Scripting News for 2/28/2007

NPR conference postscript 

I had a lovely time at the Public Media conference last week.

It had the feel of a user conference, which are really the kinds of conferences I like. And unlike the entertainment industry conferences I’d been to, these people are not so commercial and not bullies. Later, I was told that the people who come to this conference are the people most like bloggers in public media, but I also met a few execs, including the COO and a couple of board members of NPR, and they were excited too.

To say we, the bloggers, were well-received, would be an understatement. We were treated like stars and gurus, our words listened to attentively, our ideas received enthusiastically. What a joy and what a contrast to the tech industry, where bloggers are mostly seen as a business model, not a source of ideas.

Anyway, the post-conference emails are just beginning to be responded to, and I expect lots of good stuff to come from this first visit. There’s talk of doing a BloggerCon for public radio. I’m helping the NewsHour people make their podcast feeds a little more useful. Most important I want to work on a vital exchange of ideas and perspectives across the pro-amateur boundary. I want them to teach us how to produce content up to their standards, so bloggers, podcasters and vloggers who want their work to air on NPR and PBS will know what they’re looking for. And I want our methods to gain adoption in their space. An example is the way the Scripting News community researched the problem with audio on MacBooks yesterday. This open research method can be applied equally well for public media. You just have to let us know what you’re interested in. I promised to help them boot up a research blog, following this model.

To my new friends at NPR and PBS — ignore the naysayers — Andrew Keen and Lowell Bergman can believe what they want, but we want to make the world better, and we feel good about what we’re doing, and if they don’t like it, too bad!

Paul Andrews, formerly of the Seattle Times, continues.

Negotiate with users 

I wonder if, with the benefit of hindsight, the music industry wishes it had done something different with Napster. Shutting it down might have felt good at the time, but did it cure the problem? Might there not have been a way to make hay out of the lemonade?

In other words, could the music industry have struck a new deal with its users, a win-win so we get what we want, and they maintain their cash flow.

An example of a new deal — tolerate the sharing low-rez scans of the music. Set a bit-rate that’s semi-legal, and enforce, with Napster, the rule that anything scanned at a higher rate will immediately be removed, unless it can be shown that the artists permit redistribution of high scan-rate versions. I think even the indies would have gone for this, especially at the time.

The users would have had to realize that this is fair. We would get to share the ideas and feelings of the music, freely, which I think is what we want (it’s what I want) but reserve for the commercial interests the best listening experiences.

The reason this is on-topic right now is because the same battle is playing out now in video, with YouTube. Two recent events caught my eye: 1. Viacom requests that all its content be pulled off YouTube, and then does a deal with Joost for distributing that content. 2. The Oscars ask YouTube to pull down clips from Sunday’s show.

What if, instead, Viacom told YouTube that they could host clips from their shows, but reserved the hi-rez versions for themselves, and maybe they could have negotiated a link from the YouTube low-rez scan to the one served on their site. Anything would be better than the fractured world that’s being re-created now. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if users knew they just had to go to YouTube to find what they’re looking for, knowing that it would lead them to a purchasing experience if they want one.

It seems the entertainment industry doesn’t recognize the power of its users. They’re accustomed to dealing with artists and other companies, esp really large ones, but they haven’t learned how to negotiate with the users, and that’s who they have to deal with, if they want a future.

Update #1: Mark Cuban suggests a different negotiation with the user: Post a short verison of the video on YouTube, with the full version on the Oscars site, linked to by the video on YouTube. Not bad, but I like the lo-rez vs hi-rez approach better, as a user (which is what I am).

SF Chronicle: “The RIAA has sued thousands of college students since 2003.”

Today’s links 

I’m trying an experiment with Scripting News. Now every item has a title, and I’m doing longer items, and leaving the linkblogging out. That doesn’t mean I don’t see pieces on other sites that I want to come back to (that’s often why I link to something here), but I just haven’t yet found a way to make that fit into the new regime.

