The other day I posted an idea for titles of feeds for personal or corporate feeds, wishing that they would say, in the title whose feed it is. It would make for better rivers.

Now here's a similar idea for web services that produce RSS feeds (which by the way we are very grateful for).

Example: Pinterest feed for Dave Winer

Now, consider the title of the actual feed. It's just Dave Winer. When an item from that feed shows up in a river there's no easy way to know if it came from Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Posterous, Path, Quora or Pinterest.

Much better to spell it out: Dave Winer's Pinterest feed.

Finally, I just want to say how happy I was to see that Pinterest is producing a good RSS 2.0 feed for this very fast-growing service. That means we can integrate it into the work that we're doing, and you can integrate it in work that you're doing. It becomes an input device for anything you can dream up. That's the way people should do technology.

Thanks!!

 12/11/2011; 12:42:38 PM.   .

I think it now works as it's supposed to. 

Amazing how "sleeping on it" helps you find the bug!

Here's a podcast I did with Doc Searls in 2007 at an NPR conference.

 12/11/2011; 9:10:16 AM.   .

Sorry for the intrusion but I need another podcast test.  

This one is an MP3.

 12/10/2011; 6:54:04 PM.   .

I did some work earlier today on the podcatcher part of River2.  

This seven-minute podcast is just a test, though I ramble a bit about where we're at with this project.

Feel free to ignore!

 12/10/2011; 5:53:10 PM.   .

Following up on yesterday's piece about sexism in tech reporting.

I finally got access to the new-new web user interface for Twitter late last night, and have some conclusions after a few hours of use.

First, the Times should definitely get a movie critic to work on tech stuff, someone who wouldn't be so snowed by company PR. Because this release is just a re-arrangement of the existing user interface. It's not more or less accessible to non-tech-savvy users than the original interface. The only thing it's going to accomplish is to burn braincells of existing users. I don't think it will cause anyone to stop using Twitter, but it's really hard to imagine it encouraging anyone to start.

If this were a Muppet movie we'd be amazed they were calling it a new movie, because the puppets sing all the same songs. Maybe Kermit sings one song that Miss Piggy used to sing. And maybe the songs are in a different order. But to call this a new movie? Well, it's not in any way anything new.

I looked everywhere for a hint of some innovation that would simplify things in a non-cosmetic way and came up with nothing.

Of course if I overlooked anything, putting up this post will get them posted as comments, so stay tuned.

Below is a test of the new Embed-A-Tweet feature. Thanks to Shea for the howto.

But no matter what, once again, the tech press completely blew it. None of the reports explained why this release was so good for new users, just that it was. And Twitter Corp got their way. By giving the story to press who are known to simply rewrite press releases, they didn't get any negative reviews.

This system is ripe for reform. I think that's the real story here. And it's not a new one either. Every few years the tech industry goes through this kind of turn. It's one manifestation of a bubble-burst.

 12/10/2011; 8:56:06 AM.   .

When I think of scripting, I go back to the shell scripts I wrote when I was learning Unix in the 70s. That was the great thing about the OS, compared to the Apple II which I used next, and IBM mainframes which I used before. You could tie the apps together with little programs you wrote yourself that moved the output of one app to the input of another. That meant it was easy to print to a file or a printer, or pipe the output of a program to something that would transmit it somewhere else. And when it got there another script could take it and move it through an app on that machine (maybe a mail gateway) and on its way it goes. You could set up all kinds of gadgets. Back when our computers didn't do very much you actually had time to get things Just So.

Just So might be what scripts are all about. It's about making your environment yours. Somewhere along the line we lost our way with scripting, and now our newest systems aren't even scriptable. That is even if you had the time to tweak them up (no one does) you can't.

The place where we actually have the time now are the newest platforms -- mobile devices. Because they are used in places that heretofore we weren't able to compute. They aren't good for writing (not much at least, not for me). But as you're leaving who wants to spend the time to set them up Just So, so that all the stuff we want there is there when we are far away from our desktops. But if you could do it once, and run it forever, that might just work.

The script on your desktop would ask over and over -- Is the mobile device here? Is the mobile device here? Is the mobile device here? When it is, shake its hand and do your thing. And over on the other side would be a similar script saying Are we home yet? Are we home yet? You write both of these, so you control what happens when they touch.

