first appeared in the feed at 7:52AM. It showed in FF at 8:28AM.)
All this hype about real-time is welcome (but hardly new). The ideal of having search be up-to-the-minute accurate is an important one. It's just that no one is there yet. And 140-char tweets all repeating the same thing over and over and then retweeting those same things, well that hardly counts as information. After a while it's more interesting to watch Wolf Blitzer. And that's really saying something.
So, while I'm glad that FF is reaching out beyond Twitter, their interface is impossible to use. Sit someone down off the street and have them try to watch the flow of tweets and comments rush by. No doubt FF's interface would make an impressive display for a mad genius in a scifi movie about the end of the world, but for more ordinary folk? Back to the drawing board.
BTW, talking about new features that should be sent back to the labs -- Microsoft announced that they are including results from selected Twitter users. The relevance criteria is follower count. Might have worked last year, before the SUL, but now follower count is more a reflection of how much you are pwned by Ev and Biz, not how the net values your opinion. I'm sure Larry and Sergey are having a good laugh. Try again Microsoft. Use some other algorithm, follower count is meaningless.
7/3/09; 10:25:50 AM
Just the facts ma'am
On Twitter I just said I like the Perry White approach to news.
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."
7/4/09; 10:09:16 AM
Laguna Seca
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.)
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.
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.
7/7/09; 9:06:33 AM
Hyperlocal bloggers at Cal J-School
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.
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.
7/8/09; 1:36:58 PM
The Java Wars, continued
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.
7/8/09; 11:01:24 AM
Find Good Enemies
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.
7/9/09; 3:17:56 PM
A more low-tech approach to ping hubs
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.
7/10/09; 11:15:09 PM
A neat conference hack?
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.
7/10/09; 7:00:17 PM
Google's Pubsubhubbub
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.
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."
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.
7/10/09; 2:04:00 PM
Bad Hair Day #3
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.
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).
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.
7/11/09; 12:25:09 PM
What, if anything, did Microsoft announce?
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.
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.
In the early days of RSS, we had the idea that instantaneous updates would be the next step. That was 2001. It took a little longer than we thought, but now with "realtime" as the Next Big Thing, it's time to reboot all that lovely stuff.
If it works, it'll be a bootstrap. That means at first the results will be a few sites pinging each other and updating in realtime. If it gains traction, it'll get support from a lot of tech and media companies. It could happen very quickly.
One thing's for sure -- we'll need implementations in every language and runtime. I'm doing mine in the OPML Editor, of course. But just think of that as a reference implementation. I think the really scalable versions will be in Python, PHP or C.
Also thinking about using Amazon's SimpleDB to store the graph. We'll see..
7/14/09; 7:23:01 PM
Mulberry ice cream
The editorial team of InBerkeley.com had lunch today at Saul's in North Berkeley. I had a bowl of cold borscht with sour cream, and a toasted bagel with lox and cream cheese.
After lunch we all went down the block to Chez Panisse and had a Bastille Day special mulberry ice cream cone for $2.
7/14/09; 7:23:01 PM
BadHair at 7PM
It's been an interesting couple of days with TechCrunch first teasing and then releasing internal notes from Twitter Corp meetings.
At first the debate was over the propriety of TechCrunch releasing this information. But now that at least some of the information is out there, the discussion is turning to the information and attitudes they reflect.
Were having a Bad Hair Day podcast at the normal time, 7PM Pacific this evening and we'll be talking about the release. You can catch the show live on BlogTalkRadio or as a podcast shortly after the completion of the show at 7:45PM.
Our guest for this evening's podcast is Chris Saad, who we had originally scheduled to talk about commenting and blogging and everything related, which is just about everything in community software.
There was a fair amount of TechCrunch agenda in there. I didn't get that they're at war with RSS from reading the TwitterCorp notes, just that they don't feel all RSS content should flow through Twitter. I concur. Twitter and RSS are used for different purposes, and there's far too much new stuff in RSS for Twitter's system to handle.
After reading the TC piece about Twitter I thought: "How wrong that a company owns this medium." Always felt that, reinforced it.
Wonder what Doc Searls thinks about this. Seems we're derailed from the Cluetrain.
I'm just one guy programming away, but I have met Valentino Rossi, and when I'm very productive, as I have been this week, I feel like I'm programming the way he rides a motorcycle.
When things are clicking, programming-wise, it activates other parts of my creativity. I cook more imaginatively, and I consider moving to Italy, so I can enjoy the good life while reorganizing the world. They have Internet in Italy so it's hard to imagine how Berlusconi could interfere.
Anyway, this is not an earth-shaking announcement. I just got something working today that I imagined for quite some time, and it's nice.
The goal is to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined equivalent of Twitter.
I know now that there are people at Google who share this vision. They have the resources to do centralization. What we have to make sure is that the Rest Of Us have the ability to route around the centralization. I hope they don't take it personally at Google, but enough with letting one company control the flow of the real-time web. There are always pundits who are willing to sell us out to the BigCo's, but I am not one of them. Never have. I remember when Google was One Of Us. Hopefully that thread still runs strong inside them now that they are a BigCo.
While everyone was debating the morality of Arrington releasing the Twitter info, I was thinking "Geez these people are focusing on the wrong stuff." The real question is how big TwitterCorp plans to get while holding the control tightly within the confines of their Corp. That can't work. It never has. I'm amazed that smart people like the people who run Twitter are willing to bet on that, still, so far into it. That they think a single company can run the Pulse of the Planet is a sign that they are drinking too much of their own Kool Aid. This can't work. Can't.
Anyway, here's what I have working.
A Twitter-like RSS feed with a single subscriber who gets notified by the cloud when the feed has updated. It then reads the feed and displays the new stuff. This all happens before I can refresh the page. It's the same speed as the connection between Twitter and FriendFeed. Now there will be people who say it can't scale. 1. They don't know. 2. They might be right. And even if it's slower than Twitter, it's worth the tradeoff. Because Twitter is going to break. Be sure of it. Nothing in the history of the Internet has ever done what they're trying to do. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it can't be done. And even if it can, it's bad.
Anyway, time for me to enjoy what's left of the day. It's gorgeous in California. I'm going to get some exercise then have my Italian dinner and then more work tomorrow! Buongiorno and arrivaderci!
There are two 140-character messages. Each illustrates features of the new shipwreck I hope to sink, to create a new coral reef for Twitter-like systems to grow on and around.
The first three items in each message are fairly obvious:
<description> holds the 140-character text.
<pubDate> is the timestamp, when the message was created.
<guid> is the identifier for the message, so a reader can tell if they've seen it before.
This makes it possible for the messages to be edited after publication, a common feature requests from writers using Twitter.
After that come optional elements.
<category> works like tags in apps like Flickr or YouTube. You specify them in a dialog, blanks separate them, you can create tags with blanks by putting them inside quotes.
<link> is used to point to web pages. No need to shorten the URLs because they don't take up space in the 140 characters.
<enclosure> is how you attach media objects to messages. Again, no need to shorten the URLs. And since the clients know the media type, they can show a preview, or embed a player.
These all use well-understood elements of RSS 2.0. Nothing new needed to be invented.
7/19/09; 1:37:57 PM
Craigslist is progress
I don't think I've ever written about Craigslist here.
Probably because I don't spend much time thinking about it, or worrying about it. But I know that some people do, for example Terry Gross, the host of NPR's Fresh Air. It comes up when people talk about the Internet destroying things that matter, like the classified ads in newspapers. At one point in an interview with Wired editor Chris Anderson she asks, in a bewildered way, what happened. She was saying it was a shame that Craigslist comes along and does what the newspapers were doing, for a fraction of the cost, employing a small fraction of the people who used to support the classified ads in newspapers.
I'm not surprised, and if you think about it, it's very predictable. It's called productivity, and it's what new technology is supposed to do. We used to employ 20 percent of the workforce in agriculture, now it's just 2 percent. That's because of technology. You may say it's bad, but there's also less hunger in the US now than there was then. And there probably are far more classified ads today, now that they're mostly free, than there were when they cost money.
It's productivity. It basically a good thing. And as long as we invest in progress it's inevitable.
It's amazing how much discussion these test posts get over on FriendFeed.
I have to do them because my app needs something new to ping about to see if the apps that are subscribed to this get the updates, in real-time of course, via RSS.
7/19/09; 1:09:32 PM
Speedbumps and a city's carbon footprint?
We have a mail list for the back channel at InBerkeley.com, and from time to time a question comes up that requires research. If the question is interesting, my first impulse is: Write It Up!
Now, this is the result of 12-plus years as a blogger. I know my community loves interesting questions, and we have an informal approach on Scripting News that I'd like to port to InBerkeley.com.
So, in that spirit -- here's a question posed by my colleague Mark Haas.
Do Berkeley's infamous speed bumps, traffic diverters and other traffic-related policies, like politically-motivated, too-low speed limits raise the city's carbon footprint?
We just need a qualified author. Anyone know any traffic engineers, or perhaps someone at the UC Berkeley Institute for Transportation Studies? Other experts?
In October 1994, at the dawn of blogging, I wrote a piece that actually shook the software world. At the time, the idea of a mere software developer expressing an opinion in public, unedited, in his own words, without the help of a major publication, was unheard of. It had never happened.
The piece was called Bill Gates vs the Internet. The thought was pretty simple. The tech industry was mired and exhausted. Too many BigCo's struggling to be the one who controls the future. As if a company could control the future. But the headlines in the business press encouraged them to think this way. Much as the leading tech blogs encourage Schmidt, Zuckerberg and Williams today to think of themselves as masters of the universe. They aren't and it's a losing strategy today as it was 15 years ago.
The problem for Bill Gates in 1994, the newly crowned King of Tech, was the Platform Without a Platform Vendor, the Internet. The difference between the Internet platform and the Microsoft platform was this: No Microsoft. No one to hold on to the family jewels. No one to put a developer out of business if they personally offended Bill. No one to keep the personalities of developers under control. No one to cut off their air supply.
In 1994, there was a revolution brewing. Bill didn't believe. But it happened anyway, even though he struggled mightily against it.
Blogging is one of the things that came out of this revolution, and along with it archives. So I can point to a piece I wrote in 1998 and it's still there. It was systematized, in software. This idea didn't come from a BigCo, and it didn't get killed by one. The free Internet solves problems pretty well. BigCo's don't solve problems.
So now instead of Bill Gates it's Evan Williams.
I read the piece on TechCrunch and thought it sounds like the transcripts of conversations from Microsoft in the mid-90s. Both were trying to compete with the Internet. Ev's problem is how is he going to keep his key engineers from defecting to the competition. How are they going to let developers use the "firehose" without using it to kill TwitterCorp. These are problems the Internet doesn't have. It doesn't employ any engineers, and when they leave one company to work for another they still work for the Internet. On the Internet no company owns all the data, so no one can control it. If you don't like the way a service works, use another.
The tech industry keeps having this argument with the Internet. It keeps thinking "this time we gotcha" but nahh, the Internet keeps right on going.
Moral of the story: If you find yourself in competition with the Internet, you should find a way out. Imho.
7/21/09; 12:28:28 PM
Frontier bug
Wanted to record this to be sure I get back to it some point.
Problem is with all HTTP requests emanating from tcp.httpClient.
Setting the timeout has no effect when its not possible to open a connection on the server because tcp.openStream doesn't take a timeout parameter. It's always 20 seconds, near as I can tell.
Once I get back into the C source again I'll have to check this out.
You can see the problem on the log page for rssCloud -- when testing the link back from a remote app registering a handler, the timeout is never less than 20 seconds, even when it's unreachable. I have the timeout param in tcp.httpClient set at 180 ticks (3 seconds), which is plenty to find out if there's anyone at the other end.
7/21/09; 3:25:47 PM
Dumb XML question
0. I know about View Source.
1. I use Firefox.
2. When I view my site's RSS feed I want to see the XML, not a stylesheet rendering of the XML.
3. To be clear, I want to see the actual XML.
4. Is there some way to force the browser to do this?
5. Please no lectures on how this isn't the way it's supposed to work. TIA.
6. I know about View Source.
7. I know about View Source.
Update: This post seems to explain what's going on. Most browsers do funny stuff with RSS.
7/21/09; 2:33:08 PM
One of our heroes dies
MSNBC: "Gidget, the Chihuahua best known for her Taco Bell ad campaign, died from a stroke on Tuesday night at age 15."
5/6/98: "The dog is cool, and Taco Bell owns [her], for a while. Then some ad guy at some agency realizes that he could get a dog too and that dog could eat dog food and like all dogs that we love, the dog farts. Yay!"
7/22/09; 3:03:25 PM
Snappy retarded answers
Joseph Smarr asked if I had a snappy answer to why rssCloud is better than The Leading Brand.
I said I do have snappy answers, but like all such answers, they are retarded.
But I gave him a list anyway.
1. Google sux.
Or
2. Feedburner sux.
Or
3. I love RSS, they haven't heard of it.
4. Simple is better.
5. Trade one Big centralized server owned by the tech industry for... another one? You must be kidding.
6. Let's have fun again!
I don't mean any of these things. It's the tech industry way of explaining why the BigCo won't crush your or eat your lunch, or worse, crush you and eat your lunch. In all my years in the tech biz, the only times I've seen the Bigs ever actually crush anyone was when the crushee bought into the crushing.
I don't think Google will crush RSS, any more than TechCrunch will. If they try they're:
1. Assholes.
2. Idiots.
3. Losers.
So they won't try.
7/22/09; 2:44:46 PM
Implementor's guide to rssCloud
I have a cloud server running now.
I have feeds that are connected with the cloud and more on the way. I have an aggregator that is wired into the cloud.
Now, if you're a developer of a Twitter authoring tool or want to start a small community of your own (emphasis on small), it's time to start at least thinking about your role in the bootstrap.
If you recall, I wanted to provide a way for users to view the XML of a feed that contains a <cloud> element. I didn't want them to have to do anything like View Source, for a simple reason. I wanted to make it one-click to refresh, so you could quickly see the effect of a change on the XML. I really missed this from the days before the browser vendors hacked up the viewing of RSS in the browser.
Here's what I did...
1. Add a button to the LifeLiner editing window called View.
2. When the user clicks it, I read the feed XML from the server.
3. Write it out to the local file system with the name preview.xml. Turns out the extension is significant.
1. I love The Wire. It's the best TV series ever. I've paid for it twice, once on HBO and onceon DVD. So I not only believe in paying for content I love, I practice it. Redundantly!
2. I'm drinking coffee. There's no spittle in the corner of my mouth. Writing about something I've spent my whole career working on and thinking about. And I'm no kid. I'm five years older than David Simon, former Baltimore Sun journo and co-writer of The Wire.
Simon wrote a remarkable piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, saying that the NY Times and Washington Post must charge for their work the way HBO charges for shows like The Wire.
With all due respect, putting up a "pay wall" is exactly what these organizations don't need. They need to decentralize, get further out into the world, not hole-up behind a wall and try to tough it out.
What worked for HBO won't work for the news because HBO is ficition, and news is not. You can take years writing and developing a story on HBO, polish it, cut out parts that don't support the plot you've devised, even drop the series in the middle if you lose interest. That doesn't happen with the news. News is happening all the time, on its own schedule, all over the place, including many places you don't have reporters. (Think about the arrest of Prof Gates in his own house in Cambridge, this week. Sounds like something that would happen on The Wire.)
And often, the stories are far more complex than reporters can comprehend. This is something I know many people in the news business disagree with. I just don't think the reporter model is working. All it does is inflate the self-importance of these people, turn them into gatekeepers, and often bullies. People who behave like the power brokers they're supposedly covering, when they're forced into playing footsie with them if they want access. Usually under the table but sometimes in plain sight.
As a user of news, I'm sure the future is in shortening the distance between the sources and the readers. Yes, there was a time when, if you wanted to get a story on the wire you had to call a reporter. But that's less true every year, as new channels of news have developed, channels that the NYT (not so much the Post) are just starting to participate in. Watch out as that develops, because it's a potent combination. News people immersed in a sea of news makers. I don't know what news will look like coming out the other end, but it won't look like the system Simon and I grew up in.
This must run its course. The idea of putting up a paywall will just force more reporters outside of it if they want to do their jobs and shrink the publications further. It's no solution.
PS: I don't believe in citizen journalism, which has amateurs playing the role of reporters. I think news is being refactored, unbundled -- broken into components, much the same as other aggregators like travel agents and stock brokers. Music A&R people. I believe in the Sources Go Direct model, the disintermediation of journalism. I also think there's a need for aggregation, but it's a practice people like Simon often mock. In fact reporters base their work on generous people who contribute their knowledge for free -- sources.
7/23/09; 9:53:50 AM
Meetup in NYC, next Thurs
When I have new tech to talk about I love to do what I call a "roadshow." I take the idea to some other city and have a meetup with anyone who's interested. Last time, when I lived in Florida, I did meetups in NYC, Toronto and Berkeley.
Now with rssCloud beginning a bootstrap, it's time for another roadshow, this one in NYC, at the same place as the 2005 meeting.
Next Thursday, July 30 at 6:30PM at the offices of Ritchie Capital, 747 Third Ave at 46th, 38th floor. We have a big conference room with a midtown view and a rooftop patio, the meetup should go for a couple of hours, then if people want to go out for a bite, let's go.
Already have confirmation that some of the most interesting people from NY tech will be there. If you know you'll be there, please post a comment below.
BTW, thanks to Thane Ritchie for allowing us the space. The investment world has been through some hard times, as has tech, and it's great to see them still out there. His latest interest, I hear, is urban farming.
7/24/09; 12:50:47 PM
rssCloud developments
Yesterday I posted the Implementor's Guide. It walks a coder through the components of rssCloud -- the authoring tool, cloud, and aggregator.
I also released the source code for my implementation of the cloud. My aggregator, River2, was updated to support the cloud. I have not released my authoring tool yet.
I started a FriendFeed group to facilitate communication among implementors.
A feed that will help you test, if you're developing an aggregator. It updates every 15 minutes, notifies the cloud server, which in turn will notify any registered subscribers.
My personal "LifeLiner" feed is also available for testing. I wouldn't recommend subscribing in a feed reader like NetNewsWire or Google Reader. It's designed for the loosely coupled 140-character network. For which there aren't any readers. Yet! (Gotta start somewhere..)
I just posted a tweet saying I don't view the Gates matter through a racial lens, I view it through a Harvard lens. I want to explain, and I'll try to do it briefly.
First, I've had my share of run-ins with cops. When I was young, I liked drugs and street politics, and that meant lots of confrontations with NY cops. Never got arrested because I was lucky and because I was fully submissive when stopped by cops. They scared the shit out of me. I knew they had lethal force, and they must teach them how to be terrifying, because they are. Very.
Later, as a college student, I'd occasionally get drunk (in New Orleans, everyone does it) and once even got picked up and put in jail for a night to sober up. No record, but I'll never forget it.
Hitch-hiking in Calif, I got stopped by police in Tracy, and was fined exactly the amount I had in my pocket. I paid it, and wondered where the money went, but I didn't make a stink. I just left and never went back.
I once had two cop cars come to my house in Woodside, and I had to prove that I lived there. I did. Kept my mouth shut except to say "Here" as I handed over my driver's license. I owned the place. Didn't matter. Until they left they owned my ass.
A couple of years ago driving from Calif to Denver, I got stopped in Winnemucca. I was speeding. Really speeding. Stupidly speeding. I accepted my ticket graciously. Drove slowly the rest of the way and got stopped in every major town in Nevada. Never expressed any irritation. Just begged for them to let me leave the state. Promised never to return.
I say all this to point out that I have some experience with cops, and I'm white, and I would never in a million years think of yelling at a cop. Never have, and if I ever do, I expect to be arrested.
Now Gates says he didn't yell at the cop. I don't believe him. Too many other people who were there say he did. I'm pretty sure when you're yelling at a cop who's doing his job he's supposed to arrest you for disorderly conduct. I think that's more or less what disorderly conduct is.
I also think yelling at a cop is stupid. He's got a gun. If it's so much worse being black with cops (and I believe it is) you'd think blacks would be 100 times more careful about it than a white guy.
Now, the second part of the story...
In addition to being hassled by cops, sometimes deservedly and other times not, I also spent 1.5 years at Harvard as a research fellow. I was not at the level of Gates, but I had an office in Harvard Yard and a very nice ID card that got me into all kinds of great places. Being in Harvard gives you an Ivy League feeling, you're one of the Special people. It's very nice.
Imho what we're seeing here is not black outrage, but Harvard outrage. As a piece in Salon pointed out today, if he were anyone else, white or black, no one would have cared, and he probably wouldn't have been so vocal in his rage. What he's saying over and over is "Hey I'm a tenured Harvard professor. I just got back from China where I was on a PBS show. I'm a big dude. You don't treat me this way."
But I'd like to say to the Harvard prof what the Salon guy said to him. Shut up Prof Gates. You're just like the rest of us. When a cop gives you an order, you do what he says. If you have a beef with it, that comes later. And let your lawyer speak for you, and be sure you're right.
Bryan Field-Elliot raises an interesting question in the comments on the rssCloud walkthrough.
"The automatic expiration after 25 hours seems rather arbitrary. If a cloud server is going to have a policy of expiring subscriptions after X hours, I suggest that the value X be published somewhere. Within the <cloud> element perhaps, or, as part of the return value from the pleaseNotify call. That way different implementations of cloud servers can vary this value as they feel appropriate, and different aggregators will have a means to know how often they need to resubscribe."
I responded as follows (and reposted here because I wanted to make sure it gets proper consideration):
It's an interesting question.
On the pro side -- it would add flexibility.
On the con side -- it would also add complexity. Another thing to test, another thing to break.
The subscriber should poll anyway, periodically. If it detects a change that it wasn't notified of, it can resub. No harm if already subbed. In my implementation of rssCloud that gives you another 25 hours.
I'm not sure I shouldn't give you another 25 hours anytime I detect that you're alive, for example, you respond to a notification.
The point is to give the cloud a rule for when it's okay to clean out garbage. It's really hard to imagine why someone would want a different value.
7/25/09; 2:19:52 PM
Loosely-coupled 140-char reading lists
I believe we will get beyond Twitter's very simplistic and limited Suggested User List, which I have written about so many times.
What sealed it for me was reading Glenn Greenwald's piece in Salon about Cheney's plan to use US troops inside the US.
2. A very small number compared to the overall size of the Twitter base.
3. There are probably a few hundred thousand people who use Twitter who would want to know about this story, maybe 60K who would read it, as I did.
4. So how will this gap be filled? How will they find out about this story?
Well -- they won't.
But -- if there was a service they could subscribe to that alerted them to stories that would be of interest to them, based on their profile, a lot of people would give it a try.
In other words, I'm sure there's a place for editorial products delivered via the loosely-coupled 140-character network.
I tried this with NewsJunk, but it was either too early or there was something wrong with the way we did it.
It will happen.
7/25/09; 2:19:52 PM
Two-way Search
When I started DaveNet in 1994 I had a bunch of ideas for products that I hoped one day to develop. But I had been waiting so long -- it was becoming apparent that I would never get to develop them. So I wrote emails about them, and sent them to all the people I knew from various industry events. What came back often were ideas that built on them. And eventually some of the products did get built. So the idea of dumping ideas publicly, ones that aren't doing you any good, is solid.
In that spirit, here's another -- I call it Two-way Search.
Here's the idea -- if the search engine knew a little about me, it could give more relevant answers. But it's too much trouble to enter demographic info, and I might not want to share that with the search engine company. But... There's a single piece of data that unlocks a vast trove of preference information -- the address of my weblog. From that it would be obvious that I live in the Bay Area and am involved in tech. So when I ask about New York style pizza, you might include places in Berkeley in the search results. When I search for a driver, I'm probably not looking for someone who drives a car. It goes on and on.
I call it two-way because like most things that show up on the Internet, at first search was a one-way thing. I ask questions, the search engine provides answers. By using information on my weblog to provide context, now data flows both ways.
BTW, it's conceivable that Google knows where my blog is, but I don't think they incorporate that knowledge in search results.
PS: Of course this is the solution to the Suggested Users List problem as well, if the new user has a blog. You don't need to know anything but the address of the blog to make intelligent non-random recommendations of people to follow. For one, you'd know what language the user speaks, so you wouldn't recommend 20 English-speaking celebs if they only know Portuguese. For example.
PPS: I thought the idea was so good I bought the domain.
7/26/09; 2:41:38 PM
Blogging at 35000 feet
Some day the novelty will wear off, but not yet.
Flying from SFO to JFK on AA 178. The picture was taken somewhere over Wyoming according to FlightTracker.
I'm certainly not a lawyer or an expert in patent law, but it seems the work Adam Curry and I did in creating the format and protocol for podcasting, in 2001, may have inspired their "invention." It certainly predates it.
Through out 2001 we did trials and experiments to learn how the protocol worked in practice. Radio UserLand, shipped in Jan 2002, was both a podcast distributor and a podcast client.
By July 2003, I had helped Chris Lydon bootup his series of podcast interviews with the new bloggers of the day.
All that happened before VoloMedia filed their patent application. Or so it seems.
Don't waste time on other people's qualities, intelligence, hypocrisy, honor. Distractions. What matters is what you do.
7/31/09; 11:44:32 PM
The crazy ones
8/1/09; 2:54:53 PM
Chrome bookmark synch
I've been asked if Chrome's announced bookmark synch is enough to get me to switch from Firefox.
Short answer: No.
Why?
1. Right now all my machines run Firefox, and most of them are Macs. Chrome doesn't run on Macs. Yes I know they have a pre-alpha. Let me know when it's solid. And I might not do it even then.
2. I don't like it when a BigCo plays hardball with a little guy. I like XMarks. It works, and before Chrome competes with it, they should give them a chance to support their browser.
3. I like XMarks because a focused developer is going to care more about the service than a huge company that has lots of irons in lots of fires. They could easily forget about bookmark synch, if for example, a key engineer quits, or gets interested in something else. Bookmark synch is how XMarks' bread is buttered.
4. I'm scared of giving Google all my data. What if someday they decide I don't exist. What recourse would I have?
An experiment. It's just a test. I put up a web service that returns a Twitter subscription list as OPML. You should be able to import it into your RSS aggregator or feed reader. But it's just a test. When the experiment is over the service will come down. It just builds on the Twitter API and took me a couple of evenings to put together. It's not Big Tech, it's just a little thing. But interesting? Perhaps.
For example, here's the subscription list for "cluelessnewbie," a fictious user who follows the 100 most-followed people on Twitter (that's what makes him so clueless).
When I sent a preview link to Anil, here's what he said: "This got one of those immediate belly laughs that only come from seeing something new and realizing exactly how disruptive it can be. :-)"
He's right -- it's part of Le Grand Bootstrap that's underway.
In 1997, the tech press knew three stories: 1. Apple is dead. 2. Microsoft is evil. 3. Java is the future.
In 2009, the stories are: 1. Heard a rumor. 2. Rewrite press release. 3. Steve Jobs. 4. Twitter has no way to make money.
So that's some progress. They added another story!
8/5/09; 1:42:47 PM
OPML for Twitter, Day 2
Great reception for yesterday's rollout of OPML for Twitter Subscription Lists.
Some thoughts from various people.
Kevin Tofel at jkOnTheRun asks if it makes sense to output not just the people you follow but the people who follow you. At first I was going to say no -- but then I remembered a very important thread that came up at the NYC meetup. What about when Ashton Kutcher wants to move his base from twitter.com to kutcher.com. He's going to need a way to export his follower list. So yes, it matters. Now I'm not sure I want to deal with an OPML file with over 3 million entries. So we need to think about this before writing the code.
Shea Bennett at Twittercism, a very smart guy when it comes to Twitter, has a twist on Kevin's idea. He says OPML can be used to move subscribers between Twitter accounts. Hadn't thought of it, but yes -- it certainly can.
Phil Torrone says MAKE is the only OPML magazine. He's into what I call reading lists. Same idea Jay Rosen came up with for his Twitter followers. I think this time around it's going to happen. I make a list of great people you should follow, and maintain it. When I add one to the list, you automatically follow. When I remove one, you automatically unfollow. My guess is the Twitter folks already have something here too.
As I said in NY, I'm wanting to build something alongside Twitter, not instead of Twitter. I don't believe in killing in tech, I believe in respectful and peaceful co-existence. It's what really happens. Not the drama the reporters want, but the continuity users want.
8/5/09; 11:01:25 AM
rssCloud news
The cloud keeps right on rollin along!
I love this piece by Rex Hammock on rebooting his Twitter follow list. It's great for a bunch of reasons. 1. Rex is a smart user. 2. He was inspired in part by Jay Rosen, who said in our July 27 podcast that he treats his subscription list as a resource for others who want to find people to follow in his field of expertise. 3. Rex relied on the rssCloud tool released earlier this week.
Developers -- it's our job is to listen to smart users like Jay and Rex, and then give them the tools to create the revolution. We are at best enablers. I do mean best. When we see ourselves as the show, we miss the point. The users are what's happening.
I started a mail list for developers working on rssCloud. Moderated at first to keep out the trolling and the spamming.
Now, that's not to say that developers can't be users too. The best ones are, and man that is powerful because there can be really good communication betw the user and the developer if they're in the same body. A good example -- Matt Mullenweg had the idea to import his Twitter subscription list into Google Reader and it worked. However, all the subscriptions were imported at the top level, meaning he had a clean-up to do.
So I added a feature to the app, if you add "&folder=1" to the end of the URL it creates an extra level in the OPML, designed for import into Google Reader (and probably other RSS aggregators as well). Example:
5. When you return to the Google Reader main page, you'll see a new top-level section for your Twitter subscriptions.
Now you can follow Twitter folk in Google Reader. Heh.
Re Twitter's problems today. Centralized networks are especially vulnerable to DOS attacks. Loosely-coupled networks can do better. I wanted to post that to Twitter, but it's under attack. Not a joke, but something to continue to think about, planning for the future.
Update: How do you manage the global namespace in a loosely-coupled 140-character message network.
8/6/09; 9:42:48 AM
Fight for every inch of simplicity
People ask why not compromise and make it slightly more complicated for the user to gain a convenience for the developer. I say NFW. I fight for every inch of simplicity. Because every time you compromise you lose people. Add it all up and winning often means you fought for every inch.
This speech by Al Pacino from Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday may be corny and simplistic, but it works.
8/6/09; 6:40:59 PM
Another brick in the cloud
Got a couple of interesting calls this morning on the development of rssCloud. The idea is picking up steam. I'm liking it. For a lot of these things this is the second or third time I'm implementing them. That gives a certain confidence that you know how to do it, and know what the pitfalls are, and what challenges are coming down the pike.
One question comes up a lot -- how do you manage the global namespace in a loosely-coupled 140-character message network.
Twitter handles it simply, they have a server at twitter.com and when you give it a username it knows what data it applies to. It doesn't expose the internals. That's different from the Internet's domain name system, that turns a name like google.com, yahoo.com or us.gov into numbered addresses like 74.125.67.100, 209.131.36.159 and 209.251.180.18.
So in a loosely-coupled world how will this work?
1. We want to map names like jason, guy and carol to URLs like random.com/guy.xml etc, etc.
2. Probably the way it'll work is there will be a central server run by a foundation that does exactly this mapping and nothing more. It's an identity server. You sign up for a username and password and store one bit of data, the URL of your feed of 140-character messages.
3. Another possibility is to borrow the architecture of DNS, and make it a registrar problem. Sign up with Godaddy or Network Solutions or Gandi and create a domain. Now the challenge is to have that name point to a URL instead of a dotted ID. I'll leave that up to the DNS gurus to decide if it's possible or too egregious a hack.
4. Yet another possibility is to let twitter.com handle the bootstrap. Conveniently they have space for a URL in each user's profile. If you've got an aggregator and the user says they want to subscribe to someone named pearl, look on Twitter for such a user, get the URL from their profile, read it, and if it's an RSS file with a cloud element, you're home. If not, it's an error.
8/6/09; 5:12:53 PM
Trading one centralized net for another?
Interesting question came up in response to yesterday's piece about naming. Since name resolution is inherently centralized, aren't we trading one vulnerable system for another? Couldn't a hacker take down the name server just as easily as they swamp twitter.com with zombie requests?
First, I'm not an expert on this subject, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Second, let's summarize the problem we're solving.
We're trying to turn a mnemonic like judy into a URL like looselycoupled.net/judy.xml.
If the name server were to go down, one thing we lose is the ability to find new people. But our clients still know how to find all the people we were subscribed to before the attack. We also lose the ability to relocate feeds that move. But that's only temporary, and we still have HTTP-level redirects, and we don't have that ability in the RSS network today and we seem to get along okay.
Another observation. Somehow the domain name system survives these kinds of attacks (knock wood). That's all we're talking about here, a service that's no more complex than DNS. And like DNS, the net could operate indefinitely even if it went down, though we'd lose the ability to find new people or ones that moved.
One more comment, unrelated to the centralization question. A question that keeps coming up. Why not have the name be like an email address, like judy@looselycoupled.net instead of judy. There are several reasons why. 1. Twitter has nice short names, and if you want to be as easy as Twitter, you have to have short names too. 2. The goal is to map a name to a URL. If the name has all the info the URL does, why bother mapping at all? No point, just skip the whole thing and have users enter URLs.
I posted a video excerpt from Oliver Stone's movie Any Given Sunday where Al Pacino tells the team they have to fight for every inch if they want to win. I've learned that simplicity in protocols is the same. You don't get many breakthroughs, most of the simplicity comes from fighting for every inch. Stone, speaking through Pacino, tells the story infinitely better than I can.
8/7/09; 1:58:21 PM
How many RSS updates per second?
Jim Posner asked an interesting question via email.
"I was wondering about your estimate re: the number of rss updates per second there are on the web. Crazy question I know but just trying to understand orders of magnitude.
"If I were to subscribe to every available feed on the net do you think that would be 1000/updates a sec or closer to 1M/sec. Any guidance appreciated."
I responded that I don't have any idea. But I bet it's 1000 times what Twitter does. And it never goes down and isn't subject to a DOS attack.
8/7/09; 1:39:48 PM
tr.im announces shutdown
I've done a lot of building on the tr.im url-shortener, as have quite a few other developers. They just announced that they're shutting down. It's not clear what the timeframe is and how long we have to transition. Nor is it clear what will happen with all the tr.im urls that are already out there, will they break, and if so, when?
The mess this creates makes me feel pretty queasy. I wish this were someone else's problem so I could watch from afar and think "There but for the grace of Murphy go I." But this time the problem is mine. I've done a fair amount of building on tr.im, and I have at least a few users, Nieman and Jay Rosen among them, who are using my tr.im-based tool. Really glad I didn't open up the 40twits app for broader use.
If there are any url-shorteners out there that support the same functionality as tr.im, please post a comment here.
And Twitter, when your DDoS problems are cleared up, please take a look at obviating the need for url-shorteners. This is a harbinger of much more serious problems down the road, should bit.ly prove not to be a profitable business, as tr.im has proven.
Now I'm going to add one, and provide a fantastic example. It's the title of this piece -- Narrate Your Work.
Narrate Your Work is something I used to tell my team at UserLand Software, because we were a virtual team, with people in Seattle, Boston, Vancouver, Germany and California. But it would have applied even if we were all working in the same office. As a manager, I wanted to know where my people were, because if they were completing a project I needed to be thinking about their next steps and how their deliverables fit in with other stuff that was coming online. And if they were late I needed to understand why. We even developed technology for this, and Hutch Carpenter discovered the docs for it, and was excited about the discovery, and I was excited for his excitement.
Brent Simmons, who was on our team at UserLand, went on to write NetNewsWire and other gems after leaving the company. Brent uses Twitter, to this day, to narrate his work. You'd have to ask Brent why he does it, but I'm glad he does. I like how his mind works, I learn from him. He's also a friend and a guy I respect, so I like to stay in touch, and this is one way to do it.
Twitter is very much a Narrate Your Work environment, in addition to the many other things it is. In a way its question What Are You Doing? is what Narrate Your Work asks of you too.
So that's what Narrate Your Work means. I wouldn't waste your time with all this theory unless I could show you how all this fits in with Rebooted News and the News System of the Future. Here's a recital of what happened.
1. As you may know, at roughly noon Eastern time yesterday a plane crashed into a helicopter over the Hudson River in NY, killing all nine people aboard both.
2. I was away from my computer when it happened, didn't check in until about an hour later, and on Twitter there was a mess of conflicting stories, and lots of individuals "breaking" the news even though it happened over an hour ago.
3. I clicked on the page of NYT editorial people on Twitter that I keep and I saw something very different, and this is the point of this story. I saw a news organization at work. Careful to say what they do and don't know. Informing each other on experience with similar stories in the past. Whether they were all reading all of the others' posts, I don't know. They were reading and passing on reports from other Twitter users, even those that didn't work at the Times. They were coordinating the work of a larger community than just people who work at the Times.
Now why do I think this is so important? Because it's a big part of the future Rebooted News system, imho. Today's reporters don't think the public wants to see inside their process, but they are wrong about that. Many of us totally want to look inside and watch them at work for a variety of reasons:
1. We thirst for instantaneous real-time news. The cable networks have been simulating it for decades, but not delivering very often. Go back to the Gulf War, and how we were all glued to CNN watching for any hint of new information. It became an obsession that was repeated in the 2000 election and in the aftermath of 9-11. Now we try to grab for that sense of immediacy whenever possible, and they market to us on that basis even naming their show The Situation Room, when it is nothing of the sort.
2. But cable news isn't where it started, it started with the idea of news. It's not history or analysis, it's what's happening now. Think about how the Iran Hostage Crisis spawned Nightline and how the networks covered the Nixon resignation, or the moon landing or the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK. (In the recent spate of bios of Walter Cronkite I learned that he broadcast from the room he worked in at CBS News, not from a set on a stage. It's as if he was prepared to go on the air at any time and it wasn't appearances that mattered. At that time, to CBS, news was a functional thing.)
3. We also want to feel to be a part of the news process. Again this is something the networks are playing lip service to. But the Times people on Twitter aren't just pretending to use sources outside their own newsroom, they are actually doing it. And you can see it.
4. Weinberger says we should seek transparency, and of course I agree -- it's my theme song too. You can see real reporters dealing with a true breaking story not just a simulation of a breaking story, let their hair down and share everything they know with the world. This is the impulse of news, it's not about hiding things until they're ready, but when you know something for a fact, you want it out there as quickly as possible. And as long as something is clearly labeled as speculation it's every bit as true as a fully vetted fact.
5. Twitter is at least a dress rehearsal for the news system of the future. A key component of this system is that it is used both as the back room for narrating news work and for the finished delivered news product. It's this duality that makes electronic news vital. I first saw this in the LBBS and MORE software I did in the 80s, then in Manila in the 90s, and I believe we will see it in the news system that comes out of Twitter. You have two modes of viewing the content, the editorial view and the finished product view -- but it's important that the are just views on the same data, so when a change is made to one, it automatically appears in the other. This was the key concept in Manila's Edit This Page function.
6. Lenn Pryor at Microsoft figured this out a few years back when he started the Channel 9 website. Channel 9 is the audio channel on airplanes that allows you to listen to the cockpit conversation. Pryor set out to create that kind of experience for users of Microsoft products. Lenn is a creative guy who went on to work at Skype. He also coined the term unconference for the format we were using at BloggerCon.
I've known him for a long time. He's not so much a Natural Born Blogger as he is a Natural Born Evangelist.
For the last couple of years he's committed himself to the success of FriendFeed. It's really been awful to see how much he promotes it. All the time, as I watch, I'm thinking -- "Those guys are going to screw him."
All the effort he poured into FriendFeed is for naught. They sold to Facebook. In the announcements, no mention of the users, and certainly no mention of Scoble. Now would have been the time for them to tip him, throw him a few thousand. Or if not money, how about at least a hat-tip -- an acknowledgement of the help they received from users, esp Robert Scoble. Nothing. They didn't even give him the first interview.
Scoble it's time to use the web again to store our ideas, and instead of relying on Silicon Valley companies to link our stuff together, let's just use the Internet. That's what it was designed for.
And I told him I'd write a blog post about him, and that he'd like the title.
Our blogs are still there, as is the web and the Internet. They never went away just because we foolishly flirted with something fast and easy and seductive. Our blogs never went away, they're still ready to share our ideas and connect us with others.
We'll go back to basics now, take what we learned from this round of innovation, and build it for real this time.
8/10/09; 8:34:28 PM
Enough with shortened URLs
Enough!
With every shortened URL the foundation of the 140-character-sphere gets shakier. Now we know that when Twitter switched from tinyurl as the default shortener to bit.ly, they cut off the path to growth for the other entrepreneurs exploring this space.
