If our democracy were working, public discourse about the 2012 election (this year!) would be centered on things like:

1. What's next after the NDAA? How long before we decide it's more efficient to round up all people who meet a certain profile and relocate them to a central location. What with the debt and everything. We need to streamline things. (Think it can't happen here, what about all the people we're incarcerating for violating prohibition.)

2. We love the Internet, but what is the Internet? This is where the people letting us down are the political pundits, who don't appear to read tech bloggers (if they do where are the links). We read them, of course. But their view of the world must be that somehow the "technical" issues of the Internet don't concern them. They're just as bad as the members of Congress who put the blinders on when it comes to tech, and they're just as easily manipulated.

I'm thinking of writers who I admire, who seem to have a huge blind spot. Krugman and Greenwald for example. We can make it so that Internet issues are not very technical, and in the meantime if you write using blogging software, you are yourself actually becoming more technical than you give yourself credit for.

2a. There's something about the mainstream press that feels immune to criticism. This is the bigger bug.

3. Climate change. It's early January and the only snowfall we've had in NYC so far was a freak storm in late October. It's been springlike weather so far all season. We're about to get some bitter cold, thankfully (what a relief) but it's not forecast to last very long.

4. Look at the idiots the Republicans are seriously considering nominating. How could our political process be more wrong. That's a theme that should be echoing on all the news reports. It's the actual story. As opposed to the BS they actually report.

5. There's a war starting in Iran and we're the ones starting it. Discuss.

It's hard for me to believe that anyone takes the coverage of the election seriously. I admit I love to watch the Republican debates, but I don't mistake it for political discourse. It's appealing to a very low intellect and morality. It's relaxing to think the world could be that simple.

Here's the new American doctrine: "We're right and that's it." That's why Ron Paul resonates, even though his idea of returning to the gold standard shows that he too is out of his mind. Unless he's not serious, in which case he's as dishonest as the rest of them.

 1/2/2012; 12:56:35 PM.   .

I went out for a walk earlier this evening, in the Times Square/Central Park area to get an idea of the scale of the famous NYE celebration. It was huge, of course, and well-organized, and very densely packed with people. To someone who has spent most of his adult life outside of NYC, this is what's most overwhelming about New York. Where ever you go you is overflowing with people. Walking on a midtown sidewalk most of the time is a contact sport. Best to be in good walking shape and view it as skiing. That's kind of why I like the colder weather. It tends to thin out the crowds and keep people moving.

Anyway, I eventually turned north on 6th Ave, crossed Central Park South, and walked along the southern edge of the park. In every alcove, on every sidewalk, on all the major streets entering the park, were thousands of New York police in blue uniforms, mulling around. It was like an army of reserves, I imagined. I never had seen so many police in one place.

Gives you a new perspective on why crime might be down in the city. I guess it's because somewhere along the line someone built an army.

At the same time the OWS folk tried to re-occupy Zuccotti Park this evening. I can see why that wouldn't work. Before September the police didn't have occupations on the menu of things the NYPD could manage. That's why it worked at first. Then politics and media that kept them untouchable for a while. But now the NYPD will not let the protestors back into any public space. They are ready to respond, the same way they are ready for a parade, bank robbery, car accident, subway shutdown, terrorism. New York has lots of events, some planned, some not, all the time, with people packed into tight spaces, and it gets through it without people freaking out and without too many people getting killed or killing each other.

The NYPD really is something unto itself. I don't think they care who is mayor. Or who you are. If what you're doing is something their book says you can't, you're not going to be doing it. It's fairly black and white.

I don't think that's anything new. I never got the idea that NYPD people were friends, in any way. It's still true today.

 1/1/2012; 1:52:45 AM.   .

Here's the first news of 2012.

I cannot live without The Paper of Record.

If only for the movie reviews.

So now to figure out how much it's going to cost me.

Not so easy!

 1/1/2012; 12:55:50 AM.   .

Earlier I reported that Twitter was down just as I was publishing two big pieces. Then things got worse. The URL shortener we use that runs behind r2.ly went down too. So you were doubly-blocked by a creaky infrastructure that I was actually writing about in one of the pieces that didn't get through.

It's poetry in motion. Actually non-motion.

People worry about SOPA, but you should also worry about the house-of-cards we've built around Twitter. We seriously need to simplify things. The people at Twitter need to hear this. A simple change in their software, that moves the link out of the 140 characters would completely obviate the need for shorteners, and allow us to remove a whole level of brittleness in the infrastructure.

