Monday, June 30, 2003

Here's what funky means in simple non-technical language. 

Heads up to Harvard bloggers. We will not have the usual Thursday night meeting for the next two weeks. This week is a holiday, and next week I'll be in Oregon.  

Sjoerd Visscher says I'm unique, and I totally appreciate that, and I wanted to add that Sjoerd is unique too. There are very few people in the world who I trust to add none of their own bullshit. If Sjoerd says something I listen, carefully. His stuff is always interesting. I always have room on Scripting News for a Sjoerd Visscher science experiment. A few of the other people I feel that way about. Wes Felter. Scott Rosenberg. Scoble. Glenn Fleishman. Andre Radke. Brent Simmons. Jake Savin. Lawrence Lee. Lance Knobel. Ed Cone. John Palfrey. Bob Atkinson. Russ Lipton. Stan Krute. Paolo Valdemarin. Dave Sifry. Chris Lydon. Jim Moore. Joi Ito. Wow the list is getting pretty long. Doc Searls. Interesting that they're all men. And by the way, just because people add bullshit doesn't make them unworthy of being friends. Just thought I should mention that. I wouldn't believe everything I said, for example. I screw up sometimes, and often shoot from the hip. We are who we are. Someone who recently started adding bullshit, mostly because he's confused, I think: Jon Udell. People sometimes bend over backwards to appear to be fair and say things that are wrong. I think I caught Don Park doing that. Hey Don, is really better than ? That sounds like bullshit to me. Sounds like you're trying to get someone to think you're reasonable. Weren't you the one who told me to never be reasonable? That was good advice. End of ramble. 

One more thing. I used to feel that way about Fredrik Lundh. We had a fantastic collaboration. Then for some reason he started flaming me. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Then a few days ago he came back onto the scene and it was just like old days. My friend came back. I asked if he would be my lawyer, and he said yes. The world is a better place tonight for that. God bless you Fredrik. 

Dave Mancuso compares post-heart-op Dave (me) with Batman of the 80s. "This Batman was different. He didn't have the time for niceties anymore -- life was too short." 

Gary Wolf recalls a debate between Louis Rossetto and myself in 1994. "Yes, the web is like radio and cb," Dave replied. "But it is also like a front porch. I might put a few flower pots on the porch, a couple of chairs, a BBQ, a swing, decorations that say something about me, and perhaps invite other people in. Imagine if you could visit my front porch and find pointers to all my friends' porches." 

2/8/96: "Putting your thoughts on a web page is an invitation to anyone to take your hand. It's an open medium. A link is a connection between people. A web page is an open hand." 

Dave Jacobs needs a kidney transplant. "Can you imagine what it's like to bury a younger brother who died from the same disease that's almost certain to kill you?" 

On this day in Y2K, a birth notice here on Scripting News, for Dave & Amy's second son, Cassidy. "Ah, child of countless trees. Ah, child of boundless seas. What you are, what you're meant to be. Speaks his name, though you were born to me, born to me, Cassidy." BTW, John Perry Barlow, also a Berkman fellow, wrote the song.  

Dave Winer's RSS 2.0 Political FAQ. "My goal in writing this FAQ is to help people understand how RSS politics works." 

Ken Tompkins: "Is there a search engine that delivers content in RSS format as the result of a search?" 

Seyed Razavi on SixApart and Echo. "This was the lousiest set of arguments for a fork I've ever seen." 

I updated the XML-RPC spec to remove the word ASCII from the definition of string type, and changed the copyright dates from 1998-99 to 1998-2003.  

EFF Action Alert for Congressional hearings on P2P software. I find out about their alerts because I'm subscribed to their RSS feed. Very straightforward, very simple, very powerful. 

Screen shot of the weblog editor that shipped on this day in 1999, as part of My.UserLand.Com. It was a shadow of the weblog tool with an integrated aggregator that shipped as Radio 8, three years later. 

Guan Yang: I Love RSS. Me too! 

James Robertson: "There's a lot of effort being spent on a new syndication format that looks an awful lot like RSS after a few global search/replaces of tag names." 

Sunday, June 29, 2003

NY Times: Katherine Hepburn Dies at 96. 

Wes Felter: "When one side is committed to worse-is-better and the other to pedantic perfectionism, a fork is the best thing that can happen." Amen Wes. I wonder if the Movable Type people have figured out how to create an editor that real people will use that produces XHTML. The most popular editor among Radio users on Windows produces perfectly horrible HTML, which we encode and put in the RSS feeds that all aggregators handle perfectly well. We can't change the editor because it's baked into the browser. Do you think users would understand if we told them they had to use a much worse editor and enter the tags themselves because that made more sense to Ben Trott? 

Brent Simmons comments on Echo vs RSS. 

Scoble is collecting links on the current controversy.  

Don Park: "Ben of Six Apart explains why Six Apart has pledged support for Echo. Unfortunately, his list of reasons are mostly resolvable technical complaints against RSS." 

