Scripting News for 1/31/2007

Makezine, PT and today’s bomb scare in Boston 

There was a bomb scare in Boston today, the details are still sketchy, but on CNN they just said that the devices they discovered were part of a promotion for the Cartoon Network. And apparently a howto was published on Makezine.

If you work at CNN, Phil Torrone has more info on how this happened. Send him an email, pt at oreilly dot com, he’s a friendly guy.

This must be a first 

Telegraph: “There has mostly been silence from the big names, including ’superstar bloggers’ such as Dave Winer and Robert Scoble.”

The first time I’ve got a mention for saying nothing!?

There’s a simple reason for me having nothing to say about Vista — I don’t know anything about it. All attempts to be included in their public relations program have been met with silence.

What makes it better than XP? I hear they have some screens from people on Flickr. Beyond that, the browser, which already runs in XP, has mostly uninteresting RSS support.

$500 million of marketing can’t hide the fact that these days it’s hard to find anyone who cares about Windows.

Virtual hosting with S3 

Today I’m going to learn something about Amazon S3 that I’ve been planning on learning for a bit of time.

Virtual hosting is a feature that I asked for back in July of last year, and it turned out it had already been implemented.

It makes it possible to store static stuff up in Amazon space, instead of having to rent expensive server space, which I currently do. My server bills come to $1200 every month. I think I can get that down quite a bit, using Amazon, but first I have to figure out how this works.

1. I created a CNAME, pointing aws.scripting.com to s3.amazonaws.com. When I access this address, I get the error response, which is good, it’s what I expected. Next, I’ll create a bucket with the name aws.scripting.com, and put some files in it. There’s still part of the puzzle I don’t understand, which is what is to stop anyone else from creating a bucket with that name. How does S3 decide among several buckets with that name? (Right now there are none, so when I create one, that won’t be a problem.)

2. I’ve created the bucket, and uploaded a bunch of files, including one called lincoln.jpg. I’m getting AccessDenied as the error code now, even though (I thought) I created the bucket with full read-write access.

3. I’ve got the bucket working, thanks for lots of great help in today’s comments. Came across a Firefox add-on that makes it easy to browse and edit your S3 structure. It’s almost an end-user thing (add a Godaddy account for domain mapping and you’re there). Net-net, I couldn’t use it to host scripting.com because there’s no concept of a default file. Seems like such a small thing. However, I should be able to use it to offload a bunch of my static storage.

4:44PM: I’m moving over my first website to Amazon, an old static store, with early podcasts from the original crew, myself, Dawn & Drew and Adam Curry. We had big plans back then. I have a bunch of these sites, and as a result I should be able to retire one of my servers. Saving money, I hope.

The Flickr people are smart 

Thomas, I don’t want Flickr to do the dumb thing they’re proposing to do, but I figure when they actually do it, and I no longer can get into my account, that’s when I’ll raise a stink. I wonder if they really thought this through, by the way. I have a Flickr account that somehow I created accidentally that’s linked into my Yahoo account. How will we merge those two things? The old account is definitely the one I want to keep. In any case, the Flickr people are smart, and once they figure out how stupid this idea is, they won’t actually do it. Count on it.

BTW, not only are they smart, but they’re also nice! They won’t screw this one up.

Apple hides the app 

I wonder if anyone else has bought the $1.99 patch for Macs that enables 802.11n support. I just purchased it, and the order status page says “electronically delivered” but where was it electronically delivered? To me it feels like this is something I should have gotten through the software update mechanism, I’m not an accountant, but okay I paid the $1.99, now what? Any clues would be much appreciated.

Wes Felter offered a clue, there were no links in the email, but, on the Store website, the Your Account page has a section called Downloadable Software, and that’s where a link to the download could be found.

Scripting News for 1/30/2007

Matt Mullenweg on Snap: “I think this is one feature where what the masses want and what geeks prefer diverges pretty heavily.” 

MacNN: Apple pays $700,000 for bloggers’ legal fees. 

