Don’t dis your competitor

There are some very practical time-tested reasons for not dissing your competitors on a personal level.

Like it or not you share a market with this person. How are you ever going to woo away his customers by saying nasty stuff about him to people who like his product? If you waste time talking about the person, people will quickly assume your product isn’t as good as his.

Instead, try saying something like this. Paul is a hell of a nice guy, and his product is excellent, but ours works better for people like you. Hell, if it were about who’s nicer, you should buy his product because he’s much nicer than I am, and smart as a whip! But as luck would have it, our product is better for you. It has more vitamins, gets better mileage, lasts longer, smells better, gets the job done faster, for you, the most important person in the world.

Now if you make it all about how the guy who makes the other product hasn’t bathed in a month, and flunked a math test in 7th grade, well that leaves people wondering why you aren’t talking about the product.

Maybe it’ll turn out that your product is better for one thing, and theirs for another, and everyone can be happy. But dissing your competitor on a personal level makes you look like a loser.

How to save a Gmail message?

This should be a real simple thing to do but I can’t figure out how to do it. I have about a dozen messages in my Gmail inbox that I want to save to my local hard disk. How do I do it? I’ve scoured the online help and have come up with nothing. I admit I should have checked this out before making it my main mail system. I hope the answer isn’t Save Page As in the Firefox File menu.

Amyloo and Frontier’s website framework

A few weeks ago I sent Amyloo a few pointers to the website framework docs for Frontier as a clue as to how to experiment with CSS in the design of a template for the browser-based NewsRiver user interface. Now, she’s reached a point where she’s thinking (apparently) about how to make the results of her exploration available to other users. This is always a tricky spot, if you move too fast you end up with a bad design and either have to live with it, or live with breakage. I almost always decide to live with it, because breakage is too painful, and you also lose the trust of the people you want to work with. So I like to go-slow, think, and consider the alternatives carefully, and most important, look at prior art because there may already be a solution to the problem.

Now Amy is moving quickly (and that’s good) because when I looked at her post a few hours ago I said “Oh she just needs to know about file.readWholeFile,” but now I see she’s found it, and has built a layer around it, but I’m not sure that the layer actually buys you very much. I am also reluctant to create new verbs at the top-level of the scripting namespace, there aren’t many of those, because there always seems to be a context, and this gives you a way to create a new verb to stand alongside the earlier verb, without having to klooge things up too badly. Long story, hard to explain, but top-level verbs are usually not a good idea.

Amy asks if this framework is for Manila, actually it predates Manila. Our software is built in layers, and the layers came in years, like the rings of trees or the brain of a lizard. The stuff Amy is looking at was done in 1996, when Frontier took the turn from being a Mac-only system scripting environment to being a web content management system. Some people still think that was a bad idea, but that was almost ten years ago, a lot has been built since then. Even so, what we did in 1996 was good enough to basically provide the user interface for NewsRiver 0.3, and give Amy a way to explore the wonderful world of Fronteir content management. Adding Manila to the mix would complicate matters considerably, because Manila is substantially more ambitious than the website framework, which is what she’s working in. (Also, Manila is not open source, so that makes it somewhat more difficult to explore this way, unless you have the money to buy a license.)

Now, the question of whether or not the input data should come from the file system or not is an interesting one. There are other choices.

1. It could come from the Internet. In Manila we had a macro called includeHttp (there I go breaking the rule I talked about above, it could have been called manila.includeHttp, so we could have borrowed the concept wholesale wihtout confusion, calling the new macr newsRiver.includeHttp, or some such). If we used something like that here, we could still get stuff from files, because file paths can be represented by URLs.

2. Another possibility is to get the content from the object database. This sounds a bit more hairy than it actually is. You could have a command in a menu somewhere that says Open My CSS, and an outline window would open and it would say NewsRiver CSS. You’d edit it, and refresh your NewsRiver site in the browser, and boom, the change would be instantly visible. Now the user wouldn’t really be sure exactly where the CSS resides. But then they don’t have to worry about where it is. I do this in a bunch of places in the OPML Editor, and so far haven’t heard too many complaints. (Check out the Open Log Outline command in the Community menu for an example.)

Anyway, I’m not sure how much sense this makes. My teaching technique is to just string the words together and let people get confused and maybe read it again and it’ll be less confusing until all this stuff is second nature. It’s very cool that the Class of 2006 is starting to take an interest in the underpinnings. This is a good sign, and it’s a path I’ve been down quite a few times before. I’m hoping that people from earlier incarnations of the community will come back in at some point and express some opinions about how we should evolve here, of course in a constructive and helpful way.

PS: For more clues and philosophy check out the Going Crazy series I wrote for Radio in 2002.

RSS came from the publishing industry

Last night’s conversations were incredibly interesting, the next day I’d like nothing better than to continue them. One thing I wish I had said to Om, so we could have developed the idea (or perhaps he might have disagreed) is my belief that RSS did not come from the tech industry as so many assume — it came from the publishing industry. Why? Well, the ideas in RSS are hardly technologically revolutionary. As many have pointed out, ad nauseum, CDF had some of them, and as you can see in this post from Mary Hodder, there’s no doubt something like it would have come along eventually even if we hadn’t promoted it so aggressively in the late 90s and early 00s.