Aaron Swartz asks an "honest question" in public about why I'm so angry with Tim Bray. Tim said some awful stuff about me in a piece he wrote that helped, in large part, start the humongous flamewar aimed at me over the last week. It's wasted a lot of my time, and possibly has set back my work by years. I also have heart disease, so this kind of extra angst could actually shorten my life. I take that pretty seriously. Now, imho, Aaron's question is probably not very honest. He's a young guy who likes to flame. He's gotten a rep for being a software genius, but that's mostly with lawyers, not software people. He's a politician, and not a good one, and not a very nice person. He's treated me like crap for years, and child or not, I'm tired of it, and I'm not taking it anymore. When he bites, I'm going to bite back, so watch out Aaron. 

Okay I think I made my point. I take big risks on behalf of a community that does care. But the community lets others speak for it and stays silent, and lately the people who are speaking have turned abusive, then cruel, then destructive. I couldn't stand by and let that happen and continue writing Scripting as if nothing was happening. I say what I think here, and sometimes people don't like what I say. But that doesn't give them the right to destroy. We have to find a way to channel support when it's needed. If you like using your aggregator to read RSS feeds, please find a way of saying that publicly. If you want mature steady leadership for the technology, find a way to say that too. If you don't want the pavement ripped up because a few competitors have fallen behind and want to create confusion until they can catch up, say so. We have a chance to escape from the usual messes that technology people create, but only if the users stand up for their right to choose, to switch, and for that to happen it must stay simple, it must get even simpler. I'm going out for dinner and a movie and Scripting News will return bright and early tomorrow morning. 

Fredrik Lundh: XML-RPC and the ASCII Limitation. Interesting history in Fredrik's piece. It's true that the Q&A; near the end of the XML-RPC spec are responses to questions Fredrik asked when he was doing the Python implementation. I didn't know the context at the time, I just answered the questions, and thought other developers should see them, so I added them to the spec. In any event, I support his interpretation, and if you read the archive of the XML-RPC mail list, you'll see it isn't the first time I've said that. Hopefully from now on people will find other reasons to criticize XML-RPC. Disclaimer: I make shitty software and I write shitty specs, but for all that shittyness, they're amazingly popular and somewhat useful.  

Ben Trott: Why We Need Echo. 

Sjoerd Visscher explains the diffs betw Echo and RSS. 

Jason DeFilippo: Another case for RSS. 

Alan Cohen: "Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything." 

Before Napster was marked by the press as a haven for music piracy, Peter Lewis writing in the NY Times three years ago today, called it "the new Elvis of the Internet, the rebel that rocks the establishment because of its wild popularity among young people and its whiff of dangerousness." That captures what Napster meant to me. Of course Elvis did hang out with Tricky Dick.  

Adam Curry discovers that yesterday's outliner for Movable Type also works with Radio. Heh. Can't fool Adam. The cool thing about the common blogging API is that it also works with Blogger. How about that. We used to work together. We still do, but maybe not for very long. See below. 

An old software industry joke. At Microsoft, a new version of Windows isn't ready to ship until it doesn't run Lotus. Read that carefully. And at Microsoft in the early nineties they used to wear T-shirts saying Delete Philippe. That was before they cut off Netscape's air supply. Of course all this michegas is totally against the interests of users because it decreases their choice, and therefore their power.  

Two years ago today a survey asked if Microsoft adds features to their operating system in order to eliminate competition. Eighty-nine percent said yes. Note that all this is about Microsoft because for the last thirteen years they've dominated the software industry (since Windows 3.0 shipped and pushed IBM aside). Before that IBM and within their own sphere, Apple, did exactly the same. When they didn't want to be competed with they just crushed the competition. That's why power in the software industry must be controlled. The most effective controllers of power are the users, but for whatever reason, they never seem to take that power seriously. I've never seen it happen where they said "We're going to help this struggling company because we want choice in the future." I guess that's not the nature of being a user.  

I'll B.O.G.U. for Blogger 

One of the many things the Echo folk want to reinvent is the MetaWeblog API. Of course this makes my teeth grind, because I know how much time and energy went into making it work, not just for UserLand's tools, but for many others.

The only major holdout so far has been Blogger. Now, when the API was in development I asked Evan for feedback several times, directly, and he never responded. Now, over a year later, I hear that the API is inadequate for his purposes, because it doesn't have an element called appkey in its parameter lists. So the obvious question is, if we add appkey to a new version of the API, just for Blogger, and deprecate the old API, would that be enough, or are there other things he wants? Is Evan's goal to set back our work, or move his work forward? If it's the former, let's smoke that out into the open. I'm willing to accomodate you Evan. I'm willing to break the MetaWeblog API to get your support. I'm willing to convince other developers that it's worth changing their tools to get you on board. So now that we're going to bend over and grease up for you Evan, is that good enough, or do you want more?

Another data point. Over on Sam Ruby's weblog, an engineer at Google who's working on Blogger volunteers that the reason they don't use RSS 2.0 is that it supposedly doesn't have a feature that it has had since version 0.90, for over four years. If they had looked at the any of the BBC feeds they would have seen how to use it. Or the feeds Radio generates. If they had asked me I would have shown them. Instead they are switching their users to RDF, and then switching them to Echo, when RSS 2.0 would be perfectly good for their purposes. I am so confused by how they navigate through formats and protocols. If I were a suspicious man I'd think they want me to be confused.

Saturday, June 28, 2003

Radio as a Movable Type outliner. Configuration is still a bit rude, and for the brave. But the outliner works, and it's wonderful, according to Andrew Grumet, who's using it. Brought to you by Ben and Mena who generously added MetaWeblog API support to Movable Type; and by me, who wrote an outliner that can be used to edit weblog posts. 

