Scripting News for 6/30/2006

Steve Gillmor: The Attention Operating System. 

Mike Arrington: “Don’t use my own facts against me.” 

I talked with Jeff Barr at Amazon last night, and he said the bit I posted about supporting XML-RPC on S3 got through and they’re looking at it.  

I’m sitting next to John Furrier at Gnomedex and he says he heard from Bob Wyman last night that PubSub has shut down and their engineers have found jobs at other companies.  

Scott Karp: “Navigating Google ads feels like Yahoo circa 1997.” 

Today and tomorrow are officially RSS Days in Washington. 

I’m in the conference center, and haven’t been able to get online through the wifi, but luckily my EVDO modem works. People around me are getting on, maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m using a Mac? If you’re in the room and have an idea, please send mail.  

Tom Forenski: “I’ve been working with the PR industry to figure out a better way to create press/news releases that are more useful to reporters and others, in this multi-media channel world we live in.” 

Looks like I have more to do at Gnomedex than the 15 minutes on Saturday. This morning during Chris’s opening remarks, I’ll read a document signed by a Washington political leader. And then during lunch I’m doing a live hour-long podcast with the temporarily unemployed Robert Scoble.  

The server is slow again 

The other day I reported that I thought the server that’s running the OPML Community was running smoothly, but now it’s clear that it isn’t. I can’t do anything about it during the conference, but I’m getting another server provisioned, and will try to figure out how to split the load between two servers. It may not be too hard. Realistically I won’t get to that until the middle of next week. I’m really sorry for the poor performance, but I’m going to do what I can to make it better.

Scripting News for 6/29/2006

Frank Barnako: Why is John Edwards at Gnomedex? 

Melodeo looks good, but isn’t its name too close to Odeo? 

Good afternoon from the Seattle waterfront where the nerds and geeks of the tech blogging world have gathered for Gnomedex 6.0. The opening party is tonight, 7PM-10:30PM. Me, I don’t have anything that I have to do, other than talk on Saturday morning for a mere 15 minutes at 9:45AM. 

According to Business 2.0, Vic Gundotra, the guy who hired Scoble at Microsoft, is jumping ship, to Google, after doing a year of charitable work (Niall Kennedy says, to honor a non-compete). It’s interesting, he was trying real hard to keep Scoble at Microsoft, but all along he must have been negotiating the job at Google. Meanwhile, Mini-Microsoft, in Microsoft-speak, says a downsizing is coming. “Shuffling of the executive deck chairs today, but the iceberg hits tomorrow.” 

In Gundotra, Google is hiring someone who believes in RSS.  

Betsy Devine on people who “support our troops.” 

It’s come to my attention that some people didn’t learn The Golden Rule when they were young. Perhaps that’s why discourse on the Internet can be so unpleasant.  

Identity and trust 

Today Google announced the innocuously named “Google Checkout” but it’s so much more than that, and if we’ve learned anything about identity and trust, it won’t work for Google, as it didn’t work for Microsoft.

First, we could all benefit from a common identity system for the Internet. Think about all the times and places you enter your social security number, date and place of birth, mother’s maiden name, credit card number, the secret number on the back of the credit card. If you had all that information about someone else, and their bank account numbers, you could probably have all their money. And every day we hear stories of companies we trust with this information, losing it. Note the big word in there is trust. Trust a company? Hah. Now which companies do you trust? Are companies trust-worthy?

Yesterday I got my credit card bill. There was a charge of $1017 for a hotel stay that was supposed to be picked up by a company. I actually only stayed one night, the rate was $400 a night, so not only were they were mistaken in charging me instead of the company, they overcharged us. How much you want to bet that I end up paying the $1017? In this case there were two companies not worthy of trust. (When told of the problem the first company should have let me know immediately that they would cover the expense, but they didn’t. Ooops, there goes the trust.)

