Scripting News for 4/15/2006

Ben Barren is organizing a Downunder Uncon, which sounds right on to this northern hemispherian. Let’s go! 

New Flickr set: Mets vs Brewers, Shea Stadium.  

Movie: Mr Met leading the crowd in song. 

The Mets’s mascot isn’t an animal or a human being… 

It was Jackie Robinson Day. His wife was honored. Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he was the first African American major leaguer. He died in 1972 at the age of 53. 

New header graphic. Shea Stadium scoreboard. This is an old-time scoreboard, 1960s technology. They’re going to tear down this old stadium, probably replacing it with something like PacBell Park (which no doubt has been renamed, yet again). The new stadium will lack philosophy. Rather than naming it after a fallen hero, they will name it after a corporate sponsor. It will be a sad day. 

In Y2K, a resume offering 15 years of Java experience, a background in teleportation, and work at Amazon starting in 1989 actually got Niall Kennedy an avalanche of interest from executive recruiters.  

According to Gizmodo, the Infiniti G35 will come with a built-in hard drive to store MP3s. 

 

 

Scripting News for 4/13/2006

Google Calendar Beta 

On arrival in NYC, I found an email from a friend, instructing me to go to Google Calendar. I did. It worked. Looks nice.

I figured it must have been announced while I was on the plane. I went to Memeorandum to see what’s up, and there’s no mention of it. Huh? I don’t get it.

New Flickr set: Google Calendar Screen Shots.

Mike Arrington wrote a review.

Humoresque 

On the flight east I watched a Joan Crawford movie that I hadn’t seen before. Humoresque. Filmed in 1946, when she was 40 years old. It’s a serious movie, and Crawford is unbelievably good. In one scene she’s in a concert hall and her lover, played by John Garfield, is performing, sending her into ecstasy. Two other women are watching her come, one is Garfield’s mother, and the other his young girlfriend. They know what’s going on and so do we, but everyone else is oblivious. The camera gets super-close as Crawford goes over the top. The movie is worth seeing, if only for this sequence.

Scripting News for 4/12/2006

Early release of glue that connects the OPML Editor and Amazon S3. This is the basic support required for app development, to enable desktop apps to connect to S3, and workalikes. There are no end-user features in this release. It’s a collaboration with Les Orchard, and builds on Andre Radke’s crypto extension, first released in 1996. (How time flies!) 

Reminder: It’s a beach day… somewhere! :-) 

Here’s a guy who picked up on yesterday’s lucky scoop. Amazing how slow things are sometimes, like a delayed reaction. I expect people will actually notice that there’s something new in, hmmm, maybe 10 hours or something like that? I can’t figure this stuff out anymore.  

I’m going to NYC in a few hours. To prepare, I’ve downloaded the entire archive of Rocketbooms, every single one, and copied them onto my 60GB video iPod. And to share the fun, I’ve uploaded one of my favorites for all you to download via BitTorrent from Amazon S3. :-) 

Matt Mower says the rational way to back up a weblog is a combination of RSS and OPML. Makes sense to me. Lisa Williams wants to put all of that on a keychain drive.  

Three years ago today: “Everyone I knew at KnowNow is now somewhere else, so I don’t really know anyone at KnowNow, now.” 

Scripting News for 4/11/2006

I just spotted a new, very nice feature on Google. Not sure if everyone can see it, so I’ll describe it in words. I did a search for Canada. In the left margin there are blue wedges. Click on a wedge and it expands, to reveal details, click again, it collapses. Outlining shows up, in a simple manner, in a Google display. (Postscript: I just tried it again, and now I don’t get the wedges.) 

Scott Rosenberg: “When a step backwards is branded as a leap forwards, and when people can be persuased to invest in such retrograde ventures, you know that dumb money has started to pile in behind the smart.” 

Guy Kawasaki’s list of ten things he’s learned in his first 100 days of blogging.  

Rex Hammock: “One of the top ten things Guy Kawaski learned during his first 100 days of blogging is that I’m clueless.”  

A friend asked this afternoon how long it’s been since I quit smoking. I had to think. “Almost four years,” I said. It gets easier all the time. The actual number of days: 1397. 

Rex Sorgatz: “Douglas Coupland published his third novel, Microserfs, at a moment where everyone knew the future was about to happen, but no one knew quite what it would look like.” 

Mike Golding: “Web site blocking in the corporate environment is fair enough, after all who wants their employees gambling, looking at porn or even using webmail? but now I can’t even read Zeldman.” 

