Scripting News for 7/31/07

Heh 

Bug Labs, day 2 

A few items following up on last night’s Bug Labs piece.

1. As Fred Wilson points out in his post, it’s the polar opposite of the iPhone. He compares it to Ning, but it seems more like an early PC, and the app designer, if it delivers on its promise, as the BASIC that was bundled (in ROM) with those early machines. The assumption back then was that everyone would program for themselves. That of course led to the earliest users turning their personal labors of love into off-the-shelf products for other users. Hobbyists have always been at the core of the tech industry, it’s rare and refreshing to see people deliberately make a product for them.

2. It almost goes without saying, but should be said anyway — if Bug is any good, it should be possible to create the Podcast Player or Social Camera with it. So maybe Bug will be a prototyping environment for more polished mobile devices, like future iPhones. As a user and a developer my creativity has been locked out of the mobile market because I don’t have the requisite hardware skills. Podcasting is one art that would be further along if we had access to the design tools that designers at consumer electronics companies have. There certainly are others. Imagine the mobile devices doctors would create. Building contractors. Bus drivers. Realtors. Tourists. Musicians. Writers. Librarians.

3. I see various VCs commenting on the company. I wonder if there’s a complete list of investors. Since we’re talking about open technology, and a lot of trust is being asked for, it matters who’s behind it. (Fred Wilson responds: Union Square, Spark Capital, Bob Young (Red Hat), Tom Evslin, Brad Feld and Albert Wenger.)

4. Other people they should brief: Phil Torrone, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Alsop. (I’ll add them as I think of them.)

5. How refreshing that they didn’t roll this out via Markoff. It probably would have been easy to get him interested, but it’s nice that we got first shot at it. In a perfect world that wouldn’t matter, but I guess this isn’t a perfect world.

6. Bug Labs has a blog, and a feed.

7. Write-ups: Ryan Block, Robert Scoble.

A cool thing about the iPhone 

It doesn’t look like a camera.

When a Mexican band, with instruments, got on the BART yesterday, of course I wanted to take their picture.

I just took out the iPhone, pretended I was reading email, opened the camera app and clicked the shutter.

Voila! A picture of the band.

Scripting News for 7/30/07

Bug Labs (initial review) 

I went to a real interesting dinner tonight in San Francisco, to get introduced to a New York-based startup, Bug Labs, along with Ryan Block of Engadget, Robert Scoble and Jerry Michalski.

We met with their CEO, Peter Semmelhack, and their San Francisco-based consultant, Jeremy Toemann. Dinner was at Le Colonial in San Francisco.

I’ll try first to list the pieces of what it is, in the same style as the What Twitter Is piece I wrote a few days ago, with the understanding that this will be less thought out since I’ve known about the company for a very short period of time.

1. It’s an architecture for pluggable gadget components. There’s a hardware interface, which I know little or nothing about (I’m a software guy). It was explained to me as “60 pins” — they said they interface all the capabilities of the chip, whatever that means. But at a software level, each of the components interfaces with XML over HTTP. It’s as if they read my mind. The pieces are all fractional horsepower HTTP servers. They are using RESTful interfaces everywhere. I haven’t actually seen the XML, let’s hope it’s simple.

2. The designs for the components that Bug Labs is doing themselves are all open source. They’re sharing everything. So they won’t have any kind of lock in on the devices that are built with it. They asked if we thought they should connect with Stallman. I said of course.

3. There have a very sexy development platform which we saw screen shots of, but didn’t actually see running. The users design the hardware products they want. They can share the designs, and code, or sell it if they want. My guess is that it’ll be mostly shared. It’s a powerful idea, and I believe very soon, realistic.

4. And there’s the hardware itself. Again, we didn’t see it, they showed us wood mockups, giving an idea of how the pieces fit together. They’re going to ship with four initial components, a screen, GPS, a CPU, and ??? Every unit comes with wifi and USB. I’m sure I missed a lot of the details, I think I did get the gestalt.

They said they will ship in the fall.

