Scripting News for 8/17/07

Journalism is the new Catholic Church 

LA Times editorial on Google’s new feature that allows people mentioned in a news article to respond. Google’s new program is a very rough approximation of what truly open media provides, something the newspapers themselves should be doing.

It seems journalism is the new Catholic Church. Without the savior.

Imho, the pros are right to be worried. It’s the last quarter of a game they’re losing, and the opposing team is deep in their territory. They need to get the ball back and then connect on a few Hail Marys to even be in the game. Yet all they do is weakly protest that “this isn’t journalism.” We need information. To say it’s not journalism now is like a priest saying it’s not Catholic to a bunch of agnostics. You’re answering a question no one is asking.

A news story should summarize points of view that are available in full on the newspaper website. The newspapers should try to host the blogs of the people they quote. Instead they cling to the fiction that they have the exclusive wisdom to decide which soundbites and points of view are relevant, and the reader needs nothing more than what they provide. This is wrong, the world is too complicated, and the resources of news organizations are shrinking and our appetite for information is exploding (and the tools for creating and using news are getting better all the time).

If a reader wants to find out what’s really going on they have to search thoroughly for many views of the same event and try to piece it together. The first news organization that embraces that view wins. Google is taking first steps to be that news organization.

Yesterday at Mozilla, I urged them to get aggressive with powerful RSS support in the browser. Like the news organizations, if they wait much longer, Google Reader will have too much of a lead to catch. It may already be too late. In their case, much of their funding comes from Google, and if Google is smart (they are) somewhere on their vast campus, which surrounds the tiny Mozilla building, in a corner of Google-land in Mountain View, they are working on their own fork of the Mozilla codebase, one designed perfectly to run their apps (mail, spreadsheet, calendar, maps, search, widgets, wp, etc). Mozilla is in the same place as the rest of us, about to be swamped by the Google juggernaut.

I’m beginning to think it’s already too late. Too many people rooted too deeply in the past to take a chance on the obvious future. Oh well. Happy Friday!

Today’s links 

Chris Double blogs on my visit to Mozilla yesterday.

Kevin O’Keefe: “Gnomedex is about open discussion.”

Scoble interviews Marc Canter. “Life is good.”

TorrentFreak reports that Comcast is throttling BitTorrent.

Tom Morris: “I’m getting fed up of the blogosphere taking every critical remark as an ‘attack’ on a person.” Amen.

A bootstrap begins with a lot of typing 

I’m starting to play with ideas for an exchange format for movie ratings. To stimulate this thinking I needed a good list to work with, and luckily Netflix, even though they don’t provide a way to export your ratings, does provide a way to view them. A screen shot for non-members.

So I drank a cup of coffee, turned on some music, and in about an hour copied all the reviews (over 300) into a text file, organized by the number of stars I gave a movie. It was actually an interesting exercise, I changed the ratings of some movies, and thought of movies I hadn’t rated that should be included.

I think a good user interface for a new collaborative rating service would be something like Hot Or Not, where you get the name of a movie, a picture of some kind, a one paragraph synopsis, and a chance to rate it with 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1 stars. Of course it would link to a page where you could rent the movie, read reviews, or write one yourself.

One thing this project is going to need, clearly, is a web service that takes the name of a movie and a year, and returns a globally unique identifier, preferrably the address of a web page with information about the movie.

Fed cuts interest rate 

AP: “The Federal Reserve approved a half-percentage point cut in its discount rate on loans to banks Friday, a dramatic move designed to stabilize financial markets roiled by a widening credit crisis.”

This was a surprise. Now we find out if the market comes out of its downward spiral.

Friendship and blogging 

This topic has to be addressed from time to time, just to keep my head above water and make sure everyone, friends and others, know where my lines are.

In the mess with Jason Calacanis, the subject of friendship kept coming up on his blog, and here as well. It seems that Jason and others expect something special because we’re friends. But there are several kinds of friends, it seems,. At times I wanted there to be just one kind, but eventually I threw in the towel and started, along with eveyrone else, using the term several ways.

First, there are real life friends. People who you commit to being intimate with, for a lifetime. Sure, they come and go, that’s unavoidable — people move away, people die — but the intention is that we’re going to share big chunks of our lives with each other, and trust each other to tell our whole truth. These are people who come visit you in the hospital when you look and feel like shit, they help you feel a little better. And vice versa. They’re people you apologize to openly and fully when you fuck up. They’re people you trust to see your darkness and lightness, knowing they won’t abuse the trust. You can’t have a lot of people who are friends in this way, if you dilute it too much, it stops being meaningful.

Now it’s possible to have simple affection without the trust, and that can be called friendship too. People you see once in a while, or go 20 years without seeing, who you truly like, and are happy to see, who shared something good at some point, and you hope to share something good again.