So how about this — a “today’s links” section. Let’s see how that plays.

To kick it off, an interesting idea from CalacanisLand.

Calacanis: “Someone should make the Starbucks of office space.”

With little more Google juice I might just own Suze Orman. (However, I’m not sure what I’d do if I did.)

Also I still have a nice chunk of John Doerr.

For ten points, guess who is the “senior administration official” in this press release from the Office of the Vice-President of the United States. Hint: He is one heartbeat from being president.

Heads-up on a service change 

This note is of interest to people in the OPML community taking advantage of the free directory hosting feature called Map A Domain. A few months ago we changed the address of the server to 67.18.151.44, but we still supported sites that were mapped to the old domain.

I’m finally at a point where I can shut off the old server completely, and I’ll do that by the end of March. If you have a directory hosted with this service, please map that domain to the new address, 67.18.151.44, asap, so that readers will be able to find your directories.

Here’s a list of domains that must be remapped to point to 67.18.151.44:

http://bayareapodcasts.org/

http://directory.donovanwatts.com/

http://icann.lextext.com/

http://opml.casdra.com/

http://opml.casdracast.com/

http://opml.devize.nl/

http://opml.lextext.com/

http://opml.onepolarstar.com/

http://opml.readerss.com/

http://opml.yabfog.com/

http://outline.olav.net/

Scripting News for 2/27/2007

Blame the bloggers 

On the plane last night I read the first half of the galley of Andrew Keen’s upcoming book entitled The Cult of the Amateur. I’m not the first to mention the book, Dan Farber wrote about it in his reflection on the first decade of blogging.

Keen’s work is a book-length sneer at most of what we hold dear. He blames bloggers and podcasters for the demise of professional media, as if somehow we’re responsible for the endless coverage of Anna Nicole Smith on cable news, for Judith Miller’s complicity with the Bush White House, for the shameless way the press, without notable exception, hounded Howard Dean out of the 2004 presidential race. Of course we’re not responsible for any of those horrors, and Keen should, somewhere in this book, consider that blogging might be an attempt to solve some of the problems caused by a vacuum of responsible high-integrity journalism. I think, for the most part, bloggers would be happy to have real journalists at work at the professional pubs. I want more Woodward and Bernstein, more of the kind of investigative journalism done by the SF Chronicle following steroids in baseball, more reporters who are willing to go to jail for their principles, but I’m usually disappointed. There are countless examples in Keen’s book where he credits the pros for doing thorough work, when their work is anything but thorough. (And he owes a huge apology to Josh Wolf, a blogger who is in jail right now, for exactly the causes Keen extols.)

Further, he says over and over that Craigslist is responsible for undermining the business model of newspapers. But he doesn’t ask why the newspapers failed to embrace the Internet, making Craigslist necessary. What’s the lesson here? That the news industry is allowed to hold back progress? To what end? Sure Wikipedia has problems, but it also responds much faster than the older encyclopedias, and while I agree it’s wrong to dismiss experience and scholarship, it’s equally wrong to dismiss knowledge when it occurs in a person without the trappings of academia. The solution isn’t to call the amateurs names, the new world requires thought, and Keen does not provide any.

His book, while based on an important and valuable premise, that Silicon Valley is too-much admired for the good of all of us, including the tech industry, fails to enlighten while he props up the egos of obsolete people and businesses. Each of his arguments is easily refuted, too easily. There’s no food for thought in this book. I was ready for a work that would inspire a thoughtful response, because I like Andrew, at a personal level, but this book is beneath criticism. Back to the drawing board.

When in doubt, disclose 

Interesting piece by Tim O’Reilly where he talks about a new set of products from Adobe. He also says they’re presenting at his upcoming ETech conference.

O’Reilly is a board member at Adobe and presumably has an interest in the success of these products.

It’s important to disclose conflicts, so the reader knows when they’re reading a biased or interested opinion.

