Scripting News for 11/22/2006

Werner Vogels on the Dutch election. Blogs are playing a big role in Netherlands politics. (Vogels is Amazon’s CTO.) 

Fresh Air interviewed Ed Burns of The Wire today. They play a clip with one of the most terrifying Season 4 characters, a kid who kills people with a nail gun. The salesman in a hardware store explains the product to him, in the opening scene of the season, as it dawns on him that he’s selling a murder weapon to the kid.  

Kevin Murphy, via email, says the nasty murdering kid is actually played by a girl!  

New toys arrived today from Amazon. 1. Bluetooth mouse. 2. Logitech surround-sound speakers. The new music, below, sounds really cool on the new hardware, and one less wire on the desktop is nice too. :-) 

I pre-ordered Love, the re-mix of Beatles stuff, by George Martin. I couldn’t stand the wait, so I downloaded it through BitTorrent, as I imagine many people are doing. Listening now. Some of it is very weird, but it’s also generally really good. You could almost imagine that they might have mixed the music this way the first time around. Of course it’s controversial. :-) 

It’s got a heart-breaking rendition of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, one of George Harrison’s anthems. Anyone who says this album is bad has no fucking heart. 

And I hired a wiring company to install Ethernet between the den downstairs and the office upstairs. They did a professional job, at each end is a wall plate that I plug the cable into. I bought another Netgear router for the office upstairs, so now we’re styling. Now I gotta hire a Berkeley-based programmer (I have someone in mind), and we’re off and running.  

Kevin Tofel: “I’ve already got podcasts on the Zune and it was a simple matter to be honest.” 

Dylan: “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.” 

Scoble explains the diff betw TechCrunch and Valleywag. 

The Wire peaked sometime in Season 3 

I’m now just beginning the fourth season of The Wire, the one that’s currently being shown on HBO. Somewhere in the third season something changed, and the plot no longer surprised. The great thing about the first two seasons is that you had to watch every scene carefully and tune into every single word, because the damn thing moved so quickly, and the plots were so tricky, and rich, the betrayal so delicious, by everyone from the police to the drug kingpins and the stevedores and the Greeks and Russians, everyone is so damned evil on this show, and death comes so quickly, one second in the middle of a conversation the character is apparently just passing the time and boom, he’s dead, and that’s it, never to be seen again. And sometimes you can see it coming, episodes in advance.

There are no flashbacks, time marches forward relentlessly, they never go back and explain what happened, if you missed it, you missed it. That is until season 3 when it loses its edge. You can wash the dishes, flip through a B&H catalog, eat some soup, all without missing a thing. There were times when I wanted to turn the damn thing off, or just skip to the end of an episode, I was so disappointed. This doesn’t seem to appear in the reviews of the show, or did it? Maybe it’s just me, and I figured it out, and it no longer has the power to suprise?

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t delicious moments in season 3, there are. But the first two seasons are the best TV I’ve ever seen.

Mike Arrington is wrong on this one 

And so is Jason Calacanis.

First, read this bit by Mike, who takes Nick Denton apart for daring to challenge some assumptions that Jason Calacanis has left out there, just aching to be challenged.

Now Mike is wrong in so many ways, I don’t think I’ll be able to list them all, but I’ll try.

First, there’s nothing wrong with what Nick did. Jason is a public figure and made a lot of public statements about netscape.com, most of which weren’t examined more than superficially, and as long as Nick discloses that they are competitors, in case anyone is confused about where he’s coming from, he can say whatever he wants. I thought the question he raised deserved a straight answer from Jason, without the obfuscation that came from both Mike and Jason.

Did the experiment at netscape.com work? My guess is that it didn’t. Why? First, for the obvious reason, people don’t quit so quickly when their latest venture was a success. If it worked (and note that Jason doesn’t say that it did) why quit so soon? Because there’s new management at AOL? With all due respect to Jason, that doesn’t make much sense to me.

Denton asked the only question worth asking, and backed up the answer with numbers. If Jason has other numbers, let’s see them. I want to learn what worked and what didn’t because I’m always thinking up new things to do with the Internet, and it helps to know what other people’s experiences were. The new Valleywag (which Mike disses, and I don’t think he’s right about that either) is providing that new service, where the old one just focused on who’s zooming who, as if Silicon Valley was some kind of Hollywood. I lived in Silicon Valley for 20+ years, and trust me, there’s not much to report on there.

And Mike, isn’t it good that Nick is focusing on business instead of the salacious stuff? Wouldn’t it be nice to go to the bathroom at a conference and not worry about whether your sanitary habits might appear in Valleywag (true or not). Maybe Mike is protesting because the new Valleywag is getting a little close to TechCrunch? Nahh, couldn’t be.