Fake Steve Jobs: “Well my friggin lawyers are advising me that I will have to shut down this scandalous old blog.” 

Freedom to Tinker: “Having long argued that customers can’t be trusted with MP3s, the industry will have to ask the same customers to use MP3s responsibly.” 

Denon’s NetAudio 

This morning I explored the NetAudio feature of my new Denon receiver, and found more new interesting ideas, fully implemented. Had Apple done this first, we would all have raved about how they were reinventing home audio, what Denon is doing is that good, with the usual caveat that the user interface is at best workable and at worst — slow and ugly. But it works, and that amazes me.

The first thing I did was visit the central website, radiodenon.com, enter the MAC address of the receiver, which I got from the attached devices page of my Netgear router. It needs to know the address because once a day the receiver checks with this website to see if I’ve updated my favorites, and the ID it uses is the MAC address. Then I browse through the directory, by geography, by format or by language, and added my usual favorites, WBUR, WNYC, KCRW, WJCT. And a few new ones, including Virgin Radio and the DNA Lounge. Now I’m going to wait 24 hours and come back and see if my receiver knows about it.

In the meantime, I found that there’s a minimal directory available through the fractional horsepower HTTP server in the receiver itself. I navigated through its menus, and chose WBUR, my favorite Boston radio station. Now I feel like I’m at Berkman, living in Newton, and getting ready to dig some snow!

Dear Ted 

Your geeks are taking both of us for a ride.

I was subscribing to your feed, generally reading all your updates, and now I see the feed moved.

I was going to post a note saying that it would be better if you redirected to the new feed, but then I saw that your new feed isn’t RSS, to which I ask — why??

Do you want to lose subscribers?

Because that’s what happened. I can’t read your feed anymore Ted. I’ll survive, but I will miss your posts.

You and I both have gray beards, and we knew each other when we were young lads. And that wasn’t so long ago!

Isn’t life too short to keep breaking things that work?

Your pal, Dave

Very nice integration 

I am working on a contract, so I’m sending back and forth lots of DOC format files, and this morning I noticed something nice, that works really well. I’m a Gmail user, and now there’s a link when you’re looking at an attachment that allows you to open it in their browser-based word processor. It’s by far the most convenient of the three links, esp since I don’t have a desktop word processor that reliably opens Word files. Since I’m so often critical of Google I thought it was important to say “Good job” when they do something that’s nice for users.

Scripting News for 1/29/2007

Kampala Monitor: “Ugandan bloggers choose funky, strange names for their blogs.” 

Paul Boutin: “Good stories don’t have to be true.” 

Scott Rosenberg wrote a lengthy profile of Charles Simonyi in this month’s issue of Technology Review, a magazine edited by Jason Pontin. Pontin has a piece in today’s NY Times that is eerily similar to the Rosenberg piece.  

ZDNet: Microsoft copies BlueJ, admits it, then patents it. 

According to CNET, Microsoft is withdrawing the patent. 

Morning coffee notes 

I thought I would get more pushback on the piece I wrote about Carter and American Jews. However, I did get an email from my father, and in the ensuing exchange I found that he had been updating his blog. I was subscribed to it, so it was a puzzle — why had I not been getting the updates?

Probably has something to do with the feed being managed by Google, and they’re pushing the envelope, changing syndication formats, and my aggregator isn’t being maintained to keep in synch. So it seems to me that possibly Google has come between us. If so, bad Google.

So I’ll let my father, Leon Winer, speak for himself on the Palestinians and Jews, Carter and Israel; without comment.

Scripting News for 1/28/2007

There’s a new quote in the right margin, from a 2005 white paper written by Tim O’Reilly. It’s one of the most accurate paragraphs on the origins of RSS, even though the chronology is a little wrong. The term “Really Simple Syndication” didn’t come until 2002, and the confluence came in 1999, not 1997. But more importantly, the beginning moment for RSS is 1997, and RSS 0.91 was the result of the joining of two forks, which is a unique moment in the evolution of formats. Usually they splinter, they don’t coalesce. 0.91 grew into 0.92 and then 2.0, which is the format most people use today.  

