Scripting News for 3/31/2007

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American power 

Shelley Powers: “To the Chinese, freedom is a threat. To the right wingers, criticism of the Catholic Church was a threat. To some folks in Missouri, the fact that I continually bring up issues related to Johnson’s shut-ins is a threat. Exactly how do we define a level of ‘threat’ in this new Gestapo? Is it in the eye of the beholder? Kathy feels afraid, and therefore it is our duty to hunt down this perpetrator and bring him or her to justice.”

In the last week I’ve defended three people who made a hobby of humiliating me, and I did it with pride, like Nixon going to China, I oozed credibility, as they deserved protection from a mob that was angry, justifiably, at humiliation, and not knowing where to direct the anger, aimed at three reasonably pathetic and defenseless people. I called this a Chorus of Cowardice, and I stand by that description.

Shelley Powers, someone who treats me poorly in her tirades and taunts about the evils of powerful men, whose caricature of me might be the little suited capitalist in the Monopoly board game, tears to shreds Tim O’Reilly’s poorly thought out call for more mob justice. I totally agree with everything she says in this piece (assuming she doesn’t edit it to spite me). It’s what being American is about, tolerating all kinds of speech, especially stuff we don’t agree with and don’t like.

Parallels, day 2 

When I started installing XP, foolishly I thought “How cool is this, I get to use my Mac, and put the PC in a little window, even hide it if I want. And it all runs at native speeds!”

I was happy, until I hit the first stumbling block, a dead-end, deal-stopper, brick wall.

Joe Cicinelli says it took 10 tries to get XP to install. Gulp.

11:53AM Pacific: Well, I got past the first hurdle, or so it seems. I didn’t know you had to click in the window to get it to recognize keystrokes. Once I did that, it recognized the old Windows CD and asked me to put back in the new Home Edition CD. It continued the installation, rebooted the virtual machine, and now it’s “finishing setup” with 36 minutes left to go. I did the cmd-tab thing to get back into my blog outliner, so I could write this post while it’s doing its thing. The disk is whirring happily or so it seems. Here’s a screen shot. Praise Murphy, I may just have Windows running here soon. Fingers crossed!

12:05PM Pacific: It worked! Amazing. I’ve got Windows running on my MacBook. Exciting!!

12:37PM Pacific: It seems my computer should be heavier now that it has a Windows machine inside it, but it feels just about the same. I have Firefox and the OPML Editor installed in the virtual environment. Next — get a copy of WinZip.

iRobot Scooba 

Movie of my floor washing robot, Scooba, a gift from Chris and Ponzi, doing its thing.

Time to buy 

Mike Arrington announces that TechCrunch is acquiring FuckedCompany, doubling his readership and covering the decline of Web 2.0 companies as fully as they cover the incline.

My own two cents, when thinking about declining tech markets, something I’ve seen four or five times — when a boom is tailing off is the best time to invest in truly new ideas. People’s thinking has been going in one direction for a long time, so long that all the big or obvious ideas have been tried, many times, and people are creatively exhausted. It’s a good time to change your assumptions, head off in a different direction. Everyone’s been zigging, so now it’s time to zag.

Revisit early ideas that spawned the current boom that have been discarded, and continue the evolution by going in a different direction. Start with a blank screen and put someting interesting and simple on it.

Aside to Mike: A domain you might want to grab.

PS: Apparently Mike’s post was an early April Fool’s joke which I fell for. Oh well. What I said still stands, ironically, whether or not Mike is joking. Have a nice day (no joke).

Scripting News for 3/30/2007

Today’s links 

David Brown has a theory about a way I might get XP to install on my MacBook. Don’t you love DRM. It turns paying customers into hackers.

Rex: When everyone blogs, all sides of a story can be aired.

Keep blogging, you’re going to be on the A-list.

Parallels 

My second of two PC laptops died this week, and rather than get them repaired, or get a replacement, I ordered Parallels and a fresh copy of Windows XP. Both should arrive today.

Back in Sept 2005, I bought a cheap Mac because I wanted to test new versions of the OPML Editor on the Mac before releasing it. Now, having completed my unintentional migration to the Mac, I’m now in the mirror situation, needing a Windows machine so I can make a new build of the Windows version that works. I don’t think this means I’m going back to using Windows, however.

Alan German: “Parallels is so good for my purposes that I’ve never even tried BootCamp.”

Postscript: I bought the Windows XP upgrade, because I own three XP licenses and am using none of them. I even have an XP install disk, so when, during the install process, they asked me to insert a disk, I was able to. Unfortunately the Mac does not recognize the disk. So I’m out another $90 to Microsoft, and a boatload of time. I wonder if Bill Gates has to put up with this. New suggested slogan: How much time do you want to waste today?

A reminder from Kevin Tofel that Apple is no better when it comes to wasting users’ time. You can’t buy better service by spending more money — if anything Apple’s service is worse than what you get from PC manufacturers, even though you pay a lot more for the computer.

Getting static 

Lots of changes happening in my web in the next few days.

Until a few days ago, I had two servers at a colo facility in Somerville; they were my original life-after-UserLand servers, started in 2003. One was used for weblogs.com and the other for everything else. Eventually weblogs.com migrated off the server onto a Linux machine at ServerMatrix in Dallas. Then when my business with Adam Curry was forming, in 2004, I rented two servers for our podcasting work — on Sunday those servers are finally going away.

After this corner-turn I will go from seven servers to three. One of the remaining servers is running only SYO, which I must admit is suffering from lack of attention. But there is some small hope of reviving the project.

At the same time Manila sites are seriously under attack, I’m not up on the exact vector or what the company may be doing to deal with the threat. However, we are having a board meeting a week from today. Writing about the situation with Russo & Hale here apparently had a good effect. It’s the old sunlight as disinfectant thing.

