Scripting News for 10/31/2006

Charles Jade: Why can’t Apple blog? 

I’m with Josh Marshall, Kerry has nothing to apologize for.  

Olbermann: “Kerry called them stupid and they were too stupid to know he called them stupid.” 

I think in retrospect, the Democrats came to life when Bill Clinton did the interview with Chris Wallace at Fox. Throwing punches is something people don’t expect from Demos, and it’s refreshing. Kerry said something that is totally, obviously true. Bush better watch out if he decides to make this an issue, it’s likely to backfire. All Kerry has to say is that he’ll apologize after Bush apologizes for the deaths of 2800 young Americans in Iraq.  

Hil introduces the RSS Pumpkin. Ha! 

I was going to pre-order a Zune player, but I checked to see if it would work with a Mac, and apparently not. Arrrgh. What kind of competitor has Microsoft become. What if someone prefers a Mac desktop, thinks it’s possible to do better than the iPod, and wants to give Zune a whirl? I have to use a PC? Oy oy. NFW. What if my opinion influences others? I imagine that many of the opinion leaders in this market already use Macs. I doubt if I’m willing to dust off the PC just to try out their audio player. 

There was a political bloggers meetup at Berkman last night in Cambridge.  

Ed Cone interviews PodShow CEO, Ron Bloom. 

HDMI question 

I bought and HDMI to HDMI cable to connect my Denon DVD player to the Sony TV.

I tried hooking the two together, but no luck, when I clicked through all the video sources on the TV, the output of the DVD, which I could hear, never showed up on the screen.

I’ve read all I could find in the two manuals with no clues. Any ideas?

Scripting News for 10/30/2006

SlingPlayer for Mac OS X Public Beta Download. 

Scoble: “I don’t read separate feeds anymore. I just read everything in one long continuous scrolling Window.” 

There’s a lot of back-channel discussion of Apple’s option backdating problem, and the extent to which it involves Steve Jobs. Late last week, I heard that a major business publication is working on this story, but they’re hesitating, for fear of jeopardizing their relationship with Jobs.  

Ars Technica: Steve Jobs knew about options backdating. 

Google search for “options backdating apple.” 

Mark Cuban reposts an anonymous email from the Pho mail list about the terms of the Google acquisition of YouTube. Synopisis: A fair amount of the money goes to settle copyright infringment suits.  

NY Times: Circulation Plunges at Major Newspapers. 

Scripting News for 10/29/2006

Pictures taken at this evening’s Cybersalon in Berkeley. 

AP: “Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas said in a campaign debate Thursday that she would have voted against the war had she known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction.” 

Wired: “Some of the web’s more popular ‘milblogs’ — blogs maintained by present or former active duty military personnel — are going quiet following a renewed push by U.S. military officials to scan sites for security risks.” 

National Conference for Media Reform, Memphis, Jan 12-14. 

When I moved into the new house I bought a LaCrosse Atomic wall clock. It looks just like any other wall clock, except it has a radio built in, that tunes into a government broadcast frequency that sets the clock to the correct time every night. Last night it got a signal that it was off by one hour and corrected itself. One more thing not to worry about! It worked. 

Does Apple have a blogging policy? 

Apple is conspicuous among technology companies in having no one in the blogosphere from the company speaking about the company in an official or unofficial capacity. I’m sure there are many other big and small companies who aren’t present, but for a company whose presence is so large, it’s unusual they play almost no role in the conversation.

Recently, an ex-Apple person, Chuq von Rospach, wrote eloquently and sincerely about this, and Scoble, who was basically Microsoft’s first blogger (and a former employee of mine at UserLand) called him on it, and I have some facts that aren’t part of either of their stories, I was there at the dawn of Apple’s blogging policy, on two occasions, and imho the truth is closer to what Scoble says that to what Chuq says.

