I had no idea how Jason Pontin's piece, Why Publishers Don't Like Apps, would end, but it was a riveting story, for a guy like me, who believes that what comes first in news is what's new.

I don't think that fancy layout trumps newness. The name "news" tells you what's important about news. Newness. So if you follow that clue, it leads you to the obvious conclusion that news should present first the newest bits we have. What's next? The second newest bits. And third, fourth and so on.

News is one of those things that is that simple. But it takes people a while to get there if they don't allocate the time to take walks in the park and think about this stuff in an organized way. Maybe, as Steve Jobs said, it helps to have dropped acid when you were young.

Pontin has discovered the truth of rivers. He says that Flipboard is an RSS reader. It is! And if you want to do RSS for news the best way to go is rivers.

Why do the Flipboards of the world get the attention from tech execs, VCs, users and the press? It has always been thus. Hypercard was more popular with editors than outliners. They always go for the flashy bits. They think that a glittery carousel is how information should work, ignoring that history hasn't worked that way. Books don't win because of flash. They win because they're readable. It's the words that provide the excitement. Anything that gets in the way is going by the wayside.

Okay so I feel slightly vindicated here. Now while I have your attention, let me point in the next direction. Once you have a river, do something bold and daring. Add the feeds of your favorite bloggers and share the resulting flow with your readers. Let your community compete for readership. And let them feel a stronger bond to you. Then when you learn about that, do some more. (And btw, you're now competing, effectively with your competitors, Facebook and Twitter. Don't kid yourselves, these guys are moving in your direction. You have to move in theirs and be independent of them. Or be crushed.)

I wish I could work with the teams of the best publications. If that could happen, we'd kick ass. But I'm here on the sidelines giving advice that you guys take on very very slowly. It's frustrating, because it's been clear that rivers are the way to go, to me, for a very long time. A lot of ground has been lost in the publishing business while we wait. There's a lot of running room in front of this idea. We can move quickly, if publishers have the will.

PS: The new EC2 for Poets tutorial gets you all the way through a River. Takes a few minutes. And it's free for a year if you're a new Amazon customer.

PPS: This is my personal river. I take my own medicine. It includes lots of feeds from people who read this site. And I'm always open to adding more.

 5/7/2012; 10:40:09 AM.

Yahoo's CEO lied about having a Computer Science degree.

That's a fact. It can be spun in a lot of different ways, but that doesn't matter.

In CEO-level business, that kind of lie is material.

I've done two major corporate transactions, and contemplated a number of others that made it past letter of intent and into due diligence. In this mode, the lawyers emhphasize over and over that you want to disclose every liability, no matter how small, up front, before the deal is signed. Any liability that is discovered later will cost you. If the liability is big enough, you could have to return all the money, and your liability isn't even limited to that. I had one bizarre case where I was being sued by my own lawyer, and advised by another to settle or risk losing everything.

When you're working at the level of CEO of a public company, as the Yahoo CEO is, by definition, at all times, you want to preserve your right to litigate. And given Yahoo's litigious nature under this CEO, you gotta figure that'll bring out the litigators from all over.

While I've only had an occasional glimpse of the lawyer hell that corporate CEOs live in, it's hard to imagine going into that kind of constant battle with this kind of exposure. How can you sue someone for breach of contract when you lied to get your job. It's a pretty awkward situation. Never mind what it says to people who apply for jobs at Yahoo. Don't worry about lying on your resume. We don't take that stuff seriously here at Yahoo.

And just imagine the shareholder suits if they don't fire the guy.

They're going to have to do it. Yeah, it's definitely a bad day for Yahoo, and they don't have too many good ones. But it's really unthinkable that he stays.

 5/5/2012; 5:44:34 PM.

Yesterday I wrote that the Knicks season was over. Even if they were to miraculously win the next four games, it would still be over. Because the illusion of an all-for-one and one-for-all cause is broken. The bubble has burst. For me it wasn't the firing of the coach, or whether there was room for anyone on the court with Carmelo Anthony, though in retrospect, those were really clear signals that this was a mess, not a cause.

