Scripting News for 1/21/2008

Out on the UGC limb 

About the business with Jason Calacanis last summer.

Let’s be clear about what happened there, because it happens so often.

He’s a vendor with a product.

I reviewed the product unfavorably.

His response was not about the product, it was about me personally. At the time I said “I’ve never seen an entrepreneur with a product he’s supposedly proud of try so desperately to change the subject away from the product.”

I still feel now, as I did then, that Mahalo is a bad product, and that its stated premise is a lie. It’s not a search engine, it doesn’t compete with Google, and his claims that Google is clogged with spam are a smokescreen, because his actual target is Wikipedia. It’s obvious to anyone who gives it a moment’s thought, but it’s not said publicly on the blogs of people in Silicon Valley. Why? Because criticizing Jason is a messy business. It’s easier to say nothing.

It happens so often in discourse on the net, there are so many subjects that are taboo, people you can’t talk about without provoking personal attacks. The net is just as good at distributing personal attacks as it is at distributing accurate information. I guess it’s not a big surprise, given the course of every other medium, that as the blogging world matures, there are more attacks and less accurate information.

But when we don’t say anything we give up a bit of our future. And when you factor in that there are many products, people and companies who are poison in this way, what you end up with is another bubble, created out of the things we don’t want to talk about.

I think it’s better to take the hits in little increments than continue to build flawed businesses, built on incorrect premises.

Consider this a preamble for more to come, because I think we’ve gone way too far out on the UGC limb, we could and should be cutting more fair deals with the people who create the value on the net, and we’re not doing it. That Mahalo continues to be unchallenged with its nonsense plan is just an indication of how bad discourse is in this medium that was supposed to clean up these kinds of messes. Instead, it perpetuates them.

And, by the way, I’ve said nothing here that deserves a personal attack. But my guess is that they’ll come anyway.

NYT: For Old Rhythm-and-Blues, Respect and Reparations.

XMPP as the basis for interop in TwitterLand? 

Matt Terenzio: “Why we wouldn’t use XMPP as the basis for a decentralized microblogging platform?”

Good question. I’d like to play with some simple systems on XMPP. I tried to get started with some scripts connecting to Google’s Jabber server over the weekend but wasn’t able to get a conversation going. I’ll try again soon.

Update: Joe Beda from Google on GTalk & Twitter interop.

Tracking FlickrFan updates 

A long-standing loose-end.

A feed that tracks changes to FlickrFan.

If you’re running the software you’ll get the updates automatically, this feed is for the documentation of the changes.

Scripting News for 1/20/2008

Almost ready to back Obama 

After listening to Meet The Press today I’m almost ready to support Barak Obama for President in 2008. Here’s why.

FlickrFan events navigator extended 

In previous versions of FlickrFan you could only see today’s picture downloads and code updates on the Events page.

A feature request came in saying it would be nice to be able to go back in time, and I totally agreed. That’s the way it works in version 0.43, released this morning.

Details, screen shot.

Update on NYTimes on iPhone 

Here’s something coool — I was able to give the NYTimesRiver an icon on the iPhone desktop.

Russell Beattie explains how it works.

Pretty simple. You just put a file named apple-touch-icon.png in the top level of the website. It must be a 57-by-57 png image.

If you added the icon before this update, you might want to do it again to get the graphic version.

Scripting News for 1/19/2008

NYTimes on iPhone 

With the new version of the iPhone software, v1.1.3, you can put web pages on the home page of the phone.

This is good news for NYTimes news junkies, because you can now put a river of NY Times headlines one click away at all times. It’s that easy to find out what’s going on in the world, just as easily as you check your email.

1. Click on the Safari icon

2. Visit http://nytimesriver.com/

3. Click on the plus sign at the bottom of the screen.

That’s it! Now the NYT headlines are always right there. It’s really killer, imho.

PS: Phil Torrone is a NYTRiver/iPhone user.

Thanks to Yahoo! 

Thanks to everyone at Yahoo who helped make the first public demo of FlickrFan a success on Thursday night. The meetup was well-attended. There was only one glitch in the demo, otherwise every feature showed off well. There was a lively discussion. Got some great feature suggestions, met some cool new people and reconnected with some old friends.

Yahoo had a video camera there, not sure when they’ll publish it, but there will be a link here as soon as it is online.