Rogers Cadenhead has started a mail list to write a new specification for RSS 2.0. As I said in the comments on Rogers' site, this is a welcome development. Thanks. 

Scoble has a long interesting rant about RSS. He's right, when you're trying to get a new activity going it isn't about making the wrong people feel good, it's about making the right people feel excited. RSS has done that, very nicely, over the objections of some programmers who want to play with it, which really means that they want to break it.  

Internet News: "Google has added a 'BlogThis' feature in version 2.0 of the toolbar. But because it's exclusive to Blogger users, rival firms are worried Google might use its wild popularity to sideline the competition." 

10/22/02: "The chance to blow people's minds is to show it working through the open interface of a competitor's product. This is how we show web services working, as they were always supposed to, eliminating lock-in, allowing us to enhance each others' products, and to take the fear out of serving our customers. The BigCo's don't get this, they patent stuff and have powwow's among execs who have no idea what the software is used for. Heh. In the meantime us little folk are building a market. How about that." 

Halley Suitt: "We're alive here, but we're also dying." 

Michael Fraase: "Last year more than 6500 people died waiting for organ transplants." 

Joshua Allen has a talk with Mr Safe, and guess what Mr Safe thinks RSS is okay, cool, let's go, no problemmo. 

Boston Globe: "At 5:30AM yesterday, Krispy Kreme Inc, the highly profitable, highly caloric doughnut chain, finally opened the doors to its new franchise in Medford and entered the Massachusetts market." 

Tim Bray is worried 

Tim Bray: "I am worried that the next-gen syndication process rooted in Sam's Wiki is in danger of going seriously off the rails, because some of the participants have got the idea that it's about trying to invent new technology or improve RSS."

If it weren't so sad it would be funny. Bray's initial posts on this subject formed the rallying cry for ripping up the pavement and starting over. His dismissal of me as a leader of the community inspired others to incredible personal abuse and cruelty. Now he speaks as if he's the injured party.

I'll make a prediction. Because of what he did, control of RSS will go to the BigCo's, probably Microsoft, possibly a battle between IBM, Microsoft and Google. Bray deserves the credit for that. I think this post is his realization that he's going to get it, fully and squarely on his shoulders. Good luck Tim. You're on your own now. Let's see if you can dig out of this mess.

Dave Winer is angry 

Okay, I'm glad I got that out of the way. I am angry that Bray used me in such an awful way to be so wantonly destructive and now that he sees the destruction is trying to scramble as fast as he can into the hills. I've expressed that. Now let's try to move on.

How about let's try to put this back together so that RSS stays what it is, a simple syndication format, with a set of best practices that all parties adhere to, so that the format isn't vulnerable to takeover by one or more BigCo's. If you want to understand why I never took the spec to the W3C, there it is. It's a consortium of BigCo's with a director who is an RDF advocate, and until very recently an anemic patent policy. Such an organization cannot be trusted with RSS, imho.

The IETF is not much of a standards organization. Mark Nottingham turned the RSS 2.0 spec into something IETF-able, and while I didn't endorse it, I didn't stand in its way either. I was neutral on it, because it's kind of an empty thing to do. Anyone could follow such an action with a restatement of what RSS is, and that restatement would be just as valid as the original statement. Not much of a basis for interop, imho.

The other standards organizations are less familiar to me, and probably mostly are controlled by BigCo's who I don't trust (based on experience), so the RSS spec has stayed on backend.userland.com, waiting for a group of senior industry people without a major conflict of interest to work with me to figure out what's best for everyone, but most of all what's best for RSS. Maybe that day is here. It kind of depends on what's in Sam's heart, Jon's heart, and even Tim Bray's heart, even though I hate what he did, I recognize his brilliance, and think he probably was just a fool, that he wasn't deliberately trying to destroy the tenuous peace in RSS-land.

Friday, June 27, 2003

Jon Udell: My Conversation with Mr Safe. A must-read. Udell converses with Tim Bray's Mr Safe about RSS. Tim's claim that RSS is not deployable by conservative corporate managers was instrumental in getting the frenzy over Echo cooking. But Bray was wrong, RSS is in fact being widely deployed by lots of Mr Safes. And they've been quietly adopting the optional features of RSS 2.0 over the last few months. In other words, Bray is saying RSS is losing at the exact moment that it's running its victory lap. Now, Udell criticizes me personally in his piece, as Bray dismissed me (in a very humiliating way, not appropriate for a person of his stature) and I asked Udell not to do it, but he insisted it was his right. I decided to point to his piece anyway, because it's important that you hear from him. While I offered my endorsement to Echo, I did it with reservations. I don't believe it's necessary, or even advisable. As others have said, we're taking too big a risk that a BigCo (like Google or IBM, for example) is going to take control. If you think I've been a bad leader, talk to me, tell me what you want to do, and I'll see if I can accomodate. But you have to listen too, and that's what you guys haven't been doing. When I talk (so it seems to me) you flame. That's not a conversation, and it's been going on for years. I don't think the Big's are going to care about what you want. I haven't found Google particularly interested in keeping the market open, and my experience with IBM on SOAP was not very good either. Both companies use patents. You may believe they have your interest at heart, but I'd keep my eyes open about that. 

