Scripting News for 4/30/2006

Tomorrow (or Tuesday), with any luck, we’ll have a nice way for people who are new to videoblogging to get a bunch of stuff in a single download, and in doing so, help the net. It’s been a while since we’ve done something explicitly for that purpose. We should do it more often, don’t you think? :-) 

Amyloo: “I wish I could prove I predicted what’s about to happen on West Wing.” Tease! 

Posting from the BART station at SFO, thanks to EVDO. Just missed the 5:36PM train, so I have eleven minutes to kill, so why not do some shopping on Amazon. Maybe Google better hurry up and install wifi all over San Francisco, pretty soon it won’t seem so special.  

Of course I have to try using the EVDO connection on the train while it’s moving. So far so good. As a result, I don’t have to leave my seat to look at the BART map. I can see that I can ride this train all the way to West Oakland. No need to get off at Balboa Park. Pretty cool! (I lost the signal when we went underground.) Given that this is the Bay Area, no one gives me weird looks. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to save this stuff when we surface alongside 280, south of the city. Yup. Batteries last much longer with Airport off. 

I’m hearing Stephen Colbert was pretty incredible at last night’s press dinner in DC. Haven’t had a chance to watch it yet.  

Movie: Last night during dinner, on-stage, a participant was being made up as if he had been assimilated into the Borg.  

Russell Holliman on the Sprint Ambassador Program.  

BloggerCon.Org guidelines for Discussion Leaders.  

The utter futility of geekness 

Alex Barnett led an intense lightning-fast discussion yesterday that quickly went to the predictable place. I’ll explain.

When bloggers get together, the topic of every session drifts into “How do we make money doing this” no matter what the original topic was. It’s the same way with artists. It’s so funny, because bloggers don’t do it for money, and no matter how you try, the discussion never actually uncovers any ways to make money, it’s just about how we need to discuss how to make money. It’s a meta-discussion of a hopeless subject. Sort of like debating the need for world peace at the UN. Come to think of it, I bet that’s exactly what they do debate at the UN.

When a roomful of smart geeks gets going (3Gs!) the conversation always slides down the slope to its own predictable place (sds => pp) — How are we going to convince the users to use this. No point, you can’t convince the users to use anything. What geeks do, in idle years, is discuss this, until the users find something new to adopt, on their own, then we catch up with them, and then do it all over again.

I promised I’d explain once and for all why it’s hopeless to “try to get the users” to use social bookmarking software unless they’re already using it. Here’s why: I don’t know. But I do know it never works. It’s so bad that when I try to solve the problem (I’m a geek, so I fall into this trap myself, can’t help it), I hack at making it easy and painless, figuring it’s a user interface problem (if you’re a geek you’re nodding your head right now, right?) but when I make it so easy anyone would have to do it, not only doesn’t anyone else do it, I don’t even do it myself! Why? As I said, I don’t know! Makes no sense to me at all. But there you are.

I do know that Dan Bricklin posed something like a law to explain the phenomenon, as best as a geek possibly can. Software that rewards you for doing something one percent of the time will get used (email, word processing, SimCity) and software that punishes you for doing it only 99 percent of the time will not get used (calendars, PIMs, categorizing stuff, social bookmarks). The genius of del.icio.us is that it falls into the former category, even though it appears at first to fall into the latter.

Never say Bricklin isn’t a smart dude, if you remember his rule, you’ll avoid hours of interesting discussions about how important it is to do something that is impossible to do.

My guess is there’s a dozen Hugh MacLeod cartoons in this.

Scripting News for 4/29/2006

New Flickr set: Seattle MindCamp 2.0. 

Movie: An $8 flying saucer you can buy on the Internet. 

Steve Garfield: “When did you first hear about ZeFrank?” 

For the record this is my first EVDO-based blog post.  

Chris Pirillo movies: #1, #2. 

I’m leading a MindCamp discussion at 10AM tomorrow about OPML, RSS, whatever people want to talk about. We added a session at 9AM tomorrow with Ponzi called Blogging About Love. Too much talking about software, let’s have a session to talk about people.  

At noon today, Seattle Mind Camp 2.0 starts. I’m flying up in the morning, to arrive in Seattle at 11AM or so. With any luck I should be there at noon. 