Backing comes from Union Square Ventures (yet another of their deals, they seem to be everywhere) — Fred Wilson told me about it at our lunch a couple of weeks ago. Also investing is Robert Young of Red Hat. There may be other investors (probably are).

I really poked around during the dinner, said some challenging things, and it seems Semmehack’s head is screwed on tight and his heart is in the right place. He didn’t get rattled. He knows he may just be teaching his competitor’s users what to ask for. He doesn’t expect the major consumer electronics companies to get behind it. They are thinking small at first, which is great, because at first the opportunity will be small.

Photos from tonight’s dinner.

I’m really glad someone is doing this. I anticipated it in my second How To Make Money On The Internet piece in early 2001, but I didn’t expect it would actually happen so soon. Once again Fred Wilson impresses with his willingness to bet on big ideas.

2/13/01: “Every product that has an embedded computer will shift to user design. Today’s companies become fulfillment houses, building products on contract. Manufacturing margins will shrink, the real value will be in the insight — this is what people want now — and the risk taken that today few manufacturers seem willing to take.”

PS: They should brief Doc Searls. He’s going to love this.

Today’s links 

Mowser “lets you view the Web on your mobile phone.”

Dare Obasanjo is fed up with A-list tech bloggers.

TorrentFreak on a no-install Java-based client for BT newbies.

Catheroo is a Fresca fan too!

Bill Walsh, heroic coach of the 49ers, died today.

Mashery is “on-demand API infrastructure.”

Ed Kohler asks why FireFox defaults to Atom 0.3 feeds.

Michael Gartenberg on the competiton betw HD-DVD and Blu-ray. “The real competition here for both formats are not each other, it’s DVD in the past and online distribution.”

Jim Forbes, a guy I used to hang out with in the 80s, illustrates how, in a moment of vulnerability, we sometimes reveal a truth about ourselves to the rest of the world.

Attention mashups 

ReadWriteWeb wonders if the “attention silos” will ever open up.

This is a long-told tale here on Scripting News. The classic example are the movie rating data held in silos by sites like Netflix and Yahoo Movies.

But whose data is it??

Seems it belongs to the users and they should be able to take it where they want. Sure Yahoo is providing a recommendation engine, that’s nice (and thanks), but they also get to use my data for their own purposes. Seems like a fair trade. And I’m a paying customer of Netflix. They just lowered the price but I’d much rather have gotten a dividend in the form of being able to use my own data.

Think of the mashups that would be possible.

Wouldn’t it be great to link up Match.com with movie ratings to find dates that like the same movies?

Hacking Netflix: “Some of my Netflix Friends have rated thousands of movies, written scores of reviews, and have hundreds of movies in their queue.”

Scripting News for 7/29/07

MP3s in Scripting News 

Fred Wilson sends a pointer to playtagger.

“Include this tiny javascript in your HTML, and your mp3 links will automatically become playable right on the page.”

Let’s test it!

A Christmas song for Doc 

I was reading David Weinberger’s beautiful testimonial to growing older, on the occasion of Doc’s 60th birthday, which is today!

I thought the best birthday present I could give Doc is the sound of beautiful music on Scripting News. And what song? Dr Dave helped me there. He wrote a gorgeous piece about John Lennon, that brought me tears of gratitude for a life that still continues inspire, even though it was cut short by an act of lunacy.

John Lennon’s So This is Christmas isn’t strictly a birthday song, but it works anyway.

So Doc, you’re an old fart for sure, but I love you dearly, and am glad your heart is healthy and you still have your sense of humor!

Big hugs, your pal, Dave

Enough Fresca?? 

Marie Carnes: “I love Fresca ice cubes.”

A sure sign someone has switched to Mac 

Chris Pirillo: “The box said Requires Windows 95 or better. So I installed OS X.”

Scripting News for 7/28/07

118,254 RSS feeds 

Last week I met with the founders of a young Emeryville company named Persai Research, and they told me about a project to gather a huge collection of feeds.

