Last year, after giving it much thought, I decided to give out an award that I called, unoriginally, Blogger of the Year. I felt entitled to do so because I am a blogger, like millions of other people.

Why should I, of all the people who blog, give an award once a year to someone who, imho, exemplifies what's great about blogging? Because I can. And of course so can you. That's the point of blogging. Nothing makes my blog better than any else's. It's what I put here, my ideas, my beliefs, my desires, my foibles and foils -- oh never mind. The point is you can give out an award too.

But this is my Blogger of the Year award.

I'm not ready to announce who it is this year, but I've more or less made my decision. I called last year's BOTY to see if she approved my choice, and she did. Not that that's a requirement, it isn't, but I would have been surprised if she had disagreed. And while both people exemplify what makes blogging tick, what makes it worthwhile, the people couldn't be more different.

Last year's BOTY is a woman, this year's is a man.

Last year's BOTY is a tiny little person who eats vegan and spreads the joy of body acceptance. This year's BOTY is not small, and eats greasy food (as do I) and smokes!

Last year's BOTY is cute, this year's BOTY well, I don't think anyone thinks he's cute, except perhaps his wife, and even there I wonder.

Last year's BOTY often goes naked in public as a form of social, artistic and political expression. As far as I know this year's BOTY is always fully clothed in public.

Both people rub others the wrong way, get people to say "Who does he or she think he or she is?" I have a funny feeling all BOTYs will have this property.

Another thing both BOTYs have in common is they were both at BloggerCon I. Haha. Now there's a good clue.

I don't know when I'm going to announce the choice, but I love a good tease, so you gotta figure I'm going to stretch this one out, play it for all its worth. Sorry!!



 12/19/2008; 7:47:24 PM  

They're calling it #snowmageddon on Twitter.

And on Flickr too.

I know it's snowing a lot back east cause it's raining a lot here on the California coast. And now it's raining some more. More rain here, more snow there. Pretty simple.

I just posted a twit saying "People in the eastern U.S.-- more snow headed your way. Hugs, California"

We're all in it together. Just some of us are more in it than the rest.

I miss the snow, so here's what I want to do.

Where are snowcams? I want webcams in American and Canadian cities that show the snow? I'd like to accumulate a list here.

Here's a cam on West Dayton St in Madison. It's a live feed. You can see the snow blowing and cars going down the street. Wish there were audio too. The Comp Sci building is on West Dayton if I remember correctly. This building is quite close.

Funny how Madison looks the same 30 years later.

Here are some other Madison-area webcams.

Post a comment if you know of one!

 12/19/2008; 12:00:00 AM  

Doc Searls writes that Out Of Town News on Harvard Sq in Cambridge is going out of business on January 1.

There are efforts to revive it as a print-on-demand business, but come on, that's not going to work.

I think at some point you have to take a picture, have a ceremony, put up a plaque and let it go.

When I was a student in New Orleans in the 70s, I used to take the streetcar down to the Quarter every Tuesday to get the Sunday NY Times and sit by the river if the weather was good and catch up on the news from the world outside the bayou.

I imagine that's the function this news stand used to play for students in Cambridge of the same period. The stuff of stories, but it clearly not part of anyone's future.

 12/18/2008; 2:30:21 PM  

Two people I respect enormously, John Gruber and Michael Gartenberg, both joined in the discussion of what netbooks are with the same theory.

"What is the difference between a 'netbook' and a 'really cheap laptop that runs something other than Vista?' -- asks Gruber.

On Twitter, Gartenberg asks the question, and answers it. "Are netbooks a new category of device or just small, cheap laptops? I think the latter."

Not so fast!!

First, I agree that a netbook is a cheap laptop, although of course I'd prefer "inexpensive," but let's not quibble. It's that, and it's a new market category. As usual I have a story to go with my opinion.

Back in 2004 I was living in Seattle and one day I was hanging out at Microsoft, and Jeff Sandquist showed me a computer that changed my life, a small netbook-size Sony Vaio. It was an instantly charming computer, it spoke to me -- it said, no it screamed -- YOU WANT ME. It was like meeting the most beautiful woman in the world, an experience I have had, btw. When that happens the only thing the alpha male psyche knows to do is GO GET IT.

I went home and ordered one the same day, and when it arrived my then-favorite laptop became a desktop and the Vaio went everywhere with me.

Then one day in 2006, the Vaio broke. I tried to get it fixed, but it wasn't possible. And search as hard as I could, I couldn't find a replacement. It seems Sony had decided that this model Vaio had been a failure and apparently stopped making it. I literally couldn't find something in that size, a sub-12-inch laptop. They didn't make them, at any price.

Until one day I saw a comment on FriendFeed about the Asus Eee PC 901 and what a lovely thing it was. As with the Vaio I bought one on impulse, and it was everything I hoped it would be. They had picked up the baton from Sony.

The point to both John and Michael is that until the netbooks came along this was an empty category. That they are cheap is a great bonus, but I would have bought one at two or three times the price. The small footprint laptop has always been a market imho, and it hasn't been served fully until the netbooks came along.

Update #1: Apparently they do still sell the Vaio I liked so much. But the price is $3199.99. That's almost ten times the price of a decent netbook!

Update #2: This picture illustrates the difference between a laptop and netbook computer. Which would you throw in a knapsack?

 12/18/2008; 7:16:27 AM  

In October, I wrote a piece that explained why I like netbooks. It listed a set of criteria that says if something is a netbook or not. Yes, it's my opinion. But someone has to start this conversation. There have been some ridiculous ideas of what netbooks are and aren't. According to Steve Jobs, an iPhone is netbook. Heh. He's making a joke. It's funny. I have an iPhone and I like it -- but I have a netbook too.

Anyway, without further ado, here's my list of what makes a netbook a netbook.

1. Small size.

2. Low price.

3. Battery life of 4+ hours. Battery can be replaced by user.

4. Atom processor.

5. Rugged.

6. Built-in wifi, 3 USB ports, SD card reader. Ethernet, SVGA, webcam, audio in and out.

7. Runs any software I want (no platform vendor to decide what's appropriate).

8. Competition (users have choice and can switch vendors at any time).

9. Windows XP.

All these things are important. I think we could make room for a Macintosh netbook, but it's tough because one of the things that's super important is that we're not locked into a vendor. I could replace my netbook with an MSI or Acer, even though I've bought two Eee PCs. Apple could make their operating system run on the hardware these other guys make, so they could ship a netbook that meets these criteria. But we're all pretty sure, if they deign to make a netbook, that it won't offer users this choice. We'll have to wait to see how it feels, but I'm not sure if I'd switch to an Apple netbook, even though I use a Macintosh desktop and use Mac Minis as my entertainment center system (I have three of them). I've been able to integrate XP computers into this network without too much difficulty. (Which surprised me, when I switched to Macs in 2005, I thought I'd never use Windows again.)

Another concern came up in a recent thread on FriendFeed with Kevin Tofel of GigaOm, who is one of my closest netbook buddies. We share information and pretty much share a philosophy of netbooks. He says there's still a cloud over XP, that Microsoft says they're going to withdraw it at some point. They keep saying that. To which I said, Geez Louise guys, come on -- you have a winner. Microsoft has to be the most out to lunch technology company out there. By now you'd think they'd realize that the market doesn't want a new operating system, that XP is just fine, thank you. But they have their own reasons, like the auto makers, to do what they do. Or the journalists. The last people they'd let drive the market are the users, right? Microsoft is basically a full employment charity for operating system programmers. They should let all those programmers go, and hire some new ones from the user community, fix bugs and give the users what they want. Of if they insist, keep them employed, but please let us continue to use XP. It's not a half-bad operating system and its cheap and runs on cheap hardware. We like it!

Microsoft's attitude about XP reminds me of the National Lampoon issue where they had a picture of a cute dog with a gun pointed to his head. The headline said: If you don't buy this magazine we'll kill this dog. (Ouch.)

Update #1: Don MacArthur says the purpose of Vista is DRM. That's why Microsoft wants to kill XP. And maybe that's why we like netbooks -- you can watch a movie or listen to a podcast without hassles.

Update #2: Other features you should expect to find on your netbook: a webcam, audio in and out. AM Pressman says some netbooks only have two USB ports. That's debatable. It's amazing how quickly the market has rejected products without all the features of the others. Two USB ports are the minimum you can get by with. Three really is pretty important, beyond "nice to have." I added the webcam and audio features to the list, above.

Update #3: People immediately say that I should broaden the definition or narrow it to include or exclude their idea of a netbook. That's not what I'm trying to do, though. There really is a specific product the market is settling on, and it's happening quickly. Partially due to constraints Microsoft is putting on XP licensees; and partially because there are applications that require certain configurations. I'm not trying to influence anyone, I don't have that power and don't seek it. I'm doing something pretty much like reporting -- this is what I see. You may see soemthing else, or may have a different purpose, and you can (of course) to write your own piece explaining netbooks.

 12/17/2008; 11:46:41 AM  

See this FriendFeed post.

http://bit.ly/BrEAf

Thanks!

 12/17/2008; 6:49:36 PM  

German author Arno Schmidt was my great-uncle on my mother's side, my maternal grandmother's younger brother. I never met him, but when he died in 1979, my mother ended up with a collection of his writing. We want to donate these writings to a library for long-term preservation. We're going to do this slowly and carefully, because we want to do right by an ancestor, but also to learn as much as possible about the process to apply to preserving digital archives. I'll write more about the book collection later.

