Scripting News for 3/21/2007

Google and universities 

You may have heard that Google is doing deals with university libraries, in general the terms of the deals are secret, but some of the terms are starting to come out.

For example, at least some of the universities didn’t get the right to re-license scans of books that Google hands back to them.

It appears none of the libraries thought the whole thing through to the point where they realized that after it’s all done, there will be one great university library, Google’s, and it will be a commercial entity. It’s one thing to sell a food concession to McDonald’s, but the library? How much more central to the being of a university can you get?

Had they worked together first, it’s likely they could have negotiated terms that allowed them to remain in business after Google is finished sucking up all their content.

Peter Brantley, who negotiated for the University of California, wrote two blog posts about his dealings with Google. One lyrical and sad, and the other apologetic. Both are revealing and worth reading.

Remember, in all this, Google is a rich company whose first responsibility is to its shareholders. Today they’re riding high, but in a few quarters, they may have trouble making their numbers. It may have seemed Microsoft would always be on top, and no one could get fired for buying IBM. Who knows what Google will do with the trust when they need the money.

And while some of the schools are private, and responsible only to their trustees, others are public, and repsonsible to the people. What right did they have to trade away the people’s property, and what did they get in return? No one knows, yet.

Attn OPML Editor users 

The new version of the RSS-based updating code (some call this appcasting or codecasting) is available for testing.

I posted instructions for “brave souls” on the mail list.

If all goes well, these changes should be integrated in the downloadable version of the editor, along with fixes for Vista and IE7, in a couple of weeks.

Still diggin!

Obstruction of Justice 

Naked Jen says what’s obvious — the President is obstructing justice.

Congress is a co-equal branch of government.

It does not serve at the pleasure of the President.

Today’s links 

The Guardian — yet another UK newspaper with reality-challenged headline writers!

Political mashup art, across two centuries.

A vision of the future of Twitter, with twits from JetBlue, Starbucks, your favorite baseball team.

Nick Carr: Two views of Web 2.0 in business.

Brandon Paddock flamed by Walt Mossberg?

TV links is a watch-in-browser public DVR.

My first blog 

Scripting News is not my first blog, it’s not even my second.

The first was the News page of the 24 Hours of Democracy project, started on 2/15/96. It ended shortly after the project was over, on 2/27/96.

My second blog was the Frontier News page, started shortly in March 1996. It wasn’t until 4/1/97 that it was lifted up to the home page its name was changed to Scripting News.

So — April 1 is the 10th anniverary of this weblog.

PS: David Dunham wonders if DaveNet wasn’t a weblog. I wonder about that too.

Scripting News for 3/20/2007

CNN 

I’ve been watching CNN this morning as I drink coffee and catch up on news on the web.

They’ve covered two stories in 1/2 hour: 1. There’s a 12-year-old boy lost in the woods in North Carolina (I think, based on the accents, they haven’t said). 2. They broke away from that story for about a minute to tell us about VP Cheney’s doctor’s appointment, checking up on a leg condition. Then back to the 12-year-old’s father, who talks about how happy he is to hear that his boy is safe. They’re now repeating it. Is anything else going on? Not on CNN.

So I switch to MSNBC, and damn if they aren’t covering exactly the same story. Same on Fox.

In six years he may well be a soldier, in Iraq, fighting for his life, and they’ll be obsessing about another 12-year-old.

PS: I turned off the TV and tuned in the WNYC webcast. At least public radio hasn’t sold out yet. Three American soldiers died in Iraq today. Roadside bombs. President Bush is standing by Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. The President is going to Kansas City today. 3000 more emails were disclosed today in the scandal brewing around the fired US Attorneys.

PPS: At 7:30PM, I thought I’d catch up on the news on TV, after seeing Bush’s press conference this afternoon, I thought there would be an interesting discussion. Is this Watergate all over again (seems that way to me, as the President gets into coverup mode, but he’s bluffing, he can’t hold the line, I’m sure of it). Nope, Anderson Cooper is covering the lost Carolina kid. His chubby dad is on screen, finally even he looks tired. Glad the kid is okay. Sorry our country is so fucked.

Bush’s destiny? 

