I think Warren Buffet is right to buy news organizations, and I wish I had his money so I could too. And so is Chris Hughes for buying New Republic.

Working news organizations are much more valuable than most people think. You just have to change the context to see that, and project out a few years.

It's all going to change when Twitter buys one of those new organizations. That's when the lightbulbs will go on for the owners of what remains of the worldwide news industry. Because if you change context, you see the news people as a leg-up for the owner of one online news network in competition with the others. A decent portion of the value of those online systems will be in people. Programmers matter, as do support people, testers, people who can keep data centers humming, and people who have their fingers on the pulse of what's happening in business, government, sports, education, travel, food, movies, theater, music, weather, science (I'm just running through the sections of a newspaper).

That's why I've been encouraging the owners of these news orgs to invest in RSS-based news delivery systems. Rivers that gather up quality news flows. That's PE. Most of them don't see it. I bet Hughes and Buffet do. It's so simple. News is one of the big ingredients in the future of networks.

 5/21/2012; 10:35:56 AM.

Google's problem is they used Facebook as their guide to upgrading their view of what the Internet is. And that led them away from their strength, and into what I think is a dead-end. Much as Microsoft was led into a dead-end by the web in the 1990s.

The problem with Facebook's approach is more than it has centralized all access to user's data, which they have. They've also centralized the flow of new ideas to the Internet. If you buy the idea that Facebook is the Internet, which is of course the problem for Facebook. Because no matter how big they get, they're still just part of the Internet. All the devices people use to access Facebook can access other parts of the Internet. So if something more exciting comes along, people can get there.

No problem, you say, because Facebook is a very innovative company. But it is a problem, because that's the Facebook of yesterday. The one that occupied a small suite of offices in downtown Palo Alto. That was two iterations of Facebook ago. And they're working on the third iteration. Each is much huger than the previous. And they are all hiring out of the general talent pool of tech.

At best, they can produce a stream of innovation equal to 1.5 previous Facebooks, and that would be a victory. The model for everyone for scaling a company and still producing new products, and new ideas, is of course Apple. But I'd argue that the Apple of the 1980s was far more innovative than the Apple of the last ten years. They took huge unprecedented steps every couple of years. Today's Apple, and there's nothing wrong with this by the way, takes them every five to seven years. And they aren't as big, they're more evolutionary, more refinements of previous stuff. Re-releases. Like Pixar, they ship a new Toy Story every few years.

The value of the Internet is that it represents a common set of protocols and formats that are very widely implemented. Everywhere human beings are you will find HTTP and HTML. Even in space. Even at the poles. Even in the jungle. Or the core of our cities. It is even possible to add new stuff to that. But please study how that happens. Sure some of it comes from the big companies, but lots of it comes from the people. Some of it comes from young people, and some of it comes from people in their 40s, 50s and 60s.

Back in the 90s, there were only three stories carried by the press. Let's see if I remember them:

1. Apple is dead.

2. Microsoft is evil.

3. Java is the future.

Never mind whether they were true or not, what's important was that with the benefit of hindsight we see that these were not the only stories. Just the ones that reporters pushed. Even though they used Apple products, and if they had studied hsitory of tech cycles, they would have known that Microsoft was in its twilight of dominance, and that languages don't change things the way Sun and Netscape wanted us to think they do.

All along, however, all the way from the beginning of my career as a technologist in the 1970s, to the present, there has been the idea that big companies make innovation. This is the biggest impediment to actual innovation. It means that investment dollars go to the wrong places. That people are driven to become big just to innovate. Which is as silly is waiting to be happy until you're rich. By the time you get there, the sex sucks and the innovation is a memory. Instead you're mired in politics, and turf wars and strategy taxes, and execs lack the intuition they had when they were founders because now they live like almost no one else does. Even Steve Jobs drifted away from his roots as he aged. You have to work at staying in it.

If the past is a predictor, here's what will happen. Facebook will exist for a long time to come. They're huge. They've absorbed a lot of the growth of Silicon Valley. They're the continuation of companies like Sun and Netscape, Apple and H-P. Google is out there too, but they are imho where Microsoft was in the 1990s. They too will be here for a long time because it's very rare for companies as large and diverse as Google to go down quickly. It usually takes a generation or two, and sometimes they figure out how to be in it much longer.

But again, if the past is a predictor, new ideas will take root among users and those ideas will grow into the next layer of tech. That's a good place to put your attention too.

 5/21/2012; 9:49:45 AM.

I'm working on the top-level user interface for the worldoutline software, and have decided, for now at least, that blorkmarks will be a top level feature. I could leave them out in the first version, and introduce the concept as an upgrade a few months after the initial release. I might still do that. But I wanted to see if I could explain what they are to the relatively technical people who read this blog.

The core idea in the worldoutline is that you can put a marker on a headline that says this place begins a new space. Which allows you to use the outliner to organize all your spaces.