They just sent me a link to a zip file containing over a hundred thousand feeds.

http://research.persai.com/persai_feedcorpus.zip

And stay tuned to this blog for more information about the company.

Today’s links 

NY Times pumps Pownce.

An idea of what it’s like to have a neighbor who, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, has a construction crew tearing out their foundation.

Lifehacker on timelines from RSS feeds.

Fred Wilson is staying with Facebook, not declaring bankruptcy. Me, I never accepted it as a liability. Jason Calacanis gave up yesterday.

Nice thing about Twitter is that unlike Facebook, it doesn’t demand anything of you. I like that.

Doc Searls turns 60 tomorrow. Heard it on Twitter.

Rex Hammock: “Facebook is a sandbox I’m playing in — but it has a long way to go before it can hope to be the world I live in.”

Barry Bonds hit a home run last night, and is one away from tying the record.

NPR piece on MP3 blogs. Next time I want to share a song with readers of this blog, I think I’m going to do it.

Overheard at last night’s party 

One of the cool things about parties like the one last night is that ideas spread like colds in a kindergarten classroom.

And sometimes product leak, and like the game of telephone we played in kindergarten, are enhanced and tweaked with every telling.

Luckily there’s one more party, tonight, on Potrero Hill in San Francisco (a neighborhood made interesting by Marc Canter, many years ago), to transmit and repurpose last night’s lies and innuenda.

Marc, of course, won’t be there. He’s in Italy, not returning until Gnomedex, which is less than two weeks away. Yet another oppty to mix it up!

Scripting News? 

From time to time people ask what this site has to do with Scripting News.

I shrug it off, saying “It’s just a name.”

I don’t stop to explain because many people who think in terms of scripting languages think linearly and only in one direction. A site named Scripting News must contain news about scripting, right?

But what if the name describes what the author does when creating the software that manages the site? And further, if he shares that software with other people so that this site becomes a focus of the activity of applying scripting to the area of news?

What would you think about that?

Back in the beginning people would have thought I was out of my mind.

Scripting news? Why would anyone want to do that.

But today, many years later, news is the subject of much scripting.

So there you have it.

PS: Sometimes when I say the name of site in my own mind it comes out like this: “Scripting Jews.” Same logic.

A drive down Whiskey Hill 

I was early arriving at the party so I decided to drive by the back end of my old hacienda in Woodside, the one I sold in 2003 as I was moving east.

I sold it to a neighbor with plans to build a megahouse with a huge outdoor entertainment complex, and he needed the extra acres so he would comply with Woodside’s strict zoning laws.

I already knew, from Google Maps, that he tore down my old house, and that he had never built the huge house he planned to build. There must be a story. Illness, a death or divorce? Or he just got busy or lazy, or ran out of money?

I didn’t have the heart to drive up to the front entrance and see what the land looked like without the house.

It was an old house, constructed in many projects over many years. Some of the contruction was excellent, some of it terribly bad. All the roofs leaked at one time or another. Each segment of the house had its own roof, a different style, as if the builder were experimenting to find the least reliable form of roofing (if so, he found it, a flat tar roof with a skylight). But I loved the house nonetheless. It had a charm to it. And around this time of year, bees (which are really yellowjackets).

Yesterday, as I approached the property from Whiskey Hill Road, the first surprise was to find that Joan Baez’s house is for sale. And then the really big surprise, the property of the guy who bought my property is for sale too! Wow. If I had enough money I could buy it back. Heh. No way of course, Berkeley is a fine place, and I’m sure I can’t afford it. But it was a lovely place to live. And it’s great to see that the story keeps evolving even when I’m not there. I bet Jamis at Bucks knows what’s going on there, assuming he still owns Bucks after all this time?

Scripting News for 7/27/07

Today’s links 

Photos from tonight’s TechCrunch party in Menlo Park.

Apparently some ISPs are inserting ads in web content as their customers surf.

Jason Calacanis: “It makes no sense to me to build inside of someone else’s platform when you have the wide open internet out there to develop on.”