Now, according to Mashable, bit.ly wants to absorb tr.im. They would make tr.im URLs work for the forseeable future. That is, until bit.ly runs out of cash and has to shut down because it doesn't have a way to support their service.
Uncle!
URL-shorteners are at best a temporary workaround for a limit Twitter shouldn't have.
It's time for Twitter to add a simple feature to their platform that allows users to attach a URL of arbitrary length to a message, without using up any of the 140 characters. That would be the rational way to get out in front of this mess -- to remove the reason it exists.
Even if they can't implement it immediately, just announcing that they will would restructure the "market" and allow us a way forward that has a teeny bit of safety. We will still have the mess of the last three years to clean up. No way to avoid that.
If Twitter won't do that, then it's time that users insist that URL-shorteners at least provide the safety that Feedburner provided, by allowing users to point a subdomain at their server, and use that as the address for their shortened URLs. If tr.im had that feature, I would now be able to take over hosting of my own tr.im URLs and walk away from the mess. However because they didn't have that feature, I, and every other tr.im user, is stuck. Locked in, with no way out.
Twitter created this mess, now it's time for Twitter to become a leader in its own community and get involved in cleaning it up.
Two choices: 1. Obviate shortened URLs, or 2. Require portability.
8/10/09; 9:36:34 AM
Align the interests of: 1. Users and 2. Investors.
Last night Marshall and I did a flash call-in version of the Bad Hair Day podcast to discuss the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook. It was the first time I used BlogTalkRadio's call-in feature, and I liked it, and I want to do it again.
Toward the end of the show Brian Hendrickson of Portland called in to say that he was launching a replacement for tr.im called rp.ly. Then somehow the subject turned to how to build a sustainable thing out of his daring act. I gave a lame answer. In my defense, I wasn't prepared. After much more thought I know the answer and I'd like to share it here.
Before giving the answer let's be clear on what the question is.
Brian is a young ambitious hard-working creative persistent developer. I can vouch for all that. He lives in Portland, but when we have events here in the Bay Area, he comes. He never gives up, never flames, and his stuff works. He's got all the attributes you look for in an entrepreneur.
The question is this -- how to build a sustainable user-oriented business around Brian's talents so that it doesn't let the users down as the investors' interest diverges from the users' interest. That's what's going with FriendFeed and Twitter, when you really drill in. Some of it is incompetence and fear. Twitter's SUL is just plain dumb, it's not in anyone's interest. But FriendFeed getting acquired and not protecting the users, that is simple divergence. Their stockholders and the users had different interests.
Anyway, when you frame the question this way the answer is very clear. You have to align the interests of the users and the investors.
Think about that for a minute.
Align the interests of: 1. Users and 2. Investors.
How to do that?
Well, they need to be the same people.
Get ready for some non-linear thinking folks, because this is not the 20th Century. It's not Kansas and Twitter isn't Toto and the VCs aren't the Wicked Witch -- they're just business people following their training and instinct the best they can.
To understand how this can work, back up a few years and then a few years more.
Why did Google get such an outrageous market cap when they IPO'd? I maintain it's because they had a huge number of users who understood their product and were very excited about it.
Okay back up another generation. Before Netscape went public the assumption was they needed revenue at a 20 percent pre-tax margin. They squeaked by if you looked at the numbers the right way in the right light, and squinted. But in the end none of that mattered. The stock didn't end up pricing based on the old metrics. Why? Same thing -- they had a huge number of users who undestood their product and were excited about it. They bought the stock and bid up the price. And up and up and up.
We're now in the same place again. The question is this -- okay Brian isn't a Google or a Netscape. Neither is tr.im. Neither are the handful of developers who are excited by rssCloud and the idea of a loosely-coupled distributed 140-character message network. But who says public offering have to be mega-size. They don't. Sometimes they're very small affairs.
And that imho is the answer -- we, the users, need to own a technology company -- and have it work to serve our interests. It has to help us achieve our goals to do what we are excited about. I believe the users are worth betting on, much more than I believe that Marc Andreessen or Larry and Sergey really had any idea how to tap into the potential of their inventions (with no disrespect to any of these brilliant people). The visionaries were the people who believed their stock was worth a lot more than anyone in Silicon Valley did.
So that's what I'd like you all to think about -- founding a People's Software Company whose first act is to IPO and pool the financial resources of users who believe there is a gap in what Silicon Valley is providing using their old models for corporate structure. We're living in the proof that the gap exists, with all the failures of the centralized system in just the last week. See if your imagination takes you to the same place it takes me.
PS: I've turned off comments on this post. I may explain why in a subsequent post.
8/11/09; 5:28:07 PM
Every Friday, rain or shine!
On Twitter there's been a tradition called "Follow Fridays," where you tell your friends who they should follow. It's nice, but I've got another idea, a way to help build and diversify the Internet, and probably help preserve a record of what we were thinking way back in 2009 and 2010.
Every Friday, rain or shine, write a blog post.
These days when I think an idea needs elaboration I ask for a blog post.
When you see an interesting idea expressed in 140 chars that you think could use elaboration, ask them to do a longer-form post to explain. Especially on Fridays.
Farhad Manjoo, writing in Slate, sings the anthem of the new republic. "Microblogging has become too important for one company to rule the field." I agree with most everything in the piece, it's largely a summary of thoughtfully chosen quotes from Scripting News. However, I vehemently object to death metaphors for software, systems and networks. The goal is vibrant, thriving, survivable networks. The headline of the piece is something I can't support. Otherwise, excellent!
A few days ago Taylor Heffernan, a student at the University of Delaware, asked if I would drop the insurrection if Twitter became a revolutionary in the cause of loose-coupling. In a heartbeat! In a blink of an eye! In a cycle of a netbook microprocessor! In the time it takes to say the "Y" sound in You Betcha Fer Sure! He reminded me of the way we pulled a fast one on Netscape in 1999 by throwing in the towel on our syndication format and using theirs instead. I'm always a sucker for unconditional surrender, even when it wasn't asked for, much less demanded.
As Michael Jackson said to Paul McCartney, "I think I told you I'm a lover not a fighter." He also encouraged McCartney to "keep dreaming."
I also love that there are bright young people with enthusiasm for the future who are happy to learn from the past. There's hope for the world.
And to our friends at Twitter, I know you don't put me on your list of favorite Tweeters and you haven't verified my account, but I would still work with you to make all this stuff work right.
One more thing. Even though the loosely-coupled 140-char message network won't need URL shorteners (at least when messages aren't traveling over SMS) our two guests for this evening's Bad Hair Day podcast are Eric Woodward of tr.im and Brian Hendrickson of rp.ly. These guys are very interesting leaders in our little micro-community. If you recall earlier this week tr.im made headlines by first announcing it was shutting down and then in response to the incredible outpouring of support decided to give it another go. In the interim, Brian whipped up rp.ly -- and announced it on BHD 7.5 on Monday. It was a welcome surprise, which I wrote about the next day, in a piece that was reprised by Doc Searls.
And don't forget in the midst of all this michegas, Facebook bought Friendfeed, leaving Scoble with his blog. Of course it still loves him, always will.
TechCrunch doesn't cover us, we block TechMeme, we're committed to a new beginning with all-clean energy. We've done it before we'll do it again.
Yesterday Marshall wrote a story about the Twitter subscription lists app that I put up as part of the rssCloud project. As a result a few hundred people tried it out, and in the process I cached their follow lists.
Then it occurred to me this morning that this is an interesting data set. It represents some slice of the RWW readership and tells us something about who they follow. Unlike the usual argument that Twitter follower lists are garbage, these clearly are not. They represent real people with an interest in some bleeding-edge tech. Who they follow, to me, is intensely interesting.
BTW, we have a great pair of guests for our podcast, live this evening at 7PM Pacific. Details forthcoming.
8/13/09; 3:09:24 PM
Seeing superiority
So many connections are missed because people feel superior to others.
"He doesn't know how to make systems scale," observes an engineer who does. But he fails to observe that the other guy knows how to do things he doesn't. Sometimes people miss what they don't have (wish I was thinner, richer, younger) and other times we're so oblivious we can't even see it exists (he knows how politics work, he knows how to reduce things to their core simplicity).
Better to assume that everyone you meet has something to offer that you can use. Otherwise, why did you meet them?
Sometimes you meet people who are so open, so ready -- and sometimes people are too open and too ready -- you get scared and back off. Gotta strike a good balance. Don't stand behind a huge wall and don't get in the other guy's face.
Do you believe in a purposeful existence -- that everything happens for a reason? Well, you just ran into this guy for a reason. Now are you going to find out what it is or let the opportunity pass?
I guess it's unavoidable but we erect barriers to keep people out. We tell ourselves stories about how much better we have it than they do. Too old, too young, too fat, too needy. But you can always flip it around and imagine it the other way. I've seen ridiculous examples of people who had almost nothing, feeling superior to others, who it could be argued, are vastly better off than them. The mind can play some really huge tricks.
I can't tell the specific stories behind these observations because they involve people who are living who I care about. But I can share the observations and hope to help make more of the connections that want to happen, actually occur.
For whatever reason, this is what my eyes are open to right now.
7/31/09: "Don't waste time on other people's qualities, intelligence, hypocrisy, honor. Distractions. What matters is what you do."
8/13/09; 4:56:03 AM
Netscape and RSS
Interesting sequence of events.
Marc Canter writes a blog post asking if we should trust Marc Andreessen, after the hole Netscape left its users in when they sold out to AOL. He makes some good points about the browser, esp the part about how they blamed Microsoft for their demise. I think they could have survived it, if they had gotten their software act together. Instead we had five or six years of Microsoft dominance of the browser market, and those were not good years for the web.
But Canter overlooked one thing, without Netscape there never would have been RSS. I said this in a tweet. "Really???" asks Rbonini. Really.
Here's the sequence of events that led to RSS 0.91. Obviously this is from my point of view, but all these things did happen and all were necessary for RSS to become what it is today.
1. In 1997, as an experiment to satisfy Adam Bosworth, who was pestering me (jn a nice way) about XML, I produced a syndication of my "news site" -- Scripting News. I called the format scriptingNews format.
2. In 1998, almost nothing happened with this format. A few experiments, but it looked like it was going nowhere. I had other XML-based projects that appeared to have much more promise.
3. Then in 1999, Netscape comes out with RSS 0.90. It does most of what scriptingNews does, and a few things it didn't do. And vice versa. At first I was upset, they had mostly ignored my work, been incompatible when it would have (imho) been easier to be compatible.
4. Then I did one of the smartest things I ever did. I surrendered unconditionally. They didn't even ask me to. I adopted their format. Wholesale. Discarded my old format. The way I figured it, I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Because, and this is the key point -- they had support from content companies, notably Wired, Salon, Red Herring and Motley Fool. In one step, swallowing my pride, little old Scripting News and all the allied sites that used my software, could join the club. So I did it. Goodbye scriptingNews, hello RSS. (It's a little more complicated, I left out a few steps, but this is the net-effect.)
Maybe some other BigCo would have come along and do what they did, but with the benefit of hindsight, none did. It was years before the other tech companies adopted RSS, they came in after the publishing industry, led by the New York Times. It seems that scriptingNews format would have continued doing nothing. I could claim to have invented it, but no one would have cared.
Fact is, Netscape did something unusual there, something good. They were a big company that actually stuck their neck out and did something worthwhile. Did Andreessen play a role in it? I have no idea. But the company he started did it, so if he takes responsibility for the bad stuff, seems he ought to get credit for the good stuff.
8/14/09; 4:08:20 PM
Gatekeeping is a losing strategy
Human beings are funny. They struggle to get noticed. Only a few do. And of those only a few get powerful enough to control which other humans get noticed. These people are called gatekeepers.
The idea comes from the days when rich people had gates. The richer you were the bigger and more impressive the gate. I once bought a house that had a gate, but I had it removed. All that was left were two big stone pillars, ornaments with no purpose. They also had a gasoline pump and tank on the property. I had them removed too. Then I removed myself, and now I live in a noisy neighborhood with people walking by all the time. That's how I like it. I learned that I don't like to be isolated, even though I was raised to think privacy is a good thing. Instead we thrive with lots of other humans around us.
You know how Doc says there's no demand for messages? Well, there's no demand for gatekeepers. In fact there's negative demand for them. Because once a gatekeeper sets up shop, we immediately begin to figure out ways around them.
On the Internet we call them outages. Gatekeepers are outages. They're the connections that don't get made because someone imagines themselves powerful enough to prevent them. But it's only temporary. Like a river that encounters an obstacle, eventually water (influence) piles up behind it, and then either flows over or around it. There's not much future in being an obstacle.
If you live long enough in tech, you get to see this happen over and over. I've lived a long time already, and I can testify. I've watched people, even friends, get the idea their influence was so permanent that they, like the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld, could say No soup for you! if there was something about you they didn't like. Only in this case, instead of soup, it's flow. My advice -- don't believe it.
A long time ago I discovered this fundamental rule of the net -- People come back to places that send them away. Places like Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Youtube, even Twitter. These are the mainstays. You go there to get somewhere else. Sites that try to suck you in and hold you there, no matter how cleverly, go away. While it may seem like a good approach at first, long-term it's a losing strategy.
8/14/09; 11:41:39 AM
No soup for you
8/14/09; 9:53:35 PM
It's been a big development week in RssCloudLand
The beta release of the Twitter Subscriptions List app for your desktop.
Next thing up on my release plate, a version of River2 that fully supports rssCloud.
Lifehacker: Backup and Search Your Friends' Tweets with Google Reader
Educer: "Google Reader is almost a full fledged Twitter client."
Twitter clients -- time to start thinking about two-way RSS support.
Two-way RSS support in Twitter clients means they read real-time RSS feeds, and they generate them. A backup against Twitter's failure.
8/15/09; 3:10:47 PM
The $299 Walmart laptop
The tech industry keeps wanting to think that netbooks are a mistake, but they are not.
Here's a CNET article about a $299 laptop being sold by Walmart and BestBuy. They're cheap, big and run Vista.
I'll go over the specs in a minute, but first a story.
I just took a trip to New York with my new 13.3-inch MacBook Pro, which is a lovely computer. But the next trip I took, a two-day trip up north, I brought my Asus 10-inch and was much happier because: 1. Much longer battery life. 2. A lot lighter and smaller.
The Mac doesn't even have a replaceable battery. The Asus does. When I travel with it I bring an extra 6-cell, and it's still much lighter than the Mac, and it goes for 12 hours without plugging in. That's a huge important difference.
And the smaller size meant I could make the trip with just one bag instead of two.
People who think there is no reason to get a netbook simply don't have one, I conclude. That's fine for ordinary people, but if you make your living as a tech analyst, that's just plain irresponsible.
Now to the specs.
2.2GHz Intel Celeron processor 900, 2GB of memory, DVD-RW/CD-RW drive, 15.4-inch screen, 160GB Serial ATA hard drive (5400 rpm), 802.11b/g wireless, 10/100 Ethernet LAN, Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, and Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic Edition operating system.
It's all good till you get to the wireless. I like 802.11n. Much faster. And the OS -- sorry -- I don't do Vista. I have a funny feeling that Microsoft is behind all of this. For some reason they can't handle the idea that people still want their 10-year-old OS. All the R&D that went into Vista, well that's Microsoft's problem, not the users'.
They don't say how much it weighs or how long the battery lasts. Heh. I bet it weighs a lot, and I bet the battery doesn't last very long. Is the battery removable?
In any case, I'm not surprised the $299 "craptop" sells. But -- I'd also be surprised if they do anything to slow down sales of netbooks. They're in a different class. And it's valid. Get used to it, netbooks here to stay folks. And the big, heavy, Vista class? Well they're probably here to stay too. (And I still love my Macs, and wish they'd make one that was really in the netbook class.)
At one point I said to the elder Scoble, you know people's last names seem to mean something. He smiled. I said I know I have a funny last name. Like the Boy Named Sue, my father should have sat me down as a boy and said "Son, with that name, you don't get to complain."
It was nice going to Germany where my last name means, roughly, "Person from Vienna."
I enjoyed calling room service, ordering Wiener Schnitzel and really hamming it up and no one seemed to notice or think it was strange. When the waiter brought the food he pronounced it the same way.
8/15/09; 5:52:38 PM
The right and wrong way to do tech
Consider these two examples:
1. Amazon: "Using a workflow similar to the one you'd use to import data, you prepare a manifest file, email it to us, receive a job identifier in return, and then send us one or more specially prepared storage devices. We'll take the devices, verify them against your manifest file, copy the data from one or more S3 buckets to your device(s) and ship them back to you."
2. Apple: "Rising Card is a magic application developed by Theory11. The reason it was initially rejected after a long period of hearing nothing from Apple was that they felt the app would be confusing to customers. Of course, that was the point of the app as it's a magic trick meant to confuse people. The developers wrote Apple to explain that to them, but heard nothing back. They figured all hope was lost as this was hardly a high profile application, and Apple clearly didn't seem to care too much about it."
Amazon creates a service for developers, charges them money, and never asks what you're using the service for. They're happy to help, as long as you pay your bill.
Apple hires people who do the best they can to follow the orders from the top, and end up rejecting a magic trick app because it confuses the user (which of course is the point). Because there's no money in rejected software they can't afford to spend time with the developer to figure out whether they made a mistake.
Apple would do well to throw in the towel on this system, they're in a no-win situation. They're spending money to lose money. Amazon is making tech, and money, and their VPs are enjoying their weekend while Phil Schiller is hearing tales of woe from developers (and presumably from people inside Apple as well).
I wish Amazon would make an iPhone-like device that ran the same software as EC2. No, it wouldn't replace the iPhone, at least not right away. But what a test-bed for innovation it would be. Get down to the metal with a platform and distribution system that delivers software to users for pennies (if that much) integrated into the world's largest online store, that takes no stake in the products you're offering. Geez that sounds a lot like the PC or Mac market. Of course that can't work.
BTW, Joe Moreno of Adjix may have found a breakthrough in URL-shortening that solves all the issues we covered in Thursday's Bad Hair Day podcast. I mention it in this piece because it's the incredibly flexible S3 architecture that makes the solution possible. If it actually works, and I believe it will, I'll write it up next week.
8/15/09; 4:30:46 AM
Programming wisdom
Three bits of wisdom I keep forgetting to write up in a blog post.
1. The second time you write a piece of complicated code it will work much better than the first time. Especially if there are a few years inbetween and the original code was in production and you had to live with its flaws. Sometimes you have to write it a third or fourth time to really get it right.
2. Every year or so, re-read the docs for your programming environment. You'll always find a feature you didn't quite grok the importance of the last time you read the docs. It may make your code simpler, or enable you to approach a problem you previously though unsolvable. (I did this the other day for Amazon S3 and sure enough figured out a way through a tight bottleneck.)
3. This is the most important one. If you're planning on competing like a mofo in the tech industry to make billions of dollars, and then give it all to charity when you're middle-aged, instead, find a way to contribute to the ecology of the web while you're young, and make a bit less money (I suspect you won't actually make less money). We have much higher leverage on our home court and can do more good for the planet than we can, later, in medicine or politics. Obviously I'm thinking about Bill Gates, but I'm also thinking about Evan WIlliams and Biz Stone who are already worth huge money, and on their way to making a lot more. Guys...
Deal with the URL-shortening issue now. It's an Exxon Valdez waiting to happen. You won't be able to make excuses that you didn't see it coming, cause I'm telling you now.
There are already protocols in place that allow web apps to tell you how to shorten urls that point into their space. Wordpress.com took a huge step this week, doing their part. It would take about one hour of programming, if that much, for Twitter to look for the metadata and use it. If I had a Twitter client, I'd support it in a heartbeat. If I were Twitter, same deal.
Shortlink: "URL shortening that really don't hurt the Internet."
But for some reason the business types at the companies never want to do anything good for the web. They just take for themselves and eat up the seed corn others put into the formats and protocols. At some point we're going to get through. These guys are supposedly people who care about the planet. Like Bill, when they retire, they'll spend huge money to try to prove it. Why they don't care about the ecology of the web now, when they have the most power to, I'll never get it. I have to assume they don't understand. It would cost nothing to care for the web. Not like carbon offsets, these aren't even hard problems. You just have to care enough to actually do something about it.
I think it's great. I know that Eric Woodward wanted to move on from tr.im and this gives him the opportunity to do that, but allows the community that's gathered around tr.im to continue.
I am part of that community -- having build an application that gets a lot of use, and one that a lot of people want. To match Eric's generosity, I will release the app behind the 40twits site as open source.
1. URL-shorteners are bad for the Internet. They centralize linking, and make it more fragile, and more controllable. Wait till the Chinese govt finds out about them.
2. When bit.ly breaks, it will be an outage that may be bigger than Twitter going down. Not only do we lose the present, but we lose the past too. One big URL shortener that dominates the others is itself a dangerous thing.
3. Twitter could and should obviate the need for URL-shorteners. Yes I know SMS messages are limited to 160 chars. So shorten the URLs at the SMS gateway and leave them long for communication over pathways that are not so limited. Any engineer could see this obvious solution.
4. For now URL-shorteners are a fact of life.
End of preamble. Now to what is needed in URL-shorteners to work around the various issues they present.
It's not so different from the problem with Feedburner, and the solution they used, and implemented quickly once it was known.
1. CNAMEs. It must be possible for the user to own and control the domain his or her URLs live at. Technically, this means I register the domain name, and map a sub-domain to the URL-shortener site with a CNAME record. Anyone who knows how to use Godaddy can do it. I would be happy to write a howto that explains.
2. Shared data. The URL-shortener and the user share a space where the data is stored. Joe Moreno at Adjix, who I have been working with, has figured out how to do it on Amazon S3. I have mapped a domain to an S3 bucket, and given his software permission to write to that bucket. Here's the key point. At any time I can revoke the permission and my URLs still work. Or Adjix could disappear, and the shortened URLs would still work. With this method the only way there is linkrot is if S3 goes down.
Obviously the sub-domain, tmp.loose.ly, is temporary. But if you're a techie, I encourage you to do a DNS lookup on tmp.loose.ly. You'll see it's a CNAME to s3.amazonaws.com. And get the contents of the file to see how it works. It's static. Yet it still gathers statistics. Yes, it's unusual. That's why Joe was the only one to crack this nut. He's a creative guy.
It's such a clean implementation that if I decide later to move the files to an Apache server on Linux, no problem.
I think basically Adjix has solved all the problems with URL-shorteners. I hope other engineers poke at this and verify my conclusion or disprove them.
8/19/09; 1:10:38 PM
Wednesday links
Not uncommon that an intensely productive week is followed by an unproductive one. Fighting a cold. Probably just my spirit saying Slow Down Davey. I've learned to accept these things, not fight them.
Great new domain, ou.rs, suggested by Mike Wheeler -- no doubt we'll find a use for it. One thing Twitter has taught us is how to be creative in fewer characters! BTW, don't assume that ou.rs will be a URL-shortener. It might be like Andrew Baron's mag.ma, a site that was born after Twitter, and has the short URLs designed-in.
l've wanted to have Google index all the script code in the OPML Editor's root file and tools. That's where most of its personality is defined. So I wrote a simple script that visits all the scripts and does a web page listing each. I think this will possibly interest one or two people other than myself. But I'm linking to it here so Google thinks it's important enough to index.
I found an review the NY Times ran about ThinkTank in 1983. It predates any coverage from the tech industry. At the time it ran I was totally out of money and was going to shut the company and find a job. Instead, we were able to quickly raise money and a company started, leading to a Mac product and a PC product, and lots more. Now here's the scary part -- that was 26 years ago. A long friggin time already! Yow.
Went to see District 9 yesterday. No spoilers. But it's fun, thoughtful, interesting, well-acted movie with lots of B-movie scifi cliches, all done masterfully. Lots of twists, and one or two places where you go Oh Yeah! because you know what's coming is really coooool. Good movie to take your inner-adolescent to.
8/19/09; 12:22:38 PM
Chuck Grassley
I used to think Chuck Grassley, Republican Senator from Iowa, was an honorable man. An exception to the spineless liars of his party. Now he's spouting the "death panels" lie, like all the rest. This pitch hypocritically confuses and hurts the very people they claim to care about, the people and families of people who are dealing with serious illness or imminent death.
Grassley: "We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."
It seems unlikely that Grassley, who is 75, has not dealt with death in his family. If they're like other Americans, they got help from the medical system preparing for it, or dealing with its aftermath. At least they were offered the help. Being educated about this subject not only saves hurt and grief, it also saves lives.
There is no more sensitive subject. No more private place you don't want the government to mess around in. And btw, the Republicans are sneaky -- they are government. Grassley is a US Senator. Doesn't get more government than that.
Saying the Democrats want to euthanize your grandmother is beyond despicable, I can't think of a word that describes how low it is.
It came through in a tweet today, and I gotta say it's great news.
"We discovered RSS! More to come soon."
Coool! Can't wait to see what's coming soon.
RSS is totally an FCC kind of thing. It's a package of net neutrality. A level playing field in a box. It's mom and apple pie, baseball, hot dogs, and (do they still make Chevrolets).
If anyone at the FCC is listening, if you liked RSS, wait till you see rssCloud. It makes RSS updates happen in an instant!
8/20/09; 10:20:20 PM
My #blogpostfriday post
I've had a non-productive week, I've been fighting a cold -- but I made a commitment to the web to write at least one post every Friday, so here I am keeping my promise.
I'm worried about the web.
We pour so much passion into dynamic web apps hosted by companies we know very little about. We do it without retaining a copy of our data. We have no idea how much it costs them to keep hosting what we create, so even if they're public companies, it's very hard to form an opinion of how likely they are to continue hosting our work.
A few weeks ago an entrepreneur said to my face that he was the one who made the money and I was the one who worked for free. My chin dropped. I knew most if not all of them secretly believed this, but I had never heard one say it out loud.
I know others who told me their business model was to patent my work.
Shaking my head. This can't work.
This system is terrible. It's a bubble, like the real estate bubble. It's going to burst, and when it does, it will take a lot of our history with it.
But not this blog post if I have any say about it. It's stored as a static file on a Windows XP server running Apache. It could just as easily be stored on a Linux machine running anything. Or even an iPod or iPhone. Text files are the ultimate in stability. The same text file you could read on a mainframe 40 years ago could be read on a netbook today.
I'll post a link to this piece on Twitter, that probably won't last very long. But -- the backup I'm making of it is being stored as a static text file on Apache. So it may well be around for a while.
I'm really obsessed with creating a historic record. I want to feel that our writing has a future. I also don't want to work for people who are as openly greedy as the typical entrepreneur of 2009.
Anyway -- time to go to lunch. I've taken my vitamins on behalf of the web.
8/21/09; 3:00:18 PM
7 years plus 70 days
7 years ago today: "Tomorrow is Day 70 of No Smoking Dave. Ten weeks. A non-smoking story at the Bowie concert last week. As I'm walking out I see people lighting up everywhere. Smell of smoke all around. It smells good. I really want one. In my mind I outline the steps it would take to be smoking and the amount of time it would take. I would ask someone if they could spare a cigarette. If they said no I'd offer them $1. Oh hell, just offer $1 to begin with. Whoo, where would I get a match. I'd ask for a light. Take a drag. Estimated time, 15 seconds to one minute to first nicotine rush. My heart started beating faster. I felt scared like you feel on a NY subway platform as a train is entering the station and you're standing on the platform and in the instant before it passes you think how you could end your life by leaning forward. I never actually jump, and that night I didn't smoke, and it's good that inside I equate smoking with death so deeply that it invokes my subway nightmare. Do I have it beat? No way. I am still an addict, I expect I will be for life. But I'm an addict in recovery, who is not taking the drug. Even better, I am becoming a constant evangelist for a nicotine-free lifestyle for nicotine addicts, illustrating the old adage that you teach what you most need to learn."
Wish I could send a message back in time to that Dave, seven years ago. I'm sure at some level I'm still a nicotine addict, but I no longer go through this torture when I see someone smoking. Quite the opposite. I smell it and it repels me. Given enough time, you go into remission. Maybe never all the way, but pretty close.
8/22/09; 11:52:28 AM
Yahoo embracing Twitter?
Silicon Alley Insider has an interesting piece about Yahoo's obsession with all-things-Twitter. And at the end they have an even more interesting strategy. "Yahoo should work to be a better place to use Twitter than Twitter.com."
This sounds a lot like the winning strategy Yahoo used to best CNN and MSNBC in web news in the 2004 timeframe. With My Yahoo they became the place to go to find out what's new on CNN and MSNBC, and of course on Yahoo.
This kind of embrace is a perfect prelude to competing with Twitter. First, develop a base of people who use Yahoo as their interface for Twitter, and then gradually add features that only work Yahoo-to-Yahoo.
Twitter could add those features too of course, but they might not, since they believe (incorrectly, imho) that the 140 character limit and URL-shortening are part of the magic of Twitter.
Yahoo, or anyone else who adopted this approach, could capture the users who would like to have a bit more space to express their ideas.
8/23/09; 11:25:17 PM
Courage and cowardice
First courage...
Arthur Frommer, the famous travel writer, writes on his blog. "I will not personally travel in a state where civilians carry loaded weapons onto the sidewalks and as a means of political protest." He's talking about the event where people openly carrying guns, one carrying an assault rifle, gathered outside an event where the President spoke.
Arizona can say that people have the right to openly carry guns of any kind at any time, and we can choose not to spend time or money in such a backward place. Perfectly appropriate way to react to an obvious attempt to scare people.
Now cowardice.
Last week I wrote about how Republican Senator Charles Grassley from Iowa, one of a very small number of Republicans who, imho, was honorable -- took the coward's route and threw grandma under the bus, doing his part to confuse the electorate on the issues in the health care decision we will soon make. Paul Krugman follows up, now Grassley has the gall to blame first President Obama and then one of his constituents for his cowardly deception. He's 75 years old. Is winning another election so important that he wants to be remembered as a dishonorable liar and coward?
In all the debates about health care reform, the real issue isn't getting talked about. It's about the people who don't have coverage. Some of the easiest cases are people who have the money to buy insurance, and would buy it, if the industry would sell it to them. But they only want to insure healthy people. So we're in the ridiculous situation here where the people who most need care can't get it. Someone should tell Grassley that some of those people are our grandmothers, and grandsons and granddaughters. Nieces and nephews and mothers and fathers. Don't go claiming the compassionate high ground, when you're selling us out. Shame. (And it could be that some of his own family are screwed by the insurance industry. If not, why not?)
Of course there are the cases where people pay premiums for years, then get sick, and the company denies coverage, disputing information on their application, or claiming a pre-existing condition, long after accepting the premiums. What recourse do we have? We can sue the companies, but that takes huge money, money they have and we don't. And what difference will it make if by the time the case is decided the patient is dead? The whole idea of pre-existing conditions is one that we need to get rid of, completely. Everyone who wants insurance must be able to buy it. Period. No exceptions.
Because these problems concern millions of Americans, everyone knows someone who has been put through the ringer by the insurance process. These stories about angry people (what are they angry about exactly and what does it have to do with health care) are drowning out the tragic stories of people who die because they aren't covered.
One more pointer.
The Democrats aren't blameless because they aren't selling health care reform.
George Lakoff explains how it must be done. Not with lengthy explanations of policy, but with stories that fit into the experiences of all of us, and connecting the values of universal health care with what it means to be an American.
8/23/09; 8:34:42 PM
What is an asshole?
An asshole is someone who says Obama is like Hitler because he wants everyone in the US to have health insurance.
These people are so stupid they need to be slapped in the face to wake them up. They need to have their mouths washed out with soap and be sent to bed without dinner. They need to be sent into hard labor and allowed to die of starvation.
Hitler gassed my people and incinerated them in ovens. Hitler came very close to wiping us out. Hitler was a monster. Hitler was the human race going insane on a mass level.
If you think Obama is Hitler you deserve to meet with others who agree with you, starving and freezing and dying in a cattle car, sitting in each others' excrement, on your way to a concentration camp and its ovens and gas chambers, along with your children.
You will not be allowed to bring your assault rifle.
8/25/09; 10:17:14 PM
How to fix URL-shorteners, part II
Last Wednesday I wrote a piece that explained how to fix URL-shorteners. Today, with the help of Joe Moreno at Adjix, I implemented it.
Here's how my new URL-shortener works.
1. Joe is running the shortener at adjix.com. It's the same one he's always been running, but it's got a few new features.
2. In the prefs for Adjix, I told it that I wanted to use my own domain, c.oy.ly. I also told it to write copies of all my shortened URLs to a bucket at Amazon, which I had given his app permission to write to. By using my own domain, one which I control the DNS for, and retaining a copy of all the data, I am fully protected against his service going away. And I can decide at any time to take over hosting of my own short URLs by directing the c.oy.ly domain to s3.amazonaws.com instead of partner.adjix.com.
3. When I create a shortened URL, I do it by calling an API routine that works exactly as the APIs of the other shorteners. I give it the long URL, some identifying information so it knows to associate it with my Adjix account, and it returns a token, which I smash together with http://c.oy.ly/ to form the shortened URL.
4. All this is done with a bookmarklet communicating with a web app on one of my servers. It then takes the title of the page I'm linking to and adds the full URL from step 3, and redirects me to twitter.com, where I can edit the tweet before clicking on Update.
5. Then, every few minutes I call the Twitter API and ask if Dave has posted any new tweets. If so, I parse them, store the long and short versions of the URL in my database (by dereferencing the URL). Then I call a second API on Adjix to ask it to give me the counts for the most recent 50 links created by Dave. I then update the counts in my database, sort them, and prepare the familiar Top-40 report.
Bottom-line: I am now using URL-shorteners in a way that does not make the Internet suck. I have done my good deed for the day!
8/25/09; 6:17:41 PM
Dear Disqus: Can I have the old interface back?
Near as I can tell there are no new features in the new interface. Things were just moved around and everything is way way slower. The UI was always bizarre, but I figured most of it out. Now you're telling me I have to learn it over again? Why? What's the benefit?
All I know now is that my bookmark to the dashboard broke, and to get to the unapproved messages or spam messages, the maintenence I have to do on a regular basis to keep my site working, I have to wait minutes for the page to load. I don't have any idea if there are any new features in this to justify the pain.
I would really like to go back to the way it worked this morning. You know, when it actually worked.
8/25/09; 3:25:56 PM
How to get Lessig to blog
It's sad that Lessig is "hibernating" his blog, but there's always hope. It's easy to say goodbye, but what's he going to do when he has something that has to be said right now. Wait two years to write and publish a book? I sure hope not!
In his supposedly last blog post (heh) Lessig points to his first post, which was a response to something I wrote in response to something he said. In 2001 and 2002. It's interesting to recount the exchange, because only seven years later things have changed a lot.
1. First Lessig tells a story of Hemingway and source code, an analogy that I feel is flawed. And I say so, very strongly, but hopefully not in a personal way.
2. Then in August 2002, I expanded it, and on re-reading it -- I said some things that were a bit too much. A difference of opinion between two learned people shouldn't involve throwing people out and "up yours."
3. This got Lessig to write his first blog post! So there is a silver lining.
Now the hindsight.
1. In 2002 I said in five years every member of the US House will have a weblog and will be communicating directly with the electorate. I'd say that's been realized now, only they're using Twitter and Facebook and blogs, and they have to communicate directly with the electorate because the news industry is crumbling.
2. The controversy betw Lessig and myself in 2001 and 2002 was over whether software developers should be required to release their source code to get copyright protection (at least that's how I interpreted it). I was vehement in saying no, that we were already putting our ideas out there and that putting the source code out there too would give us nothing to sell. I still believe the logic of that, but since then I gave up on commercial software and in 2004 I released my main work under the GPL. There was no parade, no new respect or even thanks from people outside the community that already used the software. Did it inspire any young would-be designers? Time will tell, but it's looking doubtful. Just saying it's harder to influence the future than it should be, or maybe not -- who knows.
3. I like to think that Lessig and I have now become friends. Just goes to show that when there's a spark between two people, it may express itself in a variety of ways. I admire Lessig, I've come to see him as an open-minded, generous person who really listens. All good things!
4. I don't believe for a second that he's given up blogging.
8/25/09; 10:23:04 AM
Urgently need an Intel build of OPML Editor/Mac
I thought about writing a more creative headline, but opted instead for a direct request for help.
1. Yesterday I pre-ordered a family pack of Snow Leopard. As I understand it, the new version of the Mac OS will run PPC apps only with special software loaded, the way earlier versions of the OS ran Mac Classic apps.
3. It is also an instance of the GPL'd Frontier kernel, which I understand has been converted to be an Intel app.
4. I can build the Windows version of the OPML Editor. However, I cannot build the Mac version. It's been a long time since I worked at the C level, last time I did was with THINK C on the Mac in the mid-90s. I've tried to build the Mac app on XCode, but I always hit a problem that I don't know how to work around, and honestly I don't want to struggle at this level. I'm going to stick to developing in the OPML environment. When I can do a kernel build on both Mac and Windows, I may look at working inside the C codebase.
5. I need someone to get a build of the Mac OPML Editor together asap and to do some basic testing to be sure it works with the current opml.root.
Resources: The Frontier Kernel project website. Source download of the OPML Editor from August 2008.
Thanks in advance!
8/25/09; 9:15:51 AM
Random Wednesday notes
Last Wednesday I did a Random Links post, and here goes another. A tradition begins?
Very little flamage over my What is an Asshole piece from last night. Guess people got the point. If you fail to understand Hitler, you deserve to get Hitler. Their only sin, beyond stupidity, is their inability to imagine that it could happen here.
8/26/09; 11:08:57 AM
Joe Hewitt on Bad Hair Day at 7PM
Our special guest for the Bad Hair Day podcast at 7PM Pacific is Joe Hewitt the author of Facebook for the iPhone. What a great day to talk with Joe!
I had lunch with him yesterday in Santa Cruz. I said that if Facebook wanted to compete with Twitter they needed a vastly simpler version of Facebook. Little did I know that 24 hours later I'd be looking at it.
If you have any questions for Joe, please post them as comments here, and Marshall and I will try to get to them.
You can listen to the show live on BlogTalkRadio, and of course it will be available as a podcast from the badhair.us site.
Here we go!
8/27/09; 8:57:29 PM
My one sentence review of the Facebook iPhone app
I wish the desktop version of Facebook was this simple, fast and elegant.
Update: Believe it or not I actually had lunch yesterday with Joe Hewitt, the developer of this app. I said that if Facebook wanted to compete with Twitter they needed a vastly simpler version of Facebook. Little did I know that 24 hours later I'd be looking at it.
Health care is a lot like a fire department or police department. You never know when it's your house that's going to be on fire, that's why everyone pays equally for protection, and the person whose house burns gets the "benefit" if you can call having your house burn a benefit (or getting very sick).
The main difference is that very few houses burn, but eventually everyone needs life-saving or end-of-life care. Every responsible person must pay for care, and basically only the truly rich (multi-millionaires) can afford to self-insure.
If you assume that everyone has to pay for health insurance, then the question is how much do you want to pay. In the US, our current system costs 16% of GDP and we get less care, in some cases much less care than other rich countries that pay as little as 9% of their GDP.
So we're making poor choices here.
Obama's plan is less comprehensive than the German, Canadian, French or Japanese plans. In each of these other rich countries, health insurance is a non-profit business. That doesn't mean insurance companies don't make money, they do, but not from health insurance. Obama isn't promoting that (although it's not clear why).
And for 40 million Americans they might as well live in the third world, for them health care is based on their ability to pay out of pocket. As long as they just get colds, they survive. As soon as they need more care, they either go bankrupt or become disabled, or die. This is their country too, they get a vote in how our system works. You're related to some of these people (unless you have no family). They're the ones who should be standing in anger at the town halls. And they're not all poor, many of them are middle class or upper middle class, they just happen to not be profitable for the insurance industry. These are the people whose houses burn to the ground when they catch fire.
The people who would vote against universal health insurance are stupidly cocky, because they will all need health care some day and for many of them it will not be there. Sometimes they're people who don't smoke or aren't obese, who don't have any personal bad habits. People get sick for a lot of reasons that no one understands. Maybe just bad luck or bad genes. In the wrong place at the wrong time.
Bottom-line, we could spend a lot less money on health care and take care of everyone. Instead we're opting on the worst approach, we spend a lot more, and a huge portion of the populace isn't cared for and the rest of us are treated not as patients but as profit centers. If you happen to need health care, you can't get it. This is some kind of way to run a country? Yikes.
If you want to understand what our options are, I highly recommend listening to the FreshAir interview with T.R. Reid, who has just written a book on health care systems around the world.
