Essays and comments on the issues of the day
Tantalize me! 
Twitter blog: “Twitter now fully supports microformats.”
You don’t say!
Docs??
Smart Matt
Matt Mullenweg: “There are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.”
Haille Selassie
News you won’t hear on CNN tonight
ThinkProgress: “11 Republican members of Congress pleaded yesterday with President Bush and his senior aides to change course in Iraq.”
From Doug Kaye, via email, RSS was the question for one of the answers on today’s Jeopardy. If you know what the clue was, please post a note.
The future of news, part 3
Amyloo has a clear vision for how online news will develop, based on a very simple observable fact, news organizations specialize. Create a website that’s the union of all the specialties. You don’t need to replicate the stories, just links to the stories. Each site gets to run ads on their pages, but part of what makes a site attractive is how functional it is. If you have great reporting but the ads make your site more difficult to read, net-effect your reporting isn’t so good.
BTW, part 2 of the future is Checkbox News.
Part 1 is Hypercamp, the meatspace Newsroom Of The Future, although I haven’t been able to successfully convince anyone to partner with me on developing it. (And it requires too much capital for me to do it on my own.)
It’s sad in a way to watch the various new media startups struggle to find a way to make money, because there are so many ways, they just haven’t spotted them yet. 
Business Week misquote
I know you’re not supposed to object when a big print pub like Business Week quotes you, but they got it wrong, even when they quoted me verbatim from the web. I didn’t think it was possible, but here it is.
Here’s the article, and here’s the quote.
I do not believe “one factor spurring the growth of unconferences is their ability to tap the smarts of the people who usually sit mute in the audience.”
Yet they say I believe that.
I don’t know if they believe it. Or if it’s just some short-hand, or empty throwaway words that fill up all Business Week articles.
Truth be told, most things they call unconferences are not, imho, unconferences, and don’t address the question I said they should address. If you determine the schedule ad hoc, but still put speakers in front of a silent group of people, you haven’t changed very much, imho. If that’s spurring growth, then it’s not a good kind of growth.
Further, I don’t think the kind of unconferences I like are actually growing. I know I’m not supposed to say that, but I like to stay grounded in the truth. When I say something is growing, I want that to mean something. So I don’t say something is growing when I don’t believe it is.
See below, on The Scientific Method, as it applies to journalism.
What I would teach a journalist, part 2
A few days ago, in response to a query from a reader at the University of Nevada, I outlined how I would start teaching Web 2.0 to journalism students.
I think perhaps I said some things without explaining enough, so there were some misunderstandings.
I said skip Drupal and get the kids on blogspot.com or wordpress.com asap, because they need to be blogging before anything else happens. I saw this at a meeting with J-school students at Cal a few weeks ago. There’s a real resistance among students to just get started. I’ve seen the same thing with software developers. Every writer will tell you the same thing I said. You want to be a writer young man or young woman? Then start writing.
Too often people start by designing then building elaborate online castles, that turn out to be reinventions of castles other people built, and then on opening day, have no idea what to do next. Why don’t the people use it? Ahah, that’s the real problem. By spending a lot of time thinking and planning and coding, you’re just putting off the reckoning. You need to deal with that first. What do you have to say? Having an empty blog will raise that question, at the beginning, before you have a chance to bark up wrong trees.
I also said there’s no curriculum and I meant it. It isn’t some airy-fairy idea, I have hair on my chest, and a loud voice. Just kidding (well, I actually do). Why is there no curriculum? Because no one knows WTF we’re doing, so how could we have a curriculum. It’s like asking Lewis and Clark to have a curriculum for the Denver Nuggets. What are the Denver Nuggets, they might ask. I’m sure they passed through Denver on their exploration of the west, but there was no city there, and certainly no basketball team. See my point? You and your students are exploring the unknown.
On the other hand, there are some things that are known, the basics of journalism, how to do research, question the interests of your sources, disclosing your own interests, etc. That doesn’t go away, but that’s all in your Journalism 101 text. And there are writing skills and editing skills, all of that comes into play when writing, whether you’re writing for print or bits.