I also have a taped interview with Lucy Schmidt Kiesler, my grandmother, done by a Schmidt biographer, which I'm going to digitize and then release as an MP3 podcast. It'll be the first time I've heard my grandmother's voice since she died in 1977.

Today I want to see if it's possible to do some detective work to find some of my great uncle's letters to my grandmother, his sister -- from his home in Germany to her home in Rockaway.

Here's what I know. According to my mother, in 1977, a doctoral student from the University of Texas, Kenneth Wayne Egan, visited and with permission, studied the letters, which had been left to my mother by her mother, my grandmother, Arno Schmidt's sister. Apparently Mr. Egan took the letters, according to my mother, without permission. One thing's certain -- we don't at this time have the letters.

I have a letter from Dr. H-B.Moeller, Assoc Prof in the Department of Germanic Languages, thanking my mother for her help and hoping that she would extend her welcome, if needed again, in the future. My mother says she attempted to contact Dr. Moeller to inquire about the letters, but he didn't respond.

I scanned the letter and uploaded it to Flickr. Click on the thumbnail below to see the full image.



We did some searching and found Egan's doctoral dissertation mentioned in the bibliography of an analysis of Schmidt's Zettle's Traum. It's possible the originals are in a library at the University of Texas. If so, they should be returned to my mother so we can include them with the collection of our books in our donation. I'm not saying that Egan, or Moeller or the University of Texas did anything wrong, memories can fade over 30-plus years. But we believe the letters belong with the rest of Schmidt's writings, as a collection. In any case, it would be helpful to know where they are.

Update: Jeff Beckham sent a link to Dr. Moeller's page on the University of Texas website. I sent him an email asking for his help in locating the letters.

 12/16/2008; 8:55:13 AM  

Yesterday I posted a video of US President George Bush having a pair of shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist while yelling insults at him. Bush did what you'd hope he'd do, he ducked -- then came back up unbelievably with a half-grin on his face, just before ducking again as the guy threw his other shoe.



I also posted a number of questions on Twitter that I should have posted here, which would have made more clear my concern.

1. Will Secret Service make reporters remove shoes?

2. Bush is POTUS. Such disrespect of US is bad

3. Will they throw shoes at Obama? Will we think that's funny?

4. What if it escalates? Where is the line where it stops being entertainment?

Now Twitter is the opposite of verbose. In a blog post I can fully explain, which I will now do...

First and foremost until January 20, Bush is more than Bush, he is the President of the United States. When you throw shoes at this guy, until then, you're also throwing them at the office, and at the country. If you're an American and your pride in your country isn't offended by this, then well, you're different than me. I think Bush is the worst President we've ever had. But until he's out of office, he is our President. I hope we make it to January 20 without paying more dearly for our terrible choice.

Second, I found, from watching the video, over and over, that while I saw the humor in it, and I laughed out loud, that I can't help sympathizing with the guy who's being attacked. I admire his spirit. He didn't get angry, he sort of acted like a goalie, and fielded the shots. But as funny as it is, it is sad for us.

The day-after reaction in the Arab world confirms this. They can get away with throwing shoes at the President. What's next? Shit? What if one of those shoes had injured the man? Do we want discourse to go this way? And then what if someone throws shoes at Obama. Can you imagine there wouldn't be a response from the US? There better be or else the next symbol to go could be something bigger -- but wait a minute -- there is no symbol bigger than our President.

If you're not an American, imagine your leader visiting our country and being physically attacked this way by an American. Yes I fully understand that the Iraqis have legitimate issues with America and with Bush, but a visiting leader of a foreign country is entitled to some respect and protection. Otherwise how can we have relations? It's the same principle that provides immunity for diplomats.

This is no good. Sorry if you don't understand, when people say the shoes were being thrown at the man and not the office and not the country, I can't agree. Until the 20th of January, there's no difference between the three.

 12/15/2008; 10:49:33 AM  

Not sure what to make of the announcement that Twitter is becoming part of Google's federation. That could be the wrong way to describe it. Here's what I do know. You'll be able to use your Twitter ID to sign on to any site that supports Google's API and the relationships between you and your followers and the people you follow will somehow be reflected in the Google "social graph." It'll be interesting to see how this works because "follow" isn't mutual, if I follow you it doesn't mean that you follow me, where friendship in social networks is two-way.

Also unsure of how safe this is for Twitter. Once they've let Google have a shot at their users this way, how far a reach is it for Google to provide a Twitter-like service to all of Twitter's users and all of their users? Maybe this isn't interesting for some reason?

Update #1: Twitter is also connecting with Facebook.

Update #2: And leaves MySpace wondering WTF.

