I recently read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, and enjoyed the book, and I'm reading another of the Ender series now, Ender's Shadow. After that I will probably read Speaker for the Dead, which I've already purchased, and have read the foreword to.

The idea of a Speaker for the Dead is versatile and powerful. It basically says that when you remember someone who has died, don't edit their story. Try to stick to who they actually were. Obviously the story must be told from the teller's perspective, there's no way to avoid that. But don't change the story to make the person seem different from who they were.

We don't do that of course.

You can see it clearly when relatives talk about family members differently after they die. No need to mention names, because it's pretty standard practice.

Personally I'd like to be remembered as I am.

It also gives people an incentive to get to know people before they die. I think sometimes people already figure they know your story, and they're ready to say goodbye, long before the person dies. That's a shame, because we miss a richness of life. I've tried to say that to a few friends, but they don't understand what I'm saying. They say they respect me for who they think I am, but that isn't who I am, I say. They don't get it.

And there's an interesting twist to it, Speaking for the dead provides a nice framework for saying something I've been trying to explain about how people tell their own stories.

If you find yourself telling the story of you as a happy camper, always anxious to please others, being a great friend to everyone, and you leave out the parts where you dive into depression, or knowingly screw someone who trusted you, or the time you did something that you later regretted, you're not doing anyone a favor. If you're a real friend, I know you have bad days. You've also said things that hurt my feelings, and of course I've said things that hurt yours.

The story you tell yourself about yourself should be grounded in truth, as much as possible. If you're always chirping friendly things to others, and never balancing it with other moods that you actually have, you're trying to tell yourself that you're someone you really aren't. If you have a bad day and won't give voice to it, equally with your good ones, then you're not speaking accurately for yourself. To me that's even worse than being remembered at your wake as a saint, when you were anything but.

I once had a close friend, I thought, who was always happy, with a big smile on his face, as if he lived in bliss. But I saw him do things that made my soul wilt. Once I asked him -- where's your rage? He never talked to me again. It was in his actions, but he never put it on his face or in his voice.

OSC's idea is a powerful one. And it would be good if it didn't just apply to the dead, if we applied it to ourselves, and how we talk about ourselves to ourselves.

BTW, I didn't go to my father's funeral. I would have been asked to speak. And while I edited the story of my father's life in his last days, so we could spend time together without the past getting in the way, it was different after he was gone. In all the writing I've done about him, I've tried to tell the truth, not embellish it, or change the story. I have left out a lot of it, the bad parts -- but I have said they were there. At his funeral, I would have been called on to tell a story and would have had an impossible choice. The people wouldn't have understood if I told the truth, even a very abbreviated truth. It would have been unfair to make them listen to it. They don't need to know. But I am a writer, and I plan to, at some point, write this story. Without having a name for it at the time, I can now say I wanted to Speak for the Dead, and not tell a fake story. So I chose not to go.

 7/17/2012; 5:05:12 PM.

It was announced a couple of years ago that the Library of Congress was archiving all posts to Twitter for historic purposes.

I thought I had written about why this is wrong, but I searched, and couldn't find it. So briefly here's why it is wrong.

1. Twitter is a private company, with a corporate API.

2. The Library of Congress has not, as far as we know, done anything to archive the open web. (Note: I mean bloggers. The equivalent content that's on Twitter, but not in a corporate blogging silo.)

3. By archiving the flow of Twitter, they are providing an incentive for people to post to Twitter over the open web because their writing will be presumably available to posterity as part of a historic record.

4. The government should not favor the service of a private company over an open service that is accessible to any entity, private or public. It amounts to a taxpayer subsidy, and makes Twitter more competitive over the open web.

5. Twitter already has ample advantages over the open web. We don't need the government tilting it even further in their favor.

 7/17/2012; 4:49:54 PM.

The NY Times, as far as I know, invented the idea of a public editor, so I suppose it's up to them to decide what one is. That would be fair. But life isn't fair.

A public editor should be, imho, the representative of The Public, on the payroll of a news organization. The editor should have the ability to publish stories alongside news reports, with equal prominence, without editorial interference or oversight. No review. Perhaps some space limitations, that seems reasonable, but no one filtering what they write.

This person must not identify with the people who write the news. He or she should probably not even work in the same office. Should not go to lunch with them. It should be impossible for them to be promoted to a news function. This is an outsider's job.

Instead of "All the news that's fit to print" the Public Editor's motto is "I bite the hand that feeds me."

The job of the Public Editor is to challenge the news function when they report as fact things that they don't provide any evidence of. To challenge the news function when it does He Said/She Said reporting, on questions that are not in dispute. Or when they fail to present a legitimate point of view, or relevant facts because they would anger a faithful source, or would buck conventional wisdom. Or would ask, for example, why tech reporters report glowingly about companies that might employ a tech reporter after they are laid off by a publication such as the NY Times.

The Public Editor would report when one of the staffers goes to work for someone they previously covered, especially if the coverage was favorable. That would be big news.

It must be someone who regularly reads the stories and yells at the screen that these people are idiots or assholes or sold out.

Reporters should hear the voice of the Public Editor as they're writing their stories. It's okay, even great, if they hate that voice. But they must anticipate it. This is where the Public gets the benefit from the existence of the Public Editor.

The Public Editor runs a linkblog that points to others who are critical of the news organization they work for.