Microsoft asked for our trust with Hailstorm. But they were behaving very badly. They claimed their bad behavior was legal (it wasn’t, it turns out) but that wasn’t even the point. If we sense that a company is bad, the first thing they lose is our trust. It turns out the concern was totally justified, many times over. As they were screwing Netscape, they were screwing us, their users, even harder, sitting on the browser, not making any improvements, as malware of all types rendered our computers more and more useless. Now Microsoft is paying for their sins. (They never even apologized for all our wasted time.)

Now we turn to Google. I remember when my idea of Google soured, it was an instant flip, one day I thought these are good people who love the web, when they grow it’s good for me. Really, we used to think of Google that way. But then they started acting like Microsoft, stupidly doing things that undermine the rare priviledge they had won. It was hard to argue that losing the trust hurt them or their shareholders, until today, when their intention to be the identity czar of the Internet became apparent. It won’t work for the same reason it didn’t work for Microsoft, they screwed with our trust too many times.

It’s sad that we can’t launch companies in the tech industry that deserve our trust, it’s sad because it holds back progress and innovation. But you can’t trust who you don’t trust, and I don’t trust Google.

Ponzi and Jory 

New header graphic. Taken at BloggerCon IV in SF, last week by Scott Beale. Noteworthy for a few reasons. 1. It’s the first time I’ve used a picture taken by someone else as a Scripting News header graphic (I asked for permission, which Scott graciously gave). Of course, using a photo taken by someone else at BloggerCon is totally appropriate, and symbolic, since it’s entirely a collaborative thing. 2. What a fantastic picture of two people, Ponzi Indharasophang and Jory Des Jardin, who are totally engaged, in the loop, in the room, minds turned on, and getting something done. This is what I’d like people to think of when they think of BloggerCon and the unconference format. 3. Ponzi’s conference, Gnomedex, starts today. Jory’s, BlogHer, is in July.

Scripting News for 6/28/2006

Today was Scoble’s last day at Microsoft.  

Scott Rosenberg: “The absence of ads is one of the key factors behind Craigslist’s phenomenal success.” 

Martin Green: “Haystack is designed to provide a very scalable, reliable and cost effective platform for object storage and delivery to the Internet.” 

According to Joi Ito there are four bloggers at Brainstorm in Aspen. If the coolness of a conference is measured by how many bloggers there are, I guess Gnomedex is 50 or 60 times as cool. Sorry. :-) 

John Edwards will speak at Gnomedex on Friday. There’s no doubt he’s running for President. I saw him speak a dozen times in the 2004 campaign, so seeing a stump speech, which is certainly what we’re getting, no matter how much it’s positioned as a candid conversation, is really nothing special. Further, it should not be seen as an endorsement of his candidacy by any of the bloggers present, unless they specifically say so. Like it or not, blogging is political now, even at Gnomedex. 

Jason Calacanis is wondering, out loud what I’ve been wondering in private emails to Om Malik, Mike Arrington and Staci Kramer, this morning. What’s going on in Content Blogging Land? I’ve asked for meetings with Om and Mike at Gnomedex. These guys must be using each other as comps in their plans, so what do they know about each other that the rest of us don’t? 

The list of people coming to Gnomedex, which starts tomorrow in Seattle. If you’re going to be there, I’ll be staying at the Marriott on Alaska Way. Let’s party! 

The OPML Editor, which was brand-new at last year’s Gnomedex, is now in good enough shape that a reasonable experience can be had by a first-time user. It includes a great aggregator, NewsRiver, which is one of very few that support OPML reading lists, and of course it has a blogging tool, and instant outlining, and a fantastic community that loves it to pieces.  

Freedback: “A folksonomic Bat-light…” 

This table lists the most frequently read HTTP resources by applications running on the opml.org server. I needed this to debug the server yesterday, and as long as I had it around, I figured what the heck, I should share the data. No guarantee that I’ll keep maintaining it though. :-) 

Deadwood is the new Sopranos  

I’m caught up on Season 3 of Deadwood.

And I gotta say, it’s the new high water mark in serial drama.

Big Love hit some snags in the middle of its first season, ended on a high note, but Deadwood is rising to a crescendo, and changing the way I think about everything in business.

