Part 1

Part 2

 3/9/2012; 5:28:22 PM.

A hyper-intense, short-lived solar storm is making its way to earth. It's much more powerful than anything that has ever hit earth. But it is also just a burst. It will hit earth and be done in five minutes. The side of the earth that's facing the sun will be wiped out and the side that's dark, will be completely unaffected. But it isn't moving at a constant rate, so scientists don't know where it will hit. Mass migrations take place but people don't know which way to go. As the storm gets closer to earth they can predict with more certainty where it will hit. The President of the United States doesn't want to tell everyone where it will be. He's hiding, presumably himself moving away from the part of the planet that will be destroyed. Everywhere scientists are sought out, first with respect, but quickly held as prisoners. Should they tell the truth or not? Families are split apart. Lovers are torn between saving themselves or spending their last moments with the people they love. Finally the storm hits, half the planet is hit, some of the stars survive. BTW, the storm only kills people. Trees and houses and cars and factories and movie theaters are unaffected. The human race gets a fresh start with almost half the population gone. And of course the United States is wiped out. So they don't have to deal with our arrogant asses anymore. So it has a happy ending.

Update: Brent Simmons writes to say that there's a book with a plot very close to this. He says it's a "fun read." $7.99 for Kindle.

 3/8/2012; 4:23:26 PM.

I read this article in today's NY Times about the Obama campaign wanting to reconnect with supporters of his 2008 candidacy. The mistake is that they never should have lost touch.

In fact, the level of contact should have gone up after he took office. That was when their connection with the electorate could do the most good. When it wasn't about getting elected, rather it was about implementing what it is they wanted to do that caused them to want to be elected.

These people say they understand the Internet, but they don't.

In the future, which could have been the last three years, the campaign will be a 365-days-a-year affair, and not just one year out of four, every year. Hopefully this is something the President now understands. You have no power in Washington if you aren't working with, moving and being moved by the people who voted you into office.

Further, the people have political business all the time too. We need leadership and we need to influence. The Internet is the most powerful tool for organizing we have today. If you're President you can't turn off your Internet connection. Hopefully he understands why that no longer works, if it ever did.

The President is a campaigner. And while he or she is in office, the campaign never stops.

 3/8/2012; 11:44:05 AM.

The biggest bug in the structure of the US govt is the way we allocate Senators and the way we define states.

There are a lot of states in the west with tiny populations, but they all get two Senators, whether they're California or Wyoming. This means the small states have much greater power per capita than the large ones.

In the Senate, with its filibuster rules, forty percent of the votes can stop everything from happening. It's not that hard to put together forty percent of the votes in the Senate with much less than forty percent of the populace.

This is something the founders couldn't have anticipated. There were 13 states when the country was founded. Today there are 50.

This single fact is why our political system is so out of whack, why the extreme right has so much power, in proportion to their numbers.

Update: A crazy idea for the Occupy movement. Pick a low population state, occupy it, and send two Senators to Washington. It's a start.

Update: Here's a list of states ranked by population.

 3/8/2012; 8:17:22 AM.

First, I am not a member of the left or right. I don't like the labels. I vote based on my own process, and I don't do what any political party says. I have values that you might consider left and some you might consider right. But they aren't either -- they're mine.

That said, the left pundits and pols let the right walk all over them. For example in the latest ridiculous shitstorm about contraception. The basic argument of the Catholic Church is that they shouldn't have to pay for something that's against their values. The Republicans see a chance to fight with Democrats, so they grab it. They say it's a question of liberty. No one should have to pay for something they don't believe in.

But they obviously don't really believe this, even if the Catholic Church does.

A simple way to corner them would be to raise another issue that the Catholic Church has a moral objection to -- the death penalty. Why should members of the Catholic Church be required to pay for killing people when it's against their values? Why should any of us be forced to pay for it?

If the issue really is liberty, why does one group deserve liberty and the other must be enslaved? I'm a law-abiding tax-paying natural-born citizen of the United States of America. I hate the death penalty. If you want to kill people in the name of justice -- you pay for it. Count me out. I have a moral objection.

