Scripting News
Dave Winer's weblog, started in April 1997, bootstrapped the blogging revolution. URL
http://www.scripting.com/
Last update
17 hours 56 min ago May 15, 2008
04:33
They just announced that they bought rolodex company Plaxo.
Price rumored to be betw $100 and $200 million.
Media sharing? Comcast? You gotta be kidding. What a joke.
Maybe they can share the rolodex of the people they just bought and try to work with creative media technology people instead of threatening to fire them as customers.
Just sayin.
May 14, 2008
20:18
And fucking Twitter is fucking down.
Fuck!
14:59
See also: Interview with Nicco Mele, the man behind the $1000 reward.
08:29
I like video comments, didn't think I would but I do. I think people are more responsible and throughtful when their words are backed by their voice and face.
So when Daniel at Disqus and Loic at Seesmic asked if I would let them use Scripting News as one of the places they rolled out their new partnership I said Yes and I would be honored (I said it weeeth ze Franch agzent).
I thought they were going to roll it out at 11AM Eastern, but I see Fred Wilson has already posted on it.
We already have some video comments ( Scoble was first, of course, followed by Steve Garfield) so here we go, a new era in conversational blogging.
And congrats to the good folk at Disqus and Seesmic for making this a reality.
PS: A disadvantage of video comments -- it's hard to hear them in a crowded terminal waiting for a plane to Boston.
PPS: Why do people talk so quietly when they're leaving video comments? Sounds like they don't want to wake someone up.
May 13, 2008
22:11
I'm accumulating a photo log of my east coast trip on Flickr.
There's a puzzle on one of the pics. Why are bus signs so high off the ground? Hint: It has nothing to do with snow.
21:26
Tuesdays bring political news and today is no different.
First, an op-ed in today's New York TImes from 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. I worked for McGovern, he was the last candidate before Obama that I believed in, this was when there was a draft and a war, and I was draft age, but not old enough to vote.
Something I didn't know -- Hubert Humphrey led a challenge to the California delegation that made McGovern and his staff fight for the nomination through the convention, and according to McG this led to his defeat in November. This was news to me.
McGovern wrote: "After winning the California primary in June, I thought I had the nomination in hand. But a desperate slash-and-burn effort was pressed against me by the candidates I had defeated. California's delegates that year were allocated under a winner-take-all system, but my opponents -- led by Senator Hubert Humphrey, my lifelong friend -- began clamoring to change the rules and to assign the state's delegates proportionally."
The whole story is good reading. Also division in the Democratic Party led to the election of Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1980.
Key takeaway -- HRC is playing with fire when they hold out the possibility of fighting Obama's nomination all the way to the convention.
She won as expected tonight in West Virginia. Her speech was not in any way a concession, she's not looking to land the plane. Her advocates are talking dangerous election-losing talk.
Meanwhile, as Mickeleh says on Twitter, the really big news of the night -- the Dems won a special election in Mississippi, a district that the Republicans fought hard for. Mississippi is deep in the heart of Republican territory. Olbermann said it's as if the Dems lost a seat in Brooklyn. It's serious and very positive news for change.
Poor Huckabee was on MSNBC when the news of the Childers win came in. He didn't spin, came right out and said the news was every bit as bad for Republicans as it appears. Russert gave him credit for saying openly what Republicans had been saying privately.
Meanwhile President Bush predictably, desperately threw FUD at the process, warning that if Obama is elected there could be another major terrorist attack on US soil. Thanks for the terrorism, Mr. President.
09:41
I'm at the offices of Betaworks in New York, meeting with CEO John Borthwick who I know for many years from AOL.
They have built a product called Firefly which is rolling out tonight at the Tech Meetup in New York.
He just gave me a demo and my first reaction was "You can't do that," then I asked if I could put a demo of it on Scripting News today and he said (to my surprise) Yes.
It's so weird it's practically illegal. You can watch people's mouse move around the page, and then chat with them. Go ahead and give it a try.
May 11, 2008
08:51
From time to time people ask what the images in the margins of Scripting News mean. I don't think I've ever answered the question on the blog itself.
There are many answers to the question because they mean whatever you want them to mean. The point is to stimulate creativity. If I wrote an article about Fidel Castro, for example, and put a fiery picture of Fidel next to the piece it would satisfy curiosity. "I wonder what he looks like?" Suspense eliminated. That kind of imagery serves to quell creativity, to push it down, stifle it. It answers questions as opposed to raising them. Lowers entropy instead of increasing it.
My goal is to stimulate thinking. If people say they disagree with me -- excellent. Sometimes I disagree too. There are many sides to every question, and many of them are valid. To fix on one answer as being the only one would be to eliminate creativity, imagination. It's why stories told on radio can be so incredibly vivid compared to movies or TV. You get to supply the visuals. So if the meaning isn't obvious, you get to find your own meaning. That's better sometimes than filling in all the blanks. Create new blanks.