It's always been this way, and the problem has persisted for years. They store a lot of metadata with each tweet, so there's clearly no reason their infrastructure would have any trouble at all supporting it.

Anyway, I temporarily switched to bit.ly, so the blork.ly address we use here is likely to work. As long as bit.ly is up.

Heh. What a mess.

 12/31/2011; 1:07:28 PM.   .

Every year, when I have it together, I name someone blogger of the year.

It's always a person, never an organization -- because that's essential imho to being a blogger. To think of a tech pub like the NY Times or TechCrunch as a blogger is to miss the point. And anyone who is edited, in any way, is not a blogger. Because once you accept editing, you've allowed another mind into the writing. You're no longer finding out what someone thinks. It's not quite as clear.

Not to say one is better than the other. Just different.

Now, for past bloggers -- they continue to impress, in different ways of course because they're individuals. That's what made them such excellent bloggers in the first place!

They are: Joel Spolsky, Jay Rosen, NakedJen, Julian Assange.

This year's BOTY is...

In a minute.

First, let me say who I thought of, and why I think he may well be my choice for BOTY next year.

Richard Stallman.

It came as a surprise to me that Stallman is a blogger. Somehow I tripped across his feed. Added it to my river, and since then have been very impressed. Stallman is, in every way, what I think of as a Natural Born Blogger. His impulse is to share. And he has an opinion. And he states it, concisely and with irony and humor. It's really good stuff.

And the thing I like about it most is that it is so concise.

Twitter has made this a value we appreciate, and that's something to thank Twitter for. With conciseness as an established practice, we're heading into a new kind of blogging. What I call a linkblog.

That's why I think Stallman might be a great choice next year, if things turn out as I think they will. I think enough of us will be linkblogging outside the silos to make it interesting. If this happens it will make new kinds of aggregators possible. New news flows. Because freedom has been bottled up in the silos for too long. Too much have we waited for them to innovate in ways that don't cause more money to flow to them. Over time the low-hanging fruit becomes riper and riper. Eventually a strong wind willl come and blow it all to the ground. That's what I look forward to. It didn't happen in 2011, so the linkblog isn't the trend, yet. Maybe it will happen in 2012.

But in 2011, the most value for me was with bloggers who continue to make a strong personal investment in the web outside the silos.

So I was looking for someone who had something to say, and who beat the drum regularly. Someone who said things in clear language that was accessible to large numbers of people. And who said things we really need to hear. Things to think about, to consider, to be reminded of.

Someone who leads and inspires.

I think you're going to be surprised at my choice.

Seth Godin.

His blogging meets all these criteria and more. I never know what's coming from his corner of the world, but I know when I read it I'm going to have something to think about. Whether I agree or not. All good bloggers do that, push you in a new direction. Change the world by changing minds.

Godin doesn't force his ideas on us. He presents them as part of a smorgasboard of thought that's available in any quantity you like. There's no programming involved. He draws you back to him by the quality of his provocation. He's really the best at what he does, and what he does is important.

So bravo Seth Godin!

Thank you for all the blogging, and please keep us well-supplied with lots of new ideas and ways of looking at things.

 12/31/2011; 11:12:51 AM.   .

I published my end-of-year think piece, The Un-Internet, about an hour ago by posting it to my linkblog. Which, among other places, flows to Twitter. Which is down.

This has blunted the impact. No retweets, no kudos, no condemnation!

Proves the point of the piece so damned well.

We're way too dependent on the Un-Internet., which behaves somewhat like the Internet, but has chokepoints that can cut off the flow. The whole point of the Internet, from the point of view of the US Govt, was that it couldn't be cut off this way.

I like to say that RSS doesn't have a fail whale.

It's at times like this that it doesn't seem so cute.

 12/31/2011; 10:59:13 AM.   .

The tech world is in an infinite loop.

I've written about it so many times, but that's how it goes with loops. You don't have to write original stuff more than once. Each time around the loop, at some point, everything comes back into style.

No need to list all the loops, other than to say Here We Go Again!

At issue is this: Control.

For whatever reason, the people who run the tech companies want it. But eventually the users take it.

I wrote in 1994, my first time as a chronicler of the loops: "The users outfoxed us again. It happens every fifteen years or so in this business, We lost our grounding, the users rebelled, and a new incarnation of the software business has been created."

In the same 1994 piece: "Once the users take control, they never give it back."

You can see it playing out in the Twitter community, and now the Tumblr community.

It isn't a reflection on the moral quality of the leaders of the companies, to want to control their users. But it's a short-term proposition at best. Either the companies learn how to take the lead from their users, or they will be sidelined. Unless the laws of technology are repealed, and I don't think laws like that can be repealed.

Lest you think I was smart enough to see this coming in my own early experience as a tech entrepreneur, I wasn't. We were scared of software piracy, didn't understand how we could continue to be in business with software that could be easily copied. So we established controls that made it difficult for non-technical users to copy the software. That created a market of other software that would copy our software. So it was reduced down to whether or not the users would knowingly do something we disapproved of. Many of our users were honorable, they did what I would have done in their place. They stopped using our products. I would regularly receive letters from customers, people who had paid over $200 for the disks our software came on, with the disks cut in half with a scissor. These letters made their point loud and clear. One day everyone took off their copy protection, and the users got what they wanted. I came to believe then that this is always so.

This time around, Apple has been the leader in the push to control users. They say they're protecting users, and to some extent that is true. I can download software onto my iPad feeling fairly sure that it's not going to harm the computer. I wouldn't mind what Apple was doing if that's all they did, keep the nasty bits off my computer. But of course, that's not all they do. Nor could it be all they do. Once they took the power to decide what software could be distributed on their platform, it was inevitable that speech would be restricted too. I think of the iPad platform as Disneyfied. You wouldn't see anything there that you wouldn't see in a Disney theme park or in a Pixar movie.

The sad thing is that Apple is providing a bad example for younger, smaller companies like Twitter and Tumblr, who apparently want to control the "user experience" of their platforms in much the same way as Apple does. They feel they have a better sense of quality than the randomness of a free market. So they've installed similar controls. Your content cannot be displayed by Twitter unless you're one of their partners. How you get to be a partner is left to your imagination. We have no visibility into it.

Tumblr has decided that a browser add-on is unwelcome. Presumably it's only an issue because a fair number of their users want to use it. So they are taking issue not only with the developer, but with the users. They have admitted that the problem is that they must "educate" their users better. Oy! Does this sound familiar. In the end, it will be the other way around. It has to be. It's the lesson of the Internet.

My first experience with the Internet came as a grad student in the late 70s, but it wasn't called the Internet then. I loved it because of its simplicity and the lack of controls. There was no one to say you could or couldn't ship something. No gatekeeper. In the world it was growing up alongside, the mainframe world, the barriers were huge. An individual person couldn't own a computer. To get access you had to go to work for a corporation, or study at a university.

Every time around the loop, since then, the Internet has served as the antidote to the controls that the tech industry would place on users. Every time, the tech industry has a rationale, with some validity, that wide-open access would be a nightmare. But eventually we overcome their barriers, and another layer comes on. And the upstarts become the installed-base, and they make the same mistakes all over again.

It's the Internet vs the Un-Internet. And the Internet, it seems, always prevails.

 12/31/2011; 10:00:24 AM.   .

This is a test.

 12/30/2011; 11:12:43 PM.   .

I want to transfer frontiernews.org to hover.com.

Right now it's hosted on wordpress.com, using their domain management system.

I've done this before so I know there's a way to transfer a domain off wordpress.com.

I'm following the instructions on their howto page and not finding the links they describe.

I go to Store/Domains and don't see a link to Manage Your Domains.

The domain actually expired yesterday, but I went ahead and renewed it for another year.

However that did not get the links to show up. Still wondering how to move my domains off.

Update: Problem solved. I had already transferred the domain to hover.com. The error warnings I was getting from wordpress.com were ignore-able. However it can be hard to ignore messages that say you're about to lose a domain you care about.

 12/29/2011; 8:12:37 PM.   .

Good morning!

The year is almost over, and finally we're getting some winter weather in NYC.

A few notes, along with coffee. A tradition here on Scripting News.

1. My visiting scholarship at NYU is over. It was a two-year thing, and with the fall semester complete, I am now once again a free agent. I'm going to go without a title for a while. I've changed my blogroll bio, accordingly. Thanks to the folks at Arthur Carter Institute for giving me the opportunity of associating myself with you all while I get my boots on the ground in NYC.

