Scripting News for 7/22/2006

A new sub-directory of NY Times podcasts. If you have an aggregator that supports reading lists, you can subscribe to all the Times podcasts by subscribing to the OPML file. That’s useful because many of them update only once a week. 

Quick first impression: The Times podcasts are like the mother lode. What an incredible effort, so valuable.  

It’s too farkin hot today. 

Okay this is innnnnsane. It was 108 in Portland today. 

Jeanne Kane writes that it was 114 in Tujunga today. 

While I’m figuring out the first cut at the top level of the new podcasting directory, I’ve started a section called New branches, to accumulate a small sampling of sections that I think may fit into the directory. I’m qualifying everything because I’m seeing some OPML files that are so large they couldn’t possibly fit in a corner of this directory. Those are directories in their own right, and deserve a spot for sure, but probably in a section reserved for pointing to other directories.  

12/12/05: “People come back to places that send them away.” 

Jon Watson: “The existing directories have become ad-laden vote-getting slums where a few users rule the roost.” 

Ray Slakinski: “We have to do more than just say we support it, but use it and contribute back.” 

Scripting News for 7/21/2006

From Rob Safuto, a list of New York City podcasts. 

I deserve a new toy, so I got me one. :-) 

Scoble endorses the reborn podcast directory. 

Lance Knobel: No PhD, no comment. 

Andrew Grumet at PodShow announces that they’ve implemented the Metaweblog API to connect authoring tools with their podcast hosting system. I reviewed the implementation privately, prior to its release, and it looks good, and of course I appreciate the support for the API.  

On this day seven years ago Apple introduced Airport, the first wireless LAN and Scripting News readers were all over it. Don Clark asked: “Have you figured out if you can use an AirPort at the airport?” Read my response, it seems funny now that using a laptop in an airport seemed so futuristic just seven years ago. 

podcasting.opml.org 

I’ve been hearing from a lot of people who think it’s a good time to restart the community podcasting directory — so let’s give it a try.

As with the first incarnation of the directory, all the data for the new directory will be published, and can be rendered by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial; but the project itself is non-commercial. You can’t buy placement in the directory or any of the sub-directories. Let’s say that you can put ads on a rendering, that works okay because people always have choice. If they don’t like the way you’re rendering the directory, they can switch to another rendering. But you can’t put ads in the directory itself.

I’m going to use BitTorrent as a model. In that community there are lots of clients, but there is one reference implementation. In the beginning most people use the reference implementation, but as time goes on, we learn what people want, specialized needs develop, and lots of forks take place. See this as a good thing, not something to resist. The important thing, as with BitTorrent, is the content, not the client. We want to find good podcasts.

I’m going to go very slowly, writing about it from time to time. I’m going to accumulate pointers to these notes in the directory itself.

BTW, I’m not going to use the podchow.org domain for this project. It’s a cute name, for sure, but I want this project to be taken seriously. I also want everyone’s support, including the podcasting company whose name is very close to that name.

Scripting News for 7/20/2006

I’ll be at Wikimania, Aug 4-6 in Cambridge. 

Dana Gardner: “Dave Winer and a burgeoning chorus of supporters are proposing a fresh go at a community directory for podcasts. What an excellent idea.” 

Lessig: “I’m sitting at a hot Internet cafe in Costa Rica…” 

Progress on the static rendering of OPML weblogs. 

Scott Gatz on how RSS was adopted at Yahoo. Note how they didn’t try to improve it. A case study on how a BigCo can move fast, and win. 

Eric Rice gets behind the community podcast directory. I feel a consensus building here. :-) 

Wes Felter also bought a house on Monday.  

Jon Udell puzzles over how Google News decides what is and isn’t a news source. For what it’s worth, I subscribe to a bunch of Google News searches, and they don’t really implement rule #2, “It is managed by an organization (not an individual) and includes organizational information on its site.” I get lots of results written by individual bloggers beacuse lots of “organizational” sites include the work of bloggers, and I don’t think there’s any editorial review process (rule #4), but I don’t know for sure. It’s still useful. BTW, when I wrote for HotWired, a publication that would surely pass any reasonable set of tests, I had a deal with them that they wouldn’t change my writing without my permission. I had the same deal when I wrote for Fawcette, briefly. I’d imagine any other quality publication would work the same, so Google’s rules are kind of naive.  

