Scripting News for 8/24/2006

Today’s Rocketboom covers the NYTimesRiver. Thanks! 

Realized I had not officially announced the BBCRiver. Works great on Blackberry, Treo, web-enabled mobile device. 🙂 

USCourts.gov: “The next time you see someone pop on the headphones and get that faraway look in his or her eyes, don’t be so sure it’s a tune that’s beguiling them. It just may be the latest oral arguments from the Seventh Circuit.” 

Wired: “It’s easy to forget that one of the reasons people were so excited about Napster back in the day was the social networking aspect.” 

Netflix announces its mobile site.  

Amazon surprises us again. EC2 does for computing what S3 does for storage. I’m scratching my head, in a good way. What does their virtual machine run? Their only code sample is in Java. Postscript: Colin Faulkingham sheds some light. 

Jon Udell’s screencast demoing EC2.  

David Galbraith: “EC2 allows you to put a disk image of a Linux machine onto Amazon S3 (their remote storage service) and create a virtual machine by installing from there onto EC2.” 

Marc Canter notes what we’ve also been noting. Google’s development strategy looks more and more like the one that got Microsoft in so much trouble in the 90s. We gave them perfectly good ways of moving data around, so developers could use any company’s infrastructure. Google reinvents it so you can only use theirs. I recommend going some other way, for now. And Google, we want to ride up front, with you, not locked in the trunk, with uncertain air supply. 

Phil Jones: “The silliest thing, ever, is people getting all uptight because Dave is “arrogant.” 

A union of explainers and justifiers? 

Thanks Doc. We should start a union of explainers and justifiers who respond to the kvetchers and complainers who say we have no right to do anything new, or find a new angle on something that’s been done before. I don’t think I need to justify that I’ve contributed a lot of innovation here, yet that’s what the other folk are making an issue of. Heh. My first river of news aggregator first appeared in 1999, when RSS was new. I’ve been doing them ever since. This was the week when the concept finally caught on, imho. As with outliners, that needed bullet charts to justify them to many people, the river of news concept needed mobile devices. As payloads for RSS (2000) needed podcasting to give it a purpose (2004).

The way technology works, for those who care about such things: Start with a vision you believe in, and keep trying to find ways to show others how powerful it is. Over and over, often for years.

Outliners took eight years from idea to product of the year. Podcasting took four years. River of news took seven. This is opposite the myth of invention, the Eureka moment when everyone sees the idea. The moment often takes years to play out. Maybe it always does. But when you finally break through, savor the moment, and don’t pay any attention to the ballast. (Also, I find that the people with the biggest problems often turn out to be competitiors. It’s a dishonorable way to compete. Much better to try to give users more good stuff, not try to keep them looking at stuff they like.)