And one other thing they don’t usually teach in J-school (as far as I know) — The Scientific Method. Please, let’s be very very circumspect in stating our hypotheses, knowing what we know and don’t know, and be careful not to have anyone say things they don’t mean.
Philip Meyer: Journalism and the Scientific Tradition.
Background images
I’ve been playing around, inbetween heatwaves and bad movies, with the browser-based interface for FlickrRivr. Was looking for a cool background image, then I realized I had a whole folder of them, so I added a button that allows you to change the background image to a random choice from the folder.
To get the new features, OPML Editor users, bring flickrRivr.root to the front, and choose Update Front Tool from the Tools menu.
Truerumors
Mike Arrington has the scoop on an interesting concept for a rumors site that borrows features from Digg and Twitter.
It seems to me that a combination of Digg and Twitter has a lot of potential, as I said on Twitter on May 3.
What’s normal changes
When I was a kid growing up in NYC in the 60s, every apartment building had an incinerator in the basement, every floor had a garbage chute, and periodically they’d burn the garbage. Out of a chimney on the roof would come a vile combination of soot, flying pieces of debris, burnt garbage. They’d often burn the garbage in the morning while we were on our way to school. On our wet hair, faces and clothes made smart and sparkly by our moms, would come down this vile mixture. We’d cough, eyes would tear, what a way to start a day — what a way to start a life!
Forty years later, in the springtime the weather in the Berkeley hills is gorgeous. Every day there’s a new wonderful and natural smell rising from the gardens. The air is clear, and if it gets hot, it’s just a matter of a couple of days before “nature’s air conditioning” kicks in. The air is good to breathe, feels good on the skin, if you take a shower you stay clean. No one burns garbage.
Oh but the noise! At 8:15AM I’m awoken by the sounds of a construction site which is down the street but sounds like it’s right next door it’s so loud and jarring. It will be like that all day, my guess is it will last through the summer. We live in paradise, but it’s never quiet enough to enjoy it. Leaf blowers fill in the gaps between construction crews. Jack-hammers, saws, idling trucks, cement mixers. Every street in the neighborhood is like this.
Maybe in twenty years they will invent a quiet way of tearing down and rebuilding. I wish they would do it now.
Amyloo: “I have a memory of burning trash, too.”
Postscript: Calvin in SLC had a similar experience this AM.
Postscript: The apartment house I’m writing about.
Audio for last week’s Mix session
Mike Lehman at Microsoft produced an audio podcast of last week’s Let’s Design a Podcast Player session at Mix 07.
A hypothetical case
Imagine you’re getting an operation.
You’re on the operating table, half-conscious, some part of your body open, spewing blood all over the place.
You’re semi-sedated, on some really nice opiate, feeling like you wouldn’t mind doing this again. (I’ve actually been there, it’s a very very strange place!)
Your mind is humming along, when the surgeon says: “I’m almost finished, I’d be happy to sew you up, but you have to pay me $150,000 first.”
Gulllp.
I guess you’d have to pay.
But you’d kind of hope that the other doctors in the room would do something about it.
If you were to ask me what it feels like to have your lawyer sue you, the guy who’s supposed to protect you from legal nastyness, I’d have to say this is what it feels like.
Welcome to the country that couldn’t shoot straight
CNN: “Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius expressed concern Monday that rescue and recovery efforts after tornado-packed storms were being strained because much-needed equipment is in Iraq.”
My dad is a blogger too
Leon Winer: “The Press, or the Main Stream Media have failed us by not examining critically Bush’s moves to start and continue the Iraq war.”
I love writing reports like this one.
Two problems reported on Scripting News recently, both solved.
1. Yesterday I posted here about expanding a LAN. I had a missing, important piece of knowledge about routers and switches. Now that the gap is filled, I can see my IP-based printer from all stations on my local network. I also bought a nice new switch, which should arrive from Amazon on Wednesday, so I can add 15 more devices to my LAN, all visible to each other.
2. A few weeks back I noted that Firefox wouldn’t display local images under certain circumstances, only to discover that this is a security precaution, a wise one. This morning I thought of a workaround, don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. My app is a web server in addition to all the other things it is. So I wrote a custom responder that loads the specified image from disk and returns it. Voila. Outage circumvented, neatly.
