Lots of stuff gets invented that never makes a difference.

Invention isn't the important moment with any format or protocol.

The moment that's important is adoption. If it got adopted then we call it "good enough" and go on.

In RSS, the moment of adoption came when the NY Times published feeds in RSS 2.0 format in 2002. That got the users going, and gave other pubs something to shoot at. Blogging software already supported the format. We were off to the races.

It wasn't an act of invention, or even design -- it was adoption and then uptake that make RSS as a format significant.

Technologists and reporters should understand this is a process, not a moment.

Hopefully that sheds some light on a subject that now seems to be interesting to people, which imho is a good thing.

And obviously all this is just my own opinion. Like a guy whose been around a sport for a long time and thinks he understands what makes it tick. Not presented as anything other than that. :-)

 1/14/2013; 12:47:31 PM.

When I went to my grandmother's funeral, in Rockaway, in 1977, I was surprised at how people were laughing and exchanging gossip. It was a family event. She died young, at 66, so the family was still pretty large. My grandfather was there, even though they were divorced. I knew her pretty well, and I don't think she would have approved all the laughter. But dead people are dead. A funeral can be the place where that fact sinks in for the first time, and people are entitled to express themselves however they want. As long as it doesn't interfere with others expressing themselves, in their own ways.

When my uncle died, her son, many years later, I waited a day before writing about his passing. He had been a character on Scripting News, my blog. My uncle, along with Dan Gillmor and Jamis MacNiven, were the first people to use my Manila blogging software while it was in development in 1999. I often pointed to his site, and wrote about his adventures in Jamaica. But when he died, I didn't feel I was ready to write about it publicly for a bit of time. Probably because he was so close in age to me, just ten years older. A role model for me. And someone whose death hit me hard. I wanted to learn something from it before writing about it. At first I was just dazed. Stunned. Speechless.

Then, when my father died, a number of years after that, I wrote about it the day it happened. It was one of the pieces I am most proud of. Short and simple, and deeply truthful. I don't read it very often but when I do, I am reminded of the sadness, of the letting-go, of feelings that had been long held inside, becoming part of the past. In an instant. No longer issues. My father loomed large in my life. But I was ready to write about it because his death was a long time coming. We got a chance to talk about it, me and him. It still haunts me. But I didn't need a lot of time to process it, before I could say what I had to say.

In family, and online, I've come to respect the way people grieve is different for everyone, as it was for people at my grandmother's funeral, so many years ago. Everyone has a different process, and it could be different every time depending on who-knows-what. Death is something that I find impossible to understand. That's why it's so damned frightening. Maybe it's no more unpleasant than taking a trip. Maybe god is merciful and death is a pleasurable release full of spritual oxytocin. There are reasons to believe this might be so. Maybe death is something that's impossible to experience, much as we have no memory of existence from before conception? Death is a mystery, a horrifying one, if you love life. All the more horrifying if someone reaches a place where death is a choice they make. I find it especially hard to reach any conclusions about that.

When I was young, the father of the kids across the street, one winter day, killed himself in the basement of the house, with a gun. His son discovered the body. I've had a whole lifetime to process that event, and you know what -- I still don't have any wisdom from it. I don't understand, and my guess is that I never will. And it's hard to find anything meaningful to say about something you have no appreciation for.

I knew Aaron Swartz, not very well, but I did know him. I spent a fair amount of time yesterday reading his blog. Aaron was a voracious reader. And he really could write. And his ideas were good. I don't think enough people read his blog. Maybe more will do so now. And to repeat an oft-repeated theme here, maybe we can do something to make sure that his blog remains online as long as there is a web, which hopefully is quite a long time.

What good can come from his death? I think we have to set more reasonable expectations for our brilliant young people. It's true that Aaron was smart, and had a great capacity to learn. But he was just 26. And for many of the years we knew him, he was much younger. He was very much his age, emotionally, even if he had knowledge beyond his years. To expect so much of such a young person probably puts too big a weight on shoulders that aren't prepared for it. I feel that there's a connection between Aaron's suicide and the suicide of Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the founders of Diaspora, and Gene Kan, who was one of the developers of Gnutella.