Mike Arrington, who invests in companies, often gets heat even though he carefully discloses when he has an interest in a company he’s writing about.

I don’t invest as often as either Tim or Mike, but when I write about a company I have an interest in, if there’s any doubt whether it’s clear, I disclose.

Update #1: Dan Rabin says that O’Reilly was on the board at Macromedia, which merged with Adobe, and he is not currently on the board of Adobe.

Vista backlash 

Chris Pirillo: “The shipping version of this OS is late beta, at best.”

Jason Busch: “It’s an absolute travesty that Microsoft would have released such a half-baked product.”

MyBlogLog 

The last laptop? 

I was going to buy a new MacBook Pro, it’s finally time to graduate to something real, enough trying to make-due with a consumer laptop. But then I heard that they were getting ready to announce a whole raft of new products including a sub-notebook Mac, and I put the brakes on. It’s hard for me to walk by an Apple store, I’m so tempted to just plunk down the money, but I lust after a Sony Vaio-like MacBook with its 6-hour battery life. That might be the last laptop I ever buy. Really.

The Bushes are scaring me 

Have you been following the world travels of Vice-President Cheney?

What the hell is he doing?

It’s beginning to remind me of the waning days of the Nixon presidency, when the administration had been whittled down to Nixon, Kissinger, Alexander Haig and not much else. At some point it stopped feeling like they were officers of a great country, and rather individuals, desperate to recall the trappings of power, and the harder they try, the more they reveal how alone they are. But it’s scary, because whether or not they’ve lost their gravitas, they still have the power to blow up the world.

NY Times: “A suicide bomber blew himself up this morning outside the main gate of the United States military base at Bagram while Vice President Dick Cheney was inside the base. Mr. Cheney was not hurt in the attack.”

Then Condoleeza Rice compares Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. That’s so over the top. She talks about “Chapter 7″ as if we know what that means. Sounds like a special form of bankruptcy, but I doubt that’s what it means. She’s so incredibly dishonest, it’s better to assume that everything she says is a lie than to try to sort out the truth from the lies.

MacBook sound woes 

Somehow I ran the battery on my MacBook down to zero on the flight home last night, no problem, I charged it up to 40 percent and then sat down to watch the end of the movie I was watching when the battery got low (I shut the case at about 15 percent).

But the sound is off and I can’t figure out how to get it back on. I pull down the sound icon in the menu bar, but it’s dimmed out. I pull up the control panel for sound, the slider is dimmed. I tried rebooting twice.

Any ideas what causes this and how to cure it?

Update #1: Vanni suggests looking at this technote, which causes me to run Audio Midi setup utility, which reveals that the system thinks it has no audio output. He asks if I hear any sound at all. Only when I reboot, it makes the big chime sound as the system starts up.

Update #2: Ideas that didn’t fix the problem — launch and quit GarageBand, zap the PRAM, etc. Ben Tucker suggested that the computer may be confused, and he was right. I had been using headphones on the plane, and when I plugged the headphones in, the slider enabled. When I unplug the headphones, it dimmed. So at least I can finish watching the movies, but only with headphones.

Update #3: Here’s the club I belong to. Not an isolated problem. Probably a bug Apple should be aware of. Apparently a toothpick properly inserted in the headphone jack will fix it. I’m reluctant to do that.

Scripting News for 2/26/2007

11:20PM Pacific: Happy to report no snow in Berkeley. :-) 

A social networking site with a fantastic business model. 

Rex Hammock: “These phones are not intended for consumers, they’re intended for cult members.” Yes. 

Can’t you hear me knockin? 

If I had one wish, it would be that everyone who reads this blog would listen to the talk I gave to the NPR people last Thursday (MP3, torrent).

Things here will make a lot more sense, imho, with the podcast as background. It lays a foundation that we will build on. I was thinking of ways I could trick people into listening to it. I thought maybe I could put a secret word near the end of the cast, and then require people to enter the secret word before they could gain entry to Scripting News after a certain date. Then I thought it would be better to just post the request, respectfully, here on the blog itself, and skip the tricks.

