Scripting News for 8/31/07

Twitter losing posts 

Flickr: “Our long national nightmare is over.”

Twitter Blocks is the kind of thing that demos well at conferences. Not too useful in real life.

John Furrier has the transcript of a Calacanis podcast chutzpah-fest at RWW. He’s a blood-thirsty samurai, so he says. “I always look at entrepreneurs as samurai. It’s a lonely pursuit at times and basically your life is to fight. And you get done with one fight. You clean the blood off your sword. You put it away. You walk 10 miles to another village. And then you got to clean up that village. A couple of people got to lose their arms. And then you clean the blood off your sword. You have a cup of tea and some rice. And then you walk to the next village.” Really, and I thought he was the sensitive type who sulks in depression for days because he was interrupted.

Economist on who’s afraid of Google.

another senior bush staffer leaves. something terrible must be coming??

dan mactough *convincingly* argues that “expanded” does not belong in opml 2.0.

apple to sell ringtones. excuse me while i yawwwwn.

sugarattack says twitter is losing posts. i noticed that too. imho they ought to use some of the $5 million to make it reliable.

I’m going to cross-post my tweets here until i notice that it’s stopped losing them.

noticed that some MSM podcasts are not bothering with the length att on enclosures. not happy about this.

Proposal for ‘expanded’ attribute in OPML 2.0. Important for people developing in-browser apps that use OPML.

Dan MacTough offers a compelling argument for not including “expanded” in the core spec. (I fixed the typos, and reworded the last two sentences per another suggestion, here.)

Michael Markman on the “perfect storm” around Scoble this week.

Nathan Rein on computer-free micropodcasting. Good idea.

TechCrunch on new features for Twitter today.

Scripting News for 8/29/07

Remember the Social Camera? It exists! 

In June, on a trip to Italy, I wanted a copy of a picture a stranger was taking. “What if his camera, as it was taking the picture, also broadcast the bits to every other camera in range. My camera, sitting in my napsack would detect a picture being broadcast, and would capture it. (Or my cell phone, or iPod.)”

In tomorrow’s NY TImes, David Pogue reviews the Fujifilm Z10fd. “It’s one of several current Fujifilm cameras with an inconspicuous infrared lens on the side. You can hold the cameras up to eight inches apart, lenses facing. Then, with three button presses, you can beam a full-resolution photo from one into the other. Thanks to a new, high-speed infrared standard called IRSimple — the first serious update to infrared beaming technology since the old PalmPilot days — the transfer takes only three seconds.”

Help send Uncov to TechCrunch 20 

I just gave $100 to help send the kids at Uncov to the TechCrunch 20 conference later this month.

They still need more than $2000 to pay for their ticket.

Working with reporters 

More and more reporters are accepting that a blog can be a good source of quotes. For example, today there’s an interesting piece in Salon, explaining why Blockbuster is gaining on Netflix. It showed up in my referrer log, so I was pretty sure I was quoted.

I got the closing quote in the story, and it’s a good one, an observation I’m proud of. I’m also happy with the way it was said. It was transcribed perfectly, because copy/paste is error-free, where a reporter grabbing soundbites in a phone interview is likely to make mistakes.

Here’s the quote. “It may not be obvious, but Netflix is a social network, and the more the networks open and let the user’s data be portable, the more power it gives developers to do interesting things with the data,” Winer wrote. “Netflix has always had a great attitude about customers. It would make sense for them to be the first to trust us with our own data.”

I stopped doing interviews about a year ago. As a result, I haven’t gotten quoted as often as I used to, but I’d prefer to not be quoted than to be quoted saying something stupid, dishonest or wrong. The reporter’s filters really get in the way. Their assumption that everyone they interview is selling something, or lying to them, or hiding the truth really screws up the process.

Also, I like the quote beacuse it shows that interesting stuff happened at Gnomedex that wasn’t about you-know-who.

PS: Mike at Hacking Netflix was misquoted in Salon after a phone interview. It was a big misquote (he said he waited for Netflix for 3 months, they quoted him as saying he waited for Blockbuster). And how ironic that Mike misquoted me, saying that I do interviews only email. I didn’t say that and I never do interviews by email.

