Scripting News for 8/31/2006

Raise your hand if you believe President Bush. I didn’t think so. 

ZDNet Australia: “When companies launch a brand new product it usually takes some time to weed out the niggling issues; but how many systems need to break before the situation is recognised as a disaster rather than an unfortunate blip in quality control?” 

Apparently no one asked Tim Berners-Lee how he feels about “Web 2.0.” Listen to this podcast. He says the web has always been two-way. Not exactly big news here. :-) 

Josh Bancroft is live-blogging the birth of his second child using YoMoBlog. (!) 

Scoble: “I’m boring.” :-) 

New header graphic, the Oakland Coliseum, night game.  

The picture of the ballpark, above, is geotagged.  

Geotagging makes pages like this almost obsolete. (I couldn’t arrange for it to show me all pictures taken at 451 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA, the location of the Apple Store.) 

Jeff Veen has been geotagging too.  

Glenn Ford, the thoughtful Hollywood leading man, died Wednesday at age 90.  

Slate: “The fifth anniversary of 9/11 looms before us, and it’s hard to say which artifact is gloomier: the awful memory of the attack itself (especially to those of us who witnessed the towers crumbling) or the spectacle of our leaders wrapping themselves in its legacy as if it were some tattered shroud that sanctifies their own catastrophic mistakes and demonizes all their critics.” 

Mike Yamamoto: Can Web 2.0 save newspapers? 

Today’s song: “Then I’ll get on my knees and pray we don’t get fooled again.” 

Apparently Yomoblog works with Drupal. That’s cool! (An illustration of the power of community developed standards. There was no standards body that Drupal was a member of that decided this is the way we should work together. One vendor stepped up and said “This is how we’re going to do it,” and the next one said, “Okay we’ll do it that way too.”) 

Isn’t it funny ironic how Markoff writes about cronyism in Silicon Valley in a piece that’s full of cronyism! Oh the humanity. Meanwhile the Times and Microsoft roll out their vision for electronic media. It’s just like paper.  

I honestly don’t understand how people can send their computers to be repaired for a month, have them come back, not work, and then send them back again. I hear that all the time about people and their Macs. If I’m down for two days I have to buy a new computer.  

Back to Macs and how they don’t crash, do you count faulty mother boards and flaming batteries as crashes? I don’t know, maybe there’s some logic to believing they’re not crashes, but isn’t the net-effect the same thing? One minute you have a connection, the next minute it’s gone. That’s not a crash? Seems a distinction without a difference. 

Timidly, Scoble asks if he wasn’t invited back to O’Reilly-ville because someone complained about him taking videos. 

The innovation is the “river of news” approach

Note: My comment was “awaiting moderation” — but I think the trackback from this post will appear in the comment section. Mike, could you delete it instead of approving it. Thanks.

Jason, et al — I understand the confusion, having dealt with similar questions all last week. Glad to have the ability to comment here, to elaborate.

The innovation here are the “rivers” of news, because they deliver the flows of these services in the most convenient form, imho, for mobile users, the entire flow, reverse chronologic order, with summaries linked to print-friendly versions.

The BBC does offer something approaching this format, organized by category, the Times does not. You have to use it on a mobile device to read news to understand why it works, as most of you do, clearly.

Here’s a guy who explains it better than I can.

http://www.smstextnews.com/2006/08/dave_winer_fixe.html

There were a bunch of blog posts written by others around the time this stuff was announced, you can find them linked to here.

http://www.scripting.com/2006/08.html#When:10:09:23PM

If you all have any questions, I’ll try to answer them.

Scripting News for 8/30/2006

Today’s song: “I’m goin’ home, and when I wanna go home I’m goin’ mobile.” 

Last year on this day: “The New Orleans Times-Picayune has switched to weblog format for breaking news.” 

Business 2.0: The New York Times’ digital makeover. 

Todd Ziegler: 9 Ways for Newspapers to Improve Their Websites. 

Chris Kelley: “I hope Steve Gillmor is right that links are dead because I can’t see anyway to get A URL in here.” 

In the Trenches: “Pretty darn sick!” 

Brian Jepson: “Dave says it’s short for Your Mobile Weblog, but I think it’s short for Yo! Moblog!” 

Posting from a Blackberry 

Today I’d like to share a tool I wrote that allows me to write and edit blog posts using a mobile device. I knew I’d have to have this tool as soon as I found myself carrying a Blackberry at times when I’d usually have my black MacBook with me.

http://yomoblog.com/startup

If you visit that page, which is designed to work on a mobile device (it’ll look crunched up on a desktop or laptop) you’ll be asked to enter several bits of information (it may make sense to gather them in advance).