Please, sometime in the next few days, set aside an hour or so to listen to the talk.

With much gratitude, Dave

What if Yahoo bought UserLand? 

In late 2003, early 2004 we had talks with Yahoo about them acquiring UserLand.

The idea was that Yahoo would get into the weblog hosting business, along with customizable River of News aggregators.

Had we done the deal, it seems Yahoo might today compete with News Corp’s MySpace.

Google Reader would still be playing catch-up.

Sure, our software was designed to run on the desktop, but the design would have easily ported to a Yahoo-scale centralized app.

And we would have given Blogger a run for the money.

Wish we had done the deal!

Busted flat in Baton Rouge 

Today’s a travel day, I have a late afternoon flight from Logan to SFO, but when I woke this morning and checked the news I learned that a blizzard was moving in to NYC and JetBlue, anticipating another fiasco, cancelled most of their flights. In Cambridge, light flurries, nothing to worry about, but over the next hour I started to panic as the snow got heavier and heavier.

Turning on the local news they’re whipping up a panic, school closings, encouraging people to stay home. Oh man I’ve been snowed-in in Boston before and please please, no way do I want to do that again. It’s a miserable way to spend a few days. Being snowed-in is okay when you live there, but staying in a hotel, living off room service, that’s no way to pass the time.

Movie: Cambridge snowy Monday.

Luckily, they were overhyping the snow, NY is getting the worst of it (though it’s still snowing like a mofo here). Logan is reporting minor delays. So I’ll head out to the airport after breakfast and see if I can get an earlier flight. I can’t wait to get back to Berkeley where it’s warm and it doesn’t snow.

I want my MTV 

Just gotta say the Oscars got it right this year.

All the movies nominated for Best Picture were at least good, a few were great, but they picked the right one to honor with the top prize. Last year, I was shaking my head, this year, I’m nodding.

When I saw The Departed for the first time, I wrote that it might be the best movie ever made. I’ve now seen it four times, there’s still little treasures to discover. I don’t think it’s the best movie ever made, but it’s pretty damned close, and Scorcese has made another great movie that’s stood the test of time, Goodfellas, so now everyting’s all square.

Next item on the to-do list, let’s get Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame (and the U.S. out of Iraq).

Scripting News for 2/25/2007

Dan Farber: Reflections on the first decade of blogging. 

Tom Forenski says the center of the media industry has moved from NY to Silicon Valley. 

Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker, says the US Administration is redirecting its war strategy in the Middle East to undermine Iran, and as a side-effect, bolster al Qaeda. 

Earlier today, Boston blogger dim sum, 1PM. 

Scripting News for 2/24/2007

Boston blogger dim sum, tomorrow, 1PM. 

Afternoon working group  

I’m participating in Charlie Nesson’s discussion group about a project he’s contemplating.

Charlie talked about Harvard’s deal with Google and the role a university can play in building an open library.

In K-12 in eduction there’s a system called United Streaming from the Discovery Channel.

For the second time in two days I’ve been pointed to PBCore, that I had not heard of before.

Photo of our working group.

Beyond Broadcast II 

Starting the second morning panel, after a great coffee break.

Movie: What Beyond Broadcasting looks like in the overflow room.

I have no idea what they’re talking about. They use terms that I don’t have a sense of what they mean in real terms. When they talk about the “grass roots” I guess those are the people you see on BART or the Red Line. How do these people meet them? When these guys go to work, what do they do every day?

I signed up for the You Call Yourself a Journalist? dinner tonight. Actually I’m more of a source than I am a journalist. If you want to sort this stuff out, it’s a good idea to enumerate the different roles that go into creating a news story. Professional journalists tend to ignore their sources in this enumeration (they talk about all kinds of editors, researchers and management). Blogging allows us to go direct with our knowledge, experience and insignts, without waiting for a reporter to ask us what we think (and likely mangle it). I’m a total fan of the NewsHour, so I’m optimistic about an interesting conversation over dinner tonight.