New header graphic. A restaurant on the beach in Florida. 

Scripting News search for “header graphic.” 

A Scripting News header graphic from July 1997. 

Okay it’s finally too hot here, so I took a break to go to the movies, but the air conditioning wasn’t so great, and I got itchy sitting in one place for so long so I got up and left. Capsule review of the Pirates of the Caribbean Part II, don’t bother, the plot is about as interesting as King Kong was. They resorted as heavily to aggravating chases. No suspension of disbelief, no story to keep the interest. Does Hollywood still make entertainment, or do they just make the same old thriller over and over, to the point where there’s no thrill left.  

Boston Globe: “A noisy and lazy stopgap movie that goes absolutely nowhere and takes 2½ hours to get there.” I left after 1 hour. 

Todd Cochrane supports trying again with the community podcast directory.  

Amyloo: “No podcaster wants the distinction of becoming the first one to kill a listener.” 

I was just reading Amanda’s post saying that she’s coming to Blogher next week. I’ll be there too, but I wish they afforded men a special status, like guest, or observer, because I felt really weird when I read that Amanda was looking forward to having “fun with ‘the ladies.’” Since this is my space, still, I gotta say there ain’t no ladies here and them that say there is are going to get a punch in the nose! :-) 

Seven years ago: “Nothing like a big blank machine to get you going in the morning.” 

Scripting News for 7/19/2006

A video of young Doc Searls in 1988, speaking Cackalacky. No facial hair. They called him Dave Searls. He’s different, much younger, less serious! :-) 

Ray Slakinski would like to see the community podcast directory breathe again. 

Almost everyone missed the political significance of the Edwards endorsement (and use) of BitTorrent to distribute video. Aside from being an efficient use of technology, it is also a non-infringing use of BitTorrent. From a legal standpoint, the more non-infringing applications there are, the weaker the case of Hollywood as it goes after BitTorrent, as they have attacked other P2P technologies. Having a major national candidate using the technology for non-infringing purposes helps strengthen the case, and while I have not endorsed anyone for President in 2008, I do thank Edwards for stepping up for technology. This has a lot more impact than the kind of things bloggers usually ask candidates to do, like blogging their personal thoughts, or have video bloggers follow them into the bathroom (sorry, that’s a small exaggeration). Use of BitTorrent, esp by a Democrat, is the kind of thing that politicians can actually do to help the Internet.  

PodCamp is a “free BarCamp-style meetup for podcasters and listeners, bloggers and readers.” 

Canada Podcasts: “This directory started its life as the Canadian node of a community- maintained world-wide podcast directory which has unfortunately fallen into disrepair. Long before the plethora of podcasting sites and self-declared-podcasting centers of the universe we now have, there was this directory, its wonderful group of volunteer editors, and it was the way to get to shows. It was clean, dynamic, open and responsive.” 

The Canadian podcast directory is available in OPML. 

I’ve linked the Canadian directory into the Scripting News community directory. 

If there’s sufficient interest, I’ll happily host the root of a community podcast directory. I might even have a good domain for the purpose. Get it? It’s chow for your pod. :-) 

The Small Picture 

Reuters: “Many people see Web journals or ‘blogs’ as alternatives to the mainstream media…”

Who are the “many people” who see blogs that way? If the piece is honest, and the reporter actually believes it, my guess is it’s the reporter and perhaps some of his colleagues.

But blogs aren’t an alternative to mainstream media, he says, and we agree.

He says blogs are about story telling. And Reuters isn’t? Come on. What is there that isn’t story telling?

That blogs are about story telling is not saying that they’re not journalism. Reuters tells a story today and every day. If you want people to understand an idea, you must tell a story.

And the story here isn’t the big picture, get your mind out of the aggregate, and start thinking about the small picture. And blogs aren’t driving the change in perspective, they just reflect it.

More and more I’m sure that in the 21st century, the century we’re living in now, monoculture is an artifact, and the individual, the micro-journalist, the micro-market, micro-media, anything but mainstream, that defines who we are.