8/27/09; 3:38:34 PM
Wanted: A simple DNS app for Mac or Windows
In the early-mid-90s there was a Mac desktop app that was a Domain Name Server. Here's how you'd set it up.
1. Put it in your Startup Items folder so it would launch at startup.
2. When it booted a window opens with a list of all the domains it was managing. Of course initially it was empty. You could click on the name of any of them to edit the settings in a dialog. There was a place to edit the name of the domain. A place to add an A record or a CNAME. (In other words it works more or less the same as any web app we use to manage DNS.)
3. An Add button at the bottom of the window. Click it and a dialog like the one in #2 would appear, except all the fields would be blank.
4. There was a text file that also configured the server, in fact the dialogs above just served to add, remove or change the text in the file. I suspect the file was in a standard format that all DNS's use.
Anticipating what people are going to say, yes, I know there's a DNS built into the Mac, but it doesn't have a graphic interface and the instructions for setting it up are ridiculous. I think the one on Windows has a graphic UI, but I can't find any comprehensible instructions that explain how to set it up.
A college classmate, Sandy Wilbourn, who I think of as a brother, is an expert in DNS, and he says the app I'm looking for doesn't exist. I threatened to write it myself, he advised against it. Oh man. What is it with these simple web services that we're allowed to use them through a web app, but they don't want us running our own. I'm going to run my own DNS at some point, and I'd rather do it sooner than later.
Someone is going to ask why I need to do this. I have a good reason. You can either take my word or pay me $1000 and I'll explain.
Update: Chuck Shotton points to MenAndMice's server for Windows, and JY points to CutEdge's server for Mac. Both appear to fit the bill. Thanks guys!!
Now we're ready for rssCloud Meetup 2.0, on Wednedsay September 9, 7-9PM at 110 South Hall on the UC-Berkeley campus. South Hall is the gothic brick building in the center of the UC Berkeley campus, just across from the iconic clock tower.
The meetup is open to all, but primarily for developers. The goal is to bootstrap the loosely-coupled 140 character message network. One that's open on all sides, so anyone can add an aggregator, cloud server or authoring tool, yet still have the feel of a centralized system. There may be tradeoffs, but the benefits of not having a company at the center of the network should create great opportunities for news organizations, innovative developers, designers, businesses, and users everywhere. Twitter is great, but we want something that works better for all of us.
We hope to see one or more new implementations come online before or at the meetup.
The way it'll work is: 1. I'll talk for 20-25 minutes, review the walkthrough, technology, philosophy, then briefly answer questions. 2. We'll go around the room and people will say what they're doing, and what kinds of help they could use. 3. Then an open discussion, and we adjourn.
There will be free wifi, but if it's like the NYC meetup you won't need it. This is a complex and interesting topic that seems to hold people's attention. But it's California and you never know, so bring your laptop, just in case.
If you know you're going to be there, please post a comment on this blog post.
Thanks to the UC Berkeley School of Information for generously offering to host this event.
8/31/09; 8:20:36 PM
Is River of News enough?
For what seems like many years I was a lonely voice in the wilderness, whispering at first "River of News" then speaking more loudly and finally shouting from the rooftops, but people wouldn't listen. Developers patterned their "news readers" after email programs. Each feed was a box, and like a mail program it would tell you how many unread messages there were. "This is wrong!" I would say -- RSS is not mail.
Well in 2006 or so, things turned in the other direction and rivers showed up everwhere. They call them streams, lifestreams, etc, but they're all the same basic idea. Park yourself on the riverbank and watch the news flow by. If you miss something, not to worry, if it's important some new story will refer to it.
Then an interesting experiment, the AnnArbor.com switched its home page to be a river. Wonderful, fantastic, futuristic. A long time ago I predicted the front page of every news site would be a river. But now Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab asks, basically, is a River enough? Do you need some other structure to hang the news on? Yes, imho, you do.
The question comes up on Twitter, when you want to know the context of a tweet, because sometimes people string them together. 140 characters isn't enough to express a full idea, so you write three or four. By the time you're at number four, someone has usually tweeted you back asking what you mean. The answer is in #1 or #2 of the 4-tweet sequence. If you answer the question, you'll just beget more questions, so you hope the person is savvy enough to click on your name and read your full stream to get the context.
In the 1980s I ran a system called LBBS on an Apple II in my living room. We had the exact same problem, and found a neat solution. At first the structure was strictly hierarchic. The sysop, me, would start a discussion area, and users would post questions or assertions as first-level subs. People would respond, and those would appear in reverse chronologic order as second-level subs. Responses to those would be third-level and so on. This was an early threaded discussion system. But how to find the new stuff? For that I added what I called a Msg Scanner, a reverse-chronolic browser that ignored structure. It would keep a bookmark for every user, a high-water-mark, and when you'd jump into the scanner that's where you'd start. You'd keep hitting Next until you reached the newest message. And here's the cool thing -- when you wanted to see the context, just type / and you'd switch over into the hierarchic structure, on the same message.
News will work the same way, except someone who is skilled at organizing stuff will figure out where each piece goes in the hierarchy. This will provide the context, and you will also be able to find out What's New.
Anyone who used the LBBS in 1981, that's 28 years ago, will understand, but in this world it's still a new idea.
I wrote a narrative of this development process in 1988 when I was starting up UserLand Software.
9/2/09; 2:43:39 PM
Sorry I still hate Comcast
Hate is a word I've tried to wipe from my vocabulary, along with need. You don't really need more than air, food, water, a warm place to sleep, basic medical care. There are lots of things that are nice to have, like hugs and kisses and great sound systems and business-class-or-better. But needs are pretty basic things.
Hate? People throw that word around far too casually. The other day a rep of SXSW said that I had hated on them because I suggested they were taking money to keep me off the speakers list since 1998 or so. I had asked many times why I couldn't get in, and was met with a stone wall. So like all human beings, my mind filled in the blanks. I asked to be enlightened, if it wasn't a payoff, what was it? I offered to run a retraction if they would tell me the real reason. Stone wall again. Oh well. I don't hate them. The word I would use to describe my feeling about SXSW is frustrated.
But Comcast? I think that's the real thing. I'll tell you why.
Love and hate have a mathematical relationship:
hate = love + betrayed
I would love to have Comcast service, but I would never sign up for it again unless they apologized for the treating me so badly. And while most companies apologize when they screw up, I have a feeling that Comcast thinks I should apologize to them. And that ain't never going to happen.
Why write about this today? Well they're getting a lot of kudos because they try to fix their fuckups with reps who use Twitter to find unhappy customers. When I got fired as a Comcast customer, I was in contact with their Twitter caretakers. Not only couldn't they stop the Comcast machine from chewing me up and spitting me out, they had the gall to say they liked me while they were doing it! Now that's really asking for the hate.
Imagine a girlfriend dumping you, hard, and while she's doing it saying she likes you. Well fuck that shit bitch. <-- There's the hate.
But their service is much faster than my AT&T DSL. I pay my bills, in full and on time (as I did with Comcast), and they don't have Twitter accounts. They never cut me off (knock wood), and I never have to talk to a Twitter rep who likes me. Maybe I'm weird but that's kind of how I like to do business.
9/2/09; 12:05:21 PM
Learning from the fire of 1991
Fires are on the minds of Californians, esp ones who live in the hills, like the ones in Berkeley and Oakland.
In 1991 these hills burned. I watched the fire, safely, from a friends' deck on Potrero Hill. It seemed far away, but now I live here.
In the RTN podcast on Monday I asked Doc Searls if we could learn from the fires in Southern California.
Today, on InBerkeley, I ask if there are any old-timers who were here during the fire of 1991 who would share what they learned.
It's an aggregator that runs on your desktop and supports reading lists, rssCloud and is a podcatcher.
I'm sure there are bugs and know there are still features to come, but I and others are using it all the time to keep up with what's new in RSS feedland, and to download podcasts, and as more cloud-aware apps come online, we're going to need software that can subscribe to the. That's what River2 is for.
If you have questions or comments, post them here or on the howto linked above.
Here we go and good luck to all of us!
PS: Now I've hit my first milestone due before the rssCloud meetup next Wednesday. I have a few others to cross off the list. Wish me luck!
9/3/09; 6:58:09 PM
Hire execs who love the product
I've been in and around the tech industry since 1976, which makes me a 33-year veteran. The industry loops every 5 to 10 years so I've seen something like five or six iterations. There are some mistakes they make over and over. Wish I could tap them on the shoulder and say Don't Do It but it wouldn't make a diff. Every crop of entrepreneurs thinks it's different. They never are, but they have to learn that for themselves.
One thing they do over and over is hire execs who don't love the product.
It's as if the guy who ran professional football didn't like football. Or if Valentino Rossi didn't love MotoGP. Or the CEO of a vintner didn't like wine. Or if Alice Waters who runs Chez Panisse and is Berkeley's most famous entrepreneur didn't have a passion for great food.
Yet Twitter just hired a COO who has one of the most out-of-whack follows-to-follower ratios out there. He follows 40 and is followed by 650,263. This is probably why his RSS company, Feedburner, made it to be acquired by Google and then crashed. It wasn't built on a foundation of love for RSS (I can attest to that) and while the people of Twitter use it and they have very passionate users, the execs at Twitter, at best, dabble. And now we know they hire dabblers. (An instance of A people hiring A people and B people hiring C people?)
When your ratio of follows to followers is 0.00006151 it's inevitable that you see Twitter as a stage like the one Barack Obama stood on in Berlin or in Denver. "I'm up here," he must think, and "they're out there." His ability to understand how people see his product is limited because his view is of users as little dots, and he and his 40 insider friends loom large.
I've sat in board meetings listening to other board members explain our users, having never met one, having never used the product. Needless to say their advice is pretty general and usually wasn't very useful.
I've had it explained to me that cancer doctors don't have to get cancer to be good doctors, and of course I agree. But using a product like Twitter is supposed to be a joy. It's supposed to be an expansive thing, not a life-threatening one. And I'd add, every company that viewed its own products with fear fails. If you make a product that is not a disease and you treat it like one, people will find some other place to congregate.
9/3/09; 2:37:52 PM
Why I love my Sony Walkman
My mother has a friend who was raving about the new Sony Walkman, so I bought two, one for Mom and one for me. They're not expensive, and I've never been happy with the way my iPod worked for podcasts, which is 90 percent of the use I have for them.
Do I like it? I do! I've been using the Walkman ever since, and the iPod has become a hard disk for my BMW (which has an iPod interface).
I like the Walkman because it works way better, for me, than the iPod does.
The Walkman connects easily to both Mac and Windows without any weird dialogs that warn me that it's about to erase everything on the device. It presents as a disk drive. I copy files into the Podcasts sub-folder of the Music folder. When I'm out, I click the top-level Music icon then choose Folder, and navigate to the file I want and it plays. Click Next to go to the next one.
Back at home, next time I load it up, I just empty out the folder and copy in a new batch of podcasts. Or if I'm on the road with my Windows XP netbook, or traveling with my 13 inch MacBook Pro. Or in my office using my iMac. Or at a friend's house. You get the idea. It's totally not fussy about what you connect it to, and it never gets an idea that it knows better what should be on your device than you do.
My iPod ends up with all kinds of junk on it because even though I've been using one for seven years and I still don't understand how it works. I understood the Sony the first time I used it and it's never thrown a curveball at me. A few weeks ago I had to post here to find out how to get my iPhone out of shuffle mode.
Apple really does do nice user interfaces, but I think they either don't understand users, or don't like or trust them. The Walkman has lots of nice features, but it's nicest feature is that it's really simple.
BTW, last time I was in NY I saw that my mom had taken it with her on a walk and asked if she knew how to put new stuff on it, and she said yes. I consider this a major victory for tech!
Anyway it might not be for you. But a lot of people don't know that Sony now makes a good MP3 player. Hopefully I've done my part to help correct that.
9/3/09; 1:43:36 PM
RSS in your TV set
I am up late writing docs for the next River2 release and just got an email from Amazon about a new Samsung TV that has a built-in RSS reader. Here's a video report from CES 2008 where the TV was announced.
RSS is part of the fabric of the Internet which is now a feature of TVs. It's so cooool.
9/3/09; 5:42:34 AM
1151 cloud-enabled feeds
I just added a changes.xml for my rssCloud server.
Now you'll see a whole bunch of cloud-enabled feeds that weren't there before. They're feeds for the 1151 people and organizations that I follow on Twitter.
They're automatically produced by an app that I've had running since the beginning of 2009 that keeps an XML-based backup for everyone I follow. This is just another form of that stream.
If you follow any of these people in River2, and you have notification turned on, you'll get updates within a minute, knock wood.
This is another piece of the loosely-coupled 140 character network.
Another way of saying this is if I follow you on Twitter, you now have a cloud-enabled feed. Try updating on Twitter, and refreshing changes.xml in a minute. If all goes well you should see your feed at the top of the list.
For a lot of users looking in, this probably means as much as the pictures of the Bay Bridge being taken apart and put back together. But when it's done, you'll be able to drive a car across it! :-)
9/4/09; 2:59:41 PM
A personal request
First, it's wonderful that so many people are trying out River2. I really mean that. Thanks for giving it a try.
But please post your questions on the Howto page so it's possible other people could help with the answer. Thanks.
I'm just one person, and ideally I should be able to spend my time fixing bugs, writing docs, and building new stuff. If I have to support every user personally, well that just doesn't scale. :-)
Let's have fun!
9/4/09; 3:45:49 PM
RSS has no Fail Whale
First, thanks to Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet for standing up for RSS. You don't have to be a tech scholar to know that RSS is like XML or HTML or HTTP or text files. It's fabric, permanent, it ain't going anywhere. It's not like the Norweigian Blue, it isn't pining for the fjords or pushing up daisies. Let's keep a sense of humor and a sense of perspective. Some people look at life and see death. I look at life and try to be happy, cause yeah someday we all die, but that day hasn't come yet. (Knock wood and Praise Murphy.)
William Mougayar suggested in a comment on Fred's post that Twitter could have a button that allowed you to add any RSS feed to your Twitter stream.
I said "if they did that they'd have to absorb a significant share of the RSS flow, and that's the problem and why it's ludicrous to think that RSS is anything but the elephant in the room and the 800-pound gorilla combined."
"You can see it in the famous TechCrunch leak piece of the internal Twitter docs. They know they can't handle the load.
"That's why a distributed approach is the only one with any hope of working. The reason RSS could grow so huge is the same reason HTML and HTTP could, it's not centralized. That was the mistake Feedburner made. They thought 'Oh we can make a killing by snarfing up all the RSS.' No way Jose. That's a losing proposition. Luckily they got Google to give them $100 mill before the house of cards collapsed. They too put the brakes on growth."
Talking with Scoble last night, he offered that Twitter would have to grow to the size of Google to handle all of RSS. I agreed, but said it would be worse. Twitter would have to grow to be the size of Google overnight and without a revenue stream. Google got to grow with the web. Twitter wouldn't have that luxury relative to RSS. It became a giant long before Twitter even existed.
Which brings us to the Fail Whale.
RSS has grown in a fairly orderly fashion, quietly, without daily articles in the NY Times, or appearances on Oprah, or proclamations by athletes and movie stars. It also grew to huge size without a Fail Whale. RSS, in over ten years, has never gone down. Think about that for a moment. That's because it was designed for growth from day one. Getting on the RSS bus can be as simple as putting a file on your Apache server. It's just another rendering of your content flow. It requires a fairly small commitment, you don't need tens of millions of dollars of venture capital to build out an RSS network. You can rent it from Amazon at pennies per gigabyte.
Anyone who thinks Twitter could replace RSS doesn't understand the scale of the two things. Twitter is a fairly new company that has had trouble meeting the remarkable growth it has achieved. I use Twitter all the time, and I love it. I find that RSS and Twitter are a good combination. And I think news people create controversy for the same reason journalists have always sold war -- it gets people to read their journals, and their ads, and it makes them money. That's all that's going on here.
Interestingly, rather than Twitter absorbing RSS, it may go the other way. Perhaps RSS will absorb Twitter. That's the idea behind rssCloud. That a lot can be gained by creating a loosely-coupled 140-character network. Sure there will be tradeoffs, it'll take up to a minute for you to see your friends' updates. But there would be a lot of advantages, for example -- while one component of the network can fail, the whole thing is as resilient and distributed as the Internet.
9/5/09; 10:35:20 AM
All the angst over Atom
Yesterday at around 5PM, I added the code to the OPML Editor to support Atom 1.0 in River2, my new River of News aggregator. The coding took about an hour.
I tested it on some feeds from Blogger and Google News, fixed a few bugs, and burned it in overnight. It appears to work perfectly. So I released it this morning a little before 9AM.
The point? There were years of strife in the RSS world over this. In the end it took less than 24 hours, beginning to end, to support the new format. We could have saved all that angst. A new format isn't that big a deal.
9/5/09; 11:55:26 AM
Any Wordpress blog can be cloud-enabled
This is worth a special post.
Wordpress did two things today.
1. They enabled rssCloud support on wordpress.com. This means that any weblog hosted on their server can publish real-time. This is the announcement that got all the attention.
2. But equally important is that you can install the rssCloud plug-in on any Wordpress blog that you host and it adds a cloud element to your feed and handles notifications for subscribers. That's how we got InBerkeley.com to be cloud-enabled. It takes a couple of minutes and you're ready to go.
ReadWriteWeb: "All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer's brand-new reader River2. That will probably change very soon."
Apparently for some people this is the first time they're hearing about the <cloud> element in RSS. It first appeared in January 2001 and was part of RSS 0.92, and of course RSS 2.0.. It was fully supported in Radio UserLand 8.0 and Manila.
Also, many thanks to Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider at Automattic, and the rest of the guys. It's so cool to have them in the tech industry. We all owe them a lot for their support of open formats and protocols.
Any Wordpress blog can be cloud-enabled, not just the ones on wordpress.com. I wonder which major tech blog is going to be first to go cloud.
Also it would be great if Twitter clients, such as Seesmic and Brizzly, would start thinking about supporting rssCloud.
Don't forget there's an rssCloud meetup at UC-Berkeley on Wednesday at 7PM.
9/7/09; 3:57:57 PM
Test post
please ignore
9/7/09; 6:43:16 PM
Happy baby is happy!
Nothing more to say than what a hugely perfectly pretty happy baby!
She made me happy.
That's all.
9/8/09; 8:06:58 PM
What does rssCloud mean to you?
Okay I think it's time to explain what rssCloud means to people who use the web, as opposed to people who create it at a technical level.
The idea is to deliver news faster, without relying on a single company to do all the work.
Until now you could have one or the other, but not both.
You could have the news delivered via RSS, but if you wanted it fast you had to go to Twitter or Facebook or FriendFeed.
The problem with going to a company is two-fold: 1. The company might not be able to handle it. 2. The company might screw with it.
We saw both 1 and 2 with Twitter. Last summer they had trouble keeping the system up. They still "fail whale" a lot, and it could get worse, if they grow. Certainly if they grow to a billion users and become the "pulse of the planet" -- as they've said they want to. There are other reliability problems, like no good record of what's posted on Twitter. And all the trouble scaling has meant that new features show up in the center at a snail's pace, while the pace of innovation at the edges is furious, and limited by the slow growth at the center.
But even worse is that the company has not stayed out of the editorial flow of the community. At the beginning of the year, the basic metric, the Twitter equivalent of page-rank was follower count. Then all of a sudden some user's counts starting going up at an incredible rate. It came out that the company was recommending these people to new users. They were giving this flow to their friends, and to reporters who cover them, but not to people they don't know or don't like. They've even taken it away from reporters who have written stories they don't like. This is totally unacceptable, we've said so repeatedly. They ignore the concern.
Think about it another way. Imagine if Larry and Sergey's friends pages always showed up at the top of search results on Google, even when their pages had nothing to do with what people were searching for. Now you understand how un-Internet-like this is.
People say they're entitled to do this, and I suppose they are. But then we are entitled to take this idea and use the Internet to implement it, instead of all relying on a company.
That's how a techie like me, who loves the open-ness of the Internet, thinks.
To understand why, you have to understand that in 1993, I gave up on tech, because it was so utterly messed up by big companies fighting to control the users. A guy like me couldn't make software and sell it, because they were always screwing with us. They weren't doing it on purpose, they just didn't care. If you said "You should care" they'd call you a utopian or Mother Teresa and laugh. But in the end they got screwed by their own screwing around. The Internet straightened it all out, and newly charged with optimism, I learned something important. The tech world is cyclic. First it's wonderful, then it gets f*cked, then it gets wonderful again.
Our goal with rssCloud is to take what was wonderful about Twitter, that got f*cked by their Suggested Users List and the Fail Whales, and make it wonderful again.
I want everything fast with no company in the middle. That doesn't mean Twitter goes away, not at all. They just have to stop being in the middle.
That's what rssCloud is about. Fast news updates without the company in the middle. Small pieces loosely joined.
PS: And now maybe you understand why there was so much crap flying around RSS for the last few months. It always happens when the dam is about to break. No big deal. Just go right through it. The bark is worse than their bite.
9/8/09; 11:08:58 AM
Someone give Om an award
I just took a quick look at the RSS feeds of the major tech pundit blogs to see which had <cloud> elements.
Something else worth noting, Feedburner preserves the <cloud> element. So two things are working!
I subscribed to his feed in River2 and it grokked his realtimeness. Oh life is sweet.
For techies, you might wonder why we received notification of an update after subscribing. That shows that Om's Wordpress installation is following the Walkthrough. You're supposed to test the notification handler before you register it. If it passes the test go ahead. If it fails, throw it away. This keeps the conversation real.
9/8/09; 9:19:12 AM
2002 != 2009
There's been concern expressed today in various Twitter messages that rssCloud might not scale to support all the people who might want to use it.
I'm not an expert in massive centralized systems, that's why I designed this to be decentralized, like RSS is.
I set up an rssCloud server, fairly confident that it would scale to meet the demand, and with a fallback if it shouldn't. I'm not risking anything, because we know that polling works for RSS. rssCloud is an optimization, its purpose is to make RSS faster. But if it fails RSS still works. As I wrote earlier, even though many people predicted in 1999 that RSS would never work, it's actually never failed, there is no RSS fail whale.
This is not my first time with rssCloud. My team at UserLand Software implemented it in 2002 in Radio and Manila. We had problems, but I've factored in what we learned in 2002 in the 2009 implementation. If you're interested in the details, I've spelled them out in the Implementor's Guide to rssCloud, which was published in mid-July and has been reviewed by dozens of programmers, and implemented by more than a few, including the people at Automattic.
He wrote a beautiful piece in 2006, and just re-ran it with links to 2009 bits that illustrate his points.
It's a case study in how Internet bootstraps work. They're about 10 percent technology and 90 percent working with people, trying to figure out what they want and getting it for them. In the process something builds out that has a cohesive whole, and another layer is formed.
A few years go by and we do it again.
I'm certainly not the only person who understands this process, I'm a student, and I've learned from many others that come before. I love reading books about how this works, and the latest inspiration was the Connections series by James Burke. He goes all the way back to the beginning of civilization and shows how ideas interconnect and build on other ideas.
In the end it really is all about working together. And I'm glad that Phil is there. It's nice to have someone watching who sees how it all fits together.
Then, this evening, a really insightful Webmonkey piece came out. It's the same insight that William Mougayar had, in a comment here yesterday. When this bootstrap plays out it will all be seen to have happened at the workstation. What Matt and Wordpress did over the weekend was the nuclear fuel that lit the fire. But the big winners will be the readers, skimmers and Twitter clients that will, as Webmonkey puts it so well: "We'll just have to stop calling them Twitter clients and start calling them what they should be referred to as: news clients." Amen.
9/9/09; 7:23:58 PM
Am I a hypocrite?
Sure. Of course. I am a totally f*cked up human being.
Now that that's out of the way, let me explain.
Last night on Twitter, Staci Kramer of PaidContent asked what's the difference betwen the default list in River2 and Twitter's suggested user list.
There's a qualitative difference and a quantitative one.
I use the default list for two purposes: 1. To provide an initial user experience that isn't blank. In this sense it is like Twitter's list. 2. To highlight interesting uses of RSS and clouds and reading lists, things I want to encourage people to support. By throwing them a bit of recognition, I hope to create an incentive to support the features that River2 is leading the way with. I did this with Radio too. I do it with Scripting News. I'm unabashed about it. It's how you bootstrap new stuff. It's a good thing.
No one has paid for position on the list, but I don't guarantee that I will never sell a position on the list. But I will never put a feed on the list that I wouldn't put there if they didn't pay.
Now for the differences.
1. My list is like the default list in Tweetdeck or Tweetie or Google Reader. I don't have a monopoly. I am not the only game in town. If people dislike my choices they can vote with their feet. Twitter is the whole ballgame. As I said yesterday, it's as if Google favored their friends in search results. Or if Tim Berners-Lee made it so that 1/4 of every web page had an ad for Om, ReadWriteWeb, Tim O'Reilly or TechCrunch.
2. I have a shopping list in my pocket. On it I list products I'm going to buy when I go to the supermarket. That's also like the Suggested User List. The products on the list profit from being there. But Chef Boyardee won't notice whether or not he's on my list (he's not). River2 is a teeny weeny little product compared to the mighty Twitter, which delivers hundreds of thousands of followers to people on its list.
3. I try not to influence editorial content through my choices. I've gone with big pubs like Reuters, BBC, the Guardian, CNET, NYT. Their techies hopefully will appreciate the respect, but if it influences the writers I will remove it immediately. In TwitterLand, the problem isn't so much that Twitter tries to influence, that's understandable, it's that the reporters don't object.
There will continue to be a default list in River2.
9/9/09; 11:08:12 AM
My code is a blog
Here's a screen shot of one of the objects that makes up the River2 aggregator.
The top of the script is a blog.
We've always done it this way. There are scripts in the system that are still in use with "posts" at the top that date back to the mid-90s. From lots of team members, most of whom have gone on to other things. I imagine they've taken some of our practices with them, as we inherited practices from teams we came from and code we used to work on. There's a culture to programming that's mostly invisible to non-programmers.
Another example of Narrate Your Work, the philosophy of the blogger and reporter.
9/9/09; 10:42:26 AM
Tornado
The former FriendFeed company now owned by Facebook did something very interesting today. They released Tornado which is the customized web server that runs the backend of FriendFeed.
I speculate in a thread on FF: "Just thinking out loud if there were a REST interface for the backend that worked like the REST interface for the client, I would be able to program both ends without having to learn the internals of your system. It would be really elegant, and probably wouldn't cost that much in overhead. I was able to create an interface to the client side of your realtime API in an hour or two. If I could sneak into the backend the same way that's all I'd need to at least put together a proof of concept. Does this make any sense?"
We need what their backend does to make the connection from rssCloud to desktops. This is something the FriendFeed guys mastered, and there's reason to believe it scales to the level we'd need since they are the guys who did GMail and Google Maps.
Interesting times we live in.
I also reminded people that when cool technologies are shipping everywhere it's not a time of death it's a time of life, as long as we have the web to connect our work, there's nothing exclusive about it. The engineers don't think we're wiping each other out, only the pundits and the hangers-on do.
Interesting times we live in.
And that's a good thing.
BTW, elsewhere on Facebook, our friend Blake Ross shipped Facebook Lite, which we heard was wonderful and are not surprised to find out is. Congrats all around!
Doug also founded IT Conversations that was a focal point in the podcasting bootstrap at the beginning of the decade. The Gillmor Gang got its start on Doug's network; we were inspired by his work.
Joseph developed the plugin for Wordpress that shipped at the beginning of the week. I haven't known Joseph a very long time, but we've already had a spectacular success, imho.
We'll talk about many of the things that were discussed at last night's meetup.
Based on a quick read the changes seem reasonable, they reflect how the service is used and the role Twitter the company plays in it.
9/10/09; 8:21:09 PM
Clues for testing your rssCloud app
This is a frequently asked question.
If you're doing a cloud-aware app, a feed reader, skimmer or aggregator of any flavor or genre, you need feeds to test with. That was an issue a few weeks ago, but today it's not an issue at all. There's a huge variety of cloud-aware feeds updating all the time, for you to test with.
The original feed is one of mine that's announcing three new states every 15 minutes, day and night rain or shine. Not very interesting, but quite reliable.
Then there are the cloud-enabled feeds I've created from the people I follow on Twitter. Robert Scoble is the Old Faithful of this class. He's updating a lot, all the time. I have a changes.xml for all of these feeds, so you can see who's been updating.
Any of my feeds will also show up on the log page on my server, as will your registration. If you're not getting through you won't see anything there. It's very important for debugging.
And the new exciting way to generate a test feed is to create a wordpress.com blog, and post to it. Your feed has a cloud element and it will notify your app when you update. You control when it updates, so this makes it easy for testing.
InBerkeley.com, a Wordpress blog we host ourselves is cloud-enabled.
And finally, the punchline, the reason for all this michegas -- CNN has the first real news feed that's cloud-enabled. And it's a gem. When I got this one running in River2, I had to stop and pause and say, we got there.
9/10/09; 4:55:29 PM
Zee is spelled Zed Eee Eee
My FriendFeed friend Zee is in town for a conference, and he's worried about how Americans will take to his name. At first I was puzzled. What's so hard about the name Zee, I wondered. I had only seen it spelled out -- Zee -- cause we've never talked verbally only digitally.
He explained: "I got a blank stare when I first said it in Starbucks. The barista asked, how do you spell that? I said 'Zed', 'E', 'E'. Received a blank stare. Then I said 'Zee', 'E', 'E', which then got him a little more confused."
Ahhh I get it now. His name is the same as the first letter in his name when you say it in American English. In British English there's no such confusion.
After a bit of back and forth I came up with a suggestion.
Make up some long incomprehensible name that begins with Z (how about Zarathustra). When you get the puzzled look, say "My friends call me Zee." They'll like that for two reasons: 1. They don't have to remember the name and 2. You said you want to be a friend. Americans generally like this.
A new Rebooting The News with guest Dan Gillmor. One of our best. Dan drills into just what rssCloud is and realtime. He's one of the best interviewers out there. It was my turn this week to name inspirations, and I chose Young People, as exemplified by Blake Ross, Joe Hewitt, Matt Mullenweg and Joseph Scott. You can skip to the last five minutes of the podcast, it's worth listening to. Usually we choose older folk as inspiration, but we have to remember that youth, in the right hands, is itself inspiring.
Typepad announced support for Pubsubhubub. I predict on Twitter that we will bridge it with rssCloud so support of one will get you compatibility with th'other. Earlier I admitted to being a dork and not seeing them as being in competition. After all, they're not commercial products. What I care about is decentralizing the realtime web, so we're not dependent on one company. Both methods accomplish that. The real problem is centralization.
Brad Fitzpatrick did what I used to do, say what he really thinks in a blog post about RSS stuff. It's fine, but it is just his point of view. There are other points of view that are valid, like mine.
About "just happen to work at Google" -- come on, man -- how many people who don't happen to work at Google can add code to the following products: 1. Feedburner, 2. Google Reader, 3. Blogger.
Further, prior art is really important, it's how you keep the breadth of the pile of tech we create as small as possible, allowing us to build higher with the finite brain capacity each of us has. The cloud element was right there in the spec. And when we talked, you knew about it. So to say you never heard of it, well -- I think you had.
It's true -- I was pretty freaked when I saw the note at the top of your spec that RSS didn't matter. Sometimes I think Google really believes that. Now I'm here to say RSS does matter. You can't pretend it doesn't because it does. You blew every kind of smoke at it when we talked. That's really good motivation for a guy like me who takes pride in his work.
Now why did I get busy with rssCloud? Primarily because I wanted to remember how it worked. Once I got started, I remembered why I liked it, so I kept going. That's all.
Brad, we should get together and talk about bringing our projects together. This is what you were going to have to do whether I reactivated rssCloud or not, because RSS is there, and it's huge, and you were trying to ignore it.
9/15/09; 9:31:39 PM
Screen saver in Snow Leopard
Believer it or not there's been a lot of controversy about the screen saver in Apple's new operating system release.
I know this isn't something most people spend a lot of time thinking about, but I happen to think one of the nicest things about the Mac is its screen saver, cause I love high-res photography and one of the nicest ways to use great photos is to hang them on the wall on a 50-inch HD monitor and use the Mac screen saver to drive it. Try it sometime, you won't be disappointed.
That's why I was bummed when I did a complete fresh install on a Mac that's being turned into an art computer, first Leopard then Snow Leopard, when it appeared as if the "Choose Folder" option on the screen saver had disappeared. But I figured someone on Twitter would know what happened, and sure enough, Mike Murry pointed me to the new way of doing things.
There's a plus and minus at the bottom of the list. When you click the plus you can add a folder to the list. Nice little improvement. Used to be there could only be one folder, now you get as many as you like.
Just thought I'd leave a pointer here to anyone else who gets confused.
9/15/09; 1:20:50 PM
River2 in EC2
I'm working on an EC2 image that, when you boot it up, is a River2 installation. Since it's outside any firewall or NAT, it's ready to wire into the realtime feed network. Cloud-enabled feeds connect into Amazon's cloud. It's almost mathematical. I'm lovin it. I think we're getting close to the promised land. Hah.
1. A server I can use to manage hosts for a domain that I own that am currently not using. I have many. I will pick one.
2. Ideally I don't even want to run the server myself. Someone from the community of people who read this blog who are interested in distributed realtime message systems and want to play a role in their development. This project will not use a lot of bandwidth or server resources. It's primarily for development. The other users will be geeks like you and me.
3. The server must have a REST interface. I need at least one call. It takes three parameters (that I can think of, there may need to be more). The three parameters are: name of sub-domain (something like george), record name (I'll explain below) and the value. The same call can be used to change the value. Probably should send a string that's a MD5 hash of all the parameters plus my password. Something like that. You can tell me what it should be, but nothing too fancy.
The record name is a DNS record name. Not A or MX maybe TXT. The value is the address of their cloud-enabled feed. So george.loose.ly would be the name of George Metesky's realtime feed. If you want to follow him, you wouldn't have to use his feed address you'd use george.loose.ly. The client would just do a DNS lookup to find his feed.
4. If no one is willing to operate the server, I'll operate it. It must be something that runs on EC2.
5. I need it soon. I want to start developing a prototype. Tomorrow? Friday? Please, no later than Monday. It seems like a fairly easy thing to do.
Anyway that's the idea. Comments welcome of course. And DNS gurus if I've made some egregious errors, please let me know, gently.
9/16/09; 8:41:29 PM
Do you have a cloud-enabled feed?
It's been over a week since Wordpress shipped their plug-in that added rssCloud capability. There are a bunch of feeds out there that are now cloud-enabled, actually a few million.
If you know of any especially interesting ones, news-oriented feeds that are frequently updated -- they could be pro or amateur, bloggers or BigPubs, commercial, academic or open source, left-wing or right, it doesn't matter -- what matters is that they are interesting and that they're real-time.
I'm looking for feeds to include in the default set of the next release of River2 which is coming together now. So if you know of some, either post a link as a comment here or send me an email with a link to the email address in the right margin on scripting.com.
9/16/09; 8:10:42 PM
What's wrong with this picture?
It took me a few minutes staring at it to figure it out.
With a hat-tip to David Rowland, iPhonedeveloper, who sent it to a mail list I'm on.
9/16/09; 1:46:32 PM
Google gets a patent on reading lists
Google will probably protest that the patent they filed on reading lists was defensive. But it's a bad patent, based on an "invention" that was already out there, being discussed openly on Scripting News at least a year before they filed it. If you can subscribe to a feed, why not subscribe to a collection of feeds? And when an item is removed, you no longer are subscribed to it, and when one is added, you are now subscribed to it.
Google should explain to the RSS community how they supposedly invented this and what their process was. If it turns out that we had prior art, they should tear up the patent and apologize from trying to hijack something that doesn't belong to them.
I worry about big companies doing awful things because they do them. It's dangerous to have Google control so much of the RSS infrastructure, from Feedburner to Google Reader to Blogger. They could easily pass information between those systems without sharing the information publicly. They could, right now, deliver features to users that competitors would be locked out of. All this built on ideas, formats, protocols and know-how that were contributed by others without any limits on how they could be used. And now this patent.
BTW, both River2 and its predecessor implement reading lists. Google Reader does not.
9/17/09; 9:08:13 AM
He has a million followers
Scott Simon is on the SUL and boasts in the first sentence of the description of his interview with Clay Shirky that he has nearly 1 million followers.
"Host Scott Simon has nearly 1 million followers on Twitter."
Scott Simon is an expert on Twitter because he has nearly 1 million followers.
He actually has 1,022,105 followers and follows 56.
I once replied to him on Twitter because he said something dorky about blogs on his NPR show. He said that people talk lovingly about their newspaper, it's "my paper," but no one says "my blog."
I told him that I have a blog and I'm proud of it, and I've never had a newspaper. I give money to NPR every year, but I wonder why. He's one of the smartest people there, and as you can see, he'd not that smart.
But I do love Radio Lab. They're on Twitter too. They don't have a million followers. Thanks!
9/18/09; 9:02:19 PM
The RSS channel-level image
A heads-up on something that's going to prove useful down the road, something you might want to start thinking about now. Credit for this observation goes to the brilliant Frenchman, JY Stervinou.
One of the things about Twitter that really works are the 48-by-48 images they call avatars. They quickly become symbols for the person. When someone changes their avatar it's surprisingly important. I changed mine from King Kong to Don Quixote and people started treating me better. Not kidding. People really want me to use my face, but it bothers me to look at my face all the time. When I figure out how to have two views of myself, one for me and one for everyone else... Anyway.
If we're going to bootstrap a Twitter-like network outside of Twitter we're going to need those avatars. And luckily there's a very nice place to put them, the RSS <image> element. It's as if when Netscape spec'd RSS 0.91 they knew that 10 years later we'd need this.
The only problem is that most RSS images aren't 48-by-48 (of course) and most of them aren't square. That's what you might start thinking about, creating a square graphic that looks good. Since many people and organizations are crafting Twitter versions of themselves, this should be a relatively easy thing to do.
BTW, I include the Twitter avatars in the cloud-enabled feeds I maintain for all the people I follow. Here's an illustration.
9/18/09; 12:45:07 PM
Radio Lab
Once in a while you come across a gem like the Radio Lab podcast. I listened in delight a few nights ago when an episode about death aired on KQED. An hour of philosophical and scientific stories about death, a subject we all must spend a fair amount of time thinking and dreaming about.
A couple of examples.
The three stages of death: 1. Your body dies. 2. It's buried or cremated. 3. Your name is spoken for the last time. They postulate that your soul is in limbo until you reach stage 3. For most people that day is the day you're joined in death by your last loved one. And this makes the point that fame, which so many peope seek, may not be such a great thing. After you reach stage 2, you have no influence on how your name is used. The poor farmer whose property was turned into a college after he died, and was named after him, now must wait until the college closes. And that might not happen for quite a while.
The next idea is about a dead language, Latin. What does it sound like? No one knows, because the last native Latin speaker died centuries ago. But think about pottery. It's spun on a wheel while wet. Maybe, just maybe while it's being spun, the grooves faintly record people speaking around the potter. So a Roman vase might be an ancient phonograph record and contain echoes of long-dead Latin-speakers.
These ideas aren't useful but they touch something inside me that I like.
Bravo!
9/18/09; 10:27:57 AM
Google, open communities, patents
When Google patents ideas that have been openly discussed and implemented in the RSS community, and then doesn't understand why this raises objections -- well, I'd say we have had a failure to communicate. At least.
I'm thinking about the patent that Google was granted on September 15 that covers reading lists for feeds. They say it covers other things, and that's probably true, and if so -- if they had to patent something they should have stuck to the new stuff. And I think there's a good argument that they should follow the conventions of the community and not patent their innovations, rather contribute them in the same fashion that others had contributed their good ideas.
It's as if Google ran Linux servers and used the fact in their marketing (no problem). Then five years later it turns out they had forked the Linux code base (which is permitted) and was marketing it under their own brand name (okay) and had not checked their improvements back into the community (there's the problem). This would be a violation of the norms of the community. True, it would also be a violation of the open source license, and perhaps we should have one in the RSS community. But in both cases these licenses would be hard or impossible to enforce. I don't believe the GPL has ever been tested in court. And in the case of open formats and protocols, who knows if such restrictions would even be legal. But clearly the "norms" part of the argument is stronger than the legal one. If Google wants to be part of the RSS community, it should be respectful of it. That means not using their size and legal resources to take what's good about our work, foreclose it, sell it as their own, and control others' use of it (which is the point of a patent).
All of this adds up to nothing if Google's lawyers are like lawyers everywhere, and they probably are. And if all their talk about being supportive of open source is just talk. But, on the chance that they're serious about wanting to work with and support open communities of developers, there are pragmatic reasons why they should be respectful and careful. And they have not been either.
This isn't all about Google...
The rest of us could have taken steps to prevent this problem. And we still can head off similar problems in the future.
1. There is an idea out their called peer-to-patent. The USPTO ran a pilot project that just ended. Seems like a good idea. Basically the patent applications are published before they are granted, giving experts a chance to comment on the novelty of the work, thus providing guidance to the examiner.
2. I've long argued that there must be a parallel patent system, a good one, that works more or less the same way as the USPTO's process with one important difference. At the end of the process the public owns the invention. The creator is given full credit for his or her work, which often is all they want. But a careful document is generated that creates a hole within which there will never be patents. Every one of these unpatents acts to combat the bad kind of patents. (This idea has already been widely discussed.)
3. And perhaps there should be cash awards for those unpatents, to create commercial incentives to produce novel ideas. That would go a long ways to counter the (imho invalid) argument that patents spawn innovation. I think quite the opposite. Most patents in my area are like Google's reading list patent. Filed after-the-fact by a big company, claiming the ideas of engineers working outside of large companies.
9/18/09; 8:34:32 AM
Hooking the lizard brain up to the cerebral cortex
This is worth a special post as a followup to the earlier piece, it's so interesting.
I was talking with a friend today, he's an expert in DNS, and I said it's too bad people can't open their supercloud.org sub-domain in a browser. I understood why this wasn't possible:
1. The browser is looking for an A record or a CNAME, and we're setting the TXT record.
My friend who doesn't want me to say his name (and I respect that) said it might not have to be that way. We talked about connecting the DNS with HTTP and it was really intriguing. If you think about it, DNS is like the lizard brain of the Internet, and HTTP, while it is in some ways lower tech than DNS, is the cerebral cortex. To have them integrate is like bringing the Wright Brothers plane they flew at Kitty Hawk on an Apollo moon mission. But that's the way we do things in techland.
Then I thought -- wait a minute, what's to stop me from also registering an A record that points back to me, and then keeping a database locally that associates a name with an RSS URL. Then when you open your supercloud.org subdomain in a browser:
1. It comes to my machine.
2. It looks you up in the database I'm keeping that's a mirror of what's in the TXT records in DNS.
3. From there I get your RSS address.
4. To which I simply do a 302 redirect.
Hah! I had to try it. And guess what! The fcuker works!!
And then go through the registration process, and try it out yourself.
This is actually important because everyone expected taht you'd be able to open the supercloud.org sub-domain in the browser. Now you can.
9/20/09; 11:21:15 PM
DNS for RSS feeds
Here is a Unix shell command that gets the address of my RSS feed: dig +short davewiner.supercloud.org TXT
It makes a DNS call to get the TXT record associated with davewiner.supercloud.org. That's different from an A record or a CNAME record. TXT records are used for things like this. That's why when you go there in your browser it doesn't go anywhere.
I have an app up for you all to try out, so you can have a supercloud.org domain for your RSS feed (it works equally well for Atom, or anything that can be parsed as XML).
Enter your Twitter username and password and the URL of your feed. It verifies that it is the correct password. (And it doesn't store it or use it for any other purpose.) And then if everything goes well, your username will map to a supercloud.org domain and point to your feed.
This is of course not rocket science.
But it does seem to work.
PS: Why this is interesting, possibly, is that it may give us a way to shorten URLs and make them more flexible if we want to build a loosely-coupled Twitter-like network with feeds distributed around the net. DNS is the little bit of centralization that the Internet, itself a loosely-coupled network, is built on.
9/20/09; 1:12:44 PM
Fuck you John Edwards
I read the front page story on John Edwards with delight, as I'm sure many others did.
Yes it is news, to those who ask, because he came close to being VP, and was a serious candidate for President and the press was ignoring the story until they couldn't ignore it any more.
I remember when Edwards came to speak at Gnomedex and everyone said he was great and he should have a webcam everywhere but in the bathroom and bedroom. They wanted the transparent candidate. He thought it was a good idea.
Now we know for sure, but I thought so for sure then, nothing about the guy was real. His story was good, too good. His wife has cancer. Meanwhile, according to the Times he's promising to marry the mother of his out-of-wedlock child as soon as the wife dies, in a rooftop ceremony with Dave Matthews providing the music.
This is the end of John Edwards, who if he could have kept the act up a bit longer might have been the Attorney General of the United States. He's fucked. And maybe we should reflect on just how fucked up we are that we go for that kind of nonsense. Edwards was our ideal of what a candidate should be. A commercial product advertised on TV with the judgement of a con artist. Just the kind of guy we want a heartbeat from the Presidency. Not.
Yes this is a front page story because who Edwards is says so much about who we are. Edwards is a good serious look in the mirror.
9/20/09; 7:53:56 PM
What became of Radio's POST button?
An interesting story of evolving software.
In 2002, my company shipped a product called Radio UserLand. It was a very popular blogging tool, but it was also the most popular RSS reading tool of the day. And because it was both things, we could do integration that no other product had ever done before, or since.
Adjacent to every item in the aggregator was a button that said POST. When you click it, you flip to the blog post entry screen with the text of the item in the big box. You could add your own words, shorten it, whatever you like. When you were done, hit Submit and you'd have a post that pointed to the original article with your comments.
As an aside, this is where the RSS <source> element came from. We'd embed that, invisibly, in your post so tools could find their way back to the original. This was in response to an outcry from bloggers that we were helping people steal content. Seems like a foreign idea today, doesn't it?
Anyway...
Fast-forward to 2009, and I'm back at work in AggregatorLand, and like it or not, Twitter is where we push links to these days. So now instead of a POST button look what's there in its place.
Now, it is very much more clever than the POST button was back in 2002. Just how much clever -- you'll have to wait to find out, because I'm still working. But when you see my links to test.teamrss.com on Twitter you'll know that I'm testing the new stuff. Murphy-willing it should be released to River2 users tomorrow.
9/21/09; 10:34:58 PM
TopTwits tracks your Twitter linkage
When tr.im announced that it was going open source, I said I would also release the code of the app that does my Top 40 page and that of Jay Rosen, Kevin Tofel and Zach Seward.
TopTwits is that app. It runs as an OPML Editor tool. This means you must have the OPML Editor installed on your machine, and then install topTwits.root in the OPML Editor.
9/21/09; 10:41:11 AM
YWFFTMMR
When you get something going all of a sudden the parasites opportunists swoop in and want to take control. Funny how they leave you alone when you're not so hot.
I suppose I should see it as a good sign, but they all resort to the same kind of character attacks when I decline their offers. Some nastier than others. The offers amount to me working my ass off to make them rich, for which, in turn -- I get nothing. $0. Bupkis.
Only in the tech industry do people have the audacity to look you in the eye and say You Work For Free To Make Me Rich. YWFFTMMR.
The stupid thing about it is that's at least part of the reason I'm trying to get out of Twitter. I don't like their economic proposition but, I do like microblogging. I figure if I'm not going to make any money off my work, then I'll work in an environment where no one does. It's weird that the people behind Twitter are supposedly capitalists yet seem to not understand that very simple idea. People don't work for free. They don't pour out their passion in the cause of making you wealthy. They might be motivated to do it if they saw some upside.
I'll let you know when someone approaches this space with respect and an offer that isn't usurous.
9/21/09; 10:41:11 AM
What is the real-time web?
Four words: It Happens Without Waiting.
Narrative: Today I wrote a piece about the Berkeley Public Library on InBerkeley.Com. I wanted to find a pointer to the library website, so I switched over to Google. Looked up Berkeley Public Library. My piece, publshed less than a minute earlier. was the first item. Real-time web. (True story.)
It's a group of approximately 500 Twitter users who are "suggested" to new users when they create an account. The stated purpose is to provide people to watch when you're starting out. But are there other purposes? Could it be used to reward positive coverage and punish negative coverage? I think we now have some data on that.
There's no doubt that Twitter has received a lot of help from the press, and much of it is genuine enthusiasm for a communication tool that at least hints at the future of news.
Many of the suggested users are news organizations, reporters, columnists, marketers, and as a result, most have over a million followers. Almost all of the top tech news organizations are on the list. And TechCrunch was one of them until something happened in July as is evident in this TwitterCounter graph.
Compare this to the graph for Mashable, over the same period.
And plotted on the same graph.
It's pretty clear something happened in July.
We know this much -- TechCrunch was dropped from the Suggested User List, right around the time their follower count started heading down. As to why, we can only speculate that it was because they ran a piece that Twitter didn't like.
People have always questioned whether there was a connection between being on the list and not being too critical of Twitter. At this point, there isn't much doubt that the connection is there.
9/22/09; 8:29:43 AM
A question for DNS gurus out there in InternetLand
I bought a cool domain for a project I'm working on, r2.ly.
It takes Libya forever to approve these things, but they finally have, and I've changed the DNS to ns1.slicehost.com and ns2.slicehost.com (where I now have an account, with DNS control) but I can't tell what's going wrong cause I don't really know how to debug DNS.
I just know that it's not resolving on any of my machines.
Can you tell what the problem is with it?
And if you solve the problem you get to call me stupid in the comments and I won't moderate it out.
9/24/09; 12:55:45 AM
I want to divorce my iPhone
The iPhone is so totally not my spiritual soulmate.
I refuse to become dependent on apps grown in their environment. To me it's like contributing to the enslavement of my brother and sister programmers. I don't care how sexy the environment is as a user or a developer, the fact that Apple holds up apps and rejects them often because they compete with their own software is to me like buying a coat made of the skins of endangered species. I won't use iPhone apps for ecological reasons.
I use my iPhone as a: 1. Phone. 2: Camera that can communicate (very valuable feature to me). 3. A Bluetooth tethering device for places my Sprint MiFi doesn't work (and that's a lot of places).
For that I pay about $100 per month. I think I'm being ripped off. (Sure of it.)
Okay Scripting News readers -- tell me I'm crazy but I want a divorce. Enough of this bullshit.
But I need a phone that does 1, 2 and 3.
What will I fall in love with?
PS: I have my contacts in GMail. Must be able to synch with them. One of my favorite iPhone features.
PPS: I never use it as an iPod. I prefer my Walkman.
9/23/09; 2:02:02 PM
Sharing links in the River2 community
A new feature makes it easy to share links to stories from the River2 news page to followers on Twitter.
This feature is itself a bootstrap since one of the key ingredients are the people using it. Just the right number and the right kind (thoughtful, passionate, forgiving, visionary) are needed. The result can be an editorial product in its own right. And the first experiences will probably certainly suggest the second and third level of features.
Bootstrapping is for users too. In fact at some point, without users participating, the bootstrap stops. You have to wait until they show up, or keep trying to figure out what it will take to entice them to participate.
I realized somethingyesterday, that bootstrapping is hard because you have to use things that don't exist yet.
I often use bridges as metaphors to describe bootstraps in software. Here goes..
People hardly notice driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, they might notice the scenery, or the walkers or bike riders, or think about the oncoming traffic. But one day, a long time ago, someone stood on one side or the other -- in San Francisco or Marin -- and looked at the Golden Gate (which was the waterway before it was the bridge) and thought "I bet we could put a bridge here." Nice thought, but then what? What's the first step? And when that doesn't work, what's the next first step? Long before there's a bridge, someone has to make the trip in a bucket hanging from a cable. Today, River2 users are those kinds of people.
I've been having an on-and-off discussion with Marshall about this. He's been frustrated by the software. I understand. But I need people like him to struggle through it, tell me what went wrong, so I can try to fix it, and then tell me if it worked. The rewards mostly come from within, to know that you played a role in making something new happen. In this case it will be a distributed loosely-coupled 140-character message network that is free from YWFFTMMR. And there might be business opportunities to provide services to users. No one's saying you can't get rich. But it has to be fair, and people should always have lots of choice.
One more note -- it's taking a long time for the domain I'll use, r2.ly, to come through the registration process. So to begin with we'll use a teamrss.com domain to share links. If you see one of these on Twitter it's coming from this part of River2.
9/23/09; 8:54:56 AM
Arrington in the airport
9/24/09; 9:23:08 PM
Where we're at with rssCloud
A brief report on where we're at with rssCloudLand as September winds down.
It's been a great summer. In July, we got busy rebooting the RSS cloud, based on the experience in 2001 and 2002, with lessons learned, and a lot more success than we had seven years ago.
Based on the walkthrough document, the community has shipped multiple implementations of all three sides of the interface.
1. There have been many implementations of the cloud software, including my own rssCloud.root and wordpress.com and the plug-in that turns every standalong WordPress installation into an rssCloud server. Total number of installations: millions.
2. Lots of feeds and authoring systems numbering in the millions. Example real-time podcast feeds and photo feeds.
3. Not so many aggregators. So far only two -- first my own River2 and LazyFeed. There many more on the way. I hope one or two Twitter clients will ship rssCloud support in the month of October.
What next?
I have four immediate priorities:
1. Features that will make it possible for Google Reader and other large scale aggregators to wire into rssCloud. These are technical features, to most users they are details, but nonetheless are important. It must be possible for a server to register a notification request using a domain name, on behalf of another server. And along with this feature, most developers believe a stronger verification process is needed. I am one of them. Yet it must remain simple to implement, so the barrier to entry is as low as possible. There have been proposals in both these areas.
2. Long-polling proxies for clients running on systems behind NATs or firewalls. This technology is well-understood, and a number of developers are working on solutions. I hope when code emerges, there will be an effort to make their interfaces compatible, so maximum interop can be achieved.
3. Conventions for naming, so that URLs can be mapped to names that are managed by DNS, the naming system of the Internet itself. I've done a simple experiment in this area to get myself educated on the issues and learn how users and developers see this.
4. A high-level user-oriented vision statement for rssCloud with a roadmap for developers and marketers. My goal is to create an open loosely-coupled message network that achieves more or less what Twitter does, but in a decentralized manner. It must use the architecture of the Internet to achieve what Twitter achieves in a centralized fashion. No doubt there will be tradeoffs, some things the open network will do better, and other things that the centralized one will. This is similar to previous layers of the Internet, where systems like AOL and CompuServe provided more sophisticated features, where the World Wide Web was more low-tech, more basic. Both ways of doing things have advantages and survive to this day.
Comments, questions and suggestions are welcome.
9/25/09; 10:46:00 PM
A cloud-enabled podcast feed
In the early days of podcasting, in January 2001, we got the bootstrap started with a feed of Grateful Dead songs. Every day or so I added a song to the feed, in case anyone was interested in writing an application that grabbed audio enclosures from feeds. I needed something to test with because Radio UserLand, which we were working on at the time, had the capability.
It took a few years for podcasting to catch on, but having that example feed made a difference. You have to start somewhere.
Now in 2009 we're trying to bootstrap a network of realtime feeds, and it's going pretty well so far. Podcasts are implemented with RSS too, and while we have excellent examples of realtime photo feeds, we don't yet have a realtime feed with audio.
So a week or so ago I started exploring options, and thought I'd use the Grateful Dead again, until JY suggested using a fast-updating audio feed from the Internet Archive. I took one look and realized this was it. It took a bit of a coding to check it periodically to see if it has updated, add a cloud element and notify one of my cloud servers. Now it's done.
So if you're working on podcatching software give it a try.
Since River2 is a podcatcher, it automatically works with this feed.
9/28/09; 4:33:53 PM
An open reboot on Saturday
We're going to combine this week's Rebooting the News with next week's and do it Saturday afternoon live in San Francisco. Jay will be in town for the Online News Association meeting, and of course I live a BART ride away in Berkeley, so we'll meet at 4:30PM and do a 75-minute Rebooting the News special, and you're invited!
We're looking for a place that's very near to the Hilton. If you have a conference room nearby, within say a 5 minute walk, would you like to host this small meetup? We'd find an appropriate way to thank you in the podcast.
Also, please post a comment below if you'd like to come. Can't guarantee how much room we'll have, we may end up doing it at a Starbuck's!
9/29/09; 11:22:05 AM
Why no Twitter clients with an API?
Scoble says the iPhone version of Tweetie is so excellent that it might be the one everyone switches to. I don't know about that, I'm seriously considering a divorce from my iPhone, so I don't care so much about iPhone apps.
He specifically calls out Seesmic who doesn't yet have an iPhone app.
While I use my iPhone for tethering (and won't install the 3.1 upgrade because it would kill that) -- Scoble is tethered to his iPhone for everything. He does all his tweeting and friendfeeding from the iPhone. I find this both amazing and ridiculous. So many compromises. I guess Scoble values connectivity above all else, and wants to travel light.
He really wants a curating application, which I have, it's the app that manages my 40 Twits page. I've released it as open source, and set up an account for Scbole, but it doesn't work on the iPhone because it depends on a bookmarklet and I guess they don't work on the iPhone? I don't know enough about it to say for sure.
Bookmarklets make a lot of things possible. If they don't work on the iPhone then Apple should get to it and make them work. (Apparently they do.)
So Scoble is taking another tack to get what he wants. He's trying to scare Seesmic into providing the "curation" feature for him in their non-existent iPhone app. It would be simple, just a slight variant on retweeting. Maybe they don't want to do it because retweeting will soon get an overhaul. (And imho will finally work as it always should have.)
Which brings me to the point of the piece. Maybe Twitter clients are now mature and competitive enough of a market that they should support plug-ins of their own. It's the way things go. They are pretty much plug-ins themselves, but then so is Twitter a plug-in for the Internet, which is the end of the chain (it's not a plug-in for anything).
If Seesmic supported plug-ins then they wouldn't have to wait for their competitors to beat them in the market before they implemented something. They wouldn't have to worry if it pissed off Ev or Biz, they could just shrug it off as something a developer did (whatever it is that pissed them off).
It may be impossible for them to support plug-ins, if so, many apologies. But in case it's not, it could be the way to answer all of Scoble's feature requests. "There's a plug-in for that."
10. It's innovative and new and interesting and pretty easy. (But not trivial.)
11. A way for Yahoo to do something useful, interesting and innovative.
12. An example of a realtime photo feed. Note the use of Yahoo's Media-RSS extension.
10/1/09; 10:57:47 PM
Reboot the News at ONA09
Jay and I decided we wanted to do a live podcast at ONA09 so much we rented our own room. And it's open to the public, even if you're not going to ONA09.
Here's the deal. Come to the SF Hilton at 4PM on Saturday and look for "Rebooting The News" on the TV screen in the lobby. Or you can follow me or Jay on Twitter, we'll certainly advertise our location. Be sure to be there before 4:10PM. We'll all sit around a conference room table and reboot the news.
No punditry, or savvy church-goers, just talk about how the news will work after the new system is fully rebooted.
10/1/09; 11:10:36 AM
Flying cross-country
I'm flying today from JFK to SFO.
Trying something new, taking pictures as we go, as cloud cover permits, and uploading them in realtime.
I have enough people in my loop so that almost anywhere I post a picture of, someone is in the the picture, and a few people can tell me exactly where it is. I learned this on the west-east trip last week, when I took a picture in the middle of Colorado that turned out to be in Ouray County near Telluride. I've been there! Beaufiful country.
Realtime interactive social media. Whatever you call it, it's really coool.
10/1/09; 10:02:52 AM
Two proposed rssCloud additions
On Tuesday I outlined the next steps on two proposed changes to the rssCloud walkthrough document.
I plan to implement these changes shortly. Joseph Scott of Wordpress, who proposed the second change, has said he will also implement them in his software.
Also see the short-term roadmap I posted last Friday.
10/1/09; 9:50:27 AM
Advice on recording tomorrow's podcast?
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.
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.
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.
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.
10/3/09; 12:04:22 PM
My web site is my space
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.
10/3/09; 10:59:52 AM
Middle-of-the-week check-in
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.
10/7/09; 12:01:12 PM
Let the blogging begin!
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.
10/9/09; 11:22:37 AM
Getting ready to Reboot
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.
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.
10/13/09; 11:01:01 AM
Dave at 17
The next couple of batches of uploads at my Dad's memorial site.
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.
10/13/09; 10:48:31 AM
Friends see things you don't
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."
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.
10/14/09; 12:28:38 PM
What's obvious about netbooks
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.
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.
10/14/09; 10:46:57 AM
An open letter to Om
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.
10/14/09; 11:26:23 AM
Twitter's lists
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.
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.
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!
10/15/09; 12:24:28 PM
Rebooting the reboot of rssCloud
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 domainparameter on the REST request for notification.
2. If the notification request included the optional domain parameter, the verification process works differently.
10/16/09; 1:01:12 PM
A note about evangelism
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.
10/16/09; 1:06:11 PM
Seeing past Twitter's limits
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?
10/16/09; 11:49:06 AM
Techmeme curiosity
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.
10/16/09; 10:12:03 AM
The Internet abhors a funnel
This might be one of those fundamental Internet laws, or it may just turn out to be a way to express another one.
The Internet is a bunch of pipes and tunnels with processors located at the junctions and at the ends of the pipes. Some of the processors are little things like iPhones, routers, blogs or webcams. Some are huge like Google's cloud.
All is good until something comes along that tries to get the whole Internet to flow through it. Compelling things that get more compelling the more stuff you flow through them. Instead of being shaped like pipes, they are shaped like funnels (as illustrated to the right).
Platforms that are owned by companies start out as funnels. They may trick you for a while into believing that they made of pipes, after all it would be suicide for the platform owner to turn the lovely ecosystem into a funnel, but companies can't help themselves. They compete internally to control resources and to the people inside the company, the platform looks like just another resource to fight over. Eventually it gets funnelized, if it wasn't from the start.
This is why my current motto about Twitter is "How I learned to stop worrying and love the Fail Whale." I can love the Fail Whale, even though as a user I hate it, because it says to me that I will soon control my own destiny in this space. That cute little whale says the idea of Twitter as a funnel (it started out as one, always has been one) is not working. As the network grows, it becomes less viable.
The funnel is also why I don't like a lot of the things Google does. Things like SideWiki that are only useful when everyone uses them. It shows funnel-oriented thinking over there. Long-term they can't make the funnel work. But as Microsoft showed us in the 90s, they can slow the rest of us down while we wait for the shakeout. Better if they never tried, imho. Better for them, for us, and esp for the Internet.
10/17/09; 2:19:30 PM
Innovating outside the 140
I pitched a simple idea at yesterday's GigaOm meetup, one that is easy to explain verbally but I've not yet attempted to explain it in writing. So here goes.
When the Mac came out in 1984 it had a file system that worked much like a Unix or PC file system, it was hierarchic, had volumes, folders and files. But files had two "forks:" 1. Data and 2. Resource. The data fork was like a regular file, but the resource fork was really cool and different. It was like a file system within a file, but not quite.
Resources had a type and an id. The type was a four-character string, and the ID was a number. There were standard system types like WIND and MENU, and in them you put designs for windows and menus. There was a resource editor that shipped with the OS that had tools for the standard system types, the menu editor let you add a command to a menu or delete a command. The window editor let you set the default size of the window, its initial title, and what WDEF routine was responsible for drawing it. A big part of learning how to program the Mac was learning what all the resources were and how to set them up. Then you'd write C or Pascal code to open the windows or draw the menus.
But that wasn't all you could do with resources -- because -- and this is the key point -- you could define your own resources. You didn't have to get anyone's permission (okay theoretically you did, but we never bothered). So if I wanted to write a DAVE resource to my file I could. And then I could tell you what a DAVE resource contains and your app could read and write them, and all of a sudden we've just enhanced the platform. Pretty cool! And we did this kind of stuff all the time.
So why shouldn't tweets also have resource forks? Then if I wanted to attach a picture to a tweet I'd just pack it up in a blob and shoot it up to Twitter as part of a PICT resource along with the 140 characters which would then be a description for the picture. Or why not have a menu go with a tweet? Or a bit of HTML? Or whatever the fuck.
This would get Ev and Biz out of the loop, they could just kick back and run a storage system and stop worrying about what features to add to the platform. You see the users get to innovate inside the 140 characters, but there would be so much more action if the developers could innovate outside the 140.
10/20/09; 5:45:26 PM
Random Tuesday notes
Good morning. Getting back to work after a half-day at a conference followed by a five-hour baseball game. The conference was at Om Malik's and was the first tech conference I'd been to since the disaster at Gnomedex in 2007. This one was much better. I got to talk with a number of people I'm working with on RSS-related projects, and met a few developers with interesting projects. Om gathers an interesting group, that's for sure. And the mood at Om's place is respectful and collegial. We got some work done. Nice.
I told Om I'd like to try out the flash conference idea at his new 2nd St office. Great location and a good size. So next time there's a rush to get people's ideas on some new tech development maybe we can get together to talk about it at Om's place.
The baseball game was the third in the ALCS between the Angels and the Yankees. I'm really liking the way the Angels are playing, and of course I'm always up for rooting against the other New York team.
There will be more baseball and I'm speaking at Jeff Pulver's 140 character conference next Tuesday, a week from today. It's in Los Angeles. I can invite the regulars at Scripting News as my guest, so if you'd like to come, send me an email or post a comment, and I'll send you a link that gets you free admission. Jeff was very kind to let us party on his dime in LA.
Meanwhile, two really interesting articles you all should read:
The latter question was the punchline of yesterday's Rebooting The News podcast, which has yet to appear in the feed. The irony is that we could be doing a better job at archiving our thoughtstream, but we're actually doing a worse job. Our pictures, movies, recordings, thoughts have never been more ephemeral.
Yesterday at Om's we wasted (imho) a time talking about seredipity. The time could have been better used working on more mundane topics like maintaining a memory that lasts more than a year at a time. We love the latest and greatest stuff, but don't recognize the patterns, we've seen this before. It's like the recurring theme in BSG, it's happened before. But we threw out the archive! Oy gevilt.
I refuse to solve the problem only for Scripting News, because I don't want future generations to think I was the only one writing in the early part of the 21st century. One of our bloggers is the next Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner, Willa Cather or Emily Dickinson. Let's make sure we have their earliest emails, Flickr-ings and tweets.
BTW, this guy at Yahoo is surprisingly funny. I didn't know they were allowed to hire people with a sense of humor. Hate to say it, but I've never seen anyone at a big tech company, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook or whatever that had a sense of humor. I have an idea, they should make being funny one of the requirements to work at the Bigs. Who knows the software might be more er uhhh you know -- fun.
10/20/09; 2:39:35 PM
Flickr in hindsight
You know what they say about hindsight being 20-20. It's that way with Flickr, which was way ahead of everyone else in the social network thing. With a few tweaks three years ago, with active entrepreneurial development and the resources of Yahoo, it could have been everything Twitter or Facebook is today.
I don't know enough about what goes on behind the scenes to know if it really was possible. It could be that the code is a mess and that the last engineer who understands it left five years ago. If so, the previous paragraph is probably nonsense. But if there are still some good people working on it, it may not even be too late for Flickr to act as a backbone for at least part of the future realtime web.
The thing that Flickr does that Twitter doesn't is, as I said a few days ago, payloads. In Flickr a payload can be a picture or a video. Another thing Flickr has going for it is a great API with lots of developer support. And while Flickr does go down sometimes, it's a lot more reliable than Twitter. And there's no Suggested User List.
What it's missing is a Twitter-like timeline. But I honestly don't think that's so hard to do. I think they already do the hard stuff. Maybe when Carol Bartz gets over the flu we could meet to talk about giving Flickr a lot of independence and a bunch of cash and letting it be free to compete in wild, free of the constraints of corporate Yahoo. Then, once it's flying, the various Yahoo properties can latch on to its growth as any other developer could.
It could be a terribly bad idea. But I still love Flickr and use it all the time. I even pay them money every year for privilege. I bet a lot of other people do too.
10/21/09; 7:11:39 PM
Bruce Sterling at Reboot
Bruce Sterling gave a wonderful talk at the Reboot Conference this summer in Copenhagen. At the beginning of the talk I wanted to strangle him, but as it progressed, it made more and more sense. By the end I thought it was one of the best speeches I'd ever heard, a story that I think everyone should hear. I've made an MP3 of his talk because I want to make it available to people in my family as a podcast. I hope Bruce and the people at Reboot don't mind.
He talks about clearing your life of posessions, how you should divide everything into four categories: 1. Beautiful things. 2. Things with emotional value. 3. Functional things. 4. Everything else.
Divide each category into the things you keep and the things you get rid of. In category 1, you can keep it if it's on display in your house, if you show it to your friends, if you share it. If not, then you don't need it, it's taking up space and time, which you're paying for with your money, time and health. Take a picture, put it on a thumb drive, take it everywhere with you and get rid of the original. In category 2, if it has a compelling story, one that you actually tell people, you can keep it. In category 3, unless it's very good at what it does and it does something you do a lot of, it goes. And of course everything in category 4 goes.
He says you shouldn't try to do this in normal times. Wait until a spouse dies, a divorce, a child is born or a child leaves home. Wait till you move. It pays to figure out now what you want to do when that time comes.
I know Sterling is right because I've had things like that happen and I've done it both ways. Most of the time I don't clean house, and miss the opportunity to improve my life. But sometimes I do make the changes and it's always, in the end, been a good thing. Most people advise you not to make changes in times of great life turmoil. That's exactly the wrong advice. Those are the only times you can make change.
This is a hot topic in my family because of Father's Day. It just happened, and the shock is just now beginning to set in. It's strange that along with the pain and sorrow, there's also a new sense of freedom, of possibilities. It's palpable. And it doesn't take a second to locate the source -- it's the changes Sterling talked about so eloquently.
Anyway, most of the time most of us are not in position to do anything about the mess in our lives. But listen to Sterling's talk. It's only 43 minutes. It might be the best 43 minutes you've ever spent.
10/21/09; 5:11:41 PM
How to learn to love the Fail Whale
What if your Twitter client stayed up when Twitter is down?
Believe it or not -- it's possible. I'm sure it's crossed the minds of the people who run Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Brizzly, Seesmic, et al. What if users could keep communicating with people who used the same tool you use and have all your tweets flow out through Twitter when they're back on the air?
Even better, what if Tweetie and Brizzly got together and worked out a way for their users to stay up and communicate with each other, even if they used the other guy's tool? (See where this is going?)
Most of the time people don't think this way, except when the Fail Whale is showing up, as it has been for the last couple of days. Then creativity kicks in and you start wondering if it's possible, and if it were, what's in the way?
Maybe Twitter wouldn't like it if the client companies got too independent? Maybe they have some way to punish those who stray and reward those who don't? Some people think they do, with the little ads in the right margin of the Twitter web page. They say those ads really work, and if you don't play ball the way Twitter wants you to -- no soup for you!
I know how the Twitter clients can become free from Twitter, yet still work with it. You might have to give up your tasty Twitter soup, but you might be able to find new users you wouldn't otherwise, if word of mouth started carrying the message that your client doesn't go down when Twitter does.
10/21/09; 1:23:44 PM
Is Google/Microsoft/Twitter in the news business?
Yesterday the earth shook, and at first glance you might think it just shook in Silicon Valley, but I think a few years from now we'll look back and realize that the earth was shaking just as hard in the media industry.
I've had this really strong feeling ever since I got enamored of Twitter in 2006 that it was something the news and entertainment world would jump on if it had leadership that was as bright and ambitious as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at their prime. Alas, those days must be long gone, because they busily tried to litigate peace in the old war, which they lost long ago, looking for the reparations that are due the loser who manages to make the victor feel guilty. (In other words the crumbs left on the table after the meal is over and after the cleaning people have made their first pass.)
"Look over here!" I've said over and over. "You should be competing here."
"We don't see why," they respond.
Here's why.
Twitter got Google and Microsoft to pay for the content that the media industry should have been hosting instead of Twitter. There was money here. And as we all know, the media industry can't find enough money to keep going. They're looking for handouts from the government. Meanwhile there was money everywhere. They just had to evolve.
I'm not saying this payday means Twitter has it made, they don't. Google and Microsoft are sharks and Twitter may be a goldfish. It could be that Evan Williams and his team have the competitive instincts of a Gates or Jobs, if so, they certainly have a few tricks up their sleeves, or they wouldn't have done these deals. They better, because Google and Microsoft are almost surely executing an Embrace & Extend. What that means for Twitter is that they have clones of Twitter in development. The race is certainly on. Have they cross-licensed their streams? In other words, does Twitter have reciprocal rights to any realtime content generated by users of Google's TwitterLand? Microsoft's? Even if they do, could they handle the load? My guess is that both Google and Microsoft will quickly take the search function away from Twitter. Now everyone has the Twitter stream. What streams can Microsoft and Google add to differentiate theirs?
And what business are they in now? I believe they're in the news business. This isn't tech anymore. This is what the Times and CNN should have become, what CBS, NBC and ABC should be. What Jay calls a pro-am system where everyone collaborates to create the realtime stream of news on all levels, national, international, local, broad coverage and specialized stuff. Everything from newsletters to nightly news. Everything flows through the same pipes, and curators pick off the good stuff and route it to people who are interested. This is the way news is done from here-on. We're not talking about the future, we're talking about now. And the moguls of the media industry, without a single leader thinking in advance of the wave, are sitting on the sidelines, hoping someone will give them some money because they're such great writers or whatever it is they're so great at. Soon they'll be looking for reparations.
They should own the platform.
And it's bad for the rest of us that they don't because the moguls of Silicon Valley have a very crude understanding of what news is. Witness the longevity of the 140 character limit and the inability of Twitter to carry any type of content other than text. The horror of the Suggested Users List. I don't expect Google or Microsoft to do much better, but they'll probably have the sense to hire a few news pros to advise them on how to build a system that works for news. The Twitter guys are fumbling around, and in doing so, holding all of us back.
And FriendFeed. Oh man what a wasted opportunity that was. If they had an ounce of competitive spirit they would have noticed that the news industry wasn't seeing their way into this space, and they would have gotten on a plane and camped out in NY and found someone, anyone, with a good flow of news to partner with, to guide them toward creating the fantastic news system that Twitter wasn't building. They had the technical ability to do it, but they were too much of homebodies, they enjoyed the comfort of other engineers too much.
This is what we still have to do -- create the connections between people with technical knowhow and people who can make the news flow to create a safe harbor for the millions who want to participate in news to do so, without being owned and controlled by the titans of tech.
10/22/09; 4:05:49 PM
My buddy Rex
These days my blog posts are always essays, but it wasn't always so. In the beginning they were all links, with pointers to articles both on this site and off-site. Example.
Then it became a hybrid, at the top of the page were the links and at the bottom were articles. Example.
Then in early 2007 (Jan 6, to be exact) I went all essays, and then a few weeks after that, started using Twitter. It's funny how one event followed another.
Anyway, this article by Rex Hammock is so lovely and so vindicating, I'd do a special post just to link to it.
And one little thing, I'm going to have a linkblog up in the not-too-distant future. Again. Everything is new again, every few years, it seems.
Also it's sad that my friends, people like Rex, have to hedge so much because of a handful of stinkers who follow me around on the web. I'd like to encourage my buddies to just go through it, and say what you want to say and let the stinkers stink up some other place. Life is too short. With much love, Dave.
10/24/09; 6:20:45 PM
Testing BuddyPress
When Matt told me that WordPress was going to support rssCloud that got me started using WordPress with new purpose. I've been learning to use the product through wordpress.com. I haven't yet started my own installation. My attention is focused elsewhere.
Anyway, the point of this post is to get help learning how to use BuddyPress. I don't want a huge hosting obligation. Ideally I want a freemium deal like the one at wordpress.com. However, it doesn't seem to exist anywhere, yet.
I just came across a site that says it lets you test BuddyPress.
I was expecting to have to create an account, but it (apparently) found me on Facebook, and I'm already leaving a trail there. Totally not happy about that, but I suppose my gripe is with Facebook, who somehow has decided that they own the web and can give access to my account to anyone who asks for it? I was never asked to opt into this. Unless I'm missing something this seems just plain bad.
Anyway, I thought BuddyPress was supposed to be like Twitter. It doesn't look anything like Twitter. There's no box at the top of the page that asks What Are You Doing? Without that it's not Twitter-like.
Confused.
Update: I found my "wire" page -- and on that page, there's evidence that I had been here on April 30. So that lets Facebook off the hook. I must have created the connection then.
Update: Some free advice for the BP designers. The home page of my site has to look more or less exactly like the home page of the Twitter site. Any difference is going to equal pain for users, and pain for users means slower adoption. Later, when and if you achieve dominant market share, you can slowly evolve the UI, if you really feel you must. Users are less interested in innovation in the UI than you would think they are.
I went for a late lunch in Sausalito with Scoble after spending most of the day inside the walls at San Quentin state prison. We were sitting on a quiet beautiful street with healthy, well-fed people walking by, driving in to eat at the Indian restaurant, riding bicycles and stopping to ask for directions. Scoble entered our location into Foursquare and a few minutes later a clean, friendly young man showed up with an infant wrapped in a blanket. He greeted us with a smile, Scoble instantly knew he was. We didn't in any way at any time feel we were in any danger. I was pretty sure most of the people with us there had never killed anyone.
That may strike you as an odd way to describe a lunch in the center of high-tech land, because that's our normal reality. We expect so much, and we get it. We live the all-you-can-eat lifestyle. But just a few miles away reality is very different.
We met a man who had never used the Internet, had never seen a cell phone, had no clue what Twitter is, and probably a million other things we talk about all the time. He's been in jail since 1987. He talked to us for a while in the courtyard just inside the entrance gate. He's in a "program" and my guess from the way it sounded, will be paroled in January. He murdered his little sister when he was 18. Blew her head off with a shotgun. He did it because she and her brother and mother hid his money and drugs. He told his brother that he'd kill his sister if he didn't tell him where the stash was. The brother said he'd never kill her. He did.
He didn't tell us this, Rudy Luna, the assistant warden who was taking us on a tour, did.
The warden said that, ironically, that prison is a revolving door for people who commit minor crimes, but for murderers like the guy we were talking to, sometimes they get out and stay out. He says there's a point, usually at 11 years, where they realize that they could change. The guys who get sentenced for smaller crimes don't get there.
The guy we were talking to might not commit another murder, but I don't see how he can live with himself.
Everwhere we went we were being watched.
By everyone.
That may have been the oddest thing. I am accustomed to leading what I think is a fairly anonymous life. Sometimes on BART a stranger is staring at me, I imagine they recognize my face from my blog. But most of the time I move around without anyone paying much attention. Not inside the prison.
And it's not just us they're watching, they're all watching each other, all the time. Because prison is a dangerous place. Everything they do seems to be about keeping from getting slashed or beat up or killed.
We saw thousands of people in tiny cages.
We saw the outside of a building where people are locked up all the time, their crimes so heinous or infamous, or they attract so much attention, or they are people who will try to kill anything that they possibly can.
It's the contrast that is so striking. And what it tells me about who I am.
Having just lost my father, I'm thinking about what death means in a much more real and present way these days. Our guide tells us at one point that most of the people we're looking at, and there are hundreds of them, killed someone. And they're walking around like you and me in a park. Except it's nothing like the way we walk around in a park. Everyone is watching everyone. All the time.
I'm sure there will be other insights. Coming out of it, I think none of us knew what to write. That's the sign that we were doing something very different, something very very outside our normal experience.
10/24/09; 8:44:38 AM
Who or what will be the BitTorrent of Realtime?
A market develops, a bunch of people get it started, then someone at a big company discovers it, changes its name (sometimes they don't even do that) and relaunches it as if it were something wholly new. The press, many of whom were aware of the earlier efforts, goes for it. "Everyone knows" that it only matters when a big company does it. However, if you look at history that's often not true, it's often the small guy who ends up defining the market, despite what the press thinks.
A classic case is P2P. Ten years ago there were all kinds of early efforts, some remarkably popular (thinking of Napster) and the industry launched a huge hype balloon. Conferences, white papers, press tours, alliances, books, VC, startups, etc etc. Billions of dollars thrown at it. What ends up taking the prize? BitTorrent! An open source project launched by a bunch of nerds, without much PR. I don't know if it was the best technology, but it certainly was good enough. It wasn't glitzy or even particularly easy to to use. It worked, and most important, you could get the music and movies and TV shows you wanted.
It's a good bet that in five years we'll look back and most of the companies staking out realtime today will be forgotten and something like BitTorrent will rule this space, gently of course.
10/25/09; 5:17:53 PM
In one way, losing a father is a relief
I've been amusing myself with illogic this last week, at times giggling with the relief I feel at the passing of my father. I finally found a way to explain it in words.
When I was a kid, like every other kid, when the parents went out and left me alone, I'd do stuff that I wasn't normally allowed to do. But I had to be sure to cover my tracks so my mischief wouldn't be discovered. The lessons learned from the failures were incorporated into my future exploits, I'd never get caught the same way twice!
So all through my life I've been preparing for my father to come home and catch me doing whatever it is is I'm doing. Whether I was aware of it or not, I was always covering my tracks. My subconscious can't get rid of this. It's a program I'll be running forever. But now it has a different ending. He's never coming home.
10/25/09; 2:14:49 PM
Good API design at Twitter
I've been putting off programming with Twitter lists, but I shouldn't have.
They did a really good job, as usual, with the API.
The project -- convert the page of Berkeley people's tweets to run off a list instead of a special Twitter account. It turns out there's an API call that retrieves the timeline for a list, and it works exactly like the API call that retrieves the timeline for an account. So much so that I didn't even have to change the glue script, I pass in a different URL and it just worked.
It Just Worked™.
That's the Holy Grail of APIs.
I am happy to criticize Twitter when I think they made a mistake, and I'm even happier to applaud when something works incredibly simply, and well.
Thanks!!
10/25/09; 1:49:58 PM
My linkblog is active
If you haven't been following my linkblog, it's time!
Interesting thread on FriendFeed about the next evolutionary step for C. I wrote a comment that I felt deserved to be elevated to a blog post.
Start by creating a really lightweight and easy to use development environment. I should be able to teach Jay Rosen to program in it. Back in the 80s there was serious competition in this area -- from Borland with Turbo Pascal and on the Mac, from Think Technologies with their C and Pascal systems.
The languages aren't the issue, at least not for me. I want to program in C again, but the curve is too steep in all the environments. Give me a Turbo tool and some nice libraries, and lets go!
10/28/09; 6:33:56 PM
How to rank real-time search
Eric Schmidt says he can search real-time stuff, but how to do ranking?
Good question. Would have been easier had Twitter not polluted the follower-count measure of authority. But you can still do it by making it relevant on a personal level. Someone I follow is a lot more relevant than someone I don't. After that people who are followed by people I follow. That immediately cuts down the power of the super-elites with millions of followers (they tend not to follow many).
Google is onto it with their social search. I've been asking for that, but in a different form. I want to tell them that I'm the author of this blog. Now they know a lot more about what my interests are.
So it would be nice if ranking were a personal thing. Keep going the way you're going Eric.
10/28/09; 1:29:51 PM
Twitter feeds stray puppies
A bunch of random notes on returing from the #140conf in Los Angeles.
Next time I go to a conference I'm taking the Asus, not the MacBook. You're always looking for a power outlet with the Mac and that sucks. I'm also going to actively look for a replacement for the Sprint MiFi and my AT&T iPhone, both of which have terribly spotty coverage. I couldn't get online in LAX last night, even though my iPhone can tether and I had the Sprint. If you can't get online in one of the largest airports in the world, what is the point of carrying this thing with you. SFO wasn't much better. And I couldn't use either of them in my hotel room in the biggest hotel in Hollywood in the middle of a shopping mall and convention center. These are places that by now these cell providers should have the best coverage in. The question is -- is Verizon any better?
At the conference yesterday they explained the vague announcement made by YCombinator and Twitter over the weekend -- YCombinator startups will have access to Twitter's firehose. The audience heard "startups get help from Twitter" which they reacted to as if they said "Twitter feeds stray puppies." I hate to spoil the party, but not all speculative investigations are done by "entrepreneurs" -- and not all entrepreneurs are part of YCombinator. This is just more of the lunacy that comes from building an industry around a company instead of an open format or protocol. Paul Graham hypes it as Twitter having discovered a protocol like SMTP or HTTP. That's pure bunk. When there's a protocol, no one will own the firehose, and no one will be granted access (and no one will not be granted access).
I'm continuing to love my linkblog. I've gotten nothing but complaints from readers. Eventually you all will love it too. I'm sure of it. In the meantime, my work is 100 percent more valuable to me, and my incentive to remember a link by pushing it through Twitter (and my linkblog) is greater than ever. So I'll do more work for you, you'll be better informed, and happier and more productive. I can't promise you'll live longer. We'll feed some stray puppies too.
Reminder to subscribe to this feed not the one that WordPress provides. (Note to Matt and the WP community and company, as I use WP more and more I'm hitting limits we never had in Radio or Manila. You guys should seriously look at stealing some ideas from those products. I'll help you find them, because I'm starting to depend on this software.)
I started to watch the video of my presentation at 140conf, which everyone says went well (it was widely quoted on Twitter, of course). That's good, cause I couldn't stand to watch it because I'm frowning too much because there's a light shining in my eyes. We have to come up with a better way to do this, so it doesn't feel so much like "I'm up here and you're out there." I have to be able to at least abstract the audience when I'm speaking. That's why I much prefer the interview format, because I can talk to another person. It's part of the theme of my talk, we're just people, I'm not Mike Wallace and you're not really an audience. It's a brave new world and we should have the courage to accept it for what it is. And please believe me that I'm smiling as I write this. I wish I had been smiling more while I gave the talk.
And don't forget to feed the stray puppies.
10/28/09; 12:15:40 PM
Introducing the Bay Bridge Blog
Once again the Bay Bridge is in the news, and this time it seems obvious it's going to be in the news for years to come. So, what to do?
Okay things are getting interesting now that 50 percent of the Twitter users have the lists feature. And now it's getting pretty obvious that there are some serious omissions.
First the fun part.
I started a Twitter Babes list, but got really nervous about it, fearing backlash, so I deleted it and gave it some more thought. It came back to life as my Entourage list, very much gender-neutral, there are men and women on the list.
These are people who I admire for their intellect, big heart, creativity, willingness to take a chance. Some I would trust my life with and others I'd trust my heart. They're good people to hang with. I don't agree with them all the time, I even compete with some of them. Some I don't know well but find interesting.
I'd love to say all this on the list, but there's no way to. That's feature #1. You must be able to explain what a list means. Even if it's only a link to a web page where you explain it.
A list is like a Twitter user. In fact some of my placeholder Twitter accounts will now go away. I no longer need the page of NY Times twitterers, or the Top 100, or even the Berkeley folk. So it makes sense that all the annotations, all the metadata that goes with a user, should also go with a list.
People are going to want a way to suggest a new addition to a list, and people with lists are going to want a way to have new additions suggested.
It should also be possible to include a list within another list. My friend Cori has a list of Bay Area people. She should be able to include my list of Berkeleyites, since Berkeley is in the Bay Area (of course). That way when I discover someone in Berkeley she automatically gets updated with that person.
All the ideas that we had for OPML directories apply to Twitter lists.
In fact there should be a way to export a list as OPML, and I think Twitter ought to do this, as a way to create systems that bridge in and out of Twitter hierarchies dynamically. Very powerful stuff. If they won't do it, I'm going to suggest that Matt get on top of this asap.
I'm doing so much stuff with WordPress these days, I'm starting to see it a bit as a platform the same way I view Twitter. I wonder if that's why Matt embraced rssCloud so quickly? Heh.
Anyway I have projects I'd like to try, but I'm really busy and probably won't get to them soon enough. If I were viewing lists as an entrepreneurial opportunity, the first place I'd explore is doing a list browser and editor, with a Suggest-A-User feature. If you want to start one of these, I'd be interested in participating, for equity.
BTW, lists are obvious gold for search engines.
10/29/09; 4:52:24 PM
A new OS feature worth upgrading for
It's been a long time since an operating system had a feature compelling enough for me to justify an upgrade. But last night I thought of one.
The web is totally getting reverse-chronologic and imho that's a good thing. It's becoming easy to find the new stuff everywhere. Everywhere but on my local area network, that is.
When something new arrives, a podcast or an enclosure, or I download a new app or a song or TV show, on any of my machines, I'd like it to roll up into a list that I can scroll through, and have a blog-like calendar structure that I can search.
That's all -- nothing more.
Also a follow-up to the post about the battery needs of my MacBook vs the Asus Eee PC. Jim Roepcke thinks it's somehow my fault that the MacBook either has a weaker battery or uses more juice. And that they decided it would be better if I couldn't buy a spare battery to travel with. I have no idea which it is and I don't care. I'm a user. He thinks it's the OPML Editor that's responsible for the disparity. But that's just plain wrong. I run exactly the same software on both the Mac and the Asus. Further, if you look at the performance monitor, Firefox is the hog, not the OPML Editor. It's generally using five or ten times the CPU that OPML is.
Another clue is that at the conference, the last row of the auditorium, the one with the power strips, was filled with Mac users. I didn't see a single netbook user back there. That's unscientific of course, but it was pretty shocking nonetheless. Traveling Mac users are drawn to power outlets much more than netbook users are. It's just a fact.
I think I'm going to do an A-B test. Put an Asus next to a MacBook, kill all the apps, unplug both, and see how long it is before each of them dies. That ought to put it to rest. (And don't forget that while the Mac is a nicer computer with a bigger screen and keyboard, it's also heavier and costs five times as much as the Asus. And it runs hotter too, your lap gets scorched using the Mac.)
Update: I see in his follow-up comment he thinks I'm sniping at Apple. That's nuts. I spent $1700 on the MacBook so I could snipe at Apple? I actually bought it because I hoped to take it on trips like the one I took to LA this week. It didn't work very well. You want I should say it did?
10/29/09; 2:11:00 PM
Content drives adoption
This began as a response to a comment left by Marshall Kirkpatrick to an earlier post of mine.
My belief is that it's content that drives the apps.
You need something or someone to go first. With RSS it was Wired, Red Herring, Motley Fool and Salon then the early blogs then the NY Times and it blasted off.
With podcasting it was IT Conversations, the Gillmor Gang, Morning Coffee Notes, Daily Sourcecode, the community, then NPR and it blasted off.
This confluence has not (yet) happened for directory structures. It's not immediately obvious who the big drivers are going to be, but if they're out there, the Twitter lists feature is getting them to think about this stuff. I don't doubt that OPML will be part of the bootstrap and that people will quickly want to make lists that include resources that are not (just) Twitter users or lists of Twitter users.
In other words, this is the most promising moment for OPML directories that's come so far.
10/30/09; 6:47:23 PM
Lists and OPML
So many things to say about where Twitter's lists point, the thing is, I've said them all already, many times over many years. There's a whole architecture already designed and deployed for lists and lists of lists. And they form directories that are much more open than the original Yahoo directory or DMOZ. I know everyone thinks DMOZ is the most open directory possible, but it's not.
The list structure of the Internet should be a open as the web. That is to say no one gives you permission to create a web page on any topic you like. So if you want to create a list of resources, that might include Twitter users, but might also include many other things, go ahead. Be the best you can be. You don't need anyone to let you do it.
If you're good, I might include your directory within mine, thereby delegating that topic to you. If something better comes along, I might unhook yours and replace it with theirs. Or I might get fancy and join yours with theirs, forming the sum of two lists.
If you want to see this working, here's a directory rendering of the archive of Scripting News. Look at the white-on-orange XML icons in the upper right corner. They, as always, link to the XML version of the rendering. In this case instead of being RSS, they are OPML. Every page has a way to suggest a link.
How do you edit these structures? In the OPML Editor of course. Here's a screenshot.
The OPML Editor allows you to build these attributed hierarchies but it also includes a full web server and CMS. And a lot more. And because it was built to run on the computers of the mid-90s, it's pretty fast on today's machines. The download is the size of an MP3. Takes a minute to install.
I may try one more time to push these ideas out there. It may finally be the time. If anyone wants to get something entrepreneurial going, I'm up for it. I'm not just doing this stuff out of the goodness of my heart.
Techies, read the OPML 2.0 spec to see how the pieces fit together. My software is all replaceable. The formats are open and lightweight. And there's some great connections to search engines possible. I pitched Google on this in 2002.
10/30/09; 3:57:37 PM
Housekeeping
First, thanks to Jeff Pulver for a fantastic conference earlier this week and thanks for letting me keynote it. Putting it in L.A., away from the distortion field of Silicon Valley, made it a lot more interesting and less of a festival of wiener-boys. I fell in love at least five times in 24 hours, that's pretty good. First time I spoke at a tech conference since LeWeb in 2007.
Technorati rolled out a new version and completely lost track of Scripting News, so I took its icon off the home page of the site. I used to check it every couple of days to see if it found anyone talking about something I wrote here. Nowadays it comes up with nothing. So goodbye Technorati.
I added links to my newest projects in the right sidebar. Makes them easier for us to find and of course adds juice to them in the search engines.
That's all!
Happy Halloween! (And Let's go Phillies. Teach the Yankees about philosophy.)
10/31/09; 12:07:24 PM
What's the root list of Twitter?
My hard drive has a top level, it's called Macintosh HD.
On PCs it's C:
Yahoo's home page is the root of its directory.
Suppose you were going to design a list browser for Twitter, one that would allow you to hop from list to user to their lists to other users and their lists and on and on.
Where would you begin?
There is clearly no top to this thing. Which imho is good, the same as the web. There is no Home Page, no place everyone starts. It's why the web is open and democratic and without a bottleneck and has no gatekeeper to keep you out. Hat's off to TBL for designing it that way.
It seems that WordPress does a redirect, automatically from rss.xml (the old location) to the new one.
The editorial system should work a lot better, and I hope more interesting discussions will evolve from each show.
11/2/09; 11:32:28 AM
How Google got left behind
Suppose there's a topic you're interested in and you want to stay current on it. What tool would you use to do that?
That's at least part of the purpose of the whole push to "realtime" stuff. I've been writing about it since 1997, I called it Just-In-Time Search. Similar ideas, but not exactly.
When you search for friends you always get the same old pictures, because the search engine reports them in order of relevance. Perhaps there are newer pictures, but they're nowhere near the top, and it might not even consider them relevant enough to index.
We need a search engine whose primary axis is currency, that values news and images based on their newness, not by how many others are pointing to it. Google has News Alerts, but that's it. Their news system is geared toward big stories. I'm interested in the small stuff their search engine covers. There's news there too.
Update: A commenter says that Google does have time-based search. I'll check it out.
When you're displaying a list, you'll see a white-on-orange XML icon at the bottom of the page, right next to the (also new) Refresh icon. Click the XML icon and you'll get an OPML rendering of the list. You should then be able to import that OPML into Google Reader or some other feed aggregator just like any other OPML file. What that means? Like everything related to Twitter lists, it's too early to tell. But one thing is for sure, you can now use Twitter to author OPML. That in itself is pretty new idea. (It's totally new.)
Here's a screen shot showing where the XML button is on my innovatorslist. This is the OPML version of that page.
BTW, one of the reasons the OPML Editor is called the OPML Editor is that you can enter that address in the Open URL dialog in the File menu and it'll open in the editor. This is a convenient way to create mashups of Twitter lists. At this point I haven't got a way to get OPML into Twitter, but you gotta figure that's coming.
I've got some more kickass features in the pipe. This is very very fertile ground.
PS: The Refresh button tells listbrowser.org to get the list from Twitter, instead of using the copy it has cached. Normally it'll reload on its own after an hour, but if you just made a change to a list and want listbrowser to reflect that, just hit the Refresh button when viewing the list.
11/3/09; 7:27:31 PM
Introducing listbrowser.org
I wanted a quick way to browse around to see what people are doing with the new Twitter lists feature. So I put this simple app together.
If you have any questions or comments, please post them here.
11/3/09; 12:51:22 PM
Let The World Change You
I have a problem with entrepreneurs who say they want to Change The World.
Isn't that a lot to take on? How do you know your idea for changing the world is what the world needs? What if you Change The World and instead of making it better you make it suck. What then?
I am a former young person who wanted to Change The World himself. I look back at that young person, and think -- he was lovely in many ways but he made a pretty good mess of his life, because he had no clue who he was and how he got that way. Change The World? Good thing that didn't happen!
As someone who just watched his father die, I don't think any of us have the first clue how the world works. My father was a smart man, spent a lot of time thinking, and at the end, he may have understood 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of how the world works. And some of that was based on faulty assumptions. Yet my father would always give a couple of bucks to anyone who asked for it. And if you wanted to take a picture of him, no matter how old or sick he got, he always put on a smile and let you take it, and if you asked why, he shrugged it off, as if there was any reason to care. A week before he died, I tried to teach him to use Twitter, but he said he didn't have time. He was right.
So I've recently seen the end. I don't think too many people get much further than my dad did. He lived to be 80, grew up in Europe, fled from a war, fought in a war, raised a family, was married 55 years, got an education, taught, went to museums and the ballet and opera, traveled everywhere, and I don't think he would have said, at the end, he had any idea how to Change The World. It's only youth that figures it knows, but that's because of strong chemicals and not knowing what you don't know. It's an illusion.
Change is made by all of us, over many generations. The best we can do is make a few other people happy for a while, make ourselves happy, and if you do that, and leave the place a little nicer for having been here, I say -- Job Well Done!
Maybe instead of changing the world, relax, and Let The World Change You. That's closer to what actually happens in life, no matter how rich or famous (or not) you are.
I created a fake account, gristmillie, visited the Suggested Users page, checked them all and followed them. Then, from my own account, I went to the page of people she follows, went through each one and checked it, adding it to my list.
A caveat, this will go out of date when they add more people to the list.
Joseph Scott has a post on the main WordPress site that explains that they are now supporting the two enhancements that were announced here on October 16.
What this means: Now any aggregator that wants instant updates of WordPress sites can have it. It was an issue for complex sites like Google Reader, that's why we enhanced our apps, so they could hook into rssCloud and provide instant updates to their users. If you use Google Reader or My Yahoo or Bloglines, tell them you want rssCloud support so you can get instant WordPress updates from sites like CNN, TechCrunch, GigaOm (and of course) Scripting News!
WordPress also fixed a problem that could prevent RSS feeds from reflecting the change immediately. That was a problem because sometimes we'd receive notification that a feed had changed, and then would go read the feed only to find that it hadn't!
Many thanks, once again, to the great people at Automattic.
11/5/09; 2:21:56 PM
Peek was worth a peek
I thought perhaps the Peek email device might be a good service to get for a family member who's not very technical. I wanted them to have access to text messaging, and thought its advertised simplicity might be the answer. So I bought a device for $49 and bought one month of service for $19.95, with the understanding that it's not a service plan, and if I didn't like it, I could easily opt-out.
I used it for a few days and decided it wasn't what I wanted. It is simple, but the text messaging feature is a hack on top of email, and they put ads for their service in the text messages, and texting is more or less one-way, and it's the wrong way for my application. It's easy for the Peek user to send text messages but virtually impossible for them to receive them. This didn't suit the application I had in mind, because I wanted the ability to send messages to the family member. I didn't think she'd be sending many on her own (she doesn't now).
So I decided to opt out. There's no way to do it from the website. They don't explain how to opt out the FAQ. When I called the sales department, they said I could turn the service off, but I wouldn't be able to use the remaining time on the month worth of service I had already purchased. I said that's unacceptable. I wanted to get off the monthly plan and use the remainder of the time I had already purchased. (Maybe I'd find another use for it?)
After a lot of back and forth, the service person, Jacqueline, said I should get in touch with the operations manager, David Hung. I'm going to email him a pointer to this blog post.
Net-net, Peek is an attractive device, the service works reasonably well for email, but not for texting. It is simple to set up and use. However they don't make it easy to get out. At this point, I'm still going to charged for $19.95 on December 2. They'll probably do what I asked after reading this blog post, but you shouldn't have to write a blog post for what should be a routine matter. It should be easy to turn the automatic renewal off and on as you wish.
11/6/09; 6:09:55 PM
Twitter needs a command-line
Imagine a terminal program that accepted commands like:
twitter> follow davewiner
twitter> follow ev
twitter> unfollow sexygirl209
twitter> addtolist scoble halfmoonbay -u
The first few commands are obvious, the last would add scoble to a list called halfmoonbay and unfollow him.
I stumbled across this as I was thinking about how to implement follow and unfollow commands in listbrowser.org. Usually this would mean supporting OAuth, which is not a big deal, I already have the code, but it's a pain for users. Another site they have to trust. Even though OAuth is better than giving away my password, it's not much better.
Then I thought how nice it is for a developer to just be able to shoot the text of a tweet over at the status box on Twitter, where the user is already logged-in. But that just works for tweets. What about follow and unfollow, and list operations? And a myriad of other chores that now you can do either interactively or through the API.
Why not have something in the middle, more techy than the point and click interface, but easier than the API. We already have an idea how that works -- it's a command-line interface.
To be clear, there are already command-line interfaces for Twitter, but they run on the desktop. We need a CLI that runs as a web app from a public server. It could come from Twitter, Inc, or could be done by a developer. If there's more than one, it would be nice if they used the same syntax.
If you're already working on this, post a note in the comments or send me an email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com.
11/6/09; 6:10:31 AM
A Droid newbies site
It's a good idea when starting something new that you think you're going to do a lot of to start a "newbies" site, to accumulate wisdom about.
That's my site. I just posted my "stake-in-the-ground" -- where I'm at after two days using the Droid. I'm building a nest there. So far so good.
11/7/09; 10:19:35 PM
FlickrFan merges with River2
I have at least a couple of new things this weekend.
The first is that FlickrFan, the Feed Reader for Pictures, has merged into River2. You can now use River2 the same way people were using FlickrFan, to subscribe to photo feeds from any source, including the AP and AFP feeds, and feeds from Flickr itself.
I've explained the transition on the FlickrFan home page.
11/7/09; 1:33:35 PM
Coolest thing my father did
There's a meme going around about fathers and the coolest things they did when you were growing up.
Since Father's Day on October 3, I guess I've been reflecting on this stuff more than usual, and I have a story prepared. But first, my father actually had an opinion about this, he told a story that embarassed me about how he taught me to kiss. But I'm sure I thought it was cool when I was a toddler. Kids go for that kind of stuff. But the word we're looking for is "cool" and from my point of view, as an adult, here's the coolest thing my dad did.
Probably 1970 or 71. I was more than a bit of a rebellious teenager. So one day I got suspended from high school for bringing a bottle of wine to school. I was drinking with some friends in the yard before home room when the Dean of Discipline, Joseph Cotter, comes walking out, takes the bottle, escorts me to his office and calls my father to come get me. My dad drives to the Bronx from Queens, and I thought for sure I'm really going to catch it now, cause not only was I drinking wine in school, but it was his wine. I had stolen it from him. Oy.
Well, my dad comes in, and instead of giving me shit, he tells off Cotter. He says why don't you leave the kids alone. My chin dropped to the floor. I couldn't believe my eyes and ears. I thought I had moved to a different planet. The Dean thought so too, he was speechless. (He and I were enemies, I was, as you might imagine, and a major troublemaker. He thought he had me, but heh he no he didn't.)
So that has to be the coolest thing. On the drive home we talked about baseball and the weather, and he never punished me for taking the wine.
This is how TechCrunch works. They write something stupid, then people write rebuttals explaining how it's stupid, building flow and page rank. It's the same method John Dvorak explains in an interview I did with him at the Apple Store in San Francisco a couple of years ago.
Anyway...
Carr's piece is rubbish, and just this once I'll take the bait.
Of course what the nurse at the hospital did, according to his account, was horrible. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that in addition to being a "citizen journalist" she was also a British citizen.
Of course, the movie-taker shooting the end of the life of the beautiful Iranian protestor did something horrible too. Imagine, not trying to help or comfort her as she bled to death in front of him. Okay, let's concede he was a citizen journalist (whatever that is), but then humor me and assume he was British too.
Or suppose the nurse and the guy in Iran were both homosexual. Or both were Christian, Jewish, Muslim, recovering alchoholics, ex-cons, single parents, only children, flat-footed, Mac users, high school dropouts, veterans, or whatever.
So we could conclude that everything negative anyone ever said about Christians was true, and homosexuals and British people.
This is Logic 101 and Carr failed it. And since he's bright, assume he failed it on purpose. Why? Refer to the Dvorak explanation.
This is what press people do. When Dvorak teases Mac people for flow, it's dishonest, but it's also fairly harmless. But Carr is doing something different. He's using people's pain not just for his own self-glorification but also to build flow to attract more ads and money. It's two levels of disgusting.
Today I want to extend that support to include information from the social network about each user. In this case, the social network is Twitter. I could see situations where this namespace might be used to present information from status.net or Facebook, when they support lists, as Twitter has.
I'm going to use the name xSocial. The "x" could stand for one of two things: 1. XML or 2. Experimental, in the spirit of MIME types that are considered experimental or ad hoc, or proposals of future standards, and have an "x" in front of their names. In other words, I'm doing this because someone has to go first, and maybe someone already has, so this is my way of asking for comments (or, more likely, flames).
Here's a list of elements that may appear in documents that use the namespace.
xSocial:userId -- a string of characters that identifies a user.
xSocial:userName -- the user's name.
xSocial:userDescription -- a string of characters describing the user.
xSocial:userLocation -- a string, the location of the user.
xSocial:userUrl -- the address of the user's web page.
xSocial:userStatuses -- the number of status messages from the user.
xSocial:userFollows -- the number of people the user follows.
xSocial:userFollowedBy -- the number of people who follow the user.
xSocial:userProfileImageUrl -- the address of the user's "avatar" image.
xSocial:userScreenName -- the name the user goes by in the network.
Caveats and disclaimers:
1. Think of Twitter as establishing the precedent here. When in doubt each of these elements is defined by the way Twitter uses them.
2. Twitter keeps other information with each user, this is just the list of information that I include, now, in the OPML that's generated by listbrowser.org. I may add or remove data in the future, or use a different namespace. If it changes, I will hopefully remember to include a comment under this post.
4. The usual disclaimers apply, including but not limited to: A. It's even worse than it appears. B. I make shitty software. C. I am not a lawyer. D. My mother loves me.
Brewster Kahle is talking about the Internet Archive making public S3 storage (what Amazon rents) free on their servers.
Does anyone have any more info on this?
If this is true, I will be building on it.
Update: It's true. Here's the tweet with the scoop.
11/8/09; 1:04:55 PM
ListBrowser gets a new tool
I've done a bunch of little stuff for listbrowser.org, fixes and cleanups, added more data to the list pages, and most important, they now link back to the list on twitter.com.
This raises the obvious question, how do you get from a list on twitter.com to the listbrowser.org version of that page?
Just got a link from my book agent Steve Hanselman, to this piece by Matt Mullenweg, on CNN -- 10 blogs to make you think.
I was really proud to see my humble blog at the top of his list.
And I'm proud of Matt -- he's done really well with WordPress. I'm using it all day every day and building my newest software around it. Why? It's pretty simple, and Matt says it in his piece. He listens.
And when I asked him to add a feature to WordPress he said yes. I didn't even have to call him, or buy him lunch -- all I did was ask on the blog. He must have been reading.
There isn't enough trust in the world, imho. People can't tell, or don't take the time to find out, if someone is trustworthy. The other day I asked this question of an editor at a major newspaper -- why don't you trust your readers? I ask this of Apple, why don't you trust your users? What about the government, why doesn't it trust its citizens? Ultimately all these institutions must listen to the people they serve. The news and tech industries, even governments -- will eventually listen.
The reason people are reluctant: If you extend trust, sometimes you're going to get burned. And if you never trust anyone, you'll never be hurt. But you won't have much of a life. So you have to develop a sense of who and what you can depend on.
Not many guys in Matt's shoes take a chance on a guy like me. But it just takes one to make some amazing things happen! And while today's news people don't seem to trust me, all it took was one to revolutionize how news flows through the Internet. Just one. That's all.
I look back to the times when I have been most effective, it's always been in partnership with someone else. That's the big secret. Take a chance, and when it works, take another, and another.
Pretty soon I'm going to put another invitation out there to the universe, and I know I'll get a listen from Matt, and I hope from some other people too.
11/11/09; 10:08:05 AM
No support on Twitter please
Support on Twitter can't possibly work, for two reasons.
1. Can you really explain the problem in 140 characters?
2. Can it can be solved in 140 characters?
Better: Find a way you can ask in a comment or email, and explain carefully what went wrong.
11/11/09; 9:10:14 AM
Two bits of movie dialog
For some reason there are two bits of movie dialog stuck in my head.
1. In Fargo, there's a scene where a random cop is talking to a bar owner who's shoveling his sidewalk, telling the story of the "funny lookin guy" played by Steve Buscemi. At the end of the story, which he just told in a beautful midwestern "you know you betcha" way, when he runs out of story, he says "That's it. (Big pause.) End of story." The moment wasn't awkward at all, quite dignified, beautifully done.
2. The big "my sister" moment in Chinatown with Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson. That might be the most perfect bit of dialog in all moviedom. I don't want to spoil the plot by saying why, but... Wow.
The video of the scene is on YouTube. But don't click the link if you haven't seen the movie yet.
Some movies you can only watch once, these movies never get old. For some reason Fargo works really well on mobile computers like the iPhone or Droid.
11/11/09; 8:36:24 AM
Working on new editorial tools
This week I set a goal to get my next generation of editorial tools to a level where I could use them for almost everything I do online. Not yet for others to use, this is how I develop stuff. I do more than eat the dog food, think of it this way -- I am the dog.
So, while I have been writing very actively online for the last few days, very little of it has been appearing here at scripting.com. Eventually I'll figure out how to migrate so that it is. Right now the place to go for it all is protoblogger.com. Which is an apt name, because I feel like what I'm doing now is the prototype for what blogging will be like in the future.
Like the first generation, the new stuff mixes linkblogging and writing of longer posts.
The first time I did this stuff, it was easier, all the content flowed to one place, a static server that I ran.
In the second gen life was more complicated, I was running a dynamic server on the back-end (Manila) and using an outliner for the front-end.
Then I went back to static on the back end, which is how Scripting News currently runs. Then I stopped linkblogging here and started on Twitter, which still must be part of my work environment, but I have a lot more to say than fits easily in 140 characters. The challenge has been to create a tool that does both, in the same place, with agility. And empowers the author. And makes it easy to scatter the writing all over god's creation and at the same time create a feeling of "home" for the author.
After Automattic adopted rssCloud I decided to look at using wordpress.com as the back-end, rather with a static server. As I explored WordPress, I realized it could solve a huge amount of the problem for me, and I had no interest in doing yet another dynamic CMS, so I embarked down this path.
I gotta say, now that it's all working, it's very fucking cool.
I have 8 different WordPress blogs and my links flow through Twitter too, all from one window. This gives me so much more power than I had before, and I suspect a lot of other people are dealing with this kind of complexity too, but I am managing it. I love the complexity instead of it being in my way. It took a lot of work, both conceptual and programming to get this right, but I'm there now.
Anyway there's no purpose to this post other than to Narrate My Work and let other developers know that this kind of editorial system is coming, and it has special needs on the back-end. There's no single rendering of the content, since it's scattered all over the place (the lifestyle of our time). But there is a new position for a static server that stores the user's full content flow. It's a low-tech workhorse of a server, but it's super-important.
I have to maintain a server for the unrenderedcontent. That works fine for me, but won't work when I get users. So the back-ends should probably evolve to not just display the rendered HTML but to allow tools to store the source code for the writing along-side. That's how writing tools should be working, imho.
11/12/09; 2:57:29 PM
Why the collection is important
In response to my post about the new editorial tools I am using, Bill Seitz asked why it's so important to have a representation of the pre-rendered content stored in public on the web. My first answer was incomplete, I said I wanted an archive. I don't feel comfortable having the only copy of things I write reside on servers of corporations who might decide at some point they're not interested in continuing to store the stuff, or might have a technical failure and lose the stuff. Or whatever. Praise Murphy.
But there's another even more important reason. I hope that at some point we might swing back with everyone having their own home base and that we might still have the benefit of real-time updates, and scatter the bits all over creation. I want the best of both worlds. A place where all my writing is collected and preserved and can be commented on, and having that same content appear in as many other places as people want to view it. This was the point of syndication in the first place, to give people lots of options for viewing. And while not many people knew about the cloud element in RSS, it was there since 2001, so I don't think I have to work too hard to persuade anyone that real-time updates was always part of the vision of RSS. It was.
If we're going to get there, we have to start. That's what I'm doing, starting.
11/13/09; 8:11:18 PM
SF to Denver by train
I've always wanted to take a train across the United States. Today, I'm going to do a big part of it, from Emeryville CA to Denver. Not sure where I'll go from there, playing it by ear.
I don't know how much of the trip I'll document here on scripting.com, but you can see all the activity on protoblogger.com, including a set of pictures on Flickr. All part of a grand experiment to pioneer the next generation of creative writing tools for the web.
My tools: An Asus Eee PC 1005HA, standard issue (no upgrades). I'm using my Droid, tethered, and Verizon for connectivity, but have my Sprint MiFi and iPhone with me as backups. The camera is a Canon PowerShot, but I may use the cell phones for quick pictures.
I'm on the California Zephyr, have a bedroom so I'll get a good night sleep, meals included and coffee (thanks for that).
Want to know where I am at any given moment:
11/13/09; 1:59:53 PM
Another day of train travel
Woke up in the middle of the night in Salt Lake City, went back to sleep, and by dawn we were in the middle of a whiteout with snow on the Wasatch front. Headed east from there, roughly following the path of Interstate 70, through Green River and Grand Junction. We'll get to Denver at about 7PM, which is where I will get off the train, and head to the airport tomorrow for a flight to an unnamed destination to hang with friends for a few days.
Taking pictures all through the day!
11/14/09; 2:39:28 PM
Rebooting Personal News
One of Jay's ideas for rebooting professional news applies equally, imho, to personal news. I wrote it up over at rebootnews.com.
11/18/09; 10:00:16 PM
Traveling with electronics
See the Droidie site for observations on the tools I carried with me on my latest trip.
11/18/09; 8:48:10 AM
Coolest software of the decade?
Everyone's asking questions about the decade that's coming to a close, I'd like to ask what's the coolest software you used this decade?
For me, it might be Dropbox. I keep thinking of new uses for it.
For a guy with a huge number of computers (I don't even want to count them), it's not only a lifesaver but an idea factory. I've already built utilities on it. The basis: polling a folder is incredibly low-cost. You can do a lot of it without impacting the performance of your machine. That was true in 2002 when we made Radio do upstreaming. It's even more true today.
Because Dropbox wires together folders on any machine you link into it, it's a very simple content distributor. You can have 18 computers looking for something, when one finds it, they all find out and get the thing. It could be large or small.
Like all cool things, it's fairly obvious, and has probably been done many times before. But they put it together now and it works and is trivial to set up. I keep thinking of things to use it for. All of which makes it very cool. Unless I'm missing something, it's my CSOTD.
Update: There's a thread on this topic on Ycombinator.
11/19/09; 4:48:06 PM
The new Retweet is cool!
I sort of understand why people don't like the new retweet, but I like it very much, and probably for many of the reasons they don't like it.
If you follow me on Twitter you know that a lot of my tweets are links to stories on the web. I would probably forward other people's links more if there were a way to give them credit for the link without adding all that overhead to the text. I find that once you add a bit of text to a tweet you dilute its meaning. Do it two or three times and its a confusing mess. I don't know who said what.
Worse, often the meaning of messages are reversed when they're retweeted. Not only does the person show off that they didn't understand what was said, but they propogate the mistake by sending it to all their followers.
In the new method, forwarding a link through Twitter is error-free, no noise is added because it can't, and the lineage is carried as metadata, and doesn't take up any of the 140 characters.
I applaud features that don't use up the 140 characters, and like even more features that give them back to us. I think Twitter should be encouraged to do more to pull data out of the text of a tweet and carry it as metadata, so apps can do stuff with it, and so people get to use the 140 chars to say what they have to say.
I do almost no retweeting in the old regime. But I already do a lot more now, and will do even more once everyone has the feature. Once it's been out there for a few weeks I think we'll wonder how we ever lived without it.
11/19/09; 2:35:23 PM
Journalists as ski instructors
One of the cool things about riding on a train is that you meet a lot of people.
There are Europeans who are visiting the US and have the train riding habit from home.
There are people who remember the golden age of trains and can tell you how this or that is a shadow of its former self.
And there are people who are afraid of plane travel and prefer trains to buses.
There are also people like me who had a cross-country train trip on their bucket list, and found that the fantasy was better than the reality. (Partially because this trip follows the route of I-80 and I-70, which for me is well-traveled, by car.)
When you're sitting with strangers in the dining car, conversation turns to What You Do, and part of my story is Rebooting The News. In explaining what was happening with the news system in the US, I came up with a new analogy this time, which I told in Rebooting The News #33, and thought I should repeat here.
Journalism is like skiing in the 50s or 60s. Previously it had been a sport that very few people enjoyed, and they were all very good. But now the doors were opening to amateurs, as it did with skiing. The pros are going to have to share the slopes with people who don't take the sport as seriously as they do. They're still going to be able to ski, but the rest of us are not just going to admire them for how skilled they are, we're going to do it too. They can even earn a living as ski patrol and ski instructors. Or lift operators or more mundane jobs like people who work in hotels and drive the shuttle bus. There are still jobs in skiing after the arrival of the amateurs. But the exclusivity is gone.
11/19/09; 2:11:21 PM
Is Twitter more open than News Corp?
My chin fell to the floor this morning as I read a BBC article quoting Twitter co-CEO Biz Stone advising Rupert Murdoch to be more open.
This got me to think about where Twitter is and where they're going and how similar it is to where Murdoch's newspapers are.
In a newspaper, reporters get the prime space with the big headlines, and the readers are placed in a corner, Letters to the Editor. Or represented by a "Public Editor" who does a better job of representing the editors and owners.
In Twitter there's a similar hierarchy developing, pretty rapidly.
The prime space is allocated, in a totally non-transparent way, to certain people, and the rest of us are mostly talking to ourselves, in very small numbers.
I was having coffee the other day with a former colleague at Berkman, Ethan Zuckerman, who said he would try to do something special if he had the millions of followers you get when you're on the Suggested Users List. I've seen people go that route. All of a sudden it's not good enough to be yourself, now you have to do something to take advantage of the flow you're able to generate. I wonder if that distortion, when it all shakes out, will be all that different from the feeling a reporter gets that he or she is more than a person writing from their own point of view. My guess is that it's more or less the same thing.
Stone has made a mess of something that could have been great by not being tranparent. How ironic that he advises Murdoch on something he himself so badly needs to do. Pretty typical of the way the tech industry relates to media.
Anyway, I think it's inevitable that Murdoch and many others in the media business will see the need to challenge Twitter for dominance in the realtime message distribution network. I don't see Twitter as being any more or less open than Mudoch's company. The basis for success will come elsewhere.
11/19/09; 1:26:51 PM
Where is RSS?
I watched the morning session of TechCrunch's second realtime conference, including the half hour interview with Dick Costolo, the COO of Twitter.
Of course Mike Arrington asked him the "Is RSS Dead?" question, and thankfully Costolo didn't want to go there. It would be ingracious of him, of course, because he made $100 million with RSS.
He said RSS had been "pushed down" the stack, and it was now a protocol like SMTP or HTTP.
In a way I agree with him, but only so far.
RSS was never anything more than a protocol like SMTP or HTTP. So it hasn't gone anywhere. It's still exactly where it has been since 2002, it's part of the fabric of the Internet, and is the standard format for news distribution. We're lucky to have a standard format for that.
But...
Had Arrington asked me the question, I would have answered it differently.
RSS will form the basis for the open distributed version of Twitter.
The loosely-coupled 140-character message network.
RSS already has everything we need, including a protocol for realtime updates.
Further, any vendor of a Twitter client would, imho, be well-advised to spread out to achieve independence from the Twitter company. One way to do that, and they should all do it, is to support Facebook on an equal basis with Twitter. But that isn't enough. They should all make an investment in the open distributed way of doing what Twitter does. What that means is to offer the user the option to create a backup of their tweet stream in RSS, as a publicly-accessible feed. And once there's a base of apps doing that, they should add a feature to subscribe to those feeds.
Key point: Once they're there, they can add core features without waiting for Twitter.
Of course Arrington didn't ask me that question, and that's fine -- that's his prerogative. But there's nothing to stop me from answering it anyway!
11/20/09; 3:33:20 PM
An open letter to Google
I had an interesting but somewhat disturbing exchange with a Google guy on Twitter today. It reveals a bunch of disconnects, that I'm going to try, in this post, to address.
1. Please take these statements at face value.
2. I am just a person, I am not in competition with Google.
3. I am a Google user. My primary email account is on GMail. I just bought a Droid, and started a Droid blog to help other people get started. I like it primarily because it connects so well with Google services.
4. I am a former Google shareholder. I made a shitload of money from my Google investment. Thank you.
5. I think Google is a big company. I think the people at Google, like most people everywhere, mean well. Like every big organization there are some who don't mean well. But I judge each individual as a person. I don't assume because a person works at Google that they are good or bad or otherwise.