Shortly after Jobs took over at Apple, I got a call from him. I had never spoken with him before or since, and I had no idea the call was coming. I have spoken with Bill Gates a number of times, I’ve talked with ex-Presidents of the United States, with candidates for President, I even spoke once with Bill Clinton when he was the sitting President, but I was never so nervous as when I was talking with Jobs. I mostly listened. I’m convinced now that he was trying to be my friend, he was telling me what bozos the people running Apple were, something that both horrified me, and that I agreed with. He was so open in his derision, with me, basically a stranger. It really put me off. But in retrospect, perhaps I should have been more agreeable. I don’t know. But he was clearly in some way reaching out to me as a blogger probably, not so much as a developer. Also, I had at the time quit the Mac, quite openly, and had no plans to go back. Today, I use nothing but Macs, which is a testimony to the quality of his work, and the choices he made back then, but at the time, I was sure he would fail, and I said so openly. Net-net, at least at the beginning, it seems as if Jobs wanted some kind of dialog with the blogosphere.

The second part of the story involves Kate Adams who I first met at the Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, in 1997 (long before she was blogging). Kate was then quite outspoken, she worked in the Quicktime group at Apple, one of the successes of the company through the dark years, and one of a small number of technologies to survive at Apple 3.0.

Kate was at a company-wide meeting in Cupertino, shortly after Jobs took over, and sent me an email for publication without attribution, enthusiastically explaning what Steve had said. I published the email on Scripting News, without identifying the source. The next day she was called into Steve Jobs’s office at Apple, they knew who sent the email because they had written a script watching for mail going to me from inside Apple. Not surprisingly, I stopped getting mail from people at Apple. My sources (Kate wasn’t the only one) dried up.

To Chuq’s point, Kate wasn’t in any way acting as a spokesperson for the company. It was clear from the writing, this was an employee not a spokesperson. I didn’t identify her as a spokesperson. So if the policy wasn’t to be a spokesperson, it’s pretty clear Kate didn’t violate it.

Also, when Scoble was blogging for Microsoft, most of the time he wasn’t blogging as a company spokesman (it’s possible there were times when he was coordinating with Microsoft PR). In general people understood that he was blogging as a person. It was pretty clear, because at times he would say he thought management was wrong. Not too many spokespeople do that. Same with all the other bloggers. If Ray Ozzie, on the other hand, were to resume his blog, that would be different, we would assume, since he’s an officer of the company, that his writing was official. So if Apple really believes what Chuq says, they can relax a bunch, the blogosphere is smart enough to discern between a spokesperson and a plain old person.

An account of the Kate Adams/Steve Jobs meeting (with at least one fact wrong) appeared in Alan Deutschman’s book about Jobs, published in 2001.

An excerpt of Deutschman’s book ran in Salon.

Scripting News for 10/28/2006

What year was this picture taken in? 

CNN had a quiz a few days ago asking when was email invented. It was multiple choice, and the earliest date was 1981, which turns out to be their answer. They put up a picture of Eric Allman, saying he was the inventor. Oy, such is the state of journalism today. I think 1981 was the year CNN was invented. Email goes back to, at least, the early 70s. I used email at the University of Wisconsin in 1977 and it was’t new then.  

Wikipedia: “E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate.” 

Someday search will be old too 

Many years ago, when the Internet was still the domain of geeks, researchers and college students, the smart folks often said that the opportunities for new software companies were over, it simply required too much scale to compete in an industry dominated by Lotus, Microsoft and Ashton-Tate. Now it’s clear how ridiculous that was, even though it was correct. The next layer comes on not by building on the old layer (a trick, the guy you’re building on will eat your lunch), or re-doing what they did (what the naysayers correctly say you can’t do), but by starting from a different place and building something new, and so different that the old guys don’t understand it and don’t feel threatened by it.

At first, the Internet, the market dominated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon (and others) was about the web, a publishing environment, then it became two-way, and search developed as a core but adjunct feature, much as the OS of a personal computer is part of the package, but the spreadsheet, word processor and other productivity apps are really what it was about. There will be new technology enterprises that make the search engine as humdrum as the desktop OS is today. Bet on it and win. Think that all innovation must come in the form of applications of search and you’ll be left in the dust.

Scripting News for 10/27/2006

Well, the St Louis Cardinals kicked the Detroit Tigers in the ass, and won the 2006 World Series. That’s it for baseball this year. See you again in April. 

I was just tripping out on KFOG 10@10, trying to find the list of songs for tonight, and damn if they don’t have an RSS 2.0 feed. Man. Is that cool or what! Today they played ten great songs from 1968, which was a big year for me — I was 13. Wow.  

They chose a Jimi Hendrix song as the best song for 1968, I would have picked the Simon & Garfunkel song, America, if only because it’s such a great road trip song, and it brings back so many great memories. I’m sure everyone else put that song on their favorite tunes for long driving trips cassette tape.  

NY Times: “If the last month has taught us anything about the Republican Party, it is that homophobia is campaign strategy, not conviction.” 

TechCrunch compares traffic for Rocketboom & Ze Frank. 

And so does Heather Green at BusinessWeek. 

HDWorld, Nov 29-30, New York. 

Tim Berners-Lee: “Making standards is hard work.” 

Darren Barefoot has an apparently scandalous example of a company (one that lots of people respect) playing a nasty game of “we own your ass.” 

Rob Hof is getting Democratic spam too. I still am, too. All my efforts to unsub have been for naught.  

A bunch of people say that this Mac update may fix the random shutdown problems. I have installed it on my MacBook, of course, but I had already had my computer repaired. Apple hasn’t said anything that this relates this fix to the problems widely reported on the net. If it does fix the problem, Apple still gets an failing grade for communication with customers. Sending other people out to speak on your behalf is very Republican.  

Scripting News for 10/26/2006

Lobby of the W Hotel in Seattle. 

Evan Williams announces that Odeo is finished, and he’s formed a new company. 

Next, obvious question — will Adam give back the money he raised for PodShow? 

Kevin Kelly has been coming up with some great stuff lately on his Cool Tools blog. 

John Robb has a book coming in April on the next stage of terrorism and the end of globalization.  

 

Scripting News for 10/25/2006

Marc Canter asks about support by aggregator developers of media formats in RSS feeds.  

Dell Hell, in a JibJab-like infomercial. 

The OGQ tool? 

Something that’s missing in Google’s repertoire of information searching tools. It’s something between Technorati, Google News, and Google itself. Think of it as the old-girlfriend query tool. Let’s say I used to date a woman named Tammy. From time to time I wonder what’s up with her. So I do a search, and find the same old links. I want to find all the new stuff. I don’t just want to search blogs, so it’s not what Technorati does. I don’t just care if she makes the news, so it isn’t what Google News does. For extra credit, I’d like it to come in RSS format so I can teach my aggregator to do this for me automatically.

BTW, once we get this feature, I predict the same kind of backlash that came when Facebook added rich RSS support. All of a sudden lurkers will have a new advantage, and the lurkees might not be happy about it.

Iraq and incentives 

Listening very carefully to podcast and broadcast discussions about the war in Iraq between Washington policy-makers, there is a lot of subtlety that’s missed in the crude discussion of “stay the course” vs “cut and run.” I’m sure we’re just getting an inkling of what’s going on there, and to even get that inkling you have to listen a lot and carefully. Here are some things to consider. We’re encouraging the supposed unity government of Maliki to work with other factions, but he isn’t doing it. He doesn’t really have much of an incentive, as long as we prop him up, pay his bills, provide him with body guards, why should he do anything at all?

Further, we’re pumping billions of dollars into Iraq, how is that being spent and who is getting it? How much of that money is being used to fund the various factions in the soon-to-be civil war? Lots. 60 Minutes had a report this Sunday about $800 million that disappeared from Iraqi defense appropriations. The money is being given to people we don’t know. And some of them are arming themselves and fighting against the government, but most of them are just ignoring the government, it’s so weak and innefective.

Anyway, there’s a point to all this. Clearly behind the scenes, when the Americans put pressure on Iraqis, they’re telling them to work with each other. Even the Republicans say that, that in order for Iraq to have a chance of working, each of the factions must compromise. But here’s the disconnect. Here at home, the Republicans completely disenfranchise the Democrats and people who vote for Democrats. Every bit of disagreement is cast as cowardice or disloyalty. Most of us aren’t going to become Republicans. So how can we expect the Iraqis to do what we ourselves don’t? The answer — it’s unreasonable to expect them to.