I've had to deal with my share of death in my life, and one message I get from every one of them, approached from any direction, is that the dead are dead. Expressing love for their memory, support for the person, doesn't have much value, because they are not here to receive it. If you want to do something to honor a loved one's memory, be loving and kind to people who are still alive. That's the best thing you can do, always, every day.

PS: The shortened URL for this post is http://2ea.r2.ly/. A message?

PPS: I didn't put an image on this post because people have been very harsh about a smiley on a previous post that mentioned Aaron's death.

 1/13/2013; 7:17:36 AM.

People are asking about the history of RSS today because of Aaron's passing.

In April 2004 I put together a timeline of the various specs that led to RSS 2.0 being published on the Berkman Center website in 2003.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rssVersionHistory.html

Hopefully this adds some light! :-)

 1/12/2013; 12:18:50 PM.

If you're using the new static sites feature on S3 here's something to watch out for.

I decided over the holidays to move scripting.com to a static site running on Amazon S3.

It went pretty well, though uploading a folder with a huge number of files is something that we don't have good tools for with S3. But eventually I got it all up there, using a Firefox plug-in, called S3Fox Organizer. I had been using it for years, but forgot about it when I switched to Chrome last year. If you're managing large static S3 sites it's nice to have it around.

Then at the end, I had as a loose-end to do the same for www.scripting.com. I wanted to have it simply redirect to scripting.com from an S3 bucket. I thought this would be a simple matter, but it turned out to be impossible, leaving me in a tough bind that I'm still in.

The reason I can't do it:

I haven't tried to figure out who it is, but I probably should, and ask them nicely if they could give it up.

Right now I have a dynamic server running on EC2 doing the remap. But www.scripting.com gets a lot of traffic. It's the primary name the site went by until I became a fan of shorter names. :-)

 1/10/2013; 10:52:53 AM.

I'm a movie fan, but I am a software guy. Spike Lee is a movie guy and a basketball fan. I know what he thinks about movies and basketball from Twitter, which happens to be the kind of software I make. So I make software that guys like Lee use, and I love movies that guys like Lee make. That's something we have in common.

As a software guy I encourage people to use software. I'm never going to judge a piece of software without using it. There may be software I don't like but not software I don't like that I haven't used.

That's why I wish Spike Lee would go watch Tarantino's movie, Django Unchained. Yes, they say "nigger" a lot. I find myself using the word in my inner conversation a lot after watching the movie (in my head it's Samuel L Jackson's Django character saying it). I don't dare say it out loud, cause I'm white, I guess. I think that kind of sucks, btw. Why can Patti Smith whose music I love sing a song with nigger in the title, but it's not cool for Tarantino or me to use the word? I don't get it.

I honestly don't understand what the problem is. I'd like to understand. Maybe it's that Spike Lee would like to do a movie about slavery but can't get it funded? Surely he doesn't think no movies about slavery should be made? I can't get behind that idea. I think a lot of the BS in this country going on around the Tea Party and all the gun zealotry is all part of the legacy of slavery. We're still living in the country that was founded on slavery. Even right here in New York. (A lot of people don't know that the slave trade came through NYC.)

You know Mississippi is still a shit state. Maybe if more people see the movie they'll understand why it's such shit. It's because their ancestors treated human beings as property. It wasn't that they used a disrespectful word. It was something much worse.

Tarantino is an artist who communicates with audacity, but also with a wink. I saw Inglorious Basterds and laughed at the idea of a bunch of Jewish vigilantes in the American Army in World War II in Nazi Germany. I esp liked that Hitler liked Tarantino movies. And you know what -- I'm Jewish, and while I don't want to try to compare the pain my people feel around those events to the feelings of blacks have around slavery, there is something to be said for looking at these events with more of our senses, from different points of view, and thinking about them in ways different from the ways our ancestors taught us to think about them.

I just don't support the idea of not listening to the artist because -- because what? I don't even understand what the issue is.

 1/9/2013; 3:42:23 PM.

It's been about a year since wordpress.com released their RSS reader functionality.

Here's a screen shot of the reader taken earlier today. And here's a link to the Matt Mullenweg post where he says a new version is shipping this week.

If you have an account on wordpress.com, this link should take you to the reader.

It'd be interesting to speculate on what might be in a new reader.