Andrew Grumet: "Programmer grumbling is unfortunate but it is no match for the roar of happy users." Amen. 

Did you know that the BBC has an RSS feed just for news about Harry Potter? 

Russ Lipton sends a pointer to weblogs from the Spokane newspaper, the Spokesman-Review.  

Last year: "It's nice, even wonderful, to be able to walk for five minutes on a gorgeous California summer morning." Two years ago: "You can know what until now, only KnowNow knew." Three years ago: "I like new elements that have imperfect names and that are supported in content by leading content providers." Six years ago: "By the time a child is 18, he or she will see 80,000 murders on TV and will never see a couple making love." 

I was talking with Halley a few days ago and she asked what's going on with my friend with the weblog who has cancer. I shuddered. I haven't seen him update in a long time. Oh shit. I just checked his site. He updated Tuesday. "It's been a busy few weeks. Claudia and I bought an apartment in lower Westchester just north of the city." Whew. Glad he's okay. Brian and I were two sick guys with weblogs last summer. Seems like we're both getting back on our feet. Coool. 

Charles Cooper: "I'd love to get his reaction after SCO produces documents with keystroke-by-keystroke copies of proprietary IP -- including typographical mistakes -- which subsequently made its way into the open-source community." 

Feedback to people working on Echo 

To non-technical readers, and people who don't follow the daily ins and outs of RSS politics, here's a brief explanation of what's going on.

A group of developers, including some very important ones (the developers of Blogger and Movable Type, notably) have decided to develop a format to compete with RSS and an API to compete with the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API.

You may or may not like this idea, if you don't there's not much you can do about it, because it seems to be happening anyway, or something seems to be happening. I think if you're a user of this stuff, you can tune out for a while at least. However, it seems that some of the space on Scripting News will be devoted to this for some time to come.

So now a bit of feedback to the people responsible for Echo.

1. Please help me get rid of the personality issues. If I'm going to participate, hatred has to be off-topic, at least in the big places for discussions. When you see someone indulge, and there have been some outrageous examples, it's better if you ask them to stop, than if I have to.

2. Start an Echo weblog. Eat the dogfood. Show us in real-time what an Echo-compliant weblog looks like.

3. It should have an Echo feed, asap. And it should also have an RSS 2.0 feed, so people with aggregators can subscribe to it. This is a pragmatic thing, it's very hard to follow the project now. There are enough people involved to have one or two people serve as chronicler of the project.

4. I think it's wonderful that it's happening on the Web and not on mail lists. But you have to compensate for the fact that there's no single place to go to stay informed by creating one.

That's about it for now. Yesterday's endorsement is finished.

Thursday, June 26, 2003

I'll be in San Francisco July 12-16, returning to Boston the morning of the 17th. This time I want to do some kind of blogger's dinner or meeting. Maybe a Giants game. Yesterday it was 100 degrees in Boston, 100 percent humid. Looking forward to chilling out by the Bay. 

Jim Moore: "This year there is a 'firewall' system of primaries that follows the first two and is intended to favor a non-grass-roots candidate." 

Here's a tentative endorsement of Echo. 

If you listen to some you'll hear hype that I control RSS. That's just ridiculous. I don't control RSS. I couldn't change it if I wanted to. It is what it is. RSS controls me. Try to wiggle out from its control and I keep running into it every which way I look. Massive numbers of developers came to the realization that the design period of this network is over, that RSS sneaked out from control of RDF somewhere in the middle of last year when they weren't looking. And it took over the world. I'm proud of RSS for its power. I am in awe of it. I respect it. I am contained by it. I am content.  

Tim Jarrett: "RSS works, and if it doesn稚 do what you need it to do you can expand it with namespaces. I understand the frustration of underspecified formats, but let痴 get it straight: every groundbreaking 1.0 project is underspecified. And adoption happens anyway." 

Lance Knobel: Tom Watson, blogging MP. "I spent an hour yesterday chatting with Tom Watson, the Labour MP for West Bromwich East, and, by my reckoning, the first elected national politician to have a real weblog." 

DevX: Learn to Consume RSS Using DevX's New Content Feeds. 

I had dinner last night with Jim Moore. It was fun. He's writing a book about the Second Superpower. Smart guy. We ate buffalo. No kidding. 

Several good comments here for the Berkman lawyers on the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for hosted weblogs. 

Speaking of Berkman, here's the prototype of the new home page. See the influence weblogs are having here? Jim and I talked a lot about that last night. Weblogs are transforming the place, in a good way, it seems. 

Congratulations to the Blogger folk on getting their Blog This functionality embedded in the Google toolbar. Should have used the Blogger API so it would work with all blogging tools, but that's just my opinion of course. 

On this day in 1997, the US Supreme Court affirmed free speech on the Web by overturning the Communication Decency Act 

Last year on this day: "Twelve days of no smoking. Munching on baby carrots." 

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Jon Udell: "Let's be clear: RSS is in no way broken." 

Chris Pirillo: "The RSS feeds on this page were set up to help you keep track of new products on Amazon.com." 

William Gibson: "In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner." 

BBC: Fed cuts US rates to 45-year low. 

RIAA going after small traders: News.Com, Post, BBC, Times, Register. 

