BTW, the cute kid award for the 2008 election went to Ross Mayfield's son, talking about Obamaman. :-)

 10/31/2012; 7:40:31 PM.

I see lots of mentions of NY-based companies that didn't have adequate Plan B's.

It's time to think about how you're creating redundancy in your communication systems.

Also important as a service you can offer to users to differentiate your product from others. "We're good at keeping you online in times of emergency."

Decentralize.

 10/31/2012; 1:14:27 PM.

I just checked if Google Maps would give me driving directions through streets I know are closed because of the hurricane. It would and does.

An example -- 57th St is closed between 6th Ave and 8th Ave due to the crane collapse. Yet if I ask for directions from 501 West 57th to 501 East 57th, it gives me a straight line.

It's at times like this when utilities like Google Maps can help the most. Wouldn't it be great if it were kept up to date on road closures and could take that into account in giving directions.

 10/31/2012; 12:59:15 PM.

Harvey Araton in the Times writes today that the worst deal in NY sports is Amare Stoudemire of the Knicks. Hard to disagree. Except maybe Carmelo Anthony.

As a Mets fan since 1962, let me tell you -- it is not about winning. It's about love, and philosophy. The Knicks have two leading players that play from fear and have no philosophy. I think Carmelo could play on a team lead by someone with philosophy, as he showed in the Olympics this year, but even then, under pressure, he's the first to choke. I was watching the last great game in the Olympics against Spain, hoping that Anthony would rally, but instead he was benched -- and with the usual Baby Huey smile on his face, that seemed (to me at least) to spell relief.

The core problem of the Knicks is they chose a Number Two to be their Number One.

Neither Anthony or Stoudemire plays with heart. They are not competitors. Neither is a leader, or a winner. That's what's so fucked up about the Knicks.

They had a great team for a few weeks last year, sparked by a coach and a point guard who played with love and great philosophy. Chandler was happy to play along. Novak, Fields, Schumpert -- all young and looking for a chance to play -- flourished. Sure, given a chance this combination might not have won, but as I said -- as a Mets fan, and I'm sure as die-hard Knicks fans can agree -- it's not really about winning. It's about having a spirit that we can get behind.

 10/31/2012; 11:25:11 AM.

1. If you haven't watched the Frontline 2-hour election special, the rest of this might not make much sense. It's really worth watching.

2. I just caught up on the politics of the day. I didn't want to, but then two pieces came out at almost exactly the same time, a few hours ago, that shifted my perspective. One from Jonathan Chait at New York, and the other by Charles Pierce at Esquire. They both said in different but equally convincing ways that the response to Sandy is political and to view it any other way is wrong.

3. The timing is amazing, obviously.

4. It couldn't be more dramatic in the context of the election. Because the problem being given to Obama is one he's perfectly suited for. It's the one he wanted when he arrived in Washington in 2009 and thought he had been given, in the economic collapse. Unfortunately for all of us, the Republicans responded very negatively to Obama (understatement). This was made very clear in the Frontline report (see #1). I hadn't understood how the Republicans despised him. It wasn't just expedient. They actually hated him. I didn't get this because I didn't feel that way about Obama. But I certainly have felt that way about other politicians.

5. Enter Christie.

6. Unlike the Republicans in Washinton in 2009, he wants to work with Obama. Really wants to, it's not fake.

7. Why? Because he likes being governor of NJ, and here's his chance to do that in an incredible way, with all the money of the US govt available to him. All the planets lined up for Gov Christie. And Obama, seeing the opportunity (totally) says oh shit I'm getting the checkbook, and I'm going to spend the money and I got a Republican to play the game with me. "How much do you want?" he asks Christie. He gets to throw a Hail Mary pass, with almost no political cost, certainly none before the election. (I'd love to see Romney complain that Obama was spending too much on New Jersey, esp with the pictures on CNN likely to come in the days ahead. This isn't Benghazi or even Katrina. Our networks have lots of cameras and reporters in the NYC area. Even Republicans on Wall Street will want the money to be spent now. Look where the flooding happened.)