Thanks to Chad Dickerson, Salim Ismail, Bradley Horowitz and all the Brickhouse people for helping make this happen.

No one asked this question 

Amazingly no one asked this question at the meetup, but it just came up in an email from a journalist who works at a gadget site you’ve heard of and probably read.

The question goes like this.

Now that Apple is reading Flickr feeds in AppleTV, maybe there’s no point continuing to develop FlickrFan.

I always wonder what’s behind this question. Does the person think that people who use FlickrFan will stop using it because AppleTV can read the RSS feeds that Flickr produces? How would that work? I don’t understand.

I bought an AppleTV, I tried fitting it into my lifestyle, but it didn’t. Apple’s vision of how the Internet connects to the living room is a very controlling one. They attain a certain ease of use, true — but the trade-off is too great. I like all the special effects, but I like to be in control of my own experience. I want to be the programmer. And I despise DRM as much as my customers hated copy protected software in the 80s. It does nothing positive for me, as a user, and I don’t think it works for the vendors, but then that isn’t my problem, it’s theirs.

I much prefer the Mac Mini to AppleTV, and to everything else. But this question has always been the stinkbomb lurking over the whole Mac market. The reporters don’t stand up for the vendors. What does this guy want me to do? Would he prefer if I stopped developing FlickrFan? Will he say I’m stupid if I do. Maybe I am. Hey, I don’t ask for any money for it. Basically I do it because I want to help create a DRM-less environment for us to enjoy networked living rooms.

FlickrFan is one of the things I’m working on. Sure it’s crazy to think that I could actually contribute a little to the Mac platform. Apple surely is going to crush me tomorrow, maybe they already have. But why do users care? Why do reporters? It seems to me that we all benefit from choice. When it’s a single-party system things stagnate. When there’s competition, new ideas can gain traction even if it doesn’t fit into the Apple vision for its users. (Which is fairly limited, read this Doc Searls piece written in 1997, it’s every bit as true today as it was then.)

Hey if you think building on Flickr is crazy, think about this. My next product competes with iTunes as a podcatcher! I must be out of my mind, eh?

Finally, I could ask this guy, who I respect enormously and whose work I read practically every day, a similar question. Hey Apple writes about gadgets on apple.com. What does that say about YourGadgetSite? Got any plans for a new job? Perhaps a new career? Now that would be just rude, wouldn’t?

How about some respect for developers?

Can’t believe we’re still having this discussion in 2008. Can’t we get past this?

Scripting News for 1/18/2008

What is Coral8? 

Continuing the thread on decentralized Twitter…

I read this story on DBMS2, as part of the initial discussion, that explained there is commercial-grade software used by the financial industry that they believe can handle, reliably, much greater traffic than Twitter is handling now.

The category is called CEP, an acronym for Complex Event Processing.

This evening, a comment from Mark Tsimelzon, the CTO of Coral8, one of the leading companies in this area. He offers a pointer to their developer site, a download of the software, and help when needed.

An interesting turn!

FAQ: Is decentralized Twitter just IRC? 

In the recent vigorous discussion about decentralizing Twitter, a frequently asked question was What’s the diff betw that and IRC.

Now I could be missing something, if so, I apologize in advance, but I think the answer is No.

Something that’s fascinating about Twitter is that everyone’s experience is different. Some people subscribe to 100 people, others 5000, I’ve even seen people who follow 0 people. No one subscribes to exactly the same people you do. And just because you listen to someone doesn’t mean they listen to you, and vice versa. There’s a tremendous variety of different experiences. Yet each of us feels as if we’re in a chatroom. That’s the paradox of Twitter. It kind of feels like IRC while it is nothing like IRC.

What Twitter is most like, imho, is an RSS aggregator. The people who work on Twitter call it a micro-blogging system, because to them, that’s what it’s like, even if the users don’t see it that way. I understand what they’re saying, as I think through the possible ways to decentralize it, invariably I’m led down paths I’ve already walked in implementing blogging software and RSS software.

But IRC is very symmetric — if I listen to you, then you listen to me. And vice versa. There are ways to block someone in IRC, but it’s an opt-out, where in Twitter listening to someone is by default off, and you have to opt-in. Very different experience. In IRC it would be considered a drastic measure to block someone. In Twitter, there’s nothing offensive about not subscribing to someone.