Frank Zappa: “Gotta meet the Gurneys and a dozen gray attorneys.”

What Twitter is 

Congrats to the lead investors, Union Square Ventures and the angels, and the entrepreneurs.

I’ve been reading various posts and comments, and see a thread that’s still out there. People doubt that there’s a way to make money with Twitter. To that I say, they haven’t been reading this blog.

Now seems like a good time to pause and review what Twitter is.

1. It’s a network of users, with one kind of relationship: following. I can follow you, and you can follow me. Or I can follow you and you don’t follow me. Or you can follow me, and I don’t follow you. Or neither of us follow each other. Pretty simple. Just arrows at either or both ends of the line, or no line at all. There are no labels on the arcs.

2. It’s a micro-blogging system. Posts are limited to 140 characters. Enough for a bit of text and a link. This is a powerful idea, but not a new one. If you read Scripting News before February of this year, it was partially a micro-blogging system. When it started in April 1997, it was all micro-blogging. The earliest websites, from TBL, NCSA and Netscape were also micro-blogging systems.

An aside, I gave a talk on Sunday at the WordPress users conference. One of the things we talked about was micro-blogging. I asked the people if they would like it if the only way you could create a WordPress site was on wordpress.com. They agreed that would not be good. Analogously, if micro-blogging is to become a real art, there will have to be many ways to create a micro-blog, and lots of RSS to tie them together.

3. A relatively open identity system. I’ve said it before, Twitter or something like it, could be the holy grail of open identity. While the engineers of the tech industry have been, imho, looking at the problem the wrong way by trying to glue together the huge namespaces controlled by powerful companies who don’t want to give up control. Twitter, with it’s ultra-thin user interface, and light feature set, and simple API (more on that in a bit) and the nothing-to-lose attitude of its management, may be the breakthrough. Or it could be Facebook, with it’s much larger user base and a management that also likes to roll the dice. The key is lots of users, a growing user base, and an API with no dead-ends.

4. An ecosystem. Twitter’s API is very simple. It covers the entire functionality, leaves nothing out. You could implement the Twitter user interface using the API. That’s a key thing. Compare it to Apple, who reserves for itself and a few partners, under terms we don’t know, the right to develop rich apps for the iPhone. Twitter takes the traditional PC industry approach, give everyone equal power, make it a level playing field and let the chips fall where they may. This means that if the people at Twitter miss an opportunity, the rest of us have a shot at providing it for ourselves and others.

So what do all these parts add up to? Users and relationships between users, their ideas, and an ecosystem. It’s probably the basis for some pretty hot apps. Will it be possible to monetize them? Without a doubt. People who say that Twitter hasn’t figured out how to make money don’t understand the role technology companies play in the much larger media and communication ecosystem. Ideas gestate here, grow up, find users, and then find customers. In a way Twitter is a mega-enterprise product, and by using it, we’re helping them prove it. Their customer is likely to be a telco or an entertainment network. But it’s way too early to cash it out, they all took the right approach, seed it with some more capital to add more bandwidth, solidify the back-end, add a bit more functionality, and wait to see what the users and developers do with it.

Twitter is still a very interesting service, and as long as it remains as open as it is, we can all learn from and alongside them.

4/28/07: Twitter as coral reef.

Harold Gilchrist: “Some actually see that Web/SMS Gateway as a key component of their architecture.”

Scoble is Twittering about Twitter from Twitter with Twitter.

2/22/00: “Watching them watch us watching them watching us watching them.”

Scripting News for 7/26/07

Harry Potter wasn’t for me 

But there’s no doubt I’m going to see this movie.

Synopsis: “Homer Simpson must save the world from a catastrophe he himself created.”

Dumb iPhone question 

I have 250 or so photos on my iPhone.

I want to copy them onto my MacBook hard disk.

How to?

PS: I did read the manual.

PPS: Answer — launch iPhoto, it will see the iPhone as a camera and offer to retrieve the pictures.