8. This is what Obama is good at. Getting lots of governors, Republican and Democratic, to work with him. To let him lead and organize them. Use his intellect. Lead the team. (Give them money.) He did it at Harvard. And at Columbia and in high school. This is what he loves.

9. Now here's the ridiculous part. It's probably something that Romney would be great at too. It's exactly the kind of job he seeks out. It's the way he sees himself. Disaster strikes, and Romney comes in and saves the day -- through management, competence, consensus. If this crisis, exactly this crisis, happened in February and Romney was President, he'd be Christie's buddy too, with the checkbook open ready to fill in whatever number Chris asks him to. But he won't get to do it, and he knows it, and it must absolutely drive him crazy!

10. Christie will get to rebuild New Jersey with federal money. Before this his state was broke. Now it'll be rich. Jobs galore. He gets to be hero. And I bet he doesn't like Romney, on a personal level. And I bet he does like Obama.

11. Watch the Frontline report. :-)

 10/30/2012; 10:45:29 PM.

I've used little scraps of time during the hurricane to experiment with the Google Maps API.

I hope to simplify it so that people can set up a map in the OPML Editor outliner, by entering a list of names of places and have them appear as icons on the map. They also get to specify the icons, from the set of Glyphicons. And of course they can write a document for each, in the outliner. The outlines will be displayed more or less the same way as the About outline on Scripting News home page.

The API is pretty strange to me, largely because I've never used a Javascript API before. The callback structure is totally bizarre. I'm accustomed to the enviroment managing threads for you. To me this is an odd way to program. Which makes learing a new API doubly-difficult.

I'd rather not read a whole O'Reilly book on this API. I'd like to find a narrative to explain these topics:

I see this as another way to do a presentation, or to organize information. I would like to have a single outline for a map, making it super-easy to edit, and also to have it in the most convenient form for someone browsing over the data.

Any pointers are much appreciated.

Update #1 

 10/30/2012; 11:04:40 AM. 

I'm getting tweets and emails from friends outside NY asking if everything is okay.

1. Thanks! The concern is much appreciated.

2. Everything is good. Power is on. No one hurt. Exhausted. Happy to be safe.

3. Three trees fell on my mom's block in Flushing. She has lots of support nearby. They've lost some power. Luckily my brother was in town, he couldn't get out on Monday, so he's been there to help.

4. I live in a high-rise in mid-town. The building swayed for hours, and it was exhausting and scary. One of the windows blew open, and it was a bitch to get it closed. But at 11PM or so the winds just stopped, and it's stayed quiet outside ever since. Got a great night's sleep. Power is on. Very fortunate.

5. The streets in Manhattan are virtually empty. Some cabs, cars. Lots of emergency vehicles.

6. My SandyCam site is up, but sad to say it's mostly getting pictures of raindrops on the windows.

7. Posting links on my linkblog, of course (these also flow to Twitter).

8. All is good.

 10/30/2012; 10:14:59 AM.

To partisans: The issue isn't whether Romney wanted to kill FEMA, it's that we're having an election without climate change as an issue.

It should be the dominant issue.

As usual, people want to blame the leaders, but we get as much bullshit as we demand from them. If we decided that climate change was the issue, it would be.

Time for the American electorate to grow a pair and take responsibility

 10/29/2012; 3:39:18 PM.

A few weeks ago the NY Times firehose feed broke.

I emailed with a friend at the Times, and we were able to get it working again. But the new version of the firehose is a mere trickle compared to the former raging torrent.

This put me in a bad place because I depend on a gush of NYT headlines in my river. I could subscribe to all the feeds I could find, but that means that I'd get duplicate stories because the Times, like other pubs, runs many stories in multiple feeds.

I've always been thinking about doing a heuristic to fix this. I'd keep track of the titles that had already appeared in a river and skip duplicates. Last night during the Giants game I gave it a shot, and it worked.

I wrote the change up in this worknote.

I added a huge number of feeds to the NYT river. And it's starting to feel good again. I wanted to share this as a possible best-practice for other aggregator developers.

Updates

Pointers

 10/28/2012; 10:42:10 AM.

How to tell if a social network has soul?