The Republicans are so much better than the Democrats at forcing their will on the rest of us. Remember all those cute slogans that allowed them to prolong the war in Iraq? Don't cut and run. Don't micro-manage. There were so many of them.

Democrats have to look for opportunities to pivot major debates to force the Republicans into corners they don't like. They are pure hypocrites when they talk about liberty. They don't care about liberty. They care about winning control of the government so they can pay off their backers and retire comfortably, on our dime.

Someone should talk to the Catholic bishops, and make sure they remember there are issues they side with liberals on too. They're not just working for the Republicans. I would be surprised if the Catholics didn't welcome an opportunity to express their independence.

PS: The Republicans always made a big deal about listening to the generals. As long as they were agreeing with them. Now that they want to start a war with Iran, who cares that the generals think it's a suicide. They see a chance to fight with the President, even humiliate him. Do they care if they're being traitors? Apparently they don't. Anything to get elected.

PPS: I am not a member of the left, or the Democratic Party. I voted for Ford, Reagan twice, Bush, Dole, Bush, then Kerry and Obama. But I am now an anti-Republican. I think the party should die. Let's start over.

 3/8/2012; 8:00:28 AM.

I was a software developer before there was a Mac, so I remember something not a lot of programmers do. I remember how the tech industry reacted to it. And for the most part, it was with a fair amount of skepticism. And the interesting thing is that the negative things people say about Bootstrap today sound exactly like the negative things people said about the Mac in 1984. And in both cases, the things that people didn't like were what made them important.

What the Mac realized is that there are a set of things that all software has to do, so why shouldn't they all do them the same way? If they did, software would be easier to develop and debug, but more important -- it would be easier to use. If there was only one way to do menus, then once a user learned how to use the menus of one app, they'd already know how to use the menus of all others. Same with scrollbars, windows, the keyboard, the mouse, printing, sound.

The reason programmers didn't like it, and I was one of them, was that they took what we did and commoditized it. Further, there were limits to the one-size-fits-all approach. There were some apps that didn't take to the UI standards very well. What to do about them? Well, you adapted, that's what you did.

This is a well-known technical process called factoring. If you see yourself doing something over and over, do it one more time, really well, and work on the API so it's really easy and flexible, and that's it. You never do it again. It's how you build ever-taller buildings out of software.

The same patterns are observable in the web. In fact, it's kind of sad how much of a repeat it is, how backward today's development environment is compared to the one envisioned by the Mac. But at least Bootstrap is out there doing the factoring. If I want to put up a menu, I can just use their code that does menus. Sure, my menu looks like all the others, and that's a good thing, for users. No need to learn a second or third way to use a menu.

That this is needed, desperately needed, is indicated by the incredible uptake of Bootstrap. I use it in all the server software I'm working on. And it shows through in the templating language I'm developing, so everyone who uses it will find it's "just there" and works, any time you want to do a Bootstrap technique. Nothing to do, no libraries to include. It's as if it were part of the hardware. Same approach that Apple took with the Mac OS in 1984.

Update: A lively Hacker News thread with this post as a starting point.

 3/7/2012; 12:09:11 PM.

I found myself describing what I do in an email. It came out pretty well, and thought it would make a good blog post.

I have a bunch of projects I'm working on. The thread that joins them all together is the idea of relatively normal people running their own servers.

I've been working on this idea for about three years, actually a lot longer if you include projects that weren't ostensibly about people running their own servers, but involved them running them, even though they usually didn't know that's what they were doing.

So with good docs and appropriate UI, there's nothing hard about it. And the rewards can be as important as freedom.

That's the idea.

 3/6/2012; 4:31:48 PM.

I'm doing what's turning into a series of podcasts with Adam Curry.

Now we have a feed that you can subscribe to.

http://podcast.worldoutline.org/

You can put an rss.xml at the end of that but you don't need to.

It always returns the feed.

 3/5/2012; 1:44:33 PM.