Washington Post article on the role NY Times reporter Judith Miller played in the army unit which she was embedded in during the war. "Interrogating Iraqis was not the mission of the unit, these officials said, it became a 'Judith Miller team,' in the words of one officer close to the situation." 

News.Com: "Microsoft's path to expand the Windows empire is leading directly to search king Google." 

Jonathan Dube claims to have the most complete directory of professional journalist weblogs. 

Last semester, Diane Cabell, a director at Berkman, and a group of law school students, drafted a terms of use and privacy policy for weblog hosting at Harvard Law. It was our intention to create a template that other universities, schools and libraries could use, and a user-friendly agreement that non-technical people (like me!) could understand. Here's a place for comments and questions. After we got through this long process, Diane said "You're thinking like a lawyer now!" I'm sure she meant that as a compliment.  

Stewart Alsop: "Will Longhorn rock the world?" 

Post IDs 

FWIW, in RSS 2.0, I thought there should be a core-level post ID element, but I thought there was a pretty good chance, based on experience with the Blogger API, that each tool would have a different way of expressing it.

The compelling app for post ID's is backup and restore. If I'm using RSS to back up a weblog, and if I need to do a restore, the post ID's must be preserved, or when I regenerate the site after a restore, permalinks will break. Also since Radio and Manila are programming environments, developers may have created applications that depend on post ID's being preserved. The same is true of many other blogging tools.

Rather than put this in the core, I decided to put it in a namespace, specifically for Radio, and to revisit the issue after other blogging tools started using RSS 2.0 seriously.

The lizard brain of RSS 

Simon Willison is helping a friend get an RSS feed together for her weblog, and had some questions and had to guess because there is no FAQ. Of the three decisions he made, I strongly agree with two of them. Now for the third -- should he use link or guid to represent the permalink to the post? I believe he should use guid because that's what it was designed for. Link was designed for something else.

First, link has the easier name because it predates guid by three years, and its design is central to the initial design of RSS, to model items with three bits of data, title, link and description. Look at a News.Com story as the prototype for early, lizard-brain-level RSS. Every story they produce has all three items. My.Netscape presented each "channel" in a box, with TLD's. Now when weblogs started using RSS, almost immediately, not every post would have all three, in fact since Frontier was the main weblog tool at the time, and didn't support the common weblog-post model so familiar today, you might say that no weblog posts supported this model. It wasn't until Blogger came along in mid 1999 that TLDs were possible in weblogs. It wasn't until mid-Y2K that Manila supported TLD-type posts.

Anyway, I'm explaining all this background for a purpose, to say that, imho, link should be used only to link to the article being described by the post, it should only be used in the TLD context. I believe that was a very solid application and shouldn't be muddied. Of course many feeds these days take link seriously, like for example all 68 of the BBC feeds announced yesterday.

Now that said, Radio uses link the way Simon uses it. But then guid didn't exist when Radio shipped. Now that it does exist, I really feel strongly that people should use it, and let link be pure.

See also: Guids are not just for geeks anymore.

See also: RSS2-Support mail list.

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

DaveNet: BBC Archive, Weblogs and RSS. 

Slate: "Presumably by accident, somebody left a live prototype of President Bush's 2004 campaign site on the Web for a few hours today." 

Dave Sifry recounts a phone conversation we had last week about RSS and naming, and support from blogging tools. 

Sixty-eight new feeds from BBC News Interactive. 

Adrian Holovaty made a bookmarklet that gets the RSS feed for a particular BBC news section or story. 

BBC: Wi-fi will be next dot.com crash. 

News.Com: "Netflix has been granted a wide-ranging patent encompassing its online DVD rental service." 

Fresh and funky and ready to please.  

Press release: SOAP 1.2. 

Tom Yager explains how Apple cooked its performance test for the new G5 computers. 

Intel: "Anne Davis remembers how she reacted the first time she saw a weblog being used in the classroom." 

Jim McGee: "Sites that provide no RSS feed essentially don't exist for me." 

Wes Felter reviews yesterday's Apple announcements. 

Sam Ruby is leading an effort to create a new weblog format and API. There's a Wiki that's open for all to contribute to, and an impressive list of people who support the work.  

NY Times article on yesterday's Supreme Court decision about filtering in libraries. And another explains what it means for libraries and their patrons. 

Monday, June 23, 2003

Aaron Swartz has a neat web app that lets you find out what ads Google would put on your site if you signed up for and were accepted by the AdSense program. Here are the ads they'd put on Scripting News. Makes sense. 

News.Com: "Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs rolled out on Tuesday a new crop of Power Macs he says can outperform any Windows-based PC on the market." Register article. 

Jeremy Zawodny wonders "Does Google Like Me?" 

AP: "A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that Congress can force the nation's public libraries to equip computers with anti-pornography filters." 

Jenny Levine is gathering news related to the Supreme Court decision. 

We have another confirmation for the Cluetrain 2003 session at BloggerCon. Co-author of the Manifesto, Doc Searls. Three down, one to go. The fourth is probably in the sky flying back from Copenhagen.  

Brian Jepson is blogging Steve Jobs's keynote at WWDC. 

Register: "Intel today launched its 3.2GHz Pentium 4." 

Alexander Barnes Dryer put together a template for Movable Type that generates nice not-funky RSS 2.0. 