We fact check your ass 

I don’t know what Scoble is up to, but he’s my friend, not just the business kind of friend. So it’s my job to help him get back on track, or find out why I’m wrong, so I can get back on track.

The title of this piece “We fact check your ass” was a synthesis from the early days of blogging. There are a few key ideas about blogging in that short phrase.

1. There are many of us.

2. We care about the truth.

3. We use colorful language.

So this leads to a bunch of good blogger behavior, stuff Scoble knows about, stuff Scoble has evangelized. A person who puts his ideas out there takes the risk of putting out incorrect ideas, but that’s not a problem if there are lots of people fact checking his or her ass.

So here’s what you should do when you say something that’s incorrect. As soon as you realize it, correct it. Maybe offer an explanation, but that seems optional. But first and foremost, fix the bug.

Everyone is telling him this, but he’s not getting the message. Simply say “I made a mistake” and every piece from this point on won’t have to guess what happened.

PS: TwitterGram explaining this in my own voice.

PPS: Wired piece posted late yesterday.

Scripting News for 8/28/07

Changes to the OPML 2.0 spec 

Here’s a list of the changes I made in the last couple of days to the draft OPML 2.0 spc. The changes were in response to comments here in July 2007. Included are notes on the specific suggestions, including ones I didn’t understand or decided not to implement.

I provided in response to a request from Don Hopkins, a rigorous definition of flatdown. Actual C source code is provided. I also defined the other outline processing directions — up, down, left, right, flatup and nodirection, even though Don didn’t request those (and they’re not mentioned in the spec).

I uploaded a copy of the C source code of the OPML Editor in a form that will be better indexed by search engines, so that future queries about the internal workings of outliners can be addressed by searching the source. It’s licensed under the GPL, and build instructions using XCode are provided (as are build files for a variety of popular development environments).

I don’t generally support this technology, I wrote much of the code but it was a very long time ago, and my memory isn’t so good anymore. But surprisingly, a lot of it came back.

Don Park wants to extend OPML using a wiki. Not sure I understand how this works, but he says it doesn’t involve changing the spec (thanks!) so it’s no problem for me. I’ll watch and see how it develops.

PS: Possibly the coolest thing made possible by today’s changes is the ability to embed OPML 2.0 data in RSS 2.0 feeds.

OPML 2.0 spec, day 2 

Another day with more work on the OPML 2.0 spec.

Yesterday I provided some examples of OPML files that use the category attribute.

A reminder to people working on OPML apps, I have a beta of a validator that tests against the 2.0 spec.

Here’s an example call, the validator being used to check the current OPML file for Scripting News.

Also I’ve seen some comments recently that say that the spec isn’t very good. If you have concerns about the spec, please let me know what they are, now, while errors and omissions can be fixed. Thanks.

RSS 2.0 with OPML 2.0 

Here’s an RSS 2.0 feed with an item that contains several outlines, basically the show notes for a podcast.

http://tinyurl.com/2jehce

You might have to View Source to see what’s going on.

It’s like chocolate and peanut butter. Both flavors are tasty, but when you put them together, it’s even yummier!

Scripting News for 8/27/07

Work on the OPML 2.0 spec 

I spent this morning reviewing the suggestions that came in last month for the OPML 2.0 spec, and doing some research for the ones I am going to attempt.

One of the questions came from Randy Morin, who wants to see examples of the category attribute. I did a little digging in the archive of this blog from late 2003 when I was working on a tool I called Channel Z, that was all about routing stuff from outlines to various buckets that would accumulate content over time.

Here’s an example of an OPML file from December 2003, when I was actively exploring this stuff..

And while the dynamic site that was “aggregating” all this categorized content is long gone, archive.org is doing a good job of preserving it. Here’s the RSS category, one that I posted to a lot. You can navigate using the links at the top of the page.

Server closet beta 

Why synching sucks 

I took a picture of my new server closet. I could have used my Nikon, but it’s extra work to get the pic off the camera and somewhere useful. The Nikon pic would have been better, but I’m lazy. The step I’m skipping is synching.

I think synching is a bad idea, but Apple’s mobile technology is built around it. I dislike synching. I want my devices to go straight to the cloud, both ways. My podcast player should have a built-in podcatcher. And my podcast recorder should also be a publisher.