Meanwhile, the Manila server I set up at Harvard when I was there is back up, but only for a very short period of time. The fragility of this server is one of the things that’s inspiring my interest in future-safe systems. Back in 2003, with the help of Jack Russo, representing UserLand, we transferred the RSS 2.0 spec to Harvard, for safe-keeping through the years, hopefully decades, maybe longer. I think now, in 2007, it needs one more little bit of help to turn the corner to be relatively safe for the next century or so (knock wood, praise Murphy).

I volunteered to convert the RSS 2.0 site from a dynamic Manila-hosted site to a static Apache-hosted site. I’m moving all the images and sample XML files into sub-folders of the static HTML pages. We will also offer the whole site as a zip archive so people can download it in total. I will also provide the Harvard webmaster with an htaccess file that redirects the old urls to the new ones. I’m trying to anticipate the nit-picking that such a change is likely to cause, but I’m hopeful that with the recent Kathy Sierra mess, people will be reluctant to get so personal about it. All I’m doing is helping my friends at Harvard deliver on their commitment to provide an unchanging home for a spec that a lot of people build on. I am being careful not to change one word of the spec. Yet I’m sure, as I write this, that some people will spin as if they were on a Sunday morning politics show, hoping to confuse good people into thinking that changes were made. That’s just the context our work takes place in, there’s nothing to be done about it, other than hope people understand.

Too many lawyers!

Scripting News for 3/29/2007

A decade in a download 

Yes Virginia, no fooling, April 1 is the birth date of this weblog, and this April 1 (Sunday) is the 10th birthday.

In the spririt of item #2 below, I’m going to offer the full archive of Scripting News, a full decade, downloadable in a single archive, free, no charge — let’s party!

Today’s links 

NY Times: “Many of the fired prosecutors were investigating high-ranking Republicans.”

NPR: “Under questioning from a string of antagonistic senators, Sampson repeatedly contradicted his former boss, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.”

Ponzi and Chris sent a really cool house-warming present.

Story of My Life.com, “launching soon, is a unique way for you to preserve your life’s memories and stories, pictures, videos and more to be treasured for generations to come.”

IHT: “King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has told Arab leaders that the U.S. occupation of Iraq is illegal.”

Rex Hammock: Why I Blog.

Steve Rubel: The Value of “Why I Blog” Posts.

Fox News: “As Cathy Seipp lay dying, her nemesis took his parting shot on the web.”

Four ideas for the future 

1. I love public radio and television, but it’s time for them to become two-way media. Next time we go to war, and we seem to be doing that all-too-regularly, we must be certain that the kinds of conversations that ordinary people have about the motives of our political leaders make it onto the airwaves. And I’d like to know what the pundits are saying when they go out to dinner, not just when they’re on the air. Many people thought Bush was lying in the lead-up to the war, now let’s reform the media so those thoughts get proper coverage in time to avoid future national catastrophes.

2. I’d like to be able to pay a web company like Amazon or Google a one-time flat fee to host my content for perpetuity. I’d deposit my writing with them, on the web, and not worry about whether or not my heirs will keep paying the hosting bills to keep it alive. Today I’m hosting the weblog of my departed uncle (who I miss terribly!), I don’t mind doing it, but what will happen when I pass? I’d gladly pay $10,000 to be sure my site and his survive my death. Long-lived institutions like Harvard University or Mount Auburn Cemetary (in Boston), even insurance companies, could get into this business. Think of it as a personal endowment, it would work like the money richer people leave behind as memorials to their own lives, or lives of loved ones.

3. Another idea along these lines, I’d like to pay a few bucks to beam my thoughts to a nearby solar system that might have intelligent life. Back in the seventies, I thought it was really cool when we sent a satellite into the cosmos with a copy of the Magna Carta and Declaration of Independence and some Chuck Berry tunes (and Beethoven and Bach as well). I think this should be available to ordinary people like you and I, possibly for a fee. Maybe they could run a contest or have a reality show for people who don’t want to spend the money.

4. I’m in favor of ideas that capture the imagination, because I think we don’t have enough of them when it comes to solving problems we must deal with. If I were Bill Gates, I might send a copy of Windows Vista to Alpha Centauri (of course with a computer to run it on) and hold a contest for kids to write software that aliens might appreciate. One can be pretty sure that because of global warming or the war on terror or loose nukes that our terrestrial backups probably aren’t much good, long-term, but the stuff we send out into the cosmos might actually survive us. Do we have any ideas worth preserving? Hmmm. We might generate some if we had a reason to.

Not looking for sympathy or anything 

This turned into a long piece and I don’t have time before a breakfast meeting to edit it. Please read this with a generous open mind. I mean well, please try to assume that. Thanks.

Just want to get on the record as Michelle Malkin did yesterday, that the kind of abuse that Kathy Sierra reported is not anything new, it’s been going on for a very long time. Without going into detail, because I’ve found that just creates more of the kind of crap we don’t like.

People aren’t going to like this, but it’s true — when a woman asks for a riot she gets one, and almost no one comes to the defense of a man who is attacked. Who’s more vulnerable? Well, honestly, it’s not always a woman.

Those who provided the riot Ms Sierra asked for, unknowingly, I’m sure, attacked at least one person whose health is pretty fragile. I wonder how y’all feel now that you know that. I wonder how you’d feel if that person died in the midst of the shitstorm. Someday if we don’t change the herd mentality of the tech blogosphere, that is likely to happen. I don’t want to be part of the herd on that day, that’s why I won’t join herds.

Yesterday I said I don’t support the kinds of rules of conduct that Tim O’Reilly was calling for. Giving Tim the benefit of the doubt, I think he doesn’t fully unerstand what was going on in the blogging world, and I’m not claiming I do either, but he was running a conference this week, and it couldn’t have gotten very much of his attention. And you know what, that’s a good thing, and we should all strive to keep our perspective, before we create the kind of fantastic graphic imagery that was created around this event.