What had attracted me to the Knicks was of course Linsanity. Because here, for a brief moment, it didn't seem to be entirely about money. The young man, overcoming prejudice, breaking through and shining bright through vision, talent and vitality -- that was hugely attractive.

The image of Stoudemire sitting on the bench next to Lin killed all that was left of my enthusiasm for the Knicks. I don't care how much they are paying him. He doesn't belong there. The fans shouldn't have been booing the Heat players as much as the Knicks management who didn't have the good sense to keep Stoudemire out of view.

Anyway, this connects nicely with a blog post published a few hours ago by Paul Krugman at the NY Times.

He points out that facts aren't facts, according to some in politics, if they come from the wrong people.

There, he put his finger on the problem.

Many people see politics as I see sports. There are two teams, and my team is going to beat yours, and nothing else matters. Winning is everything. And that's a bad mistake. Because as we noted yesterday, while sports is a simulation of war -- it's harmless to project tribalism on the symbols of basketball or baseball -- it's not harmless to do that with politics. We're not manipuating symbols there. There are real armies and economies at stake. Nuclear weapons. The viability of the planet. The future of our species. If we see this as war, then it is war. How much do you know about war, and do you really want to usher it in so quickly, without thinking.

That's the problem. Politics and sports are not the same thing. One is frivolous and the other is anything but.

 5/5/2012; 1:04:43 PM.

If you've been reading this site since 1995 you know that I am mystical about sports. That means I see the mystery in it. I don't see things as entirely deterministic, at least not in the sphere that you and I occupy (assuming that gods don't bother reading my rants).

In that spirit, last night's game had moments when the Knicks looked like they could win, but it was not meant to be. And like the awful way the Bay Area handled the World Series of 1989, when the As played the Giants, the Knicks doomed their own game by putting Amare Stoudemire on the bench, along with all the courageous warriors who suited up to face the enemy, and did not inflict wounds on themselves so they wouldn't have to play.

You do realize that sports is our simulation for war, in a day when wars are fought by drones, and when the bodies are kept out of view, and when taxes go down instead of up in wartime. We, as humans, have a need for war simulation at least. We need to feel that our strongest men are doing battle to preserve the honor of our tribe. And a deserter has no place of honor alongside Chandler and Anthony, even Bibby and Novak -- people who give their all for the cause. No place.

Put a picture of the young fallen hero Iman Shumpert in the seat that would be occupied by Stoudemire. Or a roll of toilet paper. I don't care. But Stoudemire had no place on the bench last night.

The place for deserters is a firing squad. Would you like to say anything before we shoot you? "I didn't punch the glass with a closed fist." Okay thank you. Then the blindfold goes on. Ready. Aim. Fire.

The pivotal scene in the great movie Patton is very much like this moment. The General is touring a hospital, pinning medals on soldiers who were injured or killed in battle. You can tell that he really feels this. Then he sees a soldier, sitting up, and asks him what's wrong. He's scared, he says. Patton blows up. Get the fuck out of my hospital, he says (paraphrasing).

You can't put a coward on the bench, a pretender, alongside heroes, and expect to win in battle. It's pretty simple.

The Knicks have to stand for something other than money. Okay, you gave $80 million to a coward. You lost $80 million. Too bad. Now get that asshole out of there.

 5/4/2012; 9:17:46 AM.

Sometime in the last few months Canon released a couple of cameras that support wifi. If you've been following Scripting News for a few years, you know this is an event I've been waiting for. And since I had a birthday coming up, I decided to spring for it. I'm going to give my old Canon point-and-click to my Mom. She needs a new camera. And I need a new toy!

Which has turned out to be a real puzzle. How do you get the wifi to work?

I started a thread for that, detailing my experience so far.

Here's how I think the camera should work:

1. Turn it on.

2. Like either of my smartphones, an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy running Android, it automatically connects to my router, which I had previously told it the password to. (That much seems to work with the Canon.)