Seems unlikely that Google’s phone will depend on synching. It will be more Dave Winer-compatible than the iPhone is.

But the iPhone is pretty cool when you tether it to Twitter through Flickr. Yeah.

I realized earlier today that I have a pretty good bag of tricks for Twitter and Flickr. I may just package em up and give em away. You’ll have to run your own server if you want to access it over the net.

Google and search 

A few thoughts for Scoble for the morning.

1. Google is not going to replaced as the #1 search engine anytime soon. It’s a simple application of Ries & Trout. There’s a ladder in search, as in all product categories. Google is so firmly installed in the top rung of the search ladder it’s hard to even think who #2 and #3 are. (That is, if Google is Coke, who is Pepsi?)

2. Spam has not had a major impact on the usability of Google. I’m sure they’re investing huge resources in detecting and eliminating spam from their index, it’s such a core issue for them.

3. Search is like a desktop operating system. You can translate a dominant position in search into dominant positions in almost any other product category. There were lots of startups poised to kill Windows in the 80s and 90s. None of them had any impact on Windows, which was a juggernaut, as Google is a juggernaut today.

Now, about would-be competitors.

1. Scoble, if the Mahalo proposition to authors is so attractive, have you signed up? Which pages on the Mahalo site are you maintaining? What’s it like being a Mahalo author?

2. It’s ridiculous to think that TechMeme is spam-resistant where Google is not. Both are algorithmic. While Gabe Rivera is a very smart and hard-working guy, they have plenty of smart people at Google.

3. You might have a case with Facebook. When I’m searching for something and can’t find it on Google, I often ask the readers of my blog for help. Sometimes it’s hard to formulate the query. The people who read my site are smart and like to show off. I think the same thing is happening on Facebook. If you can’t find something, ask your network. That might go.

4. The idea that Facebook is an Internet within the Internet, something Time said today, that probably is a big threat to Google. I think you weakened your story by dragging Mahalo and TechMeme into it. The reason Facebook is interesting is that unlike Google it’s built on identity, it’s built on everyone being identified, and people having one identity (although it’s certainly possible to have more than one, it might be hard to get a lot of people to recognize that identity, people with a lot of “friends” may be more trustworthy than people with very few). Facebook may be on a different ladder than Google is. I’m sure Google is all over this from every possible angle, so we’ll find out shortly.

PS: Rand Fishkin steps through Scoble’s piece.

PPS: The champion of the Internet in the battle against spam is using spam to promote his own product.

Random questions 

Are there any third party headphones for iPhones?

I can’t find the disk that came with the Airport Extreme. Is there a place I can download the disk from?

ComputerWorld on Nytimesriver 

Gartenberg: “Why is nytimesriver.com so much better than mobile.nytimes.com?”

A very nice piece, hope you read it, but he got one fact wrong. I just made the river site so I could read the news on my Blackberry. I didn’t know about the official mobile Times site, because it hadn’t yet been announced. They came out within days of each other, so it’s understandable that the author thinks nytimesriver was a response, but it wasn’t.

Scripting News for 8/24/07

Twitter makes Flickr more useful 

I’ve finally got the bugs worked out of the Flickr-to-Twitter agent (knock wood). I now feel confident as a user that when I post a picture to Flickr it won’t unleash a torrent of old Flickrs on my unsuspecting Twitter followers (up to 1900 now). Because of that, I’m willing to use the feature more often.

So when I go out for a walk, and see a lovely tree with red flowers, I take a picture, route it to Flickr, my iPhone upstreams it, my agent notices it, posts a tweet, and then 80 or 100 of my followers (awful terminology, btw) click the link before I’m home. In real-time, their eyes and minds have taken the walk with me.

This is one of those rare moments, when something works, and now my use of computers reaches a plateau that makes total sense. I call this feeling Living In The Future. It’s the nicest feeling technology can deliver, and it’s one important reason I like playing with these toys.

The other reason it’s a significant futuristic feeling is that to make this work, I needed to use two web services, from two companies. Because they support standard technologies (email and RSS) and have blazed new trails (Twitter’s API) a mere user (me) can bridge the two in a couple of hours as a proof of concept, and fairly debug it in a couple of weeks. In other words something is working on a broader level. These two companies are to be applauded, and encouraged to find more ways to help users make themselves happy.