 12/15/2008; 10:38:24 AM  

My credit card account got hacked, leaving me in a sticky wicket when I got to NY. I was able to convince the credit card company to let me check in, just, and then when I got to the room they cancelled the card. As a result various services will try to bill that card and will fail (I've been through this before). Most of them come at the end of the month, but Netflix tried to bill the account the day after it was cancelled, and I was still in NY and hadn't received the new card yet. But they put my "account on hold" anyway -- which means if I thought of a movie to add to my queue in the meantime, tough noogies, no payee no queuee. No grace period, even though I've been a subscriber in good standing since 2001 or so. Assholes.

The stupid thing about it is I'm on the verge of shutting down Netflix anyway. I've exhausted my imagination of old movies to have them send me. I usually don't even watch the ones I order, I just send them right back, and it makes me feel guilty that I'm contributing to global warming. But Markman just posted a long list of great 1930s films, and I wanted to check them out in Netflix, but nooooooooo... I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

I've always said Netflix should be about the intersection between movies and the Internet, and they should own that space, and never under any circumstances close the site to an avid film user, esp one who has been paying $20 per month steadily year after year. What a bunch of losers!!

 12/15/2008; 10:07:39 AM  

I didn't know so many 20s and 30s film enthusiasts were tuned in to Scripting News. I am one myself, the 30s were probably the biggest growth decade for film, at the dawn of the decade sound was just coming out (I was wrong yesterday, The Jazz Singer was of course the first picture with sound, 1927).

A commenter posted a pointer to a Chris Pirillo piece that explains in great detail how to download an MP4 of a YouTube video. The Cliff Notes version: Right-click on this link, choose Bookmark This Link. Then when you're on a YouTube page whose video you want, just choose the Bookmark menu item, and save it to your local hard drive.

I tried it with Singin in the Rain, and it worked, and now I have a copy in my archive on Amazon S3, so it's less likely to disappear in the future.

Re yesterday's piece, I'm still wanting to create a list of all the people in the song, in order. I only know who a few of them are.

 12/15/2008; 9:30:42 AM  

I've been looking for this song, in video, for years -- and today I found it on YouTube, while flying from NY to SF on American Airlines flight 15.

It was the closing song of the Hollywood Revue of 1929, the first talking picture, which is actually in the public domain. I'd like to download an archive of this video in case it disappears from YouTube (one that was there about a week ago did disappear, for no good reason, since it is public domain).



I know who a few of the actors are, but I'd like to know the names of all of them.

A young Joan Crawford is the second in the review.



Two later is Buster Keaton, the only one who isn't singing.



I'm sure Jack Benny is in there somewhere, as is Conrad Nagel.



Marie Dressler is the old woman, third from last.



Who is this guy? He looks like he could be a friend of mine (of course no matter, all these people are long-dead).



The 1930s was a golden age of movies. So much great stuff, culminating in one of the best years -- 1939.

 12/14/2008; 4:04:57 PM  

I'm on an American Airlines flight from New York to San Francisco. It has wifi from Gogo Inflight.

Aside from immediately posting a note on Twitter, I checked to see if it had enough bandwidth to access my Slingbox, and it does. I'm listening to the roundtable on This Week while I write this.

Before we left I took a picture of the plane and uploaded it. Maybe later I'll take some morepics .

I got a special offer of 25 percent off the $12.95 price.

All the more reason for American Airlines to have clip art for blog posts now that we're going to be blogging from the air.

According to Speakeasy, I'm getting 1201 kbps up and 269 down.

 12/14/2008; 8:38:03 AM  

Cold and rainy and wintry here.

Been riding the subways, meeting with friends, walking a lot, bundled up and finding lots of free unsecured wireless all over the city, unlike the Bay Area where everything's locked up.

Another secret of NY, if you need a warm dry place to hang out for an hour or more with no one hassling you to buy stuff, try the lobby of a big hotel. There are lots of them, and they're public places, and often have free coffee. Someday they'll close these places or figure out how to charge for them, but for now they're noisy amenities that are open all the time. Across from me in the New York Sheraton lobby there's a mother and daughter playing cards, people reaidng newspapers, business people talking deals, and no one seems to be in any kind of a rush. I have my Asus 1000H with 5 hours of battery life and nothing to do for 45 minutes. I bought a Starbuck's at the bar, over-priced for sure, so I hope they're getting a fair deal from me. Christmas music playing (I could live without but) -- it seems fitting.

Yesterday I had dinner with my book agent Steve Hanselman at the Capital Grille under a huge portrait of JP Morgan. I promised a portrait of Morgan on Scripting.

This morning I had breakfast with Anil Dash of SixApart, and got his pic with David Jacobs, also of SixApart. This is an alternate universe, one of my best friends is named David Jacobs. No relation. The one here is a Mets fan and the one in SF is a Cubs fan. They both feel like brothers, for different reasons.