How often do the founders' tweets get retweeted. How often do their names pop up in your stream, not as ads of course, but because someone thought they were worthy of a pass-along.

In that spirit, I realized the other day that:

1. I never see tweets from Ev or Biz, two of the three founders of Twitter.

2. I do sometimes see tweets from Jack, the other founder, and they're often useful.

I don't use Facebook or Google-Plus, but even if so, I would imagine from time to time I'd see things linked from Vic Gundotra or Zuck. And the other day I did see something from Vic. The only times I ever see something from Zuck is if there's a shitstorm over privacy and he has to write an open post to try to calm people down. But it should be a constant drumbeat. And not something synthetic. They should be NBBs. But no network yet has figured out that they need NBBs at the helm.

This epiphany comes after an embarassingly large number of years using social networks.

Back in the days of CB Radio on Compuserve, which was very much like Twitter believe it or not, the Compuservants (people who worked at the company) never used the service. In fact they referred to us as the Lonelyhearts Club (I knew this because I had a personal friend who worked there and heard about it over the phone, not on the network). Compuserve is long-gone.

Whatever you may say or think about Scoble, he is retweeted. He works tirelessly to push new ideas out there. Any network should kill to get him on board. Pay him huge bucks. Wine and dine him. But they're so clueless they seem to resent him. Eventually this will flip around, and guys like Scoble will be seen as the equiv of NBA stars or American Idol winners. They are the reason people come to the service. If you're starting one of these networks you would do well to entice him.

What made me think about this is that Hugh MacLeod, the famous Gaping Void artist-blogger, told me that Scoble had told him he should be using Instagram as his social network. I agree, up to a point. But Instagram never sought out Hugh. And Instagram doesn't have feeds, so I can't plug Hugh's content into my flows. So bzzzt, I veto Scoble on this one. But he was 80 percent right. Instagram is a good choice for what Hugh does, if they 1. gave a shit and 2. let the data flow.

I think eventually the artists will rise and take all this over.

 10/27/2012; 1:05:44 PM.

It just occurred to me, reading an NBC article on how Hurricane Sandy might effect the election, that climate change will be an election issue after all.

We may not want to discuss climate change, but our planet does.

 10/27/2012; 6:18:36 AM.

I am unable to send links from my linkblogging tool to Twitter.

This outage started at 5:45PM Eastern yesterday. The last four of my links didn't go through. The reply from Twitter is empty. There's no error message or error code.

The first three links were about Hurricane Sandy. The fourth was about the election.

I've tried re-authorizing the account with Twitter, but that didn't seem to make a difference. The response is still empty. Nothing is posted to my Twitter account.

If you have any clues what else I might try, I'm happy to. It's possible something changed in the Twitter API that I am not aware of.

It's also possible this is the end of the road, that for some reason they've decided that my contribution is no longer wanted.

I'll save any editorializing until there's more info. :-)

Updates

While I'm stuck

Worknote

 10/27/2012; 5:38:17 AM.

I just had a flash, and that's what blogs are for.

The Soviet Union collapsed. And that changed the world.

Could the United States collapse too?

What if it already has?

What if the change in the way the press works is the equivalent of a new political system, with a new division of power.

Isn't that what happened in the Soviet Union?

 10/26/2012; 1:55:43 PM.

The constant theme of my blog is the title of this post -- Listening is Hard.

It is.

The way people read on the Internet usually has nothing to do with listening. What people seem to do mostly is skim the article looking for their own name, the name of someone they hate, or if neither of those turn up, they look for a key word or phrase that's linked to one of their canned schpiels. There are some notorious commenters here, people who make me groan when I see their names. I know what I'm going to hear has nothing to do with the topic of the piece. In the worst cases they just pick up a rant almost verbatim from The Ed Show or O'Reilly, and repeat it word for word. Nothing could be more boring. I usually turn those people off when I'm flipping through channels. I totally don't want them here on my blog, by proxy.

How you can tell if you're not listening? Here are some clues:

1. The person you think you're listening to tells you that you're not. They might be wrong, but before you dismiss them out of hand, consider the possibility that they're right. And use the scientific method. Read the actual words they have written. Not the story you hear in your own head when you read those words. Read their words.