If anyone had a reason to want retribution against the “mean kids” — I have it. They’ve been on my case for years. They’re really nasty people. That’s why I have some credibility when I tried to put the brakes on the mob. Next time, let’s have some more people do that too.

To the credit of the mob, very few people attacked me for doing what I did. That’s cause for hope! At least some sense of perspective remained.

And out fo all that was said I think Doc nailed it — we got used by a few trolls, and no one knows who they are. Everyone played a role in this, the people who stopped blogging, the people who threatened their friends, the people who called it a gang rape, and yes indeed, the mean kids. But they’ve paid enough. It’s time to welcome them back into the blogging world, and in a few weeks, ask them to reflect on what they learned. These are all intelligent and creative people, who have acted badly. But they didn’t deserve what they got.

The time to act is way before it escalates into the kind of post that Kathy Sierra posted. There should be people who are willing to provide personal support to others who are ostracized this way — and that support should be available regardless of gender, age, or other circumstances. I won’t support anything that only offers support to women and not men, we must help unpopular people, even people who we think are mean. It’s no crime to be unpopular, and you can measure our humanity by how good we are to people we don’t like.

Sometimes people say things that are designed to hurt other people. Locke, Sessum, Paynter and Head Lemur are the kinds of people who do that. I read yesterday that Denise Howell considers them friends. I’ve asked other people who do, like David Weinberger and AKMA how they can support that — I asked when I was a target of their attacks. All I got was silence. I think people need to come to terms with that, and speak up whenever people say or do things designed to hurt other people. That’s how we prevent explosions like the one we dealt with this week.

So if we have a code of conduct, it can’t just talk about how trolls behave, because truly we have no control over that. It should talk about responsible people whose names we know with reputations they care about — what should they do when abuse happens? That is something we can do something about. There should be 18 steps before something like Kathy Sierra’s post appears in the midst of the blogosphere, and it shouldn’t come from teh person who has been victimized, someone else should stand up for them and explain what happened. For so many reasons this is a much better way to go, and I’m sure the victim would like it better too (I speak from experience).

You know there’s nothing worse than being hunted and having no one care enough to speak up for you. That’s what we need to work on folks. And when we solve this problem, we can go to work on Iraq — because that’s much heavier and much worse, but kind of the same thing. Why aren’t we angry at all the wasted lives? I think we’ll find the answer to that question is related to why we’re so bad at dealing with situations like the one we tried to deal with this week.

I gotta go now. See y’all later.

It’s still the motto 

As Jerry sang: “I know the rent is in arrears, the dog has not been fed in years…

“It’s even worse than it appears.”

Which has been the motto of Scripting News for quite a few years (it’s the universal response to people who flame), and btw, is the weblog version of WMSS.

Scripting News for 3/28/2007

Today’s links 

Is Apple un-hacking user-enhanced AppleTVs?

If I’m not mistaken that’s Mike Arrington, Chris Pirillo and Robert Scoble in the latest JibJab.

Good question from The Dude Abides.

CBS5-TV report on Twitter with Scoble.

News.com: “Apparently, Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard before he had a chance to take any history classes.”

How basic is Twitter? 

Like so many others in the tech blogging world, I’ve spent the last few weeks exploring Twitter. I understand that there were lots of people using it before me, and before that, the developers of Twitter envisioned something that all the rest of us didn’t. So before going any further, let’s pause for a moment and appreciate their innovation and contribution to the richness of the cyber-environment that we work in. Congrats on a great accomplishment.

Now the next step is to wonder what the next step is.

I’ve been following the digging work that Nik Cubrilovic and Steve Poland have been doing, with great interest, particularly the report yesterday on the upcoming Twitter API feature that will allow users to direct private messages at invidual users. Both Steve and Nik have observed that names in the Twitter space may become quite valuable in the future. And Nik observes that the Twitter folk may have made a mistake by not reserving some of the juiciest names for themselves, like GET, for example.

@get “berkeley weather”

If you play it out, the Twitter command line could evolve to be something much like the Unix command line, with an important difference, it’s world-wide in scope. Before you lose your breath, this is hardly the first such command line, the address bar in the browser has a similar property as does the search box on Google (of course, any search engine). But Twitter’s would be newly interesting because the thing it wires together, better than any environment before, is something we’re all interested in — people.

So inevitably, a query about the value of namespaces leads you to wonder if there will be TwitterClones, web-based services that emulate the Twitter API, that keep internal data structures similar to Twitter, and most important, peer with Twitter, the same way Twitter peers with IM and SMS systems.

This is as far as I got in my thinking when last night I decided to ask Les Orchard, a developer I know for quite a few years, and who I’ve worked with on a couple of projects, both of which use the kind of technology that would be required for such a project —

What if there were an open source implementation of Twitter?

Nik Cubrilovic happened to be online at the moment and he jumped in with an idea. Les confessed that he was thinking of doing such a project. I thought to myself that there must be a lot of developers thinking about this right about now. We agreed it was an interesting question, and I said I’d write it up on Scripting News, which is what I’m doing right now.

What do you think? Is Twitter important, like web servers, or blogging software, so important that we should have an open source implementation of something that works like Twitter and can connect up to Twitter? Where are the tough sub-projects, and how much does it depend on the willingness of the developers of Twitter #1 to support systems that connect to theirs?

If you have something to say about this, either post a comment here, or write a blog post, and point to this article and your piece will show up in this Technorati query.

Les Orchard: “Twitter is not just a technological thing.” Amen.

Yahoo mail API 

Yahoo is announcing a new open API for mail. Interested to hear what people think. I was briefed on it earlier today.

A QuickTime screencast with Ryan Kennedy, Jeremy Zawodny and Matt McAlister from Yahoo, explaining the API and what they can do.