The blog bootstrap 

CNet searches for the creator of the first blog. That would be Tim Berners-Lee, whose first website was, in every way, a blog. A couple of comments. 1. Not sure how he tried to get in touch but I never got a call or an email. 2. I don’t want to take anything away from anyone else. Lots of people made weblogs what they are today. Why not be inclusive. 3. They call me “irascible.” Not sure if I’ve met either of the authors in person, I wonder how they formed that opinion and why they feel the need to label people like that.

In another, related article they interview the creator of Finger, who says the ideas of blogging originated in bulletin boards.

In any case, with all due respect, I think the CNet article misses something important as they make light of my claim to having bootstrapped blogging. The first blogs were inspired by this blog, in fact many of them, including Barger’s Robot Wisdom, used my software. If you go to BlogTree, a site that asks bloggers to say which sites inspired them, you’ll see how many self-declare as originating from the Scripting News community. How you summarize that effect is up to you, I call it a bootstrap.

I was trying to disperse the community that developed around this blog, from the beginnig. The goal being to inspire other people to do the same as I was doing. Jason Kottke once called me the Johnny Appleseed of blogging, and that’s something I’m happy with. That was my intention.

To people who say the ideas were obvious, I don’t think they were. I tried to convince many, including leading VCs and tech companies, to help bootstrap blogging, but I was left to do it myself.

Stuck tech 

Peter Rip, a man I’ve never met, but would like to, wrote an amazingly insightful article about where we’re at in web applications these days.

“The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website. This is no different than the world before the Windows Clipboard. All 640KB of memory was available to whatever application was running. The point of integration was the User. As it is today.”

I have lots of ideas I’d like to share about where we can go with the formats we already have, but I can’t get past the gatekeepers at the conferences Mr Rip mentions in his piece.

Today’s links 

OpenCongress: Iraq bill tests the Democratic leadership’s skills.

Scripting News for 3/19/2007

AppleTV shipping? 

Apple has been pushing updates of iTunes with features that tease about AppleTV, but today they came right out with a fairly complete pitch for the imminent product, which some think will ship later this week, perhaps as early as tomorrow.

I just got an email from Ole Eichorn saying he got a notice from Apple that they’ve shipped his Apple TV. So that’s it, whatever it is, it’s shipping.

I feel like I’ve done my homework, not sure if I’m going to get an AppleTV, it depends on how heavy the DRM is. I suspect it will be pretty heavy. I’ve had an iPod since they came out, but I’ve never bought a song at the iTunes music store, because of the DRM. I also have a Mac Mini on my TV, acting as my Internet-based DVR. I pay Comcast $115 a month for subscriptions to all the services I use.

In a rational world, we’d be building apps off this site as we’re building on Twitter. It’s really rich, but we’re too scared of Hollywood to work together on this. Or at least I’m too scared. But I admire what they’re doing, esp since they just added excellent RSS support. I may go ahead and design some software that automates BitTorrent for a friend (who will remain nameless) who is a Gilmore Girls fan who thinks its silly that she has to remember to download the program every week. I know Azureus has RSS support, but as it’s implemented it’s way too technical for even me to configure properly, and it’s hopeless to try to explain to a person who knows how to use a TiVO, which is all the technical expertise that should be required. The UI should allow a user to express their desire the way my friend expressed it — every time there’s a new episode of the Gilmore Girls, get it for me. Not 204 copies of last week’s show produced by different people. Just the one I always get. With EZTV doing quality control, the problem is close to solved for TV shows. And for movies there’s Axxo. Don’t know who he is? It’s worth learning.

The point is this — the open DRM-less world is tantalizingly close to delivering the nirvana we seek, entirely as a labor of love. If we somehow could get clearance from Hollywood to go ahead (unlikely) we could take the last few steps to make it user friendly. Compare that against what Apple will offer us in the next few days. Maybe Apple will challenge Hollywood, the open letter from Steve Jobs offers a sliver of hope. We’ll be watching, very carefully.

Blog Hits for Jesus 

This is Today’s Links with a cute name.

Anti-Hillary ripoff of Apple’s famous 1984 commercial.

TechCrunch compares Twitter, Dodgeball and Facebook.

The Mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Anderson, calls for the impeachment of President Bush. SLC is the capital of Utah, which is one of the most conservative states in the US.

NY Times: “John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.”

Scoble notes that geek productivity is up 200% today.

Airport Extreme, day 2 

Following up on yesterday’s post on configuring the my MacBook Pro to work with the new Airport Extreme, I installed the software from the CD, but found that unless I plugged all the computers into the same router, they couldn’t “see” each other. This created a problem, because the router I was using had five Ethernet jacks, and the Extreme only has three. I was able to juggle things around, which involved reconfiguring two routers, but eventually was able to get the four machines I wanted to connect to see each other, all through the Extreme.

That set up the moment of truth, when I’d find out how much faster the Extreme is for the crucial job of moving media files between a server and a laptop. The answer: it’s quite a bit faster.

I find numbers fairly meaningless, so I took a movie of my MacBook Pro, in the kitchen, copying a movie from the Mac Mini in the den.;

Movie: Demo of performance of Airport Extreme router.

Now I have another problem. I need the Denon receiver to have a local IP address so I can control it via Firefox. With the Netgear router I looked it up on Attached Devices, and entered its address in the browser, and it just worked. The Airport Utility app doesn’t seem to have a way to find the address of attached devices.

Poor Scoble 

I can’t believe how surprised MSM people are at Scoble saying that Microsoft’s advertising sucks. That’s how people talk, and one of the principles of blogging is, imho, Come As You Are. (See also: Dogma 2000.)

Personally, I think they’re feigning suprise, pretending they’re shocked, when they use language like that too. What do they think about Microsoft’s Internet strategy. When was the last time they created some software that made you think they liked software?

Postscript: I’ve received a few comments saying the reporter was justified in quoting Scoble saying something he didn’t say; and even if the headline was wrong, it isn’t the reporter’s responsibility. This is of course nonsense.

Fresh Fish Flesh 

I had a great time with Ponzi, who came to visit this weekend. We mostly acted like kids and made up a few new slogans, including the title of this post.

Try saying Fresh Fish Flesh five times fast.

Then add a “y” to the end of each word.

Some very strange sounds end up coming out of your mouth!

nytimesriver.com 

Since I had to restart the NY Times river robot to make the Twitter feed work, it was a small matter to restart the HTML page, the one that works so nicely on mobile devices like a Blackberry.

http://nytimesriver.com/

When people say it’s worth paying money for the service, that’s nice, but it doesn’t help, for a few reasons. 1. It’s not the kind of thing people pay for, and I’m not going to try to change the way people think about websites. As a user I myself wouldn’t pay for it (although of course as a developer, I am). 2. It could be a nice place to put ads for mobile products, and there doesn’t appear to be a good place to put ads to reach mobile users. 3. I would be willing, myself, to pay to run ads for the river in the NY Times, to help build a user base, but without an agreement, it would be a foolish investment.

Anyway, as long as the program is running, it’s a small matter to generate the HTML. But I’m not committing to running it indefinitely. Just for now.

Scripting News for 3/18/2007

Naked Jen in South Africa press 

Another of my friends, Naked Jen, was part of a protest to save some old trees here in Berkeley. It was written up in a South Africa newspaper, which I get via RSS. “On Saturday, 78 bare-bottomed activists — some first-time nudists, others lifelong exhibitionists — joined a half-dozen protesters who have been living in the trees since December.”

The TimesOnline quotes wrong 

They quote a top blogger (Scoble) saying “Microsoft sucks.”

The only problem is he didn’t say that.

Another accuracy-challenged “real” reporter.

Airport Extreme 

I just set up a new Airport Extreme at the house.

I thought transfers between my laptop and a server would be considerably faster, but there’s no discernable difference. Maybe I still need to buy the $1.99 enabler software, even though this laptop was purchased after they shipped the new Extreme.

I was confused at first when I ran the Airport Admin Utility after installing the new software. It still complained that it wasn’t compatible with the new version, but then after reading the MacInTouch review, I realized that they were no longer maintaining it, and ran the new “Airport Utility,” and all was good. The setup took just a few minutes, and went smoothly.

Welcome to the camp 

A big change was announced last night, TechCrunch has a CEO, ex Fox Interactive acquisitions director, Heather Harde.

The amazing thing is that TechCrunch has a CEO.

What started as a labor of love by my friend Mike Arrington, a man with a hidden gift for quickly grokking the value in a myriad of web projects, and a deep genuine passion for entrepreneurship, had become first a juggernaut, then a nascent empire, and now shows signs of becoming a for-real empire that harkens back to the heyday of Pat McGovern and Bill Ziff.

I met Heather briefly at Gnomedex last August in Seattle. I know Mike has had his eye on her for a long time. I’m glad he’s getting to focus on content, and can only imagine what they have in store. Along with everyone else, I look forward to watching this story unfold.

NY Times update 

I was trolling around looking for another Twitter-related project this morning and I came across a comment from a guy who works at the NY Times saying that: 1. The other nytimes account on Twitter is from the Times itself! 2. They’ve been there since March 5. 3. They’re planning to do more with feeds in Twitter. 4. And they welcome competition.

My first comment to all that: Awesome!

I didn’t know who was doing the NY Times twitter-river, but it’s great that it’s the Times itself. I love it when we get into this mode, where things are moving so fast when on March 18 you can boast (legitimately) that you’ve been doing it since March 5! That’s when you know we’re rising up the curve quickly. Reminds me of when podcasting was catching on.

http://twitter.com/nyt

I have more stuff planned too.

Let’s have fun!

PS: Jacob Harris from the Times elaborates in a comment here.

Scripting News for 3/17/2007

Ponzi’s new MacBook 

Ponzi is over at my house checking out the RSS Couch, and setting up her new MacBook.

I took a movie as she was getting started.

We had a bottle of Ponzi wine while we were setting it up. Hic.

jkOnTheTwitter 

Kevin from JK, an excellent mobile gadget blog, suggested he might like to see his blog as a Twitter River, and I said it would be my honor to provide one.

http://twitter.com/jkOnTheRun

Having generalized the code this morning to make it work for Wired in addition to the Times, it took all of 15 minutes to get it working for JK.

PS: It’s kind of obvious I should do it for Scripting, too?

I love Patti Smith 

1999 Salon profile of Patti Smith who was outstanding on last night’s HD broadcast of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame awards.

Patti’s mom, who called her Tricia, loved her music as much as we do. Mom told her, on the day she died, that when she was inducted she should play her favorite song, the one she played while she was vacuuming. Smith told the story so sweetly, so you had to wonder what the song would be. She turned around, put the mike to her mouth and screamed: “I don’t fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future.” Mom’s favorite Patti Smith song, it turns out, was Rock & Roll Nigger. Kind of the punk rock equivalent of We Make Shitty Software. I love Patti Smith.

Google’s discography for Patti Smith.

Wired on Twitter? 

Michael Calore at Monkeybites wonders if someone will make a TwitterRiver for Wired News.

Okay, here it is.

http://twitter.com/wired

They have 16 blogs, all of which have feeds. If they provide an OPML reading list for all those feeds, I can add them to the river. I’m kind of tempted to do it myself.

Later, after I get some sleep. (It’s 4:30AM.)

Twitter news feeds 

Tom Newman sends word to check out the following Twitter names: cnn, cnnbrk, bbcnews, bbc.

He also points out that there’s a nytimes account that reflects the contents of the main NY Times feed. The nyt newsbot I set up reflects the contents of all the Times feeds.

Tonight I’m working on generalizing the TwitterRiver tool so the same code can process multiple accounts as well as multiple feeds and correctly route news items between them.

The reason why it’s such a good fit is that Twitter is a river, I saw that immediately. It’s what I’ve been preaching. They got a lot of people to think in terms of River of News. So of course I’m going to jump on that bandwagon. I’ll take victory however I can get it.

Scripting News for 3/16/2007

NY Times on Twitter 

Okay, I got the bugs worked out, and it seems to work, fingers crossed, praise Murhpy, I am not a lawyer and I don’t work for the NY Times.

http://twitter.com/nyt

It’s set to post one new story per minute, as long as they are available. I may decrease that to once every three minutes or every five minutes. I’m interested in what people think.

“All the news that’s fit to twit.”