Sun & RSS 

Mike Dillion is Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for Sun Microsystems. On his blog he says “We’re trying something different…”

He says: “On Monday, we will release our financial information first to the public via our website, RSS feeds and 8-K filing. Then, about 10 minutes later, we will release the information to the traditional private agencies and their paid subscribers.”

Here’s a page listing Sun’s RSS 2.0 feeds.

It’s really cool the way the users, esp in the tech industry, have adopted RSS and used it in innovative new ways.

1826 smoke-free days ago 

On this day five years ago I wrote an open letter to people “who send emails to people quitting smoking that explain how hard it is to quit, and how in all likelihood, you’ll fail.”

I was 42 days into my life as a non-smoker. And I had become a support person in the cause of smoking cessation. I wanted everyone, esp smokers, to know that it’s easy to quit smoking. Because smoking, after the physical dependence is gone, is all in your mind. If you believe it’s easy to quit, it is.

In fact, as I discovered later, it’s easier to not smoke than it is to smoke. You don’t have to go to the store, buy cigarettes, find an ashtray (and keep it empty), find a lighter (and maybe buy a new one when you lose it), light the damn thing and breathe through it for a few minutes. And in 10 minutes or so you have to do it again. All those things you have to remember to do. Much easier to just blow it off.

PS: It’s now 1868 days since I quit. Not one cigarette in all that time. And it gets easier every day.

Scripting News for 7/25/2007

Twitter, month 5 

Another idea that’s gaining maturity, and therefore perspective, is Twitter. It’s now been almost five months since we fell in love with it. By “we” I mean a handful of people in the tech blogosphere, enough to create a critical mass of people to network with, enough so we can explore what it’s like to have a spam-free pub-sub channel for direct communication.

Twitter filled a personal gap that I created, unwittingly, a couple of weeks before I started using it. On February 27, with no announcement or fanfare, this blog switched from a mixture of long-form and short-form blog posts to all long-form. And then in March I started using Twitter, and it’s become the place I use for short-form posts.

Twitter also serves the purpose of what I used to call “email bulletins.” When something newsworthy would happen, or if I wrote something special that I wanted a lot of people to read, I would push a bulletin to people who subscribed. Nowadays I push them to the 1539 people who follow me on Twitter. And it works. When I do it, there are 200 or 300 reads from the people who directly follow me, and 25 or so reads from the main page of Twitter.

I have yet to figure out Facebook. Something about it doesn’t make me want to go there often to find out what’s new. Not sure why I’m not attracted to it and so many others are.

PS: I seem to have discovered Twitter on March 14. Here’s my first post. I clearly didn’t understand it at the time (and said so). By Day 2 it’s already starting to make sense. “What matters about Twitter, btw, is that people are using it.” Throughout March and April are epiphanies on Twitter.

iPhone, month 1 

Today’s the 25th of July, the iPhone shipped on June 29, that’s the day I got mine, so we’re getting pretty close to the end of a month with the iPhone.

The tech press usually doesn’t review products after a month of use, but that’s when you really find out if it was worth the initial hype.

The NY Times reports that iPhone sales are disappointing, I’d like to add that the product itself is disappointing.

I still own and use a Blackberry for its email and web capabilities, both of which outshine Apple’s product. Because the iPhone doesn’t have a search command, and apparently doesn’t store messages locally, it makes a poor choice for a mobile email client.

For example, I brought only the iPhone with me to a meeting in Palo Alto last week. As I was driving to the meeting I could see that I would be a few minutes late, so I wanted to call the person I was meeting and alert them. With the Blackberry I would have been able to do this while stopped at a red light. Just search for the person’s name in my inbox, open the first message, highlight the phone number, click the scroll wheel twice (once to dial the number, the second time to confirm that I want to do it).

In comparison, the iPhone only keeps the most recent 25 messages in memory, and this person’s email was not in that group. No search command. And it doesn’t have a scroll wheel or a clipboard. The light turned green long before I found the email that contained the phone number. (Note: I’ve gotten a bunch of email saying the 25 can be increased to 200, which I have done. Thanks!)