A good Public Editor is over-the-top critical of the news organization. He or she errs on the side of being fair to the Public and unfair to the news organization.

The Public Editors the Times has hired have flipped it the other way around. They are way too understanding of the foibles of a professional news organization. And they have a career path that prevents them from saying anything too controversial. As a result, the Public Editors have basically been Seat Warmers. Their job seems to be to make the news people feel good about themselves, which is a poor excuse for a job in a news industry that's struggling to stay afloat.

And it further angers a Public which is a lot more sentient than the news people give it credit for.

 7/17/2012; 10:40:01 AM.

It's still just July but I already have my hardware product of the year.

It's the newest iPad, with the retina display and LTE.

Why is it such a great product? I love the convenience myself, but more importantly, it's opened up computing for my mom, like nothing else before it. She's an on-the-go grandma, always out-and-about and doing things. So the ability to connect, without hassle, without having to understand wifi, or needing to use the Settings system, has made the biggest difference.

She uses GMail in Safari. We're trying to get her up on Glympse, so her family can follow her travels, but we haven't gotten that working yet. This is important not just for sharing her experience, but also because she's not such a spring chicken anymore, and if she were to get in trouble, we'd want to know how to find her. This will add to her safety, and thereby make more adventurous explorations possible. (I'm sure she doesn't want me to say how old she is, but I'm 57 and she's my mom, so you can figure it out. On the other hand, I'm her first-born and she was quite young when I was born.)

There are still opportunities to make things easier. I don't think Apple has yet designed the perfect product for a non-technical user. And product designers still don't seem to understand that a fair number of users have friends or family members who set up their computers for them. There's no way most people could set up their own iPad, imho. As long as that's true, they ought to make more of it "set and forget" -- with more comprehensive defaults. For example, in Glympse, it would be nice if I could set it up so that it always shared with me, and that it always shared for four hours. Then she could launch Glympse, and just click the Start button. And make it big, and put it in the middle of the screen. Then the instructions could be: 1. Launch the app. 2. Click the Start button. That's something she could do without getting nervous. And when she gets nervous she starts clicking everywhere, usually with not-good results (though the iPad is better at handling random clicks, it's a total disaster on the Mac).

But on the whole, this is a pretty big milestone. An always-on always-connected, easy-to-use device, that's not all that expensive. We've arrived.

PS: If this continues to work, she will not need her iPhone. That'll eliminate a $70 per month service plan. We'll put Google Voice on her iPad, and port the old number to that. Of course it would be great if there were an iPad version of Google Voice.

PPS: Also it was a bitch buying this wonderful device at the Apple store on Broadway and 68th St. I bought it online for store pickup, and went there an hour after I got the email saying it was ready. So they had ample time. Or so it seemed. Apple stores used to be marvels of efficiency and crisp customer interaction. Nowadays -- not so much. They made me wait, and wait and wait, and had all kinds of excuses. In the old days, when someone they sent to get the product didn't come back, they'd go and get it for you. Now they say it's not their fault. Who cares whose fault it is. When I said "that's an excuse" the store person got really upset. But it was an excuse! I paid the money, now I want to go home. With the product I bought. Geez. They sent me a survey via email when I got home, good move, and I explained all this. Hire a management consultant and teach your store people how to make customers happy. It's really not that hard. I remember Apple aspired to give a Nordstrom-like experience. This was not even KMart.

PPPS: Did you ever read the Chaos Manor column in BYTE by Jerry Pournelle? His approach to tech is my inspiration for pieces like this one. Hey he's still writing the columns on his own website now.

 7/17/2012; 9:54:47 AM.

Gizmodo very kindly asked me how blogs came to be and I wrote a short piece for them, which imho is some of the best writing I've done. Following is the piece, as I submitted it to them, to be sure it's in my archive as well as theirs.

I was outside the computer science building at the University of Wisconsin one day in 1978 smoking with a fellow grad student, Gary Sevitsky. He talked about the editors for the language Lisp and how they understood program structure. I thought this was a great idea. So I spent the next year writing a structured editor for another language called Pascal, running on Unix.

I showed the outliner to my housemates, all liberal arts students, English, theater, psych, social work, and they liked it, and thought they could use it. I said no way it's for programmers. But the next day, as often happens with ideas I reject when I first hear them, I realized they had a point. Maybe the editor didn't need a programming language.

When I left school I started fresh and made a structure editor, this time in a now-ancient operating system, the UCSD P-system, hacked to run on another ancient system, CP/M. I also made a relational database, and connected the two in some interesting ways. I looked around Madison and there was no way to sell the software, but I was reading BYTE and many of the ads were for companies in nice sounding towns like Mountain View and Sunnyvale. I looked them up and they all seemed to be in the same area, so I moved there. I had pictured idyllic mountain communities, with parks and vineyards, happy people and beautiful sunsets. When I got there it was like Long Island. When I was in Madison, I made friends with people at a very new company called Apple who had just licensed the P-system, so I went there, and worked my way into see Steve Jobs who said my outliner was shit but they wanted to buy the database. I said no way.

A lot of things happened in between but eventually a few years later I started a company to market the outliners, and eventually it was successful and I sold it to Symantec, and we went public and I made a bunch of money.