How important it is for publications and publishing platforms to be open. Because Twitter has a public API that allows anyone to add a feature, and because the NY Times offers its content as a set of feeds, I was able to whip up a connection between the two in a few hours. That’s the power of open APIs.

Rex Hammock: “Hey, Twitter is a newsreader.”

Don Park: “There he goes again.”

Link of the day 

A new feature! When Today’s Links would only have one item, we give an award to the one link that made a Links section necessary. The first such honor goes to Mary Hodder.

Mary Hodder: “Cingular == evil.” Concise.

Microsoft in it to win? 

I see Scoble is up pretty late too.

I had this thought when I read that Microsoft is “in it to win,” even before I read Scoble’s essay.

I’m a fan of Deal or No Deal. I know it’s a stupid show, and that’s why I like it.

I can’t believe the misplaced arrogance of some of the contestants. Last night I saw a guy who had one big number left on the board decide to go for it. The box he opened of course was the big number. So he went from having an offer on the table of $40K to $1K in a single move. That’s okay, I’m still going to win, he says. His family backs him up.

Okay, what else is he supposed to say, you might ask? Well, good question.

He should be saying “My it’s nice to have made $40K for 25 minutes worth of work.”

In other words, when you boast of how smart you are, when smarts has nothing to do with winning or losing, you look pretty fcuking dumb.

Microsoft isn’t in it to win because Microsoft can’t win, any more than the guy with just one big number on the board can. Sure there’s a infinitesmal sliver of hope, but not enough to bet your future on.

I don’t know what I’d say if I were Microsoft now. I would try to divest in the system that produced Vista as much as I possibly could. When a big tree falls, it creates room for new growth. It takes a long time for a tree the size of Microsoft to fall on its own. And it’s very hard for an exec at such a company to make big parts of it fall before they have to.

That’s why IBM was the last of the Big Iron companies to collapse after the advent of the fractional horsepower computer (aka the PC). They were the biggest, so they had the furthest to fall. Microsoft is in the unenviable position of being the IBM of our age.

Programming Twitter at 4AM 

I guess the next step in my exploration is to program a simple app that uses the Twitter API. And just like the old days, in the 70s, I’m up in the middle of the night because that’s when the system is fast enough to actually get some work done.

During the day, Twitter is very slow. As a user this is somewhat workable, but if you’re developing an app, it’s excruciating. And it’s possible that my app might not function at all when the system is overloaded. I’m feeling this stuff out. Any help from someone experienced at developing on Twitter would be much appreciated.

Okay, I don’t want to announce what I’m trying to create, because I might not be able to get it to work, and then there will be users who will be disappointed when I turn the thing off (that never really worked). But in general, it’s a newsbot. I’m sure a lot of other people are doing these, it’s kind of an obvious thing to try, right?

Anyway, I’m wondering if Twitter keeps you from posting too frequently and if so, what’s the maximum rate you can post? I’m finding that after doing some work, the connection closes as I’m waiting for a response. It could be that I’m being throttled, or it could be that the server is having problems even in the middle of the night, even when the web UI is fast.

If you have any insight, please post a comment.

WSJ head buried in sand? 

This WSJ article reminds me of the early articles in MSM about blogging. I wonder if any programmers at the WSJ are experimenting with newsbots for Twitter (see above) or if they’re just burying their heads in the sand.

At the very least this is a good sandbox for experimentation. As I said yesterday, what matters is that there are users. I wonder if they’ll ever figure this out, that when they dis something that people like, they’re losing the respect of those people.

They really make Tara Hunt sound like a b*tch. I know enough to make a distinction between sounding like one when passed through their filters and actually being one.

Scripting News for 3/15/2007

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 for 3/14/2007

Today’s links 

The 857,291st article (this one on Reuters) claiming that blogging is over.

Amazingly insightful editorial from the WSJ: “if Viacom wins this suit and busts YouTube–and there is a very good chance it will win; it is, after all, uncontested that this is Viacom’s media property we are talking about–that won’t change what consumers want one whit. They are demanding unbundled media, sold everywhere and in myriad assortments. Period. And if Viacom won’t provide it then some new media entrepreneurs will.” As I’ve been saying all along, listen to me Mark Cuban, it’s a negotiation with users, not a war with Google. Forget Google. The users want something you aren’t providing. So provide it and stop arguing so much.