6. I don't have the first clue what it's like to be inside Google, and honestly I don't care.
7. Now about PubSubHubBub. When I first looked at it I saw Atom all over it. I quickly hit the Back button.
8. There was a time when I seriously considered implementing it. But it required me to understand concepts I didn't understand and had no interest in investing in. It seemed to me that I would have to reimplement a lot of stuff I already had working. This is something big companies ask you to do a lot of.
9. One of the reasons I revitalized rssCloud was to influence Google to support RSS better in PSHB.
10. One of the clues that PSHB needs to be reconstructed is that it's so hard to describe. What's needed here is easy to explain: Instant updates for RSS. If you think RSS is a bad choice of terms, do some research. The world sees it that way. If you make that more general, you lose people. They get confused. PSHB is very very confusing to people. That hinders adoption.
11. Fostering adoption of complex technologies is something I know a lot about. I'm very good at it. You can ignore me if you want, but I usually am right about this stuff.
12. Switching gears, I like the Internet because it means I can ignore big companies and still create meaningful software.
13. I think Google doesn't like RSS. I see that in a lot of things Google does.
14. I wish Google would give up on fighting RSS. I think it's pointless. I don't think defeating or blunting or obviating RSS has anything to do with Google's business.
15. You can argue with me on any of these points, but remember #2. If you convince me I'm wrong (which is unlikely, btw, I'm no different than anyone else in that regard), you still have just convinced one person.
16. All this disclaimed, we have a common interest, I think. I don't want to pretend to speak for Google, so I don't want to try to say what that is.
11/20/09; 5:01:05 PM
How Hollywood portrays bloggers
I've now seen two movies that had bloggers in leading roles.
1. State of Play. A remake of a brilliant BBC series that was so bad, that portrayed the blogger in such a superficial and humiliating fashion, that I actually walked out in disgust. (A movie has to be very bad for me to walk out on it.)
2. Julie and Julia. I saw it last night, and stayed to the end. I was just as angry at the way they portrayed the blogger, but it turns out for an opposite reason. In this case the dishonesty was reversed, the blogger wasn't at all heroic, and they misrepresented the hero, Julia Child, who was, in many ways more of a true blogger than the blogger! Kind of funny how that works.
A blogger isn't just someone who uses blogging software, at least not to me. A blogger is someone who takes matters into his or her own hands. Someone who sees a problem that no one is trying to solve, one that desperately needs solving, that begs to be solved, and because the tools are so inexpensive that they no longer present a barrier, they are available to the heroic individual. As far as I can tell, Julia Child was just such a person. Blogging software didn't exist when she was pioneering, but it seems that if it did she would have used it.
Julie used blogging, but Julia was a natural-born blogger.
The dishonesty in the story was how they portrayed Julia Child's reaction to Julie Powell's writing. They didn't explain why she disapproved. If you just went by what the movie said you could easily think she was bitter or closed-minded or jealous of young Julie. Luckily the archive is still on the web, and a simple Google search turned up the answer. Julia Child considered The Julie/Julia Project a stunt. She said of Powell: "She would never really describe the end results, how delicious it was, and what she learned." There's a lot more in a Publisher Weekly interview with Judith Jones, Child's editor at Knopf. Now, that makes sense!
I'd love to see a movie that captures the heroic spirit of blogging. Like all inspiration, it's rare, but that's why it's worth making a movie about. The story of the nobility of blogging largely remains, imho, untold.
11/22/09; 6:54:52 PM
Reporters accepting freebies
A few notes about the propriety of reporters accepting free followers from Twitter.
1. On Friday, in an interview with Twitter COO Dick Costolo at a TechCrunch conference, Mike Arrington observed that when TechCrunch ran a piece about Twitter Corp they didn't like, they were taken off the Suggested User List. I wrote this up here on Scripting News. Costolo didn't comment, but the issue is clearly on Arrington's mind, as it should be. They're back on the list. Does this influence their coverage and if so how? (TechCrunch people should note this is a question, not a statement.)
2. Will a NY Times columnist be more likely to write about Twitter, if they've got a million followers from placement on the SUL? Is there an appearance of impropriety? Is appearance enough of a reason to opt out? In an article in today's NY Times, they say that Times reporters are not allowed to accept free trips to cover production of a television show in Bora Bora. "The New York Times and many other media outlets ban the acceptance of these freebies on ethical grounds, because there could be an appearance of buying favorable coverage." To me, the free placement on the SUL and the benefits it bestows, are exactly equivalent. Elsewhere in the Times, and in many other media outlets, the number of followers is treated as a measure of relevance.
Pieces like this always provoke challenges from people at the publications such as the Guardian and the Times. So be it. I think they are clearly wrong in accepting the free boost from an important and growing media network like Twitter. In the old days they were gatekeepers and could suppress a story like this if they didn't like it. Thankfully we don't live in the old days.
Further, I think political candidates who accept promotion from Twitter are going to have problems down the road. They operate under special rules, and I'm sure that there will eventually be a monetary value placed on SUL placement and it will count as a campaign contribution. Imho there will be even more serious consequences for incumbents who accept free followers from Twitter and other networks.
Think about how handicapped the news organizations are going to be in covering this story when they have their own issues around placement on the SUL. The only ones who will be able to cover this story without the appearance of being in Twitter's pocket are ones who opted out. As far as I know, no reporters, columnists or news organizations have opted out.
11/22/09; 12:55:33 PM
Help save a BusinessWeek blog
Jay Rosen sent a link to a post on a BusinessWeek blog: "Does anyone know how to preserve and store our four and a half years of blog posts and comments?"
Not sure what kind of blog it is, but saving the posts to a PDF (as mentioned on the site) isn't much of a solution.
We hope each of us is creating a record. The time to think about how your words will last over time is before you're leaving the job. Think about it and do something while you're writing. Choose software that's easy to archive. Ideally you should just have to make a copy of a folder to back it up. Most bloggiong software is nowhere near that simple.
If you have any ideas how to creat a backup of that blog please post a comment here or there.
I have several accounts that I use for testing Twitter apps. One of them, bullmancuso, was shut down last October. A few weeks ago I petitioned to have the account restored.
This evening I got an email from the Twitter support person BFF, who explained:
"Your account was suspended because our specialists found that your tweets were primarily links to other sites and not personal updates, a violation of Twitter Rules."
It's true of that account but it's also true of the NYTimes and many other news oriented Twitter sites.
I suggest they take another look at this.
And it's a reminder once again that we're playing in someone else's ballpark here, and they make the rules. This is not in any way like the Internet.
Update: Alex Howard quotes Twitter co-CEO Biz Stone saying Twitter "has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates."
11/22/09; 4:09:10 AM
Posterous and Tumblr are next
I continue to work on my new editorial system. Whether it will see the light of day remains to be seen. I'm finding it useful and may at some point publish the tools. In the meantime, I'm learning a lot about the various publishing environments.
I supported WordPress right off the bat.
Then I wanted to do Posterous, but they are missing one parameter on their API for editing a post. As a result you can post something but if the user wants to revise it, they have no choice but to do it through the web interface, can't do it through the API. Tumblr doesn't have this limit, nor does WordPress. I have gotten in touch with the Posterous team and made the feature request. I've also checked with Steve Rubel, the most famous (imho) Posterous user to confirm that there are no desktop editing tools for Posterous. Confirmed. Without this simple addition to the API, it would be impossible.
I know I am putting pressure on them to add the feature. But it's in a good cause. I want to enable people to use their product in the same way they use the other publishing environments.
Talking with Steve earlier today he says something obvious that's worth repeating. There is a position between the lightweight Twitter and the heavyweight WordPress. And Tumblr, Posterous and now TypePad are positioning themselves right there. I expect this sweet spot to become more important over time. Twitter is, no doubt, introducing a great number of people to the joys of blogging. When they want more, some of them will certainly move to these "lite" blogging tools.
11/23/09; 6:32:21 PM
No escalation in Afghanistan
I assumed that because we elected Obama to end the war in Iraq that it went without saying that the war in Afghanistan would be ended as well.
Apparently not so.
The President is now considering an escalation of the war in Afghanistan.
I can't imagine he will not face substantial opposition in the US and elsewhere, if the answer is escalation. I will be working to change this, and if it means working against the Democrats and the President, so be it.
11/23/09; 5:02:30 PM
Who gets their news from Google?
Like everyone else, I'm peripherally following the fur flying about Murdoch thinking about whether or not to block Google from searching his news sites. In the background I keep wondering if this isn't all a misunderstanding. I mean, do a lot of people get their news on Google? That's a question.
Okay I know I'm not average, so I don't mean to say my experience is statistically significant. For all I know everyone else is getting their news on Google. But I really don't think so. Here's what I think.
I think other sites grabbed most of the flow in news before Google got around to doing news, and such habits are hard to break. I guess that Yahoo is still the leader in online news and CNN and MSN are #2 and #3. After that, there's a lot of noise. Somewhere down there is Google. In the dust.
People say silly things like Google would be nothing without the NY Times, but it wasn't until relatively recently that the Times let Google index their news stories. I know this because I had a Long Bet with Martin Nisenholtz that I won more or less by default. Times articles couldn't show up in the ranks on Google because the Times wouldn't let them! It was dumb not just cause it meant that Martin lost the bet, but it was dumb because they let Wikipedia become the authority on so many topics that the Times would have done a better job at, imho. And they were throwing away flow, and flow is money.
So I think a lot of this debate is uninformed and generating a bit of heat and not much else. Kind of like a lot of what passes for news these days.
11/24/09; 11:19:45 PM
Natural-born blogger
Not everyone was born to blog, but some people were.
Pity the poor NBB who was born before there were blogs. You can imagine this person wandering the planet with some unspecified sense of purpose. Scratching his or her head, wondering what exactly it is they were supposed to do with their lives.
Of course that's a joke, because this instinct had many ways to be satisfied before there were blogs, but it wasn't as easy as it is for people today.
I tripped across this in trying to puzzle out what was disturbing about the Julie & Julia biopic. Both main characters were clearly NBBs, and perhaps both deserved their own movies. Smooshing the stories together made for a confusing mess. I was more interested in Julia Child, the proto-proto-blogger, the blogger before there were bloggers, because her spirit is what NBBs everywhere do.
Americans should understand French cooking, says Julia. It's hard, she says, but you can do it. So, did she just wring her hands and wish for it? No, she took matters into her own hands (a phrase Jay thought was pivotal) and made it happen. That's the spirit we love!
It seems that the spirit of blogging and the spirit of America are wrapped up in each other somehow.
This came up in yesterday's Rebooting the News, which if I do say so myself, was one of our best. We get into the subjectives of what makes natural-born blogger. Here are some of the ideas.
1. An NBB doesn't wait for permission.
2. A NBB explains things, even when they don't understand. An NBB is often proved wrong, to which the NBB shrugs his or her shoulders and says something like Shit happens.
3. NBBs go first. If there's an NBB around you don't have to wait for a volunteer.
4. NBBs err on the side of saying too much. If you find yourself wishing someone would just STFU you're very likely looking at an NBB.
NBBs annoy the hell out of you. And if they're good, they get you to think. There's the big value in having us around. We foster thinking.
When I say someone is a Natural Born Blogger, it's the highest praise I know. I am not annoyed by them, but I know that often people are annoyed by me. I don't plan to change.
So who are some NBBs? My mother, for one. It's where I got my NBB gene. I never had to explain to her why she should blog, she just knew. The mechanics of blogging software weren't so natural to her, but she eventually figured it out.
Robert Scoble is a total NBB. He has an opinion about everything. I often want to strangle him, but then I realize sheez he has a point.
Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis and Howard Weaver are NBBs. Most good reporters are, but I suspect most of the true NBBs in journalism left about 10 years ago. I was schooled in how the web worked by the striking news writers in the Bay Area in 1994. We came across this in our podcast yesterday. Good reporters and good bloggers == same thing.
In American history, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson were bloggers. Who else? You tell me.
11/24/09; 12:12:34 PM
How (slowly) we add metadata to tweets
Why make an exception for geographic data or which app created the tweet or which tweet it's in response to, or that it was retweeted by 7 people and who they are? Or who wrote it? And when?
These bits of data all live outside the 140 character "limit."
Every good idea people come up with for Twitter involves latching a new piece of metadata to a tweet. And in the middle you have a conflicted, slow and arbitrary (and opaque) decision-making process, controlled by one company.
Shouldn't the architecture of tweets be open to any kind of data that anyone thinks of?
If you make a Twitter client please, start pushing your users' updates to a RSS feed on a server outside of twitter.com. It's just a backup. That's the first easy small step down the path of free evolution. Once someone does that, there are more steps.
To get an idea of what's possible, I recommend reading A better design for Twitter retweets. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to wait for Twitter Corp to try this out?
11/25/09; 3:06:15 PM
Tumblr and Posterous
Yesterday I got my LifeLiner tool working with Tumblr. Still some rough edges, but it's more or less doing the same stuff I have been doing with WordPress.
The goal is to have a single feed that captures all my online writing.
Moving toward what I call the Loosely-coupled 140 character message network.
Yesterday I also spoke with the lead developer at Posterous. We worked out an addition to their API that would make my software work with theirs. Got a note late last night night saying the feature was in. Today I'll test it, and if it works I hope to report that I have Posterous working with LifeLiner.
Meanwhile, TechCrunch has caught onto the idea I borrowed from Steve Rubel, almost. They noted that WordPress was growing while Twitter's growth has (perhaps temporarily) stalled.
The phenomenon is not, as some have said, the "death" of blogging (I hate that word!) -- rather huge growth in blogging at the low-end as NBBs discover its joys through Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps very few of them will want more, but even a few is a lot! Expect a huge surge in medium-range and high-end blogging in the coming years, with products like Tumblr and Posterous and WordPress perfectly poised to capture the growth.
Two things the Twitter guys should, imho, be thinking about:
1. How can they capture this growth as people move up-scale? Should they have a blogging network of their own? Or...
2. As people branch out they're not going to want to give up their networks on Twitter. An alternate to #1 is to fully open the Twitter architecture before the flow around it builds. The Internet routes around a funnel, which is largely what Twitter is, because it's too limiting for what users want to do. Maybe not today, but it's easy to see the day coming.
Historically it always seems to work this way. A company boots up a new activity, then people get familiar with it and want all the power and don't need the training wheels. An industry appears where there used to be a company.
More news.. The TypePad guys have also gotten in touch with news that they have a new simplified REST-style API coming for their new "micro" service. I was actually looking for it.
I totally get the sense that there's a critical mass developing. All these companies are competing fiercely, and they're sharp and focused and hungry. And attaining some success.
I got a note from David Karp at Tumblr saying that for the first time his site is in the top 100 of all sites on the Internet. That's pretty amazing and something to be proud of. Congrats!
One step at a time. This has been a pretty good week for getting things to work together.
I'll keep you posted as things progress.
11/25/09; 12:44:44 PM
PBS and BBC could boost BitTorrent
Yesterday the popular Mininova search engine for BitTorrent radically cut back its service.
Previously, they indexed torrents for all programming that was submitted, without concern for who owned the copyright. A Dutch court ruled that they could no longer do that. So now they only index torrents where copyright ownership can be validated. Note the Mininova never stored the content, just links to files that pointed to the content.
Probably some uses of the site were illegal, in some jurisdictions, even though the mainstream media has generally been saying all uses are illegal. For example, consider this BBC article.
I often used Mininova to locate downloads of BBC programming. I've watched excellent dramatic series such as State of Play and documentaries on black holes, Darwin, wars, you name it. I also used Mininova to find PBS shows such as Frontline, Bill Moyers and Nova.
For example, last night I watched an episode of Frontline about credit and debit cards that would be hugely more powerful if everyone who had a credit or debit card would watch. It opened my eyes. An hour totally well spent.
I don't know how the BBC and PBS feel about this. Part of the purpose of this essay is to put the question out there. Since neither network charges directly for programming, is there any reason not to make the programming freely available over BitTorrent?
I've been trying to figure out the best way to ask this question, and decided that making a public appeal to both PBS and BBC was the best approach. Please consider making your content available, with your permission, via BitTorrent.
My new blogging method is to post stuff where ever it might make sense to do so, and hoping to be able to bring it all back together through various mechanisms.
In the last couple of days I've written three pieces I think Scripting News readers would want to see:
1. Reviewing the RSS generated by BitTorrent sites. The goal to help improve the quality and uniformity of their metadata, perhaps to allow more distributed applications to be built around BitTorrent, and perhaps make the network more robust and useful, and potentially more lucrative for the content owners. But where I'm starting is with the obvious fixes, and there's lots to do.
2. We need a programmable Twitter client. It took me a long time to figure this out, but I think it would be a huge accelerator. Turn over the tools of innovation to power users. It's always been this way, but somehow in the last couple of decades we've forgotten that programming tools belong to users too. Unix, DOS, Lotus, Emacs, dBASE, all pointed this way. Time to go back to our roots.
3. Journos as Ski Patrol. I've been explaining the "reboot" in news by comparing it to skiing in the 50s and 60s, when the amateurs arrived, changing the sport forever.
Tech note -- the first piece was written on a WordPress site, the second on a Tumblr site and the third on my Posterous. My authoring tools let me write for all these platforms, in exactly the same way. All are excellent products, but their capabilities are different.
It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface.
In my explorations of a hypothetical decentralized Twitter, at first I thought the clients would be where decentralization would happen. But, lately I've come to realize that it probably won't happen there because as the market has evolved they've become too dependent on Twitter Corp, and are unlikely to do anything that might threaten a friendly relationship with the company.
I saw this first-hand in the Mac software market in the early 90s. Even when it would have been in the interests of developers to work with each other, each of them tried to do special deals with Apple. Of course no one really got those deals, so we all went down. But it's human nature to think you're special and if you play nice with the platform vendor, they'll play nice with you. And the platform vendor may totally mean to be nice, but they can't help acting in their own self-interest and that almost always is at the expense of the developers.
So if the commercial developers can't or won't break free of the platform vendor, let's create an open source client that can be repurposed in as many different ways as we, as individuals want. Some of us may want to do deals with Twitter Corp, and that's fine -- but others may wish to embark on paths that are independent of Twitter. They wouldn't try to guess what would make the platform vendor happy, and instead follow the grain of the Internet, or go where the users want to go, or some users, or to scratch their own itch. Some may want to be part of the Cathedral and others part of the Bazaar. :-)
I'm not even 100 percent sure what I'm asking for, but I'll know it when I see it. Probably a JavaScript framework that comes with a Twitter timeline object. So displaying a timeline is automatic as are the user interactions. So any kind of client, one written in any language -- Python, Perl, Java, JavaScript, PHP, C, etc -- could store data in it. It wouldn't know anything about the Twitter API. It would be up to the applications to put data in the structure.
It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface. It would, of course, be programmable through a user scripting language.
Having this one component would let a thousand flowers bloom in exactly the place where we need them to bloom. The key thing is to find out what would happen if we could take a path that was not designed to please the platform vendor. Note I carefully did not say "to piss off the platform vendor." I really do mean to chart courses that are independent of the vendor.
What would be even cooler is if one of the client vendors decided to release their code under the GPL. Or, even better would be if Twitter Corp did it. That would be hugely disruptive and would likely lead to some very serious innovation. :-)
12/1/09; 2:13:52 PM
Teen tweeter cashes-in on SUL placement
BBC: "A Twitter feed set up by a Dutch teenager as a hobby has been taken over by Microsoft news channel MSNBC.com."
The report emphasizes the rate that the feed is growing, by 3000 to 4000 followers per day. What it doesn't say is that the feed is on Twitter's Suggested Users List, and that growth is normal for feeds on the list, even ones that aren't run by prodigious teens.
Editorial comment: Might as well say that a Dutch teenager amazes his parents by traveling from Europe to America in a matter of hours. Without saying that he booked a flight on KLM. :-)
We live in a time of pseudo news.
Another observation. It would be interesting to know how much Microsoft paid for his feed. That would, right there, establish the monetary value of SUL placement.
12/1/09; 3:30:47 PM
Why is technology important?
I just wrote a piece about the J-school of the Future over on Rebootnews. After writing it, I sent a note to Doc Searls and JP Rangaswami of British Telecom, both of whom are participating in the Supernova conference in San Francisco. (I listened to JP's talk on the webcast and was, as usual, impressed with his thinking.)
I asked JP if any of the technologists he employs could explain why technology is important. It was kind of a challenge, because I find that so many people who call themselves technologists don't have an answer to that question. His talk was about this subject, so I thought it was fair to bring it up. Had I been interviewing him I would have.
Anyway, the answer: Technology is important because it empowers people. That's where you start. Not in novelty or neatness, not in the fact that it changes things, because it might change things by disempowering. Change is not in itself a valid reason for anything.
The only reason to have technology is that it gives people power to change things for the better. Note that the technology is not the subject of that sentence, people are.
I don't think you can even begin to be a technologist if you don't have a passionate view about technology's importance. It has to be the reason you're doing it. Not because you have an aptitude for it, or want to make a lot of money, or want to change the world, or prove yourself or show your father (uncle, mother, sister, brother, best friend) that you have the stuff to make it. None of those things make a technologist.
If you're not thinking about people, all the time, in everything you do, then you're not a technologist.
Usually I put an "imho" at the end of statements like that, but this one is so important, I'm leaving it off.
12/2/09; 4:26:54 PM
Have you tried Google's DNS?
This morning Google announced that they're now running a free DNS for everyone to use.
The IP addresses: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
Interesting and unexpected.
Why? Obviously they get a lot of data -- all the sites we're visiting.
Have you tried it? If not, why not?
If so, how is it? They say it's faster -- is it?
They say they won't screw with it. Do you believe them?
Update: I'm using it here on my LAN. Just changed the configuration of my router, so all my machines will start using their DNS.
12/3/09; 3:21:55 PM
Recent stories
As usual, check out protoblogger.com for a list of all the stories I write on the various sites I write for.
Here's a subset, the ones I don't think you should miss.
TorrentFreak has a piece today talking about my efforts to sort out the differences in the RSS used by various BitTorrent websites.
I also posted some ideas for a Torrent namespace that can be used in RSS, or any other XML-based format that accepts extensions, such as Atom and OPML 2.0.
On the Droidie site I look at what it will take to make it the perfect podcatcher.
And a think piece on Protoblogger on the tension between doing something big and getting rich. This will lead to a followup piece that talks about creating incentives for people who don't want to go the corporate route. There really isn't that much money at stake but the really large ideas suffer if they get caught up inside corporations.
Twitter has been down now for about 1/2 hour. 3:30PM Pacific. Oy -- we're so dependent on it. Where would you go now to find out what's up? status.twitter.com has nothing about an outage. (Postscript: It was down for just about 1/2 hour. TechCrunch has a story about it.)
12/6/09; 7:19:25 PM
Uncle Arno's books found a home
In October I wrote a post looking for a home for books written by my great-uncle Arno Schmidt. The books were left to us by his sister, my grandomother, who was keeping them for him in the US.
Turns out most American universities with a German Studies department already have complete sets of his writing.
However, Timm Menke of Portland State University posted an enthusiastic comment under my post. We exchanged emails, talked on the phone and we quickly decided that they would provide the best home for his work in the US.
Yesterday the books arrived in Portland. If anyone is looking for a good collection of Arno Schmidt's work in the US, selected by the author, you should look to Portland State University.
For example, Google Maps has the ability to generate a link to the map you're viewing, suitable for sharing with others. But the URL is a monster mess. Why not make it short?
Also: It's about time Twitter put the fork in URL shorteners for good and transported links as metadata of the tweet, as they do for geo data, the post time, etc. Why are they sacrificing the stability of the web to keep bit.ly alive. I still don't get it.
12/14/09; 6:08:49 PM
A new Internet Law, named after Bill Gates
I get more than my share of flack from Google which is really strange because I am a person and they are a multi-billion dollar empire that employs thousands of people.
Sometimes I even win when they try to make me lose.
But you gotta wonder why a big company like Google wants me to lose. Wouldn't it be easier if they outsourced some of the innovation and got the seal of approval you get when someone who's truly independent says there's nothing up your sleeve? Otherwise I'm almost sure there is a hidden agenda. Esp when patents surface on stuff they didn't invent.
Had the same problem with Microsoft, multiple times. Funny how no one makes the pilgrimage to Redmond these days. It seems to me the rest of the world has a say in teh future Mr Google. I said this to Microsoft and now I say it to you. Relax. Kick back. You're going to make 40-plus percent of all the profit that comes from any growth we, outside of Google, are able to create. Maybe even more. You won't get any more growth if you insist on controlling every bit that goes over the wire, in fact you'll get less, because the more you impede overall growth, the less you will grow.
Of course I can't prove this, but it was definitely the right call in the layer before yours. Somehow I think it's a fundamental rule of the growth of the net. The current leader will always try to control growth, and thus slit its own throat. Call that Gates' Law, because he both discovered it (as it applied to IBM) and fell victim to it (in his struggle to control the web).
BTW, to Aaron Swartz, who says Google is much less of a sociopath than Microsoft. I don't actually think so. Microsoft wasn't as bad as you seem to think. They didn't interfere with 99 percent of all Windows apps. They certainly never tried to control the platform anywhere as completely as Apple tries to control iPhone apps today. I think it's very nice of Google not to screw around with search results. I also think if they did, they'd instantly fall apart.
Another BTW, in showing us the future Google Toolbar and Feedburner, yesterday, Google presented a classic Embrace & Extend. You can tweet your links to Twitter, and a number of other places. At some point they will add Google's Twitter clone to the list (unless they acquire Twitter of course). No matter what it will be the default. You can feel its presence. Not a bad thing. A way of reminding Twitter that they are still very much one of us. Might end up being a very good thing.
12/15/09; 1:14:32 PM
Build to flip?
Lots of interesting developments yesterday, and I'm glad to have a front row seat. Actually in some cases I have a seat in the dressing room, so I have to be pretty careful about what I say.
First, New York has become much more interesting in the tech world. I spent just two days hopping from rock to rock, and didn't land on most of them, but wow, there's something going on there.
In New York as on the west coast, some companies are built to flip, meaning they don't intend to be standalone companies. They were just building features or market share, intending to be bought by a big company, probably Google.
Pretty sure that bit.ly, a company I played a role in founding, was running a Build To Flip plan. I think we found out yesterday that it didn't work.
I think in general, even if your plan is to flip, you should run a company as if no one will buy it. That your liquidity will come in the form of profit from sales of services and products to users. It's good discipline. Keeps the team focused on who and what's important.
Had bit.ly been running such a program, they would be a lot further along with Bit.ly Pro, a service they announced yesterday, probably in response to Google's announcement of their URL-shortener. (If it wasn't a response it was an incredible coincidence in timing.)
My issue with bit.ly is the instability it adds to an already-fragile Internet. They removed one element of the fragility yesterday, or showed how they plan to remove it. You don't want every link on the realtime net to go through one domain. Now you can have your links go through your own domain. But I have a better deal with Adjix, one that removes the other part of the stability problem -- they also mirror my data to a bucket that I own on Amazon S3. So, if god forbid something bad should happen to Adjix or Joe Moreno, I just point the r2.ly domain at the bucket and everything keeps working. No broken links. Should both Amazon and Adjix fail, and there's still an Internet (a fair question) I can take the data and move it to another server and it will work just as well there. All it depends on is Apache or some other static HTTP server. When bit.ly does that, they will really have a Pro version. This announcement is a Band Aid, to stop the bleeding after Google (presumably) said no to buying them.
Back to New York.
The big question I have for the brilliant young tech startups of New York is this -- are you trying to become an outpost of Silicon Valley or are you wanting to build a new layer on tech, independent of the west coast?
BTW, it's not all a rotten mess on the west coast. I have become a huge admirer of Matt Mullenweg and Automattic in the last year (not that I wasn't already smitten before). They did two beautifully disrupting things in 2009 all while growing their freemium cash-generating business -- they implemented rssCloud and the Twitter API. And the year still ain't over.
12/15/09; 11:26:39 AM
Health reform politics in 106 chars
Just like there are no atheists in foxholes there are no Republicans who are uninsured and critically ill.
12/17/09; 7:04:36 PM
How open standards are created
Marco at Tumblr says that he was inspired by the "seriously clever" use of the Twitter API by WordPress. Of course I was too. When they came out with it I wondered out loud if the Twitter API is now an open standard.
Well, less than a week later, Tumblr now has implemented the Twitter API, and as a result you can use any Twitter-compatible tool to post to and read from Tumblr.
Conventional wisdom says that open standards are created by endless deliberations among experts and big tech companies, and those do sometimes gain traction.
But this is how it usually happens: Someone goes first. No one thinks of it as an open standard. Then someone clones it. All of a sudden people get ideas. Inspired, someone goes third. At this point it's inevitable that there will be a fourth and fifth and so on.
It's also inevitable that Twitter tools vendors will start testing their products with WordPress and Tumblr, and hopefully report bugs and have them fixed.
And the brilliant minds of the developers and users of WordPress and Tumblr will have their say in the evolution of this new art.
All of a sudden things are exciting again!!
PS: If Facebook were to implement the Twitter API that would be it. We'd have another FTP or HTTP or RSS.
12/17/09; 1:06:08 PM
Tumblr and the Twitter API, day 2
It's the holiday season, maybe that's why it took a full day for the discussion to get underway about Tumblr's implementation of the Twitter API. But it is rolling now, and going in several interesting directions.
Fred Wilson, who is a Twitter board member and a major investor in Tumblr, wrote a post on his blog asking for a discussion among his readers, who tend to view the tech world from an investor's perspective.
It's great that APIs finally have become an issue for financial people. They're also important for media people because they open doors in the news business as well. In this week's Rebooting The News, Jay asked me to explain what it means for WordPress to implement the Twitter API. The podcast was recorded before we knew that Tumblr was working on matching WordPress. If you're confused by all this michegas, listening to the podcast might help.
On October 17 I wrote The Internet Abhors a Funnel. In a sense all these new implementations of the Twitter API tend to lessen the importance of teh Funnel. And in addition to strengthening the position of WordPress and Tumblr, it also strengthens Google and Microsoft, because their search engines can become more complete than Twitter's, by making deals with the new players for access to their firehoses.
Stowe Boyd asks this question from another point of view. How do you follow someone on Tumblr from Twitter and vice versa? I have two answers for that: 1. That further strengthens the position of centralizers, Google and Microsoft. 2. That's what Realtime RSS is for, the concept behind rssCloud and PubSubHubBub. 3. Twitter can and probably still should position itself as the Network Solutions of this space, as I outlined in my 2007 piece that broke Twitter down into its components.
12/18/09; 12:14:16 PM
If you wrote the words you own the copyright
At Poynter Paul Bradshaw asks a question with an obvious answer.
Obviously the person who wrote the words owns the copyright. Fair use allows the reporter to quote them. I can't imagine a lawyer advising or a court deciding otherwise.
And of course this highlights the fact that a lot of people help reporters and news organizations, without any hope or expectation of compensation. It's funny that none of these people are mentioned in the sad pieces that wonder if the news industry has a future. And no one seems to see an even more interesting question -- in the age of blogs, do we still need reporters? (I think we do, but not as much as we used to.)
12/20/09; 3:32:23 AM
Why today's Twitter is like Napster in Y2K
One of the arguments for the music industry not suing Napster out of existence in 2000 was that they had all the music on the Internet under one roof. By deleting Napster, they forced music to shard into a million pieces, and then reform later as iTunes and Amazon and a myriad of Internet startups. If it had stayed in one place it would have been possible to build all kinds of community services that reached everyone on the Internet who loves music. That might have been very amazing.
If you believe, as I do, that Twitter is at least a dress rehearsal for the news system of the future, it's pretty clear we're at a Napster-like place now. Everyone has a name prefixed by an at-sign that takes you to their profile page. Twitter is, right now, the default identity system for the realtime message network. But that is changing very quickly.
Recently Facebook changed the meaning of at-sign to take you to your Facebook profile page. And on WordPress and Tumblr the at-sign will presumably take you to your home blog or profile page on either system. It's hard to imagine them defining it as your profile on Twitter. Technically it would be nearly impossible for them to do it. And politically, it's not very appealing.
A few years from now we may look back at the Twitter of 2009 as we now look back at the Napster of 2000 -- a time when there was a great opportunity to build, that was missed. In this case, it's the owners of Twitter who are missing the opportunity. They could now be defining the loosely-coupled version of Twitter, and let your home page on Twitter act as the glue that joins all the networks you belong to that link through your Twitter ID.
The address of my Tumblr profile page could be:
http://twitter.com/davewiner/tumblr
And my WordPress profile page would have this address:
http://twitter.com/davewiner/wordpress
And the implementation of the Twitter API on twitter.com would have new features that make it easy for me to find other API implementors of networks that join together through my presence on Twitter.
There probably isn't enough time to architect this, but maybe there is. It's certainly worth thinking about.
12/19/09; 12:56:30 PM
How I develop formats and protocols
I don't think I've ever written a blog post that explains how I develop formats and protocols, probably because I was afraid of getting flamed. Nowadays I'm not so afraid, so here's how I do it.
1. First, I have to understand the problem. That might take a month or more of walking around Berkeley or New York listening to music and podcasts. When I finally feel I grok it enough to begin coding, I need to have at least two apps. One that produces the format and one that consumes it. So I start by writing very simple versions of those apps and usually run them on the same machine to make debugging easier.
2. I connect them with a protocol that I know won't be the one I will use, but models it in some fashion. In the app I'm working on now, I had the server wait a random amount of time before returning the name of one of the 50 states chosen at random. On the client side, I have it open a connection to the server and wait until it gets an answer, which it just records in the database.
3. Once I have the two apps conversing this way, I start to make the conversation meaningful. I take my time, really slow down and think, try out lots of approaches. I also do a lot of prior art searches to see if I can pick up ideas from people who came before. In this case, I looked at FriendFeed's realtime API, but I came up with something that's a bit simpler. It could be that the previous protocol can do more than mine, but I just wanted to flow updates across firewalls and NATs. (Even so, my protocol has a lot of room for growth.)
4. Once I've settled on the format, and this could take a few days, I then split the apps between a real server and client and start to test it doing the work it was intended to do. Since I haven't done that yet, I can't tell you how it will go. I might loop back to step 3 and change the format based on what I've learned. I will certainly add logging features and metadata to the payload to enable debugging and performance monitoring.
5. Once I'm satisfied that it works, I write an informal document for discussion and review. I don't sneak a look to friends or people I like. If I did, that would violate the very important principle of keeping the playing field level. Instead I'll post the document publicly and post pointers in various places, on the rssCloud mail list, on Twitter, probably on the Frontier-Kernel list since I'm trying to reactivate that community after a long period of staying out of it.
Now some people say this isn't an open process, but in developing technology there has to be a time for thinking. We can't mind-meld like Vulcans. I require solitary thinking time to figure stuff out. So while people have a chance to spot problems in my proposed formats and protocols, there really isn't much room to argue over the minute details. There are always two or more ways to do something. Instead of calling a packet a <packet> I could call it a <blob> but what difference would that make?
I have participated in the working group style of format definition, what I called the "deliberative approach" in yesterday's piece. But I don't like the results that come from that. I believe in designing these bits of tech as much as Jonathan Ive would design a new iPod or BMW would design a driving machine. To me this is an art, and in art there are always choices, and someone has to make them.
The deliberative process is all about not making choices, putting all the possible ways of doing something in the spec. This gives an ego boost to the people on the working group, and a lot of grief to the engineers who have to deploy. In the end you have multiple profiles and lots of missed opportunities for interop. Having one person act as designer may hurt some egos, but the format works better in the real world.
12/23/09; 1:07:34 PM
Update on CloudPipe work
As I noted in a post on Wednesday, I'm using the holiday to build out the CloudPipe protocol that I explained in a post on December 9.
I'm getting pretty close to the point where I'll write docs and put it up for review.
But I wanted to post a heads-up now that I've made a change in how it works, a difference between the actual protocol and the December 9 narrative.
It says: "When the server detects a change in a feed the client is subscribed to, either through polling or notification, it sends a packet to the client indicating the feed has changed. The client then reads the feed, and processes it the same way it would if it had detected the change through polling."
The client may read the feed but I implemented and will specify a "fat ping." Along with the URL of the feed, we send the content of the item. If there are two items that changed, then two complete fat ping packets are sent. (This should answer in advance the question of how many items may be contained in a ping -- one and only one.)
I went this way for two reasons:
1. Competitive -- It's often mentioned as the reason people prefer PubSubHubBub over rssCloud. By providing for a fat ping, we erase that advantage. Now the two methods are at least at parity, with an edge to rssCloud because, once CloudPipe is done, it will work for clients that are behind firewalls and NAT, and PSHB does not.
2. Efficiency -- I learned when I met with the Tumblr guys in NY earlier this month that their feeds get pounded. The number one most referenced pages on their sites are the feeds. When I was running UserLand, it never was an issue, but we had a very small fraction of the traffic that Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Typepad etc have. Now that I know it is an issue, I want to address it. By sending the content along with the ping, in the realtime layer that's building now there will be fewer feed reads.
Now there's the question of whether to normalize the contents of an item. I can do it, but it might be a politically sensitive issue. Right now I have bigger fish to fry, so I won't normalize items, what you get in the fat ping is exactly what the feed broadcast. You'll have to deal with all the variability that can appear in the various flavors of RSS and Atom. I could make it so you didn't have to, but... We'll get to that later.
I expect to have a server for people to test against and docs for the protocol before January 1. Knock wood, praise Murphy, etc etc.
This is part tea-leave-reading and part pure conjecture, with a huge does of wishful thinking.
Enjoy!
12/26/09; 2:26:37 PM
Coming soon: A Twitter camera
I've been trying to find an easy way for my mom to manage her own digital camera, and have settled on getting her a netbook computer she can travel with. I'll set it up so it's easy for her to take the SD card from the camera and plug it into the netbook and upload her pictures to Flickr. It'll be pretty easy, but then I was just driving home from dinner and realized that someday, maybe very soon, it will be even easier.
Imagine a Twitter-branded camera. Here's how it would work.
It would have the inverse of Amazon's Whispernet. Where Amazon wants to push content to the remote device, the purpose of the Twitter camera would be to push the content, pictures -- to Twitter.
The user interface would be simple. Take a picture. It shows up in the little screen built into the camera. There would be a blue button with the Twitter bird on it. Click the button and the picture being displayed is uploaded and a pointer is tweeted on your behalf. One-click publication from anywhere a cell phone works.
Ultimately cameras will be able to communicate. Until today I didn't realize that they would be hard-wired into social networks. I'm sure they will.
Of course there will be a Facebook camera.
And if Yahoo had been paying attention there would have been a Flickr camera, two or three years ago.
Getting some feedback finally, though some of it has been bitter and condescending.
Please everybody. Be respectful of everyone, including yourself.
And remember: Tis the season to be jolly!
Peace on earth, goodwill to men. Ignore the grouchyness and try to find the substance. Even better if people self-edit and leave out the michegas.
Now on to the substance...
1. There is support for not normalizing the items, and that is still the plan. It's true, there's a lot of code out there that understands all the varieties of RSS and Atom. I've been saying that all along!
The reason to do fatPing is to start a bootstrap that makes everything more efficient. In this, the leadership will come from the content systems and the aggregators.
2. I've made a change to the body of the fatPing element. Instead of including the XML elements inline, I encode the text and pass it as CDATA. This means that it will make it through XML parsers that care about namespaces being declared. An example, I was passing through an item from the TechCrunch feed (they support rssCloud, btw) and they have elements from the DC namespace. My packet doesn't declare this namespace, so the Firefox XML parser declares it invalid (they're right about that). I have to encode the text because they might include CDATA elements, and that would break the XML. Let's see if this works!
3. The point has been raised that there is no "standard" way to include a <cloud> element in Atom feeds. As I said in the comments, I will not be the person to dictate that, or suggest a way to do it, even mildly. I've learned that Atom is a 300-degree stove. When I touch it I get burned. However, I am the author of an aggregator that consumes Atom feeds. If you are the author of software that creates Atom feeds, you could (just saying hypothtetically) create a namespace that contains the <cloud> element in it, as spec'd by RSS 2.0, and include it in your feed. If you told me about it, I could implement support for it in River2. That way we keep it all among implementors. There can be no doubt that you have the right to do that, and I have the right to support it. If anyone wants to get grouchy and irritable, let em!
4. To notify the CloudPipe server what feeds you want realtime notification on, send a POST to the same endpoint you call for the long poll (instead of a GET). The body of the POST is the OPML text for the feeds you want to follow. The server returns immediately while it processes the request.
5. The biggest development of the day is the draft spec is now ready for review. Please read the "Document Status" section carefully and believe what it says.
