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Permanent link to archive for Sunday, April 23, 2000. Sunday, April 23, 2000

WebReview: An Editor's Guide to Writers: "In the coming digital milieu, the editor will reign supreme, the lord and master of content. All the more reason to hone to a glittering rapier's edge one's skill in dealing with troