Scripting News for 11/30/2006

Scott Rosenberg: “Are we going to spend the next two years pretending that we’re still ‘nation-building’ and ‘fighting the terrorists’ while American soldiers keep filling body bags and Iraqi morgues keep overflowing?” 

Russell Holliman says Apple still thinks it owns podcast. 

When Amazon says “If you order this in the next hour and pay us $3.99 extra you can have it tomorrow,” they’re full of it. I’ve now done it twice, and gotten the normal 2-day delivery. The first time I chalked it up to chance, but yesterday I went for it again, and from the tracking page, it’s pretty clear the order is still sitting in their warehouse. I think they should at least (automatically) refund the $3.99 when they don’t deliver. It costs me more than $3.99 of my time to file a complaint. But I’m willing to do a blog post about it. Anyone from Amazon listening?  

Living in Berkeley is really getting my legs, heart and lungs in shape. On yesterday’s walk I decide to go straight up, from the top of Solano Ave, to see how far I could get. Well, I went all the way up to Grizzly Peak Blvd, it’s straight up for about 2 miles. I’m pretty psyched, but I have no idea what I can do to top that. That’s the toughest hike around here. Coming down was actually harder, my knees were all wobbly by the time I was back on flat land.  

I was telling a friend about an old psychadelic song from the 60s, wondering if the lyrics alone would help at all, then I found there was a video of the song up on YouTube. Voila.  

The Rojas-Winer-Calacanis podcast device 

Michael Gartenberg made a list for the Rojas-Winer-Calacanis podcast device. Peter responded positively to my query, so we’re going to meet on the 21st, here in Berkeley, to talk about the device. I agree with many of the things Michael says, but there are some I strenuously object to. And there are others I’d add to the list. I’ll explain.

First, did you think I’d really go for no RSS? You gotta be kidding. That’s the whole point. The trick to these devices is to simplify, to remove features, and having it be an RSS aggregator simplifies it a whole lot.

Since we agree that it should have built-in wifi capability, why should it have USB? USB may be a little faster, but if I can save money and space by only having one communication interface, then I’m going that way. I don’t see myself pushing content from a desktop or laptop to the device, I see it downloading on its own over wifi. I do think I’m going to have to tell it what to subscribe to over the interface, the podcast discovery mechanism really has to be on a system with a rich user interface. Wifi has plenty of bandwidth for that kind of communication.

I agree that it’s a good idea to stay lean and mean, but I don’t accept a premise that says we have to make this work with less resources than Apple and Microsoft. Peter, Jason and myself are designers, not bankers nor are we manufacturers. That’s why there are banks and plenty of Asian companies that can make devices to spec. We just need a good business person with chutzpah to rep us. I don’t think there’s any shortage of chutzpah between the three of us. Why can’t we raise $100 million to make this baby? I know John Doerr’s phone number. We used to be neighbors.

One thing’s for sure, if I have any say about this, we’re going to zig where Apple and Microsoft are zagging. At the first sign of DRM, I’m out. It’s amazing that they left this door open. The guys from Hollywood can threaten us, but my podcasts are free for copying, as are all their podcasts, as are all podcasts. This is a podcast device, so it has no DRM. Period. Non-negotiable.

Another zig to their zag, which I think is a good idea, is a reasonably open design process. I don’t want to do it completely open, because there are parasites out there (wish there weren’t) so any really non-obvious ideas will stay off the blogs. But having a healthy public discussion is a good thing, it will make our podcast device a more powerful, more competitive product.

Phil Thompson suggests a fractional horsepower HTTP server. Of course. Doh!

Thomas Beutel chimes in.

WSJ debate 

I’m participating in a Wall Street Journal debate today. It’s an interesting process, better than the usual interview, because you get to form complete thoughts, and they have to run them verbatim. I can’t say what we’re debating, or who my adversary is, you’ll see all that when the debate is published (online only). But I’m having a good time with this.

Scripting News for 11/29/2006

Naked Jen: “Last night I was out with some friends and one of them has been blogging on a site hosted by Scriptwriting Magazine. I guess their system and servers crashed and he lost his entire blog and all his posts. He’s only been blogging since September, but still! Everything is gone!” 

Confirmed, Apple does not claim the term podcast.  

The University of North Carolina is looking for a professor to teach blogging in the J-school.  

Paul Boutin: How to fight with other bloggers. 

Al Jazeera: Kim to lose iPod privileges. 

I just joined eBay. I know, what took me so long. Anyway, I’m bidding on something, and want to be notified by SMS or IM, and thought I’d use Skype (eBay bought it for $2.6 billion) but it isn’t an option. That’s pretty amazing. You’d think the Skype guys would have some sway over there. You can use PayPal (another big eBay acquisition) to pay for what you buy. 

Phil Wolff: “Dave, the reason Skype doesn’t offer Skype alerting is that Skype doesn’t operate a web service or offer a ‘naked Skype’ client or a Skype server that can talk through the Skype P2P network.” 

Speaking of eBay, I was wondering if The Wire character, Wee Bey, was named after eBay. He was kind of a nice guy, if you like mass murderers. :-) 

Postscript: I bought a Cobalt Qube for $125 on eBay! 

Speaking of buying things, Edgeio just bought Adaptive Real Estate Services. You heard it here first! :-) 

Guy Kawasaki: “You should become a venture capitalist after you’ve had the shiitake kicked out of you.” 

Sal Taylor Kydd, the head of product for Yahoo TV thanks you for your feedback on the new site. In the meantime I switched to TV Guide, which compares favorably to the old Yahoo TV site. There’s a lesson here, one that I learned in 1984, when I shipped a new product with less functionality than the one it replaced. Make sure that the new version is better than the old one, users do notice.  

John Furrier: “Saying that startups will burst when Google crashes is like saying that increase in interest rates will burst the housing bubble.” 

Caroline McCarthy at News.com says that Mike Arrington could use a copy editor. I was thinking the other way, that TechCrunch has lost soemthing now that it’s more than Arrington. There was a charm to TC when it was just MA sledding downhill at 80,000 MPH on the seat of his pants. 

Stock Market 101 

Yesterday’s bit about Bubble Burst 2.0 got a lot of response, interestingly none of it from proponents of the bubble, i.e. analysts or investors who have a stake in perpetuating the bubble (note, I do myself, but I’m famous for shooting off my mouth even when it costs me money).

And it seems that some others who comment are missing something about the stock market. Stock prices absolutely do matter, when you’re talking about bubbles, because that’s what bubbles are made of. Yes, a stock price is a pure product of group-think, but the whole economy is a product of group-think. If people liked freezing their asses off, real estate in the Colorado Rockies would be more expensive than real estate on the ocean in Florida. Wait a minute. Okay, you see the humor, I hope.

When the bubble bursts, that which was valuable yesterday is worthless today. Or worth less (much). That’s what bubbles are all about.

And yes indeed, non-public companies have P/E ratios. The price of the stock is the price at the last transaction. Whether it’s public or not determines the liquidity of the stock and whether bloggers and reporters know the price and can kibitz about it.

But with all the regulation these days, at least in the US, you do eventually find out the price, after a company is purchased by a public company.

Header graphics in random order

Scripting News for 11/28/2006

Thomas Hawk: “I’m scared of Google’s stock price.” 

Yahoo says they improved Yahoo TV, but imho, they broke it. The listings page, which until today was the only page I knew or cared about (they just added a bunch of community features) took a few seconds to load, now it’s an Ajax thing, and it loads as you scroll. Great. There’s a delay every time I hit Page Down. Now instead of finding out if there’s anything on in seconds it takes minutes. That’s an improvement? 

Mark Cuban explains why it’s going to be a long time before our computers connect up to our HD TVs in HD. 

Wes Felter says that “most people” don’t want to connect their computers to a TV. Well, most people, in the day in horses and buggies, didn’t want to ride in an internal combustion engine-driven mobility device, but today it’s impossible to live in modern society without using the darned things. I want to connect my Mac to a TV, and in fact I bought a Mac just to be part of my home entertainment system, and Wes, get this, I watch it a lot more than I watch the danged settop box, even though my Mac can’t produce an HD signal, and I love HD. Go figure. Maybe I can do things with my Internet-connected Mac that I can’t do with a settop box? Wes, open your mind, stop thinking about connecting PCs to TVs and think of computers that are part of a home entertainment system, and it’ll all of a sudden start making sense. Even better, spring for a few hundred bucks and get a Mac Mini, and stare at the the back of it and the back of your TV for a few minutes and you’ll see what’s missing. Or save yourself a few bucks and re-read Cuban’s piece and think he’s a smart guy instead of a dumb asshole.  

New feature. Every time I save Scripting News, the content system chooses a header graphic from the collection of 78 previous graphics. It’s random. You never know what you’re going to get. (Update: I found a 79th. I expect I’ll keep finding them for a while. I wasn’t always so careful about noting the new ones.) 

And then there are the header graphics that never ran. Like this blowup of the white on orange XML icon. An inversion of my grandfather and his friends. A Thomas Hawk masterpiece. 