This way of organizing has lots of advantages. It lets you view a blog as a structure of documents you can edit. And it can allow you to fork off a new blog without increasing the complexity of the world you manage. This is something you're constantly fighting. A lot of spaces shouldn't overly complicate your life.

So how does a seam get expressed? How are these markers implemented? You could either come up with a web service that takes a name and tells you how to find your way to that place, or you could use a system that already does most of the job, DNS. This is one of my basic design principles. When possible use already-deployed and widely-supported protocols instead of inventing new ones. Lots of good reasons for this. That's why I used DNS. It scales, it's widely deployed, and I've always felt it was under-utilized, that there was a lot of power there lying dormant.

So here's how it works from a user standpoint. I put the cursor on a headline, and choose the Add Blorkmark command. It suggests a name, which I can override. Then it makes a call to a server which in turn calls Amazon's Route53, to register a cname, and associate it with the node you're pointing to. It takes 20 to 40 seconds for Amazon to do its work. And after that you have a way to get to this place. To the reader it looks as if it's a world unto itself, but in your view of the world, it's just a corner inside a bigger outline. A possibly much bigger outline, containing many such spaces.

The path to the node is stored locally on your machine and on your worldoutline server. If you move it, no problem, the marker moves with it. So that's what a blorkmark is. It's something like a bookmark, but it points into content both in the place you edit it and in the place people read it.

 5/20/2012; 4:10:51 PM.

Today's milestone ride -- all the way round the park -- with confidence.

I had been taking a shortcut, eliminating the steepest part of the ride in Central Park, around the top of the park. I had ridden it before and always had found the hill a bit too much for my legs and my lungs.

This morning the conditions were ideal, I was feeling good, it was a very comfortable 60 degrees, no cars, not too much bike traffic and no pedestrians, so I went for it. Yes! It was very doable. I'm in good shape for this hill. Knock wood, IANAL, MMLM and all the usual disclaimers.

Also, no matter how early you get out on a spring morning there's always something big going on in the park. Today it's the AIDS Walk. Hasn't started yet, but you can tell there will be a hundred thousand people walking where I was riding today. Things in NY scale like that. And Central Park is probably nothing like Olmstead imagined it, as a place for contemplation. It is, however, a place where the people of the city mingle. All classes, it seems. And people from all over the world.

And since this may be the only blog post today, I'd like to add that Nic Cubrilovic probably summed up Zuck's fabulous weekend best, from a male point of view. "How can you beat IPO and married in the same weekend?" he said "Err, IPO and not married." My guess is that Zuck liked things pretty much as they were. But of course I'm projecting!

Today's map: 47 minutes, 8.30 miles, average 10.58 mph.

 5/20/2012; 8:20:30 AM.

My father had a thing for outlining, and he was lucky because he had a son who learned how to program, and made outlining work on a computer.

The great thing about outlining is that you can reorganize. That's the purpose of outlining. You can't do it on paper. That's why people invented index cards. But they are one-level outlines. Not nearly as useful as the multi-level reorganizable outlines on a computer. Outlining works on a computer much better than it does on paper.

My father taught marketing to MBA students at Baruch College and then Pace University in NYC. Once we had outlining they learned how to plan their marketing campaigns with his son's outliner. His colleagues thought he was obsessing over his son, but I know my father. It wouldn't have occurred to him. It was the other way around. The outliner showed him that there were qualities to his son that he hadn't discovered. He loved outlines so much eventually he would say "Every day is Father's Day." It embarassed me at the time, but now it doesn't, it makes me feel his approval, which like it or not, is something every son wants from his father.

I, of course, used outlines too, but until recently, not in the way my father did. I used my outliners for two things -- one big and one not so big. The big thing is writing code and organizing the data the code operates on. Frontier, the programming environment I started creating in grad school, and completed in the early 90s, was entirely built around outlining. It wasn't in any way an afterthought. The assumption was that you had a tool that could manipulate hierarchy. For me, outlining and programming are inseperable. I've been programming in this environment for most of my adult life. Since 1989. 2012 - 1989 = 23 years. Unless Python or Javascript get all this, I doubt if I can work in any other environment. I'd be open to bringing those languages in.

Anyway, the second way, which until recently hasn't been a big deal for me, is organizing my work. People who worked for me would use MORE and ThinkTank that way. Especially the people whose jobs it was to ship products. My customers used the products that way, but until recently I didn't.

What precipitated the change, believe it or not, is Jeremy Lin.

James Burke did a great thing with his Connections series. He showed how what appears to be an insignificant coincidence turns out to create the serendipity needed for an idea to pop out of someone's mind. For me, it's been the endless hours I've spent watching basketball this year. At some point, while watching a game, I realized I could open my laptop and jot down an idea instead of using a reporter's notebook, which I used to buy by the dozen for recording ideas. One jotted idea turned into a plan. So the next day when I'd sit down to do my programming work, there would be the plan, ready to go. I didn't have to think about what comes next. That made it possible for me to work much more quickly. This is something you learn better as you grow older. There's value in stepping back and getting organized before taking on the next big task.