And look at how the newcomer, Twitter, made the old standby, Flickr, so much more useful. Now I have a way to link a network that I’ve already created into something cool on Flickr. And as a benefit, Flickr has a discussion feature, so it provides an easy way for me to get to know people who are subscribed on Twitter, and of course for them to get to know each other.

All around good show, lots of win-wins, technology working for people.

New: If you want to see the pictures of all Flickr-to-Twitter users, follow this Twitter account.

Easy ‘tinyurl’ for OPML Editor users 

A script for the “custom” menu in the OPML Editor.

Scanned page from AT&T phone bill 

Click the pic to see the bill page.

Scripting News for 8/23/07

my.nytimes.com launches 

First impression: Looks like my.yahoo.com, a descendant of my.netscape.com of the late 90s. The page is divided into modules, each module corresponds to a RSS feed. Within the module the items are presented in the same order as in the feed.

Login here: http://my.nytimes.com/

Screen shot of the home page, uncustomized.

A press release ran at 9:30AM Pacific.

According to this blog post it was open to the public on Tuesday at 9:38PM.

I added Scripting News, but it doesn’t seem to show up.

Of course I’m still looking for a reverse-chronologic list of all new stories as they are published (as they appear in a Times RSS feed).

Is there a mobile version of my.nytimes.com?

What Scripting News looks like in the Times environment.

Their answer to What is RSS? gets the Dave Winer Political Correctness Seal of Approval. Good job. I’m sure they handle all kinds of feeds perfectly well, no need to bother the poor user with technical arcania.

Obvious opportunity to kiss up to influential bloggers missed. Only Battelle’s site is in the list of defaults. Markoff likes Joi Ito. Engadget gets a link, TechCrunch does not. Of course Scripting News is linked in nowhere, but I didn’t expect it would be. (Also, they clearly didn’t seed any bloggers with the beta since it’s been open to the public for about 44 hours at this writing and there’s almost no coverage in the tech blog-o-s’fear. You’d think the Times could do better PR.)

So with the disclaimers out of the way, you may take the following with a grain of salt…

Initial impression: No big deal. They haven’t improved RSS news reading in any obvious way. Looking for the reason to use this service, coming up empty. A couple of generations behind Google Reader.

Salon tried building their own CMS, and learned the hard way that they should have bought one from a software vendor. Would have saved a lot of money and gotten a better CMS. The NY TImes is learning the same lesson with news readers. They clearly spent a lot of money developing my.nytimes.com, but in the end would have done better making a deal with Yahoo, Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes or any of a dozen wannabes who are working on customizable module-oriented viewing of news. If the Times wanted to blaze a new path, they should have done something new that used their unique understanding of news, something the software industry wouldn’t think of or even understand. Such a fresh view is possible, but the Times lacked the courage, ambition, or maybe just the smarts, to try to blaze a new trail. Too bad!

Other reviews: Blodget, Mashable, MacManus.

Don’s Amazing Puzzle 

Please read this sentence.

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-

SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-

IC STUDY COMBINED WITH

THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

Count the F’s.

How many did you find?

Click here to see the answer.

Thanks to Don Brown for forwarding this. It’s a great puzzle!

Raines’ oldfangled new phone 

Click the pic for an explanation.

Gears of the blogger’s fear 

Yesterday I caught up on cable news — hadn’t been paying much attention. I was peripherally aware that there had been a mine disaster in Utah, followed by a cave-in while rescuers were searching for survivors. Some of them were lost too.

The owner of the mine, a fat not very pretty older man, had become a media star, and had said something in the last news cycle that the press had latched onto, and now talking heads were saying nasty shit about him, the kind of stuff they never say about politicians or TV anchors, the stuff they reserve for the powerless, death row inmates, Don Imus.

What he did wasn’t so clear. They said (in an amazed tone) “and now he’s denying he ever said it.” They showed tape of him denying it, but the tape didn’t include what he was denying having said. In other words, here’s a fat, ugly, old man, being defensive. He’s a bad person. I found myself thinking, nahh, he’s probably just an average person, caught in the gears on a slow news day (the other big news was President Bush finally admitting that Iraq is a lot like Vietnam, something he and other neocons would have screamed at if you said it before yesterday).