My pictures are supposed to raise questions. The first one might be "Why did he put that there?" You may find you have an answer, but know that that's your answer, not anyone else's. It says something about you. Or you might look at the picture and say "That's a weird picture" and not give it another thought. That's also a valid answer. Or you might be tired of the pictures and see one and choose not to read the article. More power to you!
Esther Dyson once sent an email asking why there was a big picture of herself next to an article that had nothing to do with her. "I thought it was an interesting picture" is what I said. I told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
I once got a call from a neighbor when I lived in the country, she said she was going to get some baby goats, and they might make a lot of noise as they were being weaned from their mother. I asked why she was getting the goats. She said she always wanted goats.
That's pretty much what the images mean.
08:47
To every yin there's a yang. Here's a brilliant counterpoint to what I've been writing here about decentralizing Twitter. I've excerpted the last paragraph because it is some of the best tech writing I've ever read. Wonderful.
Echovar: "The idea of building competitors to Twitter on the same platform, or redistributing Twitter to multiple players reminds me of the idea that New York City should be rebuilt in Ohio because it would be cheaper. Or perhaps we could distribute a little of New York City in every state of the Union. New York City is what it is because of the people who live and visit there. Building another New York City in Las Vegas doesn't result in the phenomenon that is New York City. In a very important sense, Twitter is decentralized at its core, it is rhizomatic rather than arborescent."
Now go read the whole thing, please.
PS: As has been pointed out by several emailers, the idea of relocating cities in the virtual world appeared in a piece I wrote yesterday, where I said indeed it does happen. It can't happen in the real world. But in defense of echovar, it would only happen if there were a war where platform vendors were fighting in vain to lock us in, and only when Twitter was so mature that we understood every nuance of how it's used. Yes, we are, today, locked into Twitter. And I'm not comfortable about that. Eventually, relocating New York may be what we have to do. Charles Cooper is very correct though in his piece on this subject, it's time for Twitter to get into this discussion and tell us what their thoughts are.
May 10, 2008
14:52
Oh the political debate is getting interesting!
Assuming the Democratic nomination is actually decided, then what is Hillary Clinton's future role?
Last night on Larry King I heard Carole Simpson, a black woman, supporter of HRC, say that it's white men calling for her to withdraw. ( Transcript.)
Stephanie Miller chimed in "I have ovaries."
Even so, it seems to me that people of all genders are conspicuously not asking Clinton to withdraw out of respect for her power, which she has a lot of. What she does with that power now will have a lot to do with what happens next. I know that's pretty waffly, but I don't know how else to say it. She could blow something up. She could ask women to get angry. If she does, it seems there will be some angry women. Maybe many very angry women. Scary thought. No sarcasm.
Perhaps her role will be analogous to Al Sharpton, sharp-tongued rallier of specialized anger.
HRC is potentially a political leader of women unlike any leader we've ever seen. There have been some powerful women politicians -- Bella Abzug, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Nancy Pelosi.
But what will Hillary do with her power?
09:53
There's a game being played on Twitter that goes like this.
"When Obama wins..."
The game is to fill in the blank creatively. .
Here are some examples.
Here's my entry.
09:38
The tech industry is organized around the concept of wars. In recent memory, the browser wars, the Java wars, before that there were wars over email APIs, desktops, GUIs, networking standards, you name it, if there's money to be made in controlling users, there's been a war to lock those users in. It's been that way since the dawn of time, and it will always be that way. It's in human nature.
It's also in human nature for the users to realize they're being used, get fed up, and create or discover the technology for themselves thereby routing around all the warring parties. It's as if the citizens of France during WWII got fed up with the Germans and the Allies, and decided to create a new France on new land and all move there, leaving the armies to fight over nothing. You can't do it in the real world, but it's how it works in the virtual world.
Having seen a number of these wars, and seeing each of them end not in triumph, but irrelevance, I believe we're getting closer to the end in the warfare defined by social networks. That's the real lesson behind this article by Mike Arrington, about the three companies throwing vapor at each other, two publicly, MySpace and Facebook, and Google in the back channel. Somewhere lurking back there are Microsoft and Yahoo, each with also-rans no doubt coming soon. I wouldn't pay too much attention to what the big players do here, they will be too constrained by BigCo thought processes, and a desire to appear to be giving stuff away without actually giving anything away.
Open is a funny thing, you can't be partially open. You can't edge your way toward open. You can't be open and hold the valuable stuff in reserve for yourself. BigCo's can't afford to do what it takes to coalesce a popular maturing technology around their own platform. It won't happen in BigCoLand. Only a little dude with nothing to lose can choose to build around something truly open. (The big guys are always forced to, eventually.)
The most famous war-collapse was when the web took over from the warfare between Microsoft and the Taligent team (Apple, IBM, Borland, Novell, lots of others). They were all busy blowing smoke at each other over the users when out of nowhere a network that had been around longer than any of them, that had already solved every problem they were trying to solve that was worth solving, swooped in and doused all the warfare. How? The users fell in love, and as we know, love is a very powerful force.