 12/11/2008; 10:10:17 AM  

 12/11/2008; 10:26:51 AM  

Changing planes here for NY/JFK.

Going to take the AirTrain into NY, this time I'm going to get on the LIRR in Jamaica and ride it into Penn Station.

I hear from people who are regular JFKers that this is much better than taking the A train fom Howard Beach, which is how I got there last time.

The guy behind me on the plane is talking on the phone, being very stern, and talking about screening a movie in DC for "Barak." He is wearing two hats. And being pretty rude to everyone around. Thankfully they don't allow people to use their phones when we're in the air.

I'm doing crosswords and watching an American Experience episode on the Crash of 1929. Remarkable how many parallels there are to 2008. Basically we unwound a lot of the regulations that were put in place after the crash, so we got another one.

People are telling the guy behind me that they "Love your work." Wonder who he is. Didn't get a good look. He's black and wearing two hats, and is kind of short but he doesn't look like Spike Lee. I'm so clueless. You can quote me.

I don't want to be rude and turn around and stare.

Last time I sat near someone famous on an airplane it was Suze Orman.

 12/9/2008; 9:55:24 AM  

Does it have an API?

Funny thought perhaps, or maybe only in the Bay Area -- but our subway system -- BART, has an API. And it's kind of fun. I spent a couple of hours today hacking together an application, it's not all that useful, but one of these days something else will get an API that plugs in nicely and something interesting will happen.

Here are the docs for the BART API.

And the docs for the real-time ETA feed.

And the ETA feed itself.

Clearly it's a straight dump of the database of the BART trains that are running right now, and the time of their expected arrival at the various stations on the network.

I wrote an app that loads the XML into a database on my server once a minute, it's quite quick -- and then it looks for trains that are arriving right now, and sends a tweet saying something like: "The train to Richmond is arriving at the Downtown Berkeley BART station."

This would generate far too many tweets to be humane, no one in their right mind would want to follow a user that was announcing the arrivals of every train in every station on the BART network, which isn't even that big a network. You can imagine what a PITA that app would be for a subway system like NY or London. Not cool.

So instead I had it only report on trains arriving from any direction at the three Berkeley BART stations, Ashby, Downtown and North Berkeley. That's a manageable number of tweets. And that suggested a name for the feed: BerkeleyBart. Which sounds like something from a cowboy cartoon or a Henry Fonda western starring Jimmy Stewart and Raquel Welch with Buddy Hackett as the kooky sidekick. Okay enough of that.

It's a cute little thing, nothing earth-shaking, but I wonder if it's correct. Next time I'm at a Berkeley BART station I'll check it out and see if it correctly calls the arrivals of trains.

Also it seems like just the thing Scoble will like. He's into trains and Twitter and really strange things. I've also set it up so it works with FriendFeed.

 12/8/2008; 5:54:32 PM  

Intelligence and creativity are great, highly valued by our civilization, and so is vision; and when we think of vision, we usually think of far-reaching vision, but... The hardest stuff to see is often the stuff in front of your nose, in plain sight. Your eyes gloss over it, seeing only what you expect to see. So when you look at the world, you see a reflection of what's inside yourself. The world could change, but the change goes unperceived. Or flipped around, something about you changed, and you think (incorrectly) that the whole world changed.

Programmers, as I've said many times, learn this over and over. We can't bury our mistakes, unlike other vocations. If you want to move on you have to figure out what's wrong. And almost always the mistake is one of your perception. Your eye glosses over the code and you see what you expect, even though what you actually typed is different. You can't move on until your vision improves.

I love puzzles that reveal this. I love Don's Amazing Puzzle, first shown to me by Don Brown, a programmer in Iowa. You try to count the F's in a sentence. It's just an ordinary sentence, swear to god there's no trick. But when I tried it, I got the wrong count. I repeated it over and over, still got the wrong answer. I swore it must be a semantic game, that the answer was zero or Tuesday or something stupid like that, so I wrote a script to count the F's and the script got it right! Oy.

Two people I knew at the time got the correct answer right away, one of them was a professional editor, and had developed a technique for doing this kind of review. Knowing that the human mind glosses over surprises, he reads sentences backwards. Ahh! When you break the routine your filters can't engage.

I've noticed another trick that doesn't make me more intelligent or creative, rather it increases my awareness, and the net effect is that I am more creative and smarter. When I'm out for a walk, waiting for a light to change, I watch my feet when I step off the curb. I always step off with my right foot. So I try instead to step off with my left foot. It requires some serious work to do this. But I find that I'm more aware as I walk if I do.

Another one, I could stare at a piece of code and swear the machine wasn't processing it correctly, but I know that's not the correct answer. Instead, I get up, refill my water glass, or walk around the block, or write a short post, and come back, then all of a sudden the bug pops out at me. Taking a break, taking your eyes out of context and bringing them back also improves your vision.