Emily Shurr of News.com thinks Hedy Lamarr should be one of the ten girl geeks. Makes total sense.  

BBC: “Blogs and other internet sites should be covered by a voluntary code of practice similar to that for newspapers in the UK, a conference has been told.” 

Paul Boutin offers “a couple of rules I learned in my career as an evil mainstream media writer.” 

Bubble Burst 2.0 

In the late 90s, the period of irrational exuberance, we knew the end would come, and we knew what the end would look like — a stock market crash of the dotcom sector. So, if Web 2.0 is a bubble, and if like all bubbles it bursts, how will we know when it happens?

I almost wrote a piece yesterday saying that since the Web 2.0 companies aren’t going public, they’re safe from busting in a visible, dramatic way. I almost said it will be hard to tell when the bust comes, it’ll be softer and slower, you won’t hear a crash or even a pop. But I was wrong, and today we got the first rumblings of the shock that will signal the end of the bubble.

Google stock will crash. That’s how we’ll know.

When I realized this, I should have known, because I’ve been saying for almost a year that Web 2.0 is nothing more than an aftermarket for Google. Startups slicing little bits of Google’s P/E ratio, acting as sales reps for Google ads, and getting great multiples for the revenue they generate by fostering the creation of new UGC to place ads on. When Google crashes, that’s the end of that, no more wave to ride, no more aftermarket, Bubble Burst 2.0. And the flip of this is also true — as long as Google’s stock stays up, no bubble burst.

Scripting News for 11/27/2006

MSNBC: “NBC News is characterizing Iraq conflict as civil war; White House denies” 

Wired News: “The Zune only frees up tunes for a limited free sampling period — a policy that actually interferes with the rights of artists who want people to share their works freely.” 

Al Jazeera in the US? 

One of my favorite podcasts is On The Media. It’s irreverent, funny, timely, intelligent, flattering, even a little flirty. It comes out every Friday afternoon, and I always take my Saturday walk with OTM. Always good food for thought.

Two weeks ago they had two fantastic segments, one about Lou Dobbs, the iconoclast preacher of closed borders, the imitation-journalist of CNN, and the other about the English-language version of the Arab news network Al Jazeera, and get this, one of their anchors, Dave Marish, a semi-famous US journalist, is Jewish! They interviewed Marish, and he speaks right to me about the need for understanding, and I think it’s amazing that the Arabs have hired a Jew to speak English for them.

It might seem like a small thing, but a very large segment of the Muslim world doesn’t speak Arabic, and the only common language they have is English. In Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, they get their news in English and now Al Jazeera, speaking with an American accent, will be there. Will it be different from the Al Jazeera they see in the Middle East? Yes, according to the OTM report, it will be.

It’s good news for world peace, so it seems, but if you want to watch Al J in English in the US, you’re can only get it on the Internet. They haven’t been able to get distribution on any American cable or satellite networks. I’d love to hear an explanation why. Surely it can’t because they’re partisan or represent the views of terrorists? If that were true, and I kid you not, I’m not joking, they’ll have to stop carrying Bush and Cheney who have wasted a lot more people than any of the terrorists they carry on Al Jazeera. We need to hear other points of view. The Judith Miller fiasco proved that even the most prestigious and supposedly courageous journalists in the US are owned by the defense industry.

This seems to be a commercial decision that we, as customers, may be able to influence.

Scripting News for 11/26/2006

How to Make Money on the Internet, the podcast.  

MAKE: Open Source MP3 Player Kit. 

Jason Calacanis wonders if a Rojas-designed podcast player makes sense. I predicted this would occur to the Engadget folk at some point, that they have a better idea of where a product category should go than the designers they cover. It’s an instance of the paradox that it’s easier for a user to become a manufacturer than it is for a manufacturer to become a user. For what it’s worth, a Winer-Rojas collaboration would be even better, imho.  

A slow day in Berkeley with the Andrews family. 

Scripting News for 11/25/2006

Rebecca Blood interview with Scott Rosenberg. 

Scripting News for 11/24/2006

Podcast interview with Cecile Andrews about her new book.  

The University of California is looking for a dean of their graduate school of journalism.  

Doc Searls suggests that Google do something with Blogger. “Have a real market relationship with its most serious bloggers — and not just with advertisers,” says the Doc. 

I gotta hand it to Evan Williams. He gets a hand job from the NY Times when he starts an ill-conceived podcasting company with millions of VC dollars (”We’re going to let people do what they do and we’ll see what they do and hope they do it a lot.”), and after the company fails, another hand job from the Times. What are they so impressed with I sure don’t know. 