It sounded to me like the API allowed developers to create new user interfaces or “skins” for Yahoo’s mail, through SOAP or JSON interfaces, but they said that it could do more than that.

I’d like to see another huge Internet infrastructure company provide what Amazon does with S3, and Yahoo certainly qualifies. This API is not that, but it’s still a good thing that more of the user-level services on the net are being opened through APIs. And Yahoo is one of the leaders in that effort.

Wes Felter: “The standard API for email is IMAP.”

Amateur justice 

Wikipedia: “Presumption of innocence is a legal right that the accused in criminal trials has in many modern nations. It states that no person shall be considered guilty until finally convicted by a court.”

Doc Searls: “If Alan is right, everybody on this giant thread has been taken for one of the oldest rides in the park.”

Next time — think before you trash someone, no matter how much you dislike them, especially because you dislike them.

It takes courage to stand up to a mob, but that is the best of what it means to be an American.

Postscript: I agree we need a blogging code of conduct, but not the kind of code these people have in mind.

Mitch Ratcliffe: “Trolls created the impression of a crime and sat back to watch human nature show its worst side.”

A hive of activity 

Scripting News has been a hive of activity this week, with lots of flow coming from the BBC and TechMeme. But it’s worth noting that while these sites are massive flow-builders, another high-flow site that I’d bet not many of you are aware of, is also making a huge contribution. The pie chart below illustrates.

A link from Daring Fireball keeps everything moving. It’s a gift from heaven. Thanks so much! I’m not worthy I’m not worthy.

All that is important, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out that the all-time authority champion for my site is, according to Technorati, TechCrunch. Mike, thanks so much for helping Scripting News stay on the map!

Dynamic duos 

I feel like I’m finally catching up with all the events of Russo & Hale that have loomed so large in my life for the last year or so. It’s so funny, when I said on December 12, that I was keeping the site running because I needed an advantage in a fight that was coming up, a lot of people thought I was talking about Mike Arrington, including Mike himself. No way. I love Mike, even though sometimes we have our differences. Please note the smilley I’m putting right here:

Anyway, Russo & Hale made sure that they loom large in my world, now I’m showing them, hopefully, that I can loom large in theirs. I think some of their current clients will soon be asking them why they are suing one of their former clients without even trying to negotiate a settlement. Could it be that they’re using the fact that they have free legal service, and the former client has to pay for his?

To me, I liken it to a programmer leaving a virus on a client’s computer, and then coming back a few months later and asking to be paid to remove it. That would be highly unethical, and would get someone thrown out of the Programmer’s Union, if there actually were such a thing.

But being who I am, I can’t possibly get totally serious without throwing a little humor at it. So when I write about Russo & Hale, I try to find some pictures of pairs of people or things that somehow communicate about the issues swirling around Jack and Tim.

Anyway, next time they file a frivolous action against me, if they ever do (knock wood, maybe they won’t) it’ll all be out in the open, and y’all will understand what’s up.

Yours in transparency,

Dave Winer

Scripting News for 3/27/2007

Russo & Hale: How to settle the lawsuit 

As I’ve written previously, the issues around UserLand’s future are tied up in litigation by the company’s former attorneys. I know the readers of Scripting News don’t know the details of UserLand’s corporate structure, even so, I want to outline what I think a reasonable deal would be for Russo & Hale, and UserLand’s other shareholders. If their issues with me continue, I have no doubt that all the details will eventually come out.

So here, in a nutshell is what I think we should do.

First Russo & Hale claims that weblogs.com belonged to UserLand. I don’t agree, but suppose for the sake of argument we concede the point.

Not coincidentally, just before I started operating the site on my own server, there was an offer from another company to buy weblogs.com for $250,000. I didn’t want to sell it, for a variety of reasons.

It’s lucky we had that offer, because that clearly puts a value on the service at the time of the transfer. From that point, there was a lot of work, a lot of rewrites, a lot of technical challenges (remember the June 2004 explosion), a lot of risk, and huge growth, which resulted in a sale, after much negotiation, to VeriSign.

The story of the sale leaked before we were prepared to announce it, unfortunately, while I was flying from San Francisco to Greensboro, North Carolina to participate in a blogging conference. I found out the story leaked while I was transferring planes in Cincinnati, and then when I got to Greensboro, I had to change hotels to find one that had good Internet connectivity so I could help explain to the blogging world what the deal was and why we had done it.

However, before I even got off the plane, I was getting emails from Russo threatening to sue me. Note that up until this point, Russo was my attorney, UserLand’s attorney, secretary, board member, shareholder, and friend! Before I could even get one word in, he had already escalated to suing me. He never even picked up the phone before he started getting legal with me.

And as he taught me so well, when that happens, you have to get a lawyer to do your talking, which is exactly what I did. And now two years later, we still haven’t tried to work this out as honorable gentlemen. People may be wondering why an attorney is suing his former client, without trying to work it out, and honestly so am I.

Anyway, if I were an arbitrator here, I’d say we’re pretty lucky there was a clear price set. So let’s do the math, distribute $250,000 to UserLand shareholders, according to ownership, shake hands and let’s move on with our lives. I’ll overlook the fact that Russo & Hale forced me to waste over $50K on legal fees. And most important to most of the people reading this, we get to focus on getting UserLand working again.

Doesn’t this seem eminently reasonable?

Today’s links 

Microsoft mistakenly sent this reporter his own dossier.

Chris Anderson has the actual dossier, in a PDF.

Steve Goodman visits a Phnom Penh amusement park.

Seattle P-I: “Humane law enforcement officers discovered 110 parakeets in an apartment in the 4200 block of Ninth Avenue Northeast in Seattle on Tuesday.”

The Truman Show anticipated justin.tv.

TechCrunch: Yahoo Mail offers Unlimited Storage.