1. The address of your weblog. It must support the Metaweblog API and Really Simple Discoverability (RSD). Most WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type and Manila sites do, we’ve tested the service with these tools with good results. If you’re not sure whether your blog is compatible, give it a try. Important note: If there are problems please report them on the Blackberry-Bloggers mail list, which has been set up for that purpose.

2. Your email address. You know the drill. We’ll send a confirming email to this account, with a magic URL that validates your account. So you must be able to receive email at this address.

3. The username and password for your weblog. These are the two bits you use to log onto WordPress, TypePad or Manila. You must provide these so yomoblog.com can post on your behalf.

Click Submit, check your mail, click the link, click again, and enter your email address and password. (This is the tricky part. The username here is your email address, not the username for your blogging software.)

From then on you’ll visit:

http://yomoblog.com/

Which is also designed for a mobile screen and will look scrunched on a desktop or laptop.

A few notes. When you delete a post, you are only deleting the copy on our server, the post on your blog is not deleted. This is a safety precaution.

It does support categories, which appear as checkboxes on the form, which is long. Scroll down to see the checkboxes and other less-often used user interface elements. There’s also a list of previous posts, which you can edit whenever you like by clicking on the name of the post, and then editing the text in the form.

Yomoblog.com works on any web-enabled mobile device, not just a Blackberry.

This is experimental software. Please back up your data. We are not responsible for any loss in service, or loss of data entered into the system. Will not use your personal information for any purpose other than to allow you to create and edit posts on your weblog. The security of the system is lightweight, don’t trust it for sensitive information. We make no guarantees about performance, uptime, and we may cancel the service at any time, for any reason, at our discretion.

A page listing recent blog posts:

http://yomoblog.com/updates

YoMoBlog stands for Your Mobile Weblog.

If you use it, I hope you enjoy it!

An open note to O’Reillyites 

I know it may be hard to believe this, but I don’t wish your company harm, or anyone at your company including the top guy. However, it wasn’t until the last round of BS that I realized why there’s such a big disconnect, and I thought I should share it, in case any of you are tired of the disconnect too.

Even if you don’t care about mending fences with me, there’s a bigger problem, and it’s going to spill over, I think pretty soon. You can feel it out there. Hire a consultant if you don’t believe me. It’s worth checking out. A dam is about to break. There are a lot of people pissed at O’Reilly, every time you do another exclusive event, more people are getting angry. But so far they’re not saying anything publicly because your company has said, clearly, that if you say anything negative about them, you won’t be invited. Enough people still have some hope that they don’t want to be the one to say how they feel about it. But there’s lots of back channel grumbling.

Me, I am an ornery dude. If someone tells me that I have to shut up or I won’t get invited, my response is to tell you to fuck off, in public, loudly. I value my independence more than anything. I don’t want an invite to FOO Camp next year, or the year after. If you want me to sign something that says I will never under any circumstances come to FOO Camp, I’ll sign it. So I’m not kissing up here, I don’t want an invite.

But what I do want is to avoid a bloody mess. We have work to do here. We have a bubble-pop to avoid. We need to start doing some real investing in technology, not the BS that passes for technology investing that’s been going on for the last decade.

So if you could take Tim aside, and say look, this isn’t working, we have to grow bigger, and let people say what they think about us, and our role in the industry. We’re not going to be able to keep a lid on it much longer, and it’s better to let it out in a way where people know we’re listening and we want to work with them.

I had an experience like this with Apple in 1997. The company was in disarray, the market was sinking fast. Craig Cline, who was running the Seybold Conference at the time asked me to chair a panel entitled “Can Apple Survive?” I accepted the assignment with gusto. This is exactly what we needed to get out in the open. But Apple controlled the conversation and they tried to sabotage us. Well we had the discussion anyway, ask anyone who was there, it was a real good thing we had it. A lot of people were very concerned, and rightly so. By getting the angst out of the way, we were able to focus on what was working in the Mac market, and that played some role in the revival of Apple. Not a very famous role, but I think an important one.

We need to get all hands involved in what we used to call Web 2.0. It’s time for it to stop being exclusive, and it’s way past time for one company to be controlling who’s supposed to participate. I’ve totally earned the respect of this community, and dammit it’s time O’Reilly to show some of that. You’ve behaved really inappropriately for a company of your stature. Let’s get past this, and let’s start building, and forget whatever it is that’s been in our way. I posted a very generous invite to Tim two days ago, I’ve been reaching out this way for years, now it’s about time you guys responded, don’t you think?