1. I have subscribed to several feeds but only one appears to be updating today. That should change after I publish this post, since I am subscribed to this feed.

2. Their UI says that you can subscribe to a blog, but that's confusing -- I have feeds that are not in any way associated with a blog. How can I subscribe to them? (I assume they will accept the URL of a feed, in addition to a blog.)

3. There's a ton of whitespace on the reader page. It's nice to have a little space between items, but it's also nice to get some news on the page too! (Sorry for the sarcasm.)

4. Is there a way to import or export an OPML subscription list?

5. I would, if I were them, strip the markup from descriptions. When I'm skimming, the markup is disruptive. The goal should be to have every post take exactly the same amount of vertical height, and not very much. They human brain is great at skimming, if you set things up the right way.

6. This is what my ideal for a reader looks like.

7. BTW, I like that they did a river of news, and not a mail-oriented reader. It's the right way to go, imho.

 1/8/2013; 12:01:00 PM.

I have a lot of thoughts about this development, but first -- to note it.

AP is now running its own ads in its Twitter feed, to its 1.5 million followers.

The first ads are for Samsung. They don't use Twitter's ad platform. Twitter is sure to object.

A few questions follow from this.

1. How did the AP get 1.5 million followers? Did Twitter promote their feed? If so, it seems Twitter has a legitimate right to the revenue flow from their ad feed. Do they have a contractual right to it?

2. What happens if Twitter shuts them off as they did with developers? What might a shut-off look like when it comes to a content feed? For developers it meant that their API calls were not handled.

3. What do other content companies plan to do here? Do you all think of Twitter as another channel for your content flow? Do you have plans to monetize it? Do you envision your paywall, if you have one, ever extending to your Twitter feed?

4. Why is there a picture of a frog on the AP's Twitter page? :-)

Now, my ready-made answers.

1. Don't put ads in your feed, instead think of your feed as a flow of ads pointing to your content. Put ads on the pages you point to from your feed.

2. Don't depend on Twitter to be a common carrier. They are a media company, like you. You're using a competitor to connect with your readers. This is not a healthy situation.

 1/7/2013; 1:56:42 PM.

I made a point to sit down and try to watch a Sunday morning news show today, but I couldn't make it through five minutes. It's not that I was bored, it wasn't boring. They were just freaking me out. These people have lost their minds. I've never seen it this dysfunctional. It was like watching a very drunk person get behind the wheel and drive away, down Highway 1 north of San Francisco. A windy road 1000 feet up a sheer cliff. At the bottom of the cliff, rocks and sea. Make a wrong turn at the wrong moment and everything goes. Isn't there someone who can take the keys out of their hands? It's so weird.

 1/6/2013; 9:14:29 PM.

Is anyone else using the Time-Warner iPad app?

It's surprisingly useful, because it turns your iPad into a remote for the cable box. The remote it comes with is the usual piece of junk. Mine is worse than usual because about half the keys don't work. So to get to channel 48, I have to enter 5 then a 0 and click the downarrow twice. I've learned how to find the most important channels this way, but I can't believe I'm actually willing to do this.

Then I got the iPad app, and have set up my favorites, and I can just click on the name of the channel I want to go to and the iPad sends a message to TWC's mainframe in the cloud, which then sends a message to my set top box to switch to the channel I just clicked on. It all happens in an instant. Pretty cool.

But last night it stopped working. I get a tune error message at the top of the screen when I try to switch to any channel. Here's a screen shot of the error on my iPod. Same app.

Really sucks. I'm putting this out there in case anyone else is having problems or knows what box I have to kick to get this working. I have already recycled the power on everything in sight.

 1/6/2013; 5:16:12 PM.

You know how I say there's room for something between a tweet and a blog post? Like this one. A simple idea worth a few words, but not too many.

I like watching Knicks games on MSG because one of the guys calling the plays is an ex-NBA superstar, and a really smart guy, who takes his job very seriously -- Walt Frazier.

His narrative, I realized watching the game last night, is what goes through the mind of a player on the court. And because he's so smart and cares so much, it's quite a narrative. He loves the sport, and he loves the players, and he loves great basketball. And while the nature of the job isn't to be overly critical, if you listen carefully you can hear what he doesn't like. In a word, lackadaisical play, a term he uses more than he should. :-)

But it's all good. Thanks Clyde for making it real.