Dinner with Scoble 

I had dinner last night with Scoble at LuLu on Folsom St in SF. We talked about many things, of course, but the focus was on him working at PodTech. Being selfish (like many others), I wanted to know what’s in it for me.

Right away, I figured that I should be able to find some new podcasts. It seems Scoble should be scouting for me and you and all the other people who read his blog. Not just interesting content that comes from his own company, but stuff from all over the podcast sphere. That’s one of the reasons the renewed interest in the community directory is so timely.

Anyway, it just so happens that in the summer of 2003, three years ago, I was doing what I wanted Scoble to do. I was hanging with Chris Lydon, among others at Berkman Center, who was doing periodic interviews with the bloggers of the day. It was great stuff. Every time a Lydon interview came out, I’d copy it onto my portable MP3 device and take it on my daily walk through West Newton, and of course point to it from Scripting News, so you all could try it out too. For example, on this day in 2003 Chris released his interview with North Carolina blogger Ed Cone. The MP3 is still up there, you can listen to it today. The Lydon series is, in many ways, the first podcast. Actually, in every way.

So it occurs to me that Scoble could do a lot worse than listening along in 2006 to the podcasts we were listening to in 2003. Back then I don’t know what Scoble was doing, but it wasn’t podcasting.

Having dinner with my old friend reminded me how smart he is. He’s going to figure this out, for sure, and we’re all going to learn a lot. Because it’s Scoble there’s going to be a lot of kissing-up and groveling, that’s for sure. But the ride should be pretty interesting!

Scripting News for 7/18/2006

I bought a house in Berkeley this morning. It’s a real beauty, an 80 year-old stucco, built on a hillside, with a view of downtown SF and the Golden Gate Bridge. I spent six months looking, it was by far the best house I saw. As with my first house in Woodside, there was a moment when I knew I’d own it. In this case, it happened as I walked in the front door. The place has a magic feel to it. What does it feel like? Home. :-) 

Randy Morin analyzed the links from this weblog, based on the OPML archive I made available yesterday. The most-linked-to blog is Doc Searls. The second most-linked-to is inessential.  

I got a couple of reports that McAfee’s anti-virus software doesn’t like one of my links on 12/12/03. Go figure.  

Morin talks about people who are supposedly my enemies, but none of them are. I think Hearst and Swearengen are enemies; Hearst and Bullock. Me, I mean no one harm. :-) 

My first review of Deadwood, back in April 2004. I called Wild Bill Hickock the “Wild West’s equivalent of an A-List blogger.” 

Three years ago: “Not only do I make mistakes, but sometimes as I’m making them, I know I’m doing it.” 

Edwards does BitTorrent! 

I just got a pointer to the BitTorrent site of the Edwards campaign, I clicked on a couple of the downloads, my BT client, Azureus, launched, the movies downloaded (really fast!) and I laughed out loud.

Download the movies yourself, and participate in a little bit of history. Now, there’s nothing particularly interesting about the movies, they’re the usual campaign stuff, Edwards being introduced by an actor (Danny Glover), talking to a union group.

The production values are very good, which is too bad (see Friday’s Ze Frank), but the whole package is very cool, of course.

Gary Lerhaupt explains that MoveDigital, the site that is hosting the Edwards torrents, is the successor to Prodigem, which acquired his company in April of this year.

Apple and Hollywood 

ThinkSecret has a scoop, Apple will offer movie rentals via the iTunes Music Store, to be announced in three weeks at the WWDC.

Rex Hammock: “Placating the movie studios with some easy to work-around DRM scheme is, perhaps, Apple’s role in moving things forward.”

Natural air conditioning 

It was hot here, just like everywhere else in the northern hemisphere, but the great thing about the Bay Area, and Berkeley specifically, is how nicely it cooooools down at night. It’s only 10PM and it’s already 67 degrees. Gotta love it.

Scripting News for 7/17/2006

DaveNet and Scripting News in OPML in zip archives. 

Nick Bradbury on River of News. 