Yesterday we got a look at a new software service called Branch, and a discussion between several people who used to work for Blogger, and Anil Dash (who, as far as I know, never did).

Daniel Bachhuber, a friend who works at WordPress, ooohed and ahhhed. I asked him why he liked it so much and he said a couple of things.

The discussion was focused on this topic: How do blogs need to evolve?

I wasn't asked to be part of the discussion, but since this is the open web, and they made their discussion public, I can say what I have to say. It's up to them if they want to include it in their discussion.

I've even provided the "source code" for this post -- just the text with a little bit of structure, and some attributes, with an open architecture for more attributes. So they can do more than link to it. They can "include" it.

The advantage of doing it this way is:

1. I maintain the original.

2. It can be included in as many places as it's relevant.

3. If I want to update it, I can, and it would update in all the places it is viewable.

4. Because I can update it, that means relative writing will be kept to a minimum. People can say what they think without making an issue of who's right and who's wrong. Because they might not stay right or wrong for very long!

In the thread Evan Williams says that Twitter has a big advantage because it already has all the integration tools people want. It's understandable he would think that, I suppose, having participated in creating Twitter, but I don't agree. Here's why.

1. When I quoted Daniel in the second paragraph, you wouldn't believe the dance I had to do to get a link to the tweet onto the clipboard so I could link to it from my post. Even though I've done it dozens of times, I still made three mistakes for every action that worked.

2. Twitter has a 140-character limit, which means that for any kind of complex thought, beyond a grunt or snark (which is likely to be misunderstood because there wasn't room to explain it) I'm going to have to include a link, which of course must be shortened.

3. As they point out in the thread, Twitter is a company town. The archive belongs to them, to do with as they please. I have no say in the future uses of my own writing.

4. Finally, the strongest point -- even Twitter agrees it's not self-contained, because they support oEmbed, which allows them to include content that's hosted on other servers. However, they aren't even open about being open. You can only participate if you're a "partner." I don't know who pays who for this, or if anyone pays, but they admit that being open to content hosted elsewhere is necessary, but it isn't available to the people. In other words, we've given up all the beauty of the Internet, for what exactly? What did we get in return?

Anyway, even if I was invited to participate, all I would do is post a pointer to this blog post. Because here I own the editorial tools and can make them work any way I want to. There is no 140-character limit. There's no problem getting a permalink. I own the archive. Sure if you want to participate it's a bit of work, you have to set up a blog somewhere. That's okay with me. For a little bit of work you get a whole lot of freedom. That's a good deal.

 3/5/2012; 8:21:55 AM.

I know this is "supposed" to be a tech blog, but let me tell you something. I was a rabid Knicks fan long before I had any interest in compilers or outliners or blogging tools. And the Knicks I loved were the legendary team that won two world championships and had the kind of depth and character that today's Knicks are showing. So I have some thoughts about today's Knicks, and I want to write them up.

I could write a long piece and I started to but it's really a simple idea.

I don't care if the Knicks win the championship this year or any year. What I care about is this team of young people who are shining. And the spirit of the team is something to behold. And there are two players that really don't belong. These are the two guys who, going into the 2012 season, were supposed to be the stars. They weren't doing it before, and they haven't gotten on board, and I don't want to wait. Because magic isn't something you screw around with. The Knicks have it now, but they need to clean up, and get focused. They have enough talent on the team that they can afford to do some grooming.

Bottom-line: Trade or put on waivers the two stars -- Stoudemire and Anthony.

And let's get on with the new Knicks.

 3/4/2012; 6:27:03 PM.

We shouldn't have to shorten urls. It's only because of a fairly selfish and unwise company in San Francisco that we're adding an extra layer of fragility to an already loosely-coupled network. Introducing another point of failure.

But with all that disclaimed, we still need url-shorteners.

And the point of url-shorteners is to be short.

The shorter the better.

Today I have got something working I've wanted to play with for a long time. Instead of using pages inside a site, like all other url-shorteners, I wanted to try having hostnames as short urls.