I suspect my father knew this. I think it would answer the questions he'd ask me about why I don't work harder to explain to people why outliners are so revolutionary. I couldn't explain it for the simple reason that I didn't know.

Outlining for me has always been an intuitive thing, and hard to verbalize. I saw hierarchies everywhere in computers. To me, it made sense to invest in that. If you were going to spend so much time dealing with hierarchy, why not put in a special effort to unify them. To make it so you always had a great tool for managing them, instead of a dozen so-so tools. To this day I don't understand why there isn't a generic reusable outliner baked into modern operating systems. There should be.

So now I'm on the cusp of releasing a tool that allows you to write directly onto the web in an outliner. The distance between the content on your machine and it being on the web is one mouse-click. That's exactly how far you want it to be. My father is not alive to see this, but if he were, he'd probably die from excitement. This is something he and I shared, at a genetic level, in our DNA, is this idea that the human mind can reach outside of itself, onto a computer, to make even more powerful and useful intellectual structures. Honestly, I wish he were here to share this with me.

 5/19/2012; 11:01:54 AM.

Okay yesterday was Facebook IPO day. How many times did you hear about it. What new information was added each time you heard. Why do we obsess so much about it. Did anything really happen? Blah blah blah. Yadda yadda yadda.

But it does have a real impact on our lives. I realized it yesterday after a meeting, where I ran into a bright dude, a real up and comer. He's smart. Has worked at some prestigious places. He just joined a startup.

He had been asking me questions via email about something I was working on. But I had already written docs that covered the questions he asked. Finally, meeting face to face, he asked the same questions. I asked why he couldn't put a few minutes into reading the docs. Then I realized, before he could answer -- which was good, because he was already gone -- no one is paying attention.

I'm sure he'll read this, which is funny in a way. I don't mean anything personal. This is what bubbles do to us. Even if you're not going to hit the jackpot, all that money floating around still makes it hard to focus on things that take time. Rush. It's a game of musical chairs. The music will stop and you won't have a place to sit. It's all the more dangerous today because the employment situation, outside the bubble, is bleak. (Originally I said it's bleak for young people, but it's also true for people my age. No one is offering me any jobs. It's lucky I have savings.)

I don't have any answers. I know it's hard to listen. But I feel these days like we all have our own gigs, and we're fighting for attention, because attention is where the money is, but none of us have any attention to give. Desperate. Flailing. I find myself wishing there were more people I could bounce ideas off, but there isn't much bounce these days.

So I think for most of us, the Facebook IPO is a transition, maybe to something better. A peak. It sure isn't making us rich. And it's not giving us much to hope either.

 5/19/2012; 7:26:46 AM.

It's become a running joke on Twitter that when I post an item to my Radio2 feed with this title, I get ten times the response that I get from a normal post. Not sure what it means. But no harm.

I don't usuallly run test posts on Scripting News, because the software here isn't really moving. But today I'm working on one of the connections between RSS and the worldoutline, and am doing something interesting with blog posts that are really outlines, like the ones on Scripting News.

You don't usually see the hierarchy in the feed, but today, on my worldoutline site, if all goes well -- we will.

So here's a bit of an outline, the classic States outline

Far West

Great Plains

Mid-Atlantic

Midwest

Mountains

New England

South

Southwest

If this works, when we view this over in the worldoutline, the hierarchy should show up, as an expandable outline. As it does on Scripting News. Lots of prayer and knocking on wood. And the usual disclaimers. IANAL. My mother loves me. Etc.

Update: It worked!

 5/18/2012; 9:19:40 AM.

I have to weigh in on this.

You should learn enough about anything to find out if you love it.

I had no idea I was good at writing software until, on a lark, I enrolled in a Computer Science class at Tulane University in 1975. So I'd say, looking back, that was a good thing. If it worked out for me, why not give it a shot.

But programming is at one end of a spectrum. It's like mountain climbing or spelunking, not like bungee jumping or hiking in the Alps. Programming is hard. And it's definitely not for everyone.

I think the reason well-intentioned programmers get irritated by the sudden rush of people like Mike Bloomberg who breathlessly exclaim that they're going to learn to program, is that it's disrespectful. This is something programmers learn to live with. Because we know how the machine works, and most people don't, they don't like to listen to us. Even when we're saying sensible things that aren't very deep or technical. Just listen! thinks the programmer, knowing that it won't work.

The thought that anyone could do it and it would be a walk in the park is just one facet of disrespect. When a skilled guy like Jeff Atwood, who has created some great software, blows up over this, that's what's probably going on. I feel the same way, yet I am an advocate for demystifying technology, for removing techies from the clouds, bringing them back to earth to inhabit with the rest of the mortals.