They redefine evil, what I used to think was the height of depravity now looks rather innocent. If you’ve been following the show, you know what I mean.

Highly recommended.

PS: One of the downsides of being a Deadwood devotee is that I now think of everyone as a cocksucker.

Hallelujah? 

Knock wood, Praise Murphy, I am not a lawyer and my mother loves me. With all those disclaimers out of the way, I am willing to proclaim that I think I may have found the nasty table that was overflowing on the OPML Community server that was causing the performance problems. The server has been performing very well for 24 hours, so with any luck at all it should perform well in the next 24 hours and so on. In the meantime another fire has started which I am now trying to put out. Welcome to life on the server side.

Scripting News for 6/27/2006

For users of the OPML Editor, the software Doc was using at BloggerCon to take live notes. 

Debugging Frontier-based servers 

I met so many interesting people at BloggerCon this week, it’s impossible to tell the story of every one of them. Further, there were combinations of people who would not likely have met otherwise, who I saw talking and thought “Wow that’s power.” Anyway, at dinner on Friday night I sat near a couple of guys from a company in Bellingham, WA, who do all their work in Frontier. A 40-person company. I didn’t know such a thing existed. I suggested that we might fund some work on the Frontier kernel to make our servers run more smoothly, and they were immediately receptive. This led me to start thinking of projects I would commission.

It took a nano-second to know where the focus would be. Tools for debugging performance issues. Right now if you ask the OPML blogging community what their number one priority is, it’s getting the performance problems worked out on blogs.opml.org. Same if you ask me. I’m struggling to figure out what script is causing the flatlining behavior on the server. This has been the problem in Frontier for years. I’ve got very limited tools to figure this out, but with a little cooperation from the kernel, it could almost certainly dump the information I need, pointing me to the table that’s getting too large, or the script that’s looping infinitely. That we’ve been stuck here for so long is an indication of poor communication in the community, and a lack of incentives. The technology is very simple.

I’d like the kernel to maintain a log, in a text file, on the local hard disk, of exceptional events. I get to define, to some extent, what is exceptional. I’d like it to dump the addresses of tables containing more than 10,000 elements, when the table is initially brought into memory. thread.getStats is nice for stack dumps, but not much else. I really want to know how many cumulative CPU cycles each thread has used. If I dump this table every minute on a server that has performance problems, it would tell me which thread to look at for an idea of why the server is getting hung up. The key to debugging these servers is to reduce the number of places I have to look.

Scripting News for 6/26/2006

David Berlind asks if RSS is the new Intranet protocol.  

Rex Hammock picture from BloggerCon II.  

People are still downloading the famous Dvorak movie. 

Rex Hammock’s multi-part post-BloggerCon essay. 

Platform politics 

Scanning Greg Reinacker’s latest roadmap for NewsGator, they support SOAP and REST, which I know from lots of experience means I have to work real hard just to try their stuff out. Too hard.

Amazon’s S3 service took this approach and their uptake is too slow, there’s no visible momentum (I know I’ll get lots of links for saying that). Go to a developer event, no one is talking about S3. That’s terrible because it’s a good idea and it deserves attention. I wonder why they are so cheap with the interfaces. Get over your religion Greg, and support XML-RPC, I bet it makes a difference. I won’t dig into your stuff unless you do. Too much work for me, and I don’t think you’re going to get the uptake.

That said, my first post-BloggerCon development project will involve S3. We have working code, even though it was a lot harder than it had to be to get there.

Speaking of open APIs, I got an invite to join Marc Canter’s People Aggregator today. I bet you did too. Marc is a paradox to me. He makes such a big effort to support open standards, and I’m told they do support XML-RPC, and the MetaWeblog API, unlike Reinacker and Amazon. But when I offered to build a bridge between the OPML Editor and his aggregator he lectured me on how he was doing an outliner and how much better his vision of outliners was than mine. All the time I’m thinking to myself, if that were really true, if the tables were turned, I’d encourage support for those interfaces, so he could build a market for my superior product. Marc is a smart guy, but he could learn a trick or two. I imagine this note will appear on Phil Jones’s Platform Wars site.