So here's a short url: 1.blork.ly. Try it, it works!

Now with an even shorter domain, blork.ly is not optimal, the names can be even shorter. But they're already 4 or 5 characters shorter than bit.ly urls. So it's off to a good start.

 3/3/2012; 9:16:29 PM.

 3/3/2012; 5:52:02 PM.

I mentioned this in passing in an earlier post, but it deserves special attention.

PandoDaily, a new publication spun out of the ashes of TechCrunch, ran a piece mocking the concerns about the lack of security for personal data on iPhones.

So, if they're really so unconcerned, considering that they probably use iPhones too, would they be willing to publish their address books, now -- today -- in entirety, without any editing. Every contact, phone number, address, email address, every bit of data they have put into their iPhones. So that everyone can see it?

Please include your calendar, and all photos. Remember, no editing, no selection. Everything on your phone is public, now.

And available for everyone to download.

If they do this, I will give $100 to Sarah Lacy's favorite Kickstarter project and express my admiration for the consistency of their philosophy.

Update: Hacker News thread on this topic.

 3/2/2012; 9:16:22 AM.

Sometime in the spring of 1997, the date is subject to discussion, a blog first appeared at www.scripting.com.

The one you're reading right now, Scripting News.

You'll find that no other blog has yet claimed 15 years on the planet. Just as five years ago we were first to reach the ten-year milestone.

It's tough being first because people don't know what to make of it.

Whether you think the first day was February 1, as Rudolf Ammann does (and he has done the research) or if you think as I do that it's April 1 (maybe because it gives me something non-idiotic to do on one of two blog holidays), the fact is this blog both has been here for a long time and has (the thing I'm most proud of) inspired many others to open their veins on the Internet for all to see!

BTW, my first blog-like site was DaveNet, started in October 1994. And there was also the Frontier News page, and the 24 Hours of Democracy site, all of which led to Scripting News. In terms of blogging tools, there was a parade of those as well. AutoWeb, Clay Basket, NewsPage, the website framework, Manila, Radio.

Dewey Defeats Truman

The random rotating header graphic for today is one of my favorites. Harry Truman holding up a newspaper saying he had lost the election, one that he had just won. I love it for so many reasons. First, don't be upset when everyone counts you out. I've had people say that my career was over, so many times, and so far they've always been wrong. You'd think by now they would stop predicting it, but nope -- they still think you can't be innovative, even when you've spent a life studying and practicing innovation.

They also said Truman was a shit president, but what did they know. Turns out he was one of our best presidents. He got us through all kinds of tough binds, and did it with an understated purely American grace. He looked meek, but he also gave em hell, and had something funny to say about it.

No one thought he could follow the great Franklin Roosevelt, who was indeed a great president. But he held his own and gave geeks all over America hope.

PandoDaily needs a clue

Read this piece if you're suffering from low blood pressure.

This is what a company town looks like. What matters is what the money people want. Our private info? Oh come on, lighten up.

Well, the problem is they're users too, in Silicon Valley, and their competitors, now that they know it's open season on contact info, photos and calendar info, are probably going to start going after it, if they haven't already done so.

Can't wait to see their tune change when they finally get a clue. Unless they're all willing to publish their address books now, in entirety, without editing? If they were willing to do that, well I'd eat my words.

Funniest picture ever?

I think this might be the most funny picture ever posted to this blog.

 3/2/2012; 8:48:29 AM.

Lately Republicans have gotten deeply intimately involved in female sexuality. I think they have a problem however, because they're being very gender-biased. I think it's time for us men to demand equal attention!

Men use contraceptives too. Let me explain how that works. Never mind. I assume we're all adults here.

Does the Catholic Church object to paying for vasectomies? I guess that gets right to the point.

How could the Republicans have missed this. If this is not about women, why are they always talking about female birth control?

They really drove themselves into a deep corner here. Hard to see how they dick their way out of this one.

 3/1/2012; 3:49:47 PM.