12/27/09; 1:22:01 PM
Frontier News blog re-start
I've started a new blog to document the root-level work I'm doing in the OPML Editor.
In a way this is not a new blog at all. Frontier News is a very old name in our community. Before there was Scripting News, I had a blog that documented work we were doing in Frontier.
So in a sense this is the continuation of a thread that goes back to 1996 and before that, to the CompuServe forum and support we were doing on AppleLink starting in 1990.
Big wheel keep on turning!
12/28/09; 3:54:57 PM
Anil Dash, tear down that wall
Anill Dash ran a piece this evening about Twitter's Suggested User List.
He gets that he didn't do anything to earn his placement on the list. He talks about washed-up actors who are on the list who use their follower numbers as supposed evidence that they still have pull with the people. SUL-celebs sell tweets for thousands a pop. A kid sold his SUL-enhanced feed to Microsoft. All this stuff makes you nauseous, and presumably it makes Anil ill too -- so why is he still on the list?
Further, he says that Twitter will kill the list any day now, but doesn't address the fact that people who were on the list will be walking around with hundreds of thousands of unearned followers.
Dan Bricklin says Anil is being a mensch, but that's ridiculous. You want to see a mensch. Let me show you a mensch.
Om Malik is on the list so he has 1.2 million followers. I happened to notice this the other day while conversing with him on Twitter. I said what I felt, I was pissed at him for feeding at the trough that way. After a series of tweets I concluded that position on the SUL and links from TechMeme were both ways to keep people in line. Om, whose career could suffer for saying he agrees, said he agrees. In public, for everyone to see. That's a mensch.
Anil Dash who is trying to build a career bridging the tech world and government cannot afford to appear to be in the pocket of a single tech company, yet that is exactly how it appears. And further, I know from talking with him that he understands this. Yet he remains on the list, and is keeping the account that got inflated.
The only thing he can do that has any integrity, and allows his career to remain on track, is to not only ask to be removed from the list, but delete the account that got the benefit of being on the list and start over. There are no shortcuts possible here, imho.
12/30/09; 12:25:16 AM
Marrying RSS and Twitter
This may be one of those moments like the time when the guy put peanut butter on chocolate and came up with Reese's peanut butter cups.
Maybe a kind of breakthrough.
So here's the peanut butter -- a screen shot of the River2 aggregator. You can see at the top there's a big logo doing nothing, and below it is a list of new articles. This is what I call the River of News, it's what Twitter does so nicely. Or more precisely it's one-half of what Twitter does so nicely.
And here's the chocolate -- a screen shot of Twitter.
Where I have my logo it has a small text box for entering a 140-character message.
What if you took the text box from Twitter and put it at the top of the River?
Where would the text go? Ahhh that's easy -- a Realtime RSS feed. And from there it could flow into other RSS rivers and of course into Twitter or Facebook or anything else that likes streams of 140-character messages.
I'm going to do this in the next couple of days and see how it feels.
12/29/09; 11:56:47 AM
Person of the Decade?!
You aren't going to believe this.
Slate's culture podcast chose three people as Person of the Decade and they were: George W. Bush, Paris Hilton and Dave Winer.
It's the weirdest thing.
They said my name and no one said Who dat?
I don't think it was a joke.
And it was for a good thing, podcasting -- and they're right about how nice it is to have all those great podcasts to listen to.
I didn't make a dime off podcasting, but in a more important way I did get rich from it. There's an incredible wealth of great stuff to listen to. It really took off, and it's something I'm really proud of.
Here's the full MP3. The segment starts around minute 27.
And here's the 3.5 minute excerpt where they talk about the Person of the Decade.
I hit the same wall I always hit when looking for a place to store the users' content.
It's not much of a problem when you're running the server for them, but when the server is running on their desktop, as it is in River2, where do you put the publicly accessible content? I could operate a storage system for them, but what happens if the service doesn't take off and never becomes a business? At some point I have to punt, and that leaves users with data that goes missing. Thinking long-term I don't want to set another one of these up.
The right answer is to help them get their own storage working. And Amazon has made that relatively easy, so I spent the time to make it really work.
The users' feeds are stored in Amazon S3. For this I need three pieces of data. The "Access Key ID" (which is the equiv of a username), "Secret Access Key" (password) and a default bucket. That's explained on the Frontier News site.
I created my own feed using the new tool, you can see it's on Amazon. I wouldn't subscribe to it, while it should keep updating, I'm going to merge it with my lifeliner feed.
In this screen shot I am composing a tweet to be published. Self-explanatory.
Then a few moments later, it appears, as if by magic, in its own river.
I am speechless.
12/30/09; 4:07:53 PM
Beating the drum for Realtime RSS
People always get tripped up on what I had to do with RSS. One thing I did a lot of, for sure, is beat the drum. Every little development, every new source that came online, I'd hail it here on Scripting News as the greatest thing that ever happened.
That's how you do it. The theory of the world beating a path to the door of the guy who invents the best mousetrap is just a story, albeit a good one. Never happens. That's why Who Invented RSS isn't a very interesting question. The hard part wasn't inventing. What was hard was getting people who are set in their ways to consider a new way of doing things.
So now, once again, it's time to beat the drum, for the next layer in RSS -- Realtime RSS. The first people we need to convince are the people with the feeds. They're the chicken without which we can't make eggs. With RSS, the original feeds were Salon, Red Herring, Wired and Motley Fool. I'll never forget them. Without them we couldn't have booted it up. Then each victory added more power to the flow. It will be the same with Realtime RSS.
So if you want to know why I'm so darned excited about Realtime RSS and related technologies, here's the piece to read:
Went to see Sherlock Holmes today starring two great actors -- a total waste -- one of the dumbest two hours of movie ever. Teens like it, it's sort of a cross between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Harry Potter, with yes, a little of the puzzle-master Sherlock Holmes.
The kids are likely to think "You know this literature stuff ain't so bad," but this is not Sherlock Holmes it's Sherlock Potter, or Indiana Holmes. But not as entertaining. Sigh.
Bad bad bad bad. And there's going to be a sequel, clearly, involving the evil and demonic mastermind, Professor Moriarity.
12/31/09; 10:29:33 PM
What is seduction?
To seduce someone is to: 1. Find out what they want. 2. Give it to them. 3. The way they want it.
All three elements are necessary.
I put this together as a response to a well-meaning commenter on my Person of the Decade piece yesterday, who observed that I was an "old" person who had done all the work being honored while in his 40s (and 50s!). I didn't ask for details, but I assume they meant that such accomplishments are usually the province of younger people.
This didn't feel right to me.
So I started thinking.
Not to brag, but I was also very accomplished in my 20s and 30s, and in my teens I was precocious. But as an adult, which I am now, I am capable of seduction. And you couldn't launch something like RSS or podcasting, without the ability to seduce people. Because they won't move unless they get what they want, the way they want it. It never occurs to young males to seduce, because to get what they want they just have to look young and virile. Which they are very good at! If an older male wants to get some action he has to seduce. Therefore evolution taught at least some of us to do this. And that's the skill you need to make something like podcasting work.
So don't be surprised if old (I hate that word) people make great contributions in the arts and technology. There are certain things, those that require seduction, that we do much better than younger folk.
Earlier this decade Microsoft started an effort they called the Smart Watch. It pretty much failed. Some people wore watches with keypads, presumably so they could do calculations or write memos. You'd have to have fingers about 1/100th the size of human fingers for that to work. I'm sure there were lots of other early attempts to digitize watches, but in the end, watches are good for telling time and not much more.
The reason -- to be ergonomic a watch has to be small. But to have a decent user interface a watch has to be big. Too big.
That's why the functionality that could have conceivably gone on our wrists is now in our pockets -- on smart phones, Blackberry, iPhone, Droid.
In-our-pocket is the wrong place for quick text messages. They should be on our wrist!
Enter Bluetooth.
I don't know the economics but I imagine a digital watch could be made to look beautiful and also to have a mode where it couples with our phone and acts as a receiver for text messages. That way every time someone DMs you on Twitter it could show up on your wrist, with a little vibration only you feel.
I considered calling this the Twitter Watch, but enough with Twitter. They get too much free publicity.
Discuss!
PS: I know there areBluetooth Watches, but they got it wrong. The display should be the whole watch face, not a sliver of tiny text beneath an analog watch face. And it's nice they can show you the caller ID, but I don't get nearly as many phone calls as text messages. A watch could display 140 characters, if you temporarily displace the time display (until you click the face to dismiss). The ones that try to be an MP3 player or cell phone are just as ridiculous and doomed to fail as the smart watches of the 90s.
You can't be on Twitter or FriendFeed and not be inundated with comments from and about Scoble. I don't know how he does it, but it's really annoying. I find myself relaxing when he takes a break from Twitter, for example to fly from Europe to the US. Finally I can speak without having everything one-upped by Scoble. Whatever it is, he's done it better, or bigger, or with more important people. It's irritating because I don't believe it. I'd really like it if he just turned down the volume. Or if there were a way to segment the Twittersphere, I'd like to be in the part where Scoble isn't the main topic of conversation 24-by-7.
I ordered a gadget from NewEgg on December 26, guaranteed 3 day UPS. Today's the day it's supposed to arrive, and I was totally looking forward, but UPS says: THE RECEIVER REQUESTED A HOLD FOR A FUTURE DELIVERY DATE. UPS WILL ATTEMPT DELIVERY ON DATE REQUESTED / DELIVERY RESCHEDULED[X]. That's really funny cause I'm the receiver and I sure didn't request a "hold for a future delivery." Oy.
Well, thanks to Andrew Burton I got access to a MediaWiki installation with the API turned on, and I was able to make a couple of trivial calls successfully, but I hit a wall when it came to doing the thing I set out to do. I have no doubt from reading the docs that it's possible, I just can't figure out what the dance is.
Steve Gillmor has been on a campaign to get Feedburner to wake up and make his Feedburner feed more responsive. I support him in this. Now that Feedburner is pwned by Google, there's something kind of sneaky about a big company that prides itself on keeping its servers up and responsive all the time to be asleep on this. 
First a caveat, this is going to be a technical post, so if you're not interested in techie stuff, you can skip it. However, I'm going to try to make it understandable to smart users who are willing to scratch their heads and read it two or three times, if you care to.
Okay, so now assume I've given my username/password to Wimpy's App Shop, who has a neat little Twitter add-on gizmo that I love, and everything's going great until one day Wimpy, whose shop is suffering in the recession, decides to make a little extra money by selling my login to Bluto's Greasy Spoon Spamporium, who proceeds to send huge numbers of phishing messages to Chris Brogan, Kevin Marks, Chris Messina and Guy Kawasaki. This is very annoying. We must stop it at once!
I was doing a little work on a tool I wrote in April 2007 that pushed RSS content to Twitter, and made a simple enhancement: instead of having a Twitter account reflect the content of a single feed, I made it reflect the content of an arbitrary number of feeds. 
Fascinating Slate article about how Newspapers "tried to invent the web." A lot of it absolutely true -- I thought I was in the "videotext" industry when I started out in tech in the early 80s, so much so that I named my company Living Videotext. I made countless trips back to NY to meet with people at CBS and Dow Jones, to try to anticipate the kinds of authoring tools we'd need, and how news would flow in the new system we were anticipating. That's why I wrote ThinkTank, I thought of it as an environment for authoring and reading news. 
A dynamic list of the feeds.
This is a post I've been meaning to write for some time, but this blog post, reviewing the interesting practices of bloggers finally got me off my butt. 
I left a comment on jkOnTheRun about the new Palm Pre that was announced today at CES. 
Earlier today I revised a proposal from December for including thumbnail images in HTML. I am now revising that proposal again to be compatible with Digg's (undated) proposal, which I just found out about. 
At the very end of last month I started a thread here about adding thumbnails to photo pages in such a way that web apps such as Tweetree, and others that can display graphics inline, can grab info about the thumbnail directly from the HTML of the page that the full image is displayed on. If we're going to have a future of graphics-capable Twitter-like services, or if Twitter itself is going to grok images, then thumbnails are not just nice-to-have but must-have. And a machine-readable way to link to them from the original HTML is needed.
If we had a registry for emerging web standards, we would have added one to it yesterday. The emerging format has been proposed by Facebook, supported by Digg and ratified by FriendFeed, and yesterday -- Scripting News. The format allows a photo-oriented web site or individual web page to include a thumbnail, so that when it's referred to by a site such as Digg or FriendFeed the representation may include that thumbnail.
Now, if you're a regular reader of Scripting News, you see us do investigative reporting all the time. And I'm not using the plural in a regal sense, I very much do mean "us" -- as in me and you and a whole lot of other people. For example, in December, after seeing Tweetree, and having put a lot of work into systematizing thumbnail generation (with the ongoing help of a reader, who lives in Turkey), I wanted to connect the two. So I proposed a way to do that. Immediately a flood of comments probing my decision, and a number of suggestions that I look at work done by others that I hadn't found when I looked. Now this process is not trivial, it's the equivalent of a reporter making dozens of phone calls to experts. Sure, I'm not probing their ethics, looking for malfeasance, whether or not they're bugging Watergate, or stealing funds from taxpayers or widows, instead -- they're doing that to me. Which I've learned to live with, and see as a good thing. I know my heart is pure, but they don't, at least not at first. They are right to be suspicious of a fellow technologist. Many are corrupt. I've writen about that here. (Part of the reason there's so much corruption, btw, is that the professional press including some of the pubs we all revere, have been playing footsy with the industry for a long time. But that's another story, one often told here, btw, which has gotten me a rep with the press for being an "irascible gadfly.")
This story just drips with irony!
Pretty sure someone in the Bush Administration is going to get prosecuted for war crimes. And the lower-downs were smart this time, they made sure the higher-ups were on the hook, at least according an interview on Fresh Air last summer with Phillippe Sands, an international expert on war crimes prosecution.
This is quite an article. Very gratifying.
I think it's true of all literature, media and sex -- that it's not what you say that creates the attraction, it's what you don't say. Or don't show. Or don't know.
In journalism, there's a big difference between the actors and the non-actors. The actors are trying to create an effect, you're not hearing what they really think, you're hearing what they want you to think they're thinking. Non-actors try to play it straight. They want to communicate their ideas accurately and persuasively, and strive to find better and better ways to do that. It's true in journalism and it's equally true in blogging. 
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Turns out I was early, I saved a lot of value by selling in January, because later in 2008 a lot of other people did the same, causing the market to crash. At that point I never once entertained the thought of buying bonds or stocks of any kind. Never mind the explanation of not knowing which banks had a dishonest balance sheet or toxic assets, I was basically keeping my assets in a shoebox under the bed. I was and still am totally risk averse. I won't lend my money to anyone, I'm keeping it all for myself. I don't care if I earn zero interest, or even negative interest. I want to hold, hold, hold. As close as possible. I'm scared, freaked out even by what I see in the financial world. 
In the earliest days of the Mac, there were two big stops on every rollout tour, Boston and Berkeley. The two biggest international Mac users groups were in Boston and Berkeley. It made a lot of sense cause the two yearly Mac shows were in Boston and San Francisco and of course Berkeley is just across the bay from SF, and honestly it's even more Mac than SF is. 
I've been wanting to record some NPR shows that don't have podcasts, and I'd like to record FreshAir as soon as its available, so I've been looking for software that runs on the Mac that will do this, and this evening I stumbled across Radioshift, and installed it. 
First, I love you too Craig, but you're totally wrong about that. At UserLand it was our religion not to lock users in. You could download your entire website from our servers, even the ones we hosted for free. We pleaded with people to do it, but most users either didn't understand, or didn't care enough to do it. We also provided a tool to convert those websites to folders of XML files, to make it easy to port it to other blogging tools. The only way we could have made it easier was to write the import routines for our competitors. 
NakedJen was a very early Facebook user because she worked for a "sister company" -- one that was funded by the same venture capital firm as Facebook, Inc. 
I had lunch with an old friend from college, Sandy Wilbourn. We both went to Tulane in the 70s and majored in math. Then a funny thing happened, shortly after I started grad school in computer science at UW-Madison, I ran into Sandy on campus. He was getting a degree in math there. Then a lot of years later I was shopping at Roberts Market in Woodside and saw Sandy. He lived in the Valley too. Earlier this year his uncle left him a house in Berkeley, a few blocks from where I live. Hey it's a good thing we like each other, we seem to be in the same karass. 
Tom Brokaw was pretty good. He's old enough and senior enough not to really care what the other reporters think of him. Even so, he did play gotcha while he was filling in. But he was the best of the three. Now that he's gone, Stephanopoulos is the best, Gregory is a toad. He's a tiny mind. In way over his head. He says the stupidest gotcha stuff. Here's my favorite -- he pressed Rahm Emanuel to explain how hiring more teachers was going to create jobs. Yeah he actually said that. Several times. Give Rahm some points for not calling him a fucking idiot to his face.
First, a disclaimer -- I used to smoke pot, but I haven't in many years. I don't smoke anything, or actually take any drugs that get me high. However, I strongly believe that marijuana should be decriminalized, even made legal. I think it's the ultimate in hypocrisy to argue that former members of the excecutive branch of the US govt should not be prosecuted for war crimes because it would be looking backward, while our jails are full of people whose only "crime" is that they smoke pot. It's like we have two legal systems, one for the powerful and one for the rest of us. It's so un-American, I don't know why people can't see that.
Reporting is a connecting art, like a real estate broker, travel agent, stock trader. The writing part of reporting is mundane, you want the reporter to stay out of your way as much as possible, and the good ones do. It's like the other arts -- who wants a real estate broker who sells you on how great it would be to live in a house while you're looking at it. They don't know how you live, their chatter interferes with your dreaming, and it's the dream that buys the house. I once had a travel agent who loved to golf, so I ended up staying at hotels near golf courses. I don't golf. So now I do my own travel agenting. It takes more time, but I stay in places that are a better fit.
The manufacturing process for news has radically shifted. The question is, as with the economy, whether we can transition the existing process to become the new one (imho preferable) or does the old system have to collapse before the new one can rise to take its place. 
Update at 11:50AM: I got signatures working. Here's the updated code listing. How I did it was to fill in the values in the Hueniverse tutorial and step through my code and check my values against theirs. There were differences. Where they disagreed, I made mine match theirs. Once I got them producing the same signature, I tested it against the server in Ireland and it worked. Anyone who's trying to get theirs to work, I recommend doing the same. It takes all the guesswork out of it. Now I have to step through the rest of the dance and see how it goes. 
I'm still stuck where I was last night with getting OAuth to work with Twitter. I've been able to get all the way up to making a call that requires authentication, and I've constructed the query with what I think is correct OAuth credentials, but Twitter says its an "Invalid OAuth Request."
I thought I had my signature-generating code right, I had it verified by two sources, but it still was being rejected by Twitter. I was looking for another service to test against, when Chris Messina posted a link to a wiki page that in turn pointed to three sites that verified signatures -- and I did a quick check, confident that my signature code would be validated, but it wasn't. They didn't agree. But, that implies that they don't agree with the first two sources I checked against. Which is really seriously troubling if I didn't make a mistake, which is why I'm going to very carefully check my work now. My notes follow, realtime.
It's been a lazy few days, in the aftermath of OAuth, which disrupted my flow of development. It was probably a good thing, cause it's giving me some time to reflect, veg out, watch some movies and documentaries.
I love walking around Berkeley -- it's one of the reasons I moved here from Palo Alto. You can get around on foot instead of having to drive everywhere. But Berkeley drivers are not much better than anywhere else, it seems. Put a nice socially conscious person behind a steering wheel of a 2 ton hunk of metal and they forget everything they learned in Driver's Ed -- like what a crosswalk means.
This weekend there was a furor about Facebook's terms of service -- people figured out that when they publish stuff on Facebook they lose control of it. Facebook put that in writing in their terms of service, but anyone who follows Technorati knows that our content is spread all over god's creation. People copy and paste whole blog posts, you wish they'd just link to them, but everyone has given up the fight on this, it's completely out of control, and has been for a long time. I think Facebook did the right thing by spelling out in black and white the reality of the Internet. Once you hit publish, it's gone. 
As you may know I participated in the intial design and rollout of the bit.ly URL-shortener. It was one of the most instantly successful projects I've ever participated in, up there with the release of Radio 8 in 2002 and MORE 1.0 in 1986. Sometimes the time is right for a product, and the execution is great and the communication is crisp. Everyone gets it, and it takes off like a rocket. Bit.ly is one of those phenoms. 
Back then (and still today) the only things I knew for sure were: 1. People's thirst for news and ideas was going up, not down and 2. The professional news organizations were not expanding to meet the demand, rather they were contracting. Therefore: 3. Something must rise to fill the gap. Beyond that, I could only guess how it would make money. Maybe they will make money by serving lattes to bloggers who work in their newsrooms. Maybe once there's a glut of conflicted points of view out there, the public will re-hire them to act as arbiters. I don't know. But as I said to Jay Rosen in an email yesterday, "Asking about business models now is way premature. First they have to restructure, learn how it works, and then we can figure out where the money comes from."
When they built the first Transcontinental Railroad, the guys heading east from California had a much harder job than the guys heading west from Omaha. Starting in Sacramento it went straight uphill, and didn't get any better when they got to the summit. So if approaching the new reality from the journalism side is so hard, maybe it's more approachable from our side. After all, what do we have to do, other than find a way to glue the experts together in a cohesive whole and give it authority. Not so easy -- that authority thing, but maybe it's easier than asking the professional news organizations to let their sources into their clubroom?
Now pick two or three experts on the same subject, and invite them into the newsroom. They will not be paid. No benefits. They agree to the same rules governing the integrity of your reporters. For a period of four weeks, they report to the newsroom, the physical one, not a virtual one, every day, and are part of your news team. They file stories every day, just as the reporters do, and they go through the same copy-edit process your reporters' stories go through, however they get final approval on the articles. The words that appear in the publication are their words, the ideas are their ideas. Their job is the same as the reporters' job -- to report the news. To explain what happened. 
I've been writing publicly for a long time, so I've had plenty of time to think about being insensitive. People have accused me of it for 15 years. Since I was one of the first to blog, my sin is original, legendary, unique. The reason I hear so much of it, I've concluded, is that I'm accessible. If you send me an email and it doesn't get trapped in a spam filter somewhere (try leaving out the links) I will read it. You can reach me. I'm an icon to enough people, a reason to hate or object or be offended, and unlike other human objects, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, The Dalai Lama, or Pope Benedict -- I will read what you say. They probably get 10000 times more angst than I do, but most of it doesn't reach them.
Insentive to the shareholders? Perhaps. But they're not the only ones who matter. There are the depositors, the voters and taxpayers, other banks that aren't insolvent. Students who need loans to go to school. Hospitals who need credit to make payroll. Etc etc and on and on. On a scale of one to ten being sensitive to the needs of BofA shareholders isn't even on the scale, it's such a small number it's impossible to measure. 
A new tool for the OPML Editor, it's what I use to connect voicemail I create using my iPhone to Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. 
In 1995 I wrote a piece that envisioned billions of websites, one for every person on the Internet. At the time this was considered unlikely by most experts, they believed the web would evolve to become like TV, with three major networks, Yahoo, Lycos and Alta Vista. Google wasn't even born yet, yet many thought it was already over. Having been around the loop several times by then, I was sure the shakeout hadn't happened. Today I am confident that there will be thousands of Twitters, maybe millions. Just as in 1995, there are arguments that say this is wrong. "Everyone's on twitter.com," seems to be the main one, and it's a good argument. But let me argue with it. 
2. The fact that "Everyone's on twitter.com" in some ways works against twitter.com. It's become the honeypot for all kinds of crackpots and schemers. Some people are calling themselves Twitter Pros now. Social Media Marketing Experts. I got a reply from someone today thanking me for following them; I hadn't followed them. Everyone's getting huge numbers of DMs sent from robots representing people they don't know. They come to Twitter for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks. 
I didn't think Obama was actually doing what Rove accused him of. So I said to Rove, in a tweet: "Obama's 'straw man' has a name, it's spelled R-E-A-G-A-N." A few hours later Rove responded with a DM, saying that Obama didn't understand Reagan, or was deliberately misrepresenting him. I got the last word, reminding Rove that Obama is a politician, so -- BFD. 
The reporters rush right by the readers in their pleas. Our only job is to miss or not miss them. This, imho, is the fatal bug in the old way of doing journalism, it's wrong, it never was that way. We were always active participants in news, either by creating it or being effected by it. Before they rush around us to take our money from the government, how about a conversation first, ask us what we want from journalism, what we like and don't like -- and don't assume you know the answer. (The journalists' answer is that we want sports, movie stars, bosoms, car crashes. You know that because that's most of what they give us. Maybe that's why no one is rushing to their defense. Just a thought.)
Much of the arguing goes like this: We need journalism. How will we do X, Y and Z if there's no journalism? The assumption seems to be that if I, Dave Winer, can't answer that question, then journalism is saved. The papers that are on the brink somehow just need me to be proven incapable of doing what they do, and that's it, crisis averted. It's ridiculously illogical. It makes absolutely no sense. Yet that is what comes back every damned time I approach subject which is -- How are we going to get our news after the newspapers go away?
Fractional Horsepower is a very powerful idea. It says that sometimes you can make a new product by taking an old one and scaling it down.
I tried to listen to Sunday's Face The Nation podcast, an interview with Rahm Emanuel, but I couldn't stand it. I've really gotten out of the habit, and now with fresh ears I know exactly what's wrong. I want the interviews to be grounded in the reality that we, the people, live -- not the make-believe logic that governs the ruling class in DC. Schieffer kept asking questions Republicans would ask to try to make trouble, but I understood they were based on an unstated and unproved premise that earmarks are inherently evil. Emanuel was answering the questions directly -- yes we will have earmarks. Schieffer kept playing the gotcha game, but it was stupid, Emanuel had conceded the point! OMG.
When I mentioned that I had a tool that archives my Twitter posts, and those of people I follow, a fair number of people asked that I release the code. I have done so, the app has a user interface and docs, and if you want to try it out or run it, you're welcome to. 
Another takeaway from this is that Google is watching. If Google is preparing their own Twitter, what will it look like? Will it have a different, incompatible API? (My guess, probably. Google will make their own play for developers.) Will it have the same limits as Twitter? (Probably not. This is a very easy way to put pressure on Twitter, even when they have the installed base advantage. Users will say "If Google can do it, why can't Twitter?")
Lately there have been some interesting technical discussions on FriendFeed that I'd like to connect with the technical people in the Scripting News community. 
At breakfast this morning, Berkeley friend and former journalist John Feld said we need journalists to do impartial investigations into government corruption. I asked if he knew of any and he said Seymour Hersh. I agreed. 
One of the reasons everyone should have a blog is that when a company pushes you around, you have a place to post your side of the story, publicly, so future customers have a chance to benefit from your experience. Over the years I have written up experiences with Travelocity, American Airlines, Comcast, a now-defunct ISP, a Bay Area plumber. Now I'd like to tell you about a problem I'm having with BMW.
Then at breakfast on Thursday a friend who also has a BMW says Weatherford is notorious for ripping off customers. Once he brought his car in for service, they failed to fix it three times, and each time wanted to charge him for the repair. He paid, cause what are you going to do, they have your car. Meanwhile they were pressuring me to either return the loaner, or agree to the $800 charge. I told them I was waiting for a return call from BMW of North America. (Three days later I still haven't heard from them.) \ 
It's a good idea to check in with Jay on where journalism is at every once in a while, which is what I did this morning. I'm going to try to do these more regularly with people who are on the Friends Of Dave channel, like Jay.
A quick note -- I decided yesterday, that rather than deal with restoring the new netbook that was crippled by malware after just a few hours use, I would instead take advantage of Amazon's generous return policy. I sent the computer back yesterday, and today, before noon, a new one arrived. I spent about half of the day provisioning it, something I'm getting good at. 
Then I installed the following apps: Ad-Aware, Avast, Spybot and Malwarebytes. The last is, according to Stan Krute, a tool that will help if the computer gets infected. Yesterday I learned how important that is. The malware made it impossible for me to get to the Norton site to get a tool that might remove the bad stuff. Same with McAfee and the Microsoft site for defending against malware. It's a good idea to have the removal software already in place when you need it.
All this begs the question, because even if they were just publishing RSS feeds (btw, they are), to be competitive in the API business, you have to enable other people to publish on your side of the API. That was the flaw of the Times model too.
I had hoped to lead a discussion at this year's OSCON about porting Frontier to Linux. Frontier is the runtime environment that the OPML Editor builds on. It's an object database, scripting language, outline-based editor and database browser, debugger, multi-threaded runtime, verb set, Web CMS, TCP stack, built-in web server. It was the environment that XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS and of course OPML were developed in. All this and the whole download is about 5MB and it installs in a minute. It also has an RSS-based updating mechanism and most updates are "hot" -- meaning you don't even have to relaunch. I love this enviroment, I built it starting in 1988 as the last programming environment I'd use, the one that had everything I wanted, and that's what it is. And because the early development was done so (ahem) early, it was designed to run well on 1Mhz machines with 1MB of memory. As a result it fits really nicely in today's machines. 
A new URL shortener. 
I don't know exactly what it means. If a real competitor came along that would create one possible answer, some of us would move there. Probably everyone would instantly get an account, if it were done right, some large number would stay there. If it had features that Twitter didn't have that were high value then it might suck a lot of the life out of Twitter.
First, so there are no misunderstandings, I am using Twitter, I will continue to use Twitter and I will recommend Twitter to others, as I have been for 2 or so years. This is not me slamming the door on the way out, something I dislike intensely. If you're leaving just go. But I'm not leaving.
Think about it this way -- do you know who wrote Apache or PHP? Do any of them have the power to deliver so much flow to an installation of their software? Imho, that's exactly the relationship Twitter should have with its users. Or the phone company and users of phones -- they shouldn't jump into a conversation and say (for example) "We know someone really cool you would probably like to talk to. We're connecting you to them now."
I got into this mode when I was trying to find the White Castle I used to go to when we lived in Jackson Heights.
I've got a Laconica server up, and a small community has started there -- the very same day Google released Jaiku as open source, and somehow made it able to run (for free?) in AppEngine? I want to try it!
Jay Rosen, this week the question of Twitter as an environment for journalism came up.
I'm almost done with my EC2 for Poets labor of love.
Just read this opinion piece that says that Chrome is much faster than Firefox and that Firefox "lost the plot" and is going in the wrong direction and pretty soon Firefox will die, having been killed by Chrome. 
On the other hand, Firefox hasn't shipped a feature that I care about in a long time.
I feel bad about TechCrunch, since I helped it get started, but I don't have any regrets about it. In the beginning, it was great -- lots of information about new products. By helping it get started, I was helping the entrepreneurs. Not just a two-way win, but a win-win-win. I win because it develops my rep as someone who points to cool stuff. TechCrunch wins because it becomes well-known as a place to find new entrepreneurs, and the entrepreneurs win, because people find out about what they're doing.
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!"
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. 
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. 
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.
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.
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.
According to the authors of Battlestar Galactica, Bob Dylan was tuning into a cosmic song that drives the universe when he wrote All Along The Watchtower. There are so many great scenes in the BSG series that revolve around the song. In the last episode Starbuck has seconds to jump Galactica away from the exploding Cylon death star, she's fumbling at the controls and says "There must be some kind of way out of here" and then proceeds to transport us to a magic place (no spoilers). In the background The Song is playing.
Another step on the Yellow-brick Road? If so, I think we have, for sure, taken a detour into the land of the poppy flowers or the Wicked Witch of the West. For me, the real eye-opener was this tweet from TheEllenShow, promising a treat to all her munchkins if they drove her follower number over 500K. Think about it -- that's asking for people to spam on her behalf. I follow a lot of people (more than Ellen, for example) and that meant I got a lot of people retweeting her pitch. And while it's true I can choose not to follow Ellen, there's no way to not-follow all the spam. And with a half-million followers, that's a lot of spam. 
TechCrunch has a story announcing that Digg's expected URL-shortener is now open for business. 
2. But... There is something right about an industry realizing its turf has being invaded, and acting to defend it. Because now we're seeing it another way -- the tech industry is clearly stepping on the turf of the publishing industry, a new company has started that is sniffing at a billion dollar valuation, and with all that money flowing around it, and all the red ink in newspaper publishing, you shouldn't have to be Puzzlemaster Will Shortz to figure it out. But they're talking about closing down the Boston Globe, and the SF Chron, when they should be thinking about ways to grab some of that wonderful PE ratio that Twitter is swimming in. I try to telegraph it every way I can, but they don't seem to get the clue. Hey Sulzberger, there's money over here. Get your head out of the box or cut some holes it in, or whatever.
Right now, these days, URL shorteners are a necessary evil. It's part of the price we're all paying for Twitter's building on SMS, I guess. I hardly use SMS, so this is a price I'm not happy about paying.
Another good cold weather food is pizza. But Madison is in the midwest where they don't know how to make pizza. The best pizza you can get comes from a chain, Domino's, and it's actually not that bad. I got in the habit, until someone told me that they used the profits to fight Planned Parenthood, which if you're a heterosexual male grad student, is a really bad thing, not just because you support a woman's right to choose (I did then and still do) but well, you don't want your girlfriend to find a Domino's box in your kitchen, if you understand what I mean. 
I guess I should be flattered that some professional reporters are mistaking my writing for the cause of the problems in their industry, when my work is a reaction to what's happening. 
There was an opening, and some of us rushed in to fill it. It meant our ride was more fun and rewarding, but it didn't change the outcome, for us or anyone else. 
When Scripting News started twelve years ago, it was a link blog, the only kind of blog that existed at the time, and of course they weren't even called blogs, a term that wouldn't come along for another three years. Over time I started including "posts" -- longer essays, following the form of other bloggers. Just before I started using Twitter, early in 2007, I made a conscious decision to stop linking from Scripting News, and to make every bit of content here a post. It wasn't doing any good to be the only link blog. When I started using Twitter it provided an outlet for links, I pushed the links I'd normally post on Scripting News. 
Adrian Palacios asks if there will really be a single source. "Yes I think at least for a while there will be one What's New Now site that we will "all" use -- in the same sense that everyone got their news in the early 90s from CNN. Of course there were exceptions, but it had the aura of being the place to tune in when something is happening. Nightline played that role in the early 80s. There is nothing now that does that, there's a void. But people still want news. And the Internet has great potential for news that it hasn't lived up to yet. Probably because people who love news and know it best have been scared or shouted down or some combination of both. I think the shouting is about to stop and I think a consensus will emerge. I think AP and CNN and Twitter will all kick themselves for not having focused on this."
About a month ago, Mike Arrington ran an article at TechCrunch about a deal we did at UserLand in 2002 with Adam Curry, to include his RSS feed in the set of default feeds for Radio 8.0. 
This article by Pete Cashmore at Mashable is now the top item on TechMeme.
I read Farhad Manjoo's piece in Slate about Twitter. It's the best of a class of commentary that says that Twitter is something you can skip if you aren't interested in periodic 140-character reports on mundane people's lives. As I read the piece it made sense, so I was left wondering why I was and still am attracted to Twitter and use it, daily.
I'm writing this sitting in a cafe in Harvard Sq drinking coffee and enjoying the beginnning of the day. No newspaper to read, just my netbook, a net connection and my own thoughts. 
On Twitter early this afternoon, Sarah Lacy posted a link to a TechCrunch article she wrote admonishing bloggers to go easy on Twitter. It included a graph called Gartner's Hype Cycle, which I loved, but I think it's complete nonsense, and in no way reflects what's going on with Twitter.
But Twitter is definitely leading edge, so it would be silly to predict what it will go through. Maybe Oprah will invest. And we know how much the entertainment industry respects and fears Oprah. Having her on board, in a fiduciary way, would do a lot to protect Twitter from competition in the US entertainment business. Without that, I'd worry about NBC or ABC starting their own Twitter for their programs. Or Comedy Central. And who knows, people in the news biz might figure out that instead of fighting last century's battle with Google they might try to take some of the growth from Twitter in the news system of the 21st century, which probably looks more like Twitter than Google News. 
So he's going to bring us inspiration from media, and I expect I'll do some of that too, but I think my first tale of inspiration should come from tech, and I think it's probably going to be Jon Postel and his great law that came from experience in guiding the Internet through its early days. In all of the layers we've built on top of Postel's work, we've never found a situation that wasn't covered by his law, and never really found another law to stand alongside it. Every time I think I've figured out something I want to pass on to future generations it's always turned out to be a variant of Postel's Law. That's the sign of something profound and deep, and it's simple.
New podcast: Sidebar to last Sunday's Rebooting The News podcast with Jay Rosen, relating the blogger assignment desk idea to Hypercamp, which is a more comprehensive blueprint for how blogging becomes the backbone of news in the future. 
I think some of the criticism of Twitter-the-Company has been over the top in the last few days. They've clearly been fighting some huge fires and the order in which they are 1. Acting and 2. Communicating makes sense to me, because I've been on their side of difficult situations, on a much much smaller scale, and my experience is that users don't treat the server guys fairly, no matter how you try to explain that you're doing the best that you can humanly possibly do. I've seen users do some horrible things while the fires are burning, and I see some of that now. 
This post is dedicated to Mitch Kapor, Jonathan Sachs, Dan Fylstra, Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, Ben Rosen, Ev, Biz, Jack, Bijan, Fred et al. A lot of people on that list, and I have had the privilege to know most of them, and I've met all of them. 
When the IBM PC came out everyone wanted new software for it, and the Visicalc guys just offered the same old stuff, but Mitch's software had a sexy UI (for the day) and ran like a bat out of hell, used all the memory of the PC, and had a macro language, so everyone bought 1-2-3 and that was the end of Visicalc.
I guess my point is this -- soon there will be enough Twitter users who yearn for something really new, and it seems doubtful that Twitter-the-Company will want to give it to them. With all the new users just getting started, they're going to focus on getting them up the curve. So we're really getting ready for the 1-2-3 of Twitter, the next level of power, so we can build richer and more connected networks.
6. Luckily for the other media companies, users are portable. I'll explain. Say Ashton Kutcher (someone who I had never heard of until he showed up at a tech industry conference last year) decides to cut a deal with a major studio to head a new twitter-like network. Could happen. They'll get their network built, quietly, then start leaking it with teases on billboards of course, but also (you guessed it) on Twitter. When Oprah sees him do his network, she'll want one. And so will Larry King and Shaq, and all the celebs who have yet to make a splash on Twitter. Brad Pitt and Ed Norton will call theirs The Fight Club. George Clooney's will be Oceans Million. Prince will hang out in Paisley Park. And you think Apple won't have one? It might have a 140-char limit, but it won't just be text. 
Okay I'm going to get crucified for this, but I found myself saying this on the phone today to Andrew Baron. If I was willing to say it to him, I should have the guts to say it publicly.
Sometimes it's funny how you're led to an interesting idea when you're not expecting it. This idea arrived at the end of a chain of events started by inviting Guy Kawasaki to use my 40-tweets app. Here's the story.
But...
Once again I have some money burning a hole in my pocket and I want to blow some (of course) on electronic gadgetry. And, as always, I turn to the readers of this blog for advice. 
3. I bought a Panasonic wifi webcam a couple of years ago, and it was pretty good, but it stopped working (maybe dropping it a few times had something to do with that). I want the same functionality without the wifi. I'm looking for Mac software that samples the built-in camera every minute and saves the result to a file. From there, I can write scripts to push it where I want it to go. Surprised to see this functionality isn't something Apple provides, but near as I can tell, they don't.
Seeing the first-time Twitter user experience reinforced an idea that's been lurking in the background. Since the magic of Twitter is, theoretically, in its limits, perhaps they should have a limit on who can join and under what circumstances. Perhaps before you can create a new account you have to name 20 people with Twitter accounts who you want to follow. They could be celebrities if you want, or spammers -- then at least the recommended users could be tailored to your interests. The algorithms that suggest new feeds kick in, and they are well understood, once you have a few seeds to get started. The one-size-fits-all approach obviously isn't working.
We've talked about conflicts of interest among journalists, but haven't talked about the same thing for tech people. Mike Arrington tried to ignite a scandal around me over something that happened at UserLand in 2002, when I was on the vendor side (and a blogger, which is part of what blogging was and is about). I responded, not with a blanket dismissal such as "Vendors don't have conflicts of interest" -- because I believe they do. They can get themselves out of conflict by divesting and/or disclosing. I guess most people felt that what I did wasn't so bad, because the hatefest never came about, and Mike looked bad, as if he was trying to deflect attention away from an article I had written the day before, about the conflicts that arise from accepting a large gift from a vendor you cover, without disclosing it when you write about them. 
