Scripting News for 2/19/2008

Podcatcher for FlickrFan users 

If you’re using FlickrFan, you should have a copy of podcatcher.root in your Tool folder. If not now, at the top of the next hour (launch the OPML app so it can do the update).

I want to get started with a small group of people, develop features, and then figure out how to broaden it, if that turns out to be the right thing to do. For now, I just want a testbed to develop, and a group of interested users.

I’ve put together a brief cheat sheet for FlickrFan users.

http://codecasting.org/podcatcher/00001.html

If you have a question please post it there and we’ll try to get you the answer.

Hope it works, and hope you like it.

Busy day 

I’m working today on getting the first release of podcatcher.root out to FlickrFan users.

In the meantime, the BlogTalkRadio people are responding to support questions and updating the service in response to feedback in the comments on yesterday’s post.

I think people are beginning to get the idea that this is an API, not an end-user service, although if you don’t mind reading XML, it can be a pretty handy way to create a podcast when you’re caught in Bay Bridge traffic or riding on a bus, or happen to have an idea while you’re talking with a friend on your iPhone (it’s really easy to turn a call into a conference call with the iPhone).

I hope people build apps for end-users with this back-end. I plan to use it to facilitate communication between people who use my podcatcher. And of course any other app that can read RSS 2.0 feeds with MP3 enclosures.

It’s not meant to be a replacement for high quality studio-created podcasts, rather it’s very good for instant note-taking type casts. I want to use this with Scoble to talk about some of the media hackery we hash out when we have brainstorming talks.

Not revolutionary, or earth-shaking, but easy, and a nice thing to have.

Anyway, if you use FlickrFan watch your Tools folder for podcatcher.root.

Scripting News for 2/18/2008

The simplest podcast API ever 

A new service from BlogTalkRadio…

Call their special phone number: 646-200-0000. It records the call. When you’re done it creates an RSS 2.0 feed with an enclosure that’s an MP3 of the call.

The address of the feed is a function of the phone number you called from. I just called in a podcast from my Nokia N95, which they added to this feed:

http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/8583429663

That’s all there is to it! No registration. They have a web page for it, but it’s completely unnecessary.

It’s the new application of RSS that I wrote about on Saturday. It’s brilliant because of it’s so simple.

Some people think innovation in technology is about how hard it is to implement, or how long it took, or how complex it is, or convoluted. They see innovation as wizardry. I see it differently. I’m impressed by the ratio of functionality to complexity. I like that number to be as big as possible, because the less complex it is, the fewer moving parts, the less likely it is to break, and the easier it will be for others to build on the idea.

Hats off to the BTR guys, they’ve come up with something truly useful that’s also very simple.

Could it be simpler? I don’t see how.

Ain’t too proud to beg 

The Obama Express. My latest piece on Huffington.

If you like it, please feel free to pass it on.

Scripting News for 2/17/2008

Maybe Flickr should have a Twitter? 

Last summer, when I was exploring the edges of Twitter, and building a voicemail service that hooked into Twitter with BlogTalkRadio, and then hooking my digital camera up to Twitter through Flickr, it seemed inevitable that Twitter would eventually support “payloads” so that objects like pictures and MP3s could hitch a ride on a Twitter message without using up any of he 140 characters, and with a neat url-less display.

The idea just kind of sat there, we’ve been quietly using the services, accepting their awkwardness, but without direct support from Twitter, they probably won’t become mainstream.

Along comes Twitxr, in a post by Mike Arrington on TechCrunch, and I go — why? This doesn’t seem right. Too many steps. I have it much easier, Twitter is hooked right up to my camera, I never have to get my desktop or laptop in the loop when I want to post a picture. To prove the point, I’ll now take a picture of this post, and shoot it up to Twitter.

So now Twitxr basically says it’s time to give up the wait for Twitter, and maybe they’re right, but for this??? I don’t really think this is what I want. If I have to use a whole new Twitter for photography, I probably want it to be Flickr, which I already use, whose API we’ve already mastered, whose scaling we trust, and even though Yahoo’s future is in doubt, it’s more certain than that of a startup.

