Scripting News for 4/1/2006

NY Times: “The transformation of American politics by the Internet is accelerating with the approach of the 2006 Congressional and 2008 White House elections, producing far-reaching changes in the way campaigns approach advertising, fund-raising, mobilizing supporters and even the spreading of negative information.” 

Eric Rice says Podshow is “Old Media.” For what it’s worth, I’d like to see their artist agreement and judge for myself if they’re doing anything new or if it’s the same model that the record industry uses. Is there a copy online somewhere? 

Podcheck Review has some of the details, but not the actual contract. 

Amyloo thinks their model is more like broadcast rep firms.  

Nick Denton is looking for a couple of MT devs in NYC.  

Anniversaries 

Today is April Fool’s Day, so look out for some tricks.

It’s also the 30th birthday of Apple Computer.

And the 9th birthday of this weblog.

And the 18th birthday of Frontier (the technology behind the OPML Editor).

Frontier, if it were a person, could vote in U.S. elections. I have no doubt who it would vote against, if given a choice.

Thus begins the 10th year of Scripting News.

Reassurance 

It’s reassuring to know, after all these years, I’m still a hypocrite.

Scripting News for 3/31/2006

Startup School, April 29, Stanford University. 

I’ve been following the mixup over Scoble’s meeting at Amazon, from a distance. The guy from Amazon apparently asked Scoble to cut the bullshit and tell him why he should be interested in blogs. If I had been there I would have said that blogging is now an expected channel of communication with at least some customers, with developers and the press. Amazon has customers, and presumably wants more. And they have a developer pitch too, and they have stories they want to communicate to the press. So if some of the people you want to reach like to receive information via RSS and blogs, why would you not want to provide it? To me, asking why you should use blogs is like asking why you should answer the phone. It might be a customer, a developer who wants to use your services, or a reporter who wants to write about the company. Your competitors answer the phone, so you should too.  

Dennis Forbes: Interesting Facts About Domain Names. 

Jason Calicanis says he’s “ripping off” my style, which is totally okay, and I especially appreciate that he credits me. Perhaps he should use an outliner to write his blog? That could make him even more prolific. 

One of my many mottos of the past is “Only steal from the best.” When you use someone else’s idea that’s the ultimate sign of respect. But it’s important to say who you’re stealing from, because they’re the best, right?  

Scripting News for 3/30/2006

Some people have speculated that I’m going to stop blogging on Saturday, which is the 9th anniversary of Scripting News (also Apple’s 30th). I don’t plan to, although Murphy’s Law says anything that can go wrong will go wrong. My plan is to stop as soon as the end of this year, maybe earlier. I want to get some things done first. And in the meantime, I’ve been getting some intriguing offers now that people know there’s an end to this weblog. I like that very much. Marc Canter wishes the software industry would clone the ideas that were in Radio 8, which shipped over four years ago, and speaks as if I had already retired. Not true. And the codebase of Radio 8 is largely GPL now (we could probably GPL the rest of it, need-be). I want to build a developer community around it. Marc, how about we work together, instead of giving up, let’s show em how it’s done! There’s still time, Murphy-willing. 

Steve Gillmor is thankful for many things. 

BrainJams New Orleans: “On May 4th we are going to bring the best of Web 2.0 to the New Orleans small business community in what could be one of the biggest Unconferences of the year.” 

Somehow I think he knew I’d link to this cartoon. :-) 

Paul Boutin tries to figure out what Web 2.0 means, and comes to the conclusion it’s just the Internet.  

Apparently BART crashed last night. (Not a train crash, a software crash.) 

They say all the good domains are taken, but in my experience none of them are.  

Scripting News for 3/29/2006

News.com interview with Guy Kawasaki about Apple at 30. 

The second of Niall Kennedy’s SF Tech Sessions is tonight at the St Francis Hotel, 7-9PM. 

Steve Gillmor: “This concludes the GestureBank Q&A.” 

3/29/05: “It’s not the shape, it’s how you shake it.” 

Scripting News for 3/28/2006

Steve Ballmer: “I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.” 

Lifehacker: “FeedBlendr is a web based RSS feed aggregator that pulls all of your favorite RSS feeds into one aggregate feed.” 

Podfeed does something similar, for podcasts. 

HotelChatter: Worst Wifi Hotels for 2006. 

My father has a very popular Flickr picture, it’s been viewed over 7000 times.  

There was lots of pickup on the idea of an unconference on unconferences.  

I was surprised to find that the podcasting page on Wikipedia now more or less tells an accurate story of the development of the technology. What they mostly omit, however, is the development of the art, and the key roles of Steve Gillmor’s, Doug Kaye’s and my own early podcasts. But I’m glad to see Chris Lydon get the credt he deserves. He really was the first one to do a series of podcasts, with his 2003 blogger interviews. 

Scripting News for 3/27/2006

Today’s a travel day — expect light posting. 