On the other hand, the iPhone is much prettier than a Blackberry and feels better in your hand. I’m not mocking Apple for that, style matters, esp in a personal device. But it seems they could have studied the competition more closely to produce a more feature-complete product.

I still find the iPhone virtual keyboard difficult to use even after a month to get used to it. The Blackberry is very usable, in comparison. However, I like the way Apple did punctuation better than the Blackberry.

It also seems we’re going to have a long-term discussion over whether it makes sense to have a “mobile web” or take the iPhone trade-off, more effort to use its web (lots of scrolling and pinching), but making the whole web accessible, mobile sites or non-mobile sites. I think what Apple has attempted is noble, but it’s not going to work. The screens have limited resolution, and even if they didn’t, even if they could cram a billion pixels into every square inch, there’s the limit of how much detail our eyes can see and how big our hands are.

In other words, after almost a month of trying to make the iPhone view of the web work, I think there is such a thing as the mobile web. We’re going to have to produce versions of websites specifically for devices with small screens.

The other functions of the iPhone, the camera, YouTube, the photo browser, even the iPod functionality, are nice to have, but none of them work very well, and without a functioning web and email interface, they don’t add much to the appeal of the iPhone. When all is said and done, it’s a beautifully designed, colorful, very stylish, cell phone.

A postscript — how different the situation would be if the iPhone had a full SDK, if you could run Mac OS apps on the device, or if it had a built-in HTTP server that would allow you to browse or configure it over wifi from a Mac or Windows machine. In other words, if it had the kind of revolutionary features and was an open platform in the tradition of Apple and the PC industry.

No doubt we’d be trying a dozen different approaches to email, at least one of them would be a clone of Blackberry email, as a holdover for the really great email products that would likely be coming. There’s no doubt a lot of interest among developers in the iPhone, but it probably wil never be greater than it was in the first weeks the phone was released. More likely, the iPhone, if it attains success, will reach it the way the Mac did, after the initial fatal flaws are removed, in the “iPhone Plus” or whatever.

Remember, in the 80s Apple was the first company to build networking into every machine, and later the first company to ship a wifi router. Hopefully it’s possible for Apple to open today’s iPhone, and reward the early adopters for betting on them, and get developers busy at fulfilling the opportunities it creates as a platform, not just a device.

Peter Cook says we should look at the Nokia E70.

Jackson Miller notes that there’s lots about the iPhone today on the web. Amazing confluence. When I wrote my review I hadn’t seen any of the other pieces, including a review comparing iPhone and Blackberry (!) by Mark Hendrickson on TechCrunch.

Rex Hammock: “Wait a couple of generations before buying one.”

A NSFW comparison of the iPhone and the Nokia E70.

Scripting News for 7/24/2007

Today’s links 

Wired: “Blogging is not about making friends, it’s about expressing yourself truthfully and in the process providing some hitherto unforeseen insight into an important issue or topic of the day.” Agreed.

Chris Pirillo being tormented by his wife Ponzi.

Uncov meetup in SF, Aug 3 at the Mars Bar.

Andy Ihnatko says he’s not the real Fake Steve Jobs.

Barry Bonds 

News just in that baseball commissioner Bud Selig will come to San Francisco to watch Barry Bonds try to tie and then set the all-time home run record.

The cloud over his accomplishment makes this a difficult decision, but I think this is the right choice. Baseball is our national sport, and the conditions under which the game is played always changing. When Hank Aaron played there was no interleague play, no designated hitter. For much of his career there was no baseball on the west coast, so travel was very different, and when he started his career baseball was segregated.

The two accomplishments are comparable, for sure, but not exactly. There’s no doubt that Hank Aarron earned a place in baseball history, though his accomplishment has in no way diminished the accomplishment of his predecessor, Babe Ruth, and if Bonds surpasses Aaron, as seems very likely, we’ll still remember Aaron being the great player and role model that he was.