What it takes to really pull this off are better tools and really free environments. Ones that are so free that no one is commercially interested in them, for a while -- so no one can screw them up. I know Android has scripting, but I don't trust Google. I think if we ever get anything good going there, they'll swoop in and correct us. They work for big companies, so they figure they know better than us common folk.

So maybe that's what the open source release of WebOS will come to mean. Maybe it will be the People's OS for mobile. Maybe it'll be out of range of a BigCo to mess up. Or maybe they just took it for a ride in the country and forgot to bring it home? Could be that too.

 12/9/2011; 2:18:12 PM.   .

If you're running a tech or media conference next year, please keep me in mind.

The last couple of years, for me, have been about development, writing, reflection. Now I'd like to spend some time on the road, meeting people, talking about new ideas in publishing, education, journalism, computer science. I'm interested in how the new tools can be used to facilitate change. I'm concerned that we're becoming too dependent on large corporations to manage our online communication.

My background is listed in my bio.

 12/9/2011; 9:30:43 AM.   .

The Republicans have a mantra about taxes on the rich. It goes like this.

1. Many of them are small business owners who have not incorporated, so the profit and loss of their businesses are reported on their personal tax forms.

2. These people create jobs.

3. It's "intuitive" that if taxes were to go up they'd have less incentive to grow their businesses and therefore would not create as many jobs.

When I hear this it makes me pretty angry, esp when the reporters just pass it through without checking to see if it's true. As a person who has run small businesses that create jobs, I had a pretty good idea it was wrong.

First, how many Republican politicians are business people? If they aren't how could they know what's intuitive for business people?

Second, I've never based business decisions on how much I would pay in taxes.

But NPR did something that in a world-run-right would be run-of-the-mill journalism. They checked with the sources.

They asked the Republicans for names of small business people they could interview that would confirm what they say. How many did they get? Zero. They also asked some of the lobbying groups that say the same thing. Again, no introductions. So they went online and looked for some small business people to interview, and got the same answer over and over. They played the interviews. It was inspiring! They're trying to win, in business, not win in taxes. When they have a chance to grow -- they grow, and they don't worry about whether they'll pay more or less taxes. A couple of them said taxes are too low and they worry about the country, and they would happily pay more.

That's what I love about business people. It's an art and a sport. It's best played by creative people, not bean counters, and certainly not politicians.

The Republicans have some other motive, and NPR finally had the guts to call them on it. And they did it the way it should be done. Not with a he-said-she-said piece. Those are cheap and easy. They actually went to the sources and found out.

Give these guys a prize!!

 12/9/2011; 9:13:26 AM.   .

It's always bothered me when people say they're making software for their mom, because that's a not-very-subtle dog-whistle that they're making it for people who are not technologically sophisticated. And that's being polite. I think often it's much more than that. It's one of the few forms of sexism that's still tolerated and defended. After all, how do we know that the author's mom isn't actually the person the software is designed for. Maybe they're making it for sophisticated users who happen to be women? Uh huh. If you believe that I have a nice bridge to sell you. Hardly used.

The way to tell if something is sexist (or racist or ageist or whatever ist) is to change the gender, race or age, and see if it still works.

For example, there is a story in today's NYT that says the new-new Twitter interface was designed for the author's sister. Never mind, for the moment, what the article says about his sister -- what is this headline supposed to convey? Would it convey the same idea if it said the product was designed for a brother? Obviously, not.

Now, diving into the piece, here are some of the words the author (a man, btw) uses to describe his sister:

1. A new user who finds Twitter confusing.

2. She simply didn't understand.

3. She found it incredibly confusing.

4. She's a non-techie.

5. To her the @ and # symbols don't make much sense.

6. She thinks the characters are used in place of swear words in comic strips.

7. She's afraid of the @ and # symbols.

He concludes that this new design makes sense for his sister. Which I find fairly incredible (as in not credible). Most of us haven't been able to try the new interface. Has the author's sister already tried it?

Which raises a couple of more issues.

1. Is this a marketing piece or a news piece? He accepts the company's premise without offering any judgement, any criticism, balance. Would the Times review a movie, book or any other creative act in a similar way? When I say that the general media is in awe of tech, this is what I mean.

2. I hate that large tech companies manage to completely control the initial discussion of their products by controlling who can see it. I still have not gotten access. Perhaps this is because I won't write a puff piece. I might like it, it's happened before. But I might not. Why do we put up with this? Again, would we tolerate it from other creative forms? A new art gallery that was open only to people who regurgitate the marketing message? I don't think it works that way. it's time for tech to grow up, and imho for the reporters covering it to stop playing the exact tune that the company execs call.

And stop using women as examples of confused computer users.

 12/9/2011; 8:54:04 AM.   .

Starting the community river on Scripting News was one of the best things we've ever done. Some of the people who read this site are also great bloggers. I didn't know! Now I do. (Makes sense.)

In the process I noticed something that was glaring, but somehow I didn't see.

People don't put much effort into titling their feeds. Or they use the wrong perspective. They title it as they see it, calling it "The Blog" or something like that. Yes, to you it is the blog, to the rest of us, it is just another blog. Better to tell us whose blog it is.

News orgs title their topical feeds by the topic and leave out the name of the organization. The Podunk Sun's local news feed, might be titled "Local News" but that doesn't help much unless you know it's from Podunk (just an example, for all I know the Podunk paper does this right).

The title on my feed used to be "Scripting News" but now it's Dave Winer's "Scripting News" weblog. To many people the name Scripting News doesn't mean very much. I think it should, but the fact is that for a lot of people my name is a lot more meaningful than the name of the blog. I wanted to set a good example.

The title of one of my favorite feeds is Untitled. I don't think they did it deliberately, I think it was never set.

Anyway, this is something that won't take much time that we can all do to improve communication. Include your name, or the name of the organization it represents in the title. Look at it from the point of view of the reader. That's who you have to communicate to. You already know who you are, but the reader might not.

 12/8/2011; 11:05:03 AM.   .

Let's try some open development here on Scripting News.

Yesterday's post on the new outline nodetype represented a topping-off in the functionality of the world outline software. No doubt there are more big features to add, over time, but first -- it's time to do a mix. The analogy is the job of a film editor. It's now time to take all the raw footage, scenes and dialog, music and special effects, and turn it into something with a beginning, a middle and an end and a plot that carries you through.

Basically -- I'm going to start with a fresh install of the OPML Editor on my Macbook Air, and ask myself "What would you like to publish in outline form now and how would you like to do it?"

Then I'm going to do it "by hand" and take notes. And see how I can make a super-simple power-limited user interface on the world outline. Adam and I will continue to use the full power version we have now, and it will be available to anyone who wants it. I'm thinking of journalism students and journalists, bloggers, moms, researchers, lawyers, thinkers, doctors, smart folk who want to publish their ideas. The kind of people I made software for in the 80s, who were wonderful users and appreciative and actually didn't mind spending a little money for something that made them happy.

Also thinking about how it will function as a platform for designers.

I did a lot of work here, earlier this year, to create the best templating system ever (I hope). At least it's the best templating system for any publishing tool I've done. For prior art I looked at how Tumblr does it, because the designers love it so much, and the results they achieve with it are so stunning.

But on the authoring side, the key thing is "power-limited." I know what the full-power tool looks like. I use it every day. Now the challenge is to create from all that power, a simple tool that's easy to get quick results from.

 12/8/2011; 10:34:41 AM.   .

A few people sent me a pointer to an announcement of a new Facebook push to get publications to come inside their silo. This isn't imho news. They've been working on this for a long time. It was easy to see its size and shape based on the actions they were taking. Expect a lot of announcements from major news vendors that are participating. It's probably going to be all of them, and probably governments and educational institutions as well. I don't see this as a bad thing. It could be a very good thing, esp if more people are better informed as a result.

People say they don't like that they're using what has become RSS trade dress. I don't have a strong opinion about this, at least not yet. It seems to me if what they provide works like RSS does, why shouldn't they use what has become a well-known symbol for it? Because their subscription process is sure to be a lot easier than RSS's? Maybe instead of stopping them, we should work on improving RSS's way of subscribing. Their advantage isn't technical, it's that people in the publishing industry are listening to them and doing what they want them to do. They could just as easily listen to someone who is doing it all with open formats and protocols. It's a political problem, not a technical one.

I have no standing to ask them not to use the icons. I didn't design them, and I didn't even want them. It was a fragmentation of the RSS community at the time. It's there because Mozilla blazed a new trail and Microsoft went with them, and not the default that everyone else was using. I asked them not to do it, but they didn't do what I asked them to do.

The answer isn't to stop Facebook, even if you could. The correct response is to use this impetus to get an open solution organized and developed asap so we're not all dependent on Facebook to get the news to people who want to read it. If you think you can publish a news source with integrity in that context -- you can't.

So this is a good time to think and communicate, and then quickly, do.

 12/7/2011; 12:29:59 PM.   .

Let's try some open development here on Scripting News.

I'm rolling out a new feature today. It's new stuff, so I hope it's like opening a novel to page one and finding strange characters you don't understand. But you keep reading anyway, hoping that the author will give you a page-turner plot.

I'm going to write this blog post the way I write my worknotes. It's where I think out loud. Or narrate my work. Either way is a valid way to look at it. I basically don't worry about who is listening in. Or when they're listening. Perhaps these notes will be useful someday when someone is trying to understand my code. Or perhaps to someone who is cloning my work. Either way.

Anyway, today's new feature is the beginning of a transition of the world outline to actually being viewed like an outline. How about that.

For years, it's been viewed as a directory structure. That's because my Javascript and CSS skills were almost non-existent. I had my head full of object databases and RSS and XML-RPC and such. This year I made room for JS and CSS. Now I understand them well enough to ship some relatively complex code that has a future (I hope) based on features implemented in the browser.

The idea

Expand and collapse in the browsing interface of the world outline.

The demo

Here's a demo of the feature. An outline of the Major League Baseball teams.

You can link from nodes in the outline to any other type of node, so it has all the power of OPML directories. This is important because I hope to transition the non-expandable directories to the new outline nodetype.

I've linked to a photo from a Mets game, from the Mets node in the outline. Look at the crumb trail above the picture. See how it travels through the outline. So not only is it a display structure, it's also a navigation structure. If you click any of those links, you'll go back to the outline. It's so natural it almost doesn't seem like a discrete feature (the best kind of feature).

The howto

Here's a howto that shows how an author would create one of these web-browsable outlines in the OPML Editor.

The architecture

See how URLs can be used to drill into an outline. This URL points to the Eastern Division of the National League.

A user

See how Adam Curry uses it for shownotes for his No Agenda podcast.

The OPML file

This is the OPML file for the MLB outline.

Observation -- the Set Nodetype command is your portal to happy hacking in the World Outline. It's how I got the Mets node to be a photo instead of just some text. I had to convert a copy of a thumbList node to be of type include so I could access its sub-nodes in the outliner. It blew me away when it worked, and the outline was connected to the photo from the Mets game in July.

 12/7/2011; 12:09:44 PM.   .

Let's try some open development here on Scripting News.

I'm rolling out a new feature today. Almost everyone who reads this will lack the context to understand the feature. It's like opening a novel to page one and finding strange characters you don't understand. But you keep reading anyway, hoping that the author will give you a page-turner plot.

I'm going to write this blog post the way I write my worknotes. It's where I think out loud. Or narrate my work. Either way is a valid way to look at it. I basically don't worry about who is listening in. Or when they're listening. Perhaps these notes will be useful someday when someone is trying to understand my code. Or perhaps to someone who is cloning my work. Either way.

Anyway, today's new feature is the beginning of a transition of the world outline to actually being viewed like an outline. How about that.

For years, it's been viewed as a directory structure. That's because my Javascript and CSS skills were almost non-existent. I had my head full of object databases and RSS and XML-RPC and such. This year I made room for JS and CSS. Now I understand them well enough to ship some relatively complex code that has a future (I hope) based on features implemented in the browser.

The feature

Here's a howto that shows how an author would create one of these web-browsable outlines in the OPML Editor.

The demo

Here's a demo of the feature. An outline of the Major League Baseball teams.

You can link from nodes in the outline to any other type of node, so it has all the power of OPML directories. This is important because I hope to transition the non-expandable directories to the new outline nodetype.

I've linked to a photo from a Mets game, from the Mets node in the outline. Look at the crumb trail above the picture. See how it travels through the outline. So not only is it a display structure, it's also a navigation structure. If you click any of those links, you'll go back to the outline. It's so natural it almost doesn't seem like a discrete feature (the best kind of feature).

The architecture

See how URLs can be used to drill into an outline. This URL points to the Eastern Division of the National League.

The OPML file

This is the OPML file for the MLB outline.

Observation -- the Set Nodetype command is your portal to happy hacking in the World Outline. It's how I got the Mets node to be a photo instead of just some text. I had to convert a copy of a thumbList node to be of type include so I could access its sub-nodes in the outliner. It blew me away when it worked, and the outline was connected to the photo from the Mets game in July.