 1/6/2013; 3:10:29 PM.

This is the best piece you'll read all day, maybe all year.

When people are near death they start telling the truth. I know this from experience. I got to hang out with my father for a full week when he was in hospice in the week before he died. He was never a big truth-teller. He used to say "Don't truth me and I won't truth you." But that week was different. He had a bunch of things he wanted to get off his chest. He didn't go so far as to forgive anyone, or say things that would make him vulnerable or embarassed. A lifetime of holding back on these things doesn't break in a week, no matter how close you are to death. And it wasn't his fault. He grew up into a world that told men that they had to be strong. And any emotion other than anger would scare the people around him. That such a person would grow a hard impenetrable shell is no surprise.

I've had the near-death experience myself, twice -- once when I was very young, and once a little over ten years ago. I suppose it's a reason some people find me hard to accept. But it's also the reason, I think, that the people who love me, do. If I presented an image of who they want to see, or who I think they want to see, then it's the image they love, not the person. Now that does not mean you should tell people what you think all the time in every context. But you can change, and apologize and forgive, at any time, without asking anyone's permission, and without fear of offending. Even if you come in a package that most people don't associate with change, regret or forgiveness.

Don't miss the opportunity to clean house and have a great rest of your life, even if you haven't narrowly escaped death.

 1/6/2013; 10:03:10 AM.

I have a JavaScript question today.

I have a form with lots of input elements whose names I can't hard-code into the JavaScript. I have to be prepared for anything that might be there.

On a certain event I want to grab the values of all the input elements and put them into a JavaScript object, each as a property, with the name of the input becoming the name of the property.

I can get a nodelist of all the input elements in the form, as follows:

Now, I have a global called myValues that I want to get all the values from the inputs into.

This is what I think the loop should look like (but it doesn't work).

I've looked at various Stack Overflow pages, of course.

Any help much appreciated!

Update: It works. :-)

 1/4/2013; 9:40:52 AM.

It's now 2013 and I hear that marijuana is legal in two states.

If you're in Colorado or Washington, what's it like?

Do you see people smoking in public places?

Have any stores opened?

Any unforseen consequences?

Really curious to know what legal marijuana is like...

Do tell! :-)

 1/4/2013; 7:32:44 AM.

BTW, I try not to discuss stuff on Twitter. With its 140-char limit, hard to express anything complex or subtle.

-- Dave Winer .& (@davewiner) January 3, 2013

 1/3/2013; 6:41:26 PM.

At 57, I see doctors pretty regularly. They take blood, listen to this, look into that. I don't do nearly all they want me to do, but I would like to do more. I understand there's a connection between how I feel and look, and how long I'll live.

I would do more of it, if it integrated with the rest of my life better. Having to wait for returned calls when ever I have to do something with my doctor's office -- so wasteful. Makes me avoid doing things with them. Why can't we use the new communication tools.

While various professions and industries have changed the way they communicate, doctors and their staff have not. For example, there's an app for the iPad from my pharmacy. When it's time to re-order prescription drugs, I don't have to call anyone, or wade through a voicemail tree, I just click a few buttons on a couple of screens, and the meds are waiting at the pharmacy down the street.

But if for some reason they have to talk to the doctor, it all reverts to faxes and phone tag. The contrast is stark. The doctors themselves probably don't have to deal with it, but they do have to pay for the human beings who implement all the steps manually, when they could do it with websites and email. And their patients have to deal with it too. BTW. :-)

I'm sure there are doctors that use the new communication tools. Does yours?

 1/3/2013; 1:17:02 PM.

This is an important subject.

I just moved scripting.com, a site that goes back to 1995, from an Apache server to an S3 bucket. In the process we generated a zip file that contains everything. It seems to me that archive is a piece of history.

What university is ready to receive such a gift?

Background: I have a famous great uncle from Germany who was an author and translator. His work is studied in universities. My mother ended up with (paper) copies of all his books from his own collection. We went on a search for a university that would add them to their collection, and found one, and now we're fairly confident we did the right thing for Uncle Arno's legacy.