This Blaugh bit about a theoretical move by Microsoft to “own” RSS pointed to a domain that no one owned. A social experiment? For $8.99, I said WTF and grabbed it. :-) 

One of the things I asked Senator Edwards to do at our meeting in Palo Alto in April, was for him to support BitTorrent with non-infringing applications. As you know, I’m a big believer in P2P distribution over the Internet, and we need more safe applications of BitTorrent. I’m told that they will put up their first BitTorrent application tomorrow. Honestly, I didn’t think they’d do it, historically the Democrats have been very close to Hollywood, and they’re scared of BitTorrent. If they actually do it, they deserve our thanks. 

Friday’s Ze Frank explains why bad design is so important. I couldn’t explain it better myself.  

My dance with Comcast 

There’s a lot of construction going on in my neighborhood, so from time to time someone accidentally cuts a wire that knocks out Internet service in my apartment building. When that happens, we go through a silent dance, a sort of virtual lottery — who’s the lucky S.O.B. who gets to call Comcast to report the outage.

You’d think in this modern age they could figure it out themselves, but they require one of their customers to call. So on Saturday, for the eighth time in less than a year, I called them and went through the miserable dance.

First I have to convince them it’s not the modem, because every time they’re absolutely sure it is my modem, even though the seven times before it wasn’t. I ask them to check the other customers in my building. It seems about four times out of five this really pisses them off, because I get a lecture about how I have to make an appointment, and give up a day of my time so they can have a repairman visit, why I don’t know. So I usually say goodbye at that point, and try again. More often than not the second person is sympathetic, and we test the other modems in the building and (surprise!) find out that either they all failed at exactly the same moment, or there’s some other problem that has nothing to do with the modems. Even so, before they’re willing to investigate, I have to make an appointment.

This time I tried a different strategy. I declined to make an appointment. I said that one of my neighbors would likely call in an hour or so, and they could make the appointment. I feel I’ve already made my contribution to Comcast today, as if they were a charity, by giving them an hour of my Saturday morning. That was all I could afford right now. So I went down the street to Starbucks to check my mail (I bet they don’t use Comcast) and when I came home, the Internet was back on. I’m left guessing whether or not it was a random event, or if they decided, while they were waiting for someone else in my building to call, to see if they could find the outage themselves, and reboot some router or whatever.

Now, Comcast has the best TV commercials. I’d pay them money to just keep producing the commercials. But I’d also pay them to get out of the Internet service business and let some other corrupt monopoly have a go.

Scripting News for 7/16/2006

Target Stores has an RSS feed for for early alerts on its weekly ads. Thanks to Staci Kramer for the link.  

Heads up to people who use the OPML Editor as a blogging tool. I’ve been working on static rendering of weblog content, which would allow blogs to be hosted anywhere, via any upload mechanism. That’s part of the reason why I did the fileSynch builtin (and its connection to Amazon S3), to give people lots of options on where to host their blogs. I’ll offer the tool for testing, probably within the next week. I’m doing it slowly and carefully, with lots of testing along the way.  

Mike Arrington: “How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?” 

Sylvia Paull: “Blowing up townhouses and wars don’t interest me.” 

I followed Rex Hammock’s advice and saw Superman on iMax, and I’m afraid I wasn’t blown away as Rex was. Boring movie. Yet another remake of Star Wars, basically the only movie Hollywood knows how to make these days, with the usual Superman characters, and the teeniest bit of Finding Neverland (which is an awesome movie, a real tear-jerker). The only funny lines are from Lex Luthor, and those are only outstanding because they’re the only funny lines, they wouldn’t stand out in a normal Superman movie. There’s nothing politically significant in the plot (wonder what Rex was thinking), it has absolutely no suspense value, and given the hype around 3D, I expected at least a little Spiderman-like vertigo, but got nothing. And the new Superman has absolutely nothing going for him. He doesn’t even make a good goody goody.  

Four years ago: “If there is such a thing as journalism, it must be possible to practice it in a weblog.” 

Don Park: “Who do I have to kill to require a pain-in-the-ass F2F procedure to transer 5+ digit fund out of my banking and brokerage accounts?” Amen. 

