Scripting News for 4/20/2007

RSS miscellany 

Looking for sources of photo feeds for flickrRivr…

I came across an OPML file listing all the NY Times feeds. Now that’s cool. I wish they had told me about it, could have saved a bunch of time.

Here’s the OPML in a browsable form.

I’m finding I can’t use as much of Yahoo’s stuff as I hoped to. They have feeds of news pictures, but they’re too small, when they are displayed on a TV screen they’re grainy and hard to look at. There were some other problems with Yahoo feeds, but I’m going to try reporting them directly to Yahoo people before writing them up here.

Basically I’m looking for RSS 2.0 feeds with either Media-RSS photos, or enclosures, with medium resolution photos, between 100K and 1MB, with family-safe pictures.

Today’s links 

Computerworld: “A hacker managed to break into a Mac and win a $10,000 prize as part of a contest started at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver.”

SF Chronicle: “The Virginia Tech shooting is the first major U.S. news story in which traditional media and new-media technologies became visibly interdependent.”

Microsoft is hosting a blogger lounge at Mix 07, April 30-May 2 in Las Vegas.

Tim O’Reilly defends Amazon, who is suing Statsaholic, a site that builds on Alexa, which is owned by Amazon. Amazon is an O’Reilly customer and also sponsors their conferences.

Reuters: “The Vermont state senate passed a symbolic resolution on Friday calling on the U.S. Congress to impeach U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney over their handling of the unpopular Iraq war.”

Frank Shaw: The Press And Iraq.

Dan Ruby’s Festival Preview.

Engadget: Wal-Mart $299 HD DVD player.

Oh Valleywag 

I think they’re all smoking crack down there, or abusing small animals, or sticking things in orifices god never intended things to be stuck in, or maybe all of the above (at the same time), because their brains seem to be shrinking, visibly, every day.

Sorry, but I had to even the score before I could write about them.

The latest evidence of self-abuse is this piece where they say Apple won in podcasting. I strongly disagree. The users won. And the people with programming that the users like won.

It’s not all about technology. One would think the Valleywag guys would get that. Sure there’s a little bit needed, and Apple helped distribute podcasts, enormously. If I were Evan Williams or Adam Curry I never would have invested in the systems they invested in, even before Apple came in to the market. I put my stake in the ground when both these systems launched. No future here.

It was kind of obvious — podcasts aren’t like photos, you can’t make a social network form about them because people get ideas about podcasts when they’re nowhere near a computer, unlike photos or blog posts. Apple didn’t make this mistake. Their goal was to help the MP3s make the trip from the podcaster’s server to the user’s iPod, and that they do fairly well, so god bless them, they helped us get this thing going. Thank you Apple.

So it’s shaken out as it obviously would. There was no boom in podcasting technology, and there won’t be. There’s still lots of opportunities in players, iPods are the best available, but they’re designed to play music, not podcasts, and there’s a lot of room for improvement. Whether the VCs will bet on that is a good question, or any consumer electronics companies other than Apple, but that’s where they should be putting their money, not on fakeouts like Odeshow and Podeo.

Today’s MSM monologue 

Can they only do one story at a time?

Today they’re only reporting on the second floor of Building 44 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Is this news? Barely.

In the meantime our government is in crisis.

And who knows what else is going on.

The news doesn’t mention anything other than a nameless sub-contractor who may or may not have taken hostages. Not much is known, but massive amounts of attention are focused on it.

Podcast Hotel, day 2 

Live stream from Podcast Hotel on Ustream.tv.

We cracked the code 

The Republicans are quick to jump on Harry Reid saying he’s undermining the troops, but I don’t think Americans are so dumb that they fall for that kind of BS. They’ve been selling corrupt logic for a long time, and we’ve cracked the code.

The best way to find out what the troops think, if that’s their real concern (of course it isn’t, their concern is that they might get blamed for the mess they created) is to ask them.

It could be that soldiers in Iraq have very little idea what we’re doing there, and don’t relish dying to keep Bush from going down as the disaster that he is. Who loves Bush so much that they’d be willing to die for his legacy? Isn’t the next President going to have to own up to Bush’s mistakes? At that point, how will Bush spin it? The tools available to ex-presidents are nothing compared to the power of the incumbent.

Yes, of course, the war is lost 

Harry Reid says that the war in Iraq is lost. Yeah. That’s been obvious for a long time. We don’t even have any goals for the fighting. If we did, maybe then winning or losing would mean something.

I don’t think there was any way for Reid to win by saying what he said. So maybe he was motivated by something that the Republicans don’t understand, maybe his conscience dictates that he tell the truth, if it might possibly save one life, no matter what kind of a Republican shitstorm it provokes.

When the Republicans say we should stay so we don’t lose, they’re playing politics with the troops lives.

And Reid is to be applauded for saying what’s so obvious that no one else in politics seems willing to say.

BTW, if you want to find the bug — we didn’t have a national discussion about the war before we started it. Instead skeptics were shouted down as unpatriotic. Look at what a mess that created. Will we learn the lesson? Seems we have another chance to do that. Reject the Republican smear. I don’t think Reid is wrong, but he simply expressed an opinion, and as majority leader of the Senate, we want him to do that, even if we don’t agree.

Scripting News for 4/19/2007

Podcast Hotel 

I described the idea of a podcast hotel in a Trade Secrets podcast with Adam Curry in 2004 or early 2005. The idea was pretty simple. Rent a cheap hotel in the middle of nowhere. I was thinking St Augustine Beach, FL. A few meeting rooms, a decent-sized ballroom with lots of tables and chairs, we truck in food, high-caffeine soft drinks, and a bunch of connectivity and wifi. Spend $100K and everyone rents their own room. Double-up if the price is prohibitive. Car pool. Swim in the ocean. Walk on the beach.

Spend a week there, writing code, blog stuff, doing podcasts around the clock. This was in the early days when you could fit all the podcasters in a dinky beach hotel. Then, basically — you’d get infinite connectivity if you stayed long enough. Everyone would get to know each other, and there would be a dozen podcasts that were great, tons of great ideas, and out of that would come a roadmap for all of us. And a great memory of when we worked together, to help launch an industry, a new human activity.

Unfortunately it never happened, for a lot of good reasons, mostly that it’s hard to get people to work together.

Now in San Francisco, tomorrow and Saturday, there will be a conference at the Swedish American meeting hall on Market St, that is called Podcast Hotel, but it’s a pretty ordinary conference, not even an unconference, and nothing like the podcast hotel we envisioned.