What would I teach a journalist?
Kevin Reynen, an instructor in the J-school at the University of Nevada-Reno, writes to ask what I would teach a journalism student about the new technologies. How would I design a curriculum for students wishing to learn journalism in the age of Web 2.0, if I could work with him/her every day for 10 months?
Well, that’s a juicy question. Something I’ve thought about in the back of my mind for quite some time, and it turns out that I actually have some ideas.
First, I’d forget about Drupal, and customized sites, and HTML, CSS and PHP.
Let each student create their own site at blogspot.com or wordpress.com, where ever they like. If they want to create five sites, let them create five sites.
What a privilege to be able to work with the students every day for 10 months. Don’t they get vacations or weekends off? I assume so. But five days a week, man, you could really get something done.
The students must start covering their world online, openly. Tthe class meeting would be like the Berkman Thursday meetups we had at Harvard (they’re still having them, btw). But, and this is important, they’d evolve and how they evolve is something you will figure out, with the advice of the students, as you go along. It’s hard to say at the outset what it would become, but if I had to guess, you’re going to create the equivalent of a newsroom, for your community.
Which brings me to another key point. You must bring Reno into your school. Open the doors. Go on the local TV and radio stations and explain what you hope to do, and tell them where and when they need to be. You will attract some amazing people from the community. I could go down the list of the people from the Boston area who showed up at Berkman, but the list is too long. Lisa Williams is now an editor at the Boston Globe. Andrew Grumet, who was a developer at MIT is now the CTO at a SF Bay Area startup. So many others.
Bring Reno into the school.
And don’t think in terms of curriculum.
It’ll be like an unconference — no panels, no speakers, no audience.
No students, no teachers, no classroom.
Just news about the community, and make it inclusive, and everything that needs to happen will happen, imho.
Something strange
I was struck by this Todd Bishop post at the Seattle P-I.
At first I couldn’t quite place what seemed so weird about it.
And then it hit me.
A professional reporter saying another professional is doing something un-professional.
Usually that’s the kind of thing a blogger, an amateur, says.
I like it!
Twitter for coding communities
A few days ago I wrote that Twitter is a very nice low-tech notification system. I had an application in mind, and put a first step on my to-do list.
I started a new channel called dwcodeupdates. The content in this channel will be of interest to at most 10 people, geekish users of the OPML Editor, but the concept should be interesting to members of coding communities.
I added a hook in my code check-in system. It already had a provision for me to add a comment to each partial release, derived from the outline at the head of every script that maintains a reverse chronology of the changes to the part. In a sense every bit of code is a weblog. I’ve been doing it this way since the early 90s. Here’s a screen shot of a bit of code I started yesterday. And one that was started in 1998.
As I release a change, the system posts a note to the Twitter channel. You can subscribe to if, if you care. Like everything with Twitter, no big deal if you miss something, but it does give you an idea of what I’m doing right now, in a different dimension.
As usual, what’s important are the people.
Dumbass networking question
Okay, here’s a dumb question about routers.
I have four computers plugged into a router via hard wires, and two computers via wifi. All six computers can see each others’ shared disks, and life is good.
I just bought a printer that works over Ethernet. I want to make it visible to all the computers. All the jacks on the router are used up, so I buy another router, unplug one of the computers, plug it and the printer into the new router. However, the only computer that can see the printer is the one that’s plugged into the new router. None of the other computers can see the printer. Arrgh!
Do I need to find a router with more jacks on it, or is there some way to configure things so that all devices plugged into one router can see all the devices plugged into another?
All the computers are Macs, btw. The original router is a Netgear. I have lots of choices for the new router, the one I’d like to use is a new Airport Extreme that supports 802.11N.
Thanks in advance for ideas.
Postscript: The community delivered the answer in record time. Thanks!!
To the Gates of Hell with McCain
Amyloo quotes Newt Gingrich as not liking the way debates have been moderated. I sympathize.
In this week’s Republican debate, there was a moment when, if John McCain had his wits about him, he would have punched Chris Matthews in the nose.
