Scripting News for 9/20/2006

Mary Jo Foley: “Blogging is the future of journalism.” 

Okay, I got cable installed at the new house today and got the HD option. Watching a random baseball game, it’s awesome. 

Every day on the NewsHour they have an American general saying the plan is to get the Iraqi army up and running. Sure it’s difficult now, but soon, in six to nine months (he knows that’s optimistic, but he’s an optimist) they can start moving the American troops out and that’s the plan, it’s not great, but it’s the best they can do. This has been going on since mid-2004 or so and there’s no end in sight. Aren’t the interviewers aware that we’ve been hearing this for two years and it just keeps getting worse, not better? You’d think they’d ask a question based on this simple observation, but they don’t. Every day it’s as if there had never been an American general on the show making excuses that no one believes. 

Could someone please tell NPR that their podcast directory is empty. I’m getting errors on all their non-podcast feeds as well. I hope it’s just a wire-trip. :-( 

NY Times: Some Hot Recorders for Those Cooool Podcasts. 

BBC: Chavez tells UN Bush is devil. 

A few months ago I started noticing that, walking down the street, I’d have to veer to avoid walking into people. They weren’t paying attention, if I didn’t want to have a collision, I had to adjust my path. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, did this just start happening, or did I just start noticing it, or what? I thought maybe it was the age difference, I’d always heard that when you get older you become more invisible, and in Berkeley, the average age is pretty young. But younger than Cambridge? Then, a couple of weeks ago, walking in San Francisco, I hit on what may be the answer. Cell phones and iPods. Perhaps people aren’t as conscious walking on the street as they used to be? Listening to a really interesting podcast, engaged in an engaging conversation with a friend on a Bluetooth headset. If it’s true, are people also walking into buildings more? Getting hit by cars? What’s happening with the mortality rate of pedestrians? 

Monkey Bites: How Buggy is iTunes 7? 

Joseph Pisani at BusinessWeek needs a high resolution picture of me for an article he’s writing. I don’t have one, but people are always taking pictures at parties. Maybe someone has one. If so, send Joseph an email at bweekpic at gmail dot com. 

Wired lists Web 2.0 winners and losers. Winners: Flickr, Odeo, Writely, del.icio.us, NetVibes. 

According to Valleywag, TechCrunch will launch an enterprise weblog today, edited by Nik Cubrilovic. 

Two years ago today we took a walk on the Seattle waterfront. 

On last night’s Countdown, a constitutional law expert asks if the reason that the redefining of the Geneva Convention is being debated in the Senate is that news is about to break that the President has been ordering US military personnel to torture prisoners. If that’s what’s coming, we must act to remove the President from office. He is acting in our name, and we will have to deal with the consequences long after he’s out of office. We can’t support this for another two years. If the Democrats won’t stand up to Bush, we must form a new political structure in which we can, without the Democrats. 

Important note — the dissenting Republicans are not opposing torture, they are proposing a different definition for torture. The Geneva Convention doesn’t need redefining. Imagine of some other country were debating about this, how would we interpret it? 

BBC: Free anonymising browser debuts. 

Glenn Fleishman reports that in-flight wifi may not be dead after all. 

Transcript of NBC interview with Iranian president Ahmadinejad.  

From Jay Rosen comes news that Reuters has given $100K to his NewAssignment.net to “underwrite the costs of hiring our first editor, which is going to be a fun job.” 

Scripting News for 9/19/2006

Fulfillment by Amazon: “You send your new and used products to us, and we’ll store them. As orders are placed, we’ll pick, pack and ship them to your customers from our network of fulfillment centers.” 

Amazon is kicking ass. I’ve long predicted that BigCo’s would become fulfillment companies. I just didn’t think it would happen this fast. Now I’ll predict that long after Google is burned out and forgotten, we’ll be shipping our wares to and from Amazon warehouses, with Jeff Bezos making some sheckels on each transaction. We’ll think of Bill Gates as someone like Andrew Carnegie or Burl Ives. What do you mean he’s still alive? 