I may stop in tomorrow or Saturday to schmooze a bit, shake hands, listen to a bit of stage-talk, and wonder What If.

Today’s links 

Joe Conason: Gonzales’ resignation is not enough.

Mark Glaser asks, on his PBS blog, whether NBC should have released the Cho videos.

Jeff Jarvis: Losing control of media.

1/3/05: “The professional journalist is totally part of the story he or she is writing. That they believe otherwise is the major bug in their process.”

News.com: Dell brings back XP on home systems.

Scoble argues for full-text feeds.

Joe Trippi, Dean campaign manager in 2004, joins the Edwards campaign.

Internet Identity Workshop, May 14-16, Mountain View.

Jackie Danicki signs up with Ing Direct based entirely on reviews here. I hope she’ll write up her experience as she becomes more familiar with it. One of the problems with all the online banking systems is that you can’t see the software before you sign up for an account.

Cho-TV, day 2 

When it came out yesterday that Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, had sent 23 QuickTime videos to NBC in NY, that changed forever how I thought about blogging, video, podcasting, etc. When I first put up the post, Steve Garfield sent an email saying he didn’t think it was vlogging, but I’m not so sure. Whatever it is, there’s an amateur using the new tools, not for good, but horribly, for bad.

Some people say that if NBC were to release the videos, completely and exactly as Cho produced them, this would spawn copycats. That’s a valid opinion of course, but I don’t see why. We don’t know what’s on the videos. And do you think anyone who wanted to see them hasn’t seen enough to get the basic idea? Maybe the copycat will strike because Cho’s video didn’t get broad distribution, and they have an easy shot at outdoing him. I don’t know how the mind of a mass killer works, if anyone does.

I said we hadn’t forseen this use of the technology because, as utopians, we tend to look for the good stuff. I liked to think I had a balanced view, and could see where bloggers weren’t doing good, but I hadn’t seriously considered our tools used to further such a bad cause.

What’s next? Isn’t it obvious — the latest and greatest stuff, Ustream, Twitter and mass murder. When you see a suicide bomber with a camera strapped to his or her head, you’ll know that the bad has caught up with the good.

Reuters looks at questions raised for newsrooms about social media and events like the Virginia Tech killings.

Reuters asks if they should accept amateur video, when doing so might encourage others to take risks they otherwise wouldn’t. I think that’s an easy call. They should accept video from anyone who’s credible. They should stop seeing themselves as parental to amateur reporters. They also say no amateur ever dies covering a story. They can’t have it both ways. They accept video from professional reporters who take risks, so they should treat amateurs equally.

Rob Sama: “At this point given that NBC has done a partial release, they should just finish the job and go with WinerÕs suggestion. But NBC’s attempt to split the difference between the two opposing schools of thought, both of which make valid points IMO, wound up embracing the worst aspects of both. As it now stands Cho has his stardom and the public doesn’t have enough information to figure it all out.”

Frank Shaw says if he had received the videos, he would have turned them over to the police without airing them. What would you do if you had to make the call?

I’ve heard it said we’re exploiting other people’s pain. I suppose almost any event could be spun that way. For example, when the President says we should wait six months before judging his troop surge, a lot of people are going to die because of that, and anyone who is critical of his plan might be seen as exploiting their pain. It’s in times of crisis like this that we learn the most about our values and how they compare to others. A lot of learning happens. There are always people calling foul, so be it. (People used to say who was I to write about tech, then they said I shouldn’t write about politics. I said don’t read it if you don’t like it.)

Paul Andrews: “Cho undoubtedly did not want NBC to censor the materials. But he apparently, naively or stupidly, sent only one copy out. So NBC owns the rights, unfortunately.”

Time: “How much Cho to show?”

Online banking, day 2 

Great response to yesterday’s request for experiences with online banking services.

Sounds like Ing Direct gets the highest marks from its users. Based on what I read, I almost set up a new account yesterday. Read what Clay Johnson says about them. It’s pretty rare that a product gets that kind of review from a customer.

Scripting News for 4/18/2007

Vlogging comes to mass murder 

The Virginia Tech shooter sent a package of video and pictures to NBC.

In other words, vlogging comes to mass murder, in ways no one anticipated (or no one I know).

It makes perfect sense, in a perfectly senseless way.

He sent the package in the 2 hours between the first and final killings.

Note: I took this post down for a few hours this afternoon because it wasn’t clear what was in the package, and if it would be released. We’re watching it on MSNBC now. It’s amazing stuff. The videos are Quicktime files.

NBC should release all of the videos in Quicktime form as downloads. It’s wrong to withhold them.

They’re sifting through them and deciding what to release and what not to release.

It’s 2007, and it’s a decentralized world. We should all get a chance to see what’s on those videos.

GIven enough time the focus will go on their process, much better to just let it all out now, with no editorial judgement.

If you have contacts in the blogging world or MSM that could influence NBC’s decision, please pass this on.

Micah Sifry: “There’s no obligation to put it all out there…”

NY Times: Package Forced NBC to Make Tough Decisions.

Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing is chronicling the release (or lack) of the Cho “multimedia manifesto.”

Via email, Doc Searls nails a bunch of angles on this:

“Cho sent those recordings to a major broadcast network. Not to the police, not to other individuals. (Far as we know.) Clearly he wanted his recordings broadcast — after the deeds were done, and he was dead as well.

“We don’t know if he thought about uploading them to YouTube. But, since he planned to fill the rest of his morning with murder, it’s likely that he didn’t want to post his plans on the Live Web — where somebody might see it and get authorities to stop him. So he opted instead for snail mail and a big bang later on the small screen. YouTube would come, inevitably, later.

“From what I gather, the police have seen and cleared the recordings for disclosure. So, presumably, there is no reason to protect anybody (for example, individuals Cho may have targeted for murder) other than broadcast viewers. (This is required by law, fwiw.)

“So I think Dave is right. If there is nothing to hide here, other than obscenities that cannot be broadcast on TV or radio, there is no reason why NBC should withhold the recordings other than the belief that they own them, and hold them as property. That’s their right; but it does not help the rest of us get clues that might help prevent another tragedy like this one.

“And this tragedy isn’t just about Cho and NBC. It’s about the rest of us.