McCain had just finished a monologue saying he would follow Osama Bin Laden to “the gates of Hell.” Brief pause, he smiles nervously, and Matthews says “OK,” but the tone was unmistakeable — “what ever.”
It went from reality to parody in a blink of an eye.
Of course McCain delivered the line awfully, he was almost a parody of himself.
The gates of Hell is not the kind of thing you smile about.
The line would only really work if he could have pulled off a Clint Eastwood deadpan, in the style of Dirty Harry or Fistful of Dollars.
Today’s links
Nik Cubrilovic is running Vista, exclusively, on his MacBook. Now that’s a first. Never heard of anyone doing that.
An unforseen application of Twitter.
Markman twitters from Shanghai.
Philosophy from 1998
9 years ago today: “I can imagine it would be irritating if you didn’t like the dog, but I really do like the dog, especially the way his eyebrows move, so I always watch the commercials when they come on.”
Today’s performance results
After reconfiguring the network, a two-second job. Voila! It’s much faster.
Today’s links
24 hours of Flickr.
Todd Cochrane on good and bad re-syndication practices. This is bound to be controversial, even so it’s good to ground this perennial discussion with specifics.
I don’t believe in ‘gotcha’
I don’t believe in the mythological “gotcha” moment reporters like to dream about, for a couple of reasons.
1. I’ve never seen it happen, in years of being interviewed, and knowing people who are often interviewed. I’ve never seen a reporter ask a question and get an answer that revealed something unusual that was actually understood by the reporter, and made its way into print in a form a reader could use.
2. I’ve seen really interesting juicy stories out there, ready to be reported, on the record, attributable, with dozens of supposedly ambitious and relentless fact-diggers swarming all around, and instead of going for the gusto, they cling to the safe tried-and-true nauseatingly boring and insignificant overtold bedtime stories.
In other words, if you fancy yourself a Woodward or Bernstein, stop boasting and go out and do some work and take some risks. Until then I don’t see why you need to talk to someone for 25 minutes for a 12-second soundbite. I don’t see who that serves. I don’t think very much listening is happening in that process. I think if the subject spent the 25 minutes blogging instead, the world would be a much better place for it.
So here’s a question for the reporters who may be listening. Did you learn anything in the discussion about interviews, or did we just talk over each others’ heads?
What’s wrong with this picture?
The NY Times announced their new public editor, the person who, more than any other person on the Times staff, represents the interests of the readers of the Times.
I’m sure he’s a fine person, great reporter, watchdog of politicians. But — what the Times needs more than anything is a reader to represent the readers. Someone to tell them, without a lifetime of training in the politics of newsrooms, what they’re doing wrong.
More likely, they’re getting someone who will tell them and us why the public is wrong.
As with everything else on this blog — imho.
Today’s links
Twitter’s new mobile interface, look no SMS!
NY Times review of ultraportable notebooks.
Zune, still no love
I put in another two hours with the Zune today, finally got it to say it was synchronizing, but it kept going and going, no indication of progress on the computer or the Zune itself. Finally after about an hour I unplugged it, no changes, none of my songs or podcasts are there.
Microhoo?
Lots of stories this morning on Techmeme saying that a Microsoft and Yahoo merger is coming soon.
What would this get Microsoft? An exit for Yahoo’s founders?
Scott Rosenberg: “Seven years from now Yahoo will be as much of a shell as AOL is today.”
Later…
WSJ: “The merger discussions are no longer active.”
Brier Dudley: “The New York Post owes everyone a good follow-up story.”
Everyone goes global
Om Malik: “Now that Web 2.0 is growing up, scale no longer matters. Even tiny businesses can go global.”
‘A reviewer at every table’
There’s a yin to Om’s yang — not only do companies go global easily, their customers do too.
Now we all have much better information, when we need it, to make a decision about who to do business with.
Marketwatch: “Eateries see reviewers at every table.”
Businesses that really think of the customer will be rewarded, and those that fake it, will fail to compete.
If you don’t want your customers to find out that you mistreat customers, then don’t mistreat customers.
Don’t expect them to suffer sliently. That worked in the last century, it doesn’t work in this one.
Essential television, part II
4/25/07: Bill Moyers, Buying the War.