But with digital stuff, who is going to make a big deal out of receiving a zip archive, when anyone's copy is exactly the same as all the others?

In other words, how can I make this bit of history safe? I have no clue.

 1/3/2013; 12:24:00 PM.

My mother's uncle, Arno Schmidt, was a published author in Germany. It's a long story how she ended up with a small collection of his books, but a couple of years ago she decided she wanted to donate them to a university. I've been interested in archives, so I volunteered to help.

I wrote a blog post, got some interest, and in the end we donated the books to Portland State University. They had a scholar there who studied my uncle, so we felt we did a good job of finding a home for his writing.

 1/2/2013; 7:07:09 PM.

Yesterday, the first day of the new year, I walked through Times Square to see what aftermath of the big party. The square was more or less empty, except for a few bits of random glitter blown about by sanitation workers, not much was going on.

So I had a chance to look more carefully at the incredible array of light shows in the square. One of them apparently had some image detection software, it tuned into me, and put my picture on the billboard for all to see. In a variety of ways! Wow.

We're getting pretty close to Minority Report stuff. I shot a picture and showed it to some friends. Everyone found it confusing. Who took the picture, they wanted to know. Me, of course. See if you can figure it out. Then watch the video on Vimeo that explains.

 1/2/2013; 1:08:24 PM.

With the new static sites feature in Amazon S3, it should now be possible to host scripting.com in an S3 bucket.

This is my first project of the new year. We hope. Knock wood. :-)

I have a script that will upload all the files from scripting.com, some dating back to 1994, to the bucket.

I would like to, if possible, preserve the creation and mod dates on the files. Through all the transitions over all the years, I have managed to do that because my scripts have been careful to transfer this metadata along with the actual data.

Now I'm trying to figure out if this is possible with S3. I see how you can associate metadata with a file as you upload it. However I don't see a way to transfer the modification and creation dates. If anyone has a clue, the help would be much appreciated.

PS: I know scripting.com is down for most people now. Unfortunately this transition has not been without glitches. And there are broken images too! Still diggin.

 1/1/2013; 3:11:21 PM.

 1/1/2013; 12:02:22 PM.

A friend who is a reporter sent an email saying they're looking for New Year resolutions from people in NY and in tech. Arrgh, I groaned out loud. I'll never come up with anything. So I put it out of my mind.

Then trolling Twitter thinking about doing something fun with a couple of hours free time this morning, I came across a tweet from Paul Ford, a New York tech guy who also happens to be an excellent published writer. He also makes a living writing docs about XML and scripting, and other technical topics. He occupies a unique cell in my brain. A techie who is also literate.

Every time his name pops up in my feed I think -- Man I wish there was a project I could do with this guy. Then I thought back to the question my reporter friend asked. And I had my opportunity.

Thus, my resolution for the New Year is: I will do what I can to make tech writing more literate.

 12/31/2012; 10:03:49 AM.

Silicon Valley is an idea that represents an industry, analogous to Hollywood, Wall Street, MSM, academia.

Sometimes these concepts are geographic, sometimes the geography is totally symbolic. For example, there are people who are definitely part of Silicon Valley who live and work in New York. And there are people in New York also who are part of Hollywood.

Saying Silicon Valley thinks college is a waste is like saying Hollywood is fighting piracy. Or Wall Street supported Romney in 2012. Believe it or not I am part of Silicon Valley, and I sure don't agree with the idea that college is irrelevant, so it's not an absolute or unanimous thing.

We say things like this all the time, often to explain what we don't agree with. It doesn't make sense to spend a few paragraphs stating exactly what all the people in tech think in all its variants. Even if Paul Graham hasn't heard that Silicon Valley thinks college is a waste, the students have. I went to his Startup School and talked with a few of them. I worked at NYU for a couple of years, and saw all the energy drawing students out of school and into startups. That pull totally came from tech. The students hear it even if Peter Thiel is saying something subtly different.

So that's what I wanted to respond to. And I think I wrote a pretty good essay. It's certainly resonated with a few people (except in PG's backyard). I believe there's something there.

 12/31/2012; 8:35:33 AM.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about startup culture, and am reminded of its nobility -- having started three companies in my career, and learned from each experience, and even occasionally made some money. I'm more positive on startups these days than I have been in a while.