“So I agree with Dave. More eyes will make the this bug shallower. It may save lives. Even if we see a zillion mashups of the original video, which we’ll see eventually anyway.”

Best online bank? 

A couple of years ago when I started using my bank’s online system to pay bills, I was in awe. How much easier and faster it was than paying bills by hand. What used to be a chore that I put off and as a result paid late fees, and my credit rating suffered, had become a pleasure. My queue of unpaid bills was never very deep or very old.

Now the thrill is wearing off, I’m a homeowner with a mortgage, and a business owner, which means I have two checking accounts and all of a sudden my bank’s online system isn’t working so well. Things that would be easy if the software were designed by Google or Yahoo isn’t so easy. For example, I have to use two browsers, one set up to pay bills from my personal account and the other to pay from my business account. I haven’t been able to figure out how to choose an account any other way. I’ve tried repeatedly to convince the bank that I don’t live in Massachusetts, but there are all these replicated copies of my address in their system, and they keep presenting the wrong address as the default.

So I decided to check out Consumer Reports on this subject (you must be a member for that link to work) and they don’t yet rate banks based on their websites. I suspect this will change soon.

Anyway, I thought I’d ask you to share your experiences. You don’t have to name the bank if you’d rather not for security purposes (as I am) or you can use a fake name so you can name the bank without risk. I’m just interested in getting an idea if my experience is bad or typical or good, for 2007.

Today’s links 

Fantastic rendition of My Generation.

New coffee maker. Key feature: hot coffee.

A YouTube group for OPML users.

Dvorak on the Web 2.0 Expo.

Andy Carvin: “Virginia Tech’s students are about as wired as any other school, with laptops everywhere and cell phones close to ubiquitous.”

CNN: “Insurgent bombers launched a series of attacks across Baghdad on Wednesday and killed at least 171 people and wounded scores — a particularly violent day in a bloody capital city enduring sectarian warfare and an aggressive government crackdown against insurgents.”

NPR segment on a blogger’s code of conduct.

Republican rhetoric 

The BS you hear from Republicans on radio, TV and in print would never play if it were repeated in an offline political discussion between citizens. With a majority favoring withdrawal from Iraq, even though the President is against it (which indicates a fairly strong conviction, imho), you can’t get away with the kind of idiocy that Vice-President Cheney said in his Face The Nation interview last Sunday with Bob Schieffer, who patiently put up with it because it’s his job to.

The Republicans repeatedly say the consequences of withdrawal is failure in Iraq. Which is easily pushed aside. We’ve already failed, and you’re right, the consequences suck. What now?

Last night on Countdown, Olbermann asked the same questions I asked here yesterday, although much more politely. Why are the lives of the Virginia Tech students any more precious than the lives of our soldiers in Iraq, and please explain to me why they’re more precious than the lives of Iraqi children, some much younger and more helpless than the Virginia students. They aren’t. A life is a life, all are equal. And as Olbermann pointed out, the deaths in Iraq are more preventable than those from a random act of violence.

I had a radical idea watching a debate on TV about the war, between a Republican and a Democrat. Maybe now it’s time to have some discussions of the future without the Republicans. They drop the level of discourse to the lowest level I’ve ever seen, and these days it’s all about covering their ass for the disastrous things they’ve done to this country, and the rest of the world. Maybe it’s time to stop giving them equal time so we can get on with fixing the mess they created and stop debating why they’re not to blame.

No, you don’t get it! 

A while back I was being lectured, in a blog post, by a woman, about how sexist I am.

She explained that one way to tell you’re being sexist is to reverse the genders in a story you tell, and sometimes the sexism reveals itself. Your prejudices about one gender are influencing you, and by switching them, you switch the bias around, and what was invisible before now is visible.

I knew about this, and agreed, it is an excellent way to see sexism or any kind of ism for that matter — racism, ageism. For example in a TV commercial, a woman hits a man in the face, as a joke. Or turns the sprinkler on him. Or says he’s so predictable, in a dumb way, because he likes black cars. Or doesn’t remember something like an anniversary. We’re supposed to laugh. But if we were getting physical that way with a woman, or being so condescending, it would evoke a completely different reaction.

The irony, is that if the person lecturing me were to flip genders in her own story, she’d probably see her own sexism. Would she lecture a woman the same way she was lecturing a man? Might she consider the possibility that the woman is smart, and might be offended by the assumption that she’s not? Especially if the woman she’s talking to is 20 years her senior? Basically it’s always a mistake to assume you understand something that the other guy doesn’t.

Another thing like that is the zealot’s proclamation that You Don’t Get It. Michael Gartenberg indulges in that today. As with my sexism teacher, the danger in saying that about someone else is that it likely applies to you as well. Michael has no idea what I get or don’t get. In fact he’s basing his conclusion on old data. I’ve refined my position. Even so, I haven’t used it once so maybe I have to refine it again.

Scripting News for 4/17/2007

New Samsung phone 

I got a new Sprint phone today, a freebie.

I posted a picture earlier, and a whole bunch of comments showed up. Maybe we can start a self-help group for clueless people like me. I can see it’s got a ton of features, but I can’t get started, I don’t even know what the number of my phone is.

CNET review of the Samsung SPH-M620 phone.

Politically incorrect questions 

1. How long before Bush connects what happened at Virginia Tech with the global war on terror?

2. How long before a Republican presidential contender says the Democrats want to take your guns away?

3. How long before one of the cable networks runs any story other than Virginia Tech?

3a. What’s Don Imus doing during all this michegas?

3b. Anna Nicole Smith?

4. Will anyone notice that while we’re venting and emoting about Virginia Tech, hundreds of Iraqis have died.

5. Okay, I suppose some people believe American lives are worth more than Iraqis, so what about the 3300 Americans who have died in Iraq. That’s about 100 times the number of people who died at Virginia Tech. What are we doing to prevent another 3300 deaths? Who’s responsible? Could those deaths have been prevented?

6. If you’re glued to your TV hanging on every word, when was the last time they said anything that even remotely qualified as news? (If you get bored, try playing a game, every time they say Virginia Tech, substitute Iraq.)

7. How long before Lou Dobbs raises the killer’s immigrant status?

Local image URL syntax?? 

I have a folder of images on my local disk.

If I drag one onto the Firefox icon in my toolbar, it displays.

The URL in the address bar is:

file:///flickrPics/pic42688.jpg

However, if I use that URL as the src attribute on an img element, I get a broken image.