And then there are the business relationships that are called friends. Just now on CNBC, I heard a banker say that another banker was a friend. I imagine that means they have dinner from time to time, speak well of each other, maybe exchange favors. These are also friends. It’s in that sense that Calacanis and I were friends, along with many other people.

Now usually, the saying goes, it’s bad to mix friendship with business. Usually it doesn’t work, the thing that makes someone a friend doesn’t turn out to be a good basis for business, and in the end you often lose a friend, and a business. But in the latter case that’s all there is, business. In my mind it’s not friendship, as much as an agreement to work together in some fashion. But let’s not argue about it, if everyone else calls it friendship, I will to. If the Eskimos have 18,000 words for snow, what’s the harm if we have 18,000 definitions of friendship.

Now — the big question — which I have an answer to, btw, is do any of these kinds of friendships create a an obligation that you won’t be openly critical of the person’s work? I say no, because then you have to question your friend’s motives, and who wants a friendship to be like that. Is this person choosing to be your friend so that you won’t be able to criticize their product or employer? So that you’ll only say positive things about their work? So, for example, I can be critical of Feedster, and Betsy Devine will still be my friend (she worked for them at one time).

Yet, I feel compelled, when writing about a friend’s efforts, to not only disclose the friendship (that’s reasonable of course, it protects the reader) but also say that I really like the person I’m writing about, as if I would use this space to hurt them. I feel like a real chump when I do that, but given the atmosphere of the blogging world, I often feel compelled to do it anyway, so as not to start gossip that “Dave doesn’t like so and so anymore.” A real friend, who knew me, would know that I would never intentionally use Scripting News that way, but there are readers who don’t know and some who pretend they don’t know.

A sure way to become a former friend, is to say that I have an obligation to express my opinion privately. That was one of the most offensive things Calacanis said. Had his demo been private, and under non-disclosure, if it would have been inappropriate for me to write something positive about the product, then I could understand his concern. But I have written about his product before, publicly. I didn’t plan to write anything about more about it, but there I was at a conference, and he was explaining it, and I had a very strong reaction. When I’m exposed to something that’s wrong, you can count on me to say so. Without that, this blog is nothing. And I don’t sell anyone the right to tell me what I can and can’t write about. And friendship is the worst excuse possible to say why I shouldn’t write something. This supposed friend knows nothing about me if they think that will do anything other than provoke a very strong response of independence.

I mention this not only in an effort to close the book on Calacanis (who btw could do this much more quickly by simply retracting the things he said that crossed the line), but also to lay the groundwork for me to write about Gnomedex. See, Ponzi and Chris are friends, and I have an idea that what I think of the conference could hurt their feelings. And as a friend, more of the personal kind than the business kind, I don’t want to hurt their feelings. But, on the other hand, it is an industry event that I paid to go to. I don’t go to very many conferences, and as it stands I will not go to Gnomedex next year. I’m sure some people will applaud this, and that’s fine. Enjoy. But I have more to say about this, and I plan to. I just wanted to talk about friendship first.

Scripting News for 8/16/07

Today’s links 

Wired: See Who’s Editing Wikipedia.

Dave Sifry is out at Technorati, John Furrier is out at PodTech. Wonder who’s next?

Anne Zelenka suggests using Twitter for “people-powered search.” I tend to use Scripting News.

Ted at Uncov explains why he doesn’t have “the sunshine-up-your-ass San Francisco world view.”

Great free wifi in the lobby of the Stanford Park Hotel in Menlo Park.

A sacred line 

Today I got a brief note from Jason Calacanis requesting that I not mention him on my weblog. This requires a public response. The answer is no. Jason, you just crossed a sacred line. I decide what belongs on this blog. If I worked for you I would resign, just like the editor of PC World did, when they tried to control his editorial. Geez, I hope you don’t do this to the editorial people who work for Mahalo.

Andrew Badera has a fair response to undue pressure.

The PC World editor resigned over an article entitled Ten Things We Hate About Apple. Management relented and the article ran.

At Mozilla today 

I’m at Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View today, giving at talk in a few minutes, about RSS and blogging and Firefox. As usual, I’m going to talk for 10 or 15 minutes, just tell a story or two, and then ask for a discussion.

Today’s talk came about from a random meeting with Brendan Eich at a party early this year. I had heard him once on a Gillmor Gang podcast, and found our philosophies more or less match.

Given recent experience I’m going to try not to be too critical, but I’ve been encouraged to be honest and direct. Yes, imho they have made some mistakes with RSS, but there are some really big opportunities here too.

BTW, if you’re in the room at Mozilla, reading this, please cough three times so I know you’re here.

The topics of discussion at Mozilla 

1.	Integrating an aggregator.
2.	Integrating a podcatcher.

I am in favor of both #1 and #2.