 12/7/2011; 10:27:54 AM.   .

I've started walking for exercise, which I expect to do through the winter (if it ever arrives) so that means I've been listening to podcasts again. I don't listen when I'm riding the bike, it doesn't seem safe to me, even though lots of riders do.

Anyway, I've been using my Nexus/S and the built-in Music app to listen to the podcasts. Synching on Android is, theoretically, easy. You just plug it in with a USB cable, and copy files onto the memory card. There's lots of room, and usuallly it seems to find some of the podcasts you put there. Until recently, when I haven't been able to get it to find any of the stuff I've put on it. For a while rebooting the phone would help, but now even after a reboot it can't find the new podcasts. I'm stuck listening to the same old ones over and over. Or I walk in silence. Which ain't so bad. But I'd like to get some educating while walking.

So my questions are thus:

1. Do you use Android to listen to podcasts?

2. If so, have you seen this behavior?

3. Found a workaround?

4. Should I be using some other software?

5. Should I forget about listening to podcasts on Android?

Update: Based on the first comments, it appears this bug either hasn't surfaced for others, or there's no workaround. All I'm getting is recommendations for software that gets the podcasts themselves, or work with Google Reader. To be very clear -- I want to use it the way I describe it. I have a podcatcher that's finding the content for me. I don't want to configure another app. For me, that would be totallly ridiculous extra work. I'd rather get a new device that isn't so broken, if that's what's actually going on here.

 12/6/2011; 12:26:28 PM.   .

Last week I wrote a piece asking for recommendations on fully prepaid month-to-month 4G service.

A week later, I think I have the best deal.

1. $30 per month prepaid T-Mobile unlimited data, voice and text.

2. $99 no-contract mifi hotspot designed to work with T-Mobile.

Both are from, of all places, Walmart.

Not sure if I'm going to sign up, because I can't find any reviews of actual bandwidth people are getting. Hopefully readers will have some experience to offer.

 12/5/2011; 2:33:09 PM.   .

One of my first blog posts, in 1994, was an appeal to IBM and Apple to work together to offer an alternative to Microsoft.

I felt that IBM wasn't going to make it with their OS/2, and the Macintosh needed more than Apple could provide. I wanted IBM to make Macs. Instead of three major OSes, let's try to have two. Realizing that if that wasn't going to happen we'd probably end up with just one.

Now, in 2011, it appears that Firefox is dependent on a competitor for its funding. Google, whose search engine provides their money, might not want to fund a competitor to Chrome.

Firefox appears to be walking away from its corporate users, so it's a perfect opportunity for a company such as IBM or Microsoft (or both) to step in and provide the development money that Google was providing. Of course Microsoft would have to build on Firefox instead of their own browser. But we're at a point where it would be better to have one strong competitor than two weak ones. It looks, to me, a lot like 1994 in operating systems.

The people who work at Mozilla probably would not like this, but they are just one possible path for Firefox, which is, after all, open source. All that's required here, it seems, is courage and vision from Microsoft, to manage this.

Just wanted to put that idea out there in the mix.

Happy Sunday!

 12/4/2011; 5:33:25 PM.   .

Newt Gingrich is the Republican flavor-of-the-month.

The Republican voters are either too young to remember, or their memories are too bad. They don't know Newt. They will be reminded. Shows how tired the Republican idea is that a retread like Gingrich has the feel of something fresh and new.

Then you gotta wonder if it will be Huntsman's turn, or perish the thought, Santorum. And the only reason anyone pays any attention is because it's good television. One day we might wake up to realize one of these clowns is President. Ohhh American in its waning days.

The Super Bowl and World Series have our short attention span mastered. They are over before we're fed up with them. They are over so quickly you actually miss them when they're over.

I don't know about you, but where I live, winter is having a hard time arriving. It should be cold by now. I yearn for the novelty of bundling up and venturing into the wild. Long before it's over I will be wishing it gone.

If you want to run a campaign, make it short and fun and memorable. Just a few days, but no more than a month. When it's over, accept that it's over. Take a rest, and come back with a fresh angle. Again and again. That's how you make change.

I read Random Walk by Lawrence Block. I wonder if a walk across the country in summer wouldn't be something to do. And not directed anywhere. Not a march on Washington. We're not taking back the country, or occupying anything. Maybe lots of people walking to completely random places. From New York to Spokane. San Diego to Bangor. Burlington to Austin. Everywhere you go, people walking. Visiting strange parts. Having a cold lemonade on a front porch in Podunk. Drinking beer from a paper bag on a front stoop in Baltimore. Talking baseball and politics. Discovering what it means to be American.