4/27/07: Bill Moyers, Jon Stewart, Josh Marshall.
His blog, RSS feed. Subscribed.
Previous installment: America at a Crossroads.
Don’t forget to give generously to PBS.
Why the users of Digg got pissed
I hate to say it but Ed Felten doesn’t explain why the users of Digg got so upset.
He thinks it’s a technical issue. It’s just a number, and who can claim ownership of a number?
What if it were Ed Felten’s social security number, plus the number of his VISA card, driver’s license, mother’s maiden name, a couple of pieces of data, enough to unlock a bank account of Ed’s that has say $50,000 in it. Suppose the publication of those numbers was done by the same guy who published the code that cracks HD movies on Linux? Would he be less justified in publishing those numbers? Hard to imagine Felten going along with that.
I think I understand why the Digg users got so upset. They weren’t consulted. They weren’t included in the decision. Their opinion, the core value that Digg “owns” if they own anything, wasn’t sought. That was the source of the anger.
If instead of deleting stories and users, silently, they had written an open letter to their users explaining what was happening, and why the lawyers felt they needed to respond quickly; I think that would have worked much better.
The people who man Digg want what everyone wants, respect. To be listened to. To be considered. Solicited. I think that’s where the disconnect was.
Today’s links
Don Park: “There is no value in a community of hooligans.”
ZuneThoughts is a blog about the Zune.
Wired: PC World Editor Quits Over Apple Story.
HBO has a podcast feed for the series Rome.
LA Times: The Internet sure loves its outlaws.
Nice work Yahoo Maps
Yahoo: MacArthur Maze Detour Update.
Sometimes it takes a five days to generate exactly the one piece of information that 5 million people need.
Audio of Monday’s session
Here’s a 39MB WMV from the A/V people at Mix.
Apparently they had the camera focused on the slides (we didn’t have any), so it’s really just audio.
Mike Lehman from Microsoft says he’ll turn it into an audio podcast, so if you want to save some bandwidth you might want to wait.
On the other hand, the audio ought to be enough to communicate what happened.
Jeff Sandquist, via email: “We just ship up the audio + slides during the event to conserve bandwidth within the venue. High quality videos are being prepared and will be up within the next few weeks.”
Live-blogging the Republican debate
Remember this name: Ron Paul. Renegade Republican candidate for President.
I’m much less familiar with the Republicans. The only one I like listening to is Ron Paul.
McCain is trying to sound like a president. Mitt Romney plays a dad on TV (he’s on TV). If Giuliani doesn’t win he could take over the Hanibal Lecter character.
BTW, think of Twitter as “Live-blogging for the rest of us.”
McCain: “I’ll follow him to the gates of Hell.” (Of Osama bin Laden.)
They mention Schwarzenegger, and I realize none of these guys could even remotely win against Arnold. Of course they don’t want to change the Constitution, he’d kick their ass.
Giuliani got Roe v Wade more right than the rest of them.
Controversial RSS study
ICMPA study on RSS, reaches incorrect conclusions, imho, about the quality of news you get from the feeds of the NY Times, al Jazeera and the Guardian, among others. I like getting short summaries of the news from feeds (e.g. NY Times River), and if I want more information, I can click through to the full stories. I know others disagree, but this is a matter of taste that they present as a matter of fact.
Zune, Day 2
I have a lunch in SF today, which means a BART ride, so I thought I’d take the Zune with me instead of the iPod, to listen to some podcasts and some music, but I can’t figure out how to add a folder to the list of folders it synchs up with, or how to even get it to recognize the device (which is attached via a USB port). It might be a Parallels issue. So many pieces of software to get working with each other.
Later… Turning Autoconnect on for USB in Parallels did the trick, although it caused XP to crash but reboots are really fast in this environment. It’s synchronizing now. What is it copying onto the device? I have no clue. 
Later… Nothing got synched. Oy. This trip I take the iPod.
Before I leave — When we were developing Radio 8 in 2001, we set a goal that 80 percent of the people who tried it had to get to first post in five minutes. We iterated until we got there.