Yeah I know it’s a long shot, but I want to be able to say I did everything I could to fix the problem. It’s worth trying to fix, and pride (which believe it or not I have a lot of) isn’t something that should get in the way.

Peace,

Dave

Apple in the news 

TechCrunch got a legal notice from Apple requesting they take down a video that demonstrates a feature of an unreleased version of the Macintosh operating system.

Just when I think Mike has turned into a lapdog for the tech industry he inspires me with something like this!

And with Eric Schmidt on Apple’s board, not much chance of Google launching an iTunes killer.

Scripting News for 8/29/2006

I’m still hoping Republicans for Cut and Run takes off as a community project. Let’s look for Republicans who have decided we’ve wasted enough lives and money on trying to turn Iraq into the United States. If you participate in the political discussion, let other people know we’re looking for Republicans who have or are likely to speak out on the war. It seems with the election approaching there will be more. 

Last night I went to the Oakland Coliseum to see the A’s beat the Red Sox, 9-0. 

Om Malik: “Today’s news of Google CEO Eric Schmidt joining the board of directors of Apple Computer portends potential headaches not just for Microsoft, but for anyone with digital media ambitions.” 

BBCriver.com got a nice mention on Rocketboom today. Thanks. These guys are champs. :-) 

Yesterday, perhaps in an awkard way, I asked a question, curious to know how Feedburner calculates the number of readers they report for a site like TechCrunch. Clearly the number of hits they’re getting for Mike’s feed must be going up, and perhaps the number of unique IP addresses is going up too. Do they count all the readers at Microsoft as 1 subscriber? Is that just the number of times the feed was requested per day? How then would they factor in people who read it more than once. My aggregator reads it 24 times a day, am I counted as 24 “readers?” Bloglines just reads it once for N people who subscribe, how do they factor that in? Just curious to know what the method is. Since no one has to sign up for anything they can’t directly count the number of subscribers.  

Mark Fletcher writes that Bloglines reports the number of subscribers each time it requests the feed.  

Lorenzo Viscanti: “Feedburner’s count is just an approximation.” 

Feedburner: “Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed.” 

Revisiting another question I asked clumsily, about restrictions on speech that you accept when you participate in an invitation-only event, I posted a comment on David Weinberger’s blog this evening that attempts to explain the issue in 1-2-3 fashion. To be clear, although the questions are about Foo Camp, it’s really more general. 

EJ Dionne: “By Election Day, how many Republican candidates will have come out against the Iraq war or distanced themselves from the administration’s policies?” 

Duncan Riley names “kvetch” the word of the day. 

kevetch.com is Derek Powazek’s weblog, since 1995.  

goooooooo…ooooooooooooogle. :-) 

Four years ago today: “I would love it if the source for MORE were released. I think it would be a humantarian contribution of the first order, but it’s not mine to make.” 

Hurts so good 

Without comment, here’s a recent post from Tim O’Reilly.

David [Weinberger] — I’m curious about the ambivalence you express here. It sounds to me like you’re trying to curry favor with the well-known critics of FOO (and obviously, you failed) rather than giving us real insight.

Yes, FOO Camp is exclusive in the sense that it’s invite-only, but if you’re honest, you’ll have to admit that it’s one of the most diverse technical conferences you’re ever likely to attend. We make a real effort to invite people from different technical communities, people who ought to know each other, but don’t. One of our goals is to create new synapses in the global brain, so to speak. This is way more diverse than an open-to-all comers event that draws from the same community. And it’s precisely because we limit attendance that we’re able to manage that creative mix. Do you bake a cake by using whatever amount of flour, eggs, sugar, and chocolate you happen to have in your kitchen? There’s a range of experiment, but in the end, you control the mix because you know that some combinations are essential for the cake to work at all.

This is not to say that an open-to-all comers event can’t also work (assuming you have either a narrow topic that doesn’t draw a huge crowd, or else a venue that can hold all comers, and a set of goals that will work for a very large event.) But it would be a very different kind of event, and for our purposes, much less successful.

Stop worrying about what Winer thinks. He’s perfectly happy to attend exclusive events, as long as he’s invited. He has a grudge against me, for reasons only he understands, and despite his many other virtues, on this subject, he just needs to be ignored.

There are lots of ways to do great events. FOO is one. Bar Camp is another (and we’re honored to be imitated, and in fact have invited some of the Bar Camp people this year to be sure that they learn as much as they can about how we do it.)

