Scripting News for 2/7/2006

Todd Sampson: “A Podcast is just Radio 2.0.” 

Rex Hammock: “I was just IM’d by a female reader of this weblog who informed me she was dropping what she was doing so she could run grab a Big Mac.” 

I’ve been saying this for ages. Good ads are a draw. Make more good ads. Entertaining or informative, or better, both. 

Jason Calacanis now believes Nick Denton isn’t selling Gawker, despite the rumors.  

To Matthew Ingram, imho, whether a blog has comments or not does not effect its blogness. For one thing, when I point to a post that has comments then basically I have comments. For whatever reason, people seem to be more polite when posting in someone else’s space (as opposed to my space). As you climb a tree, the higher you go, more people want to throw stuff at you, pretty soon all you get is the junk. It usually seems to happen in Year 2 if the blog is growing. Before that they say things like “It’s not a blog if it doesn’t have comments.” Then they start appreciating why it’s actually more fun and interesting (and liberating) to write without having a critics section stinking up your living room. Basically mail lists are conversations. Blogs are something different. In fact I think blogs with comments aren’t really blogs. How about that!  

I took a detour from my project, and did something that’s just plain fun and makes my head spin. If you head on over to my WordPress blog, you’ll see something that looks fairly familiar. A linkblog, in WordPress you ask? Yes, a very very old linkblog. And it updates automatically. And what does it mean? I don’t know! 🙂 

TechCrunch from Demo: “Great companies. Too bad there is no Internet access here so that we can write about them.” 

BBC: Podcasts reach Peruvian villages. 

NY Times: “Attorney General Alberto R Gonzales told a sometimes skeptical group of senators today that the Bush administration’s domestic eavesdropping program is legal, constitutional and vital to national security in a time of terrorism.” 

Richard MacManus rates the “meme trackers.” 

Amyloo says what I’ve been saying. Too many feeds in a reading list makes for an overwhelming user experience. Before you publish a reading list you should try using a few to get an idea what it’s like. In most situations, ten feeds is a lot of feeds for a reading list.  

Paolo describes his ideal RSS reader. 

My pain-staking project 

Interesting word, pain-staking. I understand the pain part, but what about “staking.”

Living in the East Bay, as I do, the Bay Bridge looms large in my life. It’s the only road to San Francisco from where I live, and it’s a traffic nightmare and is not in anyway your normal bridge. To begin with, it’s actually two bridges. There’s an island in the middle of the bay, the first bridge takes you from Oakland to the island, a tunnel takes you through the island and onto the second bridge which goes to San Francisco. That in itself would be fairly remarkable if it weren’t for the fact that they’re building a whole new bridge next to the first one, and they’re completely tearing down the approach to the bridge on the San Francisco side.

My car, which is less than a year old, has a GPS system that’s totally out of date wrt to the streets on the other side. Every day the roads go somewhere else, and when its done, I imagine it will be something like what driving in Boston is like now, a marvel of efficiency, tunnels from every where to every other where. But in the meantime, driving to the city is so pain-ful, as opposed to pain-staking, that you just take BART instead, which zooms you through all that without a care. It really is transparent and user friendly.

Now I have my own Bay Bridge construction project, which is part of the OPML Editor project. See, I use the OPML Editor to write Scripting News, but until now I’ve used an application on the back-end that I wrote when I was in Cambridge, called Channel Z. I am in the process of scrapping it, in favor of a very small back-end that ties into the OPML Editor’s back-end, which will be my server environment.

So right now editing my site is very much like driving through Boston during the Big Dig, or driving across the Bay Bridge today, but someday soon I hope it will be like riding BART.

PS 

It’s not pain-staking, it’s pains-taking.

Makes much more sense! 🙂