<img src="file:///flickrPics/pic42688.jpg">

Question: Is there a way to get the browser to display an image coming from the local file system, and if so, what’s the syntax for the URL?

Sam Yates says it might be a Firefox security feature.

Via email, Wendy McCully writes: “As long as the HTML file that references the local images is in the same directory as the images themselves, you don’t need to indicate any path at all.” I tried it — and it works, without changing the browser’s security settings.

Today’s links 

NY Times: Corzine’s Speed Put at 91 M.P.H. Near Crash Site.

Scoble says always-on isn’t for him. Good move.

Michael Gartenberg has a Mac laptop question.

I got a new Sprint phone today — a freebie!

Worth another look after three years.

Virginia Tech’s phones 

Roanoke Times: “When Virginia Tech wanted to alert students to developments in a recent campus manhunt for an accused double murderer it relied on e-mail, the Web and messages sent to dorm phones.”

Google search for “Virginia Tech” and “Rave Wireless.”

Andy Carvin: “I spoke with a PR rep at Rave Wireless today and she said that they have no relationship with Virginia Tech.”

Scoble’s cam 

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo, I did a brief interview with Robert Scoble. I wondered what his camera hat looks like.

Scripting News for 4/16/2007

Social networking and search 

When I search on Google for RSS, I’m only interested in knowing about the syndication format. However, if I was from India, it’s possible I’d be more interested in the political party named RSS.

Oddly, at least to me, when RSS was starting up, the first page of hits on Google would be a mix of the syndication format and the political party. Today, the Indians are pushed down to page 2, and at that, it’s only one link.

Another example. In 1999, UserLand released a web content management system called Manila. It was one of the first blogging platforms, and it’s still on the market, but not as famous as it used to be. A few months after Manila shipped it became the first hit on Google, then like RSS it came to dominate the first couple of pages of hits, pushing aside a city of 10 million people, the capital of the Philippines, a soverign nation. What kind of sense does that make? Well it makes a lot of sense if you’re me, or any of the few thousand people who used Manila to do their websites, but there are lots of people around the world to whom this made no sense at all.

Now it may have been cute in 2001 or 2002, but by 2007, with search integrated into society at a very deep level, and only getting deeper — it seems like it’s way past time to fix this. And we know how to do it, and it’s not even very hard.

How? Integrate social networking and search and learn what people who I’m connected with, people like me, choose when they search for RSS and adjust the results accordingly. It’s collaborative filtering applied to search. If Google doesn’t do it, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask or a startup should.

Integrity comes to Silicon Valley 

TechCrunch 20, Sept 17-18, San Francisco.

I am one of the 20 people helping choose the 20 companies to present.

None of the companies pay a dime to participate, and I’m not being paid (and I assume the other experts are contributing their time as well).

What a combination, people and products. It’s about time Silicon Valley got back to its roots, we hope.

Watching more, revealing less? 

Getting a late start today for some reason. Procrastinating about going across the bay to the Web 2.0 Expo. I have a dinner over there tonight, so I have to go at some time.

This morning I watched Scoble drive to San Francisco and park his car, on his way to Moscone for the Expo. I talk with Scoble fairly often, so I know what it’s like from my perspective, but today I found out what it’s like from his. I didn’t try the obvious thing of calling him while watching on Ustream, but others did.

Last night I did my own Ustream show, called Bad Hair Day. I’ve wanted this for quite some time. I first wrote about it in the beginning of 2006, part of a series of feature requests for Yahoo. I wonder when Ustream came online? I first heard about it over the weekend. Over on Jeff Pulver’s blog I read a comment from one of the founders saying that Twitter was instrumental in spreading the word about his service. Somewhere else I read someone wonder if Digg would respond to Twitter by becoming more real-time.

One thing’s for sure, with Twitter and then Justin.tv and now Ustream, our little corner of the web is becoming a lot faster and more intimate. People used to be shocked at how much I shared here on Scripting, now I look conservative.

It wasn’t very long ago that I thought Mike Arrington was daring for having TechCrunch parties at his house in Atherton. By today’s standards, just a year or so later, it looks tame.

A few weeks ago, when Justin.tv was raging, I said to Scoble that he would have to match him. I knew it wasn’t for me. I like a clear line of delineation between my personal and public life.

Waiting in line for coffee the other day Sylvia challenged me on this, asking if I had ever written about XXX (name X’d out), an old flame. I said nope never did. She asked about another girlfriend. Again, no. She said I write about my parents. True, but that’s relatively new, and only very surface level stuff. I’ve found that if you want to have personal relationships, you have to keep them out of public view and be very careful about that.

But we’re entering a phase of the evolution of web culture where the parts of people’s lives that are private are disappearing. It’ll be interesting to watch.

On the other hand, with everything online, where will the private stuff go, or will it just disappear. Surely Scoble will have to go to the men’s room sometime today? He may not mind having everyone watch him take a leak, but how will the other people feel about that?? Can’t wait to find out. Maybe only homeless, life-less people will be able to be online 24-7.

However, Ustream is certainly the answer to how we’ll webcast my session at Mix 07 on April 30, and all future conferences. Check one off the to-do lis.

Sopranos 

Warning — spoilers follow. Don’t read if you haven’t seen last night’s show.

Last night’s Sopranos took us right to the edge of a very tall cliff, let us look over the edge, and then said “Hang here till next week.”

Even so last night’s Sopranos left us with a satisfied yet bitter-sweet feeling. They said to us, we can take it all from you, and just to show you, we’ll let one of your favorite characters speak on your behalf.

“It’s a thankless job,” says Johnny Sack.

Like a rock concert where every member of the band gets to play one solo before walking off-stage, even minor characters remind you of their character.

Oh it’s going to be quite a show. They’ve carved out an ambitious stage, positioning Tony as a latter-day Michael Corleone. Great drama, acting, music, theatrics, chutzpah.

Let’s hope they can live up to the hype!

Today’s links 

Fast Company profile of Berkeley neighbor Sylvia Paull.

PodCorps.org is a “worldwide army of audio and video stringers who volunteer to record important spoken-word events.”

Watch Scoble drive to San Francisco. He’s listening to the radio, talking on the phone.

Scripting News for 4/15/2007

Progress on FlickrRivr 

I’ve made a lot of progress in the last 24 hours on the packaging of FlickrRivr.