Remember human dignity 

Mike Arrington: “Defending individuals against huge multi-corporation entities is one thing. Destroying human dignity is something else.” Amen.

Once, a long time ago, a Silicon Valley company wanted to break a deal with me, which happens of course, it’s just business. But one guy in the company decided to have some personal fun as they were breaking the deal, he was a really nasty mofo. I remembered it, of course, as people always remember unnecessary cruelty. I had a chance, a few years later, when my career had taken off, and his had fallen apart, to pay it back. One time, at a conference, he took me aside and said okay you won, you don’t need to rub it in. At that point I stopped. That was all I wanted.

I was younger then, today I would do it differently. I have learned that these things take care of themselves. People who deliberately choose the low road have to live on that path. Their reward comes from karma, or god, fate or luck — whatever you call it. There’s a force in the universe, much greater than any individual, that balances the books.

At a human level it pays to remember that no one stays on top forever. And the guy who needed help or just a little human kindness, will be asked to help a few years later. No one can blame him if he refuses kindness to someone who went out of his way to cause pain.

Something to remember, when someone asks for your help. It’s better to give than to receive. Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet. Namaste.

Back to Mike’s story — there is some nasty energy in the EFF, I’ve felt it myself. I didn’t like what they did to Michael Crook either. Kudos to Mike for having the guts to point it out.

The future of Twitter? 

I was introduced to Twitter last summer at a dinner at Henrietta’s Table in Cambridge by Ross Mayfield. I posted two or three notes using my Blackberry that evening and never did it again. I still receive SMS’s from Ross on a regular basis, but (no reflection on Ross’s value as a human being) I rarely even look at them. I imagine that other people may be vitally interested in his comings and goings, but not me.

Scoble loves Twitter, and I love Scoble, but I have never sent him an SMS, when I want to talk I generally ring his cell phone, get his voicemail, don’t leave a message (as his welcome message requests) and a few minutes later he calls back. Sometimes if he’s on a plane it might be a few hours. However if I were a Scoble fanboy, I would love that he posts every event in his busy life to his Twitter channel.

I’m very reluctant to dismiss Twitter as a passing fad, aware that many people said that about blogging, and I was sure they were wrong, and they were. Whenever so many people are so excited about something there must be some substance. It’s the same reasoning that makes me reject the idea that George W. Bush is stupid. You don’t get to be President and be stupid, and nothing frivolous gets to be as popular as quickly as Twitter has.

Jim Posner: “Wouldn’t it be nice to receive a twitter when the lasagne is done?”

Paolo: “Is Twitter the RSS for people with not much to say?”

So this leads to many questions. What will Twitter look like next month, next year, three years from now? Will it evolve to a point and become exactly what chat is? Will there be competitors — Twitterdum and Twitterdee? How about Twitter-A and Twitter-B? Did Twitter file for patents? Will they sell out? Obviously a company like Yahoo would love to own it. I’m sure they have already talked with each other.

What scaling walls will Twitter hit? Obviously the technology scales pretty well, it’s not using a whole lot of CPU on the back end. Do they have to pay to dump SMS messages on the network, if so that’s a scaling issue, for sure. What about human scaling? How many pizza deliveries on the other coast can you stand to be notified of before you unsub?

Michael Gartenberg says “no way” to business uses of Twitter, but be careful about that, I think there are real project management applications here, esp for geographically distributed virtual teams. I’m not just theorizing about that, I’ve used a similar tool to great advantage, managing a diverse team in Europe and North America. Whether Twitter is going in that direction is another matter. Only time will tell.

Patti & OpenCongress.org 

As I’ve often said, my favorite podcast is On the Media, although Fresh Air is catching up quickly. They cover different niches, yesterday I listened to Terry Gross interviewing Patti Smith, one of my all-time rock and roll heroes. The interview brought out her sweetness, a facet that people might think she doesn’t have, and at the same time, emphasized the younger Smith who was a revolutionary, in so many ways. She explained where her famous line about Jesus, the one that opens Gloria, came from. (Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.)