Ars Technica: “Get ready for EVDO Revision B.”

Wired looks at its own past, which includes mine.

The Twitter API grows 

Just read this article on TechCrunch about a new feature in the Twitter API.

I have the whole API covered in the OPML Editor, no user-level functionality yet to report, but I’ll have an update for this feature as soon as possible.

It’s great to see them evolve the API. It’s a pretty nice one. Easy and quick to implement.

BTW, I’ve noticed that Technorati now includes Twitter references. Might have some effect on the rankings on TR.

Nik Cubrilovic and Steve Poland on Twitter keyword squatting.

Chorus of cowardice 

Chris Locke explains the “Mean Kids” site that’s getting so much attention on TechMeme.

I don’t know Kathy Sierra, but I do know and have been abused by Chris Locke, Frank Paynter and Jeanne Sessum (and quite a few other people).

I’ll tell you what — the mob that’s going after them looks a lot more dangerous than they do. Locke and Paynter are pretty harmless, although they are nasty mofos, on the net (which is an important distinction). Sessum is a champion sexist male-basher, a real piece of work. I’ve never met her, and if I had the chance, I’d run the other way. Which is what I wish the mob of well-intentioned do-gooders would do.

On this one, I take the side of the mean kids, because no one else is, and I have a soft spot for people who are being attacked by a mob, no matter how pathetic they are.

Update on UserLand 

After posting about the future of UserLand, a lot of comments, all constructive. What a change. It used to be that when we opened this kind of discussion, the users were crowded out by flamers. It feels in a way like we’ve popped the stack back to 1995 or so, when everyone in the then-nascent blogging world was full of excitement and hope, and the negative stuff hadn’t shown up yet. The world was smaller then, and now it’s smaller again.

This morning over coffee I reflected on how unusual this situation is. It’s hard enough when a key person resigns, or your lawyer resigns, but I’ve never seen or heard of a situation where they stick around after they resigned and make unspecified demands. As some of the posters say, we hurt when people like Doug, Brent, Andre and Jake left, but they all went on to do other things, and either helped UserLand or at least stayed neutral. I certainly tried to help UserLand after I left. But this idea that Scott could get a new job, at a company that just raised $15 million in VC, and still stand in the way of cleaning up UserLand, is a mystery to me. Maybe once it’s resolved I’ll understand it.

I remarked in a comment yesterday: “The way this company is structured, the people who are central to the support of the product have no stake in its success other than they get to use it. For a company that has played such a central role in leveling those kinds of structures, it has a pretty conventional structure of its own.”

With so little to lose, it seems, we could make some big changes, and try creating a company that rewards its community when it succeeds, in a more substantial way.

The end of Rome 

Sunday night’s episode was the last of the HBO series Rome, which became one of my favorites.

I didn’t know the season was going to end with that episode, but as it proceeded it was clear that they were wrapping things up. Without spoiling the end for anyone who hasn’t seen it, I just want to say, it was a satisfying end, not as dramatic as Six Feet Under, and not the disappointment of Deadwood. Something inbetween. Satisfying yet a bit disturbing.

In the end it was the story of friendship between two Roman soldiers and the love these men have for their children. A sweet ending to good story.

Scripting News for 3/26/2007

Today’s links 

Colorful Berkeley living room on a rainy day.

AP: Bush impeachment on the table, Hagel says.

60 Minutes podcast, useful format, broken into segments.

The future of UserLand 

It pains me to watch the traffic on the UserLand support lists, because it looks like there’s no one but Lawrence at the company these days. The person we hired to be CEO, Scott Young, now has a job at another company, PostPath, and it looks like a full-time job. But he hasn’t resigned, and doesn’t respond to requests for information about how the company is doing. It’s bizarre because I am the founder of the company, one of only two board members, and own the majority of stock in the company. It seems he has moved on, but doesn’t want to let those of us who continue to have an interest in the company take care of it.

It seems to me that this is unfair to the users of the Manila, Radio and Frontier. I watch them ask questions on the mail list, and help each other, but what hope is there for the future? Will there ever be a new release of the products? I see small fixes come sporadically, but I don’t know where they’re coming from.

So I wonder what the users think– what kind of future should UserLand have? Do you think we should try to revive the company and products, or perhaps it would be better if we GPL’d the remaining software, and let the community try to take care of itself? (Note that I am in the community myself, I continue to use the products.)

Post a comment here if you have some thoughts about this.

Doc Searls pays for Radio. He says: “I have great appreciation for Lawrence’s reliable and tireless help over the years.”

Respect from the BBC 

I got a link today from the technology page of the BBC.

Aside from delivering serious flow (thanks!) it’s great to have these ideas heard, esp since they’re about combining the power of amateur and professional media.

In this case, the link itself is a sign of hope.

PS: I have a column in the pipe for the BBC. Hope they run it soon, it’s mostly about archiving for posterity, so I guess in this case, it’ll keep.

Timing is everything 

I’ve been writing about ways to integrate blogging and news for many years. I keep coming back to it, hoping “now’s the time” — only to find out that it isn’t.

Well it appears now is the time. Maybe blogging has matured to the point where it’s earned the respect of mainstream press, or maybe they’ve fallen far enough into the hole created by the Internet that they’re giving up some of their assumptions about how news is reported. No matter, people are listening and listening is good.

So I’m going to keep pumping ideas out, and hoping they help bridge the gap.

A blogger on every op-ed page 

Here’s a piece I wrote in the summer of 2005, from somewhere in the mountains of Montana. I’ll add a little context from 2007.