I have experience as an entrepreneur, but I also have an education. For me, it was a rough path. I dropped out, briefly, in high school. Got a chance to reboot my education, which was something I really needed to do. I had a professor in my freshman year of college who showed me that my mind could do math. And from there, I took charge. With mixed results. But at the end of the mess, I was educated. Not just in science and technology, but also in art, music, history, economics and literature. There were a few things I wish they had required I learn: accounting and psychology, foremost, so I wouldn't have been so scared of taxes and sex. But on the whole I think I got a pretty good deal.

Nowadays Silicon Valley says that college education is a waste. This idea has spread to academia too. They're trying to make the experience more relevant to entrepreneurs and their investors. I've heard it said at Harvard that they want to participate in the success of the next Gates and Zuckerberg, both Harvard dropouts. I find this disturbing. I want them to educate better citizens, not richer business people. If they happen to be better citizens and rich, all the better. But first comes the person, not the bank account.

I don't think Gates and Zuckerberg are good role models for young people. And not just because they dropped out. It's more subtle. Most kids who try to be the next billionaire entrepreneur will fail. There probably isn't even one such success in the class of 2013. So most will be disappointed. And if we push the kids toward that, we will lead them to believe, mistakenly, that it's enough to create a massive fortune. It is not enough. And if they fail to create the fortune, according to this standard, they will have failed in life. So, not only will we have set this generation up to fail, but we have just certified the mistake of past generations, that wealth itself has meaning. It has a lot less meaning, imho, than most people think.

When you look at the problems our democracy has, probably the biggest one is the "low information voter." The ignorant electorate that says they want government out of our lives, but keep your hands off Medicare and Social Security, for example. We should strive not to create better billionaires, we should set our sights higher -- to create better voters. I'm not saying they should vote the way I want them to. I don't vote the same way I did 20 years ago. We should however vote with a purpose. Not for style or appearance. For what's good for ourselves and for the country.

The education process could work better, so let's make it work better. But before you throw it out, think clearly and seriously about what we depend on it for.

Update: There's a Hacker News thread on this piece.

 12/30/2012; 9:20:11 AM.

What could be bad about a movie starring Matt Damon and Frances McDormand, that was written by Damon and directed by Gus Van Sant? What could be bad? Just about everything. :-(

There were two jokes in the movie. The first one they spoiled in the movie itself, and the second was in the trailer. The one Damon told had Damon's charm. Both appear in the first ten minutes of the movie.

After that it was all downhill.

The plot was taken out of the Handbook of Hollywood Scripts and then twisted so it made no sense. In other words they couldn't even get the standard plot right.

However, this time the reviewers got it right.

I don't understand how a movie can suck as much as this one did.

They had a great idea -- let's expose fracking -- something that's very important. That, and $9 billion corporations suck the life out of people and communities. And if you want to show us how, great -- but they didn't.

There were two people conversing loudly during the coming attractions, and I was thinking Oh this is going to suck. After the first half hour of the movie I thought they were more interesting than the movie.

My eyes were rolling so often I just decided it would be simpler to leave them permanently rolled. They are rolled right now in fact.

In case it isn't completely obvious: Skip this one.

PS: It did have a great poster. Probably why I was suckered into seeing the movie.

 12/29/2012; 11:04:41 AM.

According to a post late last night by Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, and an email they sent to all AWS users just now, and a walkthrough on the AWS site, they appear to have finished the implementation of static websites on S3. I'm going to check that out right now and report back.

The problem was in the past you could only map a CNAME to a bucket, not the domain itself. This is because of a limit in the DNS system. They appear to have implemented a non-standard (and appreciated!) alias feature in their Route 53 DNS service, which many of us use.

What's not clear in the docs is if a request from mydomain.com is

To some this may seem picky, but I won't be using the feature if it's #1, because I think it's just plain wrong to waste four characters at the beginning of a web URL. I'm a member of the No-WWW movement. I would rather pay the extra money for a host than have readers of scripting.com be redirected to www.scripting.com. However if the distinction is tranparent to users, then I'll use it, but hope that next year they get rid of this limit.

Cliff Notes version of the walkthrough

Postscript

One more thing

 12/28/2012; 8:02:33 AM.