We need to strike a balance. If you're going to learn to code, it's going to be hard. But if you're going to be a great programmer you have to start somewhere, and like home people relating to tourists, we should encourage it.

But it might be more useful if more people attempted the equivalent of the hike in the Alps instead of trying to scale Mount Everest or even McKinley.

And we should all learn to listen better, because there is very little of that going on these days. Working together too.

 5/16/2012; 12:08:21 PM.

Quora just raised $50 million. Quora is a very nicely done piece of software. Almost everyone thinks so. But I also think they're too late. There are already plenty of corporate blogging silos for people to write into. And the demand for them never was that high. So I think it would be interesting, with all their money and nice software, if they tried a pivot.

Here's the idea...

1. Position relative to wordpress.com. A simpler more modern, better-designed version. Updated.

2. If possible release the back-end as open source, so you can complete the picture. If not, start work on that, and make it shine. Make it an app platform that will appeal to developers.

3. Create a very simple document-oriented API with pub-sub. I recommend OPML because my tools already work with that format.

4. People can use your web interface to create and edit public documents, with a twist. Users can also provide the URL of a document, and you provide me with an endpoint that I can ping when it updates.

5. Also support the flipside of the protocol as well. Provide a URL for the document, and are willing to ping a subscriber when it updates.

6. This is recursive. Documents can contain other documents each of which supports this protocol.

Congratulations, you've just participated in the bootstrap of a document-oriented Internet, one where links are rendered in place. No one captures or controls anyone's content. You don't have to export documents, because they never were imported. There are a lot of places we can go from here. And the fallback is Quora doing the same thing it was going to do anyway. Except you've opened the door to lots of developers. The same door, btw, that the big guys have closed.

This is just a quickie. It doesn't have to be Quora. It could even be Wordpress. But it is a different model from the usual 2012 business model. I think that's a good thing. It's time to develop new models, because the current one is oversubscribed.

 5/16/2012; 11:51:38 AM.

I'm now four days into using Chrome as my primary browser, after switching from Firefox.

Top-line review: My work is better. Not just in the browser, everywhere. Having a strong competent tool in web browsing brings confidence to all my writing and programming work.

I started a thread about this yesterday.

A story. When I got angel funding for my first company, the lead investor arranged for the company to get me a car. I had been driving a rented Dodge Omni, month to month, a real piece of shit. I didn't have credit, or money for a down payment. So every month I scraped together the rent for it. They got me a lease for a new gray BMW 318i. It was an even worse piece of shit. BMW's misguided attempt to go downmarket. I didn't understand that at the time, because I had never driven a BMW before. All I knew is that I missed the piece of shit Omni.

My friend, Guy Kawasaki, who worked at Apple, had a white BMW 535 that I lusted after. So after we shipped our first product, a pretty big hit, I told the board I was dumping the 318 and got myself a 535. White. Just like Guy's. I loved that car. It was a total eye-opener. I didn't know cars could feel like that. You could feel the tires connect with the road through the steering wheel. It handled precisely. Did exactly what you wanted it to do. All my cars prior to that were blown around in the backflow created by trucks. This car cruised right through.

In case you haven't already figured it out, the 318 is Firefox, and the 535 is Chrome.

Now I hope I don't have to write a piece a few weeks from now explaining how Chrome is announcing every site I visit on Google-Plus or emailing it to ex-girlfriends or future employers. :-(

PS: I still to this day drive a BMW, though they're just another shit company treating its customers like scum. But their cars are lovely.

 5/16/2012; 11:23:19 AM.

I saw Romney interviewed on Fox, and all the arguments about him being awkward and a flawed human being, to me, are unconvincing. To balance those, I look at what I know about the President. Honestly, measuring one man against another, it's a draw.

The reason I'll almost certainly vote for Obama in the fall is that he is not a Republican.

The thought of them controlling the government again, is a real motivator. I saw what they did in August with the debt ceiling. And I see it coming again and again. This is a party that's taken a very wrong turn. I think a United States run by Republicans is in mortal danger. Even Republicans must see that. They need get a message that if they ever want power again they have to clean up their party and get it aligned with the interests of the United States. They once were a sane party. If we elect the insane version of the Republicans, we deserve what we get.

I'm afraid the President will try to win without winning back the House and retaining control of the Senate. This would be an awful mistake. Maybe the President can do a good deed for the country and make this a question of the United States retaining some semblance of sanity.

 5/15/2012; 12:59:17 PM.

On Friday I wrote a piece that suggested, perhaps, that the iPad 2 is a better device than the iPad 3.

The reasons: 1. Battery life. 2. Weight. 3. Heat.

I don't see that much difference in screen quality. Sure the new iPad has a nicer screen. But 1-2-3 above are pretty important too.

So I keep both around. Sometimes I have trouble telling which one is which.

Surefire way to tell: Turn on the pad, see how much battery is left. If it's 80 percent, it's the old one. The other one usually runs with about 20 percent.