Choice #1, if the Twitter guys are listening, is to go ahead and help us, your developers, create something seamless out of what you already have. No matter what it’s easier for users to stay with what they’re already using. It really isn’t, it seems to me, in your interest to have users switch??

Twitxr throws down a challenge to both Flickr and Twitter.

To Twitter: Scale, scale, scale and add payloads to the API.

To Flickr: Go ahead and do an event streamer for pictures.

Alan Jones: “Twixtr seems to do a pretty fair job of guesstimating my location with each image I upload from my iPhone.”

The Obama Express 

Last night a bunch of us on Twitter watched the C-SPAN broadcast of the Democratic Party dinner in Milwaukee where both Clinton and Obama spoke.

Clinton was unusually good, but as Frank Rich says in today’s excellent NY Times column, “It’s hara-kiri for a politician to step into the shadow of even a mediocre speech by Barack Obama.”

Obama was far from mediocre last night. His speech was of such high caliber, so motivational, even in anger Obama is the man, he keeps getting better and now he’s in league with the best American political oratory. The man is only 46 years old.

Last night’s speech is archived on the C-SPAN site. We’re having trouble with it on Macs but it’s reported to work well on Windows.

So many of us want to get on board the Obama Express. This is the America we want. This is the leadership we’ve been lacking. You have to go back to Kennedy’s “Ask Not” plea to find a leader as inspiring as Obama.

And inspiration matters — totally.

How else are we going to get past the wedge issue politics of the last N years. We need some good strong glue to connect us again.

The last eight years have been so terrible. The US government did more to help Iraqis than it did to help Americans. 49 percent of the electorate was held in contempt and then after the election the other 51 percent was held in contempt as well. No one but the cronies of the Bush family were given access to power. Iraqi politicians had more influence on our government than Democrats.

Yesterday I heard that 5 percent of the homes in Detroit are in some form of foreclosure. It’s almost as bad in parts of the sunbelt, California, Arizona, Florida. And the mortgage crisis isn’t over. There are more cliffs in the coming months, more junk mortgages whose payments balloon in the summer and fall, so there will be more foreclosures, more families going bankrupt. Those who think the government will bail them out should think about how effective government help has been in Louisiana and Mississippi, American states that are still economically under water, almost three years after Katrina.

Fred Wilson is concerned about the superdelegates thwarting the will of the electorate and ratifying the wrong candidate for President. I’m not worried. Read the Frank Rich article I linked to above. Obama is a freight train. The superdelegates aren’t stupid, they can see, better than you and I, where the power is flowing. They want to be on the right side of history. And Obama is not naive, he’s running a campaign on them now, just as he ran campaigns in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, etc.

Obama will sweep the remaining primaries, and by March 4 it will be apparent to everyone but perhaps Bill and Hillary that it’s over. The superdelegates will adjust to get in line with reality.

Scripting News for 2/16/2008

New Gallup poll 

For the first time Barack Obama has a statistically significant lead over Hillary Clinton, 49-42.

Draft Lessig 

1-2-3 fix for boring conferences 

Most conferences are brain-numbingly boring, right?

All the good stuff happens out in the lobby.

Right???

Want to fix conferences? Easy!

Just move the speakers out into the lobby.

You could put some mattresses in the meeting room for people with jetlag to catch up on their sleep.

It’s just Scoble! 

Talking on the phone with Steve Gillmor.

Another call comes in.

“Hold a sec Steve.”

Pause.

“Never mind, it’s just Scoble.”

We had a good laugh.

I said it would be a good name for a Scoble TV show.

We both agreed. Even better, Scoble would probably like it.

I called Scoble back.

Sure enough, we were right!

Another application for RSS 

On Monday, a new application for RSS.

Brilliant!

As far as I know, it’s never been done before.