My guess, if I had to make one, is that the social network that we will all be building on in the coming years is already out there. It could be Twitter, after it's federated, or it could be what FriendFeed is teasing about. Or it could be two kids in a garage that no one is paying attention to. Keep your eyes and ears open and trust your gut, you'll know it when you see it.
May 8, 2008
20:17
We're working to build a scalable, beautiful new TwitterGram, an application built on the super-powerful SwitchAbit platform.
16:40
This post on TechCrunch started a bit of discussion.
Ben Metcalfe posted an interesting video comment there, embedded below.
14:44
I just uploaded a song I recorded on Tuesday to Pownce. After two tries, it worked. You have to be logged in to download the song but anyone can play it. Hmmm. That removes one potential application I had in mind, Pownce as a podcast-serving platform.
Here's a screen shot of the post.
Anyone should be able to listen to the song even if they're not a member of Pownce.
Screen shot of the prefs page for public/not public.
Update: Sometime after it was uploaded it stopped working, people were unable to download the song. Obviously there are still some glitches to work out.
10:25
I just posted a Tweet: "After seeing comments blossom in FriendFeed, it seems either Twitter should have comments, or extend the API so someone else can add them."
Why?
1. People still reply to tweets, expecting a response in a tweet. It's noise to most of my followers. They send responses (to me) asking what am I responding to. If I answer that, then other people ask what I'm responding to in explaining the other person's response. Twitter is not symmetric, that's a good feature, but it makes for a shitty conversation medium, imho.
2. Far more people use Twitter than use FriendFeed. Yes, I think it's great there are APIs and that makes it possible for FriendFeed to build on what Twitter does. But it is a competitive market and ideas should slosh around among all the products.
3. The length of this post should provide a clue why comments would be good in Twitter. I started writing #1 in Twitter itself, and went over 140 chars before I had expressed a single idea.
09:19
Twitter is still my mainstay in microblogging, but I'm using FriendFeed more, and today Pownce removed an important limit that will make it useful in a way that neither Twitter or FriendFeed are. And because all three have APIs and excellent support for RSS, the chances to combine their strengths makes it possible for each to specialize.
Where Pownce is developing strength is in the area of payloads, but until today they were limited to members of Pownce and for non-pro users, to friends of the uploaders. Now it's possible to upload files that can be downloaded by anyone. The size limit for payloads used to be 10MB, now it's 100MB, and for pro users 250MB. Interesting new applications should be possible, making it competitive with services such as YouTube and blip.tv, and because it has an API it's possible to develop applications with Pownce that are not possible with other services.
May 7, 2008
19:53
Fred's heart is in the right place. He puts money behind technology he likes. This is bootstrapping. Then he bothers the developers with features he needs. He's a bootstrapper and a hacker. Then Fred reads articles written by other people and listens to a Tim O'Reilly keynote and tries to get everyone into agreement. Reminds me of The Negotiator, William Shatner.
Fred believes in triangulating, I do too. It's how you find the truth. Obviously I agree with Fred's conclusion -- just today I was working with Jay at Switchabit on a very small project. We spec'd it out, I went to work on it, and after I did it the way we discussed I realized there was a much more direct and simple way to do it, so I re-did it, and again I realized it was too complicated, and I re-did it, sent him a report, he integrated it into his project agreeing that it was much better than what we discussed.
People who believe in big-bangs miss that you learn stuff while you're implementing stuff and that learning should be recycled back into the project, again and again.
There was an excellent series on PBS a few years back called Connections; in each episode they take you through a series of developments how little pieces of one thing became something much bigger, you start with something small and every step of the way make small improvements and before you know it you're standing on the moon saying "One small step for man..."
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
I've heard bootstrapping described as "paving the cowpaths."
Twitter was a bootstrap too. There were a lot of small things that needed to get solved before Twitter could work. It may look like it popped up out of nowhere if you don't know how the pieces came together, but if you do...
One thing that's feeding epiphany for me is that I'm working with Scott Rosenberg on his history of blogging, which promises to be a great book, and reliving all the steps that got us to where we are.
15:47
1. There's no doubt now, Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee, and very likely the next President. I doubt if McCain has the sense of entitlement that HRC had but he's going to run on experience, and we don't want experience, we want intelligence, honesty and change.
2. Obama will show up once or twice in Kentucky and West Virginia, but it will be relaxed, he'll do big rallies, town halls, meetups, take a bowling lesson, shoot some hoops.
3. At the same time he'll tour the following states: Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Illinois, Virginia. I must be leaving some out. The point -- illustrate for everyone who might have been listening to HRC that he gets that these are the important states for any Democrat, and it doesn't matter that HRC got more votes in some of these states, he plans to compete to win all of them. Campaigning in those states signals that he's on to the next phase of his candidacy.
4. Take a breather, prepare for HRC's concession, a big party somewhere, and then off to Europe in June to meet with the leaders of the western alliance. A motorcade down the Champs Elysees. The family visits with Gordon Brown's family. Pay respects to the Queen of England. Show the folks back home that in the Obama Administration the US will have many challenges, but we'll also have lots of friends to help.
What else? Not sure. What do you think??
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