11PM Eastern: Arrived safely in NY. Easy flight. :-) 

Checking in from Terminal 3 at SFO. Excellent TMobile wifi. 

TechCrunch report on Evoca, a new podcasting web app that appears to have it all, and can record Skype calls.  

Jeremy Zawodny asks for ideas for evolving Yahoo Groups.  

Jared Russell says “no way” to the idea of Second Life as a new operating system. He’s right, I have no idea what lies beneath the Second Life user interface, my main point was that the next platform is likely to look entirely different from the Mac/Windows user interface, and to think creatively about what comes next.  

Scoble says Second Life is an OS. He makes a convincing case. But will Microsoft port Windows to run inside it? That’s not actually a joke.  

Hotel Chatter: Best Wifi Hotels for 2006. 

Here’s a cheat sheet we came up with for BloggerCon III that explains how unconferences work. “We don’t have speakers, panels or an audience. We do have discussions and sessions, and each session has a discussion leader.” 

I’d like to do an unconference for people who do conferences. The topic? How to improve conferences, to make them more valuable to the people who participate, to actually enable problem solving, moving the discussion from the hallways into the conference room.  

A discussion about unconferences may be developing at Matthew Ingram’s blog. 

One year ago, an interesting discussion about Feedburner. Not sure if the issues were resolved.  

Richard MacManus and Phillip Pearson started blogging around the same time, four years ago, as did Paolo Valdemarin.  

Scripting News for 3/26/2006

The nine-year aniversary of Scripting News is coming up, a week from yesterday. It started on April Fools Day in 1997. 

Rex Hammock on recovery efforts in Pass Christian, MS. 

I visited the area in December and took pictures. 

Mini-Microsoft on last week’s bad news and Microsoft’s reliance on Scoble to communicate with bloggers, among other topics. 

It seems from reading Karl Martino and Jeff Jarvis, that yesterday’s unconference in Philadelphia was a success.  

Fighting a cold this week, it kept coming and going until I started taking massive doses of Vitamin C. Knocked the cold down and brought on a nice feeling of health. 

Don Park has been digging into World of Warcraft. Gamers are reaching new heights of collaboration. Once in my career, I led a team that worked together the way Don describes, where each member was “in full contact all the time and each of them are fully aware of what others are doing at all times.” The key enabler was instant outlining, and (even more important) a commitment from every participant to work together. As Don says, it’s “powerful and exhilarating. Perhaps, even scary.” Fear is frozen fun. 

Thanks for four years of great blogging, Paolo. I know some people are going to give you shit for that post, but it always felt to me that your blog was written just for me. :-) 

When talking about an unconference, I find it’s helpful to consciously stop myself from using the term “attendee,” replacing it with “participant.”  

Love the way this Memeorandum bit came out with the reduced Second Life snippet in the margin.  

Over on Megite they associated the picture of Bob Hope hitting the road with the OS bit. 

Last night’s movie was Confederate States of America. I didn’t really like it that much, most of the jokes were spoiled by an NPR segment I heard a couple of weeks ago. Went with Sylvia, she really liked it, so don’t go by what I say.  

CSA begins with a quote from George Bernard Shaw. “If you are going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh. Otherwise they’ll kill you.” :-) 

Scripting News for 3/25/2006

You can view the 60-percent-Vista-rewrite story as something of a software development IQ test. Anyone who believes that it’s conceivable is someone who hasn’t got the most basic clue about how software development works. It’s akin to believing that all the US troops in Iraq could come home for the weekend and then on Monday all be back in Iraq fighting the insurgents. That much code movement just isn’t possible. It’s almost for certain that that much code wasn’t rewritten in the transition from XP to Vista and that’s already taken five years. You gotta understand it’s not just how much time it takes to write the code, it’s got to get stabilized too. So if you were to write an operating system from scratch (or 60 percent from scratch) today, you could expect to get some use from it in 2011, maybe. But not with an installed base like Windows and its out-the-door rate for new machines. It would be completely diseconomic, the support costs would be astronomical, even if any users would be willing to use the damned thing, because it wouldn’t run any of their software. Microsoft is learning, as we all are along with them, that you just can’t do major overhauls of Windows anymore. The only way a new OS is going to bootstrap is with a whole new environment, perhaps on the XBox or maybe Second Life will be the new operating system for this century. It takes a lifetime to build the momentum behind an OS.  

I had to book a quick trip to NY next week, and the choices on Expedia weren’t good so I tried Orbitz, which has a bunch of features I’ve wished for on Expedia. Like being able to see the seating chart before making the flight choice. This way I can find out if a flight has some empty seats, and guess if they’re empty now they might still be empty on travel day. I know, it’s a crap shoot, but look at it this way, if there are no seats available now, I know the flight will be full. The second must-have feature is the ability to say “give me results on one day on either side of this day.” Which means if I have some flexibility on when I travel, if there are some better choices, a cheaper flight or a more humane time (I hate red-eyes, won’t do one unless I’m traveling overseas, when they’re unavoidable) I would choose to travel a day earlier or later. This time I was able to save hundreds of dollars by staying one day longer, and instead of having to race to the airport at the crack of dawn I get to go in the middle of the day, in both directions. I still like Expedia’s customer service, and their site works better in Firefox, but in the end convenience, comfort and economics win out.  

