Today’s links 
Slingbox supports AppleTV.
Adam Curry has a gripe with SplashCast.
The #87th most influential person in IT.
How to design a podcast player
Notes from today’s *excellent* discussion.
It’s listed as a panel, but I’m the only official panelist. 🙂
Our topic of dicussion is, officially, How to design a podcast player.
I wrote a piece about this, with three points, in February.
1. Self-contained, untethered synchronization, much the same way a Blackberry gets email.
2. Read-write, two-way, should be able to record and connect with a publishing system for automatic upload and feed production.
3. Must be a platform, that is, people other than the manufacturer can add apps.
After we discuss that, we’ll talk about whatever people want to talk about.
Some more ideas…
1. Checkbox News.
3. Spreadsheet calls over the Internet.
WebFS
WebFS is a “web services protocol used to exchange files and associated metadata between web applications and services. It’s primary intentions are to allow the free-flow of files and data between web services and applications.”
I’m sitting next to Nick Cubrilovic of Omnidrive, who is developing this protocol as an interface to his service, and is working on an open source implementation as well.
Other developers are working on it, but he doesn’t have clearance to reveal their names.
He has a private mail list that’s he opening up.
Bay Area Outage, Day 2
Raines has an outage update. Like Raines, I made my way from Berkeley to the Oakland Airport yesterday, without incident or traffic. I also took city streets and avoided the Maze, my route would have taken me through the section of freeway that’s missing!
Bradley Horowitz, who lives in Berkeley and works at Yahoo has a daily two-way traffic nightmare to look forward to. Maybe enlightened high-tech employers will take this opportunity to distribute their workplace.
Governor Schwartzenegger has declared BART free for all today. What a trip that’s going to be. It’ll be hard to get a seat on the Richmond line. 🙂
My Twitter Friends, Day 2
Yesterday I documented the new My Twitter Friends feature in the OPML Editor.
At the time I hadn’t tested OPML inclusion in a Twitter post, but today I had a chance (while watching the Microsoft keynotes) and it worked.
Here’s a screen shot with an outline expanded.
And here’s the Twitter post that created the link.
Blogzone video
I’m hanging out with Scoble at the Blogzone at the Venetian. We’re going to watch the keynote here. There’s a guy in an Elvis outfit here. Really embarassed for the guy.
This happens to me too
Ross Mayfield: “I was reading the NY Times and glanced at the top right of the page looking for the time.”
Wikipedia editing
Yesterday I did something I had never done before, I edited an article on Wikipedia. And then I edited another.
The first one was about the MacArthur Maze. It had already been updated to include the outage, I just fixed some typos, and rearranged the words so they flowed better. Then I decided to link to my page of links about the news, expecting that would be reverted in a few days at most as the full story was documented, but it was reverted within minutes, as were all my other edits.
Then I decided to look at the RSS page to see if it linked to the RSS 2.0 spec. It didn’t, so I added a link. I haven’t been back to see if that has been reverted. BTW, most of that page is worthless, things that never happened, Rove-like spin from god knows who. That’s the thing about Wikipedia, it’s a free-for-all slamfest, and you don’t have a right to confront your accusers. Feh.
Scripting News Annex 
Posted by Jason Lefkowitz on April 30, 2007 at 7:12 am
“you don’t have a right to confront your accusers.”
Actually, you do, sort of — every Wikipedia article has an associated “Talk” page where you can challenge the page’s content, or even argue that a specific editor (or IP address, if they’re anonymous) should be locked out of further edits because of posting false/misleading/non-NPOV stuff.
Here’s the Talk page for the entry on RSS. You can see that the discussion in there is pretty lively, and you’re not the only one who’s dissatisfied with the quality of the article.
It’s not “confronting accusers” in the sense of going face to face with them, but it does let you challenge their right to make edits if you believe they’re editing in bad faith.
Posted by Dave Winer on April 30, 2007 at 7:32 am
Jason, I know all about it, that’s a fig leaf, an excuse for what amounts to defamation and slander. I don’t have the patience or time. And since it’s my work they’re sliming, I find it degrading even humiliating to be dragged down to the level that Wikipedia takes it to.
I think that the solution is obvious — Wikipedia shouldn’t try to cover things like RSS. There are too many trolls camped out there to get anywhere. Whenever anything gets fixed, they just revert it back to the way they like it. Leave subject like this to people with reputations to lose, who put their names on their accusations, not an IP address or alias.
Posted by Bradley Horowitz on April 30, 2007 at 7:58 am
So far, much ado about nothing for me… Today I took San Pablo down to Brush to 880… Actually made it to Sunnyvale in about 49m which is below average.
In terms of distributed workplaces… Amen! My teams are splayed across Berkeley, Sunnyvale, London and now San Francisco… and I just tell people to work wherever they can get their job best done (including from home.) As long as you are kicking ass, I sure don’t care where your body be…
That being said, the guys in London will tell you that being many timezones away and outta the loop on the hallway conversations comes at a huge cost. So most of them are moving (or haved moved) here…
Posted by Amyloo on April 30, 2007 at 10:05 am
“reading the NY Times and glanced at the top right of the page looking for the time”
OK, but have you ever done this? Tap on an item on your list while in the grocery store in hopes of being teleported to the aisle where it’s shelved.
Posted by billg on April 30, 2007 at 10:11 am
Remember those strap-on James Bond-ish rocket packs we were all supposed to be using by now? Too bad they never came to fruition. You all could use them right now.
Posted by Anton2000 on April 30, 2007 at 1:38 pm
BEST ADVICE: BE FLEXIBLE!
Posted by Christian Burns on April 30, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Looking forward to hearing that that session on how to design a podcast player. I hope it got recorded 🙂
Posted by Dave Winer on April 30, 2007 at 5:13 pm
It definitely got recorded, and it was great. Lots of ideas.
Posted by Jake on May 1, 2007 at 3:30 am
How is requirement #2 part of a podcast player:
2. Read-write, two-way, should be able to record and connect with a publishing system for automatic upload and feed production.
Maybe a podcaster’s device.
Posted by Christian Burns on May 1, 2007 at 2:38 pm
@Jake
Because this is more than a podcast playing device. The essence of podcasting is two way, and we have yet to tap that for the average user. With a device that has these three rules enabled, podcasting will be as easy as blogging, once someone writes the tools.