2. If you find yourself hearing someone familiar talking through them, you're not listening. For example, if the thought forms in your head that "he is just like my brother" or mother or father, or former best friend -- someone you have issues with -- then you're not listening. There's absolutlely no doubt. Classic clue that you're projecting. Instead take a deep breath, look at your surroundings, then look back at the screen. It's just a screen. Not the family kitchen table when you were growing up. Your abusive parent isn't berating you. It's just some bits on a screen. :-)

3. Try this puzzle. Most people don't get the right answer. I didn't. I was amazed. That's another proof that listening is hard. If you can't count the letters, what are the chances that you've actually heard what someone is saying by skimming their story on the net.

4. Read this piece. See how bad inference can be. 99 times out of 100 it's not about you. So don't respond as if it were.

5. A famous editor hated me for a long time, but then all of a sudden one day started being nice to me. This kept going on long enough that we've now had a discussion about why he hated me so much. It's the old inference thing. I was saying "Sources Go Direct." I wasn't saying that I wanted sources to go direct, or that editors deserved to be routed around (although as a matter of fact I did, and mostly do). But that wasn't what I was saying. I was saying that if you're in the publishing business, in any way, you have to realize that the lower cost of production and distribution has radically changed the way things work. You must factor that in. Hating me won't change anything. And if you actually listen to what I'm saying (there's the rub again) I say over and over that I want professional journalists to make the transition. But you can't make the transition by clinging to a system that has gone away.

6. Another clue is that the topic is something that you find repulsive. Most people can't listen to topics that disgust them. For example, if I say that the OWS people missed huge opportunities because they didn't listen, if you support OWS, you're going to likely respond with a story that's orthogonal. I know this because it happens every time. But isn't it better to hear about the missed opportunity, esp when it's not too late, because then you don't have to miss it? To me, this is like a programmer who argues with a bug report. Why? If you listen, you can fix it. Good programmers do not argue with bug reports. And good revolutionaries are always looking for ways to be more effective at revolution. Dilbert-like revolutionaries insist on telling you why you don't get it. Don't be a Dilbert-like revolutionary. Nothing is more pathetic.

Now let's see if anyone who comments has actually listened to what I said! :-)

 10/26/2012; 11:58:28 AM.

 10/26/2012; 10:22:03 AM.

Let's say I'm using my iPad and I come across a video, and click the link, watch it and decide to share it with my followers on Twitter.

Something not-so-good happens. The mobile link goes to everyone. Whether they're using a mobile device or not.

Mobile is about at the same place where we were with RSS when we realized that subscription wasn't just a matter of giving someone the URL to the RSS feed. We had to do more. Unfortunately we couldn't get everyone to swing in the same direction, so the problem was never adequately solved.

The correct answer here is to have a link on the page that goes to a shareable version of the page. I might be on the mobile version, but this will take me to the "general" or default version of the page. Then if someone comes to the page on an iPad or some other supposedly limited device, they can show them the mobile version, if they must.

This happens often enough to be something we need to fix, soon -- before it becomes an unsolvable problem.

 10/26/2012; 10:33:15 AM.

If you know Keith Olbermann please send him a pointer to this. I've tried tweeting to him, but I never get a response. Tell him I'm for real, that I've done this myself with great success. (I have!) You can make a lot of money doing Internet broadcasting. And Olbermann, someone we know well, is the perfect guy to do it.

Dear Keith Olbermann,

Last time around the two people I read or listened to most were Frank Rich in his weekly column at the NY Times, and you.

This time around neither of you are out there. Your voice has been missed.

According to New York Magazine and other bits here and there, it seems you're looking for a job at a broadcast network. I think this would be a serious mistake. You have a popular Twitter feed. And lots of fans. You could very easily start something on the Internet and keep all the profits for yourself, and run your own show, and if you pissed someone off that would be good because it would get more people to watch and/or listen.