I don’t read Wikipedia pages on subjects that I’m close to, and I never go near my bio page, but sometimes I come across discussion about it in the blogosphere. Mark Bernstein says someone wants to delete my bio. Not sure that would be a good or bad thing.  

Steven Levy is looking for the best tech writing of 2006.  

Every week or so the crowd that’s gathered around TechMeme goes crazy about something. Last week it was social networking and press releases and how some people get it and others don’t (as in I get it and he doesn’t). Do you care? So many do. Today it’s something even more inane. I had a long talk with Gabe Rivera on Thurs night. Blogs are great, I said to Gabe, because they’re not mail lists. The problem with TechMeme is that it drives blogs into becoming a mail list, where everyone feels compelled to comment on whatever inanity is driving the herd at the current moment. It doesn’t much matter what the topic is, as long as you get heard (sorry for the pun). To which I say, bleh, that ain’t what blogs are about senors and senoritas.  

Scripting News for 1/27/2007

Jimmy Carter’s book 

I haven’t read Jimmy Carter’s new book yet, but I have heard a few interviews with him on public radio, and I have read a bunch of stuff written about his book by people I respect, and I don’t know what it is about Jews, but when it comes to Israel they lose all sense of perspective. Do they think the Palestinians are entitled to a point of view? Imagine for a moment if you were a Palestinian. Might the treatment you’ve received by Israel feel just a bit like apartheid?

I think Carter is doing us a service, giving us a chance to see things from another perspective, and it’s so disappointing to see otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people, including at least one person I respect enormously, refuse to consider the possibility that Carter makes a valid point. How are we going to get to peace if we don’t see things from everyone’s point of view? Come on Phillip, give it another chance. If I had been at your party, it wouldn’t have been unanimous.

This is something I don’t agree with my parents about, either. When it comes to Israel all reasonableness goes out the window. I don’t feel very good about this. I was raised to think Jews are smarter than everyone else, but when it comes to Israel, we’re pretty damned thoughtless.

Morning coffee notes 

I don’t understand identity conferences. I went to one yesterday, and sat down at three sessions, listened for a bit, then got up because I had no idea what they were talking about. Funny thing is I don’t think most of the people at these events are technical, but they’ve invented a jargon that they use in fast-spoken sentences and I have no idea what the language means. Not saying they should change, but I can’t get over the hurdle to figure out what if anything I can contribute.

Doc says they need a Dave Winer, but I don’t think he understands that the reason I was able to make RSS 2.0 stick was that for a brief period I controlled all sides of the technology and could create consensus over a cup of coffee, with myself. I could have a conference in the morning, write the code in the afternoon, and ship it the next day. Seems there’s no equivalent opportunity in identity, which was already a contentious, fractured and divided world, before the Internet even existed.

Which brings me to Phil Windley, a congenial fellow, I don’t know him very well, but I know him well enough to shake hands and look him the eye and be glad to see him and see that he’s glad to see me. We’re about the same age, and I thought of similar minds, until the subject got around to Bush and the war in Iraq. Phil lives in Utah, and is very Republican and very different from me. Now what I’d like to do with our differences is have a conference about that, and balance it, one Berkeleyite to every Utahan. Let’s spend a few days, in Utah first, skiing at Park City. Pair up, a congenial older lefty like me, and a congenial older righty like Phil. Ride up on the lifts together. Ski down groomed slopes at Deer Valley. Then we all have a buffet dinner every evening and compare notes. In 2007, in today’s political climate, I think we could really get something done.