To summarize, it’s a desktop application that subscribes to one or more feeds from Flickr, and deposits them in a folder of your choosing. Then you can configure iTunes to synch from that folder to AppleTV, so you can see pictures of your Flickr friends automatically updated on the screen of your TV. You can of course also configure your Mac’s screen saver to run off this folder, for the same effect on your laptop or desktop computer.

I’ve got the configuration part working now, before I had the aggregator working and it’s been running on my home entertainment center for over a year. People find it fascinating. Me too.

Now I’ve hit some stumbling blocks, no deal-stoppers, but I thought maybe I could open this up so that people who read the site can help search for what I’m hoping to find.

Yahoo has lots of RSS feeds, and they even have feeds with news photos. Very cool, except the photos are low resolution, too low to be good for this application. Seems a shame, because in between pictures of Irina and Valerie, Scoble and Justin, and everyone’s cats and grandparents, it would also be great to mix in pictures of Gonzalez and Imus, Sharpton and McCain. A bit of Edwards and Clinton wouldn’t hurt. Obama and Blitzer. Cheney. Ahmadinajad. The Dear Leader. The Great Wall of China. Tony Soprano.

And the feeds don’t have to be from Yahoo. If you know of other sources of news photos in RSS, I can use more examples, more stuff to preconfigure FlickrRivr. If bandwidth is an issue, I don’t mind mirroring the feeds and photos on my server. I don’t think there will be so many users as to make bandwidth a serious issue.

Anyway, if you have any ideas, please let me know.

PS: I know this is realllly low-tech. All of the good stuff is. But I’d be willing to bet this is as big as blogging or podcasting. A major application for our networks. It’s that compelling.

PPS: The guy on the left in the cowboy hat is my maternal grandfather, Rudy Kiesler. Here’s the full picture.

Bad Hair Day 

Note: I’m looking for the chatroom. If anyone has an idea, please post a note over in the comments.

I was able to create the chatroom over on Ustream. Come join the conversation everybody!

Bug report 

Imus is off the air, Gonzales is still the Attorney General.

Imus is an entertainer, Gonzales is the top law enforcement officer in the US.

Did Gonzales fire the US Attorneys, or was he ignorant as he says he was? And what do you think, were they fired because they were getting too close to Republicans?

President Bush said there’s “no credible evidence of wrongdoing.” So what’s he actually saying? Gonzales may have been doing wrong, and there may even be evidence of it, but the President doesn’t think it’s credible. Wow, that’s the standard of integrity we want for our highest law enforcement official. (Sorry for the sarcasm.)

And what about the millions of missing emails? Bug or feature?

Today’s links 

Doc Searls wants to bring local public radio to Santa Barbara. With his background in radio, Berkman connections, and sheer enthusiasm, I bet he pulls it off.

Scripting News for 4/14/2007

AppleTV has an intriguing profile 

I like the way 901am describes the connection between flickRivr and AppleTV: “He uses FlickrRivr to pull in Flickr RSS feeds on his computer and then sends them wirelessly to his Apple TV device, resulting in a stream of photos displayed on his TV screen.” He goes on to suggest that Yahoo Pipes might be able to do what flickrRivr is doing, but I’m pretty sure the software has to run on the desktop, at least for now.

At some point Apple will build in a RSS aggregator that sucks down feeds with pictures, probably in Media-RSS format, in fact I suspect they’re already doing it for movie trailers, but there’s no way for a non-Apple server-based app to get in there, at least not now.

AppleTV has an intriguing profile, it has a full Internet connection through wifi, and it can connect up to any server Apple wants it to. It’s kind of a weird beast that way. I was surprised when the movie trailers were already pre-loaded, current ones. I’m pretty sure it’s checking for new ones periodically. I wonder if any of the people hacking up AppleTV have been monitoring the network traffic it generates. I’d be very interested in seeing it.

Is anyone from Apple is presenting at the Web 2.0 conf next week? They seem to be doing some of the most interesting software right now in this domain, as interesting as my own.

flickrRivr.root 

For OPML Editor users, a new version of flickrRivr.root.

I’m planning a new release of the OPML Editor, designed mostly for Mac users, although of course it will run on Windows. It’s designed to add on to AppleTV and provide a media subscription service, starting with photographs.

That’s why I’m reviving flickrRivr — which I’ve been using constantly, and wowing visitors to my house with how cool it is to have a stream of photos of friends on my home entertainment center.

Apple is obviously heading in this direction as well, AppleTV has a very beautiful screen saver that displays photos synchronized from your desktop or laptop computer. That’s what flickrRivr ties into.

The next steps in the development of flickrRivr are to make it even more turnkey than it already is.

Another coooool application for RSS.

PS: Movie demo of flickrRivr.

How to update any root 

Along with the new version of flickrRivr.root, I’ve also released a new version of the OPML Editor Tools menu that allows you to update any Tool file, using the new RSS-based updating method. Here’s how you do that.

1. Launch the OPML Editor.

2. Choose Update opml.root from the File menu.

3. Click on OK to confirm that you wish to update.

4. You should receive 2 or more new parts.

5. Quit the OPML Editor. Re-launch.

6. You should see a new command near the bottom of the Tools menu called Update Front Tool.

Now, when you want to update a root here’s what you do.

1. Choose the root file corresponding to the Tool from the Window menu.

2. Choose Update Front Tool from the Tools menu.

3. Click on OK.

That’s it. It should work for newsRiver.root, dotOpml.root, even opml.root.

A smarter net? 

On Twitter, earlier today I saw that Jason Calacanis was in Barcelona. Hmmm, I thought, I wonder what he’s doing there.

A few hours later, I see that Jeff Barr is in JFK waiting for a flight to Barcelona.

Okay, now I know something is up. So I ask Jeff, and he sends a pointer to a conference he’s going to. I’m sure Jason is going there too.

Now I wonder, who else in my network will be there?

And of course I’d like to have been alerted of this coincidence two weeks ago, so I could have planned a trip myself. While the conference doesn’t look that awesome (do they ever?) I’ve never been to Barcelona, and here’s an excuse to party with people in my network in a new city. And a trip to Europe would be interesting right about now.

Someday, probably not too far down the road, our nets will be smart enough to make these connections for us. All we need is a few hooks and a data interchange standard or two, or enough motivation to enter our data into a new app. Maybe there would be enough of a payoff.

Disclaimer: I invested in Confabb thinking they might solve this problem.

Today’s links 

Sylvia went to Om Malik’s party last night in SF.