The day before, I listened to an OTM interview with Micah Sifry, the founder of OpenCongress.org. He’s created a site where citizens can learn about Congress, what they do, the bills they vote on, who they meet with. It’s a focused aggregator about Congress. And of course Congress itself will probably be the biggest user of the site, the same way the tech industry self-obsesses through its blogs.

They make extensive use of RSS, which of course is appreciated.

Scripting News for 3/13/2007

Today’s links 

My childhood pet, as a kitten.

Mark Cuban: “If Viacom wants to put up snippets, scenes, mashups, mockups, quarter, half or full episodes of anything they own, there is nothing to stop them.”

11 Ways to Optimize Your Mac’s Performance.

Patti Smith interview on Fresh Air. She was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame yesterday.

Confabb and PDF 

Confabb announced that it is providing the web presence for the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC, May 18.

I am an investor in the company. It’s likely that there will be other announcements from Confabb later in the week.

Bove on DMCA 

Stephen Bove: “Just because music and video are the equivalent of media-crack doesn’t mean it should be legal for our entire society to deny complicity in a crime of mass-media larceny, which is being co-perpetrated with these uploading sharing sites.”

Bove is a former employee of BitTorrent, Inc.

Testing EVDO at Starbucks 

This is the real use-case, I’m paying for my EVDO by cancelling my Tmobile wifi account, that would let me get on the net at almost any Starbucks. So the real test of the EVDO is how well it performs at Starbucks. I’m at the store on Solano and Colusa in Berkeley.

Here’s an idea of the kind of performance you get downloading a podcast, again from Starbucks via EVDO. Approx 120KB per second for an 11.4MB file. Quite usable.

Four bars, 1/2 hour of connectivity with no problems.

Viacom sues Google 

The big news in the tech blogosphere today is Viacom suing Google over YouTube.

Obviously this is a negotiation, either that or Viacom is jumping off the bridge and hoping that the fall doesn’t kill them.

On 2/28/07 I observed that the entertainment industry is comfortable negotiating with the tech industry, but that’s not the negotiation that matters — they should negotiate with users, because ultimately that’s how the matter of whether or not they have a future will be decided.

“Might there not have been a way to make hay out of the lemonade?”

Mike Arrington: “They said that Google’s acquisition of YouTube would be the act that saved it from the fate of Napster - lawsuit oblivion. And they may have been wrong,”

DST bug 

After all the discussion of possible computer bugs due to the change in Daylight Savings Time, I’m pleased to report I had one.

One of my servers didn’t make the change automatically, or so it appeared. No problem, I did it manually. Then a few hours later it was back at the old time. I reset it again. Again, a few hours later it was wrong once again.

I finally had a minute to investigate, and traced it to a Frontier verb, tcp.getCurrentTime. I tried running it on the server, and it displayed the incorrect time. I then found the place where it’s called and disabled it, and now the clock shouldn’t be off on the server.

However, that wasn’t the end of the mystery. When I run it on my desktop machine, calling the same government time server, time-b.timefreq.bldrdoc.gov, it returns the correct time!

On more investigation, it’s not quite as interesting I thought it might be. Apparently the server, which is running Windows 2000, isn’t getting updates from Microsoft as my Mac OS X desktop is from Apple. My Windows machine still thinks it’s in Pacific Standard Time, whereas my desktop computer knows it’s Daylight Savings Time. When the clock is set locally, it’s automatically adjusted properly, on the server it’s adjusted improperly. Disabling the code should take care of it.

And I thought it was a government foul-up!

Scripting News for 3/12/2007

An untold story of UserLand 

What a long story, and today I can tell a piece of it that has had to remain under wraps for the last year or so.

First, a summary of how UserLand came to be.

In 1988, I had an idea for scripting software on the Macintosh.

I loved the Mac for its graphic ease of use, but I missed the user-level programmability of Unix, and felt that combining the two would yield great results. I wanted to turn applications into toolkits, to let you combine a word processor and database with an outliner and a spreadsheet to make an integrated app that’s customized to how you or your organization works.