The event that made the difference, that in hindsight was the tipping point for RSS, was the adoption of the format by the New York Times in 2002. The publishing industry, unlike the tech industry, didn’t feel threatened, apparently, by a thriving standard, so after the Times went first, they all just followed, compatibly, without reinventing, without gratuitous incompatiblity, without excuses, they just did it.

Now, also in hindsight, it’s pretty clear the reason it was RSS 2.0, both in the Times and in the blogging world is because I wanted it to be RSS 2.0. The Times delegated the decision to me. So I did the same thing with the Times’s content flow that I was doing with Radio’s and Manila’s and my own on Scripting News. All those things, flowing the same way, was enough to drive adoption of a de facto standard. The others in the blogging industry, which is definitely part of the tech industry, did what the tech industry always does, they tried to lock their users in through tiny little niggling incompatibilities — until Apple came along, and brazenly did what no one else dared to do. They built on the generous openness of the publishing industry, and never said thanks, and then lied about their own openness and reserved for themselves the right to decide who can read their content. And so far, they’re geting away with it.

There’s nothing in Apple’s past to suggest that it could possibly be different. They’ve never willingly let others compete with them. Bill Gates has never forgotten that they sued him over the trashcan. Only occasionally, when Jobs wasn’t there, did they flirt with the idea that competiton might be permitted.

But we don’t need the tech industry, and it’s about time their attitude reflected that. They didn’t bring us the web, that came from a researcher in academia. And they didn’t bring us RSS, that came from the publishing industry.

This is a test post

I am at the headquarters of SixApart in San Francisco, and we’re going to see if we can get this to work with Movable Type.

Niall and I are heading over to SixApart

Matt Mullenweg wouldn’t come out to play, so Niall and I are going over to SixApart to get WordPress.root working with Movable Type. Hehe.

This a demo of the software I is talking about.

Berkeley Bloggers Dinner, Jan 26

Let’s have a blogger’s dinner in Berkeley on Thursday, January 26, 7PM.

We got the place, Taste of the Himalayas, 1700 Shattuck Ave.

It’s a big restaurant and probably can accomodate up to 20 to 25 people, we can have a loud conversation or two. I’ve eaten there many times, the food is good and not too expensive. Nepalese food is a lot like Indian. Lots of curries, sauces, some spicy stuff, rice.

Anyone can come, no RSVP required although it would be appreciated. Include a bit about yourself in a comment here.

Maybe we’ll make this a semi-regular thing?

Let’s have fun!

PS: It’s five easy blocks from the Downtown Berkeley BART station.

PPS: When you arrive say you’re with the “Blogger” party.

Why Top Ten Sources is a Good Thing

There’s been a lightly heated discussion about the Top Ten Sources site, is it a fair use of RSS, is there a copyright issue, is it a splog, is it a good idea?

The debate has focused on the negatives, and I think missed that Top Ten Sources is a send-them-away-so-they’ll-come-back site. They publish a reading list for each of the sites, containing pointers to the RSS feeds for each of the chosen source.

Mike Arrington, the superstar blogger of Web 2.0, once told me he doesn’t care how many people read his site in a web browser, what he’s looking for is subscribers to his feed. Well, if Top Ten Sources takes off, as I think it will (I’m thinking about investing), it will not only send people to your site but it will create subscribers for your feed. The fact that they publish an aggregated view of the sources is a promotional tool, they win if people subscribe to your reading list if you’re lucky enoug to be chosen as a Top Ten Source. (And in order for that to work, more aggregators have to support reading lists, as I’m sure they will.)

I hope you can see how thought-through this is. If you want more background, listen to the podcast interview I did with John Palfrey on this subject, earlier this month.

Easing into BitTorrent

In a previous post the comments were all over the map, but I figure that’s because I didn’t explain well-enough what I was looking to do. So I’m going to break the project up into bite-size chunks, just play along with me, and help if you can. Okay? Thanks.

The first little project is to figure out what’s inside a Torrent file. Honestly, I hadn’t looked until yesterday, as I was opening it in TextEdit I was kind of hoping it would be XML. Apparently it’s a binary format. Lots of junky looking characters. So I did a couple of quick searches trying to find a document that explains the file format, something like the RSS 2.0 spec. I didn’t find it. So that’s question #1.

1. Are there any docs for the BitTorrent file format? If so, pointers please. Thank you very much.

My goal is pretty simple, I want to write a script that creates a Torrent from an MP3, and I don’t want to run Python.

Why “MacBook” is a weak name

Had an interesting talk with Phil Torrone this afternoon, wide-ranging, about a press room for bloggers, OPML projects we will do together (more on those topics later), and why MacBook was a bad name.

He explained why people don’t like the name. Here was their chance, once and for all, to make a statement that wasn’t “Mac” at all. By going to Intel, they could have claimed, in a clever way perhaps, to have erased the final objection anyone might have to using this computer. They could have a new position, instead of the snotty one they chose.

They could have said something like “Finally, a PC that’s colorful and fun to use.” That’s what I feel a Mac is, compared to a Windows machine, which is relatively joyless. MacBook is a weak name. It says “More or less what we were shipping before.” Totally unexciting.