Anyway, back to my busy day!

PS: If you like this story, you'll probably like the story about the kids in a circle and the heads and the feet.

 12/8/2008; 7:40:53 AM  

I'm a longtime Twitter user, and as you may know a very regular user of FriendFeed. Each has its strengths but if I had to choose, sort of like Sophie's Choice, I'd have to go with FriendFeed. I finally figured out why this is a few days ago as I was experimenting with a real-time photo-flow app. It could be done in either Twitter or FriendFeed, but in FF it's graphic and in color, in Twitter, it's like a command-line operating system. Then it hit me, Twitter is to FriendFeed (in 2008) what MS-DOS was to the Mac (in 1984). Have we come full circle? Amazingly I think we have.

In the 80s, MS-DOS users argued whether or not we needed a graphic operating system. "Need" was the big idea. They said they could do everything you could do with a Mac on the PC, and they were more than right about that -- they could do more on the PC than you could do on a Mac because there was more software for it. In 1984 the Mac had a lousy spreadsheet and a cheap word processor, and whole categories completely missing like databases. This is analogous to the correct argument that Twitter has more people to connect with, and of course that's the whole point of both products -- connecting with people. Twitter wins that one, hands-down, nolo contendere. And FriendFeed, even in its name, admits that this is the game, after all it's called FriendFeed, not CoolFeaturesFeed, although of course, that's why I like it.

But it's undeniable, when a picture shows up in FriendFeed it looks like a picture, not like a url. And when a YouTube video appears, yup -- it looks like a video not a url. MS-DOS users sniffed at WYSIWYG back then, as Twitter users today sniff at a visual twitstream, but the MS-DOS users were wrong, history proved that, and I think the Twitter users are wrong too.

I've been calling this The Graphics Gap, with a hat-tip to Dr. Strangelove, a satire of the nuclear arms race of the 60s and 70s, when the Russians and Americans worried about a missile gap, space gap, doomsday gap, and eventually (according to the satire) a mineshaft gap.

Now, on the other hand...

Yesterday I went into the city for a chat with tech industry guru Om Malik. Of course the conversation turned to Twitter and FriendFeed -- Om said something I hear a lot. When he goes to FriendFeed he doesn't know what to make of it. I totally understand, there are still parts of FriendFeed that I, a devoted user, have never explored. It took me months to realize that "Like" was the feature I kept asking for. It's hard to find things I post there, even something I posted yesterday. An item I posted two months ago all of a sudden pops to the surface because someone commented on it or Liked it. Unless you're very curious, or devoted to understanding this category, as I am, FF often remains a puzzle, where -- as Om noted -- Twitter is so simple anyone can understand it in a few minutes.

Hence the premise of this piece. I believe that there is space between Twitter and FriendFeed for a service that's dumber than FriendFeed and richer than Twitter. Start with what Twitter does and add the graphics that FriendFeed has. I know some people will say that's Pownce, but it's not (though Pownce was pretty nice). I don't want full blog posts, I like the 140-character limit, and I can skip out on the discussion features that FF has that Twitter doesn't. But I think a graphic and visual Twitter would kick ass, the same way the Macintosh eventually kicked MS-DOS's ass in the 80s and early 90s.

 12/7/2008; 7:40:27 AM  

Here's how the tech industry cycle goes.

A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch. They find that they can make things happen that the previous generation couldn't cause they were so mired in the complexity of the systems they had built. The new systems become popular with "power users" -- people who yearn to overcome the limits of the previous generation. It's exhilirating!

Some of those power users are venture capitalists, they're hanging around looking for things to invest in, and they pick a few things that look like winners. When I was fresh and dewy, part of the new crop of techies, these people were Mike Markkula who funded Apple, and Ben Rosen who funded Compaq and Lotus. In later generations they were different people, of course.

So the new folks, freshly funded, hire lots of people, young'uns like themselves who are doing it The New Way. They ship some products, and while the users are happy and excited about all the cool new things they can do with the new generation, now that they're freed of the limits of the previous one, they still want all the features they had come to expect in the old days. No problem! The new companies hire more people and they add all the features of the old generation. Feature wars follow, and the users get bored, and a new generation of techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch.

Round and round and round we go.

We're now reaching the end of a cycle, we're seeing feature wars. That's what's going on between Facebook and Google, both perfectly timing the rollouts of their developer proposition to coincide with the others' -- on the very same day! I don't even have to look at them and I am sure that they're too complicated. Because I've been around this loop so many times. The solution to the problem these guys are supposedly working on won't come in this generation, it can only come when people start over. They are too mired in the complexities of the past to solve this one. Both companies are getting ready to shrink. It's the last gasp of this generation of technology.