Your decision about Foo Camp 

The back-channel discussion about Foo Camp has already started. This year’s event is at the end of August, not exactly sure of the dates. Those who are invited, even people who are almost religious about open events, say they’re going. Those who aren’t invited, including people who have never been invited, are either secretly or openly pissed.

I suggest the secret this year is to not care whether or not you were invited. If you were, don’t gloat, and don’t go. This is an event where they claim to do open standards work, but it’s invite-only. It’s bad for trust in our little world. If you weren’t invited, don’t do your own camp and say it’s great because it’s open. Instead go to the movies or the beach. Call your mother and say hi. Have a play date with your kids.

For background, the best piece about Foo Camp was written by Om Malik, which includes this comment from Tim O’Reilly where he explains the whys and wherefores.

An idea is to have a badge that says I don’t support exclusive events where open work supposedly takes place. Of course I’d put one here on Scripting News, and I’d ask my friends to do the same, and you could ask your friends. Then in a week or so we’d see who didn’t put one up, and ask them nicely to please do so.

Scripting News for 7/15/2006

Steve Gillmor: “” 

Ben Barren 

Ben is a smart mofo, that’s for sure. (As is Nick.)

I don’t know why I got a blank paragraph from Steve Gillmor, but I can guess.

Steve works for Podshow and I was very critical of Podshow, with good cause, last week.

As the people at FeedBurner can attest, business models built on centralizing RSS set my hair on fire. At least with Feedburner they do it on an opt-in basis, but even then I think people should be aware of how much power they’re giving them, and always be thinking about who owns them, and their motives, and who they might sell out to, and their motives.

In the case of Podshow, I know who they are, and have seen how ruthless they can be with other people’s work, not just mine, and how their lack of conscience means they’ll do things that I don’t want to know about, but since it’s in my area of creativity, I have to be concerned. Now Steve had his reasons for making his deal with Podshow, and I’ve never questioned those here on Scripting News, because it’s not my place to. He has a family to feed and house and kids to send to college, and honest to god, Steve is a friend of mine, and I care about him, and I don’t care what devil he makes a deal with, as long as he stays friendly.

Steve didn’t like what I said about Podshow last week. So be it. Doesn’t change what I think about what they did, it was awful, and it had to be stopped, and apparently it has stopped, and that’s good. I don’t give them the same benefit of the doubt I give others, because I have lots of experience with them. I think they meant to control our podcast feeds so they could sell position in those feeds to advertisers. I don’t think they planned to ask our permission or share revenue with us. If their intentions were truly innocent this time, I apologize, but I don’t think they were.

Next time, if they want us to believe they had good intentions, they should test the services privately before taking them public. And when they screw up, the apology should be without reservation, and without kicking those who called them on their mistake. If Steve Gillmor thinks I’m fucked up for calling them on it, Steve can think that, no one is perfect, not even Steve.

Scripting News for 7/14/2006

PS: Don’t forget to check out today’s Rocketboom. :-) 

Scoble: “Sometimes I just want to read what Mike Arrington says and hell with the rest of you.” Nice kiss-up! 

Andrew Grumet is a River of News afficionado, but he comes at it from a different angle, calling it a “deletionless reading adventure.” I forget that other reader models force the user to delete articles to get them out of the way. To me this is dissonant, why would I want to delete someone else’s article. In fact I want to keep them all so I can search them. (Not that my aggregator allows that, maybe someday.) 

Kevin Marks says Technorati Favorites lets you search the feeds you’ve subscribed to.  

John Robb doesn’t like River of News. He’ll get no argument from me, in fact he gets a pointer. :-) 

2/3/06: “Aggregator developers could sure use some competition!” 

Shuman Ghosemajumder, speaking on behalf of Google, says Eric Schmidt was quoted out of context re click fraud. I find this noteworthy because Google is (finally) using its blog to communicate about serious stuff.  

BBC: “Apple has ended its legal fight to make bloggers reveal who leaked secret information about its new products.” 

I had dinner last night with an aide to a likely Presidential candidate. He said he’d prefer if I didn’t use his name. That’s okay with me. We talked about blogging and the presidency, of course. I said it’s boring to have your candidate pretend to blog. I honestly don’t care if he or she blogs. In fact, I said, if you want to make headlines, say that your candidate will not blog. We both had a good laugh. I think it’s a pretty good idea. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Solano Avenue. Here’s a couple of pictures I took of the street before dinner. 