2. When Diaspora came out, privately I said to people that I didn't give it much chance of success. I offered to help, since it came out of NYU. The kids were studying math and compsci just three blocks away from where the J-school is. They were being lauded by the press as the antidote to Facebook. I wanted to encourage them to try to lower expectations, both with the outside world and for themselves. It's true that they were no younger than Zuck was when he embarked on his adventure. But it's not wise to plan for such success. I'm sure Zuck himself didn't.

And Diaspora would have one problem that Facebook didn't -- they would have to contend with an installed-base leader with hundreds of millions of users. Much better to aim for a small piece of the problem, do it well, and move on from there.

3. If I hadn't been at NYU at the time, I probably would have said something publicly. But I had a responsibility to them more than I had a responsibility to relate my theory publicly.

4. Now there are news reports that some people associated with Occupy are taking aim at Facebook. They want to make the Facebook for the 99 percent. Oy. Here we go again. There is no market for that. Facebook is the Facebook for the 99 percent. The goal should be to make something open and non-monolithic that provides many of the most valuable services of Facebook without the silo walls. It should not be something that an individual does, or a small group laboring heroically, rather it should be something that the Internet does.

5. The reporters thirst for a David vs Goliath story. They live for it. When they spot one they seize the moment. And then they copy each other, and the people become famous, but the product never materializes. Because the people promising to displace Facebook don't understand Facebook. The whole point is that everyone uses it. Not that it's good, or what people need or want. It's the universality that keeps them occupied. Merely cloning Facebook will likely not get a significant number of people to switch. Something new and fun that captures imaginations in ways that Facebook doesn't -- that's the goal.

6. That it emerges from the Occupy movement is a good thing of course. I've gotten to know some of the technical people there, and I don't think they have the idea, any more than I thought the Diaspora guys did.

7. I'm going to stick with building writing, reading and presentation tools around open formats, each component replaceable. I'm fairly sure that's what the open system of sharing ideas and media will look like. From there, let's try out lots of ideas. I should have been able to hook my tools into Diaspora. That I couldn't says that Diaspora has zero chance against a juggernaut like Facebook. Same with the new Occupy devteam. They aren't trying to make their stuff work with existing open tools. No way does that have a chance against monsters like Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter.

8. Is the "golden age" of tech blogging over? Jeremiah Owyang says it is. I guess it's all about point of view. If you think tech blogging was Mike Arrington and TechCrunch, then yes indeed, it's over.

Not much more to say, except that TechCrunch was a blog when it started, but fairly quickly it became a tech pub pretty much like CNET or ZDNet. That one of them goes away doesn't add or subtract anything from the universe. The writers they employed will find other jobs. They will likely write the same stories they would have otherwise.

In the end they had the same point of view as CNET. A fundamental belief that money makes ideas worthwhile. It's understandable because they earn their salaries based on how much they please advertisers. It's like the hamster-farms they write about -- the readers are the product, and the customers are the advertisers. Bloggers, as I use the term, are the product without bothering with the advertisers. It's people and their ideas, for better or worse, and nothing more than that.

If that's what you mean by blogging, what they were doing at TechCrunch was not very relevant. They only wrote about bloggers in the aggregate, as if we were undifferentiated frankfurter meat to be counted and appraised, and then paid for. It's so much like the bundling that was being done in the real estate bubble. Eventually, I hope, the hamsters will buy their own cages, and make pubs like TechCrunch completely irrelevant.

My main concern with TechCrunch is that when they went to war with RSS there was a chance some Dilberts who read it would make bad decisions and decide to remove their feeds. Smart people would see it as hypocrisy, because if RSS is dead, why did TechCrunch bother to maintain an RSS feed? But there are managers at companies who don't think things through.

But RSS has no advertisers, so it's a safe thing for TechCrunch to criticize. Not many things left that they can be negative about.

 12/29/2011; 9:30:02 AM.   .

On December 19, I posted the result of a little script I wrote that ranked the sites by the number of times I pointed to them in my linkblog.

Since the linkblog has been operating all of 2011, I thought it would be a good idea to tally the links for the year, and then roll it over at the beginning of the year and start tallying them for 2012.

So if you click on the little plus next to this headline in the blog post (for people who are reading this in an aggregator) you'll see the table. It's updated once every hour.

 12/29/2011; 9:07:35 AM.   .