My new Denon receiver is really tied into Windows, but because it also has an HTTP interface, I can program it from my Mac laptop. That made me think how Apple benefits from the openness of others. Suppose Denon were like Apple, and made a closed box, then I would be pissed because I’d have to use my Sony laptop to control it, but I would use the Sony, even though I prefer to use the Mac. The idea of user choice isn’t about good or bad, heaven or hell, it’s really pragmatic. Being open creates opportunities for companies like Apple, it allows them to coexist with monopolies like Windows, to develop a superior product, even though another company has dominant market share. Maybe someday Apple will dominate, but that day will likely be a bad day for open interfaces because while Apple benefits from the openness of others, they themselves aren’t willing to leave the door open for others.

A good acid test of openness. My software runs on Mac OS X. I’d like to run my software on my iPod. I can’t. In my humble opinion, that’s too damned bad, because I’d do some great stuff with it that Apple could copy, and make a market out of. It would not only be great if they opened it up, but if there were also economic incentives for me to pour my heart into their platform. Like Steve Jobs, I like to make money. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Whatever happened to that beautiful idea.

At dinner the other day we were talking about conferences and we got around to Gnomedex. I thought of something nice, it made me smile. Gnomedex is the only show that invites me to speak, year after year, without me having to ask. That says something special about Chris and Ponzi. I’m really not a bad guy, I bathe regularly, I listen when people talk, when I talk I try to give people something to think about. So I conclude that Ponzi and Chris aren’t scared to ask the people who come to Gnomedex to do all that. Having realized that, I didn’t think I should let it pass without thanking them. Thanks!!

On Thursday at the PaidContent mixer in SF, I met a guy, talking with Susan Mernit, who, in the past, there had been er ahem, difficulties with. I said hello, paid him a small compliment on something he had done since, and was surprised that he wanted to talk. We had a good back and forth, shared some ideas, and I offered my hand, saying, you know we’ve had some problems in the past, but I don’t have a need to perpetuate that. He said me too. That made the whole evening worth it. It was a big noisy room, but not too bad. You could do some business there.

Scripting News for 1/26/2007

The HTTP interface for my new receiver. Sure, it’s ugly, but it works! Geek dream realized. Ha! 

Observation on my new stereo — it’s the first time in 35 years that I’ve had a stereo that’s good enough to sit and listen to and do nothing else. When I was a teen, I had a great (for the day) stereo, and young ears that could hear all the highs and lows. Now, I’m listening to a sound system that is so incredibly great you can feel the quality in your bones, even if my ears can’t now grasp all the greatness. Quite unplanned, I find myself sitting here listening to the Beatles’ White Album and it’s so sweet. That the music is playing from a 160GB disk that I paid $99 for at Best Buy would have been hard for 16-year-old Dave to comprehend. He didn’t even know what a byte was! 

Insider Higher Ed: “While plenty of professors have complained about the lack of accuracy or completeness of [Wikipedia] entries, and some have discouraged or tried to bar students from using it, the history department at Middlebury College is trying to take a stronger, collective stand. It voted this month to bar students from citing the Web site as a source in papers or other academic work.” 

Interesting comment thread on Snap at Rafe Colburn. 

Rob Safuto: “We agree! Snap is useless and annoying.” 

Is it just me or does it seem that the user generated content panel at Davos didn’t have any users who generate content? 

Open podcast device ideas 

I’m at the mobile identity workshop today, and I led a discussion this morning about features that people want for an open podcast player device. The rules were anyone could blurt out any feature they wanted and I put them all on the list. (I’m not endorsing these ideas, or explaining them.)

clips

recording

open platform

auto-tagging/voice tagging

transcriptionability

speaker

TiVO features/last ten seconds

voting mechanism

popup menu for categorization

wifi

hyperlinks

touchscreen

no buttons

keyboard

mashable

waterproof

synching

text input

video input

not modal

lots of dials

real volume control

multiple people

mixer

bookmarks

one-click publishing

surfing

PS: Dean Landsman photographed the handwritten version of this list.

Scripting News for 1/25/2007

See you at the PaidContent mixer tonight. Maybe I’ll get paid for some content? Heh. Of course not. :-) 

Great to see all the cool people honored by Forbes as the most popular people on the net. Scoble, Arrington, Calacanis, Om — the stars of our corner of the galaxy. I knew them when they were knee-high to a grasshopper. These guys deserve it. Mazel tov. 