God knows why America should care about change in Iraq, but Bush insists that we must. So if we want Iraq to reform, Bush should stop throwing dirt at anyone who dares to disagree with him, because he so desperately needs to be disagreed with, and we should form some kind of coalition government of Republicans and Democrats that decides how to get our country out of the mess we’re in, in Iraq.

Demspam 

Meanwhile, the Democrats have discovered the power of spam. Somehow they got my “real” email address into their database (I probably corresponded with someone who works for Democrat causes) and now I’m getting a few spam emails every day that get through the spam filters from idiots like John Kerry and Barak Obama. I call them idiots to emphasize that, with me, spam does not endear me to you, it makes it impossible for me to give you money or support. I’ve tried five times to unsub, but they seem to ignore the request, like any good spammer.

Would someone give the Internet guys down at Democratic Party HQ a kick in the butt for me. Thanks.

Postscript: I got an email from a tech guy at the DNC saying the email came from the Kerry organization not the DNC. He said: “The DNC does not buy email addresses or spam people.”

Scripting News for 10/24/2006

Salon: U.S. generals call for Democratic takeover. 

A bit of a smackdown between Ze Frank and Rocketboom. Competition is inevitable, and a good thing, imho. 

67MB movie demo of my entertainment system. 

Why doesn’t Howard Stern have a podcast? (Or does he?) 

Grace Davis explains why “we don’t mind the crazy ass real estate prices and earthquakes.” 

O’Reilly has a $7.99 booklet about OPML written by Amy Bellinger. I’m sure it’s good, Amy does good work. 

I was checking out Google’s new custom search engine feature (released today) and was surprised to see them support OPML format for “annotations.” Screen shot. 

My TV has its own computer 

Kent Newsome: “No one other than a honking nerd wants to watch TV in a little window on a computer, when a big screen HDTV plasma is sitting 20 feet away.”

I have a 46 inch LCD TV, made by Sony, and it’s great, and it does HDTV, and I watch broadcast stuff on it regularly, like the World Series (Game 3 starts in a few hours) and serials like Studio 60 and Lost. I said it before, HD changes not only the way you look at TV, it changes the way you look at everything. I’ve been struggling to find a way to explain this, and haven’t come up with one yet, but I recommend if you want to find out more, find a friend with an HD setup and watch one of your favorite shows at his or her house. It’s not enough to go to a store to get a demo, or to see a quick demo at a friends’ house. For me, it was watching Phantom of the Opera at Scoble’s house in Half Moon Bay that made the difference. Two weeks later I had my own HD setup. Yes, it happens that quickly.

But Kent is missing something that I think a lot of other people miss. His big honkin plasma TV probably has a PC video-in jack on the back, and while the UI to switch between the cable box and PC is klunky, once you learn how to do it, it’s not difficult, and it opens another door that’s totally worth opening. I know, because in addition to HD, I also bought a Mac Mini with a 120GB hard drive to watch movies that come from its hard disk. I’m developing quite a collection, thanks to Netflix and Handbrake. But it also means I don’t need an aggregator from Tivo, I just use the same one I always use, a copy of Radio running on one of my servers in Dallas. Why? Because my TV (through the Mac) also has a net connection.

I think maybe I should write a book about how you invent and promote standards for fun and profit, because what I’m doing here is exactly what I did when I started blogging, or publishing in XML and then RSS, or started pushing audio blog posts as enclosures in my RSS feeds. You start by putting two things next to each other that you think should work together. Then you shorten the distance, and shorten it again, and keep optimizing until you have something that other people could use. Then you tell them about it, and tell them again, and again and so on until you have a standard.

HD and Macs and cable, Bluetooth (for the keybaord and mouse), RSS and TCP/IP. All these techonologies come together in my home entertainment center. I don’t watch TV on my computer screen, but I do watch my computer on my TV screen, if you get what I mean.

BTW, Engadget has an excellent HD website, they tell you what’s on, and about new technology that’s relevant to HD users.