Tim O’Reilly reviews Spock, a search engine for people.

Update on RSS spec site 

James Holderness sent me a long list of small issues with the new static RSS 2.0 spec site, most of which I fixed today. I also fixed the bluearrow I wrote about yesterday, so that all instances now are relative, so the site should be totally relocatable. I also fixed the home page link on each page, it was pointing to the top level of cyber.law.harvard.edu, now it points to the home page of the RSS 2.0 site. All these are small things, but it’s always good to get the small things fixed.

Scripting News for 4/13/2007

Mix 07 

It’s going to be a busy few weeks starting at the end of the month, beginning with a discussion I’m leading at Mix 07 at the Venetian in Las Vegas on April 30 at 3PM. The topic is how to design a perfect podcast player, but I have a hunch we’ll branch out into other topics as well. Unlike the other sessions at the conference, there will be no panel and no audience. I will speak for a few minutes to get some discussion topics out there, and then we’ll see what’s on everyone’s minds. We’ll make sure the discussion has an online presence, maybe someone will even live-webcast it.

Rational comment policy, day 2 

Yesterday I posted what seemed then to be a rational comment policy, and on re-reading it, it seems equally rational today. I hope people consider posting one of their own, and since I link to and quote another blogger, we could start a process of refinement where each of us helps each other draft their policy. To me that would be the true blogger way to solve the problem, something like a bucket brigade. Blogging is inherently DIY and decentralized. I think that’s why we like cats so much.

Today’s Links 

CNN: “Millions of White House e-mails may be missing, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino acknowledged Friday.”

TechDirt quotes Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live, on YouTube. “If the work is good, I want the most number of people to see it.”

TechCrunch is hit with a defamation suit. Rex Hammock, who yesterday reported on yet another defamation suit, has more data on the latest one. It’s in the air. Coast to coast.

CNN reports Google buys Doubleclick for $3.1 billion.

From John Feld comes this handy tip. Use Google Maps to plot a course from Berkeley to London.

New RSS 2.0 spec site deployed 

As I reported here and here, I’ve been slowly working on a project to “future-safe” the Harvard site that houses the RSS 2.0 spec. Yesterday, we started redirecting from the old site to the new one.

If you’re pointing to the RSS 2.0 spec, you may want to point to its new location.

I found this project interesting, because I want to learn how to create a website that lives for decades, if not longer.

Here are some of the techniques I employed:

1. Everything is static. It can all be seved by a standard install of Apache, with no plug-ins or special software required.

2. It’s self-contained. Every resource it uses is stored within the site’s folder. That includes images, screen shots, example files, downloads.

3. Almost all the links are relative. As far as I know only one type of link is not, links to the blue arrow that marks an internal document link. If for some reason at some time in the future, cyber.law.harvard.edu should go offline, and the site has been moved to a new location, the blue arrows will appear as broken images. I may yet fix this one. I don’t think there are any other hard-coded links in the site.

The goal was to make it so that a future webmaster, wanting to relocate the site, would just have to move the folder, add some redirects, and everything would work, more or less.

You can also download the whole site, from a link on the site’s About page. You’re free to mirror it if you like. And as always it’s licensed under the Creative Commons, giving everyone the ability to create new things from it. (I also included the Frontier CMS tables the site was generated from, and the Manila site, in the Downloads folder.)

There was one example where I thought for a second about changing the spec, but I didn’t; the <docs> element, which we say should point to the spec. It’s an optional channel-level element. The example we provide is the previous location. I thought this was a good place for me to express the commitment to the spec being totally frozen, so I left it as it was. To change that value would have broken nothing but a promise, but promises are everything when it comes to specs that industries are built on, and the RSS 2.0 spec surely has become a foundation that many build on.

Of course if you spot any breakage, please let me know asap. Post a comment here, or send me a private email.

Sitemaps, day 3 

Since I’ve been playing with sitemaps, of course I created one for the RSS 2.0 site.

And I’ve checked to see that the maps I deployed for scripting.com are properly updating, and they are.

But when I checked, I realized that I would have done it differently, so that the sitemaps, in adition to helping search engine crawlers, might be interesting things for human beings to read as well.

I refer back to sitechanges.txt, a simple project I was doing in 1997 that was like sitemaps. It was also before I did XML.

The idea was that the content server was responsible for providing a daily reverse-chronologic list of pages that had changed. Then a crawler would keep track of when it had last visited my site, and only suck down the files that had changed since then. This would enable search engines to be more efficient, and provide more current content. It was nice because you could read it yourself and see what had changed. Contrast this with sitemaps, where you have to go hunting for the changes, it’s no better a user interface for finding the new and newly updated stuff than the file sytstem is. I was kind of disappointed.

Another thing I would have done differently is allowed sitemaps to include other sitemaps. There really is no need for two file types, just let me link to an index from an index, much like inclusion in OPML 2.0. This added an extra layer of complexity for everyone implmenting sitemaps on moderately large sites, or old ones where some content changes frequently and other content not so frequently (like scripting.com).

However, on balance, it’s a great thing that all these companies got together and did something to make the web work better. We need more of that!

If anyone is working on more stuff like this, I am available to review it before it’s cast in stone.

A nice thing about *not* being a Mac fanatic 

I don’t give a shit if the new OS is delayed.

Scripting News for 4/12/2007

City life 

After breakfast at Saul’s this morning, I stopped in at Long’s Drugs, nearby, to pick up a fan. It’s still cool in Berkeley, it’s only April after all, and the Bay Area never gets all that hot, nothing like the south or the east, so houses here don’t have air conditioning. But we will have a few days of 100-degree heat, and on days like that you must have a fan. Last summer I got there too late, they were already sold out, so this year I resolved to get there early. They had a good selection, and I was able to get the kind of fan I like. $20. Another item off the to-do list.

While walking through the aisles, looking for other things, batteries, soap, I overheard a conversation between two store clerks. What were they talking about? Imus, and how he had been kicked off MSNBC, and they expected he’d be kicked off CBS too, and he was getting what he deserved. It was amazing how much they had to say about it, and how what they said exactly mirrored what was being said on the cable news.

In the NY Times they say he got caught in the 24 hour news cycle, he never had a chance.

We witnessed something that looked to me a lot like the Kathy Sierra storm that swept the blogosphere a few weeks ago. I knew Imus like I knew the people who were being hunted in blogland. I liked to listen to his show in the 70s, he was fresh and different, irreverent, interesting. I feel sorry for Imus, and I think it’s sad that he’s going out this way. I hadn’t listened to him in many years, but I haven’t forgotten how the young version of me saw him as a role model.