Dan Bricklin: “Instead of making you feel bad for ‘only’ doing 99%, a well designed system makes you feel good for doing 1%.”  

I just realized that now that I have EVDO, I don’t need to print out Seattle maps for driving directions. I can just use Google Maps from the car. Hehee. I’ve been waiting for a moment like this, to realize how EVDO changes everything. Except I don’t know if it will really work in a moving car. Seems it should, like a cell phone does.  

Bill Gates helps the NY Times turn the clock back.  

Jeff Jarvis asks why. Board room comfort. There was a time when Bill Gates had it all sewn up, and a time when the Sulzbergers did too. If you were them, you’d want to turn the clock back. But as some wise person once said “Time waits for no one.” 

Scripting News has been steadily climbing the Technorati 100, now appearing at number 76. I’ve been claiming my various alter egos, thinking that would boost the rank, but apparently they only count links to scripting.com. If they included links to the essay site, the rank would be in the low 40s. Considering the attention this ranking system gets, it’s remarkable how little is known about how it works. 

The Daily Fisk is fisking Guy Kawasaki. (Not fisting.) 

I love Greta Garbo in Ninotchka. 

The first Ze Frank news show was on March 17? 

Jeff Jarvis on United 93. “Since September 11, my children no longer let me leave the home without saying that they love me and hearing me say it to them.” 

Scripting News for 4/28/2006

Today’s the day I discovered Ze Frank’s videoblog. It’s the best news cast anywhere. So good it’s revolutionary.  

BloggerCon IV: June 23-24 in SF. We’ve got two venues committed now, so there will be at least two tracks. We’re working on space for another track and I’m starting to put together a grid, and a list of DLs I want. If you’ve been a DL at a previous BloggerCon and are available to do this one, please let me know. No guarantees, but it would help to get things together more quickly, and given the closeness of the dates, time is of the essence. :-) 

The Monthly Coffee Notes podcast, inspired by the latest Gillmor Gang, about advertising on the Internet, Channel Dean and how to win the Presidency on the Internet. The sound quality is perfectly awful, but what else is new.  

The secret of Rocketboom: “I learned a long time ago, when Deborah Norville did the early morning news on NBC, there’s nothing sexier than a smart female with a clever smile surrounded by old corny males that are in love with her.” 

Essay: How to get elected President on the Internet. 

12/12/05: “The more you send them away the more they come back.” 

Yogi Berra: “You can’t think and hit at the same time.” 

In Y2K, as McCain was surging, there seemed a chance that we could have an election between two honorable men. A race between Gore and McCain would have been very good for the country, I felt then, and feel even more strongly now. Even though I’m not a Republican, and would not have voted for McCain, I urged him to embrace the Internet, and suggested he borrow an idea from a much-loved Democratic President. I even mocked up an ad for him. This might work for Edwards, if he took the time to really understand the philosophy: “Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet.” He looks like a Kennedy, on the outside. But what does he look like on the inside? I think that’s what people were asking yesterday. 

Mike Arrington on the Edwards roundtable. 

Major League Baseball supports RSS. :-) 

Boston Globe: “A coastal Maine blogger who criticized the state’s tourism office has been hit with a lawsuit seeking potentially more than $1 million in damages for allegedly making false statements and posting on his website, Maine Web Report, images from proposed tourism advertisements a New York agency prepared for Maine officials.” 

Lance Dutson: “I’m not going to fold.” 

New header graphic, the Ocean Five Hotel, South Beach. 

 

Scripting News for 4/27/2006

Rolling Stone: The rise of the video blog. 

Business 2.0: Video blogs, ready for prime time. 

Hmmm: “I could write more from the third person and polish the posts more but you know what? I like them raw, visceral and in the first person.” Amen. 

Disclaimer: I’ve received a free cell phone from Sprint, under what they call The Ambassadors Program. Sounds like something out of Lost. But it’s pretty cool. You can get music, television, and Internet access over the phone, of course it has a camera, and best of all, it does EVDO, and it works. I was able to get online today from Jing Jing, which doesn’t have wifi. So that’s the end of Dave having to hunt for wifi in airports and paying extra for it in hotels, or having to hunt for a Starbucks. I’ll be able to work in parks, if I want to. I have no idea how freeing EVDO will be, but I suspect it will be very. And you’ll probably find me writing about my Sprint phone here from time to time, and no doubt this is why they’re giving them to bloggers like me. But that’s a win-win, and I’m happy to partake. :-) 

New Flickr set: Edwards in Palo Alto. 

