Microsoft ships RSS platform

This morning Microsoft has released a public beta of version 7 of their Internet Explorer web browser, aimed at developers, although I’m sure a lot of tech-savvy and adventurous users will download and install it as well.

This release is significant for publishers who provide RSS 2.0 feeds for their content because this is the first Microsoft release that includes comprehensive support for RSS not only on the producing side, but also on the consuming side. Until now, Microsoft has not shipped an RSS reader, and now they have, for Windows XP, a operating system with many millions of users. Their aggregator, and the underlying platform, is likely to be used in very large volume, likely becoming the most-installed aggregator.

It’s also signficant in that Microsoft has been a staunch supporter of the “really simple” approach to syndication. Their aggregator, of course, has to support all the flavors of RSS that are out there, but they have worked closely with the community to be sure that they were correctly using the formats and protocols that are already in wide use. As we move forward, the target can get smaller, making it easier for all developers on all platforms, not just Windows, to support RSS. Because Microsoft is such a powerful force in the software business, this practice can’t help but influence others, in a positive way.

Further, the Microsoft offering includes support for RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures, making it a powerful engine for podcasting applications. This may create a diverse community of applications, far beyond the small number of “podcatcher” applications that are currently available.

Since I am primarily a Macintosh user these days, I have not installed the software myself, although Microsoft offered to let me try the software before its release. Even so, I am confident that they have done an excellent job of supporting RSS, and have added strength to the growing community of content providers and technology developers building on the format.

State of the Union

Basically the state of the union is so bad that I’d rather crawl into my TV set and live in a fictional presidency.

Yesterday I got an email from Chris Lydon, a former colleague at Berkman Center, and collaborator on a few interesting projects, including the first real podcasts and blogging the New Hampshire primary campaign of the 2004 election. Today, Chris has a public radio show called Open Source. Yesterday he asked me to write my own State of the Union address.

Now this may sound self-important, lots of things bloggers do sound that way to some, at first, but really my scope is limited to the world I work in. As a blogger, my budget is small, I spend several hundred dollars a month for the servers that host my blog, various sites, podcasts, software, communities, services I run and support. Yet my influence spans the globe, reaching every country that has Internet access. I have readers on every continent, you can even read my blog in China, on a good day, when the government permits.

Last night watching a re-run of The West Wing, which is still my favorite TV show, I thought of the assignment Chris gave me. I wonder if we will lose the West Wing this year, just as it’s getting interesting again. I’m pretty sure the Democrats will keep the White House, but the race is tight. And if Matt Santos wins, how will they handle the death of the actor who plays his vice-president. Will McGarry always be lurking in the shadows, walking out of the room as the camera enters? Will we hear his voice in the other room, but not see his face? The show has always been fairly creative, it’s not impossible that they would keep McGarry, but one would hope they would never hire another actor to play his role. No one gives that theory much credence.

But the show has been cancelled, and if this were any year before 2006, that would be the end of that, but this is the year that Apple has shown the entertainment industry that they could sell TV shows for $1.99 per episode, and that enough money is generated this way to, dare I say it, fund the production of a show like The West Wing, which doesn’t use very elaborate sets, or go on location very often, for a few million people like myself who have the time and money and interest to fund such a show.

Which leads to an obvious question — why are people like myself so anxious to continue a fictional presidency, even willing to consider a fictional Republican presidency, as an alternative to the real President of the United States? Well, perhaps its because we can see into the machinations of the fictional one and like what we see. Sure, they’re human beings, but they labor over the big quesitons, make the thoughtful compromises we’d like to see our leaders make, hell, they’re actually leaders. Even if I didn’t agree with something Bartlet did, I’d still support the president, because I know he’s doing the best he can. In contrast with the current president, and the country that stands behind him, I can’t believe this is the country I grew up in. If I could I choose the make-believe world of the West Wing over the real one we live in, I would, in a heartbeat. And having the TV show to compare against reality gives me hope that at least some Americans share a hope for the greatness of our country.

Berkeley Bloggers Dinner #2, Feb 9

We’ve got the date for the second Berkeley Blogger’s Dinner, it’s February 9 at 7PM at Afghan Oasis restaurant in the Shattuck Hotel, 2086 Allston Way. The SF Chronicle describes it as “the cavernous dining room where diners can sample chef Naim Amir’s Afghan dishes.” The food is excellent, and the room is huge.