Tim O’Reilly

If only… 

One year ago today: “Good morning. It seems New Orleans has been spared the disaster. That’s cool, it’s a very nice city, and so far has been totally lucky. Knock wood, praise Murphy, seems the luck has held.”

Scripting News for 8/28/2006

New OPML Editor feature: Portable rivers. 

Liz Gannes: “Flickr photos can now be geo-tagged via a drag-and-drop interface with Yahoo Maps.” 

I was playing with typography for my new mobile blogging service, and thought it looked kind of cooool. 

I’ve had the same problem with my MacBook spontaneously and instantly shutting down. My machine has always rebooted. I thought it was because I was watching a movie, that seemed to be when it would happen. The movie was Themla and Louise, btw. 

On David Weinberger’s blog: “Come on Tim, let’s get beyond whatever it is that’s in our way.” 

Mike Arrington boasts 100K readers of his RSS feed. I’ve always wondered how he knows how many people are subscribed to a feed. You don’t have to register to read a feed. So what does the number mean? 

Steve Gillmor: Beam me up, Sergey. 

Here’s a CNN story from June 16 with two Republican congressmen sponsoring a resolution calling for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. So the Republican strategy of cut and run has been on the record since June. Not sure when the Republican strategists started tarring Democrats with the term, was it after June 16? This is the first item on cutandrunnow.com, a chronology of declining Republican support for the war in Iraq. (Will Cate sends an email noting that the CNN story is from 2005, which certainly predates the “cut and run” sliming tactic. Bad bad Republican strategists, I wonder if they know they’re sliming their own people! :-) 

3/28/03: “We can’t win the war in Iraq.” 

Scoble kvetches that the tech blogosphere is paying too much attention to Google’s aspirations in the Office market. Not here. I don’t care about Office software if it comes from Microsoft, Google or God. I know a lot of people use it, but you can’t touch the stuff if you care about lock-in. Office Wars are all about who locks you in the nicest trunk. I prefer to ride up front, even if the ride is rough and the door doesn’t stay closed without a bit of rope. 

BlogTalk, Vienna, Oct 2-3. 

Wired: “Lockheed Martin’s advanced Skunk Works unit is designing a small, 12-seat passenger jet that would travel at 1,200 mph (Mach 1. but which would produce only a whisper of the annoying crack once emitted by the retired Concorde.” 

Why post from a Blackberry? 

I’ve seen a few blog posts asking why would you want to post from a Blackberry? After all, you could carry a laptop with you, and of course typing on a laptop keyboard is much easier than typing on a PDA keyboard (it is, no argument there). And maybe it’s a good idea to take a break from blog posting sometimes, maybe it’s a good thing that you can’t post from every conceivable place.

Rather than quickly respond in a comment, I want to respond here, where I can create a list and add to it over time.

1. I think it’s important to flip the question around, because when you do it helps reveal the why of it. Is email the only form of communication that makes sense when using a Blackberry? Well, maybe for some people, but for others, who may have to communicate with a workgroup, or their family, or create an RSS feed for their observations away from work or home, using weblog software makes a lot of sense, not to exclusion of email, but in addition to it.

2. Okay, great, but you can use email to post to a weblog, why not just do that? Well, I tried it. In 2001, I programmed Radio 8, which shipped in early 2002, to receive blog posts via email. The problem with that is that unlike email, I like to edit my blog posts, make spelling corrections, add items to a list, reorganize, prioritize, etc. When you’re using email to post to a blog, it’s a lot like email (surprise!) — your first version is your last. Again, email is useful, I send emails all the time, but blogging is useful too.

3. To the point that a laptop can go with you everywhere a Blackberry can, that’s obviously not true. I have my Blackberry with me when I’m in line at the supermarket, I almost never have a laptop with me then. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get ideas while standing in line. A few other places Blackberries go that laptops don’t: ski lifts, restaurants, cabs, buses and yes, bathrooms. (Someone had to say that, glad it’s out of the way.) Jackie Danicki writes that she blogged “from the Vatican during New Year’s Eve Mass, with the Pope a few feet in front of me.” You could also blog during a disaster like a hurricane or after an earthquake.

4. Bonus point. People have even said they tried reading news on a Blackberry and it was too cumbersome. That’s why we have to bang the drum so loudly and even then a few days later people didn’t get the message: With a simple change in the way news is presented, it works. It’s not a technical breakthrough, it’s a usability improvement, but it makes a big difference. Try it out before you dismiss it, and don’t try it on a desktop or laptop, try it on a PDA. Here’s the New York Times in this format, and the BBC.