I’ve now completed Season 3 of The Wire. Bring on Season 4! 

Joel Spolsky: “In the early nineties Microsoft looked at IBM, especially the bloated OS/2 team, as a case study of what not to do; somehow in the fifteen year period from 1991 - 2006 they became the bloated monster that takes five years to ship an incoherent upgrade to their flagship product.” 

The secret to a juicy turkey: Cook it upside down. The breasts are the part you have to keep moist, and if you cook the turkey with the breasts up, they get the most heat, and cook faster than the legs (which have to get hotter to get fully cooked) and gravity works against you (the juices go down, on to the back, which doesn’t have much meat). But putting the breasts down, they cook more slowly and the juices sink down into the breasts, keeping them moist. Works every time, producing a deliciously juicy turkey.  

Scripting News for 11/23/2006

Something to think about: RSS Remote Control. 

Thanksgiving 1.0 

I’m thankful that some things don’t change, they stay the same, although over time it’s possible to get better at doing them.

Here’s a toast to Thanksgiving, and a prayer that no one tries to improve on it. The version we got is just fine, thank you.

Even though the basic idea doesn’t change, nor the implementation, there will be a fire in the fireplace this year, as in years past, this year the entertainment (football, movies, parades) will be in high-def, and the music will be 5.1 surround sound. Our ancestors never had it so good!

There’s a new version of the Beatles, but Yesterday is still a great song, and George Harrison’s guitar gently weeps, for George himself, we imagine.

“I said something wrong, so now I long for yesterday.”

Thanksgiving in Berkeley is a fine holiday. Our free-range turkey, raised in open air and sunshine, will be in the oven soon. The stuffing and soup are made, everything spicy in remembrance of New Orleans. The stuffing has frankfurters in it, a family tradition started (as far as I know) by my German grandmother, Lucy Schmidt Kiesler. A blue hydrangea will be on the dinner table, provided by her daughter, my mother. And guests will bring pies, cranberry sauce, salads, firewood, wine, board games.

“Picture yourself in a boat on a river.”

In other parts of America it will be raining and cold, even snowing. I remember a Thanksgiving in Madison in a blizzard, the first of the year, a premonition of the hardness to come, but soft in the way a first snow is soft.

Thanksgiving is the American passover, the dinner our seder. We eat a big meal and then go out for a walk. Hello there! Happy holiday. We give thanks for all that we have been given, for the good life we live here. America the nation of the world, pauses once a year to be thankful, before looking forward to the new year that’s right around the corner.

“Sun sun sun here we come.”

Maybe this time next year we will be at peace. Maybe all our children will be safe next year, maybe we will have learned to listen, not just to each other, not just to everyone else in the world, but to ourselves, to our hearts.

Here we go! Thanksgiving 1.0, now and always.

Thanks!

Werner Vogels on the Dutch election

Dave, you’ll probably get a kick out of this: today there were parliamentary elections in the Netherlands. It is a multiparty system with about 15 parties competing for people votes. The government is always a collation and it has been christen-democrats + liberals for the past 6 years or even longer. Keep in mind that liberals are considered right-wing in the Netherlands. There are 150 seats in the house of representatives and it is common for the largest party to not have more than 35-40 seats.

Anyway, one of the more popular politicians is Jan Marijnissen, the leader of the SP - Socialistische Partij (Socialist Party). The SP are the hard core socialists, with strong ties to the labor organizations and very principled when it comes to taking care of the disadvantaged in the society. Traditionally the PvdA (Labor Party) was considered to be the representative of the blue collar work force, but they have been too centric and too compromising in the past decade to play this role.

Jan Marijnissen is a blogger (http://www.janmarijnissen.nl/). He embraced blogging 2-3 years ago and will write the entries himself and respond to comments himself also. He motivated the whole party to embrace the internet as one of their main communication channels and they produced a continuous stream of podcasts and videos and used collaboration tools to coordinate the grassroots organization on which the party is built.

Marijnissen’s appeal is mainly that he is a very principled, honest politician. People feel that they can trust him, and his accessibility through his weblog has been a main tool in directly connecting and responding to voters.

Marijnissen’s party went from 9 seats to 26 seats in today’s election, becoming the 3rd largest party. This kind of increase in number of seats is unheard of in the Netherlands and has earthquake like implications for the political landscape. The first reports all analyze this victory 1) people in the Netherlands still care very much for “equality” 2) the SP was really able connect to voters and the internet was an important channel for that. Many talk about that it actually gave them a strategic advantage and that even the were considered a small party, they got equal attention of the old-media because the use of internet channels.

regards, just thought you would enjoy this,

Werner