Further, you rarely see trolls or flaming in Twitter, because it doesn’t work, just as it doesn’t work in blogging. Unless you flame someone in an interesting or funny way, you’re not going to get many followers. So guys like Loren Feldman, who is funny, gets a lot of followers on Twitter. And the normal grouchy and anonymous trolls who dominate mail lists rarely gain followers on Twitter (or blogs).

Twitter is fascinating, it’s like the elephant and we’re all blind men feeling our way around unaware that other people see it completely differently.

FlickrFan for iPhone? 

I was talking with Bijan Sabet, an early user of FlickrFan, and he asked a question that I didn’t know the answer to.

Bijan: “I’d love a way to have FlickrFan photos on my iPhone.”

Early-on, I turned off synching for my iPhone, but it should be possible to synch one or all of the FlickrFan folders with the iPhone. I’ll investigate, but I’m interested in knowing what other people think.

Scripting News for 1/17/2008

A blog post in a comment 

Doc Searls: “My main long-term concern is with The Environment.”

Decentralized Twitter, day 2 

Interesting comments continue to appear in the thread we started yesterday.

http://www.tribler.org/ sure sounds interesting!

How are you feeling? 

Okay, if the mind is powerful, how is your mind making you feel today? It’s worth thinking about — with the stock market down this year, every day worse than the last, many of us are losing lots of money, I know I am, and it’s not a good feeling.

I keep arguing with myself, even though I’m losing money at a huge rate, I’m still in good shape financially, I have a nice house, I can pay the bills. But it doesn’t help. Inside I feel unsettled, poor, I’m having trouble concentrating.

Does it help that I’ve been through this before? The crash of 1987 was much worse than this downturn, and then I had no cushion, nothing to fall back on, I wasn’t even employed when it happened. I was a lot closer to being broke around the turn of the century, even though the market was doing very well. But it doesn’t help. No matter how many times I’ve been through it, I’ve always known that it’s cyclic, that the outlook will likely improve, but knowing isn’t the same as feeling. The feeling is much stronger, it can’t be counteracted with logic. I can’t reason with the feeling, you might say it’s un-reasonable.

Then I heard that a friend of mine, much younger, with a lot less at stake in the market, is having trouble sleeping because of this feeling. I realize I’m not alone, probably millions of people have a heightened sense of insecurity right now. Does that make it better? Not really…

Anyway, I thought, let’s post something and find out how others feel about the economy and how much of an impact is it having on our state of mind.

The power of the mind 

I heard a report on NPR a couple of weeks ago, and thought it was very interesting.

A study of a group hotel maids found that even though they lead active lives, get lots of exercise, their health isn’t good. High blood pressure, overweight, body-mass index, the usual signs of a sedentary life.

They interviewed them, asking if they were active — no. Did they get exercise? No. (The correct answer was yes to both.)

So they formed two groups, with one group they did nothing, with the other they had a series of classes where they showed them how doing maid work compared to other forms of exercise. The kept going until they understood that they were active and living a healhty lifestyle.

A few months later they checked blood pressure, weight, BMI and amazingly the group they had educated had become healthy!

FAQ: Why only 20 pics? 

When you first subscribe to a feed in FlickrFan you generally will get 20 pictures in the folder for the feed. People wonder why this is and how they can get more.

The reason for this is that Flickr keeps the 20 most recent pictures in the feed for each account. So when I post a new picture to my Flickr account, it replaces the oldest picture in my feed. Then, anyone who has subscribed my feed, will get the new picture next time they scan. It works the same way RSS works for blogging or a newspaper — you only get the last few posts or stories, not all of them, in the feed.

I think this is the right way to do it. You might feel that 20 is too small, but people would probably also want more if they just got 100 pictures.

So the answer is over time you will get more pictures, if the person posts more pictures.

Scripting News for 1/16/2008

Library of Congress Flickr feed 

Wow, this is really really coooooool.

The Library of Congress is partnering with Flickr, releasing pictures that it believes are not copyrighted, through Flickr.

One of the fantastic side-effects of that is that there’s an RSS 2.0 feed of those pictures that connects perfectly to FlickrFan.

If you click on this link on the machine that FlickrFan is running on, you’ll automatically subcribe to the Library of Congress feed on Flickr.

This is one of those moments when the standards are working, really well.

PS: If for some reason it doesn’t work, try clicking on this link to get the latest update (v0.42), then click on the link above again.