I used to think creating an Internet-distributed radio show was hard, but it's not. You can do it with an iPod. A video show is a little more work. People don't care much about production value, esp for someone with as well-known a voice as yours. What we want is something no one else can provide -- you! Your insights, your ideas, your angst!

Then, later -- once you've got a regular thing going on the net, you can get distribution from one of the networks, on your own terms. Don't stop distributing your stuff on the net, that's your fallback in case they start excercising control over your content.

I'll help. No charge! I just want you to do it. Nothing more.

What we, your fans want, is the pure unadulterated Olberman Experience™. We want to know we're hearing what you really have to say, not what some network executive will let you say. There's already so much of that. It's boring. Give us what we crave. Olbermann. Don't sell out!

 10/25/2012; 5:33:33 PM.

The Repubs are tempting fate, trying to allocate blame for Obama's loss in November. Obviously it's a little presumptuous.

If Romney wins, it's not Obama's fault, it's not Bill Clinton's fault. It wasn't caused by the attack in Benghazi or the weak economy.

It's time to lay the blame squarely where it would belong if we elect Mitt Romney president.

It's the American people's fault.

We have been disclaiming our power for far too long. It's become habitual. And it's wrong. In the United States, according to our much-revered Constitution, if you want to know who to blame for things being royally fucked up, just look in the mirror.

When I suggested to the people in the Occupy movement, at least the ones who would listen, that after they finished with the occupations that we should move on to fight voter suppression, I was told, uniformly that our votes don't matter and there's no difference between Obama and Romney. I recognize that as pure bullshit.

The reason we get bullshit candidates, to the extent that we do, is that we ask for bullshit. And they give us what we want. Bullshit. And lots of it.

I said last month that we suffer greatly from a lack of imagination. We are not creative. If we increased voter turnout, we the people, not some campaign or political party, or paranoid focus group like Christians or the Tea Party, if ordinary Americans of all political persuasions got together and decided that voting matters -- then get this -- voting would matter. It might even inspire a candidate like Obama to trust us, a little, and start telling more truth about things like cyber-terrorism and climate change. Instead we're arming our military to fight World War II and we're building stupid pipelines and fracking our water, and basically continuing to screw everything up. For no good reason other than we don't want to deal with reality.

So when President Obama said to Rolling Stone that young people recognize a bullshitter, and Romney certainly is the biggest bullshitter we've ever seen run for President, he's saying that he understands something that apparently very few Americans get. The buck doesn't really stop at the desk of the President. Ultimately, the buck stops with us.

 10/25/2012; 11:19:45 AM.

We used to have a pretty good technical journal for developers who worked on PCs. It was called BYTE Magazine. If you came up with something new that was relevent to a bunch of other developers, you could write an article, submit it, and they'd often run it. I wrote a few of them, about outliners and laptops if I remember correctly, when both were pretty new.

TechMeme doesn't cover new technology. In all the stuff I've written in the last three or so years, they've only picked up a very few pieces I've written that were about investment. They are really a VC journal. They cover what the investor herd is following. So if you want to know all the nuance of the latest rumor about Apple or Facebook, you'll find it on TM. But if some developer comes up with a good idea we should all know about, that's not something they appear to be interested in.

Obviously today it would be a blog, maybe even just a linkblog. But it would be moderated by people with a track record for creating innovative products. I would be willing to start something if others would join in moderating. Crowdsourcing is not what this is about. It must be peer-reviewed by people who create new products and have contributed to the general knowhow. And please no patents.

What do you think?

 10/24/2012; 2:52:33 PM.

In 1958, when I was three years old, the Dodgers moved and with them took pro sports in Brooklyn.

The owner of the team, Walter O'Malley, wanted to build a new stadium in Brooklyn to replace the aging Ebbets Field. According to his plan the new domed stadium, designed by Buckminster Fuller, would go at a transportation hub, where nine subway lines and the Long Island Railroad come together, in Brooklyn.

He was opposed by the great highway builder and destroyer of urban ecosystems, Robert Moses, who wanted to build a new stadium at the confluence of three super-highways he was building, at Flushing Meadows, in Queens.