Thomas Hawk took some of the pictures, but didn’t get credit at first. He deserves it. See, creative people like to get credit for their work. People act so surprised sometimes. 

I don’t know how you feel about this, but I find the little popup preview windows that are showing up on various blogs to be REALLY ANNOYING. Makes it hard to hover over a link to see where it points. And sometimes it’s pointless, like when the page it links to requires a cookie or a password. You know the web is pretty good just the way it is. And these little widgets ought to give users a way to opt out. Or why not just forget the whole thing. Your favorite curmudgii. Uncle Davey. 

Sometimes the pictures next to bits on Scripting News mean something and sometimes they’re just cool little bits of color to make your mind feel good. In the case of the previous post there’s a bit of hidden meaning in the picture of the boot. See if you can figure it out. It’s good to exercise your mind.  

Jason Calacanis reviews Hype Machine, a service that scans music blogs for MP3 songs and maintains custom RSS feeds with enclosures that you can subscribe to with a podcatcher.  

Ed Cone, Greensboro’s first blogger, on violence involving Palestinian students at Guilford College yesterday, in Greensboro. 

 

Scripting News for 1/24/2007

Friday in SF, the Mobile Identity Workshop led by Doc Searls.  

Disclosure 

Not sure if this requires disclosure or not, but I decided it’s better to disclose than not.

On Sunday, I added a command to the robots.txt file for scripting.com that tells the TechMeme robot to not read this site. I was told by Gabe Rivera, the author of TechMeme, that this would have the effect I desired.

I found that when I’d link to an article here that was in its domain, that very quickly that link would appear on TechMeme. Recently, a link to an old article here spawned a link on TechMeme within minutes of its appearance on Scripting News. At the time it was the only item on this site. If a human being were echoing my links so quickly, I’d ask them to stop, if I felt they would respect the request.

I’ve been discussing this on and off, privately, with Gabe, for almost a year. I’m a regular reader of TechMeme, and I plan to continue to read it. There is nothing to stop TechMeme from pointing to articles here on Scripting News, but it’ll have to find out about the articles from pointers on other sites.

I’ve not decided if the ban is permanent or not. I want to try it this way and see what happens. It’s a way for me to learn how TechMeme works, and now that you know, for you to learn too. And it gives people more of an incentive to read this site, or subscribe to it, an incentive you may not have felt before, since so many of my links were turning into TechMeme items. Also it may appeared that I was just replaying TechMeme items here.

I don’t want this move to in any way reflect on the Gabe’s professionalism or ethics. TechMeme is a marvel, and very useful, and he’s a very respected member of the tech blogging community, deservedly so.

I care about quality more than quantity 

Mike Arrington: “It’s rare for a blogger to take action to reduce her/his own influence, but that is exactly what Dave has done.”

That’s what it looks like to Mike, and I respect that, but that’s not the way I look at it.

There are a lot of things I could do to have more influence, but it might not be the influence I want.

Before I put the robots.txt block in, I basically could, unilaterally, put someone else’s ideas onto TechMeme, but I couldn’t get my own ideas there. And because people had less incentive to come to Scripting News, they weren’t reading the things I really care about.

I made a similar choice a few years back, when I quit Wired. Believe me, my flow went waaaay down that day. But my freedom went way up. I’m not getting anything like that kind of lift, but Mike is right, I don’t care about influence as a quantity.

Washington politics 

Politics is all of a sudden interesting. The Congress is organizing across (as opposed to along) party lines. Yesterday on NewsHour, senior Republican Senator John Warner from Virginia sounded more like the opposition than a member of the same party as the President. It’s a miracle to see discourse come back to national politics. We are still in a very dark period, but it’s getting brighter. And once again the brilliance and luck that’s designed into our system is saving our ass. John Adams and Thomas Jefforson hated each other after George Washington left office peacefully and Jefferson’s cousin John Marshall had guts. We’re living in a country whose political system is largely formed around the personalities of these four men.