Beyond Broadcast 

I’m at the MIT media conference, it’s so well-attended I’m in an overflow room with good MIT-hosted free wifi. It’s like watching a TV show with lots of familiar faces on the screen. Watching Doug Kaye (hi Doug!) sitting in front of a guy asking a question/giving a speech. John Palfrey my former Berkman colleague just gave a rousing Palfreyesque convocation following a Henry Jenkins keynote. I’m in a good mood at least partially because it’s warm in here and so damned cold out there.

Movie: Cab ride on Mass Ave crossing frozen Charles River.

Movie: Henry Jenkins keynoting Beyond Broadcast conf.

Jesse Walker is moderating the panel now, he looks strikingly like Scoble. Great line — “…when people talk about Web 2.0 — which I like to call (slight pause) The Web…”

People in the overflow room can’t ask questions, so if someone in the main room is reading this, please ask the Yahoo rep if they point to amateur journalism that isn’t hosted on a Yahoo site? Amyloo submitted my question in the Second Life question tool for the conference. The moderator just explained the tool, but said they waren’t going to watch it. Huh??

The preambles of the panelists are mind-numbingly boring. They ramble on and on. One of the panelists couldn’t even make it to Boston. With all the incredible minds in the “audience” — what a waste. My head keeps nodding. I’ve even noticed bits of drool forming in the corners of my mouth. Thank god for wifi.

Papa Doc is blogging away over in the other room. So far nothing from him on the panel. Could his head be nodding too?? The guy in LA is rambling infinitely on and on ad infinitum. Zzzzz.’

The Yahoo panelist says we can find real journalism on Flickr.

Brrrrr 

Except for a brief excursion to Berkman on Thursday evening, I haven’t had to go outside because of a remarkable set of indoor walkways that connect the hotels of Copley Place with shopping and food places scattered along the way.

Today I’m heading over to MIT in Cambridge for the Beyond Broadcast conference (where I am a participant, an observer) and for that, I have to go outside. Brrr.

I was shocked to see that it’s 17 degrees. Not fair!

Scripting News for 2/23/2007

I’m glad the Scobles are listening to yesterday’s talk at the NPR conference. I was partly trying to influence the tech industry by traveling across the country and talking to an industry that uses technology. I’d like to discuss the tech part of this at Microsoft’s Mix conference in April.  

I love Betsy. “George Washington Carver was a big-picture guy…” she wrote today. 

Google Grants provides “eligible organizations with in-kind keyword advertising using Google AdWords so you can connect directly with your target audience.” 

Doc Searls: The ITFS Opportunity. 

Wired: “Alcatel-Lucent isn’t the only winner in a federal jury’s $1.52 billion patent infringement award against Microsoft this week. Other beneficiaries are the many rivals to the MP3 audio-compression format.” 

TPM: “It’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone in this country not under active federal surveillance who has done more to advance the al Qaeda agenda than Dick Cheney.” 

Boston Blogger Dim Sum Sunday 

If you’re in Boston on Sunday, let’s do a blogger’s Dim Sum brunch at Chau Chow City at 83 Essex Street, Boston, 1PM.

Thanks to Jessica Baumgart of the Berkman Thursday group for organizing. It’ll be great to see people from the old days!

If you’re coming please add your name here, so “we can make a fairly decent guess at table size and so we can attempt to find people on site,” writes J.

NPR Podcast OPML? 

I’ve been asking people here for maintained OPML for the NPR podcast directory, just for fun, I did a Google search and it seems they do have a directory in OPML.

It says, in the XML, that it was last updated in October 2005, but it has podcasts that didn’t exist then. If it’s being maintained it’s a big deal.

Here’s what their podcast directory looks like in my world.