I’ll explain more about this tomorrow.

There are two sides to every story 

A few years ago, along with a bunch of other bloggers, I was invited to a Microsoft event to discuss their search engine. Having been to many such Microsoft events in the past, I thought the format was they would talk, and then we would talk, and then they would talk and we’d talk and so on. So when it came our turn, I gave them a lot of ideas, I thought that most of them were pretty good, but even if they weren’t, my intention was to help them.

They were offended by this. I didn’t realize it during the event, but found out afterwards, in kind of a roundabout way, I overheard a conversation between two Microsoft people saying some not very nice personal things about me. They knew I was in earshot, so I assumed they wanted me to hear this. I thought it was pretty cowardly, but it hurt anyway (I think that was the point, btw). It was a two-day event, so the second day I didn’t say anything. I hoped that would make up for all the talking I did the day before. Apparently it did not, because they are still repeating the story of how I hurt their feelings a few years ago.

If I had it to do over again, knowing how they were going to use this against me, I wouldn’t have even gone. They didn’t pay me to give them my ideas. Such consulting would usually bill for $10K or even $25K a day. I didn’t ask for any money. That was a mistake too, because I’ve learned big companies don’t value things they get for nothing.

However, my experience with Microsoft up till then was that it was a very expressive culture. I had been in meetings with execs at the company where they talk, very loudly and personally, for very long periods of time. Often at each other. Often angrily. The culture is led by two fairly angry people, Bill and Steve. I never minded this, btw. Being from NY, I like it when people are direct and tell you what they think. Much better than the west coast way, where you often have to guess.

Going into the search engine meeting, I didn’t know the Microsoft culture had changed, that they had become so sensitive.

For me the events are long-gone, but now, whenever someone has a complaint about me, whether justified or not, someone from that group, maybe someone who isn’t even at Microsoft anymore, sends a back-channel message, and all of a sudden it’s a big issue again. It happened this week with the Calacanis incident, another “event” that’s probably going to haunt me for the rest of my days. (Thanks Jason.)

Anyway, the headline is my point. Really, in this case, they should have said something up front. “Our culture has changed, and now we would appreciate it if you sit in the room and say nothing and listen to our talk. When it’s done, you may ask questions, or tell us how much you like it. Then we will feed you and you may go home.” Had they said that, I would have just left, because that’s not what I do.

Now, since this is my blog, and the rules are that I say what I think here, let me say that there’s something really obnoxious about a culture that penalizes people for trying to help them.

Scripting News for 8/15/07

Reading lists for Twitter? 

I’d like to be able to subscribe to bundles of users.

Use-case #1. Suppose I’m going to a conference, like Gnomedex last week. For the duration of the conference I’d like to be subscribed to every person at the conference. This would form the complete back-channel. I would hear what everyone was saying during the conference. But maybe that would be too much when I got home, if so, I could just wholesale unsub from the lot.

Use-case #2. Say I’d like to see what it’s like to be someone famous for a day or two. So I would say “Subscribe me to all of Steve Jobs’s friends.” Then I’d see what Larry Ellison, Al Gore and Bill Campbell were doing. Then when I wanted to see the world through someone else’s eyes, I’d unsub from Steve’s friends and sub to all their friends.

Use-case #3. Think of “mutual funds” of people, reading lists managed by experts. So I could subscribe to a list of Macintosh experts as we’re approaching an Apple product announcement. Or people in Peru after the earthquake there. Or a U.S. news list that would automatically recalc according to the judgement of an expert when the news shifted from topic to topic. As we approach the New Hampshire primary, news of that state would be heavily represented. After that’s over, we’d move to news of South Carolina.

Obviously this feature would work for any news-oriented social network. Originally I proposed it for RSS, they were called “reading lists,” but I couldn’t get the community of reader developers to implement the feature. I did implement reading lists for the NewsRiver aggregator that’s built into the OPML Editor. Maybe the time is right, in the developing social networks, which are very much like the world of RSS.

I’d like to experiment with this. I wonder if it’s possible to add it using the Twitter API. I’ll have to think about it.

Any thoughts are welcome. Post a comment here.

Finding your own statuses in Facebook 

Bizzle found a Facebook “feed of my own status updates.”

Here’s my own feed, and a screen shot of where it’s located. As you can see I haven’t been using Facebook very much.

What becomes possible with this? Well, you could write a bridge app that allows you to use Facebook to enter status messages to Twitter, for example. This is the opposite direction from the one Fred Wilson wants.

Jeff Sandquist: How to publish your Facebook status to Twitter.

Atom is not better and users don’t care 

I found myself writing an email to friends at Google about Google’s religion about Atom (these guys came to Google from different companies, relatively recently). At the end I realized that I had written a blog post, so here it is.

Everything would be okay if they didn’t push it so hard.

Remember that users don’t care.