Republican Cut and Run, Day 1 

Washington Post: “Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), once an ardent supporter of the war in Iraq, said yesterday that the Bush administration should set a time frame for withdrawing U.S. troops.”

And now that we have our first quote, here’s the site.

Scripting News for 8/27/2006

The second half of today’s Meet the Press was truly wonderful. First I have to say the Republican tactic of labeling Democrats as being for “Cut and Run” is disgusting, it’s dishonest, I can’t say I’ve heard a single Democrat politician say that we should get out of Iraq, but everyone in both parties is thinking about it. Bush is thinking about it as he explains why he thinks we should stay the course (he calls it “adapt to win”). Isn’t it obvious that it’s time to cut and run? Anyway, I couldn’t believe my ears when the two Republicans on the analyst panel, Kate O’Beirne and Robert Novak, started saying of course it’s time to get out of Iraq, and that real Republicans were against going into Iraq in the first place! Then I heard about Christopher Shays, Republican representative from Connecticut, on his way back from Iraq who called Russert before the show to be sure he knew that he thought it was time to Cut and Run. There it was, the Republicans were crumbling, in real-time. It wasn’t the Democrats who were saying Let’s Cut and Run, it was the Republicans! Oh is that beautiful. Who’s going to be the first to run on the slogan: Cut and Run.. For America. 

I couldn’t help myself, I had to buy CutAndRunNow.com. I’m going to put a Republican campaign site there, listing all the Republican quotes that come along that even hint of cutting and running. I expect an overflowing site. 

Ray Edwards: “One thing that I have noticed about the OPML editor/Newsriver combo is that it changes the way I blog.” 

Dennis from WAP Review: “The Rivers are 50-75K for the main page. Ordinary mobile phones like the RAZR for example, and just about anything without a keyboard or touchscreen have a page size limit of between 10 and 30K.” 

Bernie Goldbach, via email: “All 3G phones sold in Europe deliver over-the-air playback of MP3 files that make the experience feel as though it’s streaming service. I pay around $60 a month for podcasts that get me to and from work. I’m limited to 2 gigs of transfer traffic a month before I start paying around $1 a megabyte for the privilege of getting podcasts ‘live.’” 

Bob Stepno: “Back when Jimmy Carter was president, anyone with a big computer downstairs and thousands of dollars in wire service subscriptions could read a daily ‘river of news’ on our computer screens.” 

It doesn’t take much to amuse me. I think it’s cool that there’s a picture of Jimmy Carter on Techmeme. :-) 

Internet time 

Thanks Marc for the kind words.

Actually, there is lots that’s new in what I’m doing now, except it was new in 1999, when I was doing it for the first time. And as you can see from Bob Stepno’s piece, the concept is as old as journalism. He’s saying the same thing that Paul Kedrosky said, without being condescending. (We should give awards to people who find a way of giving feedback without attacking someone on a personal level. Stepno, who is a gentle person, would rate high.)

Some wise old fart once said, “Everything on the Internet is just like something else. Or if it’s any good it’s just like everything else.” So, we’ve been having this discussion about whether or not something is new, for a long time. And it’s such a waste of time, because whether it’s new or not is hardly the issue. Doc Searls gets that and says it well. What’s new is that people are getting it and they’re happy! I think sometimes that’s a big problem for some of the kvetchers and complainers, they just don’t want anyone to be happy. If you’re feeling happy don’t worry, we can fix that!

I love that one of the jackasses who says I’m an idiot also happens to be squatting on the “generic” domain in this area. Yeah I’m working for the asshole, but he isn’t smart enough to avoid kicking me in the ass as I make him a bunch of money. Isn’t that the height of stupidity? (Don’t worry, I bought newsrivr.com, just for fun.)

People said, in 2004, that podcasting was an instant success that could only happen in Internet Time. Uh huh. Except that we started pushing it in January 2001, and didn’t arrive at the right pitch until the summer of 2004. Of course the world had to change too, it helped that there were lots of iPods and people were receptive to thinking about new ways to use MP3.

We were excited about WAP in January 2000, and we (UserLand) made it so Manila automatically generated WAP and WML from each site’s home page. Where did that go? Nowhere, because no one was using mobile stuff then, they were just having conferences about it.

You have to stick with ideas if you want to actually deliver. No doubt there are people with khaki pants and blue shirts, MBAs, and mid-range BMWs, raising money right now with VCs to do what you see me doing here. They don’t like old Jewish guys who use their hands when they talk. I think they’re scared we might hug them. Anyway, some of the khaki dudes will get rich, and some of them will meet me at a TechCrunch party one day and thank me for the work I’m doing now.