Video for tomorrow? 

I know it’s the last minute, but it’s worth a try…

A number of people have asked if there will be live or recorded video for tomorrow’s FlickrFan demo at Yahoo in SF.

The answer — yes, if we can find a way to do it.

If you have a camera and laptop and are willing to webcast it tomorrow, please post a note here in the comments, or just show up tomorrow a few minutes early.

A decentralized Twitter? 

Andrew Baron is a smart guy, and he’s not a techy, so when he explains technical issues he does it in a way non-technical people can understand.

Dembot: “If you hosted your own Twitter, just like you host your own website, you could put your twitter anywhere.”

Twitter is doing us a service, with its lack of stability, in illustrating the dangers of centralized systems. We do need to figure out how to build a Twitter-like system with all the advantages of centralization and none of the disadvantages.

And like Andrew, intuitively, it seems to me we could do it with RSS. Of course RSS is not very nice to edit by hand, so a little bit of software would be needed to handle the editing. We would also need a place to store our RSS (easy and cheap), and a discovery mechanism, but none of this is impossible or even very hard, considering that Twitter already exists. If it didn’t, discovery would be a mess. Because it does, discovery would just be inconvenient, and would require foresight — the kind of foresight that tells you to keep a bunch of bottled water in the garage so you won’t die when there’s a big earthquake. You do have bottled water in the garage?

The problem is, of course, when Twitter goes down, it’s too late to use Twitter to bootstrap the decentralized Twitter-like system. Heh. Just like after the earthquake it’s too late to go to Safeway and buy a crate of Aquafina.

Larry Dignan: “Twitter is a classic case of a neat little tool that wasn’t built to scale but now has to because it has become a big deal.”

Today’s links 

Tomorrow in SF: First public demo of FlickrFan.

Congrats to Scoble on his new job at Fast Company.

Gcast: “Record your podcast via a toll-free call from any phone.”

Scripting News for 1/15/2008

New app, day 2 

This landing page is part of the new app that I’m working on, which is a tool for subscribing to and downloading podcasts, otherwise known as a podcatcher.

When you set a pref in this app, links to new podcasts are posted to a Twitter account as they arrive, so that people you know can know what you’re listening to, and may choose to listen themselves. There’s a place to comment, of course.

The cool thing about it, I think, is that if you share a podcast and I do, they both point to the same landing page, so our communities intermix based on who liked that podcast. Who knows where this goes? But it’s interesting, imho.

PS: Just as we had a cooool partner for the launch of the photocatching app, we have a surprise for the podcatching app too, and it’s probably not what you think it is.

PPS: We’re still hoping and waiting for Payloads for Twitter.

Happy birthday, Martin Luther King 

Mac fatigue 

Initially I wrote in my keynotepost that I’d buy one of the new MacBooks for sure, then a minute later I selected the sentence, hit backspace and save. A commenter asked why.

Mac fatigue. 2007 was a fun year, I spent a lot of money on Mac stuff, and then found at the end of the year that they’re a shit company that treated me like shit. Left a really ugly feeling, really sore about that.

So when I thought of all the extra expenses, a second battery (later: ooops, no can do), AppleCare, and then the likelihood that it was going to break, and then I’d be stuck waiting for a repair wondering where my data was going, I thought maybe I won’t be so quick this time.

Also the fact that the stock market looks like it’s about to crash probably contributed to the feeling.

Steve Jobs keynote 

I’m “watching” it from home.

A few minutes before it started someone on Twitter asked how long before the rate of updates on Twitter brought it down.

Well, it’s down now (9:22AM).

I’m watching the updates on Engadget, far from an optimal experience. Somone ought to make live-blogging a bit easier on the reader.

So far he’s announced “Time Capsule” — a hardware device that backs up any Mac in the house over wifi. It’s like a router with a hard drive.

The market is down, and so is Apple, almost 4 points at 175 at 9:30AM.

They’ve sold 4 million iPhones. As an Apple shareholder that makes me happy.

5 million Leopards. He quotes quotemills, Mossberg and Pogue.

Twitter is still down at 9:37AM.

Maybe they took the system down so they could demo it at Moscone without any load?

http://www.macrumorslive.com/ — much better! Thanks!!