But the next one can't be far away now. It will be exhilirating!!

Remember how great Google was when it first appeared?

Remember how great Netscape was, and before that Apple, and I know you guys won't like this, but Microsoft offered us some great new places to play. I remember finding out that their OS address space in 1981 was 640K. That was a lot to guy who was spending huge amounts of time trying to cram a 256K app into 48K.

The trick in each cycle is to fight complexity, so the growth can keep going. But you can't keep it out, engineers like complexity, not just because it provides them job security, also because they really just like it. But once the stack gets too arcane, the next generation throws their hands up and says "We're not going to deal with that mess."

We're almost there now.

Update: For a clue to how deeply mired in crud we are right now, check out this discussion among users and developers about OpenID. No one has a clue what problem its supposed to solve.

 12/4/2008; 6:43:19 PM  

When we talk about news on the net the conversation is dominated by the interests of news organizations. The stories we tell are from their point of view. The vexing problems we face are their problems, not ours. That's been the point of the series of pieces I've been writing about news. I do care about the people of news, as I care about the people of the car industry and the people who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers. And the 10K contractors who may be laid off at Google. But for the sake of this discussion, what I really care about is news and how it's going to get from them that have to them that want.

In a comment yesterday I said it's often overlooked that while the Internet makes some things that we used to do diseconomic, if you took the Internet away some things we've come to expect would go away too. All the stuff people call "crowd-sourcing" -- the million eyeballs that are constantly watching, and the thousands of them that are there when news happens.

I watched a bunch of campaign events this year, and one of the things that's largely been unreported is how much reporting goes on at them. I first noticed it when Hillary came out on stage to make her concession speech. Immediately every pair of hands in the room goes up, not in salute, not cheering -- each pair held a digital camera, and they were capturing images of the Clinton family. There's no doubt if you wanted a picture of that event you could get many to choose from.

It was something else at Mile High Stadium for the Obama acceptance event. It seemed everyone there was taking in the history of it, and again, the cameras were everywhere.

Look at this striking picture of the audience at the Obama rally in Berlin, taken from Obama's perspective. This is what he must have been seeing as he went across the country. Recording devices of every kind, all pointed at him. (A fair number of American flags too, which gave me goose bumps.)

Now if there isn't something we can do with the next generation of networking tools that's truly exciting and enabling, then we need to hang it up and let someone else drive for a while. In a couple of years every one of those devices will be replaced (knock wood, praise Murphy) and will they communicate better? I hope so! At the same time, we need to work on software and networking tools that allow us to process millions of pictures of an event and do intelligent things with it. When I was in Boulder in August I saw such a tool.

Update: VentureBeat has an excellent description of Occipital. "If multiple people upload multiple photographs from the same event around the same time, Occiptial will figure out that an event just happened and classify the photographs accordingly. Doing this right is really, really hard, yet with two people, Occipital seems to have done it. This team is scary good."

I've also been playing with a flow of thousands of professional photographs every day. It's really something to wrap your mind around, but after almost a year, I'm beginning to understand what kind of editorial tools you need to make sense of such a flow.

And that's always the tough problem, in my experience, making sense of the information. That's what reporters do. But it's all happening now on such a huge scale, we need new systems to grapple with it.

Do I think there could be money-making ventures built off this flow? Absolutely. What are they? Not sure yet.

 12/3/2008; 7:12:19 AM  

TechCrunch: "TechCrunch readers can now use their Facebook accounts to sign in before leaving comments."

Interesting. And it integrates with Facebook's news feed.

I left a comment suggesting they do the same for Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Very easy to validate a name with any of those services, though the companies didn't make a big deal about it. I'd like to see some of the smaller developers get a chance to play in league with the big guys. They could also share a pointer to your comment in the flow of any of the services, their APIs make it brain-dead simple to do.

Update: There's another reason for a site like TC to federate with the three sites above. Some of us don't use Facebook, but are regular readers of TC. I do have an account on FB, of course, but I almost never check it. I get FB friendship requests from people I haven't seen in years, and care about, and it makes me sad that I don't have the bandwidth to add Facebook to my rotation, I just don't think about it. But... I recently added a connection between Disqus and Friendfeed, and I like what's happening there. I am a constant user of both software tools, so connecting them makes a lot of sense. Any time I post a comment anywhere on Discqus's network, it propogates to FriendFeed. TC is not on the Disqus net, but I would like it to be on the FF net. I think it makes sense for TC to support any site that a significant number of their readers use.

 12/3/2008; 10:59:18 AM  

 12/3/2008; 2:46:23 PM  

Its been a long time since I written about XML-RPC, it's one of those things that when I do, the flamers show up and get all personal. I shouldn't let that get in the way, of course; and while I wasn't looking, for example, Mozilla baked-in support for XML-RPC. Not sure what you can do with that, but I'm sure someone will explain.