Throughout the President’s speech last night he expressed an idea that surely the founders, all of them, would have objected to — the idea that the people in the room were doing The People’s Work. No, that’s not the idea. The idea is much heavier than that. The people in the room are the people. That’s why the House is re-elected every two years, and that’s why the President has to come to Congress to get approval to go to war, and that’s why, when Warner reminds the interviewer that Congress is the equal of the Executive branch, she can be forgiven for needing a reminder, because for the last six years, Congress has not been doing its job. It thought it was here to serve the President. That is even further from the intent of the founders.

No matter, the founders win this one. Right now the Congress is not only serving the interests of the people, they are acting as the people, and that of course is good. That there are so many candidates for President is a sign that the system is working. Everyone should have the guts to think their ideas as worthy of discourse. This is where the philosophy of blogging and the philosophy of the US are totally in synch.

Jim Webb, the other Senator from Virginia, a Democrat, gave an absolutely stunning rebuttal to the President. I stood up and cheered, tears running down my cheeks. This is the kind of person that the founders imagined would be our leader. By the end of the speech I found myself hoping that Webb runs for President, although I think it unlikely that he will. But he would make a good President. I haven’t felt that about anyone in a very long time.

And also yesterday, lost in the State of the Union shuffle, were the initial revelations in the Scooter Libby trial. Fascinating, unexpected. The White House itself is becoming a circular firing squad. First the Vice-President is implicated by the prosecution, then Karl Rove is implicated by the defense. Who knew what when? Well it turns out there was a coverup. No major surprise, but it looks like it’s going to come out before Bush leaves office. What then? Will there be an impeachment? In the atmosphere in Washington today, it’s hard to imagine that the President wouldn’t be taken to court for his crimes. And for the President, the court is the House of Representatives.

Only one thing can save the President, it’s unmentionable, but it was mentioned in a CNN interview this morning with David Gurgen from Davos. Maybe the high mountain air made him say something that you wouldn’t say with your feet on the ground in the US. The one thing that could save the President, he said, is a catastrophe on the scale of 9/11/01.

Yes, politics has gotten interesting, once again.

Not sure if that’s good or not.

State of Wikipedia 

More often than not, Wikipedia is the top result in Google searches, and more often than not, given a choice I’ll point to the Wikipedia page as the definitive source, without knowing whether the text was written by an impartial third party with good information, or someone else; while I know that in areas where I have expertis, the Wikipedia pages are the result of “edit wars” between partisans, trolls and the people being written about. It’s hard for me to know, for example, when reading a biography of Augustus Caesar (I’m a fan of the HBO series Rome) if it is the result of the same conflicted process.

Microsoft is the latest to fall in the trap. They are criticized by Jimmy Wales, who has no credibility in this area, having been caught editing his own biography, removing mention of his collaborator. Wales is aware of the basic flaw in Wikipedia, his actions indicate that, yet he isn’t above criticizing Microsoft for trying to hire someone to do what he did for himself. To be clear, what Microsoft did is absolutely wrong. If that practice were to escalate (and who knows that it hasn’t) then Wikipedia would just reflect the views of rich corporations and individuals. The biography of Bill Gates would talk glowingly of his philanthropy, and downplay (or omit) his conviction for antitrust.

To me, in areas outside my expertise, it seems that Wikipedia is an excellent source of information. But that’s the problem. In areas that I know better, I can see its flaws. I play by the rules and don’t fix the mistakes. That leaves it to the trolls to write the story. Somehow we have to resolve this. And Wales should recuse himself from being the judge in these matters.

Scripting News for 1/23/2007

NY Times: “Mr. Schwab views the spread of Web logs as more evidence of the changing power equation. He said he might have to rethink guidelines for reporting events, which put many of the sessions off the record.” 

I watched tonight’s State of the Union: tepid, weak, more of the same. The Democratic response was powerful, resolute, inspiring, a tour de force.  