According to Darren Mauro, who is responsible for the social media on npr.org, says the OPML is dynamic, and therefore is maintained. Coool!

Stop payment on credit cards 

I read somewhere (sorry no link) that there is no way to stop a payment on a credit card, like you can stop a check. I’ve found this to be true. And then there are all the trial services that require you to enter a credit card number that must, in the fine print of their EULA say they’re allowed to bill your credit card every month even if you don’t use the service. And then there are all the $19.95 payments in your monthly statement with names you’ve never heard of, that are too much trouble to investigate.

Did you think there’s nothing you can do? Well, there is.

I tripped over this idea accidentally because one of my cards was stolen, presumably in a batch of credit card numbers stolen from some online service, so I got a new card in the mail, unsolicited, with a new number. All of a sudden the lurking quasi-legal fraudsters are popping up! We want our money, they say in their emails. Act now, give us that new number, or we’ll have to close your account. To which I say, Make my day!

I expect to hear from a lot of them on or about March 1.

Conference session circa 2007 

Movie: There’s a panel in front of the room, a moderator, people lined up at a mike, Doc checking his email and posting to his blog, the audience listens attentively, people in the hallway schmoozing. The questions are basically “How do we remain relevant as things change.”

MP3 of yesterday’s talk 

I thought the talk went very well, everyone I’ve talked with here is enthusiastic about melding with the bloggers. I hope as many people as possilble listen to the talk and the discussion that followed. It’s available as an MP3. Or help distribute the cost, download it via BitTorrent, seeded by Amazon.

Snow in Boston 

Picture taken from my room in a Copley Place hotel.

Doctorow on iPod lockin 

Cory Doctorow: “I think that it’s reasonable to assume that Apple won’t always make the world’s best music player. I’d like to keep my options open. But the longer you own an iPod, the more likely it is you’ll buy more iTunes music, and the fewer options you’ll have.”

The iPod is the best of a not very good field of MP3 players. To lock into the iPod now is a mistake for everyone.

And don’t miss that lockin doesn’t just come from format lockin, it’s also a closed box, only the manufacturer can add featues. Jobs said the reason the iPhone isn’t an open platform because it’s a phone, but that doesn’t explain the iPod’s closedness.

Doctorow is right not to believe Apple, which is a big deal for him, because he’s always been a strong defender of Apple. Me, I use their products, but I don’t buy the religion, and I had enough tech industry lockin for a lifetime.

Scripting News for 2/22/2007

Podcast of today’s talk at the Public Media conf. 

You can help me save a few bucks by downloading the podcast with a BitTorrent client. 

Lisa Williams live-blogged the session in OPML. 

They did a live audio and video stream of our session; it starts at 4PM. An MP3 will be available, they say, at the end of the day. 

I’ve heard that if you play one of my podcasts in a Flash-based player, I end up sounding like a chipmunk. Sounds like fun, but I’d rather sound like myself. So I recorded this test file at 64K bps to see if it cures the problem. Does it? 

Flying Meat Software. What else is there to say? 

Kevin Tofel: “Why would I want different reader apps for different publications?” 

At Public Media with Doc 

Sitting next to Doc at the Public Media conference, just listened to a keynote, lots of doom and gloom, but we agree it’s not that dire. NPR just has to embrace the new media. NPR.org isn’t that important. Upload segments of each show to YouTube. Give advance copies of big shows like Frontline to the bloggers that review the shows.

And Doc had the best idea of all, provide the “Alpha Torrent Seed” for all PBS shows. It should always be possible to download their shows immediately. Why not, they’re non-commercial. Brilliant.

The secret isn’t that hard to figure out, they did it with podcasting, just apply the same formula.

Scripting News for 2/21/2007

Podcast player 

I’m still thinking about the ideal podcast player.

The features that matter most to me are:

1. Self-contained, untethered synchronization, much the same way a Blackberry gets email.

2. Read-write, two-way, should be able to record and connect with a publishing system for automatic upload and feed production.