Edit all docs and specs accordingly. Everywhere it says “Atom is better” remember “Users don’t care.”

Facebook is doing the same thing, and I’m pulling back from endorsing them until they take the religion out of their docs. I won’t help propogate the myth that one format is better than the other. Users don’t care.

If you must answer the question “What’s the difference between RSS and Atom?” just say they’re different flavors of the same thing. Even better would be to find a way to avoid raising the question at all. Test your reader against all formats with significant installed bases, and do what you can to keep the number of formats to a minimum. That’s not only my advice, it’s also Jon Postel’s.

Further: If people want to debate the merits of one flavor over another, fine, but the discussion should be banished from all places that are visible to users (users don’t care). I like chocolate, and someone else likes pistachio or butter pecan. But all are cold and sweet and desserts. The argument should stop when it gets to the qualities of the people who like one flavor over another. “People who like cheddar cheese are inherently better than people who like gouda.” Now that’s obviously silly. But when you look at some of the discsussions, esp things people say about me, that’s what it comes down to. Dave is a bad person because his feed is RSS 2.0. That’s when people tune out any discussions of progress as “syndication wars.” That’s how we get stuck.

Postel’s Law 

The Robustness Principle, also known as Postel’s Law, appears in the spec for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), edited by Jon Postel in 1981.

There’s a Wikipedia page on Postel’s Law.

Restarting the draft 

Two events happened in Washington politics in the last couple of days that puzzled me: 1. Karl Rove, on his way out at the White House, said Hillary Clinton is a “a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate;” and 2. Douglas Lute, our “war czar,” said the option of restarting the draft was “on the table.”

I figured out why the czar said what he said — it’s the military, sending a message to the President, in clear terms. We can’t keep running the way we’re running, and if you won’t do something about the shortfall of soldiers for the war in Iraq (really an occupation, of course) we’ll take the issue to the people, in a way you’ll feel. No doubt, even talk of a return to the draft changes things. I think it’s a good idea to talk about it, and quite possibly a good idea to reinstate it. That would get us out of this mode of life-as-usual. We are losing in Iraq, pointlessly, and eventually we’re going to have to leave. Yes, cut and run is looking like the right way to go, esp when the cut part could be explained as “cut our losses.”

Why Rove said what he said, though, is a total puzzle. I am uninspired by Clinton as a candidate, I think a vote for her is a vote for another four or eight years of not dealing with our problems, and she’s the most Republican of the Democrats running. But Rove is no idiot, not about things like this, so he must figure that it would serve the Republicans if Hillary was the candidate, because that kind of hype really helps her. I found myself, inside, rallying behind Clinton because I so despise Rove. No kidding. So there must be some reason Rove thinks she’d be easier to beat than Edwards or Obama. Or maybe he’s figured we all understand how his (twisted) mind works, and he’s telling us this so we won’t rally behind Clinton because secretly he knows she’s the strongest Dem, and would much rather run against… Oh fuck it, this is pointless.

Facebook’s first steps 

While I applaud their first steps at exposing previously trapped data, they still have a long way to go. Fred Wilson, a user of and investor in Twitter, says he’ll feel Facebook is open when he can use Twitter to update his Facebook status. It may require an agent to bridge the two systems, there doesn’t seem to be much hope that they’ll support identical APIs (though it’s not too late for that), and at this time Facebook doesn’t provide enough in the way of APIs to do this (please correct if wrong) while Twitter does.

There would be hope for a lot more compatibility if engineers weren’t such jealous folk, and weren’t so inclined to reinvent what already has been invented. The guys at Twitter do it, as do the guys at Facebook. It’s seems to happen where ever there is expertise, a tendency to lock up power in the hands of the experts and not share it with competitors and smart users. I saw this happen in the medical industry, recently, where a friend who is not a doctor had an absolutely brilliant idea that would save lives, but he couldn’t sell it to the medical profession. Why? It would create more work for them. These are the people we trust with our lives. And having been in the software business for over 30 years, I’m sad to report, we’re no better.

So maybe Facebook is filled with visionaries who want to build on the work of others, but I’m pretty sure there are also people there who would be happy to hold things back so they don’t have to work so hard. But don’t worry, they have them at Google, and Yahoo, and Microsoft and Apple too. It’s just the way things are done in the tech world. Ths isn’t going to make me a lot of friends (something my friend Fred Wilson says he blogs for) but that’s not why I blog.

Scripting News for 8/14/07

Facebook *is* opening up 

And it’s starting to happen right now, today in fact.

I reported earlier on a new feed in Facebook, allowing notifications to be visible outside the wall.

It’s getting reallll interesting — I’ve found some more RSS feeds in Facebook’s UI.

1. Friends Status Updates. Look for the subscription link in the lower right corner.

2. Friends Posted Items. Again, look in the lower right corner.

These are new, and I’m pretty sure more are coming.