When we were looking at iPhones and address books, it turned out that every app on the iPhone was allowed to take a copy of the address book and upload it where ever it wanted without permission and without even notifying the user. It's hard to believe that Apple could not have seen this as a problem for users, if they empathized with users. How could they not? Don't they use their own devices?

I hate to think that all these companies have the names, addresses and phone numbers of pretty much everyone I've dated in the last few years. Every member of my family, every friend. I don't think there are any kids under 13 in there, but I'm sure some people keep contact information for their children, nieces and nephews or grandchildren in their address books?

The blase approach the industry took to this issue is only surprising if you assume they were surprised. I'm sure they weren't. When you think about the business models of most of the companies that get funded these days, you can see what a gold mine this information is. I read yesterday that Google doesn't care if you use Google Plus for anything, if you never come back. They just wanted your biographical info so they could target ads at you better. How much would they like to know the names and contact info for everyone who's important enough to make it into your address book.

When we were doing the investigation, it also turned up that photos were just as open to apps as contact info. Do you have any pictures on your phone of things you haven't uploaded because you don't want to share them with the world? Too bad. They're pretty much shared. Don't use your phone to take pictures of anything you wouldn't want everyone to see.

I'm not installing any software unless I personally know the developer and have heard them say in their own words that they are not doing anything mischievous with the data, and won't as long as they work for the company in question. And I sure as hell am not installing software from any companies whose business models are vague to me. Because I assume they will grab as much info as they can. Because I assume that's their business model. Better safe than sorry. Forewarned is forearmed.

BTW, one more thing -- the tech press is covering this story in slow motion. You should also be aware that any iOS app can access your calendar and your cellular carrier info. I haven't seen ths appear in any story that's been linked to from TechMeme.

PS: The camera on Android devices is even less secure.

 3/1/2012; 3:37:28 PM.

I think at the dawn of PCs there was a company with a name like The People's Computer Company. If not, it could have been the name of the whole industry.

This is what all the heroes of the 80s were thinking at the beginning. We're building tools to give power to the people.

It was an extension of the culture we grew up in, the 60s and 70s. Power to the People was a big idea then. I think it's going to be a big one again, in reaction to what the computer industry of the generation after the hippies is doing. Zuck is going to create rebellion. Apple and Larry and Sergei too.

The first product of the PPC will be a PC (of course) with all its ports open. With disk drives and an Ethernet jack. Slots. Nothing new. But the things that are disappearing from the "Post-PC" computers everyone is talking about will still be there on the Post-Post-PC.

I don't mind carrying around something a little more clunky if it can be connected to something we haven't dreamt up yet.

That's what was great about the original PC industry. It's what we'll come to value in the new one.

 2/29/2012; 6:23:23 PM.

Must remember to write a blog post about this.

The tech industry has been absorbed by the ad industry, and vice versa.

However, there is, imho, still room for a tech industry that is not merged with the ad industry.

In fact, if we want to have a tech industry at all, we'd better invest in the "other" one, because advertising isn't much to bet on long-term. Seriously.

I had this flash reading a TechCrunch piece about Foursquare. It hit me that Dennis has been getting his education in advertising for the last few years. Now instead of talking features for users he talks about features for advertisers.

Yes, I'm sure there's a lot of money in this. But it wasn't why I got into tech. I don't like advertising very much. I don't mind if it's funny (like the E-trade ads with the kids) but much of what passes for advertising these day is pretty humiliating, for everyone involved.

Like the ads in front of movies, and the ads they play during breaks at NBA games. Why? I paid $200 for my seat. If I paid $225 could I have it without the ads?

Oh well, looks like I went ahead and wrote the blog post.

 2/29/2012; 5:41:42 PM.

Big tech companies don't trust users, small tech companies have no choice. This is why smaller companies, like Dropbox, tend to be forces against lock-in, and big tech companies try to lock users in.

That's why Dropbox is so useful and the stuff that the big companies have produced so far has been so crippled.