Dave Zatz wonders whether it’s time to get HD. Yes, yes, yes. If you want to help figure all this stuff out, we need you to have the new eyes that you get from HD. Think about it this way. If there was an upgrade available for your eyes that gave you 3D vision when you just had 2D, would you pay $1500 for that? Yes, it is that big a difference, imho.

A 67MB movie demo of my entertainment system.

Another Republican for Cut and Run 

Lindsey Graham: “We’re on the verge of chaos, and the current plan is not working.”

Seems the Republicans are finally ditching Dubya.

I love what Nancy Pelosi said at the end of her 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, when asked if she would go for impeaching Bush after she becomes Speaker of the House.

“Wouldn’t they just love it, if we came in and our record as Democrats coming forth in 12 years, is to talk about George Bush and Dick Cheney? This election is about them. This is a referendum on them. Making them lame ducks is good enough for me.”

Those were the last words in the interview, and they reverberate.

No matter what, we’ve got the change we were looking for, even if the Republicans retain control of Congress. They can’t recover in two years from the kind of internal warfare they’re waging against each other now. No matter what, Bush is already the lamest of lame ducks.

Scripting News for 10/23/2006

10,000-plus planetary hacks. 

News.com: “Asus, Planex and QNap will include BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer technology in products such as wireless routers, media servers and network storage devices.” 

Farhad Manjoo: “The iPod can’t carry songs from one computer to another.” Amen. And the iPod is far from the ideal podcast player. It can’t receive podcasts on its own. And the DRM that’s fundamental to its design is pointless with podcasts, where the publishers encourage you to copy their work. I wonder if most people realize that about podcasting, it’s fundamentally different from the product of the music industry. 

Brier Dudley on Microsoft and RSS. 

Doc Searls lives on the west coast but feels at home on the east. Me too. 

Looks like the President is laying the groundwork for his own Cut And Run strategy in Iraq. As he prepares to wave the white flag in surrender, it all seems like a flip flop. Nahh, that’s what the Democrats do! :-) 

Seriously, imagine if we were as focused on rebuilding and defending New Orleans as we are with Iraq. What a mistake in priorities. We should be preparing for a big terrorist attack in the US too. The idea that we’re fighting them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight here is total bullshit. We’re hiding in Iraq, not fighting. And the people who are killing us and Iraqis aren’t terrorists, it’s a civil war. In many cases they’re the people we trained to be in the police and the army.  

Scripting News for 10/22/2006

NY Times: “Google sometimes operates in a way that almost seems to invite legal scrutiny.” 

I’ve now had HD for about a month now, and it’s a life-changer. I know it sounds weird, but you look at the world differently. The Discovery channel has really jumped on HD, they have a channel called HD Theater that is at least partly a travelogue, they sent crews around the world to take pictures in all kind of exotic places. And you sit there with your jaw on the floor, the pictures are so vivid, they’re even more colorful than reality, and they take you places you could never go on on your own, to mountain tops, underwater in a manatee swamp in Florida. And even prosaic places are beautiful. Yesterday they had a camera on a cow farm in Vermont. No voice track, no narration, just the sounds of nature and cows grazing. Incredibly captivating. This is TV as a meditation medium. Very different and very interesting. 

Inside Google: “Ze Frank decided to help monetize his vlog by letting readers buy digital rubber duckies and other things on his pages, but Google did not approve.” 

Highly recommend this Frontline report on Karl Rove from 2005. There’s a very distinct pattern to a Rove campaign, and it’s interesting to think how Rove is not in charge of the 2006 mid-term election, at least so far. It’s possible that the Democrats watched this show too, it helps explain why the Foley scandal is a the perfect antidote to Rove. 

“Surrender and wave the white flag,” is the Rove slogan for this election. George Stephanopoulos asked the President to name a single Democrat who wants to surrender and wave a white flag. Hemm and haw. Thanks, that’s the right question. What a fucking coward. Why can’t we have an election where we talk about something other than Karl Rove’s marketing slogan. Bill Frist used the term on CNN later in the morning. Republicans are chicken.