It was raining on Friday, and I went for a long walk up and down the hills, very vigorous -- but I got soaked and so did my iPhone. After taking its last picture and uploading it to Flickr, it died. It wouldn't respond to attempts to revive it, so I took it down to the AT&T Store in downtown Berkeley and bought a replacement for $199. 
I was browsing FriendFeed yesterday and saw Scoble had started a thread on the new Kindle, which was being dismissed by the tech press as a "Hail Mary pass" to save the news industry. I don't see it that way. I like the Kindle, esp for reading the news, but a Kindle with a bigger screen might make the news even more attractive. Do I think it will work? I don't know, but why not give it a try.
I just added a new feature to 100twt.com tonight, with the help of Daniel and Jason at Disqus: You can now comment on the tweets of people in the Top 100. That's just the first toe-dip into commenting on tweets in general, a starting point.
In March, I observed that Amazon had already done some URL shortening on its own, meaning that a link like this: 
Nelson wrote a book called Computer Lib/Dream Machines, in the 1970s, in which he chronicled, in a very bloglike fashion (long before blogs existed of course) the path that computers took to become the ideal tools for thinking and collaboration. This was a very radical idea at the time, I know because I was talking to people about the same concepts, and getting told that computers are not creative tools, by people who supposedly knew better.
But I'm not the problem -- my writing about this stuff may be a symptom, when viewed from the top of the journalist ladder. If so, then what's the problem? The same thing that's happening to all other centralized knowledge-based professions, where there used to be gatekeepers earning a living based on the high cost of distributing information. As the cost has come down, the jobs have disappeared. Journalists are not the first to be hit by this, and as I've said many times, my own short-lived profession, developing shrink-wrap software for PCs, was devastated by this a long time ago. I was lucky to have saved some money, and also have shifted what I do, so I've continued to make money over the years, even though today no one earns a living the way I did at the beginning of my career. 
Writing about open formats got me in the heady mood of the 90s. Back then we believed the Internet would be a free speech engine of democracy. I still do, to this day, but it doesn't dominate discourse the way it did back then. Today, money is more important. The purity of the early vision has been tainted by abominations like "user generated content" and "crowd sourcing." In the 90s, our websites had blue ribbons which stood for freedom. One of mine still does, to remind me of those days.
It never seemed to me it should work any other way. Almost exactly 10 years ago, on May 9, 1999, we put up a web app called my.userland.com that ran off the same content flow as my.netscape.com, using a then-new format called RSS. Their aggregator allowed you to lay out your own newspaper on the screen of your Mac or PC. UserLand's aggregator presented it as a flow, which I later called a "river of news" -- last-in-first-out. Want to know what's new? Visit the site and scroll until you're caught up. If something catches your fancy, click and read. When you're done, hit the Back button and resume the scroll.
I appreciate all the flow that TechMeme has sent to scripting.com over the years, but it's time to say a tearful goodbye. I think we'll do better independent of the community that TM defines. It has shifted over time, away from the individual and toward the "corporate blog" -- and I feel better just reading the TechMeme sites, and not participating in the discourse. 
I read this morning that the NY Times will decide by the end of June how to generate more revenue from its online presence. 
I read a really interesting article the other day about the 47 people at Twitter, Inc and thought it would make an interesting aggregate. So I used the same code I had to follow the top-100 most followed people and did one for the 47 people of Twitter. Since it starts on a weekend, most people are doing home and family things, or not tweeting at all. It'll be interesting to see how it picks up on Monday.
1. In our world we call it net neutrality. It means that all packets are treated equally on the Internet.
5. You don't want your Internet Service Provider to also provide your cable TV because they might screw around with BitTorrent to keep you from getting your entertainment on the net, protecting their revenue from cable TV. So they make a promise to keep the two functions separate, and there's a scandal every time they fail to.
I've got a new way to view Twitter these days, looking at the collected tweets of people who work at two companies: The NY Times and at Twitter itself. I hoped to see cohesion, discussion between people working on projects together. Not yet. 
Technology loops, it follows a pattern that repeats, and we're in one of those loops right now. 
For a guy like me, who mastered blogging long ago, Twitter is compelling because of the people. All these new people blogging, I want to read what they write, maybe they'll come up with something! But more and more, sorry to say, I don't think they are coming up with much. I think 140 characters is really very limiting for most people. Esp when you layer all the RT's and @screennames and #hashtags and tinyurls in and on it. It's getting really crowded there in 140-character-land.
It came to me while washing the dishes the other day, I figured out what the NYT should do with their Twitter feed, the one with almost a million followers. 
Reading lists allow you to delegate subscription to feeds to experts. So for example, I could let Lance Knobel, an economist who I trust, choose the feeds I follow in his area of expertise. That way, when a new feed comes along, instead of sending me an email saying "Hey Dave you might want to subscribe to this feed" he can do it for me simply by adding it to his reading list. 
I've been feverishly experimenting some new ideas this week, the most interesting of which is a mashup between Twitter and Disqus. 
Yesterday I soft-launched a little project I'm working on called twdsc.us. Today the service gets a little more real, because now you can create discussions around tweets too, and not just your own tweets, anyone's. In other words, this could get interesting. 
For sources of inspiration (it's his turn) Dave returned to three: James Burke's public television series Connections, about the history of science and technology (inventions are usually the result of a synthesis of things created by earlier inventors); the Cluetrain Manifesto (ten years old and great); and VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers-- the demo for which was 
Early-on in the life of Twitter I tried to figure out how it works behind the user interface, and was told I couldn't, that it was very complex, and I shouldn't try. This bothered me then, and it bothers me even more now. After all, I'm an experienced software engineer, with a number of products under my belt, some quite complex. If I can't understand it, who can? And if they say I can't, do they?
Jay asked, in a recent RTN podcast, why simplicity is so important. I don't think I had ever been asked this question, and it had been a long time since I considered any other way, so I didn't have an answer prepared. I fumbled.
At the end of the series Burke lays out a set of choices we faced in the late 70s. We could continue along as we have been through all of history, or we could change course. It's now 30 years later and we didn't change course, and it seems we're not likely to. But if you're an innovator, you have a choice. You can create new things with an emphasis on being understandable to the people who use them, not just at the surface level, but under the hood too. It often takes more work to make it hard to understand. But even if it takes more work, it's worth doing it simply, helping create the sense that technology is understandable, because imho that's the key to moving forward in a way that might just work. 
Just read a wonderful post by Jackie Danicki, about how she chokes up in the presence of older people. Me too. I have tears streaming down my face as I read her piece, as I write this one, as I experience the memories it evokes for me. 
When the Guardian ran a piece over the weekend on the Suggested User List, my interest, and others' re-stoked. Then I got an idea from Sarah Delman, pondered it, wrote some code, published the results. Now we know more about the source of the SUL. More back and forth, some of it heated, then it comes together for me -- we lack leadership. I can't provide it, I'm not trying to. I'm trying to be an provocateur, a role I often cast myself into. 
I don't know to what extent Twitter archives my posts. For example, here's a blog post from January of this year. It links to a tweet, which is still there. Not sure if it keeps around older stuff, or how I would browse them if I wanted to see what I had written. The search command in Twitter stops at a certain point, exactly where that is -- I don't think anyone knows. 
Just tweeted: "mifi is a battery operated wifi router that fits in your pocket and connects to the net via cellular."
Another way of saying the same thing is that Twitter has become the newspaper of record. In a few years what's left of the news industry will call Twitter a parasite and demand royalties. Too bad they don't see this coming, and create an even better news system built around the principles of Twitter and instead of asking for alms they'd get a piece of the PE.
Tomorrow is another big Apple announcement day, and most people expect there to be a new iPhone. Maybe there will be more. But one thing that's likely to come is more of Apple's positioning relative to netbooks. And more sniffing from people who love Macs about how inadequate the current crop are.
For me, Berkeley is a refuge -- it's a place to live because you have to live somewhere. I tried a lot of places. I spent 20-plus years in Silicon Valley, it was the right place for me when I was an ambitious young man determined to prove his worth. I liked living in Cambridge, the people were great, the intellectual life fantastic, but it was cold. I liked Seattle, but people worked so hard. I loved the beach in Florida, and the people were nice, but their politics were too different from mine. 
When we started bit.ly, about a year ago, I had a very strong idea of how we'd make money with it. Unfortunately bit.ly never got there. Now a couple of new shorteners are doing it, so I want to tell the story.
TechCrunch used to do an annual list of Web 2.0 services they couldn't live without. The list wasn't about which apps are cool, but which ones are so useful that you build your online life around them. Products that becomes mainstays, apps you use all the time, tools that would cause panic if they went away.
I admit to being confused by the event that Facebook has planned for 
An interesting discussion over on FriendFeed, spawned from a series of comments I made yesterday on Twitter about the cyclic relationship between the tech press, the tech industry and the users. I think this time around the loop things may change for good, the cycle may just break.
6. Then Twitter adds the Suggested User List to the mix. The way I discovered it was noticing that @anamariecox's follower count, which had been around 3000, had jumped to 40,000 then 50,000 then 60,000, all in a matter of days. No one could figure out why until @ev posted a comment on a blog explaining. Then we could see the effect all over the place. All kinds of random people were jumping in follower counts only because they were on the SUL.
Never has it been more clear -- we are building a dangerously precarious centralized system that will, given everything we know about computer networks, at some point, fail. It's so important now that the US State Department got in the loop in the last couple of days.
I love Woody Allen movies, more so over time, as I grow older, they seem to get better. A couple of years ago I went through them all, Annie Hall, Manhattan -- classics, but there were also some surprises, some great movies that I didn't remember as being great. I pretty much liked them all.
Three years ago I got a Blackberry and fell in love. I was riding all over the place on the BART system and I could take the news with me. It didn't take me five minutes to realize it was the perfect River of News device, so I adapted my NYT and BBC rivers to work in their browser.
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. 
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. 
Myth: Twitter is perfect. If you change even one thing its magic disappears. 
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?
Every time I write about Sources Go Direct, like clockwork, someone asks how will we get Woodward & Bernstein reporting without great reporters sniffing around for stories that bring down Presidents. 
Yesterday while my poor addled brain struggled to cope with jetlag, Twitter released a small feature with potentially wide implication, and FriendFeed released something new related to search that I thought they had already released. I don't think my confusion in the latter case had anything to do with jetlag.
All this hype about real-time is welcome (but hardly new). The ideal of having search be up-to-the-minute accurate is an important one. It's just that no one is there yet. And 140-char tweets all repeating the same thing over and over and then retweeting those same things, well that hardly counts as information. After a while it's more interesting to watch Wolf Blitzer. And that's really saying something. 
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."
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.)
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.
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. 
Today's Google thinks in terms of industry warfare, and when they look for an adversary to fight, they see Microsoft, looming large.
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. 
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. 
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. 
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.
Hey I just had an idea for a conference hack you can do at a traditional audience-oriented conference. 
It's got a weird name, and I found the spec somewhat hard to understand.
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. 
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. 
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. 
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.
It's been an interesting couple of days with TechCrunch first teasing and then releasing internal notes from Twitter Corp meetings. 
The goal is to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined equivalent of Twitter.
Here's a screen shot to contemplate.
I don't think I've ever written about Craigslist here. 
The piece was called Bill Gates vs the Internet. The thought was pretty simple. The tech industry was mired and exhausted. Too many BigCo's struggling to be the one who controls the future. As if a company could control the future. But the headlines in the business press encouraged them to think this way. Much as the leading tech blogs encourage Schmidt, Zuckerberg and Williams today to think of themselves as masters of the universe. They aren't and it's a losing strategy today as it was 15 years ago.
I read the piece on TechCrunch and thought it sounds like the transcripts of conversations from Microsoft in the mid-90s. Both were trying to compete with the Internet. Ev's problem is how is he going to keep his key engineers from defecting to the competition. How are they going to let developers use the "firehose" without using it to kill TwitterCorp. These are problems the Internet doesn't have. It doesn't employ any engineers, and when they leave one company to work for another they still work for the Internet. On the Internet no company owns all the data, so no one can control it. If you don't like the way a service works, use another. 
I just stumbled on an answer to Tuesday's Dumb XML Question.
When I have new tech to talk about I love to do what I call a "roadshow." I take the idea to some other city and have a meetup with anyone who's interested. Last time, when I lived in Florida, I did meetups in NYC, Toronto and Berkeley. 
I just posted a tweet saying I don't view the Gates matter through a racial lens, I view it through a Harvard lens. I want to explain, and I'll try to do it briefly.
Bryan Field-Elliot raises an interesting question in the comments on the rssCloud walkthrough. 
When I started DaveNet in 1994 I had a bunch of ideas for products that I hoped one day to develop. But I had been waiting so long -- it was becoming apparent that I would never get to develop them. So I wrote emails about them, and sent them to all the people I knew from various industry events. What came back often were ideas that built on them. And eventually some of the products did get built. So the idea of dumping ideas publicly, ones that aren't doing you any good, is solid.
Last Thursday we had a very successful meeting in NYC to discuss development of the 140-character loosely-coupled message network built on rssCloud. 
An experiment. It's just a test. I put up a web service that returns a Twitter subscription list as OPML. You should be able to import it into your RSS aggregator or feed reader. But it's just a test. When the experiment is over the service will come down. It just builds on the Twitter API and took me a couple of evenings to put together. It's not Big Tech, it's just a little thing. But interesting? Perhaps.
Kevin Tofel at jkOnTheRun asks if it makes sense to output not just the people you follow but the people who follow you. At first I was going to say no -- but then I remembered a very important thread that came up at the NYC meetup. What about when Ashton Kutcher wants to move his base from twitter.com to kutcher.com. He's going to need a way to export his follower list. So yes, it matters. Now I'm not sure I want to deal with an OPML file with over 3 million entries. So we need to think about this before writing the code. 
I love this piece by Rex Hammock on rebooting his Twitter follow list. It's great for a bunch of reasons. 1. Rex is a smart user. 2. He was inspired in part by Jay Rosen, who said in our July 27 podcast that he treats his subscription list as a resource for others who want to find people to follow in his field of expertise. 3. Rex relied on the rssCloud tool released earlier this week. 
Now, that's not to say that developers can't be users too. The best ones are, and man that is powerful because there can be really good communication betw the user and the developer if they're in the same body. A good example -- Matt Mullenweg had the idea to import his Twitter subscription list into Google Reader and it worked. However, all the subscriptions were imported at the top level, meaning he had a clean-up to do. 
Another observation. Somehow the domain name system survives these kinds of attacks (knock wood). That's all we're talking about here, a service that's no more complex than DNS. And like DNS, the net could operate indefinitely even if it went down, though we'd lose the ability to find new people or ones that moved.
Jim Posner asked an interesting question via email.
I've done a lot of building on the tr.im url-shortener, as have quite a few other developers. They just announced that they're shutting down. It's not clear what the timeframe is and how long we have to transition. Nor is it clear what will happen with all the tr.im urls that are already out there, will they break, and if so, when?
Over the years I've seen ideas that show up over and over in various different forms, and when we discover one, we give it a name. Examples. Jay Rosen came up with Atomization. Doc Searls said Markets Are Conversations. David Weinberger has so many -- including Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Transparency is the New Objectivity. Clay Shirky says Here Comes Everybody. Jay and I together came up with Rebooting The News. Some of mine are Sources Go Direct, River of News, We Make Shitty Software, Checkbox News, People Come Back to Places that Send Them Away, Ask Not What the Internet Can Do For You, The Platform with No Platform Vendor, It's Even Worse Than It Appears.
1. We thirst for instantaneous real-time news. The cable networks have been simulating it for decades, but not delivering very often. Go back to the Gulf War, and how we were all glued to CNN watching for any hint of new information. It became an obsession that was repeated in the 2000 election and in the aftermath of 9-11. Now we try to grab for that sense of immediacy whenever possible, and they market to us on that basis even naming their show The Situation Room, when it is nothing of the sort. 
Scoble it's time to use the web again to store our ideas, and instead of relying on Silicon Valley companies to link our stuff together, let's just use the Internet. That's what it was designed for.
Last night Marshall and I did a flash call-in version of the Bad Hair Day podcast to discuss the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook. It was the first time I used BlogTalkRadio's call-in feature, and I liked it, and I want to do it again. 
And that imho is the answer -- we, the users, need to own a technology company -- and have it work to serve our interests. It has to help us achieve our goals to do what we are excited about. I believe the users are worth betting on, much more than I believe that Marc Andreessen or Larry and Sergey really had any idea how to tap into the potential of their inventions (with no disrespect to any of these brilliant people). The visionaries were the people who believed their stock was worth a lot more than anyone in Silicon Valley did.
On Twitter there's been a tradition called "Follow Fridays," where you tell your friends who they should follow. It's nice, but I've got another idea, a way to help build and diversify the Internet, and probably help preserve a record of what we were thinking way back in 2009 and 2010. 
A few ahems...
One more thing. Even though the loosely-coupled 140-char message network won't need URL shorteners (at least when messages aren't traveling over SMS) our two guests for this evening's Bad Hair Day podcast are Eric Woodward of tr.im and Brian Hendrickson of rp.ly. These guys are very interesting leaders in our little micro-community. If you recall earlier this week tr.im made headlines by first announcing it was shutting down and then in response to the incredible outpouring of support decided to give it another go. In the interim, Brian whipped up rp.ly -- and announced it on BHD 7.5 on Monday. It was a welcome surprise, which I wrote about the next day, in a piece that was reprised by Doc Searls.
Yesterday Marshall wrote a story about the Twitter subscription lists app that I put up as part of the rssCloud project. As a result a few hundred people tried it out, and in the process I cached their follow lists. 
Marshall Kirkpatrick, my partner in the Bad Hair podcast, has a scoop worthy of comment on Scripting News. 
So many connections are missed because people feel superior to others.
On the Internet we call them outages. Gatekeepers are outages. They're the connections that don't get made because someone imagines themselves powerful enough to prevent them. But it's only temporary. Like a river that encounters an obstacle, eventually water (influence) piles up behind it, and then either flows over or around it. There's not much future in being an obstacle.
The tech industry keeps wanting to think that netbooks are a mistake, but they are not. 
Apple hires people who do the best they can to follow the orders from the top, and end up rejecting a magic trick app because it confuses the user (which of course is the point). Because there's no money in rejected software they can't afford to spend time with the developer to figure out whether they made a mistake.
3. This is the most important one. If you're planning on competing like a mofo in the tech industry to make billions of dollars, and then give it all to charity when you're middle-aged, instead, find a way to contribute to the ecology of the web while you're young, and make a bit less money (I suspect you won't actually make less money). We have much higher leverage on our home court and can do more good for the planet than we can, later, in medicine or politics. Obviously I'm thinking about Bill Gates, but I'm also thinking about Evan WIlliams and Biz Stone who are already worth huge money, and on their way to making a lot more. Guys... 
Marshall has the announcement.
Not uncommon that an intensely productive week is followed by an unproductive one. Fighting a cold. Probably just my spirit saying Slow Down Davey. I've learned to accept these things, not fight them.
I used to think Chuck Grassley, Republican Senator from Iowa, was an honorable man. An exception to the spineless liars of his party. Now he's spouting the "death panels" lie, like all the rest. This pitch hypocritically confuses and hurts the very people they claim to care about, the people and families of people who are dealing with serious illness or imminent death. 
I've had a non-productive week, I've been fighting a cold -- but I made a commitment to the web to write at least one post every Friday, so here I am keeping my promise.
7 years ago today: "Tomorrow is Day 70 of No Smoking Dave. Ten weeks. A non-smoking story at the Bowie concert last week. As I'm walking out I see people lighting up everywhere. Smell of smoke all around. It smells good. I really want one. In my mind I outline the steps it would take to be smoking and the amount of time it would take. I would ask someone if they could spare a cigarette. If they said no I'd offer them $1. Oh hell, just offer $1 to begin with. Whoo, where would I get a match. I'd ask for a light. Take a drag. Estimated time, 15 seconds to one minute to first nicotine rush. My heart started beating faster. I felt scared like you feel on a NY subway platform as a train is entering the station and you're standing on the platform and in the instant before it passes you think how you could end your life by leaning forward. I never actually jump, and that night I didn't smoke, and it's good that inside I equate smoking with death so deeply that it invokes my subway nightmare. Do I have it beat? No way. I am still an addict, I expect I will be for life. But I'm an addict in recovery, who is not taking the drug. Even better, I am becoming a constant evangelist for a nicotine-free lifestyle for nicotine addicts, illustrating the old adage that you teach what you most need to learn."
Silicon Alley Insider has an interesting piece about Yahoo's obsession with all-things-Twitter. And at the end they have an even more interesting strategy. "Yahoo should work to be a better place to use Twitter than Twitter.com."
An asshole is someone who says Obama is like Hitler because he wants everyone in the US to have health insurance.
2. In the prefs for Adjix, I told it that I wanted to use my own domain, c.oy.ly. I also told it to write copies of all my shortened URLs to a bucket at Amazon, which I had given his app permission to write to. By using my own domain, one which I control the DNS for, and retaining a copy of all the data, I am fully protected against his service going away. And I can decide at any time to take over hosting of my own short URLs by directing the c.oy.ly domain to s3.amazonaws.com instead of partner.adjix.com. 
Near as I can tell there are no new features in the new interface. Things were just moved around and everything is way way slower. The UI was always bizarre, but I figured most of it out. Now you're telling me I have to learn it over again? Why? What's the benefit?
It's sad that Lessig is "hibernating" his blog, but there's always hope. It's easy to say goodbye, but what's he going to do when he has something that has to be said right now. Wait two years to write and publish a book? I sure hope not! 
Health care is a lot like a fire department or police department. You never know when it's your house that's going to be on fire, that's why everyone pays equally for protection, and the person whose house burns gets the "benefit" if you can call having your house burn a benefit (or getting very sick).
In the early-mid-90s there was a Mac desktop app that was a Domain Name Server. Here's how you'd set it up.
The first rssCloud meetup in NYC in July was a great success.
In the 1980s I ran a system called LBBS on an Apple II in my living room. We had the exact same problem, and found a neat solution. At first the structure was strictly hierarchic. The sysop, me, would start a discussion area, and users would post questions or assertions as first-level subs. People would respond, and those would appear in reverse chronologic order as second-level subs. Responses to those would be third-level and so on. This was an early threaded discussion system. But how to find the new stuff? For that I added what I called a Msg Scanner, a reverse-chronolic browser that ignored structure. It would keep a bookmark for every user, a high-water-mark, and when you'd jump into the scanner that's where you'd start. You'd keep hitting Next until you reached the newest message. And here's the cool thing -- when you wanted to see the context, just type / and you'd switch over into the hierarchic structure, on the same message. 
Hate is a word I've tried to wipe from my vocabulary, along with need. You don't really need more than air, food, water, a warm place to sleep, basic medical care. There are lots of things that are nice to have, like hugs and kisses and great sound systems and business-class-or-better. But needs are pretty basic things.
Or as ready as it'll ever be. :-)
Yet Twitter just hired a COO who has one of the most out-of-whack follows-to-follower ratios out there. He follows 40 and is followed by 650,263. This is probably why his RSS company, Feedburner, made it to be acquired by Google and then crashed. It wasn't built on a foundation of love for RSS (I can attest to that) and while the people of Twitter use it and they have very passionate users, the execs at Twitter, at best, dabble. And now we know they hire dabblers. (An instance of A people hiring A people and B people hiring C people?)
My mother has a friend who was raving about the new Sony Walkman, so I bought two, one for Mom and one for me. They're not expensive, and I've never been happy with the way my iPod worked for podcasts, which is 90 percent of the use I have for them. 
I am up late writing docs for the next River2 release and just got an email from Amazon about a new Samsung TV that has a built-in RSS reader. Here's a video report from CES 2008 where the TV was announced.
William Mougayar suggested in a comment on Fred's post that Twitter could have a button that allowed you to add any RSS feed to your Twitter stream. 
RSS has grown in a fairly orderly fashion, quietly, without daily articles in the NY Times, or appearances on Oprah, or proclamations by athletes and movie stars. It also grew to huge size without a Fail Whale. RSS, in over ten years, has never gone down. Think about that for a moment. That's because it was designed for growth from day one. Getting on the RSS bus can be as simple as putting a file on your Apache server. It's just another rendering of your content flow. It requires a fairly small commitment, you don't need tens of millions of dollars of venture capital to build out an RSS network. You can rent it from Amazon at pennies per gigabyte. 
This is worth a special post.
Apparently for some people this is the first time they're hearing about the <cloud> element in RSS. It first appeared in January 2001 and was part of RSS 0.92, and of course RSS 2.0.. It was fully supported in Radio UserLand 8.0 and Manila. 
I set up an rssCloud server, fairly confident that it would scale to meet the demand, and with a fallback if it shouldn't. I'm not risking anything, because we know that polling works for RSS. rssCloud is an optimization, its purpose is to make RSS faster. But if it fails RSS still works. As I wrote earlier, even though many people predicted in 1999 that RSS would never work, it's actually never failed, there is no RSS fail whale. 
I'm certainly not the only person who understands this process, I'm a student, and I've learned from many others that come before. I love reading books about how this works, and the latest inspiration was the Connections series by James Burke. He goes all the way back to the beginning of civilization and shows how ideas interconnect and build on other ideas. 
Now for the differences.
The former FriendFeed company now owned by Facebook did something very interesting today. They released Tornado which is the customized web server that runs the backend of FriendFeed.
We're having a special Bad Hair Day podcast which is a mini-reprise of last night's meetup in Berkeley. 
This is a frequently asked question.
My FriendFeed friend Zee is in town for a conference, and he's worried about how Americans will take to his name. At first I was puzzled. What's so hard about the name Zee, I wondered. I had only seen it spelled out -- Zee -- cause we've never talked verbally only digitally.
Chuck Barris used to announce The Gong Show as just some stuffff.
Brad Fitzpatrick did what I used to do, say what he really thinks in a blog post about RSS stuff. It's fine, but it is just his point of view. There are other points of view that are valid, like mine.
It's true -- I was pretty freaked when I saw the note at the top of your spec that RSS didn't matter. Sometimes I think Google really believes that. Now I'm here to say RSS does matter. You can't pretend it doesn't because it does. You blew every kind of smoke at it when we talked. That's really good motivation for a guy like me who takes pride in his work.
Believer it or not there's been a lot of controversy about the screen saver in Apple's new operating system release. 
I'm working on an EC2 image that, when you boot it up, is a River2 installation. Since it's outside any firewall or NAT, it's ready to wire into the realtime feed network. Cloud-enabled feeds connect into Amazon's cloud. It's almost mathematical. I'm lovin it. I think we're getting close to the promised land. Hah. 
2. Ideally I don't even want to run the server myself. Someone from the community of people who read this blog who are interested in distributed realtime message systems and want to play a role in their development. This project will not use a lot of bandwidth or server resources. It's primarily for development. The other users will be geeks like you and me.
It's been over a week since Wordpress shipped their plug-in that added rssCloud capability. There are a bunch of feeds out there that are now cloud-enabled, actually a few million. 
Scott Simon is on the SUL and boasts in the first sentence of the description of his interview with Clay Shirky that he has nearly 1 million followers. 
A heads-up on something that's going to prove useful down the road, something you might want to start thinking about now. Credit for this observation goes to the brilliant Frenchman, JY Stervinou.
A couple of examples.
1. The browser is looking for an A record or a CNAME, and we're setting the TXT record.
I read the front page story on John Edwards with delight, as I'm sure many others did.
When you get something going all of a sudden the 
I bought a cool domain for a project I'm working on, r2.ly.
The iPhone is so totally not my spiritual soulmate. 
This feature is itself a bootstrap since one of the key ingredients are the people using it. Just the right number and the right kind (thoughtful, passionate, forgiving, visionary) are needed. The result can be an editorial product in its own right. And the first experiences will 
A brief report on where we're at with rssCloudLand as September winds down. 
In the early days of podcasting, in January 2001, we got the bootstrap started with a feed of Grateful Dead songs. Every day or so I added a song to the feed, in case anyone was interested in writing an application that grabbed audio enclosures from feeds. I needed something to test with because Radio UserLand, which we were working on at the time, had the capability.
We're going to combine this week's Rebooting the News with next week's and do it Saturday afternoon live in San Francisco. Jay will be in town for the Online News Association meeting, and of course I live a BART ride away in Berkeley, so we'll meet at 4:30PM and do a 75-minute Rebooting the News special, and you're invited! 
He really wants a curating application, which I have, it's the app that manages my 40 Twits page. I've released it as open source, and set up an account for Scbole, but it doesn't work on the iPhone because it depends on a bookmarklet and I guess they don't work on the iPhone? I don't know enough about it to say for sure. 
Jay and I decided we wanted to do a live podcast at ONA09 so much we rented our own room. And it's open to the public, even if you're not going to ONA09. 
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.
I'm flying back to NY to be with the family.
Let's start by saying there's nothing good about losing a parent.
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. 
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. 
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. 
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.
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. 
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.
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. 
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. 
This might be one of those fundamental Internet laws, or it may just turn out to be a way to express another one.
I pitched a simple idea at yesterday's GigaOm meetup, one that is easy to explain verbally but I've not yet attempted to explain it in writing. So here goes.
I refuse to solve the problem only for Scripting News, because I don't want future generations to think I was the only one writing in the early part of the 21st century. One of our bloggers is the next Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner, Willa Cather or Emily Dickinson. Let's make sure we have their earliest emails, Flickr-ings and tweets. 
Bruce Sterling gave a wonderful talk at the Reboot Conference this summer in Copenhagen. At the beginning of the talk I wanted to strangle him, but as it progressed, it made more and more sense. By the end I thought it was one of the best speeches I'd ever heard, a story that I think everyone should hear. I've made an MP3 of his talk because I want to make it available to people in my family as a podcast. I hope Bruce and the people at Reboot don't mind. 
What if your Twitter client stayed up when Twitter is down?
Yesterday the earth shook, and at first glance you might think it just shook in Silicon Valley, but I think a few years from now we'll look back and realize that the earth was shaking just as hard in the media industry. 
And what business are they in now? I believe they're in the news business. This isn't tech anymore. This is what the Times and CNN should have become, what CBS, NBC and ABC should be. What Jay calls a pro-am system where everyone collaborates to create the realtime stream of news on all levels, national, international, local, broad coverage and specialized stuff. Everything from newsletters to nightly news. Everything flows through the same pipes, and curators pick off the good stuff and route it to people who are interested. This is the way news is done from here-on. We're not talking about the future, we're talking about now. And the moguls of the media industry, without a single leader thinking in advance of the wave, are sitting on the sidelines, hoping someone will give them some money because they're such great writers or whatever it is they're so great at. Soon they'll be looking for reparations. 
These days my blog posts are always essays, but it wasn't always so. In the beginning they were all links, with pointers to articles both on this site and off-site. Example. 
A market develops, a bunch of people get it started, then someone at a big company discovers it, changes its name (sometimes they don't even do that) and relaunches it as if it were something wholly new. The press, many of whom were aware of the earlier efforts, goes for it. "Everyone knows" that it only matters when a big company does it. However, if you look at history that's often not true, it's often the small guy who ends up defining the market, despite what the press thinks.
I've been putting off programming with Twitter lists, but I shouldn't have. 
Interesting thread on FriendFeed about the next evolutionary step for C. I wrote a comment that I felt deserved to be elevated to a blog post.
Eric Schmidt says he can search real-time stuff, but how to do ranking?
A bunch of random notes on returing from the #140conf in Los Angeles.
I'm continuing to love my linkblog. I've gotten nothing but complaints from readers. Eventually you all will love it too. I'm sure of it. In the meantime, my work is 100 percent more valuable to me, and my incentive to remember a link by pushing it through Twitter (and my linkblog) is greater than ever. So I'll do more work for you, you'll be better informed, and happier and more productive. I can't promise you'll live longer. We'll feed some stray puppies too. 
Okay things are getting interesting now that 50 percent of the Twitter users have the lists feature. And now it's getting pretty obvious that there are some serious omissions.
Also a follow-up to the post about the battery needs of my MacBook vs the Asus Eee PC. Jim Roepcke thinks it's somehow my fault that the MacBook either has a weaker battery or uses more juice. And that they decided it would be better if I couldn't buy a spare battery to travel with. I have no idea which it is and I don't care. I'm a user. He thinks it's the OPML Editor that's responsible for the disparity. But that's just plain wrong. I run exactly the same software on both the Mac and the Asus. Further, if you look at the performance monitor, Firefox is the hog, not the OPML Editor. It's generally using five or ten times the CPU that OPML is.
This began as a response to a comment left by Marshall Kirkpatrick to an earlier post of mine.
So many things to say about where Twitter's lists point, the thing is, I've said them all already, many times over many years. There's a whole architecture already designed and deployed for lists and lists of lists. And they form directories that are much more open than the original Yahoo directory or DMOZ. I know everyone thinks DMOZ is the most open directory possible, but it's not.
First, thanks to Jeff Pulver for a fantastic conference earlier this week and thanks for letting me keynote it. Putting it in L.A., away from the distortion field of Silicon Valley, made it a lot more interesting and less of a festival of wiener-boys. I fell in love at least five times in 24 hours, that's pretty good. First time I spoke at a tech conference since LeWeb in 2007.
Suppose there's a topic you're interested in and you want to stay current on it. What tool would you use to do that?
A new feature of listbrowser.org.
As someone who just watched his father die, I don't think any of us have the first clue how the world works. My father was a smart man, spent a lot of time thinking, and at the end, he may have understood 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of how the world works. And some of that was based on faulty assumptions. Yet my father would always give a couple of bucks to anyone who asked for it. And if you wanted to take a picture of him, no matter how old or sick he got, he always put on a smile and let you take it, and if you asked why, he shrugged it off, as if there was any reason to care. A week before he died, I tried to teach him to use Twitter, but he said he didn't have time. He was right.
Joseph Scott has a post on the main WordPress site that explains that they are now supporting the two enhancements that were announced here on October 16.
I thought perhaps the Peek email device might be a good service to get for a family member who's not very technical. I wanted them to have access to text messaging, and thought its advertised simplicity might be the answer. So I bought a device for $49 and bought one month of service for $19.95, with the understanding that it's not a service plan, and if I didn't like it, I could easily opt-out. 
I stumbled across this as I was thinking about how to implement follow and unfollow commands in listbrowser.org. Usually this would mean supporting OAuth, which is not a big deal, I already have the code, but it's a pain for users. Another site they have to trust. Even though OAuth is better than giving away my password, it's not much better. 
There's a meme going around about fathers and the coolest things they did when you were growing up.
And when I asked him to add a feature to WordPress he said yes. I didn't even have to call him, or buy him lunch -- all I did was ask on the blog. He must have been reading. 
In response to my post about the new editorial tools I am using, Bill Seitz asked why it's so important to have a representation of the pre-rendered content stored in public on the web. My first answer was incomplete, I said I wanted an archive. I don't feel comfortable having the only copy of things I write reside on servers of corporations who might decide at some point they're not interested in continuing to store the stuff, or might have a technical failure and lose the stuff. Or whatever. Praise Murphy.
Everyone's asking questions about the decade that's coming to a close, I'd like to ask what's the coolest software you used this decade? 
I sort of understand why people don't like the new retweet, but I like it very much, and probably for many of the reasons they don't like it. 
I watched the morning session of TechCrunch's second realtime conference, including the half hour interview with Dick Costolo, the COO of Twitter.
I've now seen two movies that had bloggers in leading roles.
2. Will a NY Times columnist be more likely to write about Twitter, if they've got a million followers from placement on the SUL? Is there an appearance of impropriety? Is appearance enough of a reason to opt out? In an article in today's NY Times, they say that Times reporters are not allowed to accept free trips to cover production of a television show in Bora Bora. "The New York Times and many other media outlets ban the acceptance of these freebies on ethical grounds, because there could be an appearance of buying favorable coverage." To me, the free placement on the SUL and the benefits it bestows, are exactly equivalent. Elsewhere in the Times, and in many other media outlets, the number of followers is treated as a measure of relevance. 
Jay Rosen sent a link to a post on a BusinessWeek blog: "Does anyone know how to preserve and store our four and a half years of blog posts and comments?"
I have several accounts that I use for testing Twitter apps. One of them, bullmancuso, was shut down last October. A few weeks ago I petitioned to have the account restored.
I continue to work on my new editorial system. Whether it will see the light of day remains to be seen. I'm finding it useful and may at some point publish the tools. In the meantime, I'm learning a lot about the various publishing environments.
Not everyone was born to blog, but some people were. 
Why make an exception for geographic data or which app created the tweet or which tweet it's in response to, or that it was retweeted by 7 people and who they are? Or who wrote it? And when? 
Yesterday I got my LifeLiner tool working with Tumblr. Still some rough edges, but it's more or less doing the same stuff I have been doing with WordPress.
Yesterday the popular Mininova search engine for BitTorrent radically cut back its service. 
It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface.
I just wrote a piece about the J-school of the Future over on Rebootnews. After writing it, I sent a note to Doc Searls and JP Rangaswami of British Telecom, both of whom are participating in the Supernova conference in San Francisco. (I listened to JP's talk on the webcast and was, as usual, impressed with his thinking.)
They should start using it in their own products.
I get more than my share of flack from Google which is really strange because I am a person and they are a multi-billion dollar empire that employs thousands of people. 
My issue with bit.ly is the instability it adds to an already-fragile Internet. They removed one element of the fragility yesterday, or showed how they plan to remove it. You don't want every link on the realtime net to go through one domain. Now you can have your links go through your own domain. But I have a better deal with Adjix, one that removes the other part of the stability problem -- they also mirror my data to a bucket that I own on Amazon S3. So, if god forbid something bad should happen to Adjix or Joe Moreno, I just point the r2.ly domain at the bucket and everything keeps working. No broken links. Should both Amazon and Adjix fail, and there's still an Internet (a fair question) I can take the data and move it to another server and it will work just as well there. All it depends on is Apache or some other static HTTP server. When bit.ly does that, they will really have a Pro version. This announcement is a Band Aid, to stop the bleeding after Google (presumably) said no to buying them.
Marco at Tumblr says that he was inspired by the "seriously clever" use of the Twitter API by WordPress. Of course I was too. When they came out with it I wondered out loud if the Twitter API is now an open standard. 
It's the holiday season, maybe that's why it took a full day for the discussion to get underway about Tumblr's implementation of the Twitter API. But it is rolling now, and going in several interesting directions.
One of the arguments for the music industry not suing Napster out of existence in 2000 was that they had all the music on the Internet under one roof. By deleting Napster, they forced music to shard into a million pieces, and then reform later as iTunes and Amazon and a myriad of Internet startups. If it had stayed in one place it would have been possible to build all kinds of community services that reached everyone on the Internet who loves music. That might have been very amazing.
I don't think I've ever written a blog post that explains how I develop formats and protocols, probably because I was afraid of getting flamed. Nowadays I'm not so afraid, so here's how I do it.
Now some people say this isn't an open process, but in developing technology there has to be a time for thinking. We can't mind-meld like Vulcans. I require solitary thinking time to figure stuff out. So while people have a chance to spot problems in my proposed formats and protocols, there really isn't much room to argue over the minute details. There are always two or more ways to do something. Instead of calling a packet a <packet> I could call it a <blob> but what difference would that make?
As I noted in a post on Wednesday, I'm using the holiday to build out the CloudPipe protocol that I explained in a post on December 9.
I've been trying to find an easy way for my mom to manage her own digital camera, and have settled on getting her a netbook computer she can travel with. I'll set it up so it's easy for her to take the SD card from the camera and plug it into the netbook and upload her pictures to Flickr. It'll be pretty easy, but then I was just driving home from dinner and realized that someday, maybe very soon, it will be even easier.
Anill Dash ran a piece this evening about Twitter's Suggested User List. 
This may be one of those moments like the time when the guy put peanut butter on chocolate and came up with Reese's peanut butter cups. 
You aren't going to believe this.
I hit the same wall I always hit when looking for a place to store the users' content. 
People always get tripped up on what I had to do with RSS. One thing I did a lot of, for sure, is beat the drum. Every little development, every new source that came online, I'd hail it here on Scripting News as the greatest thing that ever happened.
Went to see Sherlock Holmes today starring two great actors -- a total waste -- one of the dumbest two hours of movie ever. Teens like it, it's sort of a cross between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Harry Potter, with yes, a little of the puzzle-master Sherlock Holmes. 
To seduce someone is to: 1. Find out what they want. 2. Give it to them. 3. The way they want it.
I don't know the economics but I imagine a digital watch could be made to look beautiful and also to have a mode where it couples with our phone and acts as a receiver for text messages. That way every time someone DMs you on Twitter it could show up on your wrist, with a little vibration only you feel.