Then I went back to the original idea -- the programming language with the outline editor. And instead of a relational database I made an object database, another fairly new idea (at the time). Then I made the language, a new one, to work with the database in a very intimate way so it was easy to write code that worked with large data sets. Then I worked with Don Park to make it possible to control Macintosh apps with the programming language. This eventually became Apple Events, and Apple competed with us with the vaporous AppleScript, and I shut the company down. After a while I was looking for something new to work on.

I was tinkering around one day with some scripts, and my friend Marc Canter, the father of multimedia, was having a big press event in San Francisco, so I wrote a script that sent the announcement of the event to all the people I had business cards for. There were many big shots on the list, because I had been going to computer conferences for years and chatting up all the icons of tech at the time. After the press event, I sent Marc's follow-up to the group. Then a few days later, I remember exactly where I was, I was driving up highway 280 toward San Francisco in my new BMW which I loved (very powerful car, made me feel powerful) when I had a flash. I could use the scripts to send out my own ideas, not just Marc's. I honestly don't know why this didn't occur to me before.

I had written a letter to John Sculley at Apple and Jim Cannavino, the guy who was running IBM at the time, saying they should get together and IBM should stop making OS/2 and Apple should let them have the Mac OS, and they should try to offer an alternative to Windows which was becoming a juggernaut. They had never responded. I figured the letter had gone straight into the trash. So I published it. Then I wanted to write about PDAs and about how everyone was getting them wrong, so I did, and as with the previous screeds, I sent them to my friends with my script. A friend of mine from Apple, Randy Battat, who was running the Motorola PDA division wrote me an email saying I was wrong, and here's where I had the second epiphany. I didn't even ask. I did a very light edit of his email and sent it back out to the people I had sent my email to. The response was amazing. Everyone was into it. I collected their responses and sent those back out to the list. It was so much fun! I was a publisher. And it was easy.

I was on fire. I woke up one day and wrote the pivotal piece called Bill Gates vs the Internet. In the story, I said if I could do this, anyone could. And I wasn't using any of the ridiculous bloated standards of the tech industry to distribute my ideas. I was using some very airy protocols, that didn't do very much. Looked at another way, they did a lot. You could have it be simple, and unencumbered and also be very powerful. I figured Bill Gates, who was coasting to victory with Windows 3, after defeating IBM, was actually doomed. I published it. Then something great happened. Gates read my email, and responded with a total Bill Gates rant, and of course I sent it back to my readers. I would say that's roughly when blogging was born. I know some people disagree. But from that point on, no one questioned the power of an individual with a net connection and a scripting language.

And by the way, I was right -- Gates was doomed. He didn't know it then, but a few months later he wrote his version of my piece called The Internet Tidal Wave. To his credit, Gates is a great listener. Not exactly a blogger, but close.

 7/16/2012; 11:05:12 AM.

Fred Wilson is writing about Free-vs-Pay services.

My main comment is that there are cases where the dominant company has a for-pay service. Amazon's web services platform, Dropbox and Rackspace virtual servers are the ones I depend on the most.

What they have in common is that these systems provide a low-level function in which the user creates their own service. They are platforms, even though Dropbox has a fairly high-level entrypoint. I have been coming up with new applications for it constantly. They're not hard to implement, but they take your mind through some wonderful little twists. I use it mostly for server management, but like everyone else we use it in our family to share photos and we're converting the family scrapbooks slowly so they're in a Dropbox folder structure. It's low-level, but until this service came along there was no neat way to do it. And of course we pay for it, happily.

People who think Amazon and Rackspace are just for developers are wrong. EC2 for Poets is something any user who mastered MS-DOS could handle. It could be even easier with customization. I tell people that running a server is almost exactly as complicated as running a laptop. Slight differences like one goes in your knapsack and the other one is always on and always connected. But the software is identical to the software that runs laptops. People are surprised when I say that, but it's true.

Services must be for-pay when this kind of flexibility is required. I don't have any doubt that a for-pay version of Twitter would work, in the same model as Dropbox. I've often felt that Amazon should have a simple notification service that does everything that Twitter does and nothing more. Huge explosion of innovation would come from that, because there are so many developers who eat Amazon APIs for breakfast. I happen to be one of them.

I've gotten so much value from the Route 53 API, for example. It's made it possible for me to do things I only dreamt of before.

Twitter, on the other hand, inspired similar dreams, with an uneasy feeling because I was concerned they would do more or less what they ended up doing. Squeezing out a commercial platform and killing off the parts that I loved. I end up with something useful, the Twitter user interface, with none of the geek love. What if instead of hiring a marketing guy to run it they had hired an architect with a sweeping megalomaniac vision. Some truly great stuff would have happened. That opportunity still exists.

But for me to buy into a for-pay Twitter-like service, I would have to know the company pretty well. I don't have absolute faith in Amazon, Rackspace or Dropbox, I've had issues with two of the companies (Amazon and Dropbox) in the last couple of years. Non-trivial ones. But net-net I go ahead and build on their services. And I like the deal. I can't believe how little I pay for them, but I'm glad I do pay.

BTW, I'm not pointing to Fred's piece because I don't want to be in the chorus for his piece on Techmeme. I'd like to get equal billing. (Update: it didn't work, they put me in the chorus anyway. And of course they didn't link to my piece about User/VCs which imho is much more to the point than free-vs-pay. The issue is how we fund development in tech. We're only getting a slice of it supported by investment, so of course, that's the part that works.)

 7/15/2012; 5:27:40 PM.