3. Go to my desktop Mac. The camera appears in my list of nearby computers.

4. Click on the icon, see the disk, same as any other computer on the LAN.

5. Open the disk, open the folders and there are my pics.

6. Use the Finder to copy them where ever I want. (They are my pictures, yes?)

Reading the docs, which are, as usual, awful, or the reviews on Amazon, makes me pretty sure this isn't the way it works. Instead, you somehow have to connect to the desktop from the camera and then use its unfamiliar and awkward UI on its low-rez screen (which is really cheap of them because the screen is actually very high resolultion, it's the software that doesn't have enough pixels and that's just memory, and not very much) to copy the files from the camera to the computer. That's exactly the wrong way to do it. But I'm pretty sure that's the way it works.

There have been some reviews of this product in the usual tech pubs. Gizmodo claims they got the camera to connect to the computer, but they didn't say how they did it other than "it's a bit of a pain."

The other day I wrote a piece about how I like to spend enough time with my own products to make sure stuff like this works and isn't embarassingly difficult. It's products like this Canon camera that have taught me how a lot of product makers don't give a shit. Or their companies don't let them give a shit. Net-effect is the same.

BTW, it takes a really sharp picture. This is why I want to use a Canon camera that communicates instead of using a smartphone that takes pictures. Here's the same pic at full resolution. Look at all the detail!

PS: The manual on the CD included with the camera says nothing about wifi.

PPS: Peter Rojas started a thread on gdgt to try to figure out how to get the Canon 320 wifi working.

 5/3/2012; 9:04:17 AM.

"I think you're an okay person. Why do people say you're an asshole?"

This used to happen a lot, not so much these days, but it still happens.

What do you say when someone says that. There are so many things wrong with it. I don't even want to try to list them.

I tend to want to respond with something approximating the truth.

The "people" who say this, if there really are any, are doing it behind my back, not to my face. We both know that's not a highly principled thing to do, right?

I'd like to say I don't care, but I'm a human being, and we are approval-seeking animals. So when you say that, and it registers -- and believe me it registers -- my body chemistry reacts as if I've been threatened. I then have to have an internal conversation about it to compensate. "There really is no threat," I say to myself. And that's energy I'd rather not spend.

But maybe there is a threat. Who knows. It's such a vague statement. You know what, if you say that to me, you aren't being a friend. Maybe that's the best, simplest, thing to say.

 5/2/2012; 11:38:32 AM.

The other day when I wrote the Last Man Standing piece about Carmelo Anthony, I was bothered in the back of my mind about Amare Stoudemire. I know we're supposed to think of him as a star, but I've never seen it with my own two eyes. He doesn't feel like a star to me.

I still feel the tenacity of Melo, esp after Game 2, where he overcame Miami's suffocating defense and scored a bunch and did a heroic job of trying to win for the team. Really, I never expected the Knicks to win any of this. And I don't care. I just love the illusion that they're putting their heart and soul into it.

But then Stoudemire punches a fire extinguisher, cuts his hand, and is out for the series.

Everyone else on the team seems to be doing whatever they can. I cry for Iman Shumpert, the rookie with the huge heart, who died on the field of battle in Game One. Stoudemire was supposed to set an example for the rookies of how to keep your cool when the world is crumbling around you.

Then I saw an off-hand comment about how much he makes. And the bubble popped. This guy is paid $20 million per season. It's his job to get to the playoffs, and then push as far into the post-season as he can. They lose two games on the road. It's not over. Not even close. But his heart is sick and he can't see himself on the court, so he takes himself out of it. I don't see how Stoudemire goes back on the court again, especially wearing a Knicks uniform.

I couldn't believe this comment on Twitter. "We all have done thing out of anger that we regret. That makes us human. Bad timing on my part. Sorry guys. This to shall pass." Human? I suppose. But then being a pussy, coward, dickhead and loser is also human. I don't care if what he did is human. He didn't want to compete so he took himself out. Yeah, that might be human. He should give the money to charity. That might restore a little of his dignity, honor or manhood.