I’m participating in a discussion in Palo Alto today with a bunch of people from the web communityin the Bay Area and Senator John Edwards. The terms of the discussion are that we’re allowed to acknowledge that we’re at this meeting, but we’re not allowed to talk about what’s discussed here.  

Movie: danah boyd at Jing Jing, explaining. 

Tara Hunt sends word that there are multiple groups on Flickr devoted to fire hydrants. Her favorite is the Birdsill Holly Association. 

Parking meters & fire hydrants 

Yesterday I had a choice between a parking meter and a fire hydrant as my new header graphic. As you may know I have a thing about parking meters.

On my last trip to NYC a fire hydrant caught my eye, I snapped a pic, and it won my heart. Someday that’s going to be on top of my world, I thought to myself, and yesterday it happened.

Then this morning Mike McGrath, whose Flickr feed I am subscribed to (great feature), posted a pic of a very fancy fire hydrant in Belmont. I prefer a more down-to-earth look, but it’s great to know there’s another fire hydrant lover out there.

Heroic fire hydrant 

If you think fire hydrants are always dull and boring, think again.

According to legend, this fire hydrant saved San Francisco’s Mission District.

How about that!

Rather may blog after leaving CBS

Last night I had a 5-minute talk with Dan Rather, former CBS News anchor and managing editor. We covered topics that weren’t covered in the 1.5 hour interview with Orville Schell. Dan Farber of CNET took a picture of us talking.

Of course what I wanted to talk about is Rather becoming a blogger. He said that his employer discourages it. I was surprised, more news organizations are encouraging their reporters to blog, it makes economic sense to do so. I thought that CBS especially would be thinking this way because they were so rocked by bloggers in 2004. He said that large companies like to control what’s said about them, and that CBS is part of a large company (Viacom).

But he added something that was surprising, that I’ve not heard elsewhere — he may leave CBS, and if he does, may start blogging. I offered my help and advice if he goes that route, he said he’d like that.

Rather could be a great blogger

I think Rather could be a great blogger. He’s a thoughtful, considerate person, who thinks about stuff. He has strong opinions about what should be covered by the news, about the responsibilities of citizens in a democracy, and he certainly has experienced the power of blogging personally, and has now had time to reflect. These are qualities of the blogosphere, although the louder and more sensational voices of course tend to be heard more by the MSM than the thoughtful ones. I don’t doubt that Rather would be listened to.

Given his broadcast presence it might make more sense to podcast, and to do interviews with other people. I can tell you for sure, I’d love to do a series of podcasts with him. I kept thinking about that as I listened to the on-stage interview. There are so many challenging ways to approach his story, places to go with the events that don’t lead to the same tired places that mainstream news people always go to. Lessons not only for the old news medium, but for the new. His career has gone from the Vietnam War to Iraq; from the political activism of the 60s, to the activism of the blogosphere. His point of view is an inherently interesting one.

What if CBS News had decided to blog…

…or had sought the diversity of the blogosphere to look at the National Guard story from angles other than the right-wing bloggers (who I have met and have respect for, btw). What if, in addition to being the lightning rod for this event, they had also covered it, brought the blogosphere onto their nightly broadcast in 2004, in the last days of the campaign.

Had they embraced the controversy instead of trying to deflect it, just followed the story like any reporter could have done, it all could have come out very differently. They were in a position to learn the power of the blogosphere in ways that weren’t available to NBC, ABC and CNN.

Understandably, they missed the opportunity. And, equally important, the focus of the story might have included whether or not the President took his national service responsibility seriously at the time of the Vietnam War. This angle, the important one, got lost, as the Republican bloggers took control of the story.

Edward R Murrow

At one point in the interview Rather choked up and was on the verge of tears, talking about Edward R Murrow, the first great television newsman. Rather said that his accomplishments had never been equaled, perhaps so, but the take-down of Rather and CBS News in 2004 seem comparable to the CBS News take-down of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954.

We sympathize with Rather, and despise McCarthy, but the similarity is that both expressed the power of a new medium coming in, and an old one going out. I doubt if Rather would agree with this at first, but I’d like to ask the question again a few years after he started blogging, after he’s seen the power from the other side.