Earthlink’s feed reader is an important product 

The job of a newspaper is to show you what’s new.

Imagine a newspaper that got more and more clogged with old stuff every day, as every category of news accumulated all the old stories you didn’t read, and showed them to you every time you looked, as if this time you might actually want to read a story that you didn’t want to read the last 80 times you looked.

Your daily newspaper doesn’t tell you that you haven’t read 83,284 articles, why should your computer-based news tool?

Well, that’s how most feed readers work, and it’s just plain wrong. Your software should, instead, find the new stuff since the last time you looked and show you that first.

The first aggregator, the one I wrote in 1999, did. And so did the one that’s in Radio UserLand, and so does the NewsRiver aggregator that’s built into the OPML Editor. Until yesterday these were the only aggregators that worked this way. (To be fair there are developers who say theirs do, but I’ve never seen one that actually does.)

The irony is that this kind of reader is easier to develop than the ones that emulate mail programs. They are also far easier to use. This must seem counter-intuitive to the programmer’s mind. They worry about the details of the user interface and miss the big picture, that the model for the software, is so utterly inefficient

It apparently seems counter-intuitive even to very smart users like Mike Arrington, who said “Neither are cutting edge,” of the two new Earthlink tools. As much as I adore Mike, the Earthlink reader has the essential feature all others (except mine) are missing. They show you the new stuff first. You can’t see how important that is with just one use. Go ahead and import your OPML and go back tomorrow, and the day after, and you’ll see what a huge difference it makes to have the computer figure out what’s new for you.

To the Earthlink people, I will sing your praises to anyone who will listen, but I ask one thing, that you not say that this is the first and only feed reader to work this way. In fact, as I explained above, the very first feed readers did.

Note: The user interface is not optimal. Make the page much longer and the text smaller. You’re not taking advantage of a key capability of the human brain, it scans very quickly as you scroll. I want all the new stories in an hour to fit on one page. Depend on the vertical scrollbar, and tighten up the display of each news item. And I don’t need the list of feeds I subscribe to on the same page as the news. Reclaim the space, just link to the list of feeds. Cut the cord with the mail reader approach, it’s wrong, have the courage to go all the way, you won’t be sorry.

Scripting News for 7/13/2006

Michael Calore calls me the blogosphere’s den mother (heh) and says the unconference format is like a Grateful Dead concert. Interesting piece. :-) 

Steve Rubel reports that Wikipedia now supports RSS for article revisions for all its pages. This means you can monitor pages even if you don’t remember to visit them.  

Steve scores another scoop with Earthlink’s new RSS reader. “It shows you only the new articles since your last visit,” he says. 

Kaliya is at Mashup Camp in Santa Clara. 

Since I write about Google from time to time, I have also disclosed that I own a few shares of their stock, purchased at the IPO. I’ve made 4.3 times on the money, which makes it pretty awesome investment for a couple of years. Today I sold all my GOOG stock, so as of today I am not a Google shareholder. 

Rex Hammock on Martha Quinn, an original VJ on MTV. 

Amanda Congdon was on MSNBC last night. 

Business Week interviews Steve Newhouse on Wired Mag’s acquisition of Wired News. “One of the things we haven’t done yet, but we are deep into thinking through, is the combination of giving the audience tools to create content and giving them the ability to network with each other.” We were working on that in 1996, when I wrote for HotWired, and then left to start ths blog.  

My first weblog was part of the 24 Hours site, February 1996. It was originally hosted on hotwired.com. Thanks! 

AOL, which is, in 2006 struggling to become part of the blogging world, was one of the sponsors of the 24 Hours project. Their sponsorship was quite active, they contributed people to help run a couple of the servers. Their contribution to the blogging world goes all the way back to the beginning. 

These “moon mission” projects are cool because they bring creative and idealistic people together. Brent Simmons, who went on to create the NetNewsWire feed reader ran a free essay server for the 24 Hours project. The technology we created on this project would eventually form the foundation for Manila RPC and then the MetaWeblog API.