So far I’ve put at least three hours into the Zune, and I haven’t managed to get one of my songs or podcasts to play on the device. Granted, a lot of the difficulty has been using the device inside Parallels on a foreign operating system. But, a fair amount of the difficulty has been in getting meaningful feedback from the software. The controls are impossible to find, the settings a first-time user is going to look for aren’t there (of course they must be there, but I poked at all the obvious controls and didn’t find them). The online help is pretty useless.
It seems the designers of this product could benefit from having a similar goal. Measure the performance of the device in terms of the success of a first-time user. True, in 2002, I had similar problems with the iPod. But it’s not 2002 anymore.
Alsop’s rebuttal
What do you do when two people remember an event differently?
Yesterday, I got an email from Stewart Alsop, saying that I got the facts wrong in in my recount of his Agenda conference. Of course it is possible that I got it wrong because my memory is imperfect, and I do make mistakes.
But I have a very distinct memory, sitting in the audience of his conference, having paid a lot of money, and believing that the table had been unfairly tilted in favor of Stewart’s interests.
He says it’s not possible. So I ran his objection at the end of my story. And I wanted to give it even more prominence, here this morning. However, I want to make it clear that I am not retracting, my piece is very clearly labeled as my recollection, and I’ve disclaimed that my memory is imperfect, so I think everyone has all the caveats they need to decide for themselves.
Here’s his rebuttal.
Stewart Alsop via email: “I became a VC in June 1996. At Agenda 97 that fall, I shared the program 50/50 with Bob Metcalfe. I made my first investment at NEA right after that conference in December 1996. I did not participate in running Agenda 98, by which time I had three portfolio companies. But, even if I did AND if I had all three CEOs participate (which none of them actually did), it’s hard to imagine that 3/26 of the program would be a ‘fair number of the presenters.’”
Berkeley quake
We just had a small earthquake here.
Amazing how quickly the USGS site has info.
It was only a 3.0, but it was really close. (And quite close to the MacArthur Maze, site of the truck crash on Sunday.)
Tech conferences and integrity
When Mike Arrington launched TechCrunch 20, I said that integrity had come to conferences in Silicon Valley. I meant it then, and I still mean it today.
The brief look we had yesterday at the invite list for the conference in Hawaii run by David Hornik of August Capital provided a reminder that there’s often a story behind how the speakers at conferences are chosen (or invitees to invite-only events), a story that often is not shared with the people who pay to go to the conference, and the rest of the world, even though sometimes the conflicts are very clear.
The first time I remember being sure of such a conflict was at an Agenda conference after Stewart Alsop became a venture capitalist. I noticed that a fair number of the presenters were from his portfolio companies. He may have even joked about how he was using his power to tilt the table in favor of his investments. I also remember hearing a lot of grumbling in the hallways (some of it from me) that we were paying to see ads.
Hornik’s investments are well-represented among the people invited to his conference. Are his competitors represented as well? We can’t analyze that now, because the site has been closed.
Who loses when tech conferences lack integrity? I’d argue that the Valley loses. It’s this kind of inbreeding that kept them from seeing what they call “user generated content” until 2004 or 2005, when it had been growing along with the web since its inception in the early 90s. An industry that prides itself on always being at the forefront had fallen far behind the leading edge. And even today, they don’t understand it — they call it “new media” — and invite people who make them feel safe, they don’t want to hear from people who challenge their assumptions. That’s not a good way to design a conference, people come home feeling bored with the same-old same-old, when there are new experiences to be had, new ideas to be shared.
Long-term this is their loss, although it slows down the flow of capital to new ideas when they most need support. They are happy to come in when it has been proven that there’s money to be made, but the technologies come out much less powerfully than they would if the investors of the Valley really risked alongside the innovators. But they find us too brash, or outspoken, that’s how we sound to them — and to their friends in the established media and “new media” but until they embrace the randomness of the web, they’ll continue to be surprised, continue to play catch-up, and continue to miss the really big opportunities.
Stewart Alsop via email: “I became a VC in June 1996. At Agenda 97 that fall, I shared the program 50/50 with Bob Metcalfe. I made my first investment at NEA right after that conference in December 1996. I did not participate in running Agenda 98, by which time I had three portfolio companies. But, even if I did AND if I had all three CEOs participate (which none of them actually did), it’s hard to imagine that 3/26 of the program would be a ‘fair number of the presenters.’”