This location is closer to BART than the last, the station is just around the corner from the restaurant. For people coming from SF or the South Bay, perhaps it makes sense to drive to a BART station and take the train across the bay. It’s virtually impossible to make a 7PM dinner from the other side of the bay without leaving two or three hours for travel, if you come by car. The train takes 20 minutes to get from the Embarcadero to downtown Berkeley. It’s an incredible deal.

How to reform the VC industry

There’s a wisp of a discussion materializing in the tech blogosphere about reforming the VC industry. I have been thinking about this for many many years. It’s an exciting time because I think it might actually happen now. Here’s the rough outline of my plan to reshape the VC industry around the philosophy of the web.

1. One word: disintermediate. Take out the middleman. We don’t need the partners, limited or general, they gum up the works. We need money to start new ventures. Luckily we know the people with the money, they’re the users. And we need people to validate the ideas. Same people, the users.

2. It’s not actually a new idea. That’s how Netscape and the dotcommers that followed went through the roof of the stock market. People who traded could see the raw power of the Internet and knew, one way or the other, that this was going to change how everything was done, from business to romance, travel, gambling, everything. So the users of the Internet bid the stock of the Internet up. And up. And up. And so on.

3. So what did the middlemen do exactly? They invested in all kinds of idiotic things. Anyone could have made the bets they did. The users hadn’t had time to fully absorb the Internet in the 1990s so they bought all the garbage the middlemen shipped, leading to online pet food companies with market caps exceeding the largest industrial companies.

4. So now we’re in the middle of the next decade, and the users are caught up, and we’ve got a pipeline going, from entrepreneur to user, and maybe not much inbetween. Matt Mullenweg hasn’t taken on any VC to start wordpress.com. Who knows how far he can go without having to sell stock? I don’t want to say how he’s paying the bills, I’ll leave that up to Matt, but suffice it to say it’s honest, sustainable, and legal.

5. In any case, I’m sure there will be startups that need capital. Let’s assume so. So let’s start a new company, with Rick Segal as the CEO (if he’ll do it) called User Internet Capital Corp or something catchier. File all the right paper with the SEC, and do an IPO. You have to, because we’re going to be selling shares to the public right at the start. This thing will be public from day one. The purpose of the company will be to invest in promising young Internet companies, chosen by the users, nurture them through startup, get them liquid through acquisition or IPO and distribute dividends to the shareholders accordingly. Retain some cash for overhead and (I insist on this) a small percentage for pure technology research and development, so there will be new ideas to base the startups of 2009 and 2011 on.

That’s it. Never stop investing. All you have to do is listen to the users, who also happen to be the owners. How about that?

Postscript #1

About the “I insist on this” part — of course that’s negotiable. I wanted to get that in there initially so it would be discussed.

It came from a chance meeting on the street with John Doerr shortly after the dotcom bust. I said to him, next time, make sure you have some new ideas in development while you’re riding the wave, to avoid this boom-bust cycle, or at least to cushion the fall and shorten the downtime.

So I’m not talking about the individual projects, I’m talking about big ideas. Imho, money should have been funneled to TBL’s project in the early 90s, who knows how much further the web might have gotten in its early stages if there had been some money around then. I can tell you for sure that RSS could have used some resources while it was in gestation, while Doerr & Co were feasting on the meal that TBL prepared for them. I don’t have to imagine how much further along we’d be now, I know.

Also some of the money should be earmarked for funding open source projects. Another mistake made by Doerr was not flowing some of their return into the underpinnings they’re building on. Watching Podshow recruit engineers now (from a distance of course) I can see how a few bucks from KP a few years ago would have left them a lot closer to realizing their potential now (or not). Now they have to reinvent a lot of wheels because open source projects are largely understaffed.

So I’m proposing to practice what I preach. It’s like leaving some money on the table after you eat a meal, as a gratuity for service. If we’re going to return a dividend to the shareholders (we’d better or its not worth it) we should also support the people and ideas that brought us here, and invest in our future.

Hopefully that clears it up a bit.

Postscript #2

Mark Evans writes: “So who are these people and what makes them more insightful than VCs?”

That’s a very fair question, and I’m sorry that wasn’t clear, I did just kind of gloss over the idea, but it’s very important, so I’ll elaborate.