Your crazy uncle,

Dave

PS: Sneak preview of tomorrow’s big feature.

Scripting News for 8/26/2006

Heads-up: NYTimesRiver now includes podcasts. The new feeds were added at about 9PM this evening, so most of the items in the river now are podcasts. This should even out over the next few hours. If you want to listen to the podcast, click on the sound icon. Note that some mobile devices can’t play MP3s; this unfortunately includes the Blackberry.  

Something to ponder. How close the various PDA-makers are to something that would kick the iPod in the behind. We just need a quick way to get an MP3 over HTTP. These cell phones, with built-in speakers even, are good at audio.  

NewsRiver feature: Eliminate duplicate stories? 

NewsRiver feature: Goodbye annoying “web bugs!” 

Andrew Baron: “Google Video is set up so that you can actually link to any second in the video.” 

I learned something today on my walk that I did not know. Writely, the Google-acquired web-based word processor, can generate RSS. This I have to check out. If it works well, that means that Writely is actually a blogging tool. Could it possibly be that cool? I’ll report back. BTW, it came from the NY Times Tech Talk podcast.  

Postscript: Hold on to your hats, Writely supports the Metaweblog API. That’s awesome! 

Library Camp East, Darien CT, Sept 25. 

Phil Windley: Which Mobile Device Should I Buy? 

Earlier this week, while trying to sip from a firehose of feedback, Ed Vielmetti pointed out that the BBC river derived from their UK Edition, and that there was more in the World Edition. So it went on my to-do list, and this morning I was able to find them and now they’re tributaries.  

Why carry the water, David? 

David Weinberger: “If FOO doesn’t make an effort to be diverse, the old boys will just naturally become better friends because they spent 2.25 days camping, eating and peeing together.”

As long as you keep carrying their water you’ll be peeing with them. The minute you say something honest and honorable, you’re out. This is why the tech industry is so rotten.

Tatoo this on your forehead: It only works when it’s open to all comers. No matter how much of an “effort” O’Reilly makes, a closed community is still closed.

BTW, keeping it closed is a perfect way to be sure you’ve got a bubble. If you want sustainable growth, you have to keep investing in strange new ideas. That’s what I told John Doerr just after the last bubble burst, but he didn’t listen. You guys aren’t listening now.

By keeping it nice and closed, and keeping everyone you invite too scared to say what’s obvious, you make sure that this little euphoria you think you’re having will pop at the first sign of trouble. There’s nothing sustainable about what you all are doing.

You need to invest as you’re spending, but there’s none of that going on. If you have any guts insist that Tim ask me to keynote his Web 2.0 conference and I’ll lay out a roadmap for investment. That’ll be a good first step toward insurance against this being a bubble.

Why the title works 

In a perfect world every item would have a unique guid.

In a better than perfect world, not only would they all have unique guids, but they’d all be permalinks.

In an even better world, if an item appeared in two or more feeds it would have the same guid (and it would also be a permalink).

But it’s not a perfect world, and even if you put it in the spec that it must work the best possible way (as the Atom 1.0 spec did) there’s no guarantee that it will actually work that way. But it sure would be nice if it did!

We have to live in a less than perfect world. I know many people think I’m omniscient and all-powerful and it’s my fault that the world isn’t perfect, so go ahead and blame me, if it makes you feel better, but that’s not the point of this piece (although my detractors will surely stop right there).

You can do a decent job of figuring out if you’ve seen an item before and not show it to the user if you look at the title of the story. Like the situation I describe above, it ain’t perfect, but then neither is anything else in the world.

Why the title works…

I noticed that headline writers tend to be creative, they don’t come up with different headlines when a story appears in more than one feed, so I tried using that as the guid, it worked! Poof there go the dupes.

Now I’m sure you’ll miss some articles as headlines get re-used, but I’ve found that it’s much more likely to go the other way. As a day goes by the editors play with the titles, making slight, subtle editorial changes. I have a table that tracks this, and it can get really humorous. An inside peek into the mind of an editor.

Anyway I thought I should share this bit. Have a great Saturday!

Scripting News for 8/25/2006

A moderated mail list for people who blog and want to use a Blackberry, Treo or other web-enabled mobile device to create and edit blog posts. I’m starting this group to test some software I’m working on, but it can be used to discuss anything related to blogging and mobile devices. Please join the list if you have time in the next few days to test the software.  