Jeff Jarvis blogs from an unconference in Philadelphia on the future of news. 

Rafat Ali snaps a pic of Barry Diller at a cupcake shop.  

Amy’s 17-year-old son is planning a “virility festival.”  

When I’m feeling down I’ll just remember that Scripting News is Amanda Congdon’s favorite weblog. Wow. :-) 

Lifehacker advice on hitch-hiking. I’ve done a fair amount in my younger days. Here’s my number one tip. If possible, ask to be let off at a rest area. Then, if you have the chutzpah, walk up to people and ask if they could give you a ride. This gives you a chance to size them up and it’s hard to say no to a person, where it’s easy to drive by a guy on the side of the road. Also people feel better after a little rest, and are more likely to give you a chance.  

NY Times: “A 24-year-old blogger for The Washington Post, Ben Domenech, resigned yesterday after being confronted with evidence that he had plagiarized articles in other publications.” 

Niall Kennedy: “I am in west Los Angeles today and dropped by theOffice, a community workspace serving the professional writing community of Santa Monica.” 

Scripting News for 3/24/2006

Steve Gillmor: The Allchin Tax Cut. 

tvRSS just got a major upgrade. BitTorrent, RSS and TV. This is a really big deal. It’s time for all aggregators to learn how to do BT. 

Marc Canter says Bill Gates learned to say microformats just in time for his Mix 06 talk. Imagine if he had learned to say BitTorrent. Amazon is leading the way, busting through as the first major Internet company to embrace BitTorrent. It’s time for them all to follow suit, there are lots of non-infringing applications, like podcasting, for example. BitTorrent is rational technology, it’s long past time for the technology industry to stop bending over for the entertainment industry. Bravo Amazon! 

Lifehacker: How to get happy. 

Odeo says podcasting pays. “People want to listen to good stuff! And they’ll even pay for it!”  

The power went out today so I snuck out to the movies and saw Inside Man, which was super-good. I especially liked Jodie Foster as the borderline-evil arranger. 

The top stories on Memeorandum this week have been the delay in Windows Vista and the reorg in OS development at Microsoft. Their web conference in Las Vegas didn’t make much of an impression in the blogosphere. My guess is that they just went with safe bloggers, and if you go for safety you might as well not do it at all. Now, if they had come to us and said, what could you do with the resources we’re going to put behind this conference, could we have created some lasting value? Without a doubt. How many millions of dollars did they spend on Mix 06? I’d have gone looking for a college classroom building we could use during spring break, and put participants up in Motel 6, Best Western and Hampton Inn (and pay their airfare and incidentals). One space for podcasting. One for blogging. One for APIs. And so on. Add 1/3 Microsoft people so they can absorb the culture. And do a hack-a-thon, something that’s definitely part of MS culture (they were doing them as far back as the 80s). But today they have strict rules about who controls what is said. And as a result, their bad news dominates. So much for control. What a waste. A conversation? No way.  

According to David Richards, an unbelievable 60 percent of the Windows Vista code is going to be rewritten before it ships. It’s unbelievable because if it’s true, there’s no way it’s shipping in 2007. If true it’s not just a setback, it’s a multi-billion-dollar debacle on the scale of Apple’s Copland (which, if you recall, resulted in regime change). Basically until someone from Microsoft confirms this, I’d give it zero credence.  

I’ve said before that I believe RSS is going to embrace and extend Microsoft, not vice versa. I’m sure Microsoft doesn’t accept this. But the longer they delay, the more it will cost them in leadership.  

Who are the three men and what are they smiling about? 

Salon: A portrait of the blogger as a young plagiarist. 

 

Scripting News for 3/23/2006

Dan Farber: Craig Newmark’s modest anti-spam proposal. 

Bill says to Mike, you better sit down, I got some bad news. 

Some rational thoughts on A-list blogging. Like this. “Every A-Lister could stop blogging at once and the blogosphere will continue on.” You bet it would. Wouldn’t it be interesting if every certified A-lister, by convention, didn’t blog during the third week of every month. What if that idea caught on? Heh. That might be a mind bomb, right there. :-) 

MAKE Mag’s OPML of their feeds. Viewed in our grazer. 

Le blog de Jean-Louis Gassee. 

Fred Wilson’s favorite business model: “Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.” 

Jacob Reider sends pointer to docs for a Wiki that has an XML-RPC interface. 

Britannica responds to Nature on Wikipedia. 

BBC: Apple attacks plan to open iTunes. 

Om Malik: Meet Ajax Write. 

TechCrunch: Jigsaw is a Really, Really Bad Idea. 

Don’t forget to feed the meter