There are moments when if people compromise something great can happen and if they don't the opportunity passes. I saw it happen with Apple Events in 1990. I tried to broker a deal between Microsoft and Apple to make a cross-platform interapplication communication layer so you could mix LANs with MS and Apple machines and they would interop. Microsoft said yes, Apple said no. The result was COM.  

A Russian developer network with really nice non-funky RSS feeds. Da! 

Ed Cone: "One topic we won稚 spend much if any time on at BloggerCon is last year痴 question: are weblogs journalism? That痴 settled (affirmative). The interesting questions deal with what kind of journalism weblogs can produce. But not everyone has gotten the memo." 

Don Park: "Although I agree with Dave on the issue of funky RSS, I think he is misusing the word funky." 

A gentle introduction to the RSS controversy, for power users, not developers, not XML jocks, for people who use computers, who like their aggregators, and would like some new features every once in a while. 

1/2/02: "I must give away some of the juice if I want to have a growing and prosperous software business. It's how I create a market to compete in. One little company selling a product does not make a market, no matter how unfair that seems." 

Josh Allen: "Microsoft can rightly brag that we adopted RSS before most of the other big behemoths." 

Sunday, June 22, 2003

A picture of the classroom we're going to use for BloggerCon. I'm terrible with names. That goes for classrooms too. It's named after a former dean of the law school. Someone will tell me the correct name in five minutes or less. BTW, that's John Palfrey in the picture. I asked him to stand in front of the room so that the picture would give a sense of the scale of the room. John was quoted saying "ain't" in the NY Times today. He's probably never said ain't before in his life. His ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and his great-great-great-great-grandfather was Teddy Roosevelt. Even with all that blue blood in him, he's still a really nice friendly human being. He settles all the arguments at Berkman, and he's only 30 years old, just three years older than Eric, see below. I'd love to see the two of them get together some time. Really smart good people. I bet they'd solve some problems. 

Eric Kidd, a 27-year-old programmer, writes about The Missing Future in software. "What if I have a great idea, and I want to change the world?" he asks. 

Jon Udell: "Every day I use Perl, Python, Linux, Apache, Mozilla, Zope, emacs, and countless supporting libraries and tools. But I also use Windows, Mac OS X, MSIE, Outlook, and a bevy of commercial software products." 

Xeni Jardin writes to say she's having a lot of fun with her phone cam blog. BTW, there's an interesting feed associated with the phone cam blog.  

RFC: Art Interludes at BloggerCon. 

BloggerCon progress report. 

NY Times: The Corporate Blog is Catching On. 

Blogger's recently updated blogs. Interesting reading from the middle of America. 

Bryan Bell: "IE has now taken Netscape 4's old position as the boat anchor being dragged behind the Internet." 

On this day in Y2K, I blogged Microsoft's rollout of .NET. 

Weird Al Yankovic interviews Chris Pirillo, video. 

Last year on this day I wrote about smoking. "I'm the kind of person who likes to solve problems by smoking," I explained how my mind would automatically soothe itself with thoughts of smoking. That was then. It's gone now. I had forgotten about it. I'll have to give this some thought and figure out what it means. This was also the day I saw the Get Well blog. BTW I still use the iPod. It made the cross-country trip just fine. It goes to Harvard, always in my knapsack. On the back, engraved, it says "Let's not limit the dreams of people who use our tools." Amen to that. 

Saturday, June 21, 2003

Simon Song: "This is a weblog about my work as an intern at the New York Daily News and my life in New York." 

Chris Lydon: A God for Bloggers. 

This morning I spec'd a new BloggerCon session, sent invites, two confirmations. It would be an unusual, bloggy sort of thing to open up the process, so what the heck here goes. The first two people to say yes are Jim Moore and Adam Curry. I'm not going to say who the other two are because I like to tease, and they may say no (I don't actually think they will). Ralph Waldo Emerson is a virtual presenter. 

Halley Suitt: The Blog Cabin. 

Greenspun: "Look around at stuff that you believe to be public property. Very likely it will soon be given away to America's largest corporations and consequently their stock will go up even if they don't innovate." 

Brad Choate: RSS 2 Dates and Such. 

Scoble: "These guys have it made," nine-year-old Patrick, my son, said as he got a tour of Microsoft's game development and testing facilities this afternoon. "They get to play games all day long." 

Paolo: "I'm an happy geek." 

My neighborhood has an ice cream truck. I haven't lived in a neighborhood with one of those since I was a kid. I'll try to get a pic tomorrow. 

Thanks to Michael Gartenberg for sending the DVDs, I was able to catch up on the end of last season of The West Wing, the stuff I missed in the spring. Wow, the last three episodes are really something. The writer won't be back next season, what a complicated situation for his successor to pick up. 

John Lee Hooker: "No matter what anybody says, it all comes down to the same thing. A man and a woman, a broken heart and a broken home." 

I also picked up the wide-screen version of the Spiderman movie, which I saw last year in San Jose with Scoble & Scoble. I liked the movie last year, but I liked the DVD version even better, because in this one, he kisses the girl, first as the superhero and then as his alter-ego. 

On this day last year, Scripting News resumed, slowly. I am told that to a reader of the site this is when things started to return to normal. But the glass screen hides so much. A year later I can remember that moment like it happened yesterday. Then, I thought to myself, this isn't going to be the same, ever again. So far that's quite true. But on your side of the screen, things probably aren't very different. 