One of the unwritten rules of tech blogging is that you don't write about VCs. Or if you absolutely must, if it's unavoidable, it's always in glowing terms. I suppose the reason is that in the back of writers' minds is that someday you're going to want funding, or one of them is going to tap you on the shoulder, but none of that is going to happen if I'm critical. Or if you even mention them.

VCs like to operate in the background. But there's no reason they should, because they're centrally important to the way technology evolves. VCs are the reason that the equivalent of a hit movie in tech is a startup, and not a software product or web service. Our whole industry is oriented around that idea, and it's poison. The individual VCs may not know that it's poison, but that doesn't change the fact that it is.

I've been watching them as closely as I've been watching the BigCo's over my many years in the software business. I've had something like friendships with the leading VCs. They've often invested in my ideas, but never in companies that I started.

Up until 2004 I thought it was because they didn't understand the ideas when they were fresh. But then they did a couple of rounds of investments, first in RSS startups and then in podcasting startups, that convinced me that it's personal. They don't mind trying to make money from my work, but they don't want to bet on me personally. Okay, so why should I be careful with their feelings? No reason to.

Another reason to write about VCs is that the Republican Party is about to nominate one for President. As I watch the way Romney talks, and the way he approaches problems, it's so eerily like the VCs I know. So clubby and shallow, so mercenary, so without shame or passion. He's been told that it's important to at least fake passion, but you can see right through it.

So I'm going to start breaking the rule in the title of this piece. I'm going to talk about VCs as if they were product managers at companies like Google and Microsoft. I think in many ways that's exactly what they are. But they can't generate horribly confusing technical standards to keep their competitors at bay. Instead they feed off open development work, like the stuff I've been doing for twenty-plus years.

There have been some recent innovations in VC that have worked well, and that I think are good trends. The leading VC in this generation is without a doubt Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. His innovation is that unlike previous generations of VCs, he uses the products he invests in. That seems to come first. If Fred uses your software and it works for him, that seems to have a lot to do with whether he invests or not. That's an improvement because previous generations didn't use the product, and their decisions were one level more abstract. At least Fred's companies create products that are usable, because he has a good eye for that. So resources are allocated, properly, to products that may make users lives better in some ways, and further the art of making usable software.

But that isn't good enough, because his products are predatory. They feed off open development work, destroy the value of its open-ness, and put little or nothing back. So those of us who are on the side of shoveling open innovation into the network, are constantly trying to keep up with the destruction of Fred's companies. And we're always falling behind.

And that's bad for the Internet, for sure, but it's also keeping the growth down for the funds that these user-VCs manage. Eventually the well is dry, there are no more seeds to eat, use whatever analogy you like. The growth stops and we go through a completely unnecessary contraction in tech. The VCs lick their wounds, but it doesn't hurt too much, because during the boom they pocketed billions. But like the American workers who Romney's tactics cost their jobs and pensions, young tech contributors are out of work. The boom-bust cycle is very hard on the workers in tech.

Eventually the generation that Fred Wilson leads will fall behind, as did the one led by John Doerr at Kleiner-Perkins. What they will be replaced with is one that is not only aware of the usability of products, but also has a sense for the flow of open technologies to fuel the ecosystem. These VCs will make side investments in technologies that are not intended to produce an IPO or acquisition, rather are intended to produce a new layer of technology that a whole generation of startups can feed off. At the same time, some percentage of each fund will be plowed into programs designed to generate the next layer after that.

The VCs will tell you that it's not their business to fund innovation for the sake of innovation. That's as short-sighted as saying that an oil company wouldn't invest in exploration or research into new extraction methods. Or if you got good service at a restaurant you wouldn't leave a 15 percent tip. Of course you don't have to do either. But if you don't do some exploration or leave decent tips, you'll be out of business one day, or get hot coffee spilled in your lap.

I've always felt that as long as Moore's Law is operating, and it shows no sign of letting up, that we aren't doing our jobs if the tech industry isn't tracking its growth in a linear fashion. The boom-bust cycle is a product of the lack of vision of the VCs. Or our over-reliance on VCs to lead the investment decisions of the tech industry.

 7/15/2012; 11:55:57 AM.

I did a podcast a couple of days ago and forgot to post it to my feed here. 

It's 22 minutes, about Katrina, earthquakes, Repubs.

Enjoy! (And I'll try to remember not to forget next time.)

 7/13/2012; 5:32:35 PM.

I've been the CEO of a company.

Not on the scale of a Mitt Romney, but I had a board of directors. I was not the sole shareholder, but I was the largest. I was both chairman and president.

I didn't have any illusions about who was responsible for the company.

Romney is supposed to be such a sharp and savvy business pro. But get this.

1. He was the CEO, chairman, president, sole shareholder of a company.

2. But he wasn't responsible for what the company did.

Even for a member of the ruling class, this is some pretty heavy inbreeding.

Look, this is scary. This level of incompetence in presidential candidates hasn't been seen before, not even from Republicans.

 7/13/2012; 1:09:21 PM.

I wrote about this a long time ago but there was little if any uptake.

Let's try again.

Suppose someone invents something but doesn't want a patent, but wants to prevent anyone else from getting a patent.

More than ever, we need a pro bono legal function that's funded as a charity that patents these items, makes a public record of who the inventor is, for kudos purposes only, and thereby prevents a huge company from patenting it.

I understand that a new patent "reform" will become law soon that changes things from first-to-invent to first-to-patent. So there's some urgency to putting this system in place.