Barry Bonds has done what no other player of his generation has done, and like it or not, performance drugs are a part of baseball today. Whether Bonds took the drugs or not, his record is important and must be recognized by all who love the sport.

And by the way, this would be a great time to forgive Pete Rose, and let him join the Hall of Fame.

Twittergrams in this window 

Thanks to Amyloo!

Blogging about friends 

I had lunch a couple of weeks ago in San Francisco with Fred Wilson, who has become a regular cross-blog sparring partner of mine. It’s funny that two people who seem to get along so well face to face have such big disconnects in the blogosphere.

For example, Fred was one of the people who suggested that the ability to opt-out was the answer to Google owning Feedburner and possibly using its near-monopoly in feed serving to control other parts of the RSS ecosystem. I responded in my second post, and apparently convinced Fred that there was a problem, only to find out that my title wasn’t friendly enough.

I guess it’s all in the perspective.

How you look at things.

The new software I’m working on caused me to review a lot of the posts here since February 27 when I switched to the long-form blogging style, and most of my headlines and much of my copy is fairly irreverent. But that’s what makes a blog interesting. This is a medium where the person shouting the loudest is most likely to be heard. So when I want to be heard, I say it directly and strongly. And in this case, I think I understated the danger of concentrating so much power in Feedburner, and its successor, Google.

And Fred, your title wasn’t so friendly either. The problem isn’t “Feedburner and Dave,” the problem is “Feedburner and Google.” It’s a subtle technique. Deflect criticism by naming the critic. That’s what the Feedburner guys did when I asked questions about them before they were acquired. All of a sudden it was a personal issue with me. Republicans do it, Democrats do it (not quite as well), and so does the tech press. So that’s why we have blogs, imho, not so that we can make friends, rather so we can make truth.

I get itchy when I see would-be journalists praise people they write about. Same with bloggers. That makes me wonder who’s paying whom for what? I’d rather hear from people who aren’t being paid, and people who start out a piece saying nothing about how much they like someone. (Although I’m frequently guilty of this myself.)

And don’t forget this one…

“Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet.”

If you’re just taking and not giving, you’re fucking everyone who does.

Finally Fred is a New Yorker, as am I. Since when do manners come first? New York is a town for doing business, you get things done, say what you mean. This idea of never offending is very Californian, which may explain why I’ve had such trouble fitting in here.

New directions 

I’m working on new software again.

Maybe some big changes around here soon.

Get out your iPhones and Blackberries!

Heehee.

Scripting News for 7/23/2007

Apache on the Mac, day 2 

Thanks for all the great advice on configuring Apache on the Mac.

After wading through all the options, many of which included mastering system options that I don’t care about, and have nothing to do with the problem I want to solve, I decided to give MAMP a try, and so far so good. It’s doing what I want to do, without having to enable root access.

I love Fresca 

Why Feedburner is trouble, day 2 

Saturday’s post about Feedburner was much-discussed, and that’s good. The most common rebuttal was the user’s ability to opt out. If you don’t like it you don’t have to use Feedburner. But that’s not any kind of a rebuttal. Let me illustrate.

First, I don’t use Feedburner, never have, never will.

However, if Google ties Feedburner to Google Reader that still hurts people like me, because my feed doesn’t work as well with Google Reader.

Now let’s take a deeper look at “doesn’t work as well.”

It could end up meaning “doesn’t work at all.” It’s quite possible in the second or third iteration that Google drops support for non-Feedburner feeds. It wouldn’t be unprecedented, far from it. Google Blogoscoped has a list of Google products that “prefer” other Google products. I’ve never seen Google not do this when they had the chance. The instant they bought Blogger they tied it to their toolbar. If they had used an open API the toolbar would have worked with all blogging tools. Google just doesn’t think that way, sorry to say.

The ability of one user to opt out would do absolutely nothing to stop or even diminish the negative effects of monopolistic tying. And users show no inclination to do anything for the benefit of the Internet as a whole, so there’s no reason to believe any of them would withhold their support of Feedburner just because it screws with the benefits of a level playing field in the RSS ecosystem. Certainly not enough to persuade Google not to tie the two products.