Let’s see, I bet there’s a law here, or a life lesson. Either you’re going to be a platform vendor or not. If you choose to push a platform, don’t go half way. Platforms that are picky usually don’t gain traction. If you got a platform you must be open to all comers, enthusiastically, without reservation. I think this is what we were saying to Stewart Butterfield last week about Flickr’s APIs.

Late afternoon coffee notes 

Doing a conference like BloggerCon is exhausting work. First, you work around the clock the week leading up to the show, spend a lot of time waiting for stuff to happen, for people to call back, etc. You make lots of lists, do things on the list, scratch things off, move undone tasks from one list to another, and in the end, there’s plenty of stuff you never got to do, but somehow it all works anyway.

Human beings are amazing at filling in the blanks. And the people who show up for an event like BloggerCon are the most generous, optimistic, and rewarding people to work for. In the end, it works. After it’s over you’re tired. So there’s lot of sleep and lounging around and letting the head empty out. Yawning, watching TV, mending, healing, and then waking up.

My to-do list has a different sort of task on it now. Do the laundry. Pay bills. Renew my car registration. Hardly any phone calls to return.

I noted that my email link has been broken for some time. If you sent me mail in the last month or so by clicking on the mail icon in the upper right corner of this page, you might try again. I didn’t get the mail. A table overflowed somewhere in a mail server. I went looking for it today and gave up. I pointed it to another server, and went on with life. The mail is being delivered once again.

Scripting News for 6/25/2006

Were you at BloggerCon IV? (Either physically or tuned in over the webcast and IRC.) If so, please add yourself to the Frappr map, and let’s see where we all are from.  

The MP3 collection of audio from the conference is complete. Amazing turnaround from the CNET folks.  

On Friday, Jay Rosen asked for a show of hands of people who had been to all four BloggerCons. Only two hands went up, Jay’s and my own, so I made an official report on Saturday. Later, Frank Paynter, who wasn’t in the room at the time, said that he’s been to all four. So let me amend that. Three people have been to all four. There’s a certain roundness, a balance and symmetry, to that. :-) 

10/19/94: “Once the users take control, they never give it back.” 

Scripting News for 6/24/2006

The room during the Core Values discussion.  

A video of the hands of Doc, blogging the Video blogging discussion at BloggerCon. 

The next conference on the Summer of Love Tour of West Coast Blogging conferences is hosted by Chris Pirillo, seen (making faces) in this movie during the video blogging discussion in the waning hours of BloggerCon IV in San Francisco.  

The speaker’s wiki. “A listing of speakers, their websites and affiliation, contact information, past speaking engagements and other important information to help conference organizers choose speakers to talk on important topics.” 

Amyloo: “Technography is a revelation to me.” 

Phil Jones: “Good software creation, like any other creative activity, requires a deep knowledge of the nature and constraints of the medium.” 

Wired: BloggerCon Boosts the Blog Boom. 

Nick Bradbury: “What I’d like to see at a future BloggerCon (or Gnomedex) is an open, respectful discussion between users and developers. Even though public speaking terrifies me, I’d still be willing to moderate a session between users and developers if it would make the discussion less adversarial.” 

Notes from Day 1 

Things that worked: The song, wifi, air conditioning, signage, lunch.

All the DLs and monitors were awesome. The right people showed up, the right people stayed home.

Phil Torrone was every bit as good as I imagined he would be, esp given that this was his first BloggerCon, Jay Rosen who now is officially the only person aside from me who has been to all of the Cons, was of course, a monster super star.

Chris Pirillo and Niall Kennedy had the hardest sessions, which didn’t go the way I hoped they would, but then I’ve learned that my expecations aren’t what’s important. That’s a basic life lesson. Niall was a hardass with people who tried to cross the no-commercial line, and was a hardass with me, and I apologized for not respecting him well enough.