A few years ago, people said only old-fashioned folk wear watches. But I thought I would always wear a watch. Today I don't wear a watch. How do I find the time? Either I do without or I keep my eyes fixed on a screen that has the time in the upper-right corner. It's gotten so that I resent the fact that reality doesn't have the time in the upper-right corner.

 12/28/2011; 10:29:35 AM.   .

A housekeeping/philosophical mini-post.

The housekeeping part -- I am using Dropbox again. I've narrowed my use to keep personal stuff out of there.

The philosophical part -- We used to say the network is the computer, but I'm seeing more and more that Dropbox is the computer. Once some data is availble in my dropbox, the question of which computer does what is entirely fungible.

Just shows there's more to the story. It wasn't all set when email was invented.

 12/28/2011; 9:57:01 AM.   .

In the late 90s we wondered what the next decade would be called.

Here it is, the decade in question is now over, and we never answered the question.

Isn't that funny! Maybe that's why it feels like a lost decade. Never got a name.

Now I'm hearing people call the next year "twenty-twelve" even though this year was, as far as I'm concerned, "two thousand eleven."

Doc Searls asks if this is a trend, and I think it is. I think we'll look back and think "two thousand twelve" sounds funny.

Here's why.

We just came out of a decade that forced us, for the sake of clarity, to name the years as follows:

Two thousand one.

Two thousand two.

Etc.

Why? Because the following would have been ambiguous:

Twenty one.

Twenty two.

Etc.

But starting in 2010, there was no more ambiguity. Why did it take people this long to adjust?

I have no theory about that!

A little diversion on our way into the next year, whatever it may be called.

 12/28/2011; 9:29:57 AM.   .

I've transferred 35 domains out of GoDaddy in the last few weeks. I started the process long before the SOPA thing blew up. What finally got me to move was a $4.99 charge for a service I never wanted. I must have ordered it accidentally when reserving a domain. Something GoDaddy goes out of its way to make difficult and error-prone. We all know this. It could be a lot simpler. We all know that, I'm sure they do too.

It wasn't so much that I had the charge, but that it was almost impossible to get them to remove it. I got in contact with their support people and they said I had to do it myself, they couldn't do it "for" me. On what planet is a customer, expressing a very clear wish, asking you to do something for them. That's what you get paid for. To do things on my behalf. Hopefully you make enough money. If not, you should just charge more, not do these horrible ripoffs.

Even worse, the page they told me to go to, to get rid of the feature, didn't have the command they told me to look for. I used the search command in Firefox. The text wasn't there. I tried looking for text like it on the page. Nope. I tried viewing the source code of the page. Nope. I think they were actually lying about this. Unbelievable. All for $4.99.

Finally, I said I was going to send them a certified letter asking for the service to be removed from my account. When that wasn't enough, I decided to let them have the money and I'd just move off their service. And of course write up the experience here as a warning to any would-be future customer.

Of course there are a huge number of blog posts like that. GoDaddy didn't care. Fresh hamsters keep rolling up to the front door, ready to go through the same process they put me through. And all their other dissatisfied customers.

They like to say they have great support, and in some ways they do. But there is no way to have a line within a company that a customer respects. On one side of the line are the "nice" people, and over there are the assholes. If you, as a structural part of your business, defraud customers (and I believe what they do is fraud) then you don't have a "nice" part of your business. The whole thing is scum and deserves to die.

So, GoDaddy is backing off support of SOPA. But if they want to recover from this the way Johnson & Johnson handled the Tylenol poisoning scare, a textbook example of how a company should deal with a crisis, they must do more than back off SOPA. They must reconstitute the way they do business. Clean that site up. Streamline the domain registration and renewal process so you don't get page after page of boxes you have to check the right way to avoid getting ripped off.

They must change their company so that their support of SOPA could not have happened. Any company that takes sides against their customer's interest is a dead company. Every decision the company makes must be judged on how it effects their relationship with customers. Supporting SOPA was a bone-headed move. But this is a company that fights with customers over $4.99 charges for services they clearly say they do not want and have never used.

I can make them this offer because I still have 45 domains there. I am, as of right now, still a customer. I'm not talking about "progress" -- I want them to redesign their customer interface from top to bottom, and get the bullshit out of there. And teach your people that without customers you have no business, so their needs come first.

PS: Maybe it's time for Consumer Reports to rate Registrars.