The other day when I asked about an XML-RPC interface for ImageMagick, Justin Walgran took me up on it, and deployed one on Google AppEngine. Now that makes sense for so many reasons. A perfect application for AppEngine, and since its native language is Python, and Python has great XML-RPC support (we upgraded ours in Frontier based on their inspiration, the highest form of respect), it was not a very large programming project.

Hopefully I'll be able to test it out today, once we know the name of the procedure, what server its running on, and what parameters it takes.

I made a suggestion in the comments that where the procedure calls for the image itself, that it accept the URL of the image. This would work better for my app because by the time it needs the thumbnail it has already uploaded the image to an HTTP-accessible server. It would work better to not have to upload it twice.

So the procedure would look something like this:

imageMagick.createThumb (image, height, width) returns binary

Where image can either be a binary type containing a JPEG, GIF or PNG graphic; or a string that contains an HTTP URL to the graphic. Height and width are numbers that reflect the desired height and width of the thumbnail. It returns a binary type containing a PNG (?) thumbnail.

Of course if there's an error it uses the XML-RPC exception mechanism.

Needless to say this is a very interesting project to me. And if someone wants to create an equivalent REST application, I will promote it alongside the XML-RPC application.

Update: Imagin appears to be exactly what I was looking for. It's fast, flexible, takes a URL as an image parameter. Very nice. What's not clear is how hard you can drive it without pissing him off.

 12/3/2008; 3:13:46 AM  

Jeff Jarvis responds to my series of pieces about news after the hypothetical collapse of the news industry. I wrote a comment there, which I'm reproducing here, with some light edits.

Jeff, the stuff you're justifying is the stuff that's going away, that there is no money to support. If we all care about the news, and making sure that it gets from the people who have it to the people who want it, we're going to have to learn how to do it without all the heavy iron. It seems to me the responsible thing for the news industry to do, while it is laying off its reporters and editors and the rest, is to help us come up with a Plan B -- what we will do for news once all that is gone.

An analogy -- imagine a group of doctors knew that the hospitals and pharmacies were about to shut down. What would they do? Might they do something to make sure their client's health needs were at least partially attended to?

The same would presumably apply to many other professions, whose services are in some way necessary for life: police, fire, bus drivers, teachers, garbage collectors.

We're often asked to believe how noble the profession of news is -- now that is about to be tested in a whole new way. Are we just supposed to cry for this industry and throw our hands up and wait for the collapse before starting to put it back together, or would they like to help while they're still here?

Here's a question I ask people privately to help focus their thinking... Suppose there were no NY Times tomorrow, and you heard somewhere, maybe on Politco or Huffpost or Memeorandum that it had gone out of business and was never going to publish again.

1. How would you feel?

2. What would you do?

3. What should the Times have done but didn't do before they shut down?

Food for thought.

It's time to have this conversation Jeff. Imho.

Update: Scott Rosenberg checks in on the thread. "Victimhood is written deeply in the culture of the newsroom."

Newsosaur: "A newspaper that cannot sell enough advertising or cut enough expenses to sustain profitable operations is not likley to make it to the other side of 2009."

 12/2/2008; 11:10:06 AM  

On Sunday, I wished for a web service that would take an image, a height and a width, and return a thumbnail for the image.

Andrew Burton put up a service, I gave it a try, with no luck. Maybe we can get this working. Ideally, I'd like to run it on the same machine as the application that calls it, since the images can be fairly large.

Here's a text file containing the text, and the picture I used.

 12/2/2008; 9:50:15 AM  

I was a Pownce user. (Ack it can't find my page -- and I was a premium, paying user! Oy. When did that happen?)

There were some things I liked about it, but I agree it's time to pull the plug.

I stopped using it when:

1. Twitter got its act together and stopped acting like a Norwegian parrot pining for the fjords.

2. FriendFeed occupied the space above Twitter, as the messaging system with more (than Twitter). FriendFeed has never had trouble staying up.

The biggest problem with Pownce was:

1. It couldn't handle even a modest load. It would get very very slow when anything interesting started happening, therefore keeping anything interesting from happening.

The one thing Pownce got right was:

1. It had payloads!

Three things that slowed adoption of Pownce beyond the inability to handle a load:

1. It was in private beta for a long, long time.

2. It took forever for it to get an API.

3. When the API finally came it wasn't compatible with anything.

Net-net, there were interesting things about Pownce, and we'll remember it with a certain amount of fondness.

Hopefully Leah can take what she's learned and turn out something great at SixApart.

I'd recommend: Twitter-Plus-Plus. (With lots of interop, and do the payloads thing again, they need a kick in the ass over there at Twitter to get it into their product.)



 12/1/2008; 1:22:17 PM