3. Must be a platform, that is, people other than the manufacturer can add apps.

That’s it, those are the three main features that PPs need and don’t today have, imho.

Celebrating 10 years 

I’ve now got an idea how to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of Scripting News, on April 1, just 38 days from now. It came to me after I got a note from a dear friend, Tori, who lives in Texas, who I haven’t seen in (too many) years. She explained: “I was just catching up on your blog and saw the post about your surgery. Dude. I’m glad you’re ok. I got goose bumps reading about Dave Jacobs’ project. You and your friends change the world.”

Now there’s so much value in this email, for me.

First, I had no idea that Tori was reading my blog.

Second, it reminded me that Dave Jacobs is an amazing guy.

Third, it reminded me that I have amazing friends.

And fourth, and most important, it suggested that there may be people I haven’t heard from in a long time who stay current with me through this site. Which is cool, but…

I want to know how they’re doing! Too.

What’s up. Had any kids? What have you learned lately? How’s your health? The family? What are you thinking about these days. Been to any good parties? Gotten in trouble? (I hope.)

This connected up with a discussion I have been having with Sylvia, and with the Bloghers, Elisa, Jory and Lisa. I want everyone to write something, let’s create a document on the 10-year anniversary of Scripting News, about anything that occurs to you that might in any way, no matter how loosely, relate to SN, blogging, surgery, Dave, podcasting, coral reefs and sunken ships, RSS, outlines, desktop art, thank you money, my friends — whatever you think is important that might belong in a time-capsule-like document attached to this blog.

Sylvia tells me there is a name for something like this: festschrift. Of course there’s a Wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festschrift

To me, this would be the perfect commemoration, the ideal way to party in the ScriptingNews-o-Sphere.

What do you think?

Days to April 1 

A 1-liner that computes the number of days to 4/1.

number (date (”april 1, 2007″) - clock.now ()) / (60 * 60 * 24)

BTW, I like writing long posts in the airport in the morning.

Thanks Dan! 

Photo: I was sitting in the Buena Vista bar at SFO this morning waiting for my flight and Dan Farber of ZDNet walked by. What a surprise! I invited him to join me, and we caught up.

Thanks Anil! 

I like this piece he wrote about Evan Williams, because he includes me, among Williams, Jason Calacanis and Mark Cuban, as people with “Thank you money” and therefore can say what they think, without anyone telling them they can’t.

That’s very nice company indeed. I totally respect Jason, Mark, and Ev — and I’m glad to see him put Odeo to rest so, honestly, we can get back to doing serious work on podcasting. I don’t think he had podcasting in his blood, Twitter looks much more like an Evan Williams project. There I go telling you what I think again.

Podshow isn’t right either. We don’t need a record industry-like advertising agency in the middle of PodcastLand. It’s not a good fit, although I understand why Ron Bloom, when he first looked at it, saw a combination of the record and advertising industries — that’s where he came from. Podcasting is much less rulable, it doesn’t need a central entity like the one Bloom envisioned, or Odeo, or even Apple. What it does need is what I hope to talk about on Thursday in Boston at the public radio conference.

Dave Winer bio 

Dave Winer, 51, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies.

A native New Yorker, he received a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

“The protoblogger.” - NY Times.

“Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS.” - Time.

“RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer’s ‘Really Simple Syndication’ technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape’s ‘Rich Site Summary’, which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows.” - Tim O’Reilly.

Scripting News for 2/20/2007

The Economist has a podcast feed. 

PrioritiesNH tracks political events in NH. 

Doc Searls doesn’t believe in “social media.” 

Reading lists in 2007? 

In late 2005 I was promoting the idea of OPML reading lists.

We added support for them to the NewsRiver aggregator, built into the OPML Editor (which is the latest rev of the UserLand reader, which traces its roots back to My.UserLand in 1999).

Mike Arrington wrote an excellent and simple TechCrunch piece about reading lists.