Movies on iTunes, this is what Netflix was worried about. Lots of questions. Only 1000 titles. 30 days after release on DVD. What’s the quality? HD? I don’t think Netflix has much to worry about, they have much more than 1000 titles (I think I’ve probably already watched 1000 movies on my Netflix account) and they get them the day they come out on DVD, and ahem, I have to say this, so does BitTorrent. Hollywood is still scared of the net. They didn’t give a great deal to Steve, or so it seems.

Ahhh — AppleTV 2.0. No need to synch with a desktop or laptop. Why don’t they just sell the Mac Mini. Perfect product for the living room.

Community movie features. Just like Netflix.

Just checked Twitter at 9:52AM — it’s up.

More stuff about AppleTV. It’s a software upgrade. Does pictures from Flickr and .Mac. That’s good everybody, good. RSS everywhere.

At 10:05AM, Twitter is dead again.

I see they came out with a thin sub-notebook, MacBook Air.

drop.io/tradesecrets 

Eleven days ago I wrote a blog post describing a call-in service that I’d like to use to create a podcast with my friend and fellow blogger Robert Scoble.

A new service (or one that I just became aware of) comes achingly close to doing what I want. Maybe it goes all the way there, but I’ve not seen how to do it.

First, here’s how it works.

1. Call 646-495-9201 x 49763.

2. Talk.

3. Hangup.

There will be a new recording here.

http://drop.io/tradesecrets

Looks good!

But there are two problems.

1. The RSS feed doesn’t have an enclosure, and even if you were willing to scrape the HTML there’s no pointer to an MP3 file.

2. There’s no pointer to an MP3 file on the landing page, although there appears to be one if you don’t look at the HTML source. Tricky. It was enough to get Mike Arrington at Techcrunch to think it was there. I have a call into Mike to discuss.

A caveat, I am also in touch with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I want this service, and we’re close to having it now. drop.io doesn’t go quite far enough, they clearly want to drive traffic to their site, and appear unwilling to let the MP3 out into the wild.

Interesting stuff!!

Update: I did a podcast with Robert and Patrick Scoble using drop.io. I was able to download the MP3, although it pretty well hidden, and upload it to my S3 account.

Scripting News for 1/14/2008

About to ship a new app 

Once you ship a product you immediately start getting feedback, and if you’re paying attention you can easily find the trends.

One of the big pieces of feedback about FlickrFan relates to branding. When you download the app and mount the disk image, where’s FlickrFan? It isn’t until after you figure out that you need to open the folder and click on the OPML app that you see FlickrFan. (I need to add a Readme file that makes this much more obvious.)

I knew this would be confusing. I could have renamed everything FlickrFan, it wouldn’t have taken much work, or testing, and the chance for breakage was nil, since it was a new product.

I didn’t do it for a simple reason, the engine that runs FlickrFan will run other apps, and I knew I would be shipping one such app within a matter of weeks. Once there’s a second app running in the same engine, it may still be confusing. But there will be more after that.

Maybe there won’t be millions of users, but my goal is to bootstrap a community of networked living rooms. For that I don’t need more than a couple hundred households who want to play and I already have that.

I will soon tell you more about the new app, and if you’re paying attention on my Twitter feed, you’ll get a pretty clear idea of where this is going. It’s all about communities, social features and big media. FlickrFan is about beautiful pictures on high def TV. The next one is about…

Stay tuned!

East coast snow pics 

It’s snowing in Boston (where else?).

Here are some pictures from my friends on Twitter.

CKelly in Cambridge, MA.

Brad Searles in Allston, MA.

Colin Grady found these pics, unknown location.

Ethan Bodnar has snow pics from Connecticut.

Corey Goldberg from Back Bay, Boston.

Heh. It’s snowing in Italy too.

If you have snow pictures or stories, please post a comment below.

Scripting News for 1/13/2008

The place on the Net for Flix 

They are running for the hills but the end of the trail is Little Big Horn, where Custer made his last stand, and lost his life. Of course the Indians didn’t do too well either.

AP: “Girding for a potential threat from Apple Inc., online DVD rental service Netflix Inc. is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed Internet connections.”

Please oh Netflix strategy gods, get a copy of Marketing Warfare and read it.

Netflix owns what used to be a great hill, for some it might still be one, the movies-by-mail hill.

They obviously feel they need to be in the Internet movie business, and in that they have a huge head start that they aren’t using. They are being too damned fair to their competitors.