The smoothest session was also the riskiest, Lisa Williams kept the Emotional Life session going along. And I got to play technographer while Doc led a discussion asking people to ask how we’re changing the world.

Special hat tip to the BlogHer people who added so much to Day One. And of course, thanks for the incredible support from CNET, esp Marianne and Jason, who did a great job of producing the show, kept the mikes working, the music playing, and kept us on time.

Scripting News for 6/23/2006

How to tune into BloggerCon. 

I’m linking to the MP3s as they become available (about 20 minutes after each session, thanks to CNET). 

Kevin Marks’ video webcast feed. 

The song: The Hokey Pokey. 

Another famous Marc Canter sleeping photo. 

Movie of the room during Phil Torrone’s session. 

Dan Farber is blogging the conference. 

Phil’s photos for the Tools discussion. 

We’re live at CNET, we got the tunes playing, people are starting to arrive, life is good. Just got a report that the webcast has been tested and works. 

SF weather: “Highs in the 60s to lower 70s.” Cooool! 

I switched to Colloquy, which is a much nicer IRC client. 

Chris Pirillo: Users vs Developers.  

Scott Karp: Digg vs the NY Times. 

Mike Arrington: “No one crafts a sentence like you, Steve.” 

Two years ago today: “This time the pros beat the crap out of the blogs in a story about blogs. Something to think about. This time they fact-checked your ass. “ 

New header graphic, the Rockies west of Denver shot on a flight from New York to San Francisco.  

How to tune into BloggerCon 

Whether you’re remote or local, you can participate in BloggerCon in many ways.

1. Tune into the IRC at irc.freenode.net/bloggercon.

2. Or the webcast. (Murphy-willing.)

3. Doc Searls is the technographer. If you’re in the conference room, you’ll see his outline projected on either side of the room. If you’re coming in over IRC and/or the webcast, you can view the outlines in a web browser through the table of contents. They are also available in OPML, so they are viewable in any environment that works with OPML. One interesting idea to try out is to follow a discussion using the Instant Outliner in the OPML Editor.

4. Listen to some funky music and get yo rear end in motion!

5. Listen to the MP3s as they become available.

6. Kevin Marks’s video webcast feed.

Jake Ludington 

Jake is producing the BloggerCon webcast.

Rex Hammock, Terry Heaton, Paolo Valdemarin 

With Robert Cox in the background.

Post partum before startup coffee notes 

It’s 4:20AM, I’m awake, drinking coffee, and running over in my head, one more time, the checklist of things we still have to do, which of course are largely the things we won’t do. And then there are the things we didn’t do at previous BloggerCons that I must remember to do at this one. And the things I’m worrying about, because I know theny went wrong before and I’m wondering what will go wrong this time.

1. What if no one shows up?

2. What if the air conditioning doesn’t work?

3. We didn’t get signage, will people think that’s tacky?

4. What if no one shows up?

5. What if the wrong people show up and the wrong people don’t show up?

6. What if we can’t think of a song?

7. And on and on over and over.

Face it, I’m a worrier. Someone who doesn’t worry can’t ship software. But that isn’t why I feel unsettled. I actually know why. There’s a little bit of a story to it.

About two weeks before BloggerCon I, in September 2003, I returned a call from to brother, he was boarding a plane in Chicago (I think) and he said I’ll call you back when I get to my seat. That’s when I knew something bad had happened. In the two minutes my mind raced. Was it my mother, my father, was someone sick, had someone died? It turned out it was my uncle. He was young, just 58, and had died suddeny in Jamaica. I decided not to go to Jamaica to participate in the settling of his affairs, I stayed in Cambridge to make sure BloggerCon came off. It was one of the most hyper-real couple of weeks, every minute of it in shock, depressed, but also participating in what would turn out to be a great event.

Now I don’t remember the unsettled feeling, trying to sleep at night in the last days before the first conference, or should I say I don’t usually remember; but last night at the party, someone unexpected was there, Mark Stahlman, who I had last seen in Negril with my uncle, and he had stories to tell, and didn’t know that Ken had died. It stirred up everything, and that’s why this morning, there are unresolved feelings to feel, and it’s totally appropriate to process them in the hours before the fourth BloggerCon.