A classic mainstream journalist with the time and perspective to learn blogging could be a real pivotal person, and Dan Rather has shown before that he has the courage to make history; maybe he can do it again.

Viacom

I blogged as the voice of Harvard Law School for a couple of years. It was nothing like my main blog, Scripting News, where I blog in my own voice. If a venerable and stodgy institution like Harvard can do it, why can’t CBS News? Maybe this is a clue that the downward spiral of MSM isn’t necessary, it may be self-inflicted.

Scripting News for 4/26/2006

Story: Rather may blog after leaving CBS. “They were in a position to learn the power of the blogosphere in ways that weren’t available to NBC, ABC and CNN.” 

New Flickr set: Dan Rather at UC-Berkeley. 

Dan Farber’s report on the Rather interview.  

Scratchy video of the Rather interview. 

Andrew Baron’s thoughts on BitTorrent.  

David Wilkinson explains why he blogs.  

Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Vince Welnick of the Grateful Dead sing the national anthem at Candelstick Park on 4/12/93.  

New header graphic. A lovely fire hydrant. Sometimes they aren’t inspiring or beautiful. Welcome to the real world.  

On Wikipedia they’re debating whether the excellent Hacking Netflix blog should be linked to from the Netflix page. Hmm. That’s like Jimmy Wales showing up at an unconference with a stack of PowerPoints and asking people to hold their questions till the end.  

BTW, to answer the question of what do you say when introducing yourself to Dan Rather, here’s what I did. I said: “My name is Dave Winer. I’m an early blogger.” Then Steve Gillmor, standing next to me, explained that I actually did more than that. It’s a perfect way to avoid the awkward moment where you have to appear to be boasting. Let a friend do it for you. :-) 

Chris Pirillo animates United’s flight safety instructions.  

Salon reviews United 93, a movie about the doomed 9-11 flight that crashed in a field in Pennsyvania. 

Scripting News for 4/25/2006

Much love and support to Terry Heaton, whose wife Allie died suddenly last night. 

This evening I’m going to a talk at UC-Berkeley by former CBS news anchor Dan Rather. They also invited me to a party honoring him. So what do you say when you’re shaking the hand of a historic figure? I guess we’ll find out. :-) 

Irreverent snark-filled comments today, esp re Rather.  

Kosso implements Hugh MacLeod’s widget, in Javascript. 

Last year on this day I wondered why Kill Bill I & II aren’t the ultimate chick revenge movies, like Thelma and Louise. A year later, I still don’t get it.  

Scott Rosenberg: “Congress is considering allowing the big phone and cable companies that now control most of the broadband access in the US to do something they want to do, but that has never been done before: turn the level playing field of today’s Internet into a sort of class-system environment, in which packets sent by companies that pay more get preferential treatment.” 

I listened to my first Gillmor Gang in many months, last week’s show with Hugh MacLeod. More and more I realize that it’s Mike Arrington’s world, we just live in it.  

New header graphic, veggies at Seattle’s Pike Place Market. 

According to SiliconBeat, the Sphere weblog search engine is about to open to the public.  

Integrity in 2006 

Amy Gahran asks what integrity is. Try this. “A human being has integrity if he or she is what he or she appears to be. That’s why integrity commands us to disclose conflicts, so that what we say, and who we appear to be, are in synch. Change the appearance if necessary.”

PS: A simple search reveals 521 instances of “integrity” on this site. No need to guess, or look in the dictionary to find out how I use the term.

Next steps for BitTorrent

Early this year, I put my stake in the ground and said: “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.” I stand by the prediction.

Recent milestones

Here are a few milestones, small but significant steps that pave the way for larger and more significant ones.

1. Amazon ships S3, a public utility storage system, with native, automatic BitTorrent support. You can access any object in the the S3 store through BitTorrent as easily as you access it over HTTP. All the details are taken care of automatically. This is the prototype for server-side BitTorrent support — completely automatic and transparent.

2. Opera ships version 8.0.2 of its browser, with built-in BitTorrent support. Now, downloading something via BitTorrent is no more complicated for the user than clicking on an HTTP or FTP link. There’s no extra software to run.