By now it should be obvious that bloggers are part of the landscape of investigative journalism. If you doubt this, do a little investigation yourself into how the story about Alberto Gonzalez and the US Attorneys is being managed. You’ll find that this time it’s a group of bloggers playing the role of Woodward and Bernstein — the Talking Point Memo people, doing really kickass work. I’ve been reading Josh Marshall every day as the scandal has been developing. And he’s getting credit from some of the professional reporters I respect. Paul Kiel from TPM was a guest on this week’s On The Media, and Josh was a guest on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

I was proud of the Powerline guys when they brought down Dan Rather, not because I agree with their politics (I don’t!) or because I dislike Rather (ditto!) but because the pros had gotten sloppy and careless, and they need the help we bloggers get from the communities we’re part of, they need someone watching over their shoulders asking how they know this or that, or if maybe this reporter has a conflict of some sort. They often do.

The Times has invented The People’s Editor, in response to the Jayson Blair scandal, a job that’s supposed to perform this oversite function, but it doesn’t. So far, they’ve only chosen from their own ranks, people with careers to protect, that keep them from looking deeply into things people don’t want looked into. Further, I can’t send an email to this person and have it taken seriously. He or she doesn’t read the blogs to see what we’re learning about their reporting.

I want them to have a blogger on their editorial page, two or three times a week, someone who comes from our world, someone who will hear what we learn. I know that even if they don’t agree with my politics and vice versa, I will get a respectful hearing from most bloggers. That’s a great first step for any publication to begin the integration with the blogging world. I suppose it seems risky, but you’re going to have to take some risks, big ones, to turn this corner and survive.

My favorite new soup 

Scripting News for 3/25/2007

The Do It Yourself country 

Another thought before calling it a night.

I am not a lawyer.

I am not a judge.

But I have done jury duty.

And in doing so I became an amateur judge.

The noblest kind of judge there is.

It was a wonderful experience, and while, like everyone else, I felt inconvenienced at first to be dragged into court, by the time it was over, I saw the value in it, was glad I did it — it changed my life forever, for the better.

So when people wonder if it makes sense for every educated person to spend a semester in college learning to be a journalist, think of jury duty as being an amateur judgement, and then think how wise our founders were for designing a system where we are judged by amateurs, our peers, not by our supposed superiors, and ask yourself if journalism is any less noble a trade than judgement.

I heard a report in this week’s On The Media about a law in Rwanda that requires journalists to be licensed. The justification was that the law requires doctors and lawyers to be licensed, because a lawyer can lose your freedom, and a doctor can lose your life, and they found that in Rwanda that journalists can help create genocide. Pause for thought. Journalism is powerful stuff. Too powerful to be left to the pros.

The United States is the Do It Yourself country. To the extent that we don’t remember that, that is the extent we’ve lost our way.

It’s good that everyone gets a chance to be a journalist. That doesn’t mean that everyone will be one, but it’s important that everyone can be one if they want to. So teach the kids to be journalists, take the mystique out of it, show them how to vet a source, what integrity means, how to think for themselves. The gatekeepers are losing their power to keep us out. The naysayers can say their nays, but it doesn’t change a thing.

Over and out.

Geek love 

Sometimes people fall in love with geek toys for reasons they can’t express.

It could be that they love iPod because it’s a hard drive that you can put massive quantities of free music on and take with you everywhere. It may have nothing to do with the cool UI (which I don’t think is really all that cool).

And Apple TV may be fun for geeks who have never had a computer hooked up to a HD TV, while its fatal flaw is –> no BitTorrent content, no Netflix content, just what Apple says you should have.

It may solve the “problem” with the iPod that was really core to why people loved the iPod.

That’s just a theory, I don’t have an Apple TV, but I do have a Mac Mini connected to my TV and on the net and I think that’s the coolest toy ever, even after almost six months.

PS: I wrote this as a series of Twitter tweets.

InfoWorld, we hardly knew ye 

I read Jim Forbes’s memorial for InfoWorld with goose bumps. It turns out they finally pulled the plug on the magazine, which used to be known in the very early days (which I am old enough to remember) The Intelligent Machines Journal. I first heard about it at one of the early West Coast Computer Faires, the same one where I met Ted Nelson, Mitch Kapor and Dan Bricklin.

Lots of great reporters got their start at InfoWorld. I rolled out all my products of the 80s through it. I was friends with all the editors, including Stewart Alsop, Jim Fawcette and Jonathan Sacks. And Michael Miller, before he went to PC Mag, set the standard on software reviews. More great people I’ve worked with when they were at InfoWorld: John Dvorak, John Markoff, Paul Freiberger, Denise Caruso, Laurie Flynn, Adam Osborne, Deborah Branscum, Michael Swaine, Scott Mace, Maggie Canon, Rachel Parker, Brett Glass; and of course Jim Forbes.

They were the second publication to review ThinkTank, in 1983, and they put us over the top, with four perfect ratings. We raised two million dollars on the Doug and Denise Green review, in a very real sense, InfoWorld put me in business. That review also got Guy Kawasaki to call me, just before he took his first job at Apple. I remember his first words — “They say your product walks on water.” And that got me one of the first Macs, when it was still a secret, and as they say, the rest is history.

InfoWorld was the first tech publication that gave you sweaty palms when it arrived in the mail. This was before the web, so news came in weekly installments. When InfoWorld arrived, everything else stopped. I read it from cover to cover.

Truth be told, I thought they had stopped printing InfoWorld a long time ago. it’s amazing it lasted so long. We grew up together, all the great people who worked there. But we’re grown up now, the news happens much more quickly, and as I’m fond of saying, it’s distributed now, but I’ll never forget the great times we had, way back when.

One week from today 

Is April 1, the 10th birthday of Scripting News.

Right now, nothing special planned.

If you have an idea, post something and point to this post. We’ll all see it in Technorati.

If I had a hammer 

Ian Betteridge thinks my view of journalism is “frankly, nonsense,” comparing journalism to carpentry. “This is as silly as saying that carpenters are middlemen for wood merchants,” he says.