I’m wondering if other RSS developers have done work with reading lists. If so, I’d like to help users, publishers and authors find out about what they’re doing.

If you have information, or questions, please post a comment here.

Twitter trail 

Yesterday, I was reading a blog post where a guy was talking about how Brent Simmons is a great developer, and pointed to his Twitter log for an example of how he keeps his community of users in his loop.

It immediately made me think of how the team at UserLand worked on Radio 8 at the end of 2001. We had a great outlining tool for keeping each other informed about what we were doing, even though we all worked in different places and many in different time zones, and what made me think of it of course was that Brent was on the team, and how well he used this tool.

Then it occurred to me that Twitter and the outlining tool would probably be nice when used together, which led me to wonder if Twitter had an API, which it turns out it does.

Scripting News for 2/19/2007

Cool overkill use of technology. Rather than wait for the pot to boil downstairs, I pointed the webcam at it, went upstairs, zoomed in on it, and when it starts boiling I run downstairs. 

Britain’s Channel 4 News “highlights the images and stories from Iraq left out of mainstream news.” 

NH campaign linkage 

Thanks to Betsy Devine for pointers to New Hampshire primary campaign coverage on the web.

The Manchester Union-Leader has a page with campaign coverage, both Republican and Democratic.

The New Hampshire Democratic Party has a News & Events page which appears to list campaign events. Two are listed for Hillary Clinton next weekend.

The Republican Party lists upcoming events on their home page, they also have a calendar.

I’m going to spend next Sunday (Feb 25) in New Hampshire, looking for campaign events.

If you know of any events, please post a note on the wiki.

Hate the ad, love the product 

Ever see those ads on TV for a desipicable product called Head-On? The ads suck, and you know they did it deliberately because later they run an ad with a very unpleasant person saying how much the ad sucks, but they love the product. An ad for headache medicine that gives you a headache. Followed by a meta-ad (an ad about the ad) that gives you two headaches for the price of one. Oy.

I feel the same way about The Long Tail, because if you’re in the “tail” it doesn’t look like a tail at all. If you see yourself as outside the tail, in the head for example, it may look like a tail.

(And we all know the tail doesn’t really wag the dog.)

The Long Tail metaphor helps old media people feel like they’re still in charge. So does the idea of Citizen Media, because old media people are cynics about citizens, they think we’re lazy couch potatoes who have never had a good idea or a noble thought, they’re the smart people living the interesting lives. We’re like the Gammas and Deltas in Brave New World, there are a lot of us, and our job is to consume, consume, consume — what they tell us to.

Nice story, but that’s not what’s going on.

Imagine if you looked at telephones in the aggregate. So many people having so many conversations, how do you know which ones to listen to? It’s so confusing! We need a metaphor. Or maybe we don’t, because we live in a world with ubiquitous telephones (lost mountain climbers call home to say goodbye before they die), and really — were there any metaphors that could explain what this ubiquity would mean in practice, when we lived in a world without telephones everywhere?

Just the same, we can’t understand, in our old terms, what it means to have publishing in the hands of everyone. But it’s no longer such a theoretical thing. In 1995, it was ridiculous to predict the world we live in now. It’s just as ridiculous today to predict that (more) big, unprecedented change is coming.

I’ve only met Wired’s Chris Anderson once, on a happy occasion (I was receiving an award from him!) and now I’d like to shake his hand. I’ve become a regular reader of his blog, and usually grimace and wince as he spouts comfort food for print journos about the new media.

I hate the ad (The Long Tail) but I love the product. Chris says he creates his own media by mixing together sources into his subscription list. He doesn’t want to delegate to anyone else the job of deciding what he’ll read.

There it is — one of the key ideas of the revolution.

And even better, this is what Anderson does for a living (edit and assemble writing). So he’s willing to conceive of a world where Everyman does what only The Elite could do before. That’s a man with a future, imho.

Right on right on.