The users validate the ideas. I’m sure the prices of Flickr and de.licio.us were a function of how many users they have. They call it user generated content, and it’s what drives market cap of acquisitions these days.

So, while there would need to be some kind of an investment committee that decides where to allocate seed capital to get initial ideas going, from there, it’s the number of users, the need for scale that drives the flow of money.

If a Flickr needs more servers, or wants to hire some programmers to create some new functionality, they get the money (and we get equity of course) as determined by the number of users and the rate of growth, and somehow related to how valuable the users are. We can afford to be crass about it, because we are the users.

What is friendship?

Upfront caveat. There are approx 80,000 people who will think this post is about them. It’s not. That’s the point.

I write a blog, have since the mid 90s or so, and I sometimes write in a personal fashion, and people connect to that, which is fine, but it often creates misunderstandings that, I think, go deeply into how humans evolved, and how that evolution never anticipated a medium where a written word could be read by so many people without a connection coming back.

This leads to a sense of familiarity, which is expected, but it can also give a sense of intimacy, even friendship, which is wrong, because what’s going on here is not friendship, although inside us many of the feelings that come from being a regular reader of a weblog are the same ones we feel as we are developing a friendship, in the world evolution designed us for. But this is not that world.

And with this comes a tough lesson, and unfortunately it seems, you only learn this by living, television doesn’t teach it, schools don’t teach it, and if you’re above a certain age, our parents didn’t teach it. You have to learn it by living, by thinking of someone as a friend, only to find out they don’t think of you as a friend. It can be devastating, I know, I’ve been there myself. But all the wishing, all the manipulation, all the determination, just serves to push the would-be friend further away. Because friendship is something you choose to do, you don’t do it out of a sense of obligation. To force someone to be a friend is to not have a friend.

It’s not just something that happens with blogs, celebrity of any kind yields a false intimacy, they’ve made dozens of movies about it. The star is objectified. In the presence of a fan, the star is not a human, it’s an object, it behaves the way the fan wants it to behave. It signs the autograph, it smiles, it thanks. Stephen King wrote a horror story about this called Misery in which the protagonist is bound, held hostage and tortured by a fan. There’s an awful DeNiro movie, where he plays a fan who’s determined to be friends with a star, played by Jerry Lewis. It’s one of the few movies I’ve walked out on, it’s so hard to watch.

I learned a lot about friends when I got sick in 2002. I learned that a friend is someone I trust to be with me when I am at my weakest and most vulnerable. And they are people who, no matter how painful it is to see, are willing to be with me when I am so helpless and weak. If I would trust my life with you, and vice versa, we are friends. It’s not about whether you are trustworthy, or whether you are friendly, it’s the actual act of trust that is the basis of friendship. If I trust you to be truthful, then you’re a friend. If I find I must be careful how I say things, then it’s something other than friendship.

Friendship is not a state of mind, it’s an act. It’s something you do, it’s not about whether you’re good or not, it’s not a reflection of you, it’s a balanced relationship between people. That doesn’t mean it’s always balanced at every moment. Sometimes you “need a friend” and other times it’s the other way. It’s a trust that’s returned. When I was younger and thought I was in love, a friend said it’s not love unless it’s returned. Friendship and love are not quite the same thing, although there’s a lot of love around friendship. I learned that love isn’t even something about two people, it’s a state of being for one person. You aren’t in love, you are love. You are, whether you acknowledge it or not. The heart that’s pumping blood through your body is an act of love, 24 hours a day, whether you’re Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler. (Sorry for the extreme example.)

There’s a world of difference between being a friend and being a fan. I’ve heard people who I’ve never met say we’re friends. And then of course when I do something they don’t like, I’ve betrayed the supposed friendship. They’re living in a dreamworld. The more popular my weblog has become the more people have this dream. It’s very puzzling to be the object in the middle of this swirl of emotions, I say object because my job isn’t to be truthful, my job is to be who you think I should be. Of course that’s not friendship, that’s torture.

In 1997 I wrote: “When a friend changes you can find the bond that’s connecting you at a deeper level. The surface stuff isn’t a good thing to depend on. Physical bodies change as they grow. So do emotional bodies and intellectual ones. Take a deep breath. People move, life is more like a wild dance than a ceremony. You just can’t tell what’s coming next.”