 7/13/2012; 11:31:00 AM.

Simple idea. You should be able to follow a hash tag. And unfollow and block.

And of course there should be a block-with-timeout for all kinds of follows.

 7/13/2012; 11:28:06 AM.

This is one of those moments when I'm ashamed to be an American.

Read this NY Times story about how the U.S. is "purusing a middleman in web piracy." Sounds ominous, but it's not.

He's a 24-year old who ran a search engine that found torrent files. His mum, who was interviewed for the story, says whatever money he made is gone. "He would take his mates to the cinema and pay for them." This is what the US legal system has been reduced to. Humiliating.

Meanwhile, to see just how cowardly this is, if you go to Google, a multi-billion-dollar company whose execs serve on blue-ribbon White House commissions, you can get exactly the same information.

Here's an example search which returns torrents for an awful Hollywood movie that has grossed almost $1.5 billion so far.

So Google, too, is a "middleman in web piracy." This isn't new. Google has always returned these results, and they're right to. That's what search engines do.

BTW, it would be nice if the Times pointed out the humiliation of the US government, being paid off by Hollywood to do its dirty paranoid work.

 7/13/2012; 9:40:19 AM.

Follow-up on yesterday's rambler.

What people don't get about The Newsroom is they are hacking cable news.

How so? By reporting on current events, the way Sorkin wishes the real cable news people would do it. When a liar lies on camera, ask why she's lying. So what if they won't come back. Hey it's fiction. The characters aren't real. (And if real politicians start showing up on the fake news, it isn't fake anymore, and they'll lose their credibility. If that happens, it'll be over.)

More evidence. Will McAvoy has a Twitter account.

Yes, the young producer has a fax machine next to his bed.

And they all use Blackberries and Nokias with embarassing ringtones. They should of course be using iPhones and Androids.

Their email system has bugs which allow people to accidentally send personal messages to huge numbers of people.

Yes, it is supposed to be taking place in 2012.

And yes, it seems they are going to totally screw with the mediocrity of the cable news system.

Which makes the rest of it look like serious head-fake.

Hey we get Breaking Bad and The Newsroom on Sunday nights. This is going to be a lot of fun.

Update: Another way Sorkin is hacking news. McAvoy goes for a walk with the network demographics guy. He says Will's numbers would go up if he tossed a bone to conservatives. Next show he says something nice about Sarah Palin. He gets his wrist slapped by the EP, who says he can't do that. He says OK. A tutorial for media slaves (hamsters) on How It Really Works. May be boring or subtle, but it's also truthful. This way the show is also The Wire for News.

 7/13/2012; 8:57:40 AM.

First, I love The Newsroom. I know it has flaws. I don't care.

Until today, a Thursday, I didn't realize how much or why I loved it.

The show is on Sunday. There hasn't been an episode in four days. There won't be another one for three days. But there's something happening in the news today, with Obama and Romney, and I'd like to spend an hour with the story on television. But I realize the hour I'd like to spend is with Aaron Sorkin. Not MSNBC, not CNN, not Fox.

I got the idea from a Utah Senator who is demanding a retraction from HBO as if The Newsroom was real. In other words the suspension of disbelief was so complete that a real politician fell for it. Strange.

I'm falling for it too. My mind is confused. It thinks The Newsroom is news.

In the last episode the exec producer wanted to know if the anchor is in. She didn't ask me, but I'm in too.

A real news network could live up to the promise of The Newsroom, and put on a real news show with the fight that's building between the Repubs and Dems over Bain Capital. I yearn to watch that, tonight, as much as I look forward to the next episode on Sunday night.

In another way The Newsroom is a more polished version of the Jon Stewart appearance on Crossfire in 2008. Sorkin is saying, as Stewart did, please love our country. Sorkin adds, okay you can't figure it out. I'll show you. It's patronizing and condescending, for sure. But nothing else has gotten through to the news people. Maybe this will.

The Newsroom is The West Wing for News. We loved the West Wing not just because the characters were compelling, but because it was happening while Bush and Cheney were wrecking the country. For one hour per week we indulged in a terrible fantasy that we were competent and caring people in the United States.

I love The Newsroom in a similar way. Okay it's not as perfect, yet, as The West Wing, but it's still very early (and the West Wing had some bad moments too). But the backdrop, the real TV news is as awful as the Bush presidency.

We only get to change governments once every four years, but we could change TV news practically overnight. Where the West Wing had the power to calm and pacify viewers The Newsroom has the potential to reform news. I know the news people say newsrooms don't work like that. Of course. I get that. I don't care how newsrooms run. I care about what goes on the screen.

Maybe professional news people could look at news through the other side of the screen, the side we look at news through, and imagine for a moment at what news might be like if it were more like Sorkin's idea, and think about how to get us some of that.

 7/12/2012; 4:57:12 PM.

I don't think I've ever written this up, but I should.

Here's a news river.

http://nola.newsriver.org/

Notice that each item has a RT link. Click on one. A dialog appears, asking for the domain of your linkblog. I enter r2.scripting.com, the domain that my copy of Radio2 is running on. Radio2 is linkblogging software. The river then saves the domain as a cookie so I don't have to enter it again. (You can change it with the Set Linkblog command in the menu at the top of the page.)

After configuring the domain, when you click on an RT link, we go to your linkblogging software, and pre-populate the entry boxes with the title, link and description of the post you came from.