It's a good thing that Apple didn't buy Dropbox because you certainly wouldn't be able to store any kind of file you want in any structure you like inside an Apple-owned Dropbox.

The BigCo guys would tell you it's a formula for chaos to give users so much power, but they've been saying that forever, and they've been right in their own contexts, and wrong in the larger one. Big tech companies come and go, but this idea of not trusting users has been a constant.

So to think that Dropbox couldn't grow to become a platform the size of Apple or Amazon, well you have to make that argument, you can't just say it. It's the kind of careless inside talk I'd expect from an average tech writer, not the great Farhad Manjoo! (No sarcasm, not even the slightest bit.)

Google thinks files and folders are obsolete ideas. Oy. That's like Ford and Exxon thinking that roads and traffic lights are obsolete. It's true perhaps that we could invent better ways to store user's info today, but that's the way we store information. It's not going to change just because a product manager at Google or Microsoft thinks it should.

When Google finally releases their GDrive product, I bet it will manage files and folders the way Dropbox does. Who do we have to thank for that? Dropbox. But if history is a guide, they'll probably screw it up some other way. Limit the power of users in some way that Dropbox doesn't.

Re Bill Gurley's assertion that there's something special about the Dropbox synchronization algorithm, I'm a Dropbox user and I don't see it. I think the algorithm has some cosmetic glitches. No matter, it's still a useful product (this is not a bug report). The advantage Dropbox has is that it's a small company that's got a big idea, and they're executing well. The big competitors are good at huffing and puffing, and impressing reporters, but that's not where the fight is won or lost.

Now to Farhad's assumption that this service has to be free -- why? That's so depressing. What else in life is free? If I want to eat lunch I pay the restaurant. If I want to ride on the subway, I have to pay to do so. Again, in a very untypical fashion, Farhad just states that it's obvious that it has to be free. Well, that requires an argument. Maybe he's right, but why?

I like the fact that I pay for Dropbox. That means that they would be wrong to attach a horribly invasive business model to mining what could be some of my most sensitive data. It's really foolish to give all that stuff to a company without having a customer relationship with them.

As to the niceties, having it be able to remember the state of all your apps, it doesn't matter to me. Everything about how I use computers is so chaotic, it would be a very small thing to remember which apps and which windows within the apps were open. You know what I'd like even more -- having iPad browser tabs not refresh when you activate them. One of the most annoying features ever. But Topolsky wants Dropbox to know about the state of apps and windows, and maybe a lot of others do too. Let's see if we can get it. Maybe if the users got active and said to the people who make the operating systems that we want Dropbox and we want those features, they would work with them to give us what we want. But if I had to choose between good relatively safe synchronization that Dropbox provides and the mess that Apple provides, well, there's no choice.

But the really huge big gaping hole in Farhad's piece is that any of the big vendors are going to work better with their big compeitors than they would with the upstart Dropbox. Apple's synch server will give you lots of neat features but only for your Apple-made devices. Same with Google and Microsoft. That's a pretty worthless feature if you own an Android phone, an Amazon tablet and an Apple desktop.

Farhad has fallen into the trap that all tech writers seem to fall into eventually. They stop seeing the user as an important factor in the outcome of tech industry warfare. But if you look at history, not only are the users important, they're the only constant power. And they vote out lock-in, eventually. And that tends to favor Dropbox, not the incumbents.

Dropbox has the opportunity to build a platform that sits outside all the platforms we've come to know. Their challenge is to get users to care whether they can connect their Dropbox data to the devices they use. So far, they've done better than anyone else. And they won't have to deal with the second-guessing and turf wars that happen inside big companies. I don't think it's a slam dunk that Dropbox will grow to be a huge tech company, but I also don't think their product is just a feature.

Steve Jobs didn't say these things about other people's products, btw, because he had given it a lot of thought. He did it because he had a nasty streak, and he was trying to demoralize a competitor who didn't want to sell to him. I'm pretty sure they do this in other industries too. I've seen it done many times in tech.

 2/27/2012; 8:48:45 AM.