In December I did something really stupid that worked. I linked to a picture of a little lap dog perched atop of a fire hydrant using the word podfather. Now it’s the number one hit on Google for the term. That’s why I have to quit blogging. I have too much power! :-) 

At lunch with a reporter yesterday, the conversation turned to Ted Nelson. He recounted how, at a conference, Nelson spoke up, saying that we were all doing hypertext wrong. I’ve heard Nelson say this, and I know what he’s saying. His concept of hypertext, which was the original (he coined the term) was that links were two-way. The reporter said that Nelson was really weird and kind of rude. I took exception to this. Nelson is a visionary, and a teacher, in many ways it’s his passion that’s the fabric of the web. If he hadn’t written his seminal book in the 70s, I wonder if the web would exist today. Later, I thought, how strange, we want visionaries, we need them, but we want them to fit some impossible concept of humanity. Someone should have passion without being too passionate. I wonder if people have really thought this through. I’m willing to cut a guy like Nelson almost infinite slack, because I so totally appreciate what he has done for us, and for me. 

If Nelson had a Linked-In page, I’d write a testimonial for him. “Computer Lib/Dream Machines changed my life, as it changed every young technologist of the 1980s. Nelson opened doors for me, many of which I didn’t even know existed. In every generation there are at most two or three people as influential as Nelson was to people of my generation.” 

According to Bob Tedeschi in today’s NY Times, beef jerky is big business in the blogosphere, and he’s right. I wrote about this just the other day (and for the last ten years). It’s great to see the world sorting itself out. Tedeschi once said, a long time ago, that blogging was about as important as CB radio was in the 70s. That was of course intended as a put-down. Seems Bob underestimated blogging, based on the number of times he’s been writing about it recently. 

Yes, I am cursed with a long memory. :-( 

My Linked-In Profile page. At the closing dinner at Esther’s conference last month she asked who had Linked-In profiles. Almost every hand went up, but not mine. Now I have one. Not sure what this will do for me, but let’s find out! :-) 

An opportunity for investment

Continuing the discussion that was fired by Charlene Li’s post about podcasting and whether it’s achieving its promise. I wrote on xxx that from the perspective of the Scripting News community it’s doing just fine, now I’d like to explain what I think is needed for podcasting to break through.

Better user experience

User experience is another one of those terms that makes something human seem technical, but it’s what’s missing in podcasting. Today’s environment for capturing and listening to podcasts is difficult, very Gen-1. It’s easy to imagine something that works much better.

Scripting News for 4/10/2006

New header graphic, a wheat field in Saskatchewan. 

This blog has a great header graphic. Imagine you’re the guest speaker at a dinner. Everyone’s had their meal, the waiters have served coffee. You’re introduced, you arrive at the podium, take out your camera, and shoot the scene. 

Jeff Jarvis on ABC’s plan to provide TV shows on the Internet, with advertising.  

Chris Pirillo: “My guess is that when IE7 goes gold, more people will be driven to start using Firefox.” 

A man in Malaysia received a phone bill for $218 trillion.  

Four years ago today a remarkable deal between the New York Times and UserLand. A big turning point for RSS.  

John Brockman is giving a talk in Cambridge on 4/12. 

Berkman is hosting a conference about citizen media, May 12-13, also in Cambridge. 

Okay tonight’s West Wing was great. A real tear-jerker and a happy story. I don’t want to spoil the plot for anyone, but now I wish more than ever that the show was continuing. I want to live in their world, not the one I actually live in. I wonder if there isn’t something I could do with my time to make the 2006 mid-term elections more meaningful, you know, the real elections, not the TV show. Nicco, what do you think? 

I’ll be in NYC for Passover. Arriving on the 12th, returning on the 18th.  

Springtime in California 

Scripting News for 4/9/2006

Essay: “You need a village to raise a child, and you need an Internet to fully develop an idea.” 

Clif Guy: “I like blogging much better than forums because they’re driven by the blogger’s creativity, writing ability, and personality.” 

Fred Wilson: “While big companies deliberate, small companies obliterate.” Amen. 

Richard MacManus and Marc Canter on the expanding footprint of Google Base.  

SF Chronicle: “Privacy advocates are raising concerns about Google Inc’s plans to cover San Francisco with free wireless Internet access, calling the company’s proposal to track users’ locations a potential gold mine of information for law enforcement and private litigators.” 

Lowell George 

For most of the music that I love you just have to imagine how great it is, we can’t listen to it together. Well, that’s not true of Little Feat, one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time. There’s a generous sampling of Little Feat music at archive.org, all of it live, and some of it very very good. I’m listening to the set from Ultrasonic Studios, recorded in 1974. Zoom in on this MP3 of Two Trains. Oooooh.

Podcasts and Amazon S3 

I’m experimenting with S3 and large objects. Here’s a podcast I recorded in Amarillo, Texas. It’s pretty funny. But then I’m biased.

Podcasting is what S3 is all about, of course.

I’m now going to try to upload all the MCNs.

Bonus: Holovaty is using S3 to store media files.

Now I gotta go to sleep. See y’all tomorrow!

Too much fun.

Scripting News for 4/8/2006

Essay: The Internet as “idea processor”. 

Signed up for Seattle Mind Camp 2.0. I’ve been looking for an excuse to make a trip up north, and now have one. :-) 

Must-read piece by Robert X Cringely about Windows on the Mac, and OS X on Dell, HP, et al.  