 12/27/2011; 2:57:56 PM.   .

If you have five minutes, read this item at FastCompany.

FastCompany: Using Empathic Listening to Collaborate.

I've had the same experience, on both sides. I grew up in a family where everyone was struggling to be heard. So you held the floor for a moment, before someone used something you said to go right into what they wanted to be heard about. There was probably almost no actual listening going on. As a result we all had a very poor idea of who the other people were, what motivated them, what they were trying to be heard on.

There's so much to say about this -- but hearing other people is all part of hearing yourself. And healing yourself.

When I was in my forties I made a concerted effort, with help, to go through as much of this as I could. And I was lucky that my parents were still alive so I could make a point of listening to them, to really understand -- whatever it is they wanted me to understand.

Real listening is a secret technique for being friends with children. No one listens to them, even though they are complete emotional people after age four or so, with aspirations, ideas, interests, and a thirst for knowledge and desire for understanding. Showing a child that you respect her or him is a way to help that new person feel respect for themselves. In a very important way you are making the world a better place. In a human-sized way.

If you want, try an exercise. With a close friend or family member, or a complete stranger (probably the same thing), sit at a table, or on the floor, facing each other. In a quiet place. Then take turns talking, five minutes at a time. When the other person is talking, don't say anything. Don't nod your head. Don't smile or give them a hug. Look straight ahead. Don't look up or down, to the side, behind you. Don't cry, show sympathy or fear. You may have all these feelings, but you may not demonstrate them. You are here for one purpose only -- to listen to the other person.

You'll find it's very hard to do, on both sides. To really hold the floor talking about yourself for five minutes, knowing the other person is hearing every word you're saying, and really absorbing it. For some people just this experience can be transformative. Listen to the actual words the other person is saying, and struggle to take them at face value, to really understand what they're saying.

That's why when I say "Thanks for listening" I"m giving you my deepest form of gratitude. Because life, in a sense, is all about being heard. Once you've been heard, it's then time to find new meaning for your existence.

This week might be the best time of year to do it. It's dark, the weather is probably not that great, what else do you have to do. And we're spending time with people we're close to. All the buttons are being pressed. Try getting through it by doing a little listening.

 12/27/2011; 9:15:17 AM.   .

There's a lot of poetic justice in GoDaddy putting the big target on its own back, and the users taking aim, and shooting well enough to make the point. SOPA is the result of the entertainment industry figuring out what DNS is and how it works. Learning if they snip a few wires here and there they can control everything. It was always this way, but they didn't know.

DNS is the front-line of SOPA, and GoDaddy is probably the largest commercial entity in the DNS world these days. And they were so stupid they screwed it up. Shows how bad bankers and lawyers are at managing technology. Just imagine if they had some respect for people who do the plumbing.

The only problem is that by trying to hijack DNS in such a public way, with legislation, the entertainment lawyers and lobbyists educated the users of DNS. People who own domains with GoDaddy. And now they're figuring out how to move their assets. Overnight Namecheap has a name (and is just as fast ruining it). It would have been a lot smarter for the MPAA to buy their way in. Didn't Verisign just sell itself really cheap. But then ICANN probably isn't as easy to push over as the US Congress. Or is it? (Honestly don't know, but some of the people who read this blog are involved in the ICANN process.)

I love this little demo because it proves the Internet hasn't all been sucked into Facebook, Google, Twitter and Apple. We're not 100 percent silofied. All those domains that are moving away from GoDaddy point to places outside the BigCo silos. How about that people who say the Internet is dead. You're seeing new life. And eventually this power will show up inside the silos too.

 12/26/2011; 11:05:58 PM.   .

Transferred ten more domains from GoDaddy to Hover this evening, without a hitch.

Namecheap has a post kicking GoDaddy pretty hard. Too hard, really. Please be more careful. It could be that their customers don't have a lot of experience tranferring domains. It is tricky. Or it could be a bug or a glitch. We all know servers screw up sometimes, esp under heavy load.

Further, Namecheap is reaping a windfall. All the extra business they're getting isn't because they're good, rather because a competitor is bad. It doesn't look good to be kicking GoDaddy when they're already losing. They wouldn't like it if the tables were turned. There's plenty of anger for GoDaddy. No need for Namecheap to remind us we don't like them.

And it's good to see a shitty company getting taken out. This should be a message for all other companies who don't treat their users with respect.