Harish Rao: “Nicco’s recent post about his support for Senator John McCain has caused quite a lot of ruckus. We at EchoDitto disagree with his decision. While Nicco does not work for Senator McCain, his support for a possible McCain candidacy runs contrary to many of our core beliefs at EchoDitto.” 

Scoble is hosting a no-foo no-fight at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay tomorrow at 2PM.  

Mike Arrington proposes the creation of an open API for job boards. “I don’t want to have my own garden, a sort of mini monster.com. I want to be a part of an ecosystem.” Amen. 

Guardian: Dipping into the River of News. 

I just spoke with Nicco. I don’t think he really thought it through before he said he supported McCain. He’s definitely not a seasoned political operative (not that I am either). I consider Nicco a friend, and I know him pretty well, and I’ve been listening to McCain, and I think it’s a total mismatch. Almost every reasonable person can agree that there’s something admirable about McCain. But he can’t be the next President and solve the problems created by the current President. He is a loyal Republican. Even if he were secretly against the war, he couldn’t take the steps needed to end it. And he’s always said we need more troops in Iraq. Nicco worked for Howard Dean, and while there’s a lot that I don’t like about Dean, he got the war issue right, back in 2003. It’s even clearer in 2006. For Nicco to support a pro-war candidate now is completely unreasonable, and I told him so. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this. 

BTW, even Republicans can now agree that Dean got it right, no matter how galling it must be to admit you were wrong. What if we had never gone into Iraq? Would the country, the region be better off than it is now? Obviously, no matter how bad Saddam was, his crippled and contained regime was preferrable to the bloodbath that Iraq is now; and come on, we all know it’s going to get much worse before it gets better, if it ever does. We’re not the idiots the Republicans make us out to be. And never mind Iraq for a minute, what about the US? Isn’t the President’s first responsibility to America? There’s no doubt we’d be better off if we weren’t fighting a war in Iraq. Something to think about when pulling the lever in November.  

I told Nicco he was going the wrong way. People are going to be leaving the Republican Party in droves. It’s like buying a house as the market is collapsing (which I just did, btw). Buying Republican stock right now is a bad investment. 

Denise Howell on legal issues raised by the rivers.  

Steve Garfield is testing a Nokia 93 cell phone over wifi with the R.O.N. 

Yesterday Andrew Baron and Nicco Mele met in NYC. I suspect this meeting will be recorded in history books. :-) 

Nicco is always surprising. Yesterday, I just found out, he announced he’s going to work for a Republican, John McCain. Moral of the story — be careful who you help today, they may become a Republican tomorrow. And to think Nicco is a Mets fan, and therefore, presumably has a philosophy. What now, is he going to start rooting for the Yankees? Arrrgh. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education on Google’s agreement with the University of California, via Jeff Ubois. 

“So Much Better” 

People are still saying I’m a bad person in the comments on various blog posts. It’s funny how they only say that when I’m doing good, if I stay quiet and don’t ship any software they aren’t compelled to say how much they despise me.

When it gets my blood hot, I calm down by explaining to myself that I chose to do this work knowing that the usual people would try to hitch a ride on the flow with their negativism. That’s the way it works on the net. So be it.

I chose to do it because I knew that the River of News method of reading news is vastly superior to the hunt and peck method. On mobile devices it’s so much better that it leads to an AHA moment for everyone who tries it. Kind of the way outlining made building a slide show so much better in 1986 with MORE (thanks to Guy Kawasaki for that breakthrough idea).

After this loop there will be a lot more news used on mobile devices, and that will make me happy. I know because that’s what’s happening with podcasting right now. Every time I hear a news organization, like NPR or ABC News, say they do broadcast and podcast, there’s the evidence of some good I did for the world. And I might add, for myself. I have a much richer life because the news is flowing through open formats like MP3 and RSS 2.0.

As Phil Jones suggests in a comment on this post, in the next few weeks you will indeed see a strategy emerge. The pieces will have already been invented, for sure. In many cases the invention was mine, although some people will try to say someone else did it. It won’t matter because the record is out there, people who care can find out where the ideas came from. Where the software came from will be totally apparent.

If you want to understand why honest people get upset when one of my ideas clicks, read Josh Bancroft’s post on the subject. I think his comment is very honest and fair, and it’s what I think is behind what many other people are saying. Josh wishes he was achieving the kind of success I seem to effortlessly achieve, but it only looks effortless, it’s actually a lot of work. Do a search on Scripting for river of news to see how long I’ve been beating this drum. Also do some checking to see how long I’ve been trying to gain traction with a mobile version of this weblog and those created with my software. But that said, I think I understand where Josh is coming from, and believe it or not, I often feel the same way, about many of the things I have tried to promote, only to have someone else capitalize on it. I try to find the silver lining where I can, but it is indeed frustrating. You can also find that frustration in the archive of this blog.