 5/14/2012; 10:40:49 AM.

Earlier this month I made an offer to news organizations, that I would work with one or two or all of them to revolutionize the way they offer news to their community. I have a very simple proposal, which I outlined in the piece. It would require guts. But it takes guts to live, and there's no security in any of it. No takers, so far, but John Robinson of the News-Record in Greensboro, NC called publicly on editors to do it. For which I am thankful.

I have a similar offer to universities. I thought I might outline it here, although I've written about the idea quite a few times.

Here's the proposal.

Let's start a program where we teach students to run their own servers. They set one up, install a few apps and administer them. Support users. If they want, add features, or even write their own server-side apps.

This is not an idle or simple idea, it's a revolutionary one.

We always get stuck in this loop in relationship to technology. We, users, get caught waiting for the guys in the air-conditioned palaces to give us the stuff we want. Eventually we get tired, and break out of the wonderful jails they create for us. Then we do this dance again. And again. We should also teach the students the history of tech, so they can, in their careers which will stretch deep into the 21st Century, to recognize this, and to circumvent it.

Taking the mystique out of running a server is step one. A server is just a laptop that is on all the time and has a persistent net connection. And a fixed address. You can get to it from where ever you are, from any device. Otherwise it's just a computer. That's the Aha! moment. From there, it's pure fun (for a certain kind of person, of course).

I think ultimately this should be a required course, but I doubt that will happen. Just as I believe every student should take a semester of accounting, so they know how to do their own taxes, and know how to vote on matters of tax policy. And I also think in the age of blogging, every student should take an introductory class in journalism, so they know how to ask questions, and to tell a story, and the importance of disclosure. With everyone writing publicly, it would be great if an education included some practice at doing this well.

Universities are right to move onto the Internet. But that's not just a matter of putting the faculty online, teaching TED-like classes, which no doubt are, and deseve to be, popular. It's also a matter of putting the future on the Internet, in meaningful and powerful ways. For that, the place to turn is the student body.

 5/14/2012; 10:19:36 AM.

A quick note that I switched from Firefox to Chrome on my main desktop computer, and plan to make the switch everywhere over the next few weeks.

I decided to switch finally because Firefox is trying to get me to switch to version 12 from 3.6. I've been warned by them that there will be no more security updates for 3.6. And over the last few days I've been given warnings by the software that they will soon automatically move me into what I see as a tester's program.

I appreciate that Firefox existed when I needed to get off Windows. I didn't want to use the OS vendor's browser, Safarin, on the Mac. I learned that limited my options in getting off the Windows platform. Didn't want to repeat that mistake.

But I don't like a user interface that's a moving target.

If Firefox were just moving the browser to provide more features for web developers, I'd consider going with them. But they're actively changing the UI of the browser. And that's not something I'm willing to be forced into.

I wrote about this in June of last year.

So I switched to Chrome. Not sure it will be any better. I will, of course, let you know.

 5/14/2012; 9:57:50 AM.

Mathew Ingram, writing in GigaOm, offers three reasons he doesn't like paywalls. His second reason is "Paywalls are backward-looking, not forward-looking," which is the one that resonates with me.

Before the Internet, news orgs had a natural paywall, the distribution system. If you wanted to read the paper you had to buy the paper. And the ink, and the gasoline it took to get it to where you are. In fact, everything that determined the structure of the news activity, that made it a business, was organized around the distribution system.

But that's been over now for quite some time. And paywalls express a desperate wish to go back to a time when there was a reason to pay. Now news, if it wants to continue, must find a new reason.

I think there are plenty of ideas here. But linear problem-solution thinking won't get you there. This is the box we have to get out of. Because change comes whether or not our minds can conceive of it. That's the magic of new generations. Their minds are not limited the way ours are. Things we feel will "always" be one way really never are.

I always thought my generation would be different, but you have to work at keeping your mind agile. For one reason or another, I have been blessed with the ability to do this. This gets people angry with me. To me the world looks like one big crowd of folks yelling "Who does he think he is!" -- which has taught me to appear more humble than I really am. I'm pretty sure I understand where news is heading.

Anyway, here's how it goes.

The model of news we used to practice was started to solve a business problem. A guy named Reuters who lived in London, wanted to know what was going on in the markets elsewhere in Europe. He found that the faster he got this information, the more money he could make. Then he learned that he could sell access to the flow of information for even more money. Then he wanted information from America. So he invested some of his profits from Europe in better ways of doing that.

We went from horses and boats, to carrier pigeons, to telegraphs, to cross-Atlantic cables, all to drive better access to information. And huge fortunes were made doing it.

That's a simplification of course, but it's the basic idea. Information wasn't flowing well. You could make money by making it flow better. And that led to more efficiencies. And then it branched out into other kinds of news because they affected market prices. And eventually a new model emerged, of news as entertainment that could cause people to watch advertisements.