It does basically what the "retweet" command does in Twitter. But it's all loosely-coupled. You can connect it up to any linkblogging tool that supports the parameter list that's sent. It's as we say "really simple" -- doesn't take very long to implement. But it provides a very nice kind of de-coupling. You can use whatever river software you like and whatever linkblogger you like. And they just work together, if everyone does a little to make it work.

Since we're very early in the era of linkblogging on the Internet, it seems like a good time to put something out there.

PS: People often ask the question of how New Orleans will get by without a daily paper, and they say no one has an idea. Like when people used to say there was no new Mac software when there was lots of new software. The river I point to above has a lot of news about New Orleans that most people aren't getting. That's how the reboot starts. By creating new conduits for news to flow through. And listening to people who want to participate.

PPS: There's another potential standard hidden from view in the source code for the river. There isn't actually any content in there, it's just a jQuery app that displays a JSON-structured news feed. Another de-coupling that could prove useful.

 7/12/2012; 11:06:00 AM.

I'm fed up with idiots who say that government is bad. You are all users of government. All beneficiaries of the rest of our generosity.

Government is all of us. When a city like New Orleans drowns, we have a few choices, none of them good. You may not like it, but too bad, that's the way life is. People shouldn't have lived there, you say. Nice. People shouldn't live where you live either. And yet, if your world is overturned, we'll help you, if we can.

Not just because we care, and people mostly do care about others, but also because if we let a city collapse and disappear the people will just move to other cities, where we're obligated to help them. What choice do we have?

Your choice is to either face up to the fact that life isn't fair, and often isn't fun, and we all depend on each other. If you don't think so, take your vast wealth and buy an island and move there, and good luck.

Some very rich people are renouncing their US citizenship so they don't have to pay taxes here. You can go where ever they go. (I have a funny feeling you won't be welcome.)

 7/12/2012; 7:39:18 AM.

The whole business about Twitter and its API was not big news last week when it erupted. Twitter had already clearly telegraphed the end of its developer program, to anyone who cared, a couple of years ago.

What they're doing with content though does much more damage to the open Internet. It's shameful for their stockholders and partners to profit this way. I hope by writing this to influence them to put pressure on Twitter to stop this practice.

What are they doing? Well, if you link to a story on one of their partner sites, you don't have to click on the link to read the story. It opens directly in the Twitter client. No context change. It's a feature users will like, and they will ask people whose sites don't do this, why they don't.

Problem is, only Twitter gets to say who gets this feature.

And by writing this piece, that's critical of Twitter, I'm pretty much guaranteeing that my software never gets this feature. I would be much smarter, as a business person, to praise them for their cleverness, and behind the scenes beg them to make me a partner.

So what does this say about the independence of news organizations that are viewed by Twitter as a partner?

It says they aren't independent.

I got a ton of heat from tech insiders and profiteers when I crticized Twitter for inflating the follower counts of friends of the company and its founders. The whole RSS is XXX campaign by TechCrunch was almost certainly payback for that (it didn't work, of course, TechCrunch still has an RSS feed, and RSS chugs right along).

Tech is a company town. VCs praise other VCs and the users aren't given a seat at the table. Critics are pushed aside. That is, until it blows up, as it surely will. You can't hold down the Internet, you can't capture it in your silo and milk it for all its worth. But short-term you can do a lot of damage. That's what Twitter and its VCs and partners are doing.

So if you see an article inside Twitter and think "oh that's nice" -- think again. The publisher of that article is compromised. It's a sign of dirty journalism if a publication is getting special treatment from Twitter.

 7/11/2012; 8:12:09 AM.

It's really clever how the Repubs scoff at Keynesian economics, but are perfectly happy to use classic Keynesian arguments when it suits them.

They say if you raise taxes on "job creators" they will create fewer jobs.

So if you keep their tax rate at historic lows, as they are now, isn't that a Keynesian stimulus?

Hmmm. I'm sure they have a nice tapdance for that, and I'm not from Missouri, but I recognize a load of bull when I hear it.

A much more direct way to stimulate "job creators" to create jobs instead of pocketing the difference is to be totally direct about it. Give them a tax credit when they create a job. If they create a job for a black teenage male (their unemployment rate is close to 50 percent) give them a double credit. If they create a job for someone who's over 55, same deal.

If we're going to be Keynsian, at least be smart about it!

But the so-called "job creators" really aren't. They're just rich people who pay off politicians to spout bullshit on their behalf. Not very patriotic of them when the country is in such a deep economic hole.

 7/11/2012; 7:57:20 AM.

After Katrina, Spike Lee did an HBO documentary where he interviewed New Orleanians, who asked why no one warned them that there might be a storm that the levees couldn't handle.

But they were warned. Many times over many years in many ways. When I lived there, as a college student in the 1970s, it was common knowledge that eventually there would be a big enough storm to flood the city.

The warning was repeated on 60 Minutes a decade before Katrina. It was a very stark and illustrated warning from a charismatic LSU professor and a US official. I would love to find a pointer to the piece. As with all great 60 Minutes bits, it was both frightening and highly entertaining.

Scientific American ran a story in 2001 that was equally stark and unequivocal. No doubt very few New Orleanians read that magazine, but it probably was reported on TV and in newspapers, or it could have been.

People were warned.