I love it when software gets to the stage that the worldoutline is getting to.

For the last year, while under development, it's been a hot steamy mess. But I use my messes, and I have users, so every time I had to undo a mistake, or had to change my mind about how something worked, it meant a difficult "corner-turn" where breakage would happen, and putting the pieces back together was often hard work.

But it seems to have paid off. The last set of changes have been cleanups. Taking out half-done experiments, and relying on frameworks that were experimental before but now are rely-able (or reliable). And as a side-product it's gotten faster and faster, to the point where I can now link to pieces on the worldoutline from Twitter without taking the server offline while the bots that hack Twitter pound every link you push through there (Twitter might try to do something about this btw).

I just published a piece about infinite loops you might find interesting. I think it's really cool that all of a sudden people are curious about how programs work. I love to tell stories, and it's a challenge to find human terms to explain programming concepts. Everything in programming, of course, is human -- the languages were designed by people, used by people. They fit our way of thinking. If insects had evolved into a high form of life maybe they would have come up with a different kind of programming. Hey for all we know they have. (That's how programmers think, always questioning assumptions.)

Anyway, I expect to post more "over there" and at some point, "here" will move "there" as well. That's another thing about the tech world, everything is scaffolding, it's always just here to provide a basis for the next big thing that will replace this old thing.

 2/26/2012; 10:02:02 AM.

I did a podcast with Adam Curry yesterday. 

Except for one glitchy Rebooting the News last year, this is the first podcast we've done together since 2005, the early days of podcasting.

http://adam.curry.com/2012/02/24/wop120120224final.mp3

I know we need to get a feed going. We will do that, reallll sooon now.

BTW, one more thing -- sometime this month, according to Rudolf Ammann, this blog will be was 15 years old! Almost old enough to drive.

 2/25/2012; 10:40:29 AM.

I just read Mathew Ingram's report on John Paton's talk about the future of news. I agree with what Paton says, but with an important caveat. He doesn't go far enough. The change he describes will not be at equilibrium. It is not the shape of the news system of the future. The practice he describes will not hold back the tide.

What I've advocated to news organizations for 15 years, which has been ignored probably because it is so distasteful to the people in positions of power in the news industry, is that they reform around the idea of sources with the ability to communicate direct to readers. The role of news professionals in this future is to choose quotes from each of the sources to form something like stories. To distribute authority through the trust that readers have in their name, a trust that is rapidly diminishing, with good cause. In this model not only is the gatekeeping function gone, but so is the media function. We live in the age of disintermediation. A fancy way of saying we've disempowered the entity in the middle. Perhaps not eliminated them, but they no longer rule.

If you want proof it's all around. Rick Santorum was able to become a leading candidate without money or the support of the media. Same with every other front-runner in the 2012 election cycle, except for Romney and Obama. The media worked actively against the Occupy movement, but that didn't slow it down. The story got out anyway.

There was an obvious opportunity here before blogging took hold, by offering to host the platforms for the most influential people in your community. It's probably still not too late to do this, but it won't be as powerful today as it would have been before WordPress, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.

The news people may still not like this because they aren't the heroes, but get this -- they never were, and this is where I agree with Paton emphatically. The bug in the mental model of news people is that they are gatekeepers. This may have been true because the means of distribution were expensive, but it's no longer true. And besides, the news writers were just employees anyway, the people with the power were the people with the capital to buy the machinery.

PS: If I were advising an existing publication how to get started down the Sources Go Direct path, I'd urge them to start a river, aggregating the feeds of the bloggers you most admire, and the other news sources they read. Share your sources with your readers, understanding that almost no one is purely a source or purely a reader. Mix it all up. Create a soup of ideas and taste it frequently. Connect everyone that's important to you, as fast as you can, as automatically as possible, and put the pedal to the metal and take your foot off the brake.

 2/24/2012; 9:43:06 AM.

I understand that the Catholic Church doesn't want to pay for insurance for its employees that includes coverage for contraception, even though they are required to do so by law. I take them at their word that it's a matter of conscience. With the Republicans, who have made this their issue, I have doubts about it being about conscience. But I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, for the sake of argument.