And no, I didn’t invent it.

Scripting News for 2/15/2008

I heart EyeTV 

One of the neatest gadgets I’ve bought in the last year is a high-def receiver to work with the EyeTV software. It plugs into a USB port on my Mac, and it receives digital high-def programming over the air.

I put it in my upstairs study where I’ve got a clear view of San Francisco Bay, and the reception is very very good. I get all the big networks this way, was able to record last night’s episode of Lost in full HD fidelity, for example. Just for the cost of the disk space.

And the best thing is that I get a half-dozen different PBS broadcasts. I’ve recorded somegreat stuff. My favorite so far is a special from 1967 Monterey Pop festival. Wow. So many heroes of the rock revolution when they were young and dewy. I’m watching Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane singing one of their classics.

I forgot how optimistic those days were.

There’s this moment where the camera moves to Mama Cass watching, studying — in awe of Janis Joplin, performing Ball And Chain. There’s art, and media, networks, and the future viewed through the lens of what’s now relatively ancient history.

Scoble wrote the other day of technology so great that it made him weep. I know the feeling.

Why Valleywag doesn’t work 

Valleywag is mostly puff pieces. I guess they’re writing about people who, for one reason or another, they don’t want to offend.

Typical of business press. Don’t screw your sources or else they’ll dry up. Don’t speak ill of Steve Jobs or else no cover picture for you.

So, it’s reasonable to conclude — if you read something unbelievably nice about someone in Valleywag, that person is a source.

Thing is, they’re reduced to attacking about five people. And the flow is miniscule. A pointer from VW is worth about 20 hits.

In other words, hire a business reporter to do VW, and you get Infoworld, about 25 years too late.

Senate roll call on FISA renewal 

President Bush is going all the way to get amnesty for the phone companies who assisted the government in what appear to be illegal wiretaps of American citizens.

The Senate, even though it’s controlled by Democrats, went with this nonsense (roll call). The House acted as a firewall, and voted for FISA renewal without amnesty. Good for them.

Among the Presidential candidates, Obama voted against amnesty (thanks), McCain voted for, as did all other Republicans, and Clinton didn’t vote, even though she was in DC and could have.

Scripting News for 2/14/2008

What if you were a criminal President? 

President Bush wants to give the phone companies immunity.

Who would you like to give immunity to?

What crimes are you willing to excuse?

Putting outages to good use 

If you’re a regular user of Twitter you’re probably quite familiar with this image.

They’ve tried lots of variants, making it funny, or cute, with pictures of LOL Cats, doing cute things with screw drivers, but the pictures aren’t funny for long, the more you see them, the more tiresome they get.

Then I had an idea they could be used for a good cause.

Yeah that does it!

How to get Twitter to declare your love 

Those little devils who keep the gears turning inside the Twitter machine added a toy that’s got the community sending public love missives whizzing around. You can figure it out yourself, or you can cheat and read this howto.

@lovelyperson <3

Substitute the name of your lover in place of “lovelyperson” and you’ve just broadcast your love to all of TwitterLand.

While we’re on the subject of Twitter, a couple of other items.

1. A must-read piece in today’s NY Times, gives a clue why kids don’t go for Twitter if their parents use it. No kid wants to be observed by his or her parents. Would they go for it if their parents weren’t there? No one knows.

2. Conventional wisdom says you can’t build a scalable distributed Twitter out of RSS. At first I accepted this, as a puzzle, then I remembered that’s why we put the cloud element in there. I felt that for some applications polling would be too much. Since the cloud element has been largely ignored, most of the the apps of RSS couldn’t scale to do what Twitter does. But if RSS desktop apps like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon were adapted to understand the cloud element, and if a proxy system was worked out to get through firewalls and NAT, it might just work.

3. Or you could use XMPP.

Scripting News for 2/13/2008

For the Twitter FAQ 

This Meg Fowler post should be part of the Twitter FAQ.