O'Malley got his new stadium -- in Los Angeles. And Moses got his stadium and a new team, the Mets, to play in it. The Beatles famously performed there in 1965. They tore the stadium down in 2009, and built a more modern one, with restaurants and fancy skyboxes, in the parking lot of the old stadium.

Fast-forward to 2012, and a new sports arena has risen in Brooklyn, at the exact location favored by O'Malley. Fans won't drive to events at this stadium. Moses must be rolling over in his grave. Gradually the city is adjusting to the future it should always have had. And Brooklyn is on the rise again! All is good.

 10/24/2012; 1:13:58 PM.

Yesterday while I was waiting, along with hundreds of other server guys, for Amazon Web Services to restore service on one of their Virginia availability zones, I kept referring to their status page, where they have kind of an ad hoc method of accumulating information about the outages.

I had nothing better to do than stare at this, and it gave me an idea. Why not systematize it? They have a feed for every service. And my aggregator produces a fairly usable readout, imho of course. :-)

So I wrote a script to pull out all the feeds from the Amazon page, and loaded them into River2 running on one of my servers (hosted at Rackspace, so it won't go down when Amazon goes down), and started running. It looks pretty good. So here it is.

http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=aws

You might want to bookmark it and have a look whenever you're wondering what's going on at Amazon.

 10/23/2012; 8:57:52 PM.

Interesting news that Mike Arrington and MG Siegler have returned to TechCrunch.

I have an idea that a new bloglike pub would be one where everyone that these guys attack gets a platform from which to defend themselves. Strictly to set the record straight.

Imho it would instantly outstrip all blogs in potential revenue and would probably put a little fear into the people at AOL. :-)

I kind of like the idea. Should we start it?

We could even run a conference, where the devs sit in the audience and the VCs boast about their talents on stage! We could even invent silly hoops for them to jump through. A personality contest. An award for best swimsuit.

 10/23/2012; 12:39:09 PM.

Stating what's obvious.

Candy Crowley and Martha Raddatz were wonderful debate moderators.

Schieffer and Lehrer were as awful as the other two were great.

Next time I nominate Ezra Klein and Shepard Smith as the male moderators.

Time for a new generation.

 10/23/2012; 10:14:30 AM.

In theater and movies there's an imaginary fourth wall at the front of the stage. When an actor talks directly to the audience this is known as breaking the fourth wall. It's a good technique in acting, and it would also be a good technique in political debate, if you want to establish a bond between yourself and the audience.

In the three debates this year, neither candidate did it. I wished many times that Obama would have looked straignt into the camera as Romney was going on and on in fantasy-land and say "He just makes this shit up."

Instead we say it among ourselves on Twitter.

George Burns did it

Breaking the fourth wall is not a new idea.

George Burns did it well, and he even took it a step further. After breaking the fourth wall, he'd stroll over to his TV set and snoop on people as if he were on Homeland or The Wire and could tune in any person he wanted to as if they were a program. Usually he'd spy on his ditzy but wonderful wife, Gracie Allen.

Here's an example.

Bring the audience on stage

I've also suggested that next time around the debaters would be allowed to bring a computer with them and hook into Twitter, or whatever is hot in four years, and participate in the discussion while his opponent drones on and on lying about this and that.

 10/23/2012; 9:37:13 AM.

Update: There was an outage on Amazon today. A segment of one of their server facilities, in Virgina, went out. This caused a large number of scripting.com sites to go offline. A couple of hours into the outage, I relocated my threads site to another server and started taking notes here. I was also posting tweets, some of which are included here.

Heh. I realized that now that everything I have is in the worldoutline, it's remarkably easy for me to move a whole website from one server to another. It took two minutes to do the tech work, and it'll probably take as much as 20 minutes for the DNS change to propogate. But we're now back on the air, somewhat, and I can document the Amazon outage and its effects here, where I should have always have been able to.

I also have to hook up the static home page. Done.

One thing I'm going to have to do is export the roots list on each server to OPML so that I can automate the movement of the content on one server to another. Should be possible to make it even more automatic.

At 8:40PM with the debate about to start, the outage has cleared.

 10/22/2012; 5:54:49 PM.