While the Repubs and Dems spend billions raised from bankers to run ads on commercial TV, we'll be walking around the land, too busy to watch them.

 12/2/2011; 8:59:26 AM.   .

While I'm on the subject of missing web services, here's another one I'm looking for -- and I'm fairly sure this one exists, and I'm interested in people's recommendations.

My mother put together a family photo album, which I scanned. So now I have a folder full of page images, and we want to go to work with with this material, but the family is distributed around the country. We're not going to sit around the kitchen table and do this in an afternoon. Rather, we're going to do it in our spare time, over a virtual kitchen table, over a period of months. It could be a very nice way to fill idle time, thinking about the past, and people we miss.

A venue for story-telling.

But right now what I have is a folder of images.

We need to do a bit of processing. Each page has several images. They need to be split up. And then there needs to be a place for a discussion.

It seems Flickr might be a good choice, but it doesn't have any integrated photo editing tools, does it?

I'm thinking of Picasa, but I don't like what Google is doing with all their products. What if my family photos become part of their kill-Facebook strategy.

And Facebook itself is out of the question. I don't have an account there, and plan to keep it that way.

 11/30/2011; 8:55:11 AM.   .

I want to buy tickets to a Broadway play this Saturday and/or Sunday.

It's the height of the season, so the best plays are sold out.

Yes I know about the TKTS booth in Times Square.

What I want is a ticket-broker site that takes a query like the one in italics in the first line of this post.

I know some of the shows have seats open. But so far all I can find is a hunt-and-peck interface. I can ask about individual performances of individual plays. That's going to take forever. A service like Hipmunk or Kayak for plays. Now that would be nice!

If you know of such a service, helllp! If not, get busy.

PS: To be clear, all the services ask you to pick a play first, not a time. I only have certain times available. I want to know what plays I can buy tickets for at those times.

PPS: In the VRM world envisioned by Doc Searls, I would write a blog post like this one, and the offers would start streaming in.

 11/30/2011; 8:16:09 AM.   .

Here comes a "back in the day" story...

Sung to the tune of So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star.

I used to be a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Back in the day, you made a product, put it in a box, put the box through distribution, helped retailers sell it, got back a little money, paid your employees, and hoped there would be enough to make some more product, boxes, etc.

If you weren't one of the BigCo's the distributors would play games with your money. Eventually the games got so sophisticated, they had it worked out so you owed them more money than you made, so there was no way to get ahead. Unless you were one of the Big Ones. But even they hit the wall, and the software-in-a-box business went by the wayside.

A few people got rich from that. Yes, it was a bubble. What you got paid for was not your ability to make money. But, rather the ability of the VCs to sell Wall Street on whatever it is they sold them on back then. We were part of the whole system that eventually hit the wall with Credit Default Swaps and huge bailouts and unrepentant bankers. There was a trickle-down. The closer you were to someone who actually made something, the less you got paid. You read that right, the less you got paid. I'll repeat it. If you made something you got paid less.

There was a lot of risk though, and that's what capitalism rewards. A lot of my contemporaries went splat, and had to take jobs working for a salary with no hope of getting rich. That was also a big part of the Silicon Valley reality. But they had jobs, and they paid well, and that's what most people want even if they dream about getting rich.

Mike Arrington is great at getting a cross-blog discussion going. There's no doubt that his personal story is the honest to god truth. He did work hard. And often with no hope of getting anything back. He did love what he did and he was good at it. He had the chance to rake in the big bucks, and he did. And no one can blame him for that. It's the right thing to do, imho.

A lot of young people are starry-eyed over the idea of being an entrepreneur. They think there's glory and wealth in their future. I don't think so, not for most of them. The bubbles have been getting bigger all the time. I guess it takes a bigger bubble to get rid of the headache caused by the previous ones. I don't know. But just like the mortgage industry needed unqualified borrowers to take their junk mortgages, so does the new VC industry, such as it is, need a huge influx of young people willing to drop out of school, and work their butts off. And most of them will go splat. It's a foregone conclusion.