Give the users the ability to grant other sites access to their movie ratings. Build Netflix into the social network of movies. You’re already there, but you need to make every other social network connect up to Netflix. You need to be the hub for movie-watching on the net. You’re lucky that so far that’s what you are. But soon you will have to fight for that too, and then it will be too late to try to force your competitors to connect to your site. They will have data that you want. Then the nature of the negotiating will change. Right now you have the data. Use that power!

Make the users everyone think of Netflix as the place on the Net for Flix.

How Hillary hit a nerve 

She may or may not have been acting, but either way, when she sighed in New Hampshire and almost broke out in tears, and said how she feared that our country was heading from a bad place to a much worse place, she came close to expressing how many of us feel. Close but not quite there, because unlike the rest of us, she has a chance of being able to do something about it. The rest of us, Republican or Democrat, are going to have to sit by, and hope (there’s Obama’s word) that someone else can straighten out the mess, and really means it when they say that’s what they want to do.

Meanwhile…

On Twitter, a reminder from Republican diehards from the south, of the supposed discourse we’ve had over the last five years.

“Cut and run.”

“Micromanage.”

It’s all positioning, appealing to fear. Of course I don’t want to cut and run. Nor do I want to micromanage.

Can we macromanage, or do we have to shut up and watch?

Our president used the term World War III, he actually spoke the words, as an optional American-started thing. This is the horror that makes us feel like HIllary did that day in New Hampshire.

In the sixties, the hardhats used to yell “America love it or leave it” to protestors. They had no clue about the country they were defending. Its strength is that you can love it, disagree with the people who run it, and not leave it. Even better, come Election Day, you can overthrow them, in a bloodless coup, and march down Pennsyvlania Avenue to celebrate. It’s all right there in the Constitution. (But you don’t get to hang the guy you overthrew.)

Watching the Republican debate in Myrtle Beach, SC on Thurs night, the loutness of the Republicans was striking. First, the way they shouted down Ron Paul, who like HIllary, raised questions that most of us have. Why are we in Iraq? They laughed when he asked. Not only didn’t any of them answer it, but none of them had the presence to realize that the majority of Americans who wonder the same thing might be offended by their laughter. I certainly was. When did dismissing an opinion you don’t like become a proper response for someone seeking our vote? Any one of them could have said “I may not agree with Ron Paul, but please let him speak, and let him have our respect.” Any of the others could have closed the deal in that moment. None of them had the guts to do it.

I also was struck by the gungho rhetoric about going to war with Iran. It was like one of those war movies where the young guys rush to sign up wanting to teach the Kaiser a lesson, or the Commies or whoever the demon du jour is. The movies almost always teach that war is hell, by the time the war is actually underway everyone wishes it were over. The way wars start is with spit and vinegar, vim and vigor, talk of pride and honor, but they quickly devolve to misery, futility, death, devastation. My generation learned that early-on, with Vietnam. I don’t remember anyone thinking we should be there. I missed being drafted by luck. I thought for sure that my generation would never choose to go to war. I was wrong. But I didn’t imagine that, after creating such a quagmire in Iraq, which we still haven’t extracted ourselves from, we would be so quick to conjure up another futile war.

War with Iran is a crazy, crazy idea. All evidence is that Iran has actually been trying to work with us since 9/11. Even if they weren’t, as Ron Paul says, they’re a third world country, no threat to us. That the Republicans would contemplate war with Iran, with such colorful gunghoisms (gates of hell, introduce them to their virgins), this is where HIllary hit the nerve. Could we be in for another four years of lunacy? Will those who object be called unpatriotic?

Could a Republican actually win this year? Who thought Bush could actually be re-elected at this time in 2004?

I heard on one of the Sunday talk shows that the reason Republicans don’t like Ron Paul is they think he’s anti-American. I’ve listened to him, if you take him at face-value, which I do, his ideas seem radical, unimplementable, but un-American? He’s fervently pro-American. He says we should fix our own house, it’s falling apart, instead of trying to control others (which doesn’t work). How would we feel if our country were occupied by foreign troops? Would we do everything we can to expel them? (Of course.) Why should we expect any other country to be different? I’ve been saying the same thing since our invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ron Paul has the guts to say the madness is mad. He’s the only one in either party who does that, though Obama comes close, and in her New Hampshire moment Hillary did too.