And the Bay Area lives under a similar sentence. Eventually there will be an earthquake so big that the US economy won't be able to absorb the cost of reconstruction.

The entire world lives under the cloud of climate change.

The human species has some strengths but taking warnings like this seriously isn't one of them.

It's pretty obvious that our numbers and lifestyle have grown to the point where it no longer scales. A lot of systems are overdue to collapse. Katrina was just an early warning.

 7/11/2012; 7:31:07 AM.

One of my stops on the road tour I just did was Chapel Hill, NC, where I went for a morning bike ride with Anton Zuiker and had dinner with Bora Zivkovic. We talked about a lot of interesting stuff. More to come, I hope.

Bora is the chief science blogger at Scientific American, and just wrote a piece about what it means to be a science blogger. I don't think he had seen my 2003 essay, posted on the Harvard weblogs site, re what makes a weblog a weblog.

After sending a tweet connecting them to the 2003 essay, my eye drifted to the right margin, and saw the links there, and I re-imagined how we bootstrapped the blogging community at Harvard, a little less than nine years ago. I smiled. And wondered what had become of all the sites. Not good news. They're almost all gone.

I wondered how much trouble it would be to restore them. I would love to be able to look at all the notes from our first Thursday evening meetings. See what's in the aggregator. Happily, one of the links still works, because we went to special pains to make sure that it would. The technology site, which the RSS 2.0 spec is part of, is still there. I hope it remains for many years to come.

It was kind of audacious for a law school to have a technology site, but it worked! Sometimes radical ideas are just what are needed to shake things up. Why is this spec at a law school. Perhaps it's something special?

We have to do better. I should have set this up more carefully. It's sad that at a serious university we didn't do a better job of preserving a project that ultimately had so much impact. Most of the things we do aren't that influential.

We should be sure that when we have a hit, it's there for others to learn from, for perpetuity.

Update: The NYT Magazine had an excellent article on future-safing in January 2011.

 7/10/2012; 11:32:03 AM.

I was a Firefox user until a couple of months ago. I switched because the people in charge of Firefox were making really bad decisions, treating users badly.

A year ago I wrote: "Browsers should be like the lens in my glasses. If you're thinking about it, your attention is in the wrong place. You use a browser to look through, at other things."

Firefox was breaking that rule, very deliberately.

They wanted you to look at them. To that I said -- no.

They say they understand the web, but I don't think they do.

Things I would have supported:

1. Make Firefox faster. Not at rendering pages, but at handling mouse clicks after it had been running for a few hours.

2. Get rid of the spinning cursor. Firefox would disappear for very long spells. I would sit there tapping my fingers, waiting to get control of my computer back.

3. If they found a sexy feature, great. I'm all for great new features.

Things I could not tolerate:

1. Breaking plug-ins that I depend on for my daily work.

2. Removing features I depend on.

3. Interrupting my work flow with dialogs.

4. Interrupting my work flow with dialogs that threaten me.

Lest they think Google is perfect, they are not, in any way, perfect. They decided to change the way Google Groups works. Now I can't find my groups. And I can't find the commands that control the individual groups.

When I am testing the water with a new product, I can start small, and take careful steps. Over time I come to trust it, and I build more. And more. Then I move into the house I created. What Firefox did, and what Google did with Groups, is act as if I was starting with a new product. They knocked down my house, leaving me homeless. They didn't begin to understand what their users do. Neither company.

Now there's an excellent piece by a developer at Firefox that shows that at least someone is paying attention. He's only getting a very rough outline of how users work. But at least now someone is listening. Instead of having awful condescending and inaccurate theories about how users work.

His piece is an echo of my own We Make Shitty Software, 1995. Our software sucks, so does yours. We'll make it better. Part of making it better is not breaking your users. Do that and you lose their trust, fast. I learned that one in 1984 when we shipped the first Thinktank for the Mac. It was missing many features that were in the IBM PC product. The users didn't care why. They were right.

I don't trust any of these companies. They are run by very narcissistic people, who imho aren't trying very hard. They think they have lock-in, and they do have a little of it, for a while longer. But when change comes, it comes explosively. I don't think they're going to like it when it happens. What Firefox is learning now is that if they push their users hard enough, they will leave. My guess is that Chrome will learn the same thing at some point.

I wrote in 1994, as the web was first booming, that every 15 years or so the users revolt and take control. I think we're getting close to that point again.

Marco Arment said something very nice the other day. That eventually I am proven right. It's only because I've seen this before. It's as if you've seen a play three times. The fourth time you see it, you can almost say the lines along with the actors.

 7/10/2012; 9:28:30 AM.

All of this is my opinion. I have been wrong before. Your mileage may vary.

A lot has been written in the last week about Twitter's API and developer concerns that it would soon be closed to apps that are platform-specific clients. The discussion was started by a post by a Twitter manager, Michael Sippey, who was also one of the earliest bloggers.

Then Brent Simmons, who I worked with for many years at UserLand, wrote a somewhat puzzling post (to me at least) saying that Twitter developers should start a migration to using RSS to connect their apps. That way, if Twitter outlawed clients, they'd have a means to connect their users.

That's the preamble. I have some comments of my own.

1. I thought Twitter had already said that developers should not do straight clients. Yes, this was unfair. Twitter had been telling developers, for years, that they should develop all kinds of clients. That was when Twitter was just a website and had no clients of its own. It bought a few of the developer products, and the advice changed. Really bad planning, and/or carelessness of the worst kind. I'm surprised there weren't any lawsuits. It was when they did this that I decided, for myself, that I would stop maintaining my Twitter apps, except the one I use to post to Twitter. I figured that functionality would be the last to be disconnected, if it ever was.