“I even love the people that unfollow me because I won’t shut up. I support your efficiency and realization of my inherent freakiness.”

That pretty much sums up the mutual laissez-faire-ness of the culture that forms around a tool with the feature set of Twitter.

About my Seesmic investment 

Today, Seesmic, the company founded by Loic Le Meur, announced their initial $6 million funding. Several people noticed that my name isn’t on the list of investors.

I’ll probably end up kicking myself when Seesmic becomes the next Google or YouTube. I remain a fan of the company and Loic and his team and will be rooting for them.

Why did I get cold feet? It has nothing to do with the product or the company, both of which appear to be outstanding. It’s the stock market. I had to make the final Seesmic decision as I was getting out of stock, at a significant loss.

The only stock I hold now is AAPL, and sadly, it’s way under the price I paid for it on October 8.

Like a lot of other investors, right now stocks give me the willies. I will likely get back in, slowly, a little bit every week to average out the price, hoping the market has found a bottom.

I don’t care if Roger Clemens is lying 

I’m a lifelong baseball fan, and I don’t care if Roger Clemens took steroids, or if he is lying or if McNamee is lying.

News is stuff that’s important. If it’s national news, it’s stuff that is important to everyone in the nation. Whether Clemens took steroids or not is a proper topic for a 60 Minutes, Fresh Air or Nightline segment. To take a whole day across all the cable channels the day after three pivotal primaries is very wrong. (And what if they do it again tomorrow? Oy.)

So it’s ridiculous that all the cable news channels are broadcasting the full testimony of Roger Clemens and his accuser. Hours of repetitive questions and the same answers, over and over, while there is news happening in the world. I know because I’m subscribed to the MSNBC and AP feeds on Twitter. I have a Google Alert that shows me results of all the campaign conference calls. (There have been a couple this morning, from Obama and McCain, I’d love to get MP3s, and still looking for a feed.)

It’s time for some serious routing-around, or for the cable news programmers to get back on the job.

Elisa Camahort: “Oh God, I so agree.”

Cross-posted at Huffington.

The mind of Yahoo 

Yesterday while we were waiting for returns from the Potomac Primaries, some disturbing things started showing up on the wire. Layoffs at Yahoo, long planned, were now happening. People we knew were leaving. This morning we have a better idea of how wide the layoffs were.

You have to wonder what they’re thinking at Yahoo.

Odds are that Yahoo is going to be acquired, even though they rejected Microsoft’s offer, it’s not clear that there’s another way forward. The possibility of going it alone seems even slimmer after the layoffs.

Why would Yahoo want to self-inflict more doubt about its future at this moment where doubt is its worst problem?

There’s only one explanation. The layoffs were planned before Microsoft made its bid. “Business as usual” may be the order of the day, but this order should have been held until the Microsoft situation has cleared. If Microsoft is the new owner, let them decide who should go and stay, and whether Yahoo as a whole can operate with less profitabiity. As a division of a larger company they have less direct responsibility to shareholders. If they’re going forward alone, then perhaps the layoffs still make sense, or maybe not. When tech companies are acquired the people are the primary asset.

You gotta wonder what Microsoft thinks about this. Maybe it’s the ultimate poison pill. Let’s get rid of the talent that Microsoft wants to acquire. Of course that’s a poison pill that would surely kill the patient.

A hint in a postscript 

Dare Obasanjo works at Microsoft.

In his blog post about the Yahoo layoffs, in a postscript, he indicates that Microsoft is interested in creating a Twitter clone.

I’ve said openly, on Twitter (and now here) that I would like to be part of a venture that aims to create a scalable Twitter. I’ve had several conversations with people who are attempting to do this. I haven’t done a deal yet.

My bet: There will be a lot of growth in Twitter in the coming years, and it seems likely that the Twitter company will not be able to scale their systems to meet the demand. There are features that should have been in the product and in the API months ago that are on the back-burner, likely due to Twitter’s constant battle to meet meet demand (scaling).