You can see this in a movie starring Edward G. Robinson as Mr. Reuters. It's not a great movie. But it does help explain the idea.

Now, I live in NYC. I really like living here. But the Internet in NYC is a lot like news flow in Europe before Reuters revolutionized it. It really sucks for most of us. Why couldn't someone make it their business to solve this problem? If they do, I believe they will become the news organization of the future. Assuming people still want to live in NYC. And it seems that quite a few people do!

I think you have to look at things this way. Where are the inefficiencies, and can you do something to erase them? If so, that's probably a good business. But like all businesses, there are risks, and no guarantees. You have to try it before you know if it works. Most big news thinkers are not business people, so they don't seem to understand this. But the tech guys do think this way. And that's why that's where the new forward-looking movement is coming from.

Paywalls go the other way, they remove efficiencies. It's hard to see how, long-term, that can be profitable.

What paywalls are really asking is how are the news people of the past going to hold their lock on the flow of information in the future. And that's not a great question, because the answer is they aren't. Let's hope no one does. But of course that's a lot to hope for.

PS: I love how my random algorithm chooses header images for Scripting News. Today's choice is from a remote stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway in Saskatechewan. I drove there in 2004, going from Boston to Seattle.

 5/12/2012; 11:57:10 AM.

Nothing special, like every other Hollywood piece of shit movie.

One thing was promising, because it was set in 1972, they could include lots of great old songs, which was fine for a while, until they hacked up two really great old favorite Alice Cooper songs. Especially Ballad of Dwight Fry.

And Alice Cooper is such a great stageman, and got to do none of it in this movie. He just stood there like an idiot holding a microphone.

Why can't Tim Burton do a movie like Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands, or one of the stop motion greats he did, Nightmare Before Christmas, or Corpse Bride. Those movies had humor and soul, even grabbed your heart. Lately his movies have really sucked. This one got great reviews so I had high expectations, but maybe that's why I hated it so much, because it was such an ordinary stupid dull idiotic plotless movie, with no characters. Awful.

My favorite Tim Burton movie is still Beetlejuice. I think I'll watch it tonight to remind me how much fun a good haunted house movie can be.

Now, I'm sure NakedJen will love it. And I respect her for that. But I give a huge thumbs-down. Terrible waste of talent.

BTW, I'm sure it'll make huge money. It's exactly teh kind of movie that packs in the kiddies.

 5/11/2012; 6:28:17 PM.

I had a thought that goes back to the very early days of blogging, and a theory I had then, which thanks to Kickstarter seems to either be about to come true, or has already come true.

It goes like this.

1. Companies are terrible at listening to their users.

2. But users have the most valuable ideas for products, locked up in their experiences with current products.

3. They can see the problems because they have a different point of view from the vendors. And point of view is very important when it comes to products. It's as important as technical knowledge.

4. In the old way of doing things the product guys are geniuses and every so often they come down from the mountain and bestow their gifts on us mere mortals, and we praise them and thank them, and pay them, and then they ignore us. (See item #1.)

5. But once the users can communicate with each other, we will be able to pool our experience, and given enough time, smart users will learn the technology well enough to make the products that (key point here) they know there is demand for. Because they are the ones demanding it.

I figured that blogging communities would form and out of that would come new products and businesses, and products that more closely match the way people really are, not the way the companies imagine we are. I've been inside enough companies to know how badly companies abstract the needs and wants of users.

Now, Kickstarter, an idea I knew was right from the get-go (wish I had had a chance to invest) is either tapping into the knowledge that users have that vendors are missing big opportunities because of poor vision. I think sites like gdgt and Stack Overflow are tapping into the other side of it, providing venues for smart users to share experience. Eventually the two will meet. Threads will start on these sites and migrate to Kickstarter, and the mutual-itch will turn into a vision, and it gets funded, and is realized. Or at least have a chance to be realized.

BTW, as an aside -- what led me to this is my interest in communicating cameras. The products here are moving way too slowly. So when Canon came out with with a camera with wifi earlier this year, I immediately bought one, without a second thought. But it is a tantalizing disappointment, because they designed it in a fairly brain-dead way. I couldn't get it to work. So I started a thread. And after a while Jeff Hellman, a person who reads my site, figured out how to get it to work, and posted a howto, which I then tried and it worked! Hey. That's pretty cool. But there are too many steps and too much software to install. The company, like all companies, thought we needed them to make this work. We just need them to create a bridge, we can make it work better without their help.

There's a next step to this. Let's jailbreak this mofo like they open up iPhones, and get the Canon camera to act as a file server. All I want is SMB file sharing on the thing. I don't care if it's protected, at least not at first. Let it boot up as a read-only device that I can access as a file server from any computer on my LAN. I'll let my router provide the security.

Even better -- put an HTTP server on it. That idea, my friends, goes back to 1997. How ridiculous to have to wait that long! Whole lives have been lived in the interim (well almost).