3. On Marc Canter’s blog I just read that a software company that he admires is shipping “commercial grade” BitTorrent. It’s hard to figure out what the product is from the website, but if Marc thinks it’s good, then it must be. (Please explain in concise terms what services you provide. Thanks.)

Next steps for BitTorrent

1. Amazon must have competition, from other back-end service providers, such as Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, etc. There’s nothing wrong with their service, the API is reasonable, but Amazon has a history of patenting stuff that we really need to not be patented. By having second sources, we are assured that Amazon will not likely use BitTorrent as a way of locking us in.

2. It would be especially nice if Apple and Microsoft built BitTorrent support into the Macintosh and Windows operating systems, with simple APIs that made it easy for all software running on these two popular platforms to add client and server BitTorrent support. It goes without saying that all popular flavors of Unix should also have easy-to-integrate BitTorrent libraries.

3. BitTorrent and Firefox were made for each other. If every Firefox user had easy to configure (with good defaults) BitTorrent support, we’d be 90 percent of the way there.

4. We more good non-infringing content. I’ve asked the RocketBoom folk to create packages each containing a month of Rocketboom, available over BitTorrent. These would be sizable downloads, it’s great stuff, and no one can argue that they don’t have the right to distribut it this way, nor can they argue that we don’t have a right to download it.

5. We need a podcatcher that supports BitTorrent, seamlessly, with good defaults. It seems unlikely that Apple will add this to iTunes, because of their close relationship with Hollywood; same with Microsoft and their iTunes challenger which is no doubt coming soon. The Rocketboom folks say that FireAnt has good BitTorrent support, but it’s missing a key feature (it should keep seeding a file for a while after it’s been fully downloaded). This is a big opportunity for any podcatcher developer who isn’t in bed with the entertainment industry to differentiate their offering from Apple’s.

Summary

Breadth of support is the most important thing BitTorrent needs. We need easier and more servers and clients, more non-infringing content, and more commitments from the tech industry, government, and eventually, of course, the entertainment industry. It’s a very rational, open technology, quite useful, and with a little more effort it will become a fixture in the toolkit for Internet developers, publishers and users.

Scripting News for 4/24/2006

Essay: Next steps for BitTorrent. 

Hugh MacLeod decided to “build the widget.” 

Japanese earwax cleaner, $90, has a built-in camera, but does it have a feed? 

AP reports that Scott McNealy is stepping down as CEO of Sun Microsystems. Jonathan Schwartz, a blogger, is taking charge at Sun.  

New header graphic, Microsoft visitor badges from the summer of 2004. 

FYI — if you’re sending mail to my old email addresses, dave at scripting dot com and dave at userland dot com, the chances of it actually reaching me are slim to none. The most reliable way to send me email is to use the mailto icon on this page and enter the mail into the browser. It will go to a mail address that is not published, therefore is not spam-filled. The other option is to send mail to dave dot winer at gmail dot com. That’s a pretty unspammed box (fingers crossed, Murphy-willing). But the old addresses are so swamped with spam and the filtering I used is so completely routed around. I just browsed through a few weeks of email there, and found one or two real emails, but mostly it’s hopeless, and I’m sure I’m missing real messages. Sorry if yours is one of the ones I’ve missed.  

Not sure what to make of FeedCache.  

I hate to spoil the fun, but Scripting News is back in the Technorati 100 at position 88. Sorry. Hehe. :-) 

Proclaim: Amanda Congdon — the new Walter Cronkite. 

Disclaim: Scripting News does not meet the high standards of 120-day blogger Guy Kawasaki. 

Wacky idea: Social networks in meatspace. 

Social networks in meatspace

I just had a wacky idea.

We know what social network software is, right.

Now suppose we turned a conference into a social network.

Ask everyone who’s coming to sign up with LinkedIn or Friendster, or maybe Ted Leonsis’s new system.

Then we ask people to check off people they’d like to talk with at the conference, and make a brief note about what they want to talk about, and whether or not it must be private, and how long it will take, and if it can be part of a group discussion.

The person you want to meet with can say yes or no or no response.

Then, a week before the conference, we publish a schedule, with meeting places.

The people who a hundred people want to talk with in public get meeting rooms.

People who no one wants to meet with can sign up for dinners and lunches, or post on their blog about how fucked up the A-List is.

What do you think?