Note that Nick has more or less said he’s aiming Valleywag at TechCrunch. So when Mike gives Nick grief for challenging a competitor well, Mike ought to be careful about that, because he appears to be doing the same thing.

And finally, I’m glad someone is digging in on these things. The more this happens, the more likely that bullshit is exposed, quickly — the more careful people will be with slinging bullshit. And believe me, Silicon Valley has no shortage of that!

Postscript: I think the world of Mike and Jason. They’re both great guys. Alan Kay once said the Macintosh was the first computer worth criticizing. Jean-Louis Gassee said that as the monkey climbs the tree, the more people can see his derriere. Mike is at the top of the tree these days, what he says matters. And I say competition is good, it keeps you on your toes, and no one loves you as much as your competitor. And I also say it’s good to take a break once in a while, to get your thoughts in order. I love talking with both of these guys, they’re smart, they’re curious, and they learn. Both of them would be more than welcome at the Bronx Science for Adults. And I don’t know Nick as well, but I suspect he would be too.

Scripting News for 11/21/2006

FeedYourZune is a “full featured RSS reader and Podcast Media Player.” 

Flickr has an opinion about the most popular cameras.  

Scripting News for 11/20/2006

Doc Searls: “As a photographer, I have a relationship with Flickr. Not with Yahoo.” 

Ethan Zuckerman, a former colleague at Berkman, on a yesterday’s outline of a “Bronx Science for Adults.” Maybe this should be a Berkman spinoff. Not kidding about that. A deliberate attempt to congregate creative people in a collaborative fashion is something worth revisiting, now that we have an Internet.  

Mike Arrington: “Great late-night conversation with intelligent people is a lot more interesting that the hallway chatter at the latest conference.” Amen. 

I like Sunday Brunch conversations with intelligent people more than late-night conversations, morning person that I am. :-) 

BTW, over the last month I’ve watched all the previous episodes of Entourage and am now in the middle of season 3 of The Wire, two fantastic and reality-altering HBO series. I find the world of inner-city Baltimore so captivating, but I’m glad to be watching it from this side of the LCD.  

A question you can’t easily ask the Internet today. “Where can I buy firewood as a function of price and distance from where I am now?” I invested in Confabb because it’s that kind of no-nonsense obviously useful idea that the tech industry so often overlooks. Another one that I’d invest in, in an instant: An easy accounting system for small business or home users. I want to be able to pay bills (already can do this at my bank), and categorize the expenses, and have the same data available through the web, to my accountant. Same with income. When I describe this, people say “Quicken.” But geez come on, it’s not web based and it’s not easy. I want to be able to enter an expense no matter where I am. That’s the secret for detail-averse people like myself, make it painless.  

Another example of the relative information poverty we live in now. There’s no easy way for me to get a list of all the local shopping malls and the stores within. You have to ask friends for that information. We’re still living in the word of mouth era. Yeah it’s a lot better than it was ten or twenty years ago, but we still have a long way to go. 

Too bad they don’t still make the Cobalt Qube. I could really use one now. Maybe the Mac Mini is as close as you get these days. The cool thing about the Qube was that you really didn’t need a keyboard, mouse or screen to make it work. Here’s a picture of the back of the machine. The little LCD readout was used for one thing only, to set the IP address of the box. They could have even done it without that, by booting up with a DHCP-determined address, and then letting you enter the IP address in a web form (probably causing the server to reboot). That one little accomodation to user input was all it needed. Here’s a picture of a man holding the Qube, to give you an idea of how small it was.  

Valleywag: “Netscape visitors, most of whom only stuck with the neglected portal out of habit, were the worst subjects possible for Jason’s radical experiment.” 

Another reason why college papers are worth reading — they aren’t owned by media companies.  

Scripting News for 11/19/2006

Crazy Bob: 802.11n on OS X? Not yet. 

NY Times: “Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who regularly advises President Bush on Iraq, said today that a full military victory was no longer possible there.” 

Where is the Bronx Science for adults? 

The best thing about going to Bronx Science, for me, was being in daily contact with really smart and creative people my own age. That’s what I keep looking for, as an adult.

I didn’t quite find it at Harvard, what I found there was permission to be creative, which is more than Silicon Valley gives, but I didn’t find other people who were creating in the same way I was, or who could appreciate what I was creating, or whatever — not sure, but the connections didn’t get made. I’m watching a PBS special about Aaron Copland, and he found that kind of collegial creativity, in New York, in the early-mid 20th century.

Hanging out here with Doc Searls for a couple of days last week was like what I’m looking for, but I want ten Docs, and I want to be around them 200 days a year, developing ideas across disciplines. This is what my soul yearns for, not fame, or wealth, more like fullfillment.