Scripting News for 6/22/2006

BloggerCon party: 6:45PM tonight, Jillian’s, 4th & Howard.  

Don’t forget to sign up for a Friday night dinner.  

Doc Searls movie. It was a looooong hot day, setting up and getting ready for technography and webcasting at BloggerCon.  

This morning’s webcast was great, and got a good WMA file. :-) 

Music courtesy of the Carnival Cast.  

BloggerCon monitors. “There are two monitors for each session, each of them ‘owns’ a wireless mike, and moves around the room partially at the direction of the discussion leader, and partially in response to requests from others in the room.” 

BART is free today. Almost all public transit in the Bay Area is free too. 

Ken Sands, the online publisher of the Spokane Spokesman Review, on citizen journalism. He’ll be part of the citizen journalism discussion, tomorrow morning, at BloggerCon IV. 

Bill Gates: “This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.” 

All the whitewash that’s fit to print 

David Pogue: “Some people remain cynical about the timing of Mr Gates’s exit.”

Pogue gushes “when you step back far enough, Mr Gates’s entire life arc suddenly looks like a 35-year game of Robin Hood, a gigantic wealth-redistribution system on a global scale.”

Look, I’m willing to give Gates his due. As long as I’ve been listening to him, he’s always been clear that he would at some point give away his fortune.

But in creating his fortune, he wasted the creativity of a generation. This isn’t something that should be washed out of the history books.

Also, it shouldn’t be missed that Gates claimed to see what had eluded his predecessors, the founders of DEC and the other mini computer makers, and the management of IBM when he was dealing with them in the 80s. In fact, he fell into the same inevitable trap all big technology companies do. They get big, the leader’s assumptions are rooted in the past, and they spend their capital trying to keep the world from changing, instead of embracing change, and staying out the way of the inevitable evolution of technology.

Gates did some really nasty shit that cost us all a lot. He could have, instead of saving his generosity for his fifties, practiced it in his late 30s and 40s, and then I wouldn’t be so cynical about his motives. You can find my public pleading with him to ease up on the destruction in the archive of this blog and DaveNet.

Further, I think it’s buying into a lot of PR hype to call Gates a scientist as Pogue does. We’ve already devalued “innovation” to please Gates, now will we do the same to science?

No panels at BloggerCon 

Scripting News for 6/21/2006

Sign-up page for Friday night Food for Thought dinners. 

What if your number is greater than 150? 

Technography and OPML at BloggerCon IV. 

Peter Merholz on tech conferences. “Same old people singing the same old song.” 

Kevin Marks has set up an IRC channel for BloggerCon. It’s the same one we’ve used at previous shows. I’ve listed it on the Webcast page if you need to find it later. I am using Ircle on the Mac, and was stumbling around for an hour, frustrated with the user interface, until I found this howto, and now I’m on the BloggerCon channel. Whew. 

Jared Benedict: “It is my position that hyperlinking to publicly accessible MP3’s is perfectly legal.” 

Awesome Frontline last night on the face-off between Vice-President Cheney and former CIA Director Tenet, and then complicity in the deception that led to war in Iraq. 

Doug Kaye: Interviews via Skype. 

Heat wave! 

I promised it would be chilly, but I was wrong!

We’re having a heat wave. It was 93 in Berkeley today. Not much cooler in SF. On Saturday the Bay Area’s natural air conditioning kicks in, with a more reasonable high. But we’ll sweat tomorrow and Friday.

Live MCN 

Okay, let’s do something new this morning.

At 9:30AM Pacific, we’ll do a live Morning Coffee Notes, via webcast.

I can’t Skype people in, but I can respond to things people say via IRC.

We’ll do it for 1/2 hour. Then I’ll upload a WMV archive, and if someone can figure out how to convert it to an MP3, I’ll redistribute that, or if not, I’ll work on it later.

How does that sound?

PS: The archive didn’t happen.