Josh, I suggest that we find ways to help each other. We both want an exciting future for news on mobile devices. Let’s work together to get there. Life is too short to be putting obstacles in each others’ way, imho.

Foo/Nofoo 

A note for those going to O’Reilly’s invite-only camp this weekend in Sebastapol. Remember, no open standards work. Can’t do open work at a closed event. Otherwise, have a great time, enjoy the lovely California weather.

Announcing the Nofoo Wiki, where influential and important people who are not going to O’Reilly’s FOO Camp can sign up and be cool. Who knows, if enough people sign up maybe we can do some open standards work.

Amyloo: “I’d like to come to the virtual no foo camp, but it’s sort of hard for the self-esteem-challenged to self select as important and influential.”

Scripting News for 8/24/2006

Today’s Rocketboom covers the NYTimesRiver. Thanks! 

Realized I had not officially announced the BBCRiver. Works great on Blackberry, Treo, web-enabled mobile device. :-) 

USCourts.gov: “The next time you see someone pop on the headphones and get that faraway look in his or her eyes, don’t be so sure it’s a tune that’s beguiling them. It just may be the latest oral arguments from the Seventh Circuit.” 

Wired: “It’s easy to forget that one of the reasons people were so excited about Napster back in the day was the social networking aspect.” 

Netflix announces its mobile site.  

Amazon surprises us again. EC2 does for computing what S3 does for storage. I’m scratching my head, in a good way. What does their virtual machine run? Their only code sample is in Java. Postscript: Colin Faulkingham sheds some light. 

Jon Udell’s screencast demoing EC2.  

David Galbraith: “EC2 allows you to put a disk image of a Linux machine onto Amazon S3 (their remote storage service) and create a virtual machine by installing from there onto EC2.” 

Marc Canter notes what we’ve also been noting. Google’s development strategy looks more and more like the one that got Microsoft in so much trouble in the 90s. We gave them perfectly good ways of moving data around, so developers could use any company’s infrastructure. Google reinvents it so you can only use theirs. I recommend going some other way, for now. And Google, we want to ride up front, with you, not locked in the trunk, with uncertain air supply. 

Phil Jones: “The silliest thing, ever, is people getting all uptight because Dave is “arrogant.” 

A union of explainers and justifiers? 

Thanks Doc. We should start a union of explainers and justifiers who respond to the kvetchers and complainers who say we have no right to do anything new, or find a new angle on something that’s been done before. I don’t think I need to justify that I’ve contributed a lot of innovation here, yet that’s what the other folk are making an issue of. Heh. My first river of news aggregator first appeared in 1999, when RSS was new. I’ve been doing them ever since. This was the week when the concept finally caught on, imho. As with outliners, that needed bullet charts to justify them to many people, the river of news concept needed mobile devices. As payloads for RSS (2000) needed podcasting to give it a purpose (2004).

The way technology works, for those who care about such things: Start with a vision you believe in, and keep trying to find ways to show others how powerful it is. Over and over, often for years.

Outliners took eight years from idea to product of the year. Podcasting took four years. River of news took seven. This is opposite the myth of invention, the Eureka moment when everyone sees the idea. The moment often takes years to play out. Maybe it always does. But when you finally break through, savor the moment, and don’t pay any attention to the ballast. (Also, I find that the people with the biggest problems often turn out to be competitiors. It’s a dishonorable way to compete. Much better to try to give users more good stuff, not try to keep them looking at stuff they like.)

Scripting News for 8/23/2006

How I do a blog post from my Blackberry, in a movie. 

I also uploaded the movie to blip.tv. 

Steve Rubel: “Startups advertising on startups spells trouble.” 

Evan Williams surveys the podcasting directory sites. 

Robojamie: “If less effort is required to use RSS it’s use by a majority of Internet users will soar.” I agree. 

newsrivers.com is not my site. Amazing how quickly a popular idea takes hold on the web. 

Ed Cone has an interesting perspective on NYTimesRiver.  

The German version of Wikipedia is getting gatekeepers, on an experimental basis. Experienced users will approve changes before they go live. This could cut down on vandalism, but what else will it cut down on? 

Just curious, what tools do people use to post to their blogs from a Blackberry or Treo?  

I’m hosting a mobile version of the BuzzMachine blog. 

Doc Searls: “The river metaphor makes me look at the supply side of blogging from a whole new perspective.”