The thing is, why we need to be paying attention to this in the blogosphere, is that we’re doing the same thing, all the time. We have all the trappings, the cameras, the mikes, the beautiful interviewers. And we make big deals out of little ones, and let crooks off the hook. We haven’t started any real wars yet, but give us time, we’re just getting warmed up. And maybe if we are somewhat aware of this, we can try to offset it with a little bit of humanity. Maybe someone can speak up for the poor schnook who gets caught in the gears of the blogger’s fear.

(Sorry for the pun.)

Solution to Don’s Amazing Puzzle 

There are six F’s in the sentence.

There is no catch.

I found three. I went back and counted and recounted, and I was sure there were just three. So I wrote a script to see what was going on. It said there are six! Mystifying.

Here’s a screen shot of the script.

I first ran it in DaveNet in 1997. It’s usually fun. Only two people I knew back then got it right without any coaching. My uncle and Scott Rosenberg. Scott said his trick was to read the sentence backwards, something he learned as an editor at Salon. My uncle was an engineer at heart and loved puzzles. He just did what the puzzle told him to do, literally. Most people, myself included, don’t. That’s why it’s an amazing puzzle. It teaches us about our ability to see what’s right before our eyes. Don’t feel bad if you got it wrong, you have a lot of company.

Scripting News for 8/22/07

Anatomy of a Flickr photo (its metadata) 

Thanks to great advice yesterday from SN readers, I am now able to loop over all my photos from a script.

Today I wrote a glue script for Flickr.photos.getInfo, which returns a table of structured information about the picture. It’s a fascinating piece of metadata, and something a lot of people should look at, but I don’t imagine too many have, because it’s buried under so layers of code.

So I took a snapshot of the metadata for a picture that I took at BarCamp last weekend. The page is not dynamic, so if notes or tags get added, the snapshot won’t change. More: The data from flickr.photos.getSizes for the same pic.

PS: The table was generated from an age-old Frontier macro that I had a lot of trouble locating.

Where Today’s Links have gone 

More and more I’m posting my daily links on Twitter.

There may be a way to synch up with the website, I’ll think about it, but in the meantime, you may want to join Twitter and subscribe, or subscribe to the feed in a RSS reader.

Critique of Gnomedex, day 2 

Chris Pirillo, the Gnomedex conference host, responds to yesterday’s review.

I just read the comments on Chris’s post, they’re pretty interesting. Of course I also ready Chris’s post. Not sure what to make of it, and maybe I don’t have to draw any conclusions. It’s his conference, he gets to decide where it goes, it’s an expression of his values, what he thinks is important. I never questioned that. But whether I’m part of that will be a function of where he decides to take it, and that’s my choice to make.

I place a very high value on discourse. The idea of sitting in a dark room with 300 other people listening to someone say nothing for 1 hour really bothers me. In my mind I start multiplying, figuring out how much time is being wasted, and how much better it could be used. Think of all the ideas locked up in all those brains. Is this the best we can do?

To me, this year’s Gnomedex was the kind of conference I was talking about in my What is an Unconference piece. I know we can do much better, I’ve seen it done, by the participants in the four BloggerCons. I saw it done at BarCamp last weekend in Palo Alto. I saw it in the hallways at Gnomedex, some of those conversations were so juicy, everyone should have heard them. Many of them were much more interesting than what was being talked about on stage.

BTW, people who weren’t there think Calacanis was the star of GD2007, because in the post-show flamage, he hogged the attention. In reality, he gave a lackluster talk, an obvious ad. Most people zoned out after an attempt to discuss it with him. Only now are we able to begin to have a discussion about the conference itself. His MO is obvious, he picks Internet fights to draw attention to himself.

Scott Rosenberg: “Gnomedex is no more exempt from the laws of public speaking than any other conference: If a keynote speaker can’t be bothered to prepare a cogent talk, the audience has a right to its disgruntlement.”

How things get better 

I’ve said it here many times in many ways, if you make a tech product or service, there will always be problems — bugs, system failures, human errors. The question isn’t whether your product is perfect, it’s how do you respond when it breaks.