So if you find yourself trying to coerce someone into not changing, then dear reader, that is not friendship, that is coercion.

A postscript

One thing I feel needs to be said is that there are many other relationships that aren’t friendship that are still positive. There are many people I admire who aren’t friends. I work with lots of people who aren’t friends. In fact, I often think it’s a bad idea to work with your friends (more on that another time).

The world isn’t divided into two parts — friends and enemies. I choose to think of friend as a very strong word, representing a very close relationship. I think this may be in part due to what I do, because I need a good solid line separating my public life from my personal. A friend is a personal relationship. I like and admire many people who I don’t consider friends.

A second postscript

One of the hallmarks of a person who is more likely to be a friend-that-was than a friend-for-life, is that person quotes anonymous people who say they were my friend but I betrayed them. That’s such a huge turnoff, that usually wakes me up in an instant. A friend would never even consider saying something like that, because it’s so objectifying, so impersonal, so unfair, so un-friendly. In a court of law you’re entitled to cross-examine your accusers. Same in the court of friendship.

Yahoo game-changers for 2006

Yesterday I participated in a Yahoo management offsite at the spectacular Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Half Moon Bay. They invited two outsiders, myself and Om Malik, to come discuss the new ideas of 2006 with them. They asked what I thought would be the game-changers. They were interested not only in ways they could change the game on their competitors, but how a smaller upstart could be the Choice of a new generation and unseat them as king of whatever hills they’re king of.

Microsoft used to ask us to events like this, Google and Apple never have (except briefly while Amelio was in charge, but that went nowhere). Yahoo continues to impress as the exception to the rule of Silicon Valley. They don’t have the usual arrogance, they’re more inquisitive like the old Microsoft was. Refreshing.

So what did I talk about? Three things.

1. Of course I gave them an abbreviated Clone the Google API schpiel. No need to repeat it here. Search must become a developer platform. If you can’t make the current search engine do it, then hire a new team and build one that can.

2. BitTorrent. There’s no doubt that when we write the year-end pieces for 2006, BitTorrent is going to be at or near the top of the list of technologies that made a difference. Yahoo can make it two-way. Right now BT is largely serving as an (unwilling) channel of distribution for Hollywood, but now we have podcasting and videoblogging, and that stuff is just going to get bigger, and along with that the bandwidth bills for users will keep going up. Ordinary users should get the BitTorrent service for free (after all it doesn’t cost very much to provide) and Yahoo should charge advertisers to distribute their infomercials, ones that users subscribe to, willingly. This is the model for commercialization of the Internet as we go forward. It also is a game-changer on Google, which is going the DRM, appease-Hollywood sell-to-couch-potato approach. I said whereever you’re doing something to make another industry happy at the expense of users, switch polarity, immediately, and get on the side of the users. That in itself is the biggest game-change possible.

3. P2P webcasting. I wrote about this vaguely the other day, and no one apparently understood what I meant by Skype for webcasting. Come on guys, it’s pretty simple. Suppose we’re having a conversation, and I decide “Wow, this would be great for Scripting News, let’s do a webcast of this right now.” So I whip out my laptop, get onto the net (there’s wifi everywhere of course, heh) and launch my Yahoo Webcaster desktop app for the Mac. I choose New Webcast from the File menu. A window opens. There’s a button that says “Copy URL to clipboard.” I click it. Go over to my outliner, paste it into a post on Scripting News. “Tune into this webcast I’m about to do with Bull Mancuso about intellectual property and organized crime.” I highlight the word webcast and click on Add Link. Save. Then I go back to the Yahoo app and click Start. We talk for ten minutes, all the while people tune into the stream, which is managed via a realtime BitTorrent-like P2P connection. And of course when it’s all done it’s automatically archived to an MP3 and included in my RSS 2.0 feed for people who subscribe. If you’ve ever done a webcast, you know how much better this would be. And it’s ready to go, we know how to do all the bits.

PS: I’m a cheap date, probably too cheap. Today, to get me to cough up these ideas all you have to do is put me up in a swanky hotel with a Pacific Ocean view, and feed me. I sing for my dinner, so to speak.

Start OPML Editor support for WP

I’ve gotten some emails from people who seem like they might know what they’re doing on the insides of WordPress, so I’ll play along and start the bootstrap from the OPML Editor side of things (hoping some OPML Editor users or developers pitch in when they see questions they can answer).