Friday, June 20, 2003

Ed Cone announces the journalism session at BC with Scott Rosenberg, Glenn Reynolds, and Joshua Marshall.  

Greenspun: "If George W had only declared war on urban traffic congestion instead of Iraq!" 

BBC: Fifth Harry Potter book on sale. 

Glaser's guide to the blogosphere. Fascinating. 

Lessig: "Give Madison Avenue a rest?" 

Simon Willison hosts a quiet conversation about RSS.  

John Robb: "I am alive." Whew. 

Mark Hurst: This Is Broken. "A new project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience." 

Brad Choate: "United States Patent No. 4,558,302 expires today. This is the technology behind the common GIF file." 

More great scans from Adam. 

Three years ago today I visited with Napster and took pictures, of course. This one made it into a history book of computer science. My favorite is this one of VP-Engineering Eddie Kessler, smiling for the camera. 

Six years ago today, a story about boys and adventure. 

The role of technology at BloggerCon 

Last night someone listed the three big areas we're going to cover at BloggerCon, before I said anything, and got it right. Something must be working. The three areas: Politics, Education and Journalism.

Notable in its absence: Technology. It's no accident. Weblog technology is advanced enough today in 2003 to be out of the way. There will be steady improvement, I hope, but users have choice, and the choices are good enough to get the job done.

But technology will be everywhere at BloggerCon, but if it's doing its job well it will be transparent. People won't be thinking "Oh that's important technology" they'll say "What an interesting idea."

Meg Hourihan on WMAWAW 

Meg read my What Makes A Weblog A Weblog essay, and sent an email (from Copenhagen) explaining that I missed the fundamental difference between weblogs and everything else.

She says: "The biggest thing I keep stressing, which I think is the fundamental difference: posts vs pages. It's about posts, chunks of content, not pages, which is what wikis are, and it's the content that Vignette and Interwoven output. They treat the chunks of content as pages, and they don't see the more discrete bits that are the posts."

A new session for BloggerCon 

Last night at the Thursday Berkman weblog writers meeting we talked about BloggerCon.

We covered so much ground in two hours, it's impossible to report it all. But there's one idea I want to talk about here this morning because it's important idea and I want to get out there way before October.

A question to the group -- how do we use Chris Lydon -- a great interviewer, the radio version of Charlie Rose. Chris was in the room, and he took the floor and started talking about Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his relationship to weblogs and radio. I didn't get it, but I liked the way it sounded. Then someone else talked about the Cluetrain Manifesto, markets are conversations. Then politics, hey they're conversations too, and so is education. Wait a minute weblogs are conversations. Whuh.

It's hard to describe the feeling in the room at that moment, it's the same thing that's been interesting to me about Chris, his radio and my Radio seem to be flipsides of the same thing. And I've said to Doc that weblogs are the implementation of the Cluetrain, and he agrees.

So we're going to put these two people on stage, Chris and Doc, and add one more person (who I haven't talked to yet) and maybe one more after that, and see what happens. It won't be a panel, it'll be a conversation. Duh.

Kendall's Amazing Puzzle 

Kendall Clark: "Like it or not, the web services part of the Web's future is being developed by the largest computer corporations almost entirely in terms of standards bodies."

This used to be Clay Shirky's line. And before that News.Com believed it. And before that there was a whole industry waiting with baited breath for the next pronouncement from IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Apple, Lotus, you name it. Lots of waiting for trains that never came. This one won't come either.

What if Kendall really understood the Law of Expectation, you see what you expect to see. A statement like his tells me more about his filters, his experience, than it does about web services, the Web's future, ie the things it purports to be about.

See also: Don's Amazing Puzzle, Michael's Amazing Puzzle.

Thursday, June 19, 2003

Prior art: "We listened to you, we thought you were right, so we did it your way." 

Brent Simmons: "Prior art is your friend." Indeed. 

Feedster: RSS-Search Merges with Feedster. 

Sorry for the lack of posts today, been in various hardware hells trying to get all kinds of new stuff working, and then there's the Thursday evening meeting in a few hours. 

Doc Searls got a link from the NY Times today. Nice article. Says a hit from Doc delivers lots of flow. It's true. So I wondered how many hits the Times delivered to Doc. About 67 as of this writing. Not as many as Doc.  

Lance Knobel: "Twenty years ago, when I used to write about architecture and design, I recall someone criticising a chair that had been designed by a Danish duo. 'No one person could come up with something so awful. There had to be at least two of them.'"  

Chris Sells: "Win a free seat at the Applied XML Developer's Conference in greater Portland, OR, July 10-11." 

News.Com article about MSNBot. 

Chris Heilman blogs beautifully.  

Verizon already sucks 

I've been a Verizon customer for less than three hours and they have already hacked my system.

My browser now says "Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by Verizon Online." Funny it didn't used to say that.

My email accounts were all hacked, so now my client checks with their server, not my server.

My home page is on verizon.net.

I called up their support number (I had to, it took three long calls to get the DSL service working) and asked where they thought they got the right to do this. Read the service agreement, the support guy said.

What about the personal information they ask for (gender, age, occupation). He said "You don't have to tell the truth." You're telling me to lie? He said he didn't say that.