Of course the big question is How Far Will They Go?

Do you all think that the apps we’re building on top of Twitter will be able to run on the Facebook platform? I think there are a lot more users “over there.” (I’m still very much centered in TwitterLand as I’m sure is obvious to anyone who’s rooted in FaceBook.)

TechCrunch coverage of this story.

Jeff Sandquist: “I suspect this will allow me to send my Facebook status updates to Twitter.”

Paul Thompson: “The ‘friends status updates’ feed has been available for a while now.”

Geekspeaker says RSS may be the new HTML.

Many people report (see above, and on TechCrunch) the Facebook feeds are not new. Maybe so, but… If they’re not new, their significance hasn’t penetrated the thinking in the tech community. According to convention wisdom, Facebook was, until today, considered a sandbox, a walled garden, a silo. Now that we know that the feeds are being implemented (many are still needed to make it really open) it’s possible for Facebook-generated data to percolate into other Internet applications. As Fred Wilson has wisely pointed out, there is no winner-take-all outcome possible, and closed sandboxes just encourage route-arounds, so what Facebook is doing is smart and necessary. (Wilson is a backer of Twitter.)

If Jason were a mensch 

He’d apologize as follows.

“Dave, I’m sorry I made it sound like you were the only person at Gnomedex talking back during my speech. In fact, the chatroom and Twitter were erupting, and people were talking in the audience, and you weren’t even the first person to speak out loud. I’m also sorry for all the personal things I said about you, I have no insight into your personality, I’m still trying to figure myself out. At age 37, I haven’t even had my mid-life crisis yet!”

And he’d also apologize to Nick Denton.

“Nick, I’m sorry I called you a ‘fucking liar’ on stage at Gnomedex. I think sometimes you stretch the truth, and maybe you actually lie, but I lie too, and I wouldn’t like it if someone talked about me that way.”

And to Google.

“To our friends at Google I’d like to apologize for saying that your search engine is filled with spam.”

And finally, he’d apologize to the people at Gnomedex.

“To the people who came to Gnomedex, I realize that you took time off from work, and paid to attend the conference, and in many cases paid for your travel and hotel, in some cases thousands of dollars, only to hear an advertisement. That might have been okay if my talk weren’t about the evils of advertising and how it was destroying the Internet we know and love. Boy was that ironic and I am really sorry for wasting so much of your time and money.”

Bonus 1: Wikipedia page and Google search for mensch.

Bonus 2: Wired report on the Calacanis speech, just after it happened.

Bonus 3: Dave W as viewed by Tim O and Jason C.

Has Facebook opened up? 

Josh Bancroft: “Is the RSS feed for ‘Your Notifications’ in Facebook a new feature?”

We’re going to check it out Josh.

Here’s my notifications feed. I was able to subscribe to it in my aggregator, no problems.

It’s definitely getting my notifications out of the Facebook silo (assuming you can see it).

Here’s where you can find the feed.

Tim O’Reilly’s reasons 

Wired quoted Calacanis quoting TIm O’Reilly saying some pretty nasty stuff, explaining why I’m not invited to his conferences. He wrote this piece in 2000.

The problem with the O’Reilly piece is that is isn’t true.

After he wrote the piece I was invited to speak at E-Tech and OSCON and to participate in an Open Source Summit. I accepted all the invites. Nothing disruptive happened at any of them. You can ask the people who were there. I think Doc Searls was at all of the events.

And Wired might want to check these things out before repeating such damaging attacks as fact. I think that’s covered in Journalism 101.

These mob attacks are fun for you guys, but they’re not fun for the people who get ganged up on. Some people take advantage of that, and use it to build flow and page rank, and distract people from issues they don’t want to talk about. Publications like Wired should be counted on to slow things down and check the facts. If we have more of that, we’ll have less of the bad stuff.

Today’s links 

Jay Rosen on Karl Rove and Washington politics.

Xeni Jardin reviews (new!) Virgin America airline.

Scripting News for 8/13/07

Fantastic Holiday Inn commercial 

I saw this commercial in March, and have been looking for it ever since. A group of Dilberts is hanging out in a Holiday Inn, talking about a blogger they work with.

Back in Berkeley 

I love driving my new car. It’s fast. Feels strange to be home, to not be moving. But it’s a nice house to come home to!

First thing on my to-do list, figure out why the next-prev links broke as soon as I left home. (Update: They’re fixed. Trivial bug.)

Sylvia reviews Gnomedex and the main Seattle library.

Apologies to Calacanis 

I gave it some thought, and I decided to apologize to Jason for interrupting his speech at Gnomedex. I wish I hadn’t done it. It’ll never happen again. That’s a promise.