The first time I got bad news about a product was when I asked a friend to use the software I was working on. He wasn’t a programmer, he had never used a computer. An educated intelligent person, roughly my age. (When I was young, believe it or not, there were many people who had never used a computer.)

Before he had fully settled in I knew it wasn’t going to work. I was able to play out, in my mind, what was about to happen. The software would say nothing to him, so how could he know what to do. I waited and what I predicted did happen. He looked at me and asked “What do I do now?”

That’s where the conversation between product and user begins. A first step must be evident, then a second and a third. At some point, a choice. Eventually, a “virtuality” reveals itself — a world with its own laws and logic, it’s own sense of how things work, so a user’s guess at how something works actually does. You build trust, one step at a time, knowing all along at some point the house of cards will fall down. (Something like that happened to Skype a few days ago.)

If you want to make a product that people use then you have to pay attention to their experience when they use it. The better you are at understanding, the better your product will become over time. The inverse is true as well. If you deny the value of feedback, or deflect it, your product will never get better.

Scripting News for 8/21/07

Critique of Gnomedex 2007 

If you go to the Gnomedex website, you’ll see it’s positioned as “The blogosphere’s conference,” and with the usual caveat that there are many blogospheres, if you look at the people who came, you’d see that’s correct.

More specifically it’s a blogosphere user’s conference. Tech companies may sponsor the show, but they are largely observers. When the discussion on stage is focused on blogs the people presenting often are users. And that’s the thing I like about Gnomedex. When you put vendors on stage, they have to get their money’s worth, it’s their job. I know because I’ve spoken at many conferences as a vendor. It’s always a struggle, the temptation to sell, balanced against the audience’s right to get value for their money.

Which brings me to another thing that’s fairly unique about Gnomedex. Most of the attendees pay to be there, unlike most tech conferences where almost no one pays. At Gnomedex, the tradition is so strong that even though I’ve spoken at two of the three shows I’ve been to, I’ve always paid for my ticket. It may be be out of personal loyalty to Chris and Ponzi, or knowing that it’s not a big corporation putting on the show, not sure what it is but it never occurs to me to ask for a comp.

This is a good thing, btw — because its made it inappropriate for people to give commercials from the stage and kept the focus firmly on the users’ interests. There are plenty of tech conferences where sponsors take the stage and pitch their products. At least there you’re not paying to listen to an ad. Let there be at least one conference that is about users.

But this year, the program wandered off-topic too much, imho.

Too many of the speeches were about politics, the speakers were intolerant of discussions, and in two cases even questions were not appropriate. Someone has to say something about this, and surprisingly very few people have.

The opening keynote speaker, Robert Steele, was a total disaster, completely inappropriate, insulting to our intelligence, and way off-topic. He rushed through his complex slides, strung together countless buzzphrases into non-sentences, never completed a thought, and made it clear he wasn’t even taking questions, much less disagreement (and how could you disagree with a presentation that never bothers to make a point). The guy looked and sounded like a poor man’s Rush Limbaugh. I thought for a while maybe he was a joke, a parody, a comedian, but you don’t make your opening speaker of a conference you care about a joke.

The presentation on Open Money was equally confusing and insulting, the speaker refused to even define the concept. And in the end, after supposedly explaining a revolutionary system of finance, he had the gall to ask us for the old kind of money that he was theoretically finished with. It was laughable.

There were other examples of speakers who should not have been on stage at Gnomedex, or should have been given 5 to 15 minutes, but couldn’t make effective use of the hour they were given. That the audience was relegated to being only an audience this year only made it worse.

It’s fine to have one off-topic speaker, a retired politician, a Nobel laureate, a sports hero, maybe an astronaut or former president. But not as a keynote, and not so many, and not such flakes. We are worth it. I don’t think Chris gets that. A lot of accomplished people would like to present their ideas to the people who come to Gnomedex.

If Gnomedex is to continue, it must get back on track, it must reflect our interests, the audience’s interests. Chris is a great entertainer, and a warm human being, but his vision of the political and economic future is not something I share, or would find interesting to discuss.

Chris may choose to run a conference about his political views, but I have a choice too, when I go to political conferences, they reflect my interests. I go to Gnomedex to meet other bloggers and discuss what’s happening in the blogosphere. It shouldn’t be hard to program that, we can help, if asked.