At the same point in my life that Imus made me laugh, so did Kurt Vonnegut. I loved his books when I was young, and I made a point, four years ago, to re-read most of his books, so I’ve got an updated appreciation for how wonderful they are. And they were made more important for me because I shared his writing with my uncle, who had (I felt) a similar sense of humor, of irony. Like many others of my generation, Vonnegut formed my perspective on the world, on mysticism, and politics, on the smallness of everything we care about. If you’ve read Sirens of Titan, my favorite Vonnegut book, you know what I’m talking about. No spoilers here!

And while I shared Vonnegut with my uncle, I shared Imus with my younger brother. He was in NY, where Imus was broadcasting; he’d record cassettes and mail them to me in New Orleans, where I was in school. Getting a tape of Imus was like getting a bag of fresh bagels or a Sunday NY Times. Love from home.

I hope Imus finds something satisfying to fill his remaining time. Maybe he’ll become a podcaster or a blogger. It’s smaller than being a radio star, and we have witch hunts here too, but here they can’t shut you down for being rude. At least not yet!

Response to Motion to Reconsider 

On March 27, Michael Risch, a partner at Russo & Hale, filed a motion to reconsider a ruling that denied them the right to represent UserLand shareholders in an action against me.

We filed a motion today to deny their motion. “Counsel’s mistaken view of the law regarding shareholder actions, which they display again in this Motion, is not a proper basis for granting a motion for reconsideration.”

Sitemaps, day 2 

I now have my sitemaps implemented for scripting.com.

There’s a sitemapindex file, that points to all the sitemaps.

By design, some never change; others change frequently.

I’ve added the auto-discovery link in robots.txt.

There’s a lot of room for optimization, for sure.

I followed the instructions for pinging the search engines, I tried Yahoo, Google, Ask and Microsoft; and none of them acknowledged that they accepted the ping, in fact they all returned cryptic error pages. Not a good omen!

AppleTV, day 2 

I think I understand AppleTV, after setting it up, playing a few video podcasts, copying some pictures into its screen saver, and reading about its limits on various weblogs.

I’ll give you the punchline before the details.

If you’re technically proficient enough to read this blog, AppleTV is not for you.

I’m not sure who it is for, but you don’t need it. You’re much better served buying a Mac Mini, or the equivalent Windows box (maybe a cheap laptop).

AppleTV seems designed with the same philosophy as the PCjr of the 1980s. The PC was super popular, a juggernaut, and IBM felt that the “home user” (i.e. idiot) couldn’t handle all its power so they created a scaled down machine, with a crippled keyboard. Problem is people wanted a PC, not IBM’s dumbed-down vision of a PC. (They secretly wanted to kill the PC because it was destroying their mainframe computer business.)

AppleTV is an exercise, for me, in discovering what it won’t do. Most important to me is that it won’t play the AVI files I create when I scan DVDs using Handbrake. On the other hand, my Mac Mini, with VLC installed, does. Yes yes, I know I can hack up my AppleTV to get it to be a Mac Mini, but I’m lazy, and I’ve already paid Apple for the Mac Mini.

And why do I need synchronization with iTunes, when file sharing works so well on the Mac? It’s pretty easy, I don’t think AppleTV’s syching is any easier.

True, the Mac Mini costs at least $599, and AppleTV is $299.

Anyway, I don’t like AppleTV, but I have a TV in the kitchen that didn’t have a computer, and I spend a lot of time working there, so I will keep trying to find something useful that it does that the Mac Mini doesn’t already do much better.

Etienne Deleflie: “Why doesn’t someone come up with a Linux box that just hosts VLAN?”

Earl Moore says I miss the point of AppleTV. “I could turn a 5-6 year old loose with the Apple TV and they could watch cartoons or movies galore without assistance.”

I don’t think there’s a connection 

Adam Curry wonders if the legal difficulties we’re having around UserLand are the source of some technical problems with his RSS feed, which is hosted on a UserLand server.

As far as I know, there is no connection. I don’t work at UserLand, haven’t worked there in almost five years, so any problems I have are not likely to effect your RSS feed.

But you never know, Murphy works in strange ways. I suggest sending an email to Lawrence, in the meantime.

Why TPM deserves an award 

Scott Rosenberg has taken a hiatus from writing political essays, but he just published another great one, about why we should pay close attention to the coverup of the firing of the nine US attorneys. Whether the President was a Republic or Democrat, makes no difference, if the US attorneys were fired to subvert with the election process, it’s a scandal of huge proportion, that undermines the fairness of the US justice system.

What many don’t know, and it is not widely reported, that if this is a replay of Watergate, then the role of Woodward and Bernstein is being played by a community of bloggers, Talking Point Memo, founded by Joshua Marshall, who was at the first BloggerCon, and who will be at the Personal Democracy Forum in mid-May in NY (I will be there too). When I see him, I hope to shake his hand, thank him and congratulate him.

Meanwhile I read in the Guardian, yet another conflicted and self-serving piece from a MSM publication, saying that blogs didn’t turn out to be such a big deal after all.

If someone were to ask me what the future of blogging holds (and I am asked that frequently) I would say that in the future, mainstream press people will give up their fight with blogging and accept us as sources of information and perspective that enriches what they do, instead of being in conflict with it.

To me blogging is not just protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, it is also an instance of the Second, the right of the people to keep and bear arms. When the justice system is corrupted by the executive, we have the right and responsibility to reform it, with words, and with actions, as Marshall and his crew are doing so admirably, so Americanly (if that’s a word).

We were meant to have an active and armed citizenry in the US. As long as people like the TPM community feel empowered, we have a chance of keeping our intellectual life rich and informed. Keep up the great work, it’s important, and appreciated!

A rational comment policy 

I hosted my first online discussion group in the early 80s. I’ve been on mail lists, a multitude of chat systems, hosted a web DG, then turned it off, brought it back, turned it off again, etc etc. After all that, I’ve arrived at a comment policy that’s more or less what Will Fernia outlines here:

“I don’t mind anonymous comments if you have something worthwhile to say. If you don’t have anything worthwhile to say, I won’t approve your comment even if you do put your name on it. (And sometimes even worthwhile comments that aren’t quite relevant or that speak more to other commenters than what I’ve written don’t get approved. People can start their own blog and say whatever they want and no matter how many happy badges I put on my blog, I can’t do anything about that.)”