Interesting point, but in carpentry the raw materials are dead things — wood, nails, screws. In journalism the raw material are sources, living people, who can, if they want go direct, if they get tired of being misquoted, or if no reporter ever asks what they think, or if when asked, they don’t understand. That’s the sense in which reporters are intermediaries.

I suggest a visit inside the sausage factory. Ask a reporter what dumbing down means, and how they feel about the headlines that have appeared over their writing.

Charles Hope: “Who can believe any breathless hagiography about journalists?”

Scripting News for 3/24/2007

Berkeley CyberSalon tomorrow 

Tomorrow’s Cybersalon, at the Hillside Club, 5-7PM, $10, is entitled “Life After TV.” Moderated by Andrew Keen, whose upcoming book is an embarassment to Berkeley, and panelists Mary Hodder, Evan Berg, and Joe Savage.

I’ll be in the the back dressed as a bird, and twittering away on my MacBook Pro, devising new ways to conquer the world.

The experiment worked 

On Thursday I wrote about my intent to reposition Scripting News as a place where ideas originate, and it seems to be working. My piece about reforming journalism is now the #1 item on TM. Re-wiring the attention of the TechMeme bot, while it resulted in a short term loss of attention, seems to have had the long-term benefit.

Saturday Twitter thoughts 

First, it seems we have the OPML Editor updating corner-turn done. Everyone who tried the new RSS-based code updating method reports that it works as advertised, so I can now start pushing new code down the modern highly-scalable pipe. That’s pretty cooool.

The first bits I’m going to push is new script glue for the Twitter API, making it easy to write little apps in the OPML Editor (or Radio or Manila, for that matter) that use Twitter as a back end. I think some interesting pub-sub apps will be made possible by this.

So, as I was beginning to test the new code, I created a new test account on Twitter, one of many that I’ve created, for each of the channels of content that my little robots are maintaining. This one is called simply enough “opml.” Then something occurred to me — exactly the right people are signing up to Twitter these days to make it possible for another bootstrap to occur, one that many people seem to want, as do I — we could make Twitter the open identity system we’ve been looking for. Make your Twitter ID the one that you use to log on to other services. It seems we’re going to go through that bootstrap anyway, and it also seems that if the Twitter folk want to do something good for the Internet they could.

So I wonder if any of the identity gurus are watching this and see the opportunity?

Anyway, I’m going back to my coding for now.

system.verbs.apps.twitter is on the way!

Trouble at the Chronicle 

Tim O’Reilly is hearing rumors that the SF Chronicle is in “big trouble.” It’s a fascinating piece, a must-read, it’s kind of scary to think that the mainstream press is going down without a fight.

At a breakfast meeting yesterday with a CTO at a major print pub, I observed that the MSM guys love to hear Jeff Jarvis’s message of gloom and doom, but feel threatened by my prescription for embracing the new media, a message of hope, of finding new relevance for the skills and experience of professional journalists.

It’s worth another try…

First, reform journalism school. It’s too late to be training new journalists in the classic mode. Instead, journalism should become a required course, one or two semesters for every graduate. Why? Because journalism like everything else that used to be centralized is in the process of being distributed. In the future, every educated person will be a journalist, as today we are all travel agents and stock brokers. The reporters have been acting as middlemen, connecting sources with readers, who in many cases are sources themselves. As with all middlemen, something is lost in translation, an inefficiency is added. So what we’re doing now, in journalism, as with all other intermediated professions, is decentralizing. So it pays to make an investment now and teach the educated people of the future the basic principles of journalism.

Second, embrace the best bloggers. How? Easy — every time someone is quoted in your publication, offer them a blog hosted on your domain. This has a couple of advantages: 1. It gives the reporters the ultimate say on who gets to share some of your authority, who gets a chance to be the next amateur star. 2. It gives the reporters an incentive to only use sources that are qualified, it would improve the quality of your reporting. It also has a third benefit, as you expand the number of people writing under your banner, you also expand the reach of your publication, into school boards, local government, sports teams and businesses. It’s also important because it’s how you decentralize, aligning your interests with the “grain” of the web, as opposed to the current positioning, against it.

Of course you run ads on each of the pages, that’s your reward for sharing your authority with the people who used to be your sources (and who still are, in every sense). Now your reporters just have to read the blogs to find the new trends, the quotes for their articles. They will learn a lot and perhaps even start having fun, instead of (as Markoff puts it in the O’Reilly piece) feeling like they’re at a wake. That’s depression, and you can feel it in the articles they write, and you can’t possibly dig out of a hole when you’re depressed. You need to find a way to tap into the excitement of the Internet, to bring it into your publication. In the tech business they call this “embrace and extend.”

Eventually new businesses will form out of the messy brew of sources, editors and reporters you’ll be supporting and in some cases, employing. The publishers and owners must also keep their eyes and minds open, be creative, no one knows the future, but there certainly is one, even if some days it feels like there isn’t.

Thanks to Tim for opening the door to this discussion.

Scripting News for 3/23/2007

Today’s links 

Harvard’s Manila server is down.

Frank Barnako: Rocketboom may charge for shows.

Andrew Baron: “Rocketboom will remain freely available.”

Dan Gillmor takes off the gloves.

Russo & Hale, our law firm, sues us 

On March 12, I wrote a cautionary tale, part of the history of UserLand. The story was written in a general way, and raised a bunch of questions. Today I’d like to answer some of those questions.

1. It’s really weird to be sued by your lawyer. Not a very nice feeling. Sort of like being made sick by your doctor, deliberately.

2. There are now two UserLands: The original company, and a new one which was formed in 2004 to market Manila and Radio, to create incentives for a new management team, and to settle claims by our law firm.

3. I stopped working for UserLand in 2002, for health reasons, but I never sold my stock. Today I own 90 percent of the original company, and more than 50 percent of the new company.