Technically, the idea worked, but as a product it failed. By 1993, I was ready to move on, so I did, I left UserLand and later in 1994, discovered the wonders of the web, and I wanted to figure out how to use it as a communication system for people. In 1995 or 1996 I got a prophetic email from Mason Hale, who had discovered Frontier and thought it would make a wonderful environment for CGI scripting. He was right, but I came to wish I had never gotten that email. Seriously.

I revived UserLand, without cleaning it up at a corporate level. I poured money and time into it again, and the results were pretty fantastic. News sites became weblogs. Cross-platform inter-application communication became XML-RPC and then SOAP. XML syndication became My.UserLand and RSS. Edit This Page became Manila. Lots of innovation, but the company went through two boom cycles and never participated in the bonanza. Looking back, there are a lot of reasons for it, and one of them was that I should have taken the time to get a fresh start in the mid-90s, and I didn’t do it it.

Finally in 2002, at age 47, after struggling through the release of Radio 8, I collapsed physically, was lucky to have survived, and as I recuperated from major heart surgery, I decided to quit UserLand, to leave behind all possible upside, just walk away from it, glad to have gotten away with my life. Once again, I made the same mistake. I should have hired a new attorney to document the transition, but I thought that everyone involved would be glad I survived, and would understand that I was finally moving on, for real.

Then in 2003, after everyone but Jake Savin and Lawrence Lee had left UserLand, my brother and I decided to revive the company. Again, for a third time, I made the mistake of not carefully creating a legal basis for this. I thought everyone understood what they had agreed to do, and we would all do it. Again, I should have taken the time to get an independent attorney to look at the deal, but I didn’t.

By 2005, weblogs.com, one of the many sites I was caring for personally, as a labor of love, had been growing exponentially. A year earlier it was doing 100,000 pings per day. By the spring of 2005, it was doing two million. I had reprogrammed the server a dozen times, each time stripping out functionality, buying more hardware. I hired a contractor. It co-existed with competing ping servers from well-funded companies, and I came to realize more and more over time that, as an individual, I was way out of my league. Weblogs.com was becoming something a person couldn’t operate, it required the resources of a company.

One day, when I was living in Florida, I happened to be talking with Keith Teare, an old friend, who was doing consulting work with VeriSign. I broached the question, would they be interested in taking over weblogs.com. He asked, and they said yes. It took a few months, and here’s a key point, this time I did get new lawyers to do the deal, including Mike Arrington (a friend who is now famous for the awesome TechCrunch weblog), and along with some great people at VeriSign, we put together a careful deal to transfer weblogs.com to VeriSign.

The day the deal was leaked was one of the best days and one of the worst days of my life. Through all the incarnations of UserLand, I had one lawyer, Jack Russo, and he was very angry with me after the deal. Before I could even talk with him, he was threatening to sue. All the turns in UserLand, that I had done informally, were now coming back to haunt me.

Eventually the threats turned into a real lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara County Court, around the time I was buying the house in Berkeley. I’ve spent over $40,000 in legal fees defending myself, while Russo presumably spent much less because he’s a lawyer. I think that was the central part of his strategy, he knew I would have to spend money to defend myself, where he wouldn’t have to.

Anyway, I wanted to write about this here, and I almost did several times. But on Friday, we got a decision from the court that agreed with our position, so now I feel that the future is pretty clear, and that if I want to clean up the mess that UserLand has become, now I have the ability to do so. It will still cost me personally many thousands of dollars, but it’s a price I have to pay for having cut corners over the years. If I want my freedom, a bunch of lawyers and accountants and the government have to be paid. So be it.

I learned a very important lesson here, one that my friend Jason Calacanis said at the OPML Road Show in NYC in 2005. If a deal is worth doing, it’s worth documenting with a good agreement. Anyone who is doing business with me these days knows that I have embraced this ethos wholeheartedly! Wish I had been following it through the 80s and 90s. A word to the wise.

Got the EVDO 

The EVDO card arrived today. It took a bit of fussing to get it working, but it does work now.

When I use it downstairs I only get two bars on the connection strength graph, and it disconnects so often as to make it useless. Upstairs I get five bars and it’s stayed up for over an hour now.

It’s a lot slower than my DSL, slower even than DSL over wifi. Disappointing, but the tech support person at Evdoinfo assures me that it’s normal.

I’ll run some formal performance tests and report back.