That said, I have a lot of trouble believing that a street fighter from Brooklyn (I’m from Queens) is still having an emotional time with this. But some people are very sensitive, and I’m willing to believe, long enough to apologize, that Jason is still feeling emotional about being interrupted on Friday.

However it could also be a tactic, an attempt to silence a critic. I’ve seen that done before too. Recently I objected to a piece written by Richard MacManus on ReadWriteWeb, where he characterized my posts about RSS as warfare. I asked him if there was a way I could write about RSS without it being warfare. Richard is a good guy, who I’ve met many times, and I know him to be thoughtful, and he had a thoughtful response. The answer is that I should be able to write about RSS without it being characterized as warfare.

If the blogosphere is about anything, it’s about discourse. So if someone has an opinion about a format or a product, not only are they allowed to express their opinion, it’s actually encouraged. It seems this is part of our shared values. So we should be very careful about characterizing mere writing as somehow harmful, or war-like. Imagine if President Bush had written a series of blog posts about Saddam Hussein instead of starting a war. Wouldn’t the world be better off if he had? (I know it’s ridiculous, but I’m making a point).

Writing freely is also an American value, not just a value of the blogosphere, it’s right there in the Constitution. We are encouraged to speak our mind. And if I may be so bold, it’s also a special value of people from New York. So if a boy from Brooklyn doesn’t want a boy from Queens to write his ideas on a blog, well that’s not a problem for the boy from Queens.

I also offered, in a comment on the Wired blog, that Mike Arrington, the co-host of the TechCrunch 20 conference, has used exactly the same method as I use. When he’s sitting in an audience and has trouble with something someone says, he says so. There were a number of people who did it during morning sessions at Gnomedex on Friday, and other people did it during Jason’s talk, in fact I wasn’t even the first one to speak out. So forgive me if I feel like I’m being used as a scapegoat. It seems Jason’s problem isn’t with my approach, or even me personally. It must be something else.

Honestly I think I hit the nail in my post on Saturday. I think we ought to discuss his product, Mahalo, and see if we can’t come up with a business that works for him and his investors, and for the blogging and podcasting world, maybe even for developers. If you read this blog you know that I’m into win-wins. I’ve been writing about it for many many years, and it’s a sincere thing, I’ve backed the writing up with action. It’s where XML-RPC and SOAP came from, where RSS and OPML came from, and believe it or not, its where blogging itself came from, something Jason has profited from enormously. I don’t begrudge him that, but then he shouldn’t begrudge my right to speak, even if I’m saying things he doesn’t like.

If I may quote from I a piece I wrote in 1996, after attending a conference where every speaker gave a talk like Jason’s: “Here’s an invitation to truly embrace the creativity of others. Instead of beating your breast about how great you are, try saying how great someone else is. Look for win-wins, make that your new religion. Establish a policy that nothing will be announced unless it can be shown that someone else will win because of what you’re doing. How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others’ creativity.”

A lot of people read that, and it was widely quoted. I think in some ways this is the anthem of Web 2.0. It’s our core shared value. If you can’t find a way for other people to win with your product, then imho, you should keep looking. As I said on Saturday, no matter how much we may dislike or distrust Google, they found that sweet spot, and they haven’t wandered off it. So when Jason launches his company with disrespect for Google, he’s dissing us too, asking us to overlook a basic contradiction in his proposal.

I think when he proposed to his investors he treated them with no more respect than he did us, but he probably couched the proposal in better terms. He must have told them they would make money, but if they look deeper, I think they’ll find the same problem I found. And all the personal attacks can’t hide that.

On Saturday I resigned as an advisor to the TechCrunch 20 conference, but I’m not going to stop giving them advice. I think Jason should present Mahalo there, and let the reviewers take him apart. It’ll be good for him and for his company, and maybe if he finds a good proposition, good for us too.

Scripting News for 8/12/07

No, *you* have a nice day! 

When you think of something serious like a bruhaha or kerfuffle in the blogosphere, remember this asshole.

He’s a friend of Scoble’s.

And if that doesn’t make you smile, how about this quote…

Winston Churchill: “In the morning, I shall be sober.”

A travel day 

I’m writing this in Seattle, in a few minutes I’ll get in the car and head south, back to the Bay Area.

I had a great time at Gnomedex. Chris and Ponzi, as always, put on a classy show. It had its ups and downs, and emotional moments, and moments of great inspiration. I think Guy Kawasaki and Darren Barefoot gave the best talks. Derek Miller touched our hearts. People are talking about one presentation more than all the others mostly because the speaker is a great promoter, but the sparks also flew at a couple of other talks that aren’t getting as much coverage.