I want someone to win my vote by telling me how good I am, not how bad the other guy is. I see through it, I know the Dems don’t want to micromanage, they don’t wake up in the morning looking for ways to lose. I know they’re not cowards. All this sloganeering has done is make us weary of ourselves. I want to get started fixing things, if not now — when? That’s the nerve that Hillary hit.

Scripting News for 1/11/2008

Political links 

Salon: “What Huckabee has lacked is a top-level adviser to layer some intellectual heft and policy realism onto the candidate’s make-it-up-every-morning improvisational style.”

NY Times: “The Democratic presidential primary in New York on Feb 5 is shaping up as the state’s most competitive since 1992.”

Amazon SimpleDB followup 

I spent a few days over the last week trying to get a connection between Frontier and Amazon’s SimpleDB.

I got connections going with: CreateDomain, DeleteDomain, ListDomains. They all use the same basic code to handle authentication, and all three work.

But I hit a dead-end with the PutAttributes call. At first I thought I had found a problem on their end, because their JavaScript scratchpad app (a life-saver) had exactly the same problem as my code. I got in touch with the Amazon people, they asked me to download a new version of the scratchpad app, and it worked, but of course my app still doesn’t. I compared my parameter list to theirs, and except for the signature and time-stamp they are identical. So there’s something wrong with my code, clearly.

Here’s a link to a plain text listing of the code. All four of the interface routines use this code to call the Amazon web service. This is the place the problem almost certainly is.

And here’s the interface for PutAttributes.

As often happens, the geeky readers of this blog may spot the mistake that I don’t, so all suggestions are welcome. I really want to get past this and start building applications that connect with this new web service.

Update: Problem solved? I got an email from my contact at Amazon, he suggested maybe I wasn’t sorting the parameters before generating the signature. I checked, he was right. At one point I had been sorting them, but in an attempt to solve another problem, took a different approach which left the parameters not-sorted. Had I taken another look at the docs I would have seen that the params must be sorted before generating the signature. When I re-coded it so that they were sorted, PutAttributes worked! Heh. So now I have to do some more testing to be sure I really have the answer, but it looks pretty good.

The debate about the worth of podcasting 

There’s a mini-debate going on about whether podcasting is a success or worth it, or whatever, I’m not sure exactly what the issue is, but it’s framed this way –> if you can’t get advertisers to hitch a ride on your podcast then podcasting is not worth much if anything.

I’m having a slow Friday so far, it’s cloudy and chilly here in the Bay Area, we’re in the January doldrums, so I thought maybe I could liven things up a bit by saying both sides of this argument are wrong.

Let me explain.

My phone doesn’t have a business model. Neither does my porch. I still like having a phone and a porch because they help me meet new people and communicate with people I know. Same with my blog and podcast.

Meanwhile…

There’s another mini-debate about bloggers playing pranks at CES. The Gizmodo guys ran around with some gadgets that turn TV sets off. At CES is this a big deal because much of what goes on there is TV. They were being assholes, interfering with people’s ability to do their jobs and make a living. As a result bloggers get a bad rep.

The problem is that they’re not bloggers, they’re reporters and they work for a company that’s not a blog, it’s a publication. Publishing stuff on the web with blogging software says nothing about the people and what they write.

A blogger is person who has an idea, expertise or opinion who wants to convey that to other people. The unedited voice of a person. What makes a blogger interesting is that they do something other than writing a blog. If all you do is write a blog, and if you want or need to make money from your blogging, it’s really hard to distinguish what you’re doing from what professionals who don’t use the web (are there any left?) do.

Same with podcasting.

I do a podcast from time to time because I want to say something. Whether I can run an ad on my podcast means nothing to me because I would never do it. And if I went crazy and let someone put an ad on there, it would only be to reciprocate for them having hosted the podcast, as a way of paying for the podcast itself (I’m contemplating doing exactly that right now so I had to include the disclaimer). I would never burden my podcasting with the task of supporting me. It’s not why I podcast.

We keep having this argument. Amateurism is good and there’s lots of it. Professional writers and broadcasters probably have a place, I don’t know, it’s not my problem. But let’s be clear blogging and podcasting exist independent of a professional’s ability to eek out a living using the tools of blogging and podcasting.

Now I’m going to try to get some work done.

Bob Stepno: “Podcasting lets people sing to each other again.”

See also: Podcasting News, Mashable.