Jason Kottke said something really nice about me today. Thanks man. Getting a MacArthur would be great. It would probably make my parents pretty happy too. :-) 

Joel Spolsky: “The phone they sent me, an LG Fusic, is really quite awful, and the service, Power Vision, is tremendously misconceived and full of dumb features that don’t work right and cost way too much.”  

Four years ago: “Weblogs, in a very real sense, get your mind out of bed, and back in the world. They can help alleviate the endless aloneness that’s part of recovery.” 

Sparkplug 9: “Pope says Islam is violent. Islamics react with violence. Pope apologizes.” 

Google has satellite pics of Baghdad. 

Movie: More chickens on stilts from Sunday’s parade. 

YouTube offers “several RSS feeds for categorized groups of videos (such as recently uploaded, top viewed etc) as well as customized feeds for users and tags.” 

If the Democratic Party had a sense of presence, they would run national TV commercials commemorating the life of Ann Richards. A few schmaltzy snips from her convention keynote in 1988. “I’m delighted to be here with you this evening, because after listening to George Bush all these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like.” I guess it would make today’s party leadership look as anemic as it is.  

Amanda Congdon is back with a new show, a roadtrip across America. A bunch of feeds, a website and a wiki. 

I signed up to be a beta for MSN’s Soapbox video community. I’ll let you know when I get a chance to try it out. I don’t feel bad, Mike Arrington doesn’t have an account either. I guess Microsoft is learning the art of teasing? Or does it just look that way?  

Scripting News for 9/18/2006

Niall Kennedy on private feeds. “I believe large publishers such as Salesforce.com or eBay would produce more feed content if they knew their customers’ data was kept private and secure.” 

Scripting News for 9/18/2006

Got my new Sprint AmbassadorPhone today, as I imagine a bunch of other bloggers did as well. I tried the music store, the software is dorky but I was able to easily get a few songs to play over the speaker. I tried hooking it up to my MacBook using the provided USB cable, but no-go, and since my Windows laptop is at my other house, I couldn’t try it out today. The packaging is very nice. Has a built-in FM transmitter (haven’t tried it yet). It has a web browser, but I haven’t yet figured out how to enter a URL so I haven’t been able to try one of the rivers out. They do have news, but the UI is molasses-like.  

I went for a hike today with the parents in the hills. 

Muslims who demand an apology from the Pope for insulting Islam would have more credibility if they demanded Ahmadinejad apologize for saying the Holocaust never happened. Think that’ll ever happen? Nahh. 

Niall Kennedy on private feeds. “I believe large publishers such as Salesforce.com or eBay would produce more feed content if they knew their customers’ data was kept private and secure.” 

Scripting News for 9/17/2006

The Citizendium Project will “begin life as a “progressive fork” of Wikipedia.” 

Scripting News for 9/17/2006

Dan Blank: “Much of the web needs to look deeper into making their mobile versions more user friendly.” 

Steve Philip: “Somewhere in the heartland of America, a conservative’s head has just exploded.” 

Photos from today’s How Berkeley Can You Be parade. 

Movie: Chickens on stilts open Berkeley parade. 

Movie: Mobile cupcakes. 

New header graphic. Volkswagen beetle art car.  

Go2Web20 reveals just how silly Web 2.0 is. A bunch of them have significant competitors that aren’t included (in other words it’s a club of some sort, with vague rules about who’s included). I see a few there that are dead, in other words no one uses them. And quite a few that are vaporware. One where the CEO was just fired. A number of them are part of very large companies, so why aren’t their other sites listed? Why are some Web 2.0 and others not? Who doesn’t know this is all bullshit? 

The Citizendium Project will “begin life as a ‘progressive fork’ of Wikipedia.” 

Mike Arrington: “The Wikipedia community has completely intimidated me to the point where making a change to that site is unthinkable.” 

Jory Des Jardins: The Conflicted Bride. 