Scripting News for 11/18/2006

Maryam: “My aim is to make Ponzi blush.” 

BTW, one of my 2006 predictions sort-of came true this week. “Jason Calacanis will stay at AOL though Easter 2006.” Okay, I was off by a few months. And a whole bunch didn’t come true. Example: “Scoble will appear on Oprah. His book on corporate blogging will top all the best seller lists, his royalties will eclipse his Microsoft salary, but he’ll stay there, because it’s in his blood.” :-) 

Yucky peanut butter 

First, Yahoo’s stock is doing okay, the company is growing and profitable.

It’s also diversified, which is another way of saying everything that the memo complains about.

They have turf battles and they duplicate each others’ work. In other words, Yahoo is a big company.

There is no way to make them lean and focused, that’s not how big companies work. Sheez, some small companies have a hard time being lean and focused.

Yahoo should continue to buy their innovation from outside, because that’s where innovation comes from.

What Yahoo may need is someone who can speak for them, who can give an exciting speech, who can lead all the external forces, and internal ones too. What they may be missing is an eloquent founder-type who, when people need to settle a difference, can come in and make the choice. At Microsoft, in the old days when Microsoft worked, people could ask themselves What Would Bill Do? Google has Larry and Sergey. Yahoo may need a leader. But they’ve got a pretty good foundation to build on. And they could probably go a long, long way without great leadership, since most American companies don’t have that.

And come on — bleeding in purple and yellow? Garlinghouse is a bad ripoff of Guy Kawasaki.

NY Times: “Yahoo has not been nearly as good as Google at reaping profits from the huge volume of search traffic it attracts.”

Mike Arrington calls it a “power move.”

Josh Allen: “Every company wishes that they could appeal to 50 million normal people and the 57,000 who read TechCrunch. Yahoo! has succeeded at this in two important categories.”

Scripting News for 11/17/2006

 

Scripting News for 11/16/2006

Sylvia Paull: Mr GNU meets Mr RSS. 

According to Mike Arrington, Jason Calacanis has left AOL. Hey Jason, I call dibs on doing a project with you now that you’re out of BigCoLand.  

Slate: “The new formats are doomed because shiny little discs will soon be history.” 

Sitemaps becomes a defacto standard 

I’ve been pretty busy the last couple of days, so I’ve had to wait to offer my support and congratulations to Microsoft, Yahoo and Google for getting together on a protocol that optimizes search engine crawlers called Sitemaps. It’s a simple format that should be easy for all the major tools to support. It helps improve the efficiency and currency of the web, good things of course, but it’s even better that big companies are working together instead of reinventing. This means that developers only have to support one mechanism.

Of course it’s pragmatic for Microsoft and Yahoo to get on board behind the leader in search, Google. But there have been many times when big companies have avoided such pragmatism, so they deserve our support and gratitude.

Now that the Dems control Congress 

I think having a Democratic Congress is cool, but it just pops off one level of lunacy. They’re still talking about Iraq like it’s a borough of NYC, both parties. I think I see what’s going to happen now — gradually Iran is taking over, waiting until they can announce that they have nukes. Eventually we’ll have to decide whether we want to fight a war with Iran or come home, defeated. The purpose of the Baker group is to spin it so that it’s not W’s fault, maybe even pin it on the Dems. We’re headed for some bad times, no way out of it, and I think they all know it, and they’re jockeying not to let the blame land on them.

So what’s the best outcome in Iraq? The Shi’ite part of Iraq will either become part of Iran or will be a client of Iran. The Sunni part will be annexed by Syria, and everyone will fight over Kurdistan. Now if I were a pessimist, I’d say that this is the place we’ll fight World War III, with lots of fronts opening up all over the world, including here in the US.

It was never an option for Iraq to become an American style democracy, I don’t think Bush and the neocons ever really believed that could happen. If they did, I would have loved to have seen the plan for that to come about. One thing you can hear in all the Washington spin is that no one is talking about democracy anymore. The next myth to explode is that Iraq actually has government. And we should stop shipping arms into Iraq, we’re just arming various sides of the civil war, and bringing about the death of more Iraqis.

When you watch Baker in motion, don’t think he’s working for you. He’s working for the Bush family, and more broadly, the Republican Party and the defense industry.

Scripting News for 11/15/2006

Wired interview with Gracenote co-founder and chief architect Steve Scherf.  

The stalk is gone? 

Valleywag, with a new writer, Gawker publisher Nick Denton, while missing some of the stalkiness (I know it’s not a word) of the previous version (like the bathroom habits of tech industry icons), is starting to provide some hard, useful data that helps fill in some of the blanks. Over the last few days we’ve gotten some fresh data about Google’s acquisition of Blogger, almost three years ago. And it’s starting to have an opinion about things that matter. Not sure if this is intentional, or if Nick wants appreciation, but no matter, I appreciate what he’s doing.