As a user, I’d like to view the product and the company as a black box, but that’s impossible with the system glitches and outages. What users are doing now with Twitter is far more important, imho, than the servers, or the company. The company, understandably, thinks their issues are most important, but that’s a matter of perspective. We don’t own any stock in the company, so our perspective reflects that. To us, they’re a utility.

All this is a verbose way of saying that Microsoft applying their resources and scaling knowhow to this problem woud be an interesting development.

Scripting News for 2/12/2008

Resolving the super-delegate issue 

Michael Markman asked his rep to support Senator Obama, because his district went for him in the Washington caucus last Saturday. The response he got is one we’ve heard frequently. What about Kennedy and Kerry, will they vote for Clinton because Massachusetts went for her?

What I said: “They’re independent questions. It’s a rhetorical trick to try to invalidate your opinion or confuse you. You want your rep to support Obama. Period. Let’s send emails to Kerry and Kennedy saying the same thing.”

In any case…

I don’t think it’s going to be such a big issue.

The remaining primaries are a referendum on the two candidates. The voters of Virginia, Maryland, DC, Wisconsin, Vermont, Rhode Island, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, et al, will decide. Whoever they choose will be the nominee. The super-delegates who invalidate that decision do so at considerable risk. In the age of the Internet, we have excellent communication tools. There will be no way to hide such a decision. That’s what makes 2008 different.

A possible Democratic ad for the fall 

Best Buy sued for losing laptop 

A customer filed a $54 million lawsuit against Best Buy for losing an $1100 laptop she took in for service. The reason, exposure to identity theft.

It’s about time vendors were forced to recognize the value of customers’ data. I recall how the chief genius at the Apple store in Emeryville complained that they would have to eat the cost of the drive in a deal they made with the manufacturer. Someday they’ll have a clue that the data on most drives is worth far more than the hardware, and that their potential liability, if the data ends up in the hands of an identity thief, is also much greater.

Susan Kitchens: “The arrogance just takes my breath away.”

A list worth studying 

Here’s the Wikipedia list of Democratic super-delegates.

A peek behind the screen 

Jim Posner sent me a link yesterday to an MP3 of a conference call between the press and two members of the Clinton campaign. It’s really illuminating.

There are controversies the press isn’t reporting, esp betw the Clinton campaign and NBC. Will there be a debate on Feb 26 and will CNN host it or MSNBC? There’s some doubt, but you can’t see it when you watch the broadcasts.

I’d love to subscribe to a feed of these conference calls, but we only happened to stumble upon this one. This morning on MSNBC they were talking about a conference call with Hillary Clinton, they said she sounded tired. I’d like to hear that for myself.

There’s a difference in 2008, the campaign is not just being covered by the professional media, the people are doing it too. Even if we don’t have our people on the calls, I’d still like to hear them.

So, if you have an idea how we could catch a stream of these, please post a comment. Thanks.

PS: I archived the MP3 in case the link above goes bad.

Scripting News for 2/11/2008

Scripting the iPod, day 2 

Continuing the thread from yesterday.

I got absolutely nowhere, some people suggested I use a smart playlist, missing the point that I’m a developer working on a podcatcher, not a user trying to use iTunes as a podcatcher. I’m sure it’s an excellent way to subscribe to podcasts, but I have my own ideas how podcatchers should work, and I want to integrate them with other stuff I’m working on. Integrating with iTunes is proving to be quite a challenge, or maybe it’s an art, we’ll see.

As usual Mac users are superior sumbitches.

(Quoting the James Brolin character the first time we meet him in the third season finale of The West Wing.)

Anyway, the search continues, I tried another more direct tack, and looked for glue for iTunes for UserLand, and bingo, there’s a match, from 2001, a well-known Frontier programmer Sean Elfstrom, apparently converted glue for the Sonic SoundJam app that iTunes used to be, before Apple acquired it.

I installed the glue in the OPML Editor. It’s daunting, for sure, but let’s see what I can get working.