Scripting News for 9/16/2006

Where we’re at with mobile-friendly news. Matt Mullenweg and James Snell have made two different recommendations for linking a mobile-friendly rendering of stories into an RSS item. Imho either approach is workable. No spec text yet. The next question is what is a mobile-friendly rendering? 

And they say all the good domain names are taken. :-) 

Tom Morris says that the innovative magnetic power adaptor for his new MacBook is already falling apart. I didn’t want to say anything, but I noticed that it is pretty fragile, and suspected it wouldn’t hold up well over time. I’m beginning to get the picture about Apple hardware, they make an import, like a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, they spend a lot of time in the shop, but they’re fun to drive. Me, I’ve always gone for Toyotas or Datsuns, they also are fun to drive, not necessarily very fast (but I don’t like fast) and they require almost no maintenence, which is good for me, because I’m really baaaad at maintenence. :-) 

Gotta love President Bush. He says the Geneva Convention is too vague. He says a lot of Americans are confused, because it’s complicated. It’s not actually that complicated. We take care of the other country’s soldiers, our enemy, because we want them to take care of our soldiers. That’s why two Republican soldiers, McCain and Powell say Bush is wrong, and the US must continue to support the Geneva Convention. To do otherwise would be grossly unkind to our own soldiers. So many Republicans are coming out against this, you gotta wonder if this isn’t some kind of trap for Democrats, who are saying nothing. Didn’t Bush check with the Senate before going on this campaign? Is he running against his own party now? Hard to believe.  

Next Apple question. I’ve got a cool little Airport Express at the new house. Scoble is coming over today, and I’m sure he’s going to want to use the wifi, but he uses a ThinkPad, and I have a WEP password. I know how to enter the password on my Mac, I just type the damned thing in and it takes care of the rest. But it’s not so simple on Windows. Suppose my password is ohyomama or something like that, what does Scoble have to type into his ThinkPad to get on my network? I used to know this, but I always forget. 

To Daring Fireball, maybe he does but he ain’t here yet. :-) 

The last house was called The Internet Hut (among other names). The new house doesn’t have a name yet. It’s tall, so maybe The Internet Tower? Hmmm. Not sure yet. 

A book I’d like to read — Deadwood, the Rest of the Story. Assume the character development of the HBO series. Take the screenplay for the season they didn’t produce and add some narrative. It’d be a best-seller.  

Scripting News for 9/15/2006

Chris Messina: “As a white boy who attended yesterday and today’s Future of Web Apps summit, I feel compelled to speak up about a disturbing element of an otherwise well-produced event.” 

SF Chron: “Technolgy guru Esther Dyson has quietly put out the word that the 2006 PC Forum, held in March in Carlsbad, California, would be the last.” 

Doc is in PhoneCo hell, with Verizon. No doubt all the people he’s talking to are in India or the Philippines. That’s what the SBC guys were telling me. But get this, I got a business card for one of the installers. It’s like gold. He speaks my language. Even better, it has an email address on it! Wow. Pretty cool. It’s a good idea to plant a few spies inside these big companies. Kind of like putting a blogger on the op-ed page of the NY Times. Hasn’t happened yet, but I’m sure someday it will.  

The wait is over, the DSL is working at the new house. Halla fucking loo yah! The techs at SBC were great. Once we got dial tone working, they swarmed on the house, and made it their mission to squeeze 6 megabits from the ancient copper running down my street. The result is an awesomely fast DSL connection. I also got 5 static IP addresses, so get ready for some fun new servers.  

Now that the DSL is in, it’s time to stress over something else. :-) 

Today I’ll be over at the new house waiting for the DSL installer. Knock wood, praise Murphy, maybe I’ll have Internet at the new place. In the meantime, if anything interesting comes up I’ll post it on my mobile weblog. 

Gary Short: “It seems to me a namespace extension to RSS could be the way to go.” 

Scripting News for 9/14/2006

Evan Williams explains how Odeo screwed up.  

“Mr Gutman” on second-time entrepreneurs. 