2. Smart developers will not just conclude that Twitter is unsafe to build on, but also any company that is operating in the Twitter model. If they are running a website, and trying to attract a lot of users, and are going in the direction of advertising, you'd be a fool to think they won't do the same as Twitter has. They just may not be as far along. I had an interesting conversation in Amsterdam last year with the founder of SoundCloud, who asked me to use his platform for podcasting. That's like asking a guy with a gambling addiction to put down a bet. I said no. At some point they will screw their users and developers as Twitter was already doing. I'll pay for my own hosting and use software I can run myself.

2a. Same advice for users re products like Feedburner. I think that was a bad bet and you'll eventually regret using it to serve your feeds. My own opinion.

2b. I have mixed feelings about companies like Dropbox. They charge money for their service, and that's a good sign. But they don't treat their customers like customers, enough to give comfort that they won't arbitrarily shut down developers.

3. What Brent is advising is exactly what I have been advising for a few years. Further, it's exactly what I've implemented in the combination of Radio2 and River2. I developed these products to play the role of a coral reef. I hope if anyone is getting started here, in bootstrapping an open alternative to Twitter, that they will be compatible with these two pieces of software. As Ben Franklin once said, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we will hang separately." This is a time to keep the variability to a minimum. However, I am not optimistic. Had Brent not published his missive, I probably wouldn't have said anything. I don't think Twitter developers create products to provide functionality to their users. I think they do it to provide an interface to Twitter. Perhaps a subtle distinction, but an important one. It's a lot like the days when I was an Apple developer. Everyone hoped they would be the one who Apple made a deal with. Few developers did what would have been smart for all of us, worked first with other developers to make each other strong. It's a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

4. Speaking of Apple, why is it a bad idea to develop on the Twitter API, but a good idea to develop on Apple's? I don't get it. Apple is far bigger therefore far more dangerous than Twitter.

5. To news people -- pay attention. This is your future in the months and years to come. You may feel that Twitter is now a solid platform to build your business on. It is not.

Conclusion -- corporate APIs are good for the corporations that own them, and bad for everyone else. I would be reluctant to develop on any corporate API unless I was prepared to have my work completely deleted or obviated or usurped by the platform vendor. You really don't have any power. However it's impossible to avoid them. But try to. And don't be a crybaby when you get hurt.

Eventually the bubble will burst, and then we'll build on whatever open APIs we have, and the corporate APIs will explode along with the bubble. It has to happen, it always does. Until then, be smart.

 7/7/2012; 5:58:10 PM.

Listen up, this is a rant along the lines of Howard Beale's mantra in Network. Or Tom Cruise's manifesto in Jerry Maguire. Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant.

Check it out.

There's no reason that everyone you know who uses the Internet shouldn't know exactly what the Affordable Care Act does. Never mind whether you like it or don't. Everyone should know what's in it.

Everyone should know what's in it.

Everyone. Should. Know. What's. In. It.

And why not.

A few weeks ago The Oatmeal told the story of Nikola Tesla, a not-so-famous inventor of the 19th Century. How much you want to bet that awareness of who Tesla is shot up by a billion percent.

Look.

We've given too much power to the news media. They aren't telling the story. But we can tell each other. In terms that mean something to human beings. About friends and family members who don't have health insurance because they have asthma or diabetes or high blood pressure. Or had cancer. Or whatever.

What an outrage that insurance companies can cancel your insurance when you get sick. How convenient for them. Hard to believe that's even possible, but it is.

So if you have a way with words and infographics and want to help your country, let's do this.

The White House doesn't do Internet stuff very well. That's no excuse. Let's take this into our own hands.

BTW, the time to do these things is when your back is not against the wall, when it's not a desperate last gasp. Health care reform just dodged a bullet. So please let's make sure it's got super powers next time. Because there will be a next time.

 6/30/2012; 9:41:29 PM.

If you're working on a podcast client here are two suggestions for improving your RSS and OPML support.

1. RSS has a cloud element that makes it possible for a feed subscriber to request notifications of updates so that user sees the new stuff more quickly, and doesn't have to wait for a periodic scan. My River2 aggregator supports this as do all WordPress sites. It's a feature of RSS 2.0, and dates back over ten years.

2. Allow users to subscribe to OPML subscription lists. When you read one of these during your periodic scan, subscribe to any feeds it contains that are new to you, and unsub from any feeds that were present in prior scans that are no longer there. This allows a lot of powerful connections. Notably:

Note that neither suggestion calls for changes in RSS or OPML, and btw, they are equally applicable for general RSS aggreators and readers. But podcast clients are on people's minds currently.

If you have comments or questions post them here.

 6/29/2012; 11:17:52 AM.

I had a recorded phone conversation yesterday with Andrew Phelps of Nieman Journalism Lab about the development of podcasting.  

From the initial idea from Adam, to the enclosure element in RSS, the experimentation at Berkman, the Democratic Convention in 2004, Morning Coffee Notes, Daily Source Code and the podcasting community. .

Also a discussion of the significance of the medium and ideas for its future

Here's the MP3, and Andrew's write-up.

 6/28/2012; 4:24:33 PM.