I look at some of the kids who see themselves as entrepreneurs and think to myself there really aren't that many real honest to goodness people who are ready to do it. And I think that's a good thing! It's not a very nice lifestyle. And getting rich solves nothing, if you're one of the 1 percent that actually gets there. And what if you aren't? What have you got to show for it? You're a college dropout with nothing. If you go that route you have no one to blame but yourself if you go splat.

I'm afraid the adults are not levelling with the young folk. And we should be. Even the universities glorify the idea of being the next Zuck. That's like betting your future on winning the lottery. And you're not going to win the lottery. And you're not the next Zuck.

 11/29/2011; 9:44:13 AM.   .

I have a new religion when it comes to phones. I only do month-to-month, fully prepaid.

If I want to switch, I don't have to call anyone and beg. I just forget to add more money to the account. Maybe I'll get a few emails reminding me I'm about to lose their service. But there's nothing they can do.

Now with that in mind, I'm interested in knowing if anyone here has signed up for a 4G plan that is month-to-month and is happy with the service they're getting. Obviously I have a bias toward NYC, but I travel, so it matters how it works elswhere.

I'm thinking of trying ClearWire. But I'm not sure if their service is any good. Hard to find much comment on blogs about it.

 11/28/2011; 8:38:59 PM.   .

From Ben Hyde via email.

He searched for my name on Facebook, and they said that I only share some of my information publicly.

He sent a screen shot.

See, that's a lie. I deleted my account. I don't share any of my information on Facebook. Oh I get it. They're not actually lying, technically. It's true. I do only share some of my information publicly.

However their next statement is a fraudulent. "If you know Dave, add him as a friend or send him a message."

They don't have the ability to add me as a friend or send me a message.

He says he tried to friend me, and they didn't say they couldn't do it.

I was prepared to give them kudos for living up to their promise.

BTW, I don't really care if they have a page about me there from Wikipedia, as long as it's labeled as such. It's when they make representations that you can contact me through their service, that's really damaging. Because people will think they can reach me that way, and that I'm not responding when they try. Just think of the problems that can cause.

It's kind of like a phone company that won't forward your number when you drop them as a service.

 11/28/2011; 10:25:05 AM.   .

The Scripting News community river is one of the most exciting projects we've done here in a while.

Here's the OPML for the river. Look at how many feeds are there.

I took a snapshot of the OPML so we can have a benchmark, and if this thing takes off, you all can have proof that you were among the pioneers that got the bootstrap going. I have a feeling this idea is going all the way.

Another reason I'm so excited about this is the quality of the content. There are a fair number of people who blog about the same mix that I do. Tech, people, design, politics. Low-tech stuff that works. Empowering people. Learning about ourselves. And it's interesting stuff! I've already gotten some new ideas and perspectives. Folks, that's what I'm here for.

Each blogger has his own way of connecting with others that works for that blog. I've had comments here for the last few years, thanks to Disqus, but I find comments are good for brief notes tacked on to a post. When people start writing blog posts in the comments it stops working. It very much matters which "space" you're writing in. When people write in their own blog, the writing has to make sense mostly standalone. You get more interesting stuff that way. Comments tend to be very relative and therefore not so interesting. "You're right and btw, here's the product I'm selling," is the basic message of a lot of the stuff that gets posted here and taken down right away. The line between comment and spam is getting harder to find. If you can't find the value in posting a complex idea on your blog, then why should it be as a comment to my post? Only if you want to get some of my flow. And of course the people you want to reach have figured that out, long ago, and mostly don't pay attention to comments.

I'm also interested in trying more experiments with these feeds. Assuming we get a critical mass. And it's already driving ideas for the software that's running the river, which btw is free, and available for anyone to run. Mac or Windows. And this software does not have to be on a publicly accessible server, even if you want your river to be publicly visible. It can write static files to Amazon S3, which is a very economical way to host this stuff. For most people hosting a river there will cost pennies a month.

This is what I wanted. As the OWS folk say -- it's the beginning of the beginning. And I'm glad it's happening now! We're absolutely ready for it, knock wood, praise Murphy, IANAL, My Mother Loves Me and I'm not as stupid as I look.

 11/28/2011; 9:19:00 AM.   .

We need a badge!

And... I'm not good at drawing pictures so I didn't even try.

I put this badge in the right margin of scripting.com, and linked it to the river.

http://river.scripting.com/

If your site is part of the river, you can add it to your blog too.

And if you're a creative drawing-type person, feel free to give the badge a try!

 11/27/2011; 4:28:25 PM.   .