Scripting News for 2/10/2008

Happy birthday XML 

According to Tim Bray, and he ought to know, today is the 10th birthday of XML.

XML is good basic technology that we’ve built lots of stuff on.

It’s certainly not perfect, but nothing is, it’s a good example of Less Is More and Worse Is Better.

It has also been the subject of many dramatic political battles. But thankfully, that seems to be behind us now. Today, we just use XML, and it serves us well.

Thanks to the originators of XML and the W3C for seeing it through.

PS: My branch of the RSS tree was 10 years old in December, and XML-RPC will celebrate its 10th in March. This period in 1997 and 1998 was, in retrospect, a very productive period in web tech.

Scripting the iPod 

A Sunday morning exploration…

I want to write a script to move podcasts from my Mac hard disk to my New Podcasts playlist on my iPod.

More simply: A script to add an MP3 file to a playlist on an iPod. If it has to go through iTunes, so be it. It must be relatively simple and reliable.

I can write the script in AppleScript, but I’d prefer to write it in UserTalk so that porting to Windows (if possible) won’t be a completely new project.

Update #1: I found this tool from Peter Breuls. (It doesn’t contain any code for copying to an iPod.)

Update #2: This 2003 post from Adam Curry mentions a script created by “Marcus” that does what I want.

Yahoo + Microsoft, reloaded 

If you search for Yahoo Microsoft, this page is the second hit. I like that of course. It’s generating a fair amount of flow, since the combination of Yahoo and Microsoft is a pretty hot topic.

Keeping the topic going, I think it’s pretty amazing that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, but then again, which of all their web efforts has captured our imagination? At least Yahoo has Flickr, and when they try something new, we all try it with them (often with not the greatest results).

The rambling continues…

If Yahoo is into poison pills, try this one out.

Reserve 5 percent of Yahoo’s common stock for blogger options. Put us to work to find new businesses for Yahoo, ones that are relevant to our world. When we find them, reward the bloggers with a significant upside stake in Yahoo’s future, not the airy-fairy kind, but real stock that we can trade. Handled properly, it could raise shareholder value by much more than 5 percent. Just the kind of deal they pay you to do, oh Yahoo gods and board members.

Of course it’ll never happen. It’s an idea like the one I keep proposing for newspapers — that they hire their public editors from the public, independent bloggers with no journalism experience, with no undue reverence for the institutions so revered by journos. They’re going away, just like Yahoo is (sad but true). Now what will rise in their place? Imho, something that’s home grown, with the integrity of the people, in our interest. The more they invite the public in, the more clued in they will be when we figure out where we want to go with news on the web.

It’s why I’m excited about the Obama campaign and why I keep giving to it (I’m up to $400 now). I’m excited because so many other people are excited.

I like his idea about tuition for public service for college students. It’s so simple. People want to be involved, they want to use their energy and creativity to solve problems. In the 20th century we were couch potatoes. In the 21st we do it for ourselves.

The first tech company that fully embraces this, not just in the form of User Generated Content (what an insult) but by giving us power (that comes from stock) will rule the world. If Y! had the guts, it won’t be long before they’re making tender offers to buy out Ballmer.

BTW, I think I understand why Ballmer wants Yahoo!

When Yahoo engineers wake up they program stuff like Yahoo Live, which is pretty cool and runs on the web, and while it steals ideas from smaller companies, it adds some pretty cool stuff of its own.

When Microsoft engineers wake up they program stuff like Vista, a multi-year, multi-billion dollar waste of money, time and customer goodwill. They can’t do another Vista without wrecking the franchise. Now the question is — where do they go for growth? That’s what Yahoo is for.

Mini-Microsoft: “Give me that dream and a milkshake and at least I get to enjoy the milkshake.”

Greenspun: “If I were a Yahoo shareholder, I would be looking at purchasing an old battleship, sail it into San Francisco Bay, and lobbing some shells on the Board members’ houses in Atherton.