The main difference in the way I do it, is that like many others, I use the WordPress feature that requires a commenter to be approved the first time he or she comments using a specific mail address. It seems to work pretty well. If someone abuses the priviledge there are easy ways to deauthorize them.

For the most part, these days, the comments here are fairly productive, abuse is not allowed, strong opinions are allowed, even strong opinions that disagree with mine, as long as they’re on-topic, and not personal.

I see the comments space as largely belonging to the readers, and I don’t comment there myself too frequently. However I will respond to a direct question if I have something to say and feel it would add to the discussion.

Scripting News for 4/11/2007

Kurt Vonnegut 

The author speaking through one of his characters, Eliot Rosewater:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

Vonnegut died this evening in NY. He was 84.

Nappy ho 

An old white radio personality didn’t just wake up one morning and think of “nappy ho” all by himself.

Okay he’s white and he said something stupid and he’s old, so he’s easy to pick on.

But maybe black people should take the issue up with the music industry too.

And its not just music, all that kind of stuff was in a movie that lots of white people saw, myself included. 9 years ago. In that movie Halle Berry said “Don’t you know you my nigger” — to an old white guy!

Maybe it’s just a sign of respect. Certainly when some people say it, it is. I don’t know, seems a little racist to me to have a huge national shitstorm when a white person says something that if a black person said it wouldn’t be any cause for alarm.

Maybe Imus didn’t mean any harm at all. Just a thought.

Postscript: A commenter named “Solo” points out that Jesse Jackson has a lot of chutzpah going on national TV saying that Imus has to go. Maybe he forgot Hymietown?

Sitemaps 

Autodiscovery for sitemaps. I’m working on sitemaps for scripting.com. An example, the sitemap for the “misc” folder.

We can arrive at a fair solution 

I don’t think my old attorney blogs, but maybe he should. Maybe by the time we’re done with all our michegas, he will.

Two weeks ago I posted a proposal, in public, to try to get a dialog going. In that proposal, I tried to see things from his point of view. I like to figure out what’s right, and then do the right thing. I don’t want anything I’m not entitled to.

I did all the work to create weblogs.com, and took all the risk, and withstood all the flaming — and I also invented it (unlike RSS, weblogs.com was invented), so it might seem fair that I get all the proceeds. (I did all that without getting a salary from UserLand, all my time was at my own expense.)

But UserLand did help, it registered the domain for me (something we did for anyone in our community who wanted us to, back then domain registration wasn’t so easy), and I did run the site on one of its servers (also something we did for others, at no charge), so let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that UserLand owned it when it was transferred to me in 2003. That was the starting point for my proposal. From there, I thought we could easily arrive at a fair solution, shake hands and go forth and do our respective things.

So here we are at a fork in the road.

As far as I’m concerned the proposal is still on the table.

But — today I thought about what it would be like to go through depositions and a trial. I can do it. I blogged Jury Duty and got something from it, and so did my readers. Maybe I’ll write a book from the inside of the legal process, I suspect there will be plenty to write about. Sure it’ll cost money — but I have money.

Net-net: I believe in being fair, to others, and to myself.

AppleTV here 

My AppleTV arrived. I’ll try to install it later today, and of course will report on the experience here.

Engadget reports that AppleTV hardware is capable of doing HD, but inexplicably, the software isn’t provided to do it.

3PM: I have AppleTV hooked up to my kitchen TV set using the HDMI cable. Everything worked the first time. Connected it to the LAN through a wifi router in the den. Connecting my laptop to the unit was like connecting a Bluetooth device — you enter a password that’s displayed on the screen of the TV. It’s now synching all the content in my iTunes library, even though I didn’t ask it to, and when I stop it, it starts again on its own. I’ve decided to let it have its way. I want to link it to a folder of photos on my laptop’s hard disk, but the command it says I should use isn’t present in my copy of iTunes. I tried copying an AVI file I ripped from a DVD, but it was rejected. So after setup it’s confusing, and not working the way I expect it to. More later.

I found the tabs, I was looking in the wrong place. It’s synching pictures now.

I happened to have a copy of a video Meet the Press podcast, and it got synched to the AppleTV in the initial setup. And when I browse through the menus, which are patterened after the iPod menus, there was a section for podcasts, I chose this podcast, and there was the first “aha” moment — I was watching an episode of Meet the Press, albeit an old one, and it looks pretty much like it looks when I watch it on NBC throug my cable box — far from HD quality, but still a pretty good demo of what it can do.

They have a full selection of trailers, already downloaded. That’s cool! I’m watching a preview of Grindhouse.

Twitter slowdown? 

The furious pace of growth on Twitter, for me, has slowed to a trickle, and now all the action is on Jaiku — or maybe it’s just that Jaiku is catching up? It’s hard to say because everyone’s view of these systems is different. Jeff Pulver, in Scoble’s video description of Twitter, said it was IM or a chatroom, and Scoble corrected him, pointing out that it was very different in one important way, that people opt-in to listen, and can opt-out at any time. So true. But to others, with very few people listening, it must look like a chatroom, a chatroom they can’t post to, a conversation they can listen to but can’t participate in. I imagine for some personality types this is exactly what they like.

Web 2.0 conference 

I will be at the Web 2.0 conference next week, at least for one day (not sure which one), so if there are any products or companies you think I should see, or for that matter anyone should see, please post a note here or send an email.

Thanks to the folks at O’Reilly for approving my request for a press pass.

Doug Kaye 

I had a nice lunch on Monday here in Berkeley with Doug Kaye. It had been too long.

I learned a lot about Doug that I didn’t know before. I thought he was a tech guy, turns out he’s a film and audio guy who learned tech out of necessity. No wonder his stuff is so useful.

I first met Doug when he was an early member of the Radio developer community. Come to think of it, that’s how I met most of the people who went on to do great things in blogging, podcasting, and Web 2.0 in general.

Doug recommended a movie, Memento, saying it was one of the ten best movies of all time. I had never even heard of it. Of course, with that kind of endorsement, I had to see it, and I now have. Very good, really haunting. I bet Doug likes it because it is a technical marvel, I’m not a movie technology guy, but even I could see that putting this movie together required greatness. I rated it a B+ on Yahoo. (Also you have to see it twice to get all that’s going on.)