I think the Registrar business has a lot of growing up to do. Even Hover, which is doing an excellent job, seems a bit over-eager, and unaware that their customers are very busy, and when they need help from a registrar it's often because we're fighting some kind of outage, and don't have a lot of cycles to spare. That said, it's better to have a registrar who goes out of their way to make sure things are working. But it'll be nice when they smooth out some of the rough edges.

I plan to do a lot more work with DNS in the future, already have done a bunch. So it'll be good to see this industry shake out some of the weak players.

 12/26/2011; 5:43:53 PM.   .

We go to the movies knowing that it's not real. If you want proof, next time you're watching a movie, or a preview -- focus on how the actors move their mouths and eyes while they talk, and then try to imagine someone in real life talking that way. Real people don't talk like that. And that's cool. We go to the movies to escape our real lives, to see things from another person's point of view, or from a different context. We ask to be deceived that it's real. Or just for a rush.

But sometimes it goes too far and the illusion breaks. Like an airplane stalling in midflight. They're running along great, you're in the plot, and all of a sudden something happens that doesn't make sense in the context of the story, and the trance is gone. All of a sudden you find yourself in a movie theater wondering how you got there, when you were in the movie just a few instants before.

And some movies never get you into the zone at all. You never even get liftoff.

Badly Written and Extraordinarily Stupid (I refuse to learn the actual name of this movie) never gets started. You never feel anything for the characters, yet how hard would that be, given the circumstances. They jerk you around, with cheap pictures of airplanes that might be flying into buildings. Blown up photos that don't look like people who fell or jumped to their death from the WTC. A kid's scrapbook that looks like it was produced by an ad agency working for Coca Cola or Land's End. A kid who might be feeling real emotions, or might be suffering from a disease. They won't commit. They won't actually give you a story to hang the scenes on. No takeoff.

I get disturbed just thinking about the events of 9/11, yet this movie that had two-plus hours never got my emotional meter to budge. It's amazing that this picture made it out of the movie factory, much less debuted on Christmas Day.

 12/26/2011; 12:49:39 PM.   .

 12/25/2011; 8:09:44 AM.   .

Okay here's the schedule for this year's NJFF.

9:45AM -- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy.

1:00PM -- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

4:25PM -- Carnage.

6-8PM -- Dinner.

8:10PM -- Young Adult.

All movies are at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 except for Carnage which is at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

 12/24/2011; 12:58:03 PM.   .

Back in the day I could post a request for a badge, and automagically one would appear.

From a great designer of course.

Let's see if it still works!

I need a badge for my blog that says This is a Facebook-free Zone. There are no Like buttons. No Facebook comments. No bugs that report to anyone at Facebook that you are here and have read this page.

Berkeley has signs on streets when you come into town saying it's a nuclear-free zone. I want something similar for my blog, except for Facebook.

I could see the day that I will only use sites that have this symbol and abide by the promise.

 12/24/2011; 9:36:09 AM.   .

Just a few random notes for my outliner in the morning.

1. We had the plenary for the NJFF last night, here in NY of course. NakedJen and I went to see Mission Impossible in the IMAX theater on Broadway and 68th St. It was a great way to kick it off. It was like a roller coaster ride. And intellectual palate cleanse. Very light fare. But the images were thrilling. I thought the scenes with Tom Cruise flying around on the tower in Dubai were going to be the climax, and horrifying -- and they were that, but the climax came later, with a missile headed for Seattle or was it San Francisco? The writing was pretty shitty, sometimes movies can be appreciated for their shittiness. This movie was a fine way to start the fest. (Which now is a three-day affair?)

1a. Tonight's movie might be Carnage, starring the wonderful Kate Winslet.

1b. Listings for theaters around Lincoln Center.

1c. The best part of the movie was the preview for some new Batman movie, in IMAX of course. Super-thrilling! Freaky.

2. I was quoted in several places telling people to kill their GoDaddy accounts. That was incorrect. I think it's a pointless gesture. Dan Gillmor asked why. SOPA is not yet law, not even close. It seems likely it won't make it through all the hurdles. This time. But they'll keep coming back. And if they ever do get a law that tries to turn the Internet into a movie theater, that's the time to act. Occupy the movie theaters. Shame the actors whose lawyers are foreclosing on the Internet the way a banker forecloses on a bad mortgage. You can't be popular with the people, Mr and Ms Hollywood Star, and support killing free expression on the net. It's an either/or thing. It's like a Hollywood action film. There are good guys and bad guys. If you don't act out against what your industry is doing to our freedom, then you're the bad guy. We should all be looking for a lot more than outspoken-ness from our favorite movie and recording stars, esp the ones who use social media. Not just speeches or symbolic gestures, real action. That's why now is not the time, because there can only be symbolism now. Later, if it comes to that, there can be movement.