The death penalty is also a matter of conscience for a lot of Americans. It's abhorrent to them that people be killed in the name of justice, especially when some of these people are innocent. As one of these people, myself, it's a horror not only that they're being killed or murdered in my name, but also that, through my taxes, I have to pay for it.

So, if we're to establish a new precedent that Americans should not be required to pay for things they find morally abhorrent, then the death penalty is going to have be funded some other way, not through public money.

PS: It seems the Catholic Church would agree, btw -- since they oppose the death penalty. I wonder why they haven't refused to pay taxes until the government gets out of the business of killing its own citizens.

PPS: Ooops. I didn't realize that churches don't pay taxes. So why then don't they STFU about paying for moral things. They don't pay, we do. I don't see where they have any say in it.

 2/24/2012; 9:13:46 AM.

There was a time, in the year 2000, when everyone was talking music. Everywhere you went. You'd be checking out the cucumbers and lettuce at the supermarket and the person next to you would ask if you were using Napster, and before you could answer they'd be off telling you what they found and how amazing the experience was.

That was already twelve years ago, but I'll never forget it. All of sudden something wonderful and unexpected had happened. Outside the normal. It wasn't planned by some marketing guy. The world had changed and it was great, and we didn't know what the limits were. Or how it would end.

I remember thinking -- I wish Jerry had been here to see this. The other day at the Knicks game I said to one of my friends that this was the first huge thing Steve Jobs missed. (Later I realized that he more or less missed Occupy too, which was just as big as either Napster or Linsanity).

So this led me to a tweet this morning, where I compared the the opportunity the Knicks and basketball have to the opportunity presented by Napster, and realized they're going to blow it. When we were at the game the other day, they had the usual things to keep fans entertained during timeouts. But we didn't need them! Here we were soaking up something as great as Beatlemania or Napster, and they're shooting cheap t-shirts -- advertising for crying out loud -- into the audience as if we needed anything to occupy us.

On the way out of the Garden you could see the signage hadn't changed yet. They had huge pictures of stars, who were still technically playing for the Knicks, but they weren't the story. Don't they have any actual fans working for the team? Yeah they were selling Lin jerseys, the street-level marketers knew how to adjust, but the corporate ones? Imagine what their meetings must be like. Imagine all the sleazy promotions they must be planning.

But they didn't create Jeremy Lin. They didn't even see him. Are they going to define them? Are we going to hate them? (Of course, the only question is what exactly will they do to make us hate them.) This is still America, and we're still run by lawyers and accountants. We just had a breakout of soul, a lot like the joy people had with Napster. Bloomberg shut down Occupy. This too will end. But for right now -- it sure is wonderful!

BTW, a few days ago I wrote about the Beatles, and what happened with them, how Beatlemania ended. One of the four really wanted to be a Beatle. That wasn't enough to drive them forward.

 2/23/2012; 3:50:13 PM.

Suppose Facebook or Twitter wanted to be really good netizens, and let you use their service to log onto other services, but to not lock you in. How might that work?

Well, I wouldn't be known on other nets as @davewiner, instead I would be known as dave.scripting.com. That name would be a CNAME for Facebook, if I was using Facebook to guarantee I really am who I say I am. But if, in five or ten years, I decided to use another service, one with a neat feature Facebook doesn't offer, I could point dave.scripting.com at the other server.

It would be like changing your credit card number, something we have to deal with from time to time. Not a great thing, but then not too bad either. You get reminded of all the things you're paying for automatically. I actually like to go through that ritual from time to time. In this case you'd be reminded of all the services that have access to your personal stuff.

I doubt if Facebook would do this, but then a commercial ID hosting service, one that charged me say $10 a year to be my identity server, might be willing to offer such a service and make it easy for me to switch.

And here's the funny part. Such services already exist and they work really well. They're called registrars.

 2/23/2012; 1:04:56 PM.