And if you still think opting-out is some kind of answer, consider that the whole point of tying is to penalize people who opt-out.

Note that I’m not asking anyone to do anything, and I’m not even saying Google is doing anything wrong. However, it could be that there are people at Google who understand the benefits of keeping things open, and if I can help them argue inside Google, then I feel I’ve done something good.

Betsy Devine has opted out of using MSIE, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have to deal with sites that only work with that browser (it isn’t even available on the computer she uses).

Check out this comment by Kevin Marks. Hey works at Google.

Jeremiah Owyang explains how Google may favor Blogspot sites in the search engine.

Scripting News for 7/21/2007

Exploring Apache on Mac 

In the background I’m learning how to configure Apache on Mac OS X. There are lots of little stumbling blocks that involve penetrating the user interface and getting down to the Unix running underneath. There’s a tiny sliver of Apache showing through the GUI but not enough to do anything interesting.

The first thing I had to figure out, after learning where the document root is (still not totally clear on that but I got it working) is where the httpd.conf file is. I found it at:

Macintosh HD:private:etc:httpd:httpd.conf

You can’t normally get to this location in the Finder, but there is a way, in the Terminal window, to tell the Finder to display hidden files and folders, and then you can navigate there. A tutorial at MacWorld explains how.

Even better, you can open the folder from within the OPML Editor using the file.openfolder verb. There’s probably a way to do it in AppleScript as well.

So I opened the httpd.conf file and started reading it, and it seems like a standard Apache install with an added nicety: at the end it includes all files ending with .conf in the users sub-folder. So you can modify the install without having to modify the shipping conf file, which means you can get an upgrade from Apple without losing your changes. Good.

So I started writing a file that would map virtual hosts to store in my personal conf file, but when it came time to save, no luck. On further investigation I find that I don’t own the files, even the one named after me! They belong to the system.

So now I’m scratching my head trying to figure out how I log on with permission to edit files created by the system. There must be a way, right?

Suggestions are welcome of course.

PS: This is what I needed. Thanks!!

Why Feedburner is trouble 

When Feedburner first came online I warned that there was danger in giving so much power to one company. They argued that they were just a little company, struggling to make a go of it, and no one should fear them. Some of them even took the predictable political tactic of trashing the personality of the person raising the question. I held my ground. I’ve been around this business a long time, and I was sure their strategy was to sell to a bigger company, and I don’t trust big companies.

People at big companies often are underpaid, with stock options going nowhere, and feel unappreciated by their colleagues, and when they look outside their company they see lots of people who look happy and successful, making more money than they are, without the political troubles and strategy taxes, and they feel like they’re doing all the work. (Of course we look at them and see much the same thing, the grass is always greener over there.)

So now someone at Google “owns” Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone. Reader software might have trouble working with it. They would say “Oh but the new feeds work better with Google Reader, and that’s the one most people use.” And by the way, more and more that’s true these days. But what about other feed suppliers? Do they have to change to work with Google Reader? They will say no, but there may turn out to be practical reasons why they must.

People at Microsoft used to say that Windows isn’t ready to ship until Lotus doesn’t run. That’s not a typo. You’d think it would be the other way around, that a popular operating system would never hold the users of a popular spreadsheet hostage. But it could happen when they have their own spreadsheet and want you to switch. Or if they want everyone to put ads in their feeds. Who would miss a few blogs here and there, don’t we all use Blogger anyway (that’s one area where they haven’t taken over, btw, thankfully).

I would have been concerned no matter who bought Feedburner, had it been Microsoft or Yahoo, or Fox or even Cisco, or if they hadn’t sold out at all. Little companies can sometimes do desperate things when new management comes in.

These technologies work best when there’s lots of competition and lots of choice, and when users are alert and don’t trust companies that don’t deserve their trust. But I can’t say I’ve ever seen that happen for any sustained period, but I still have hope it could happen someday.