Of course I lied. I'm a female government employee born on this day in 1980.

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

DaveNet: Boucher on Hatch; Microsoft aims at Google. 

DaveNet: What makes a weblog a weblog? 

NY Times: A Blogger's Big-Fish Fantasy. 

Here's Microsoft's about page for MSNBot. 

According to Laurence Simon, Senator Hatch may have a copyright violation on his own site.  

An anonymous source provides details on MSNBot. Google in the crosshairs. MS offered to buy Google. Search made $150 million profit for MS last year. Search baked into Longhorn.  

Ed Cone: "Virginia Representative Rick Boucher says legislation allowing the recording industry to damage personal computers is highly unlikely to be enacted." 

BBC: "Microsoft is taking legal action against alleged e-mail spammers in the US and the UK." 

Zawodny: The Bot from Redmond. 

Search Engine Watch: "Google has expanded its contextual ads program to allow many more content sites to carry its paid listings." 

Glenn Reynolds enters the What Is A Weblog discussion.  

A question for Senator Hatch. 

It sounds like a presidential candidate is going to visit us tomorrow at the usual Thursday evening weblog-writers meeting at Berkman. That's cool. Last week we talked about New Hampshire. This week we'll talk about BloggerCon. 

Two years ago today, issues around Microsoft's (now defunct) Smart Tags in MSIE exposed key questions about integrity in web-writing.  

Happy birthday to Sheila, Andrea and Paul McCartney. 

BBC: "A US senator wants to develop new technology which would remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music tracks." 

Martin Schwimmer: "If I were Senator Hatch's press secretary I would suggest to him that he say that he was not referring to destroying the computers of home users who might have in effect shoplifted a few CDs or movies, but was instead referring to those professional counterfeiters who use their computers as illegal printing presses to distribute counterfeit works on a large scale." 

A new version of Oddpost, the elegant browser-based email client, is now an RSS reader. Nicely done, as always. More info in an email from Ethan Diamond explaining the design of the new features in context of recent comments here. 

A few days ago someone asked when I started doing permalinks. Here's the answer. 

Graeme Foster: "Why not expose RSS feeds as POP3 and have an RSS aggregator in any email client?" 

More great Adam Curry scans.  

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

News.Com: Mary Bono downplays RIAA job rumors. 

Adam Curry scanned some of his old pics. This one is my favorite.  

Another great no funk feed is Mary Jo Foley and the rest of the ZD Net bunch. They don't funk around. 

Everywhere I look I see lack of funk. Chris Sells come on down. Great feed. Completely easy to understand. No funk. Nothing that would make a non-rocket-scientist break a sweat. My man. 

Blogger Pro 1.1 does a pretty good job at RSS: no funk here. 

Check out the NYU weblog portal listing the blogs of NYU students and alumni. 

Hiawatha Bray: "There's plenty of juice left in the blogging boom." 

To improve performance on UserLand servers, the HTML version of weblogs.com is now updated every five minutes instead of every minute. 

News.Com: "The University of Twente in the Netherlands has launched a unique, campuswide wireless hot spot, claimed to be the biggest in Europe." 

Mary Harrsch: RSS -- The Next Killer App for Education. 

The Australian Democrats get behind RSS. 

Backend.UserLand is now a weblog. Now when something of interest happens in the community, there's a place to point to it. There's also an RSS feed, so you can subscribe.  

Tim Bray is looking for stock quotes in an RSS feed. 

Brent Simmons's RSS feed is totally not funky. Thanks Brent. And I think it's safe to assume that even if Brent's software sucked up all the other software in the world, his feed would still not be funky. Postscript: Brent's feed is so not funky that it's even less funky than my RSS feed, which is pretty damned not funky. Maybe I'll remove the three bits of funk in my feed. I wonder if anyone would miss them.  

Register: Torvalds to leave Transmeta, will work full time on the Linux kernel. 

Dan Gillmor notes that Time is a publicity tool for Time-Warner.  

The NY Times reports that Continental and United Airlines are installing in-flight email. Which raises the question, is it really just email and if so why not just offer Internet access so we can access the Web?  

Tim Bray: "There are some cultures where hugging is just not done." 

Monday, June 16, 2003

DaveNet: NY Times Archive, Weblogs and RSS. 

Steve Gillmor, author of the popular Allchin Tax piece, has a funky RSS feed. I sent him an email along the lines of Oh The Humanity. Steve will understand. Jim A won't care. If our wagons aren't circled he will do unto us what we do unto each other. It won't be a pretty sight.  

My father decided to retire as a college professor. He's been doing it for 29 years, and was considering staying on one more year. He decided to retire for two reasons. First, he's always been researching better ways to teach students in his field. In the past his dept would adopt the ideas that worked. They've stopped doing that. The second reason is more disturbing. His students are cheating, and when he catches them, they fight about it, instead of being shamed. Being a professor seems pointless to him in this context. Makes sense. What's the point of teaching when people just want the grade, not the education.  

William Grosso: "Is it just me, or did we have a month of good, old-fashioned, Internet time in the web browser universe." 

I just got a call from the chair of our journalism panel at BloggerCon, and he got a yes from his fourth panelist, so one of the key events is now set to announce. I've asked him to write up a two-page introduction for the site and the mail list and we're going to move on to the education panel, politics panel and technology panel.