Now if Podshow’s CEO, Ron Bloom, Odeo’s competitor, were as insightful and open as Evan Williams, he would say something like this. “I thought all the technology for podcasting had been invented, but boy was I wrong!”  

Rex Hammock in 2/05: “Opportunism should never be confused with passion.” 

Engadget on Microsoft’s new iPod-alike, Zune. 

Todd Bishop: “If Zune is to become the long-awaited iPod killer Microsoft so clearly wants it to be, it’ll have to compete on a much more elusive battlefield: coolness.”  

Michael Gartenberg: “I can share any song on the device to any other device in range. DRM content or plain MP3s but don’t get too excited.” 

I don’t understand what Amazon is doing with Promotion via API and RSS for ECS, but it’s intriguing. Are the feeds a demo, or is that real data? 

Mobile-friendly news 

The next step in the evolution of mobile rivers is a way for a feed to link to articles that render well on mobile devices. I don’t want to propose a specific way of doing that, I could, but then the argument would be why I think I have the right to do that, which is an old boring argument that I’d rather side-step. Rather, I’m going to ask the great minds of the tech blogosphere to mull this over, discuss it if you like, and propose some solutions. Even better if you are a source of content, and can vouch for a bunch of feeds that will support your proposed solution. Then we can seek a second party and a third to support the first workable solution that pops up.

Let me try to state the problem concisely, so we’ll know when we have a solution.

First, consider the BBC and NY Times rivers. When I link to an article, I start with the URL to the “rich” HTML rendering, and apply an algorithm to turn the rich URL into a URL that points to a “plain jane” page, one which renders well on a mobile device. For example, here’s an article on the BBC website, and here’s the mobile-friendly version. See the difference? On a desktop or laptop, you’d probably prefer the rich version, but on a mobile device, like my Blackberry, the plain version works much better.

I was able to figure out a mapping for the Times and the BBC, but clearly that won’t work in every case. Somehow each feed is going to have to tell us where the mobile-friendly version is. And that means, inevitably, using a namespace (creating a new one or using an existing one) to link from an item to its mobile-friendly rendering. Or so it seems to me. I could be wrong. Figure it out and let me know. I’ll use whatever works and is supported by the community. (But the clock is ticking, I have an app almost ready to deploy that needs the solution.)

PS: Anticipating that people are going to suggest using Google’s algorithmic method of generating mobile-friendly content, I’d rather not depend on Google, I’d rather the content people take care of this. Building too much on one large platform is a precarious way to build. We’ve already found, many times, that Google doesn’t care what we think. So let’s fix this ourselves, it’ll work much better that way, imho.

PPS: I linked this into a new Technical Issues section in the NewsRiver.org directory.

Scripting News for 9/13/2006

Feedburner: A Peek Inside TechCrunch’s 100K Milestone. 

Lessons from AT&T/Yahoo 

In early August, I wrote a piece about where the intelligence is in the network of users and vendors, and how so much of it is with the users, and in the past that was so poorly utilized, and how the Internet is in the process of flipping it around, to the point that users become manufacturers, and that’s the process Jason was trying to explain yesterday. We still need expertise, I don’t know how to design a bridge, and my doctor can’t design a web app, but we also need the expertise that users develop, that today’s manufacturer’s just throw away.

The current product development process, that focuses on a few supposed geniuses and ignores the intelligence that’s in the user’s minds, same as with unconferences, is about to run its course much as the old style conference can’t possibly compete with one that involves the brains of the people formerly known as the audience.

Back to AT&T/Yahoo. I could tell them so much about their organization because I’ve had to deal with 20 different people in their organization the last couple of days. The information I have is stuff they don’t, and I’m sharing it with other people on the web, and it’s going to show up in the search results when people try to figure out whether or not they should go with AT&T/Yahoo (so far, I wouldn’t, I’m on the verge of cancelling the order, but they’re getting another chance, because Comcast is even worse).

Ahem cough *tease* cough ahem 

Ryan Sholin: “Does this mean a new NewsRiver online aggregator comes with a slice of strawberry cheesecake?”