4. Jack Russo was UserLand’s attorney, a board member, secretary and my personal attorney, from 1988 to 2005.

5. Russo and his law firm, Russo & Hale sued UserLand, Scripting News, and myself, in August 2006. Earlier this month, the court ruled to disqualify Russo & Hale from representing UserLand’s shareholders due to conflicts of interest. Their strategy was clear — to force me to spend a lot of money on lawyers while they used their own in-house, relatively inexpensive, legal resources.

6. In the 2004 settlement, Russo released all claims with UserLand and myself. He was compensated with a large share of the stock in the new company. He drafted the agreement, it was signed in his office in Palo Alto.

7. As I said in the previous piece, the company was in awful legal condition. While I take blame for that, as founder and former CEO, some of the responsibility must also lie with Russo, as the company’s lawyer.

Man on the street 

I’ve been trying to get someone to go in business with me on this idea, but it ain’t happening, so what the hell, here it is.

Start with a two-person video crew, like Andrew and Joanne, in New York, and every Tuesday, rain or shine, go to Times Square and interview 20 or 30 people, asking a very simple query. Tell me about a product, service or company you hate, and why. Then on Wednesday morning, release a video, very well branded, through every channel imaginable, with the best interview from Tuesday. By best I mean most enthusiastically hateful. The company who most screwed someone recently, told graphically and personally, from the point of view of a user.

Of course the companies who are targeted may try to sue you, but what would they sue you for? You’re just relaying a customer’s experience, told in the first person. Buf if they sue, so what. It’s great publicity, the best.

Then one day, probably not very far into it, one of the companies will get the idea that if they respond to the complaint, people might actually like them. They might turn hate into respect, derision into love, if they do the totally un-American thing — listen to a customer, and respond as if they care.

“Yes, we know we let you down, but we promise to fix the problem, and to do better next time.”

Then you know what happens — sales soar. This is really great marketing. Much better than ads that say “Our product is great, we don’t suck, buy buy buy.” Because everyone knows you suck. There’s no such thing as a product that doesn’t suck. But we’re going to give our money to the company that knows that and is trying to do better.

I think this is a gold mine. The video producers that capture people’s imaginations with real-life product nightmares will own the brand of the future in advertising, because this is the future, user-perspective marketing, where the users define your products, and you make the products they want you to make. Same with politics, btw.

I’ve pitched this to lots of people in the video world, but they don’t believe. Now at least my stake is in the ground. I bet that by this time next year, someone will be doing a great job of this kind of video, and they’ll be raking in the bucks from the people who used to waste money on the old kind of advertising. I’d love to work with a team that really wants to go for this, maybe even invest.

Todd Cochrane (via email): “The man on the street proposal you have is how I got GoDaddy as a sponsor. I bashed the hell out of them on a issue they responded very publicly and fixed the issue and those actions have earned them a significant amount of money through my show. While I still jump on them when they screw up I do it publicly and guess what they generally fix it. I love your concept and think it is a great one.”

Ryan Tate: “One our most talked about stories at the Business Times a few years ago was one with some architects complaining about what buildings they hated most.”

Scripting News for 3/22/2007

Today’s links 

Randy Morin: SEOing Dave. Heh.

Steve Rubel: Twitter may face huge SMS bills.

Michael Gartenberg reviews and positions Apple TV.

Marc Canter nails it. As long as war is incredibly profitable, the US will continue to “solve” every problem with war.

Personal Democracy Forum 

I spoke with Micah Sifry this afternoon and we agreed that I would do a keynote at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, on May 18 at Pace University.

The topic is the importance of open standards for all kinds of tools and devices. As with the Public Media conference last month, I’m going to write a series of essays here to prepare for the talk in New York.

300 

I played hooky today and went to see 300 at the IMAX theater in San Francisco. Not exactly my kind of movie. Pretty linear, the costumes were cool, and some of the monsters were so ugly they were funny.

Not sure why people think this movie is so great. But IMAX sure is impressive. If I were as rich as Mark Cuban I’d have one installed in my house.

McNulty from The Wire is in the movie. It was funny to see him speak with a British accent and pretend to be an ancient Greek.

I guess you can tell I didn’t get sucked into the plot. I don’t think you’re supposed to come away thinking the movie is funny.

Top Dave 

Randy Morin notes that I’ve been gradually changing the way Scripting News works. It’s true. I’m trying some experiments, to learn, but not to improve the rank of the site, rather to make it more useful to readers, and make it more likely that the things that I want to get attention, get attention.

For example, I noticed that I was always in the choir on TechMeme, but rarely did people discuss what I was interested in. Over time this got more pronounced. So I decided to opt-out of TechMeme, and rebuild, and see if I could reposition Scripting News as an originator of ideas, which it always has been. It seemed to me that Gabe’s engine had drawn an incorrect conclusion about this site. I’ve noticed that Scoble can get an essay near the top of TM, even if no one is pointing to him, and if three excellent sites point to an essay here, it barely makes a blip on TM.

So I don’t think his system is fair, or right. But unlike the B-list complainers, I’m not going to try to guilt Gabe into fixing it. I think a route-around is the web way of doing it. Make it all happen outside Gabe’s world, and that will get his attention.

Now I may not be into SEO, but the changes are improving my rank, nonetheless. I’ve noticed that my articles now are showing up closer to the top of searches in the areas they cover. Of course I like this. Nothing wrong with a little respec!

BTW, I’ve been doing this with O’Reilly for a long time. I don’t get invited to speak at their conferences, but they talk about what I want them to talk about anyway. Blogging, RSS, podcasting — these are always big topics at ETech and the Web 2.0 conference. Same with SXSW. You think people don’t know I’m behind these things? Heh. Of course they do.

You know the old Godfather rap, keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. Seems Tim and Hugh could learn a few tricks from Don Corleone.