I had some interesting hallway talks, but none more interesting than the one with Kevin McEntee of Netflix about providing a way for users to take their movie ratings from Netflix to other services. This could turn Netflix into the hub for movie ratings (the first place that exports becomes the default UI), and could enable all kinds of interesting combos, such as checking a box on Match.com to be introduced to dates who like the same kinds of movies. At least you’d know you have one thing you can talk about. And what movies you like and don’t probably says a lot about people. 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. It’s so clearly the manifest destiny of the web, we just need one of these companies to go first. 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. “People come back to places that send them away.”

I used some new technology at the show, my pictures flowed from iPhone to Flickr to Twitter, effortlessly, and pointed the way to the way publishing from a mobile device should work. I got pictures and text to flow in one package, and we have sound flowing in a separate stream. I want them to join, and I want the UI on the reader to be more enjoyable, but I’m satisfied that it works pretty damned well for August 2007.

A heads-up on breakage. I broke the audio Twittergram functionality when I implemented the Flickr functionality, but that’s fixed now, and you should be able to do audio posts again. And the Next-Prev links on Scripting News have been broken for a few days. I can’t fix this problem from my laptop, but it’ll be one of the first things I do when I get home.

I’ll be writing some tonight, and taking pictures through the day. It looks like the weather is good. Time to hit the road. Seeya later!

Mark Smith: “The social side of movie watching definitely needs more exploration.”

On the road, around noon 

Scripting News for 8/11/07

We’re a BarCamp sponsor 

Scripting News is a proud sponsor of BarCampBlock on August 18-19, in Palo Alto, CA.

Gnomedex 07 photos 

Click on the thumbnail to the right for my collection of Gnomedex 07 pics.

All these pics flowed through Twitter, using the new Flickr-to-Twitter mashup. It worked without a hitch, and was a big hit with my fellow twitheads. Not one complaint.

My theory is that as long as the photos have titles, they are just like normal Twitter status messages with the benefit of having a visual image attached. People only complain when the pics all ahve the same title. This actually makes total sense.

Now I want the whole package, a title, an image, and an opportunity to narrate verbally. My iPhone has all the capabilities I need, but I can’t write the software. Open platforms will rule here.

Jason didn’t bring us a win-win 

Jason Calacanis posted a continuation of the discussion around his presentation at Gnomedex yesterday. It’s mostly personal, about me. Pretty nasty stuff, anything but friendly (though he claims to be my friend). He could just edit that stuff out, it’s irrelevant. If he wants to succeed as the CEO of Mahalo, he’s going to have to get past his feelings and listen to what we were saying, and think about it, and resolve the conflict he has in the structure of his company, rather than just try to pave it over with his supposed personal issues with me.

Yesterday, and in all his previous marketing, he rails against advertising and spam, which ironically, was exactly what he was doing to the environment at this mostly non-commercial conference. What we said (and I wasn’t the only one speaking back to him, I wasn’t even the first) was a response to this. It didn’t come out of thin air. If he had given a similar speech to venture capitalists, if he offered them no way to win, they would have had the same response, but it probably wouldn’t have been as patient or polite. Now, clearly he doesn’t have the same respect for us that he has for VCs. But it seems that to some extent the success of his company depends on winning over the people here at Gnomedex. If it didn’t, he should have stayed home, because his pitch, as delivered, doesn’t work here, because he didn’t offer us anything we want. We get a better deal from Google, believe it or not.

Some of his argument against Google rings true, very few people love them as we did in their early days, but their proposition to web writers and podcasters is basically fair, it’s a win-win. We get flow from them, they get ad revenue. They also offer us a way to put ads on our sites, so we can profit financially from the relationship. Nothing in Jason’s pitch offers us anything like that. No flow, no money. And technically, it’s not a platform, so we can’t build on it.

We’re people, and we’re smart, Jason, just like you, just like your investors. If you come making a pitch, there should be something for us, or it’s not going to be well received.

So there’s a big bug in the concept behind his company and he tries to blow by it with an attack aimed at one person. That might convince really stupid people, but smart folk can see right through it.

Bottom-line, he needs to figure out a way to build the company so that many others can profit from it. Otherwise I don’t think it has a prayer against Google, which we like less and less as a company, but who basically offers an equitable proposition to the users of the Internet, who the Gnomedex crowd represent in a loose kind of way.

His pitch here failed. He can’t blame me for that. A good CEO goes back to the drawing board and figures out what works. I’ve known lots of successful CEOs, that’s how they all work. I know many more CEOs of companies that failed, and they approach problems the way Jason is approaching this one.

Ultimately, this is the act of friendship Jason is looking for. Now let’s see if he has the maturity and will to succeed to let him see that.

Rosenberg on Mahalo 

Scott Rosenberg: “The day that Google’s results look like the flow of spam into your e-mail inbox is the day that people will start clamoring for something like Mahalo. But unless Google slips up badly, that looks unlikely.”