PS: Valleywag has a copy of the invite list.
PPS: I’ve backed it up here.
Today’s links
Micah Sifry: The Battle to Control Obama’s Myspace.
Om Malik: Hey Microsoft, forget MIX, focus on Mobiles.
Learning about Parallels
For some unknown reason I needed to reboot my Mac by powering it off a number of times while I was in Las Vegas. Each time the Parallels desktop would be forced off without saving its state, and now it won’t launch Windows XP.
So I’m reinstalling the operating system, and all the apps, again (third time).
I’m getting good at this!
PS: I’m doing this so I can install the software for the Zune that Microsoft gave to all the speakers at Mix 07.
Zune setup
It’s been said before, elsewhere — but this is ridiculous. They’re asking for my life history. I just want to put some podcasts on the device and talk a walk and try it out. For example, they want my phone number and birth date, both are required fields. Geeeeez. I lied, like everyone else.
Later, I’ve completed the installation, now, how do I get a few songs and podcasts onto the device?
It shows up on the desktop, but when I click the icon, it launches the marketplace user interface, which lets me buy music from their store. But of course I already have music. Seems they should make it a bit more obvious how to copy my tunes onto the device.
Later, I might be getting somewhere.
Fumbling around, I believe it’s possible to synch up a podcast downloaded from the web with my Zune device, but everything I try results in it playing the MP3 on my desktop instead of copying it to my Zune.
I wish there was a way to use the Windows desktop file copying commands to move content onto the Zune. I already know how to use it, and I’ve never liked synching.
In this blurry picture of a Zune, look at the top of the screen, you’ll see a list of menu options. I can’t figure out how to get the cursor to go up there. Any ideas.
Michael Gartenberg on the Zune UI (and a comment on Parallels).
Kevin Tofel explains how synching works on the Zune.
Thanks!
52 years ago on this day I was born.
My mailbox overflows with birthday wishes.
It’s going to be a great day.
Thanks everybody!
PS: Megnut-the-blog is 8 today.
Were you invited?
Another exclusive, invite-only tech conference, $3000.
Here’s the list of invitees, username “enter” password “thelobby”.
Can’t believe they didn’t invite Scoble. What’s up with that?
However, the format seems really interesting. “No panels, no keynotes,” which is 2/3 of the disclaimers for BloggerCon (we also featured no audience).
It’s a good idea. I’d throw in a few of the Hypercamp ideas as well, but (of course) I wasn’t invited (nor would I go to such an exclusive event).
Frankly, I doubt if they needed to make it invite-only with the steep price and long distance (Big Island of Hawaii). The exclusiveness and publishing the invite list is more of a marketing thing, and more than a little unfair to use people’s names without their permission, if in fact they didn’t have their permission.
Of course you have to look to see if you were invited. Or to see who’s cool enough to be invited. Any surprise omissions? Post a comment.
I’m off to Gordon Biersch for dinner with a bunch of nerds who invited themselves. Heh.
Jay Rosen on Frontline’s News War
Jay Rosen: “The way the film was edited to bring out one story: heroic press fighting against ownership and its budget cuts, a government that would like to silence it, and untrained bloggers and amateurs buzzing around, stinging like knats. This is the story Lowell wanted to tell. He’s been a part of it in his career and feels very passionate about it. He’s newsroom Joe himself, and he’s got newsroom Joe’s mindset. You let that perspective carry the day. You’re entitled to make that decision, which is an editorial decision, and I’m entitled to be angry about it. Because it’s inadequate. You had the materials to challenge it more, you just didn’t want to.”
Today’s links
Jeremie Miller, the designer of Jabber, is joining Wikia.
Travel day
Heading back to Berkeley this morning, going through Oakland, and I’ll avoid the Maze by taking city streets through Oakland and Berkeley.
Tonight there’s a dinner at Gordon Biersch in SF for British blogger Hugh MacLeod. I’ll be there if BART travel isn’t prohibitive.