And there's another idea I'm desperate to see done right -- a podcast player. Apple still doesn't understand podcasting. Sorry. I know you all think they invented it, but they don't do it right. I'll write another post about this soon, but I'm pretty sure it's already in the archive here on scripting.com.

This is why the real power of blogging has yet to be realized, imho. When it's done, industry will have been restructured around communities of users who communicate (see the similarities in the words). Today we're still in the world where the companies market to us through social networks. That is vestigial. Marketing isn't as important as experience.

 5/11/2012; 7:57:44 AM.

Like all dutiful Apple customers I plunked down the money to get the latest and greatest iPad in March. The screen was nice, at first, but very quickly it became normal. The gee-whiz effect faded almost immediately.

I got the LTE version, and that feature is great, but I don't really use it a lot because I'm almost always close enough to wifi. But I'm sure I'll take a train trip where it will be nice to have blazing fast Internet access. And I like the fact that it can share its connection with other devices. I used that feature, when waiting at the DMV to get my New York State driver's license.

I've been using the iPad a lot recently because I've been watching a lot of basketball. It's a great TV companion. But that has meant that I'm always running up against the battery issue. Because the new iPad has more pixels, presumably, it uses more power. Presumably that's why they gave it a bigger battery, and that takes longer to charge. The computer is heavier, and it runs hot. It's not hugely uncomfortable, but you do notice both things, the increased weight and heat.

The other day, with the battery running down, I had an idea. I charged up my old iPad, so it would serve as a backup, next time the battery ran down on the new iPad. And the next day I got to use it, and here's the thing -- I like it better than the new one! It's lighter, the battery lasts longer, and when it runs down it charges much more quickly. Having gotten used to the new iPad, the old one feels like an upgrade!

I thought that was worth a blog post.

 5/11/2012; 7:37:08 AM.

In 2005, Google came out with an email service, and like a lot of other people I signed up. I liked it because it kept spam out of my way. It was fairly miraculous how it did that. On the other hand, I didn't like the way they bundled emails into conversations. But I eventually became accustomed to that, even though to this day it's hard to manage.

I was more or less a happy Gmail user until they started trying to turn it into the dreaded Google-Plus.

Gmail is nice to have, but I don't want to blur the line between private email and public writing. The two activities should be as far apart as possible.

I wouldn't mind paying to use Gmail. But this isn't a good thing they're doing, trying to turn email into something else.

 5/10/2012; 10:13:09 AM.

I watched all the way to the bitter end.

All I can say is thank god it's over.

They had their brilliant moments, but at the end they were a rag-tag crew of nincompoops.

The Miami Heat, who put the Knicks down, in contrast are a vector. They're pointed toward an outcome. They mean business. If there's any justice they will be in the finals this year, playing Oklahoma City in one for the ages. Whoever wins will have defeated a great team.

The Knicks aren't a team. And they aren't that great as individuals. And in basketball only teams matter. It's not a sport for individuals.

Now, I look forward to finding other causes to believe in!

PS: The NYT tells the same story, with more detail and a great closing paragraph. I won't spoil it here.

 5/10/2012; 8:54:52 AM.

I loved this piece about angel investor Kevin Hartz.

He says "When I see a massive number of new investors and carpetbaggers coming in, it's time to get out."

We'e singing the same song, except we're playing different parts.

When I see products, customers, performance and value not being important, I said it's time to move off to the side and invest for the long-term. Unfortunately I've never been able to convince the actual money investors to bet along with me. They like to skip all that, expecting what seems to them as magic, but to the people who do the work -- risky investment.

They invest in the people who make them feel good. That's pretty dumb, imho -- long-term, while it might yield spectacular returns, short-term. It's probably not wise, either.

 5/10/2012; 8:34:45 AM.

I've been getting into a groove, doing the same ride every day. Enter the park at Columbus Circle. Ride around the park drive, but take the cutoff before the big hill at Harlem Meer. To make up for that, I do an extra circuit around the front part of the park. So I actually get more mileage than one circuit. But I'm getting stronger. Pretty soon I'll start going the full route.

The difference between this year's standard ride and last year's is this -- hills! At first I swore I'd never get used to it. But when I rode in Menlo Park/Woodside in Calif, I did a lot of hill riding. So I can do it. I just have to get in shape.

My rides are getting me more oxytocin or whatever it is that you get high on. Because I float after I ride. And if I miss a day, as I did yesterday, I get very grouchy. I think it's called withdrawal.

One more thing. It's wet and humid today and the park is filled with smells. These are magic smells. I'd get this experience when I lived in suburban Boston, because these were the smells of childhood, the good ones (there were bad ones too, like the smell of the incinerators burning garbage, they used to do that in NY when I was growing up). Boston was close, but these are the exact smells my brain is programmed to recognize as "home" -- proof that our lower brains are programmed just like all animals, to find comfort in being in a familiar place, even at a sub-conscious level. Another reason my heart is activated on these rides (the other being, of course, exercise!).