Dr Dobbs podcast interview with Amazon’s Adam Selipsky explains S3. One new piece of data here, S3 is the same storage system that Amazon uses for its service.  

Kevin Werbach, Danah Boyd & John Perry Barlow.  

Mike loves blogging because “we fact check your ass.” 

Day 3 with Amazon S3. If the net stays up, I’ll begin working on the internal API. (PS: It crapped out again. Arrrgh.) 

Curry & Bloom v2.0 

I listened to a podcast interview with Ron Bloom, CEO of Podshow. The interview was done by Steve Gillmor. Also on the show was Bill Rinehart, the CEO of Limelight Networks.

A bunch of people sent me links to the interview wanting me to comment on this or that. But I’m going to comment on something else.

I’ve heard Bloom talk about “Advertising 2.0″ before, but it isn’t until now that I heard something like a definition. Bloom fights his way through sentences the same way Bush tortures his words, so if you took a literal transcript of what he said it would be nonsense, but he managed to communicate the idea anyway. It’s something I’ve said many times, probably to him, certainly to Adam Curry, and also here on Scripting News. Advertising is changing, advertisers have to learn to communicate to people who aren’t captive couch potatoes. They have to say things people want to hear, in the way they want to hear them, otherwise they won’t listen. All the new electronic modes give the user the power to skip ads they aren’t interested in. Advertisers must take this into account.

Luckily people want commercial information, they seek it out. So there is a role for marketing in the future, but advertisers are slow to adapt. Bloom is saying, rightly, that they must adapt. He says it in a more fear-inspiring way, but fear or no fear, they should listen to what he says.

I spent a bit of time with Bloom early in 2005 talking about businesses that might be possible around podcasting. He’s found one of them. But he doesn’t need and can’t use the amateur podcasters in the new business he seems to be building. Why he continues to promote his company to user-content-creators is a mystery. His business is that of an Internet advertising agency, which is exactly what the last company he and Curry started was, in the dot-com boom.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Big Wheel Keep on Turing Etc.

The Internet as “idea processor”

I followed the thread about how bad a term “user generated content,” is and I fully agree. It misses the point completely, so completely that it betrays a perspective bug.

The value of writing publicly on the Internet is that you can solve problems quickly, by using a network of people who pool what they know to create something larger. When the Internet works this is why it works. It’s why conferences of VCs and their employees miss the point on technologies like RSS and even new stuff like Amazon S3 (which isn’t actually entirely new, but it’s still cool, very).

Without the Internet to develop RSS, it would have turned into something like CDF or ICE. Never heard of them? Exactly my point. S3 is likely to benefit from the Internet as a development platform because it will require a healthy sharing of ideas to make it work. Whether Amazon realizes this and lets it happen will determine whether S3 is a go or a no-go.

You need a village to raise a child, and you need an Internet to fully develop an idea.

In the 80s I called my outliners “idea processors” to focus on the application over the technology. But even then I was sure that networking was going to amplify the power of these tools. In that way, instead of thinking of “user generated content” think of the Internet as an idea processor, and you’ll be much closer to the power of what’s going on.

Shared-discovery blogging

I’ve found a new iTunes-compatible public radio station, KCRW from Santa Monica, CA. It’s a good station for me because it’s in the Pacific zone, so they’re playing early morning stuff in my early morning. I still like WNYC, WAMU and WBUR, but they’re on the other coast.

Anyway…

I’ve heard it said that blogs are about conversations — I’ve never agreed with this.

I’ve seen people complain that if I don’t say things they can react to then they have nothing to say — I don’t pity them.

Hey there are already lots of ways of having conversations on the net, email, IM, mail lists, usenet. We hardly need another way to have conversation.

I blog to share discoveries, large and small, mundane and profound and everything inbetween.

Then search engines can pick up my observations, and make them available to others.

The better search gets, the more valuable blogs become.

Here’s an example. This morning I started listening to KCRW in Santa Monica, a Los Angeles public radio station. Now, a few hours later I’m listening to a music show that’s got all this interesting pop music, stuff you never hear on public or commercial radio elsewhere. In Boston, you get classical on WGBH. At WAMU in DC, which may be the closest public radio station to the Appalachians, you get excellent bluegrass. I bet if Nashville has a public radio station they do country and western. Well, Los Angeles is the HQ for pop music, and presumably draws people who are interested in new stuff that they might be able to sell to everyone else, so you get world pop. Very interesting stuff. What a surprise, but then if you think about, not a surprise at all.

See how that’s not part of a conversation? I’m not calling some other blogger a bad name, or saying he or she is stupid, or whatever. I’m not trying to get on Memeorandum. But maybe some search engine will come along and figure out that there’s some data here, it might connect some dots between various public radio stations based on the kind of music they play. Then when someone wants to know about it they’ll find it.

Maybe the best blogger for shared discovery blogging is Phillip Greenspun in Cambridge. I think he even once wrote a piece like this one where he explained that blogging, to him, is kind of a responsibility for a curious person who does interesting things, or even someone who does mundane things but has a curious way of looking at the world.