The very most basic call you need to support is something like this (or exactly this if you want to keep the client side changes minimized).

opmlCommunityServer.saveFile (blogid, username, password, path, bytes)

It creates or overwrites a file in a server-side OPML store associated with each weblog.

The first three parameters are the usual params for the MetaWeblog API.

path is a forward-slash-delimited path relative to the root of the weblog’s folder where the bytes will be stored.

If I wanted to store my blogroll, it would go to blog/decorations/blogroll.opml. That’s the convention for where the blogroll is located.

In WordPress, blogroll.opml is read, compiled into the internal WordPress structure (a relation?) and all pages that include it are caused to recalc if necessary (not sure if all pages are fully dynamic).

That’s the single XML-RPC call you need to make this stuff work minimally. Later, for extra credit, there’s deleteFile. The folder synchronizer notes when local files are deleted and deletes them on the server using this call.

Any OPML Editor user can tell you where the other files live, by just looking in their www folder. And any implementor that tries to do the WP stuff without at least installing the OPML Editor app and posting a hello world message to the blog is working way too hard and probably wasting a lot of other people’s time. Imho.

Dan Gillmor’s story

Dan Gillmor tells the story of Bayosphere, as he turns away.

There’s been a lot of discussion about this. It’s good that he told the story after the fact, but it’s too late to do anything to help. What if Dan had been blogging the process as he was going along. Yes, people would have taken shots at it, that’s always going to happen (you can see that in my proposal yesterday to create a connection between two promising open source projects). But, people who might have partnered with Dan’s company might have had their creativity activated if it had been discussed openly. To me it was a puzzle what Dan was doing. Too bad we couldn’t participate in the process while it still was a process.

As CEO of UserLand, I tried to narrate my process, best I could. So there’s not much of a post mortem to write, it’s already been written, it’s in the archive of my weblog.

I disagree strongly with Adam Green’s assertion that you must be able to consider the possibility of failure. I’ve learned, through both successful and failed startups that the only times I’ve been successful was when I couldn’t visualize failure. That’s different from anticipating downturns, there are always ups and downs in any ongoing business. I remember trying to imagine what the last day at Living Videotext would look like, and I just couldn’t imagine it. I knew the day would likely come, but I didn’t see how I could lock the door for the last time, calling it a failure. Where would I go then, what would I do? The times that I have visualized failure, I did fail. The times I couldn’t, I didn’t. Hardly proof, but still a belief of mine.

Anyway, it’s good that Dan wrote this piece. I was going to give him a hard time about it, his silence was conspicuous, as he transitioned away from the startup into his new jobs at Berkeley and Berkman (two places I’m pretty close to, kind of weird that way). Journalists often over-simplify what it’s like to be an individual entrepreneur. Maybe now Dan can inject new reality into the world of journalism. Gaining traction as an independent is hard to do, and when it happens we might be more careful about turning things over to the BigCo’s so quickly.

Since WordPress is open source…

I sent an email to Matt Mullenweg the other day and then I realized I sent it to the wrong place. It should be posted publicly so anyone who knows how to work on WordPress and can write production-level code, high enough quality so it could be included in the main distribution, could see it.

Here’s what I wrote to Matt.

Matt, following up on our conversation on Thurs, I’m interested in developing a strong connection betw the OPML Editor and WordPress.

Here’s how it works — there are lots of elements of a weblog that are editable by outlines. The hierarchy of categories, blogroll, templates, blog posts, the about page, all can be edited as outlines. The blogging tool built into the editor already has these connections, implemented with a very simple back-end. It’s not actually very much work, even though it may seem it is, and in fact the architecture would simplify your code (I’ve written five or six blogging tools over the years).

I’d like to phase out of running a back-end. I can’t do the development in WordPress, but I am happy to provide guidance…

So what do you think?

Comments and the Washington Post

Do you care if the Washington Post has comments?

There are plenty of places to post comments on the web, and lots of ways to find out what people think about articles in the Washington Post.

Frankly I understand what a nightmare it must have been maintaining a centralized cesspool of hate and irrelevant immaturity. Why should the shareholders of the Washington Post fund that? Couldn’t those people post their nutty ideas on some other site?