3. I'm doing more digging into JavaScript. It is indeed very close to UserTalk, the language I designed. So I understand how it works. I'm finding the curly braces and semi-colons to be a nuisance (I forget to put them in, our language doesn't require them). But I'm liking doing software that runs in the browser, with very limited communication with servers. Having worried about scaling for all these years, it's fun to be relieved of that concern.

4. The project I'm doing is integrating rivers with the Bootstrap Toolkit, in an entirely static way. My prototype for this work is my personal river. Note that the RT's work. All you have to do is set up a linkblog server that can "catch" the kind of message it throws. Do a view source to see how the scripts work. And you can see how I edit the template, in an outline of course, and I use Dropbox to connect the outliner with the web app. Works like a charm. (I mirror my dropbox public folder in my own S3 space, that's what dropbox.scripting.com is.)

5. With cookies and JavaScript you can almost do a real application.

6. I need a good reference book for JavaScript. Real quick, show me how all the syntax works, and give me a list of all the built-in verbs.

 12/24/2011; 8:45:17 AM.   .

Just a few random notes for my outliner in the morning.

1. We had the plenary for the NJFF last night, here in NY of course. We went to see Mission Impossible in the IMAX theater on Broadway and 68th St. It was a great way to kick it off. It was like a roller coaster right. Very light fare from a writing standpoint. But the images were so thrilling. I thought the scenes with Tom Cruise flying around on the tower in Dubai were going to be the climax, and horrifying -- and they were that, but the climax came later, with a missile headed for Seattle or was it San Francisco? Like I said, the writing was pretty shitty, but the movie was a fine way to start the fest.

2. On Twitter yesterday I felt it was necessary to clear up that I was not recommending people boycott anyone at this time over SOPA. It's not law, not even close, and I have a feeling it's not going to make it through all the hurdles. This time. But they'll keep coming back. And if they ever do get a law that tries to turn the Internet into a movie theater, we'll just occupy the movie theaters. And we'll shame the actors whose lawyers it is that are trying to foreclose on the Internet the way a banker forecloses on a bad mortgage. You can't be popular with the people, Mr and Ms Hollywood Star, and support killing free expression on the net. It's an either/or thing. And we should all be looking for a little more outspoken-ness from our movie and recording stars, esp the ones who use social media.

 12/24/2011; 8:45:14 AM.   .

GoDaddy likes SOPA. They said so on their website.

GoDaddy was bought by an investment banking firm. So they're probably not coming at SOPA as a technology thing. I'm sure they see it as corporate lawyers would. And lawyers don't see what the fuss is about. They were never that into freedom anyway.

Step by step, the United States is becoming China. Not surprising since we're financially very closely tied. And the financiers want the Internet to keep us docile and quiet, and they don't want any of the crazy Arab Spring type stuff, not in the Arab world, not in China, and definitely not in the west.

It's all the same as Matt Taibbi points out today in a Rolling Stone piece about the rich and their awful PR. But why should they care. It's not as if anyone can do anything about it. We really can't. So they can boast about their money, trophy wives, jet-set lifestyle. They didn't bother to hire a PR person to make it sound pretty. There was no need.

Anyway, the GoDaddy thing has an easy resolution. One or more of their competitors can issue statements that are the mirror-image of GD's. Then the users who want to move can have a place to move to. It'll be basically symbolic, because if the US has a political firewall, whether your registrar is inside or outside the US won't matter. And it won't matter whether they do or don't like SOPA.

I already decided to start moving off GoDaddy a couple of months ago. I'm using a Canadian registrar, Hover, which is part of Tucows. I've known the guys there for a long time, and they have a great reputation. And they're Canadian. Not sure how much independence that actually gets you these days. But it's better than using GD.

The only good thing about SOPA is that it will get people into the streets. All kinds of civil disobedience will be possible once we no longer have the Internet as a distraction, or soporific.

 12/22/2011; 7:51:51 PM.   .