Scripting News for 8/10/07

Here’s what bothers me about Mahalo 

When someone gets up and gives a speech about a platform, my mind gets engaged about ways I can have fun or make money.

There’s none of that with Mahalo. It’s about Jason and his investors making money. Why should I care about that?

It’s like the iPhone. Very limited opportunities for us to be creative.

Not my cup of tea.

I hate speeches that are ads 

Calanis is ranting about marketers are intruding on the Internet.

But explain to me how what he’s doing is not an ad.

Bold hypocrisy. He’s spamming us right now. What a joke.

Sorry for the lack of updates 

I’m mostly sitting around listening to the conference speakers.

Guy Kawasaki was awesome. He and I come from the same school of software. I agree with everything in his talk about evangelism.

Other speakers were pretty good. The first speaker of the morning, Robert David Steele Vivas, was a Rush Limbaugh class idiot. I know Chris has some nutty libertarian ideas, I think he’ll outgrow them eventually. But this guy was a total wacko choice to open the show.

Me, I’m practicing silence. Just doing the hallway thing.

Had a great talk with a guy from Netflix, as you know I want them to give the users control of their movie ratings. I think there’s a chance they may do it.

I’m using my Flickr-to-Twitter web service to take portraits of all kinds of Gnomesexers. You can see the latest in my Twitter stream or log directly onto Flickr. All of them are tagged with gnomedex07.

Mike Arrington got sick. I think he’s in the area, but is missed.

There’s a surprise planned for tomorrow evening. Can’t say what it is.

Good morning everybody! 

Live-blogging from Gnomedex.

It just started and I’m already bored.

Nothing to do with the conference, I love Chris and Ponzi, but conferences are so brutal.

“Amazon is the hub of the world brain” — says Robert David Steele Vivas.

“Huh?” — says Dave Winer.

He mentioned Jello Biafra.

He just called Karl Rove a Nazi. Hey I like this guy.

World’s most pissed off end user.

“I gave up on Wikipedia because I don’t have time to deal with morons.”

Scripting News for 8/9/07

Ready for a few testers 

If you want to test the new Flickr-to-Twitter page on twittergram.com, send me a private message.

I only have 10 invites for Round One. Anyone can register for the service, but only approved testers will be activated.

I want to do this slowly. The service is going poll your Flickr RSS 2.0 feed quite frequently, so I want to see how much server bandwidth it’s going to use.

Update #1: Okay, I’m going to try to quickly add support for special tags, so that not every Flickr picture you upload ends up in your Twitter stream. This was the other Fred Wilson request, and other people are asking for it. Obviously it needs to be in there. First I have to figure out how Flickr adds them to the RSS feed.

Update #2: The tag is there in the feed. But I gotta editorialize. Why did they invent their own category element instead of using the RSS 2.0 category element? Their new element appears to work exactly like the one they NIH’d. They didn’t follow Postel’s very good law there at Yahoo. No matter. I’m going to use it anyway. End of editorial.

Scripting News for 8/8/07

Today’s links 

Doc Searls remembers summer heat in New Jersey before air conditioning.

Dan Gillmor discusses a new Google News feature that’s on the right track, but not the right implementation. Google should just buy Technorati (Note to Sifry: 1 percent please), and get it reliable, and use it in place of this new human-intense feature. Let the people discussed in news articles get blogs, Google can even host them. Let the readers sort it out. Much better than depending on employees.

Gabe Rivera notes that Google News doesn’t allow sites like Techmeme to crawl Google News, but they depend on other sites being open to make Google News possible. The news organizations should offer blogs to everyone who’s quoted in their articles, btw. Should have done this a long long time ago (I suggested it to the NY Times in 2001 and to the SF Chron earlier this year). Instead Google does something lame, and beats the whole news industry. Some days it seems the whole world is built on cowardice and fear.

TorrentFreak reports that Google filters torrents out of search results.

This appears to be an article about RSS, in Hebrew.

Flickr-to-Twitter, day 3 

I added another user, Fred Wilson of A VC.

He successfully posted a picture this morning. He asked that I add a feature that uses the title of the picture in the Twitter post. Of course, makes total sense. Done.

Now this new feature, and TwitterGrams, suggest that perhaps Twitter should have the concept of attachments for status messages, esp if they’re posted through the API.

There would be two parameters:

1. A content type, like image/jpeg or audio/mpeg.

2. The bits of the attachment.

For a small set of types, Twitter would know how to display a “thumb” — in the case of an image, it would be a tiny rendering of it. Click on the thumb to see the full picture. For MP3s, there would be an inline player.

People are kind of repulsed by the urls I’m dropping into the feeds, on one hand, on the other, I’m getting a hundred new subscribers a day, so people are attracted to it in (much) greater numbers. Rich media in Twitter posts makes a lot of sense. A much prettier UI is possible, but this is something they have to do.