Passionate and lucid essay by Briar Dudley on why it’s so urgent that we define “blog.” Once thought, by some, to be an unimportant academic discussion, the lack of a clear idea of what is and isn’t a blog is standing in the way of meaningful campaign finanance rules.  

Valleywag lists five reasons to fear for the future of Steve Jobs. 

People’s Daily: “U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was deeply involved in the leak of a former CIA agent’s identity in the summer of 2003, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said Tuesday.” 

Steve Rubel: “Someone should commission a study on bloggers who choose to syndicate the full text of their posts in RSS feeds vs. those who abstain. Something tells me they’re read more.” 

The new governor of Masschusetts is podcasting. Pioneered at Harvard just a few years ago, podcasting has been growing at an amazing rate.  

Jeff Walsh on invention and discovery 

Jeff Walsh: “Who wants a CEO that gets mired in nuance and grey areas?”

Please read all of what Jeff says, and consider it carefully. It is flattering to me, and like everyone else I like to be appreciated. But his point is right on. Columbus popularized America and deserves credit for its discovery even though Vikings had arrived here, by accident, centuries earlier, and did nothing with the discovery.

To me, I’d like credit for discovery of some cool stuff, invention of software that makes it work and content that makes it compelling, all of which are neccessary but not sufficient, because the new stuff also has to be demystified, and it has to stay easy to understand, so that rather than intimidate, it should invite discovery by everyone else.

I don’t make credit an issue, other people do. When I said I want to celebrate not just ten years of Scripting News, but ten years of blogging, I got a pile of “who does he think he is,” as I knew I would. Well, something started with Scripting News in 1997, whatever you want to call it, I call it blogging. If you think I’m wrong, blog it.

That’s how blogging started by the way. I had a discussion group here, and people would write there how wrong I was about this and that, to which I said — you need to start a blog. I must have said that to hundreds of people. By giving them something to respond to, Scripting News played the role that a shipwreck plays to a coral reef. You can quote me on that.

I learned from the Frontier community that people will always do what I do, even when I did what I always wished other platform vendors would do — telegraph the roadmap, clearly. When I would do that, other people would start to do what I was going to do, and then scream loudly when I did it. That taught me that if I wanted people to do something, I had to do it first. The Pied Piper effect drives adoption and builds communities. It’s not surprising that the generation of bloggers that came after the the first generation said they hated me and were trying to steal my thunder. That’s human nature. But they were doing exactly what I hoped they would. They blogged their discontent, and as a result built something much larger than one person can build, and then they spawned communities that eventually hated them, and on and on, ad infinitum.

I also know that discovery comes in layers, as did the blogging world. There are many levels of early adopters. Today there are people who are discovering new applications of blogging in new contexts. Davos, this year will have more blogging than it had in 2000, when Lance and I were (probably) the only two people blogging there. I can’t claim credit for bringing blogging to Davos though, because my efforts didn’t gain traction and grow. If blogging was meant to happen there, it didn’t happen in 2000. Maybe it’ll happen in 2007.

Still diggin!

More advice for RSS developers 

My last piece about RSS aggregators was well received, so let’s try some more advice.

From time to time I get emails from readers saying the feed for Scripting News doesn’t display well in apps like Netvibes or Google’s customizable home page because some of my items don’t have titles. Some have even said I am wrong to have items without titles, but I don’t agree, and the spec backs me up on that. The item-level title is optional.

The reason titles are optional is that there have always been blogs that had items that don’t have titles and those items had to be expressable in RSS, as did ones with titles. There are some aggregators (such as the ones I wrote) that deal perfectly well with either kind of item, so I know it can be done. Two of the earliest blogs, Scripting News and Robot Wisdom, both had title-less items. I admit they’re not common, but it’s good way to blog, and right now I’m not going to change, especially when the developers who are reading these feeds could easily adapt (and since they all came after RSS had this feature, it seems to me that they must).

Anyway, that’s the historic preamble. Now here are two ways to deal with titleless items.