If you have comments, please post them here.

Tris Hussey defends Gnomedex, questions my honesty and value as a human. Sad.

On 8/12 I wrote about the things that worked at Gnomedex.

I’ve been talking with Scoble about GD. He approves of this critique.

Question about the Flickr API 

Popping the stack of pending projects, I want to write an app that creates and maintains a backup copy of all the pictures I’ve uploaded to Flickr. This will make Flickr more valuable, it will become the user interface for my photo archiving system.

I’ve been staring at the docs for the Flickr API and can’t find a way to loop over all my pictures. I must be missing something obvious.

I found flickr.photos.getNotInSet, that returns a list of photos that are not part of a set. That will possibly be helpful. Not sure what the format of a “unix timestamp” is.

If anyone has an idea, please post a comment here.

Zach Beane has a clue. Use the search verb, look for nothing. Loop over the pages of results. Sounds good.

Richer namespaces for Twitter? 

As Twitter evolves, maybe the URLs will get longer?

Imagine what might go at:

http://twitter.com/davewiner/gnomedex

All twits that I post while at Gnomedex? If you follow that URL, when Gnomedex is over, the subscription goes away.

Just an idea. There’s a lot of detail that could be added to what now is a very simple namespace.

Embeddable Map 

New feature today, Google maps can be embedded in pages the same way YouTube videos can.

Here’s an example page.

This is going to be very useful for conference websites, restaurants, bowling alleys, Craig’s List ads.

Scripting News for 8/20/07

Podcast: Open identity in 2007 

On Saturday, after reading Brad Fitzpatrick’s piece about Social Graphs, I did a podcast explaining why it’s not likely that existing networks will allow users from other networks to use their services.

Here’s the 1/2 hour podcast.

Dan Farber asked me to summarize, I suppose that’s all right. I don’t do many podcasts these days. I did this one because I want people to listen. These are relatively complex economic and political issues, and simple thinking won’t yield useful answers.

But I will try to summarize anyway.

1. Brad is absolutlely right, many people are tired of entering the same relationship information for lots of different social networks. I am one of those people. Maybe you are too. Maintaining this information is even more problematic, that’s why we tend to use one “current” social network, and leave a trail of moribund networks behind us.

2. The more tired we get, the more demand there will be for a single resource that allows people to establish and maintain these relationships, and use them in a wide variety of different applications.

3. While Facebook, admirably, takes risks with users’ data, the users are a lot more conservative than we techies might like them to be. Wishing it weren’t so won’t change the way they feel.

4. There are enormous economic incentives for companies that run social networks to not let users of other networks access their services. Shareholder value is a function of how many users they have, how they are “monetized” and how hard it is to switch. The harder it is to switch, the more money each user is worth. Any exec that did anything to decrease the number of users they control would probably be fired. So anything that depends on this isn’t very likely to happen, in existing networks.

5. However, a network that, from Day One, allows users of other networks to participate, and allows developers to access user’s data, with the user’s permission, but without permission from the network, may become the www of open identity systems. As much as it is considered politically incorrect in the tech world to say this, don’t bet on OpenID being that network. You would have gotten roasted in 1991 for saying OpenDoc wasn’t the future, but it wasn’t. For the same reasons OpenID isn’t.

Now if you want to understand why all these things are true, give me 1/2 hour of your time, listen to the podcast. Take it for a walk, or take it with you on your commute. If you’re interested in the future of web technology, I think it’ll be worth the time.

Adriana Lukas: Users do not stand still.

More on the Gnomedex mess 

I ran into Tom Conrad of Pandora at BarCampBlock yesterday in Palo Alto and he volunteered that he was at Gnomedex earlier this month, and from his point of view what happened during Jason Calacanis’s presentation wasn’t that big a deal.

I asked him to explain and he told me the story, which he repeats in a blog post this afternoon. I totally appreciate that Tom was willing to speak up. Thanks Tom, I won’t forget it.

Aidan Henry sees it as I did, but I missed his post when it appeared a week ago. “Gnomedex presentations are meant to spur discussions and conversations around trends, standards, principles, ideas, and concepts — not specific companies.”