But he still has time on his contract. So they say he will be back next year.

If that's the case, I hope they trade Melo, Novak, Lin, Fields, Smith, Davis, Chandler and Shumpert, and all the other fine players on the Knicks. I'll root for them on their new teams. Just so I can forget about the cowardice of Stoudemire.

And btw, to the Knicks' equipment man -- put a punching bag in the locker room so no player in the future has even a remote excuse for doing what Stoudemire did.

 5/2/2012; 9:09:18 AM.

Can you imagine if you wanted to play professional basketball, and you were good, you were on a couple of championship teams, and have set a couple of records, that they'd say to you "Okay, we'll let you play, but you have the be a CEO and give us a business plan we like."

What if in addition to being a great painter or musician, you also had to look great in a suit and have an MBA?

Or if you wanted to be a surgeon, and had to spend all day every day in meetings with people you don't like or respect, explaining to them, without hurting their feelings why you have to use this scalpel instead of that one.

Maybe you might not be a great CEO but you could paint Starry Night or sing a nice ballad, or arrange flowers nicely, or cook a great meal for 2000 people.

There are a lot of talents that have nothing to do with being a CEO.

And then there's this...

I don't want to be a CEO.

Let me say that slowly.

I. Don't. Want. To. Be. A. CEO.

But I do love to make software.

I suspect in 20 or 30 years the tech business, if it survives all the bubbles that will come and go between then and now, will be structured around creative talent as well as corporateness (and I'm being generous to corporateness). But that day has not come yet. And until it does, btw, the tech industry is just as vulnerable and just as dumb as industries it looks down on. As long as you think of programmers as employees and not creative people, or see being a CEO as superior to being a world-class developer, you're vulnerable to disruption. Really big time disruption.

 5/1/2012; 3:36:03 PM.

A lot of things are working now in the WorldOutline, so I've really slowed down the development work and am spending a lot of time trying things out just using the product.

I used to do this at Living Videotext, a long time ago. Back then, I wasn't coding the product, so I got to play a different role in the development process. I called that role First User. I would use the product to do the things it was intended to do, and in doing so would bump up against loose-ends or rough edges. I would then communicate them to the lead developer, in a daily meeting.

I would always bring my notebook, which was a physical thing, because the tool I was working on was a notetaking tool. I needed to have some other work to use the product for, which wasn't a problem because I was also the CEO of the company (my Day Job) and was working with a lot of other people on a lot of projects. That's what a CEO does. Juggles lots of things, all of them important, some tedious, but necessary -- and others more than necessary, crucial to our success. Making sure the product could be used for what it was meant to do was somewhere between necessary and crucial. And it was also a matter of honor. One of my pet peeves are products that have glitches that every user must see. That means the company either didn't know or didn't care. By glitch, I mean an annoyance that could be easily fixed.

The project I'm playing with is the "threads" app. It uses Disqus for comments, and all of it is embedded in the Bootstrap 2 environment. So I can use any of the gizmos or doodads that they define there. (This gives me an idea, Disqus should have a switch that allows me to tell it that it's running inside Boostrap and it could use their doodads and gizmos too.)

Here's the example that goes with this post.

The menu you see at the top of the screen is the one I'm going to use to tie together all the scripting.com sites. They don't all have the same menu, but they should. That will happen when all my content is flowing through this engine. That might be a very long time from now.

BTW, I set the menu for a page, or a site by setting the menuName attribute to the name of the menu. There is no command yet for setting that attribute in the OPML Editor, but I can do it with a one-line script.

op.attributes.setone ("menuName", "scriptingNewsMenu")

That's the advantage of having your editor be a scripting environment too.

Also one of the things that comes out of using your product as it was intended to be used, is that you learn how to explain in very few words what its intended purpose is. As you're developing it, especially if you're not following in someone else's footsteps, that can be a hard thing to come up with.

I've created an abbreviated version of this post on the threads site in case you'd care to comment, or have a question.

 5/1/2012; 2:05:52 PM.