Today’s links 
BarCamp Boston this weekend at the Stata Center at MIT.
The California primary will be held on Feb 5 next year. A major change in the US political system. 15 other states are considering doing the same: Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Texas.
Salim works for Caterina at Yahoo’s Brickhouse.
The twitter-fan wiki.
Macapper: How to clean a black MacBook.
Blogging from the kitchen today.
New feature, a Technorati link at the bottom of each of the stories pages. Click on it to find out who’s pointing to the story. I’m not the first to do it, but it’s nice to have anyway. 🙂
I started tracking hits separately on the stories site earlier this week. The number one referrer is Techmeme, after that Twitter and Overlawyered.
I’m up to 179 followers on Twitter. Getting ready to do an outliner interface. I’m sure you could see that coming. I live in an outliner.
Microsoft’s S3?
Scoble thinks Microsoft is going to offer the equivalent of Amazon S3.
That would be great!!
Here’s what he said: “Amazon S3 charges right now about $.15 per gigabyte of stuff delivered. Watch what happens after Ray Ozzie jumps into the market. I bet that by late 2008 the cost per gigabyte delivered will be about 1/10th that.”
Yehi! The more the merrier. I’ll use them both. What are the chances that both Microsoft and Amazon go out of business? We’re starting to approach future-safeness. Let’s see, I’d like BofA to provide one too, how about Exxon-Mobil. And of course Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and the University of Michigan.
It’s funny, I just had a flash about Ray and his new job. I always assumed it would be a burden, like a death march, struggling with all those corporate types to get them to do something creative, interesting, something that might capture the imaginations of users and developers. There’s no doubt that Scoble is much more creative nowadays. But this makes me wonder if maybe Ray gets to do some creative stuff after all.
BTW, I love that picture of Scoble, taken the day he announced (or leaked deliberately) the news that he was leaving Microsoft. I know he was kidding around when he posed for the pic (I asked him how it felt to be leaving Microsoft). But you can’t hide a certain truth, even when you’re playing. Scoble was probably freaked, just a bit — but that’s good. Life should be scary. It’s not like anyone knows what’s really going on here. Not even Tim O’Reilly or Hugh Forrest. 🙂
Speaking of Scoble: I just saw a funny Holiday Inn commercial on CNN Morning with a group of business people talking about someone in their group who’s blogging and getting written up in all the business pubs. One of the guys jokes to the boss that he should be working for her. She walks in, and acts dorky and blogger-like. It’s like they put Scoble in a TV commercial.
Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo on S3.
Twitter, day 2
Lots of flow and lots of follow-up on Twitter yesterday.
Perhaps the most interesting comment was from Tom Morris. “It’s fun like blogging is fun. That is, until the kids start using it to tell their friends how much a particular movie sucks while they’re in the cinema and Hollywood sees revenue from lame movies drop further.” Hmmm.
BTW, I am using it and learning from it. Writing an essay like yesterday’s is my way of warming up before using a piece of software, I guess.
A remarkable thing about Twitter is how quickly my network booted up. I already have 200-plus people monitoring my feed — and you can think of it that way, and they even provide an RSS 2.0 version, of everything, apparently. Thanks!
I find myself thinking of Twitter as an adjunct to this site. I used to send out email bulletins during the day. Perhaps I should send out pointers to new blog posts during the day. Or maybe Twitter is playing the role that the new “Today’s Links” is playing.
What matters about Twitter, btw, is that people are using it.
I said this on Twitter, but it bears repeating here — if ever an app cried out for bundling the functionality of Tinyurl, this is it. Maybe Evan, with his post-Google riches, should make a deal with them, maybe even buy them. Every link you enter into the Twitter entry box should automatically be Tiny-ized.
Confabb changes
Salim Ismail, founder of Confabb, has passed the baton to the company’s first CEO — David Dell, ex of The Conference Board, and took a juicy entrepreneurial job at Yahoo.
Griffin Rocket
Griffin’s Rocket FM sounds like just the toy to connect my gorgeous new MacBook Pro to my gorgeous new Denon receiver.
I wonder why there isn’t a Bluetooth-based way to couple a receiver and an audio source, or is there?
Scripting News Annex 
Posted by Christian Burns on March 15, 2007 at 5:54 am
Actually they already incorporate tinyurl when you are posting from the twitter page. long urls get converted automatically. When you posted that to twitter yesterday my first urge was to respond on twitter @davewiner but realized that you do not count me as a friend yet and you would not see my response so I kept my mouth shut. It kind of goes along with my idea that there needs to be a way to see an @username that is directed to me even if I dont count that person as a friend. I mention more on that in this comment.
Posted by Dave Winer on March 15, 2007 at 5:57 am
Interesting. I’m just figuring this stuff out.
You did get the message through to me, btw, using an existing channel, or does every bit of communication have to go through Twitter? Is there some advantage to that?
Posted by Christian Burns on March 15, 2007 at 6:47 am
Yes, and I knew that I could have commented off topic on yesterdays blog post, but it is different.
the advantage is the access that you have to our attention and knowledge. If you ask a question and can hear the response. Like asking a question at an unconference and some people don’t have a microphone.
but the “room size” is changing and twitter is getting bigger. we need tools.
The other day scoble asked for questions to ask firefox, he gat great questions
Posted by Dave Winer on March 15, 2007 at 7:02 am
Christian, it’s just like instant outlining, where you could subscribe to anyone’s outline, but it wasn’t reciprocal. Or it’s just like RSS — I might be subscribed to your blog but you might not be subscribed to mine. I read John Markoff’s articles, but he doesn’t read mine. I understand the frustration, but I think it’s an absolutely crucial feature. It’s because of this that RSS was able to get sorted out. There were a lot of people who were unhappy about that, and on a mail list where everyone is subscribed to everyone else, we never would have been able to reach a consensus and still have public discourse.
Posted by Christian Burns on March 15, 2007 at 9:17 am
Dave,
Yep, others will build out features that take it to the next level. It is great that we have the ability to even have this conversation. Thanks for helping to get some new ideas flowing in my brain, I will need to process them.
Posted by David Mercer on March 15, 2007 at 12:36 pm
If you’re talking about using bluetooth to send audio, you can’t with any fidelity. It’s used for phone connections because everything gets scrunched down to the 56kbps lowest common denominator of the phone system. Bluetooth is only a few hundred kbps, not enough for hifi.
Posted by Christian Burns on March 15, 2007 at 3:40 pm
I went ahead and did a podcast about what we were discussing. http://christianburns.wordpress.com/2007/03/15/cbp-003-twitter/
Posted by Ryan on March 15, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Is Amazon Web Services the Compaq of ISPs?
Until Dare’s post on AWS I had not heard of EC2. I’ve been using S3 to backup my Linux server instance on Linode, via a ruby script called s3sync, and it’s worked like a snap. I also backup my home PC to S3 via JungleDisk.
With EC2 I’d have a virtual server like on Linode, but could requisition a new server whenever I felt like it (theoretically — it’s still in beta, who knows how well they’ll execute) and have it running in 10 minutes. It’s 10 cents per instance hour, or about $72 per month, for the equiv of 1.75GB ram, 160GB hard drive, 2GHz server! On Linode I pay $60 monthly for a 600MB ram server with maybe 16gb ram. The reliability and service, bttw, have been excellent.
Posted by Ryan on March 15, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Actually Linode has me at 768MB ram and 24GB hard disk, I’m not sure the guaranteed rate on the processor is.
Posted by Ryan on March 15, 2007 at 9:53 pm
PS Both Linode and Amazon EC2 provide me with more RAM and continuous CPU speed than my home PC!