RIch Skrenta who knows SEO, reviews Mahalo.

Fast Company: “As a kid, he was tossed out of school for fighting and mopped blood off the floor of his father’s bar; his mother, an emergency-room nurse, would stitch up the combatants at a local hospital.”

Video cameras, Day 2 

Elaborating on yesterday’s post about video cameras…

I think it’s silly for a group of people in a garage in Palo Alto to think somehow there’s something significant about them standing in the garage on a Sunday morning listening to a talk about the history of the place. It’s a nice place to be if everyone is acting like a normal person, not like a TV star. But with three video cameras running, one a big professional rig (it seems to me) people are exaggerating what they say. As I talk, I wonder which soundbite is going to appear on the blog everyone points to tomorrow. My mind moves away from the garage, out into the future, and I want to get the fuck out of there as fast as I can.

I’m at a cocktail party, but I’ve been drinking water because I’m being taped in every conversation I have. One guy is even live-broadcasting to god knows who. I feel like a presidential candidate. What if I say something which, taken out of context, sounds like I have a belief that’s politically incorrect. Think that’s crazy? In 2003 if you said the war in Iraq wasn’t patriotic, and that Bush wasn’t a visionary, people looked at you like you’re strange. I don’t have to imagine living in a totalitarian state, we’ve been there, maybe we’re still there. But I really would like to be at a party with friends and have a chance to relax and enjoy myself without having to worry whether what I say there makes sense when viewed in a completely different context by people who weren’t there.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that with so much seriousness, having to be so careful so much of the time, maybe people can understand why in the future we may think the greatest luxury is to be so far away from video cameras that our words won’t be recorded, so we can just be dorky shlubby nobodies whose words would seem foolish if the wrong people were listening, even if just for a short while.

Godwin’s Law 

I got a chance on Twitter the other day that I don’t think Godwin’s Law is funny, esp in the times we live in. Its assumption is that things never get so serious as to justify a comparison to the most famous fascist regime in recent history.

But Godwin’s Law is cruel because there are still survivors of the Nazis alive today, and it cuts off their using the Internet to teach. And their children are very much still alive. You may want us to forget, but Jews will never forget what happened there.

Scripting News for 8/19/07

Pictures from BarCamp in Palo Alto 

In reverse-chronologic order…

Silona, hippie freak.

Newton Chan, professor, Foothill College.

Don Park, telling it like it is.

The house the HP garage is behind.

The famous HP garage.

Heather Harde, TechCrunch CEO.

Gaba Rivera, Techmeme.

Brian Salis.

Phil Wolff, skypejournal.com.

Meng Wong, VCs Suck.

Scott Beale & Lane Hartwell, schmoozing.

Chris Heuer.

Sarah Meyers, video journalist.

The beautiful Lane Hartwell.

Lane, objectified.

Brian Caldwell => Valleywag.

Andrew Baron of Rocketboom.

Dave Jacobs.

Ross Mayfield, SocialText.

Tara Hunt (Miss Rogue).

Blue Chalk Cafe.

Joyce Kim & Niall Kennedy.

Factory Joe on Open ID.

Why I don’t like all the video cameras 

In the past the ability to publish or be broadcast was prohibitively expensive, that’s why the publications and broadcasts of the past had to have business models, and that’s why those of us from the previous century always want to know how some blog or vlog or podcast is going to make money. We were trained to think that they had to, because they were so expensive to produce.

But today it’s nothing like that, and the everyday papparazzi are proving it. The video cameras are so cheap and so are Internet connections, we’re heading to a place where even the most casual of encounters may be captured and broadcast.

I want to live a more ordinary life, not one where I feel like a celebrity. People already expect too much of me, I never seem to live up to their expectations, that’s because they think I’m running for office or want them to buy my record or watch my TV show. I want none of that. Mostly I want to just be a normal schlub, sitting in the audience, maybe contributing something once in a while, and publishing my art on the Internet, for my own pleasure, and that of anyone who happens to be looking in.

Why mention this now? Why should you care? Because soon you’re going to have to decide whether you’re a celebrity or a schlub. And you may not have a choice but be a celebrity.

My request: If you point a camera at someone, ask for permission before you start recording, and if they say no, don’t turn it on, smile and say “No problem.”