Choice #1: The simplest way is to ignore items with no titles. Pretend they don’t exist. This is so much better than displaying a blank line, which is what some do.

Choice #2: Synthesize a title. Here’s a way to do that. Take the description text, strip the markup, take the first fifty characters (or whatever works for you) and add an ellipsis (two or three dots). If you really want to be cool, back up to the last space, delete everything after that, and then add the ellipsis.

BTW, there are likely to be some condescending and fairly nasty comments about this, and that sometimes has the effect of reflecting negatively on me. That’s how those people stop me from helping, or at least how they have in the past, and it’s one of the reason blogging doesn’t work so well these days. If you take the way they express their opinons as reflecting only on them, then we can go somewhere. You have a lot more power than you realize. Me, I’m just trying to make things work better. Really.

Why some items don’t have titles 

Scripting News has long posts, like this one, and very short ones, that are basically links to off-site articles that I think an informed person would want to be aware of, but about which I don’t have anything to say. Here’s a screen shot of a few of those from the Jan 10 SN. Those items are just links to articles, but each one should be its own item because they came online at different times in the day. To give each of them titles not only would waste screen space, it would create intellectual clutter, something that I’d like to reduce, not increase. Esp when it’s so easy for software to handle the case.

Scripting News for 1/22/2007

NY Times: “The major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions.” 

Marc Canter: “IBM has validated the usage of social networking in business.” 

NPR: “January 22 is the most depressing day of the year, according to Wales-based psychologist Cliff Arnall.” 

Settop box HTTP server 

Buried in yesterday’s piece about layers of the Internet; actually only implied by it, was an idea worth emphasizing.

The day is coming when the cable TV box from Comcast or Direct has another interface coming out: Ethernet, and inside, an HTTP server. Then the TV set will have a variety of HTTP clients, in a perfect world one for each data type, but we don’t live in a perfect world, so — as many as needed. The setup screen, accessed on the TV itself or on your laptop via HTTP (the TV will also have an HTTP server) allows you to choose which player gets which content type. Sorry, even more than today, you’ll need to go to college to learn how to watch TV. Maybe then the content will improve to offer something a bit more challenging to the educated mind. But I digress.

Apple’s TV interface tethers itself to iTunes running on a desktop, but this is a world that imho, Apple is not destined to rule. Denon, the manufacturer of the receiver I just bought, is deeply in bed with Microsoft. Their interfaces are totally nestled in the Microsoft world. Somewhere there is a sales team that works for Redmond who has been touring the Far East, making deals with the home entertainment manufacturers. This means, to me, that at some point Apple will surely offer a receiver of its own, and a TV of its own. Of course Denon also has a port for an iPod (actually two, one in front and one in back). The iPod was the first device to provide content for my new stereo. No tape drive, turntable, CD player. No analog content for this crazy uncle. We’re all digital from day one.

It’s all confusing, so many deals, so many things only work with some other things. This isn’t how I like my technology. Or maybe it’s exactly how I like my technology. A few months ago I found this stuff daunting. Now, I admit, I find it inviting.

And then Denon did one really nice thing, they also put an HTTP interface in there. I haven’t tried it yet, that’s my next project. Hopefully I’ll have some screen shots soon.

In the meantime, thanks to Mark Cuban for pushing my mind in a new direction. Settop boxes with fractional horsepower HTTP servers. Of course! Why not? Can’t wait. Let’s go.

10 year t-shirts? 

Raines has a good idea for the 10th Anniversary celebration.

I follow with a comment of my own.

More ideas…

An event distributed across the wifi-enabled food courts of the world? Apple Stores. We need t-shirts, buttons and hats so people know who’s a celebrant. A Flickr tag. I want a HyperCamp or two.

Maybe I’ll celebrate in NYC, make it easy for people from the US and Europe to join me. One in DC for blogging lawmakers. A blog-in like the be-ins of the 60s?

Good omen: April 1 is a Sunday.

Obviously we’ll need a wiki and a mail list.