This makes me feel good. Happy to say.

Map: 7.5 miles, 43 minutes.

 5/9/2012; 2:04:49 PM.

Farhad Manjoo, one of my favorite tech writers, has a stimulating piece today about Amazon. He says he can't figure out what they're doing, how they intend to make money. What's the razor and what's the blade? He wonders if they know.

In the old days companies offered the same deal to everyone. They had to because they didn't have all this information about us and computers and actuarial tables, and years of experimentation to guide them. That's not true anymore, and especially not true of Amazon. That's the first thing you have to realize. They're blazing a new trail in selling things. No one has been down this path before. Yet there are others that are on the path.

They made me the same offer they made him. Because I pay $79 a year for Prime, I can have one book a month for free. They pay the publisher on my behalf. And it's not all books.

They might make me an offer on one book and another to Farhad. You just don't know. One thing's for sure, their algorithm has a hunch that if it does this, I might do that. And if I do that, maybe I'll do something else. Somewhere on that path I will trip over the wire and Amazon will make $100. That's how they make money. They can't explain it, any more than a hedge fund guy can tell you why his algorithm just decided to buy 214,203 shares of Podunk Mining Co and turn around and sell it five minutes later. He might, if he did a lot of data dumps, be able to trace back and see how it made the choice, but by then it'll have done 813,329 more transactions.

More and more you and I are hamsters. They're making money off the pellets. That's the best we know.

BTW, I asked my friend NakedJen, who is a serious dog person, what she thinks her dogs think she's doing when she picks up the prizes they leave in the park. She carefully puts them in plastic bags. Later it appears she is depositing them in a bank. What must the dog think about her relationship with Jen?

Sorry if that's too vivid an example, but hopefully it makes the point.

BTW, he thinks Apple has a straight relationship with us, more straight than Amazon's, but I bet he's wrong about that. They've just managed to make us feel more comfortable about it. They hire from the same talent pool as Amazon.

 5/9/2012; 11:38:49 AM.

Twitter is getting all kinds of kudos for not turning over the tweet history of a user in response to a New York State subpoena. But what are the facts of the case, and is Twitter doing the right thing?

Here's a BBC story on the issue, and one from the ACLU.

Here's the question -- were these public tweets? If so, that's like asking for the archive of a blog.

Which raises another question. Yes we know that Twitter's archive is unreliable, that after a certain period of time tweets become inaccessible unless you have a direct link to them. What that period is is uncertain. And why you can access them when they are inaccessible is another mystery.

Is the State of New York just asking for help working around a glitch in Twitter's software?

What is Twitter's explanation?

Now, if this user's tweets were private, that's another matter. I would say it's still a gray area, that the tweets are somewhere between public and private. Does Twitter's terms say what's a permissible use of a private tweet that you have access to?

Neither of the two articles dive into this story in enough depth to ask these questions, which imho are crucial to deciding whether or not Twitter is acting correctly.

Also, btw, to NYS which I happen to be a resident of -- this is ridiculous. These people are citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. There were a lot of people at the Brooklyn Bridge that day, and it wasn't clear what the police instructions were. Why don't you work with the citizens. These are the people you work for -- aren't they? Please. Pick your battles.

Another btw to NYS, even though I think what you're doing is wrong, you might check with the Library of Congress. They have a complete archive of the flow of Twitter. Our tax dollars at work! (He said sarcastically, the government has no business investing taxpayer dollars in private companies.) Thanks to @dannyhorowitz for the link.

 5/9/2012; 8:26:58 AM.

The only time the world "dead" belongs in the headline of a news story is when something that was formerly alive is no longer. A person, animal or plant. That's a legitimate use of the word in news. I can't think of another use that isn't some kind of revenge or spite. Because things that were never living can't be dead.

Fred Wilson has a blog post about this today, which means it will probably be picked up on TechMeme, where a lot of former TechCrunchers, especially Mike Arrington, Steve Gillmor and MG Siegler will probably see it. These three people went on a campaign to plant a meme about RSS that I still hear about every day, usually in the form of a well-intentioned person saying that RSS isn't you-know-what. Every time this happens I put a pin in virtual voodoo dolls of each of their spirits, esp since two of them are former friends. For some reason they decided to put this bell around RSS's neck. Their idea worked. It didn't hurt RSS, it just gave it a smell that isn't very nice. And this for something that never did them any harm, and that they still use on their blogs, and for all I know in their reading of the web. If they don't they're not very well-informed because the news still flows through RSS, and honestly it's hard to imagine a day when it doesn't.

It's shit like this that makes me cry for tech. That such carpetbaggers have gotten control of the flow of ideas. It's very much like the world that we encountered before blogging. And then I remind myself that we marginalized that generation of gatekeepers, and we can do it again. We will do it again.

 5/9/2012; 8:07:00 AM.