Something else Valleywag is now doing right — disclosing conflicts of interest. It always bothered me when they went after Jason Calacanis, whose Weblogs, Inc is a direct competitor of Gawker Media. They would never disclose that fact. In this piece they do.

Note to opml.org bloggers 

Something is wrong on the server, not sure what it is. I’m going to have another look in an hour or two. I just took a quick look and couldn’t immediately find the problem. Sorry for the outage.

Postscript: Found the problem, fixed it. The server had run out of disk space, and trashed some of its data as a result. Restored the damaged file from a backup.

Scripting News for 11/14/2006

The Zune of Steve’s eye 

I met with the people doing the Zune at Microsoft in the summer of 2004, when podcasting was gaining traction (in Seattle no less), but wasn’t showing on their radar yet. I explained how they could make their device a perfect podcast client. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking of course, but it seemed they weren’t convinced podcasting was real. Too bad, they could have made a simple product, not had to do any deals with Hollywood, and do an end-run around Apple, which still hasn’t made the corner turn to DRM-less media (which is one of the most profound things about podcasting, and no accident, I assure you).

A striking thing about that little section of Microsoft: pictures of Steve Jobs on doors, walls, bulletin boards, each with a quote from Steve below it. The pictures were there, I was told, to motivate them, and to remind them of their goal. The usual thing for Microsoft, a taillight chase.

One more thought, a question actually, does anyone know about the protocol that allows Zunes to share tunes with other Zunes? Is it open and clonable (ie, if I made a podcast device, could I use the protocol). And I suppose it’s naive to ask if it’s patented, but what the heck — is it?

Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times sheds some light.

Ryan Tate wonders if Zune is a developer platform.

Scripting News for 11/13/2006

Engadget: “Our experience with the first version of the Zune software this afternoon is much like that of many version 1 software experiences. It sucks.” 

Nick Douglas leaves Valleywag, you heard it here first.  

Sheila Lennon wonders what version of the web will they use on the Starship Enterprise. Beam me up! 

Nick Bradbury: “The Semantic Web may happen, but if it does, it’s going to be a helluva lot messier than the architects would like.” 

Google Blogoscoped: “I asked several bloggers about their most popular, or one of their most popular, blog posts.” 

Confabb 

TechCrunch on Confabb. “A new service launching today that offers a centralized place to find information about all kinds of conferences.”

First, an important disclaimer — I am an investor in Confabb. I believe in the product, it’s a simple but incredibly useful tool for conference managers, speakers, participants. I put together something much more limited than Confabb for the four conferences I have done, my tool was hard to use, and it was missing important features, but it worked. Next time I do a conference, I’ll use Confabb to organize it. You can find out who’s going to what sessions, see what other conferences people participated in, publish your own conference itinerary and look at those of your friends. It’s a metadata-rich application, kind of a no-brainer, you have to wonder why no one has done this before. When I saw it, I immediately recognized the power.

Examples: Le Web, TechCrunch party in NY, Web 2.0.

Scoble’s interview with Salim, recorded here in Berkeley yesterday, he explains just how awesome the product is.

Technorati linkage about Confabb.

The Confabb weblog.

Dueling Markoffs 

Imagine John Markoff on the banjo, playing with Tim O’Reilly also on the banjo, except Markoff calls his instrument Banjo 3.0, and you get some idea how surreal tech publishing has become. Markoff, theoretically the top technology journalist in the world, and O’Reilly who many believe publishes the best howto and reference books (I’m among them) seem to think somehow this BS matters! I know why O’Reilly wants to perpetuate the myth that anyone understands wtf Web 2.0 is, but why would Markoff and his NY Times bosses want to get into this fray? If you have a clue, please post a comment.

What a day! 

Yesterday was a super-interesting and sweet day here at The House that RSS Bought. First, NakedJen came over from Santa Cruz, and we went for a walk up and down and up the hill, then we took some (warning, not work-safe!) pictures here and Scoble and Patrick came over. Patrick and I went into the den to watch Ice Age 2, while his dad interviewed Jeff Ubois. Salim Ismail came over, he also did an interview with Scoble, and a demo (more on that later).

Jen showed me how to use my food processor (never been used) and then went back to Santa Cruz. The remaining partiers went down the hill for Chinese. I came back up, made some delicious carrot soup, easy with the food processor, then Sylvia called and I walked up the hill to her house to hang out with Richard Stallman and Henri Poole. I had never met Stallman, and contrary to his rep on the net, he’s a warm, considerate person, definitely with a very specific focus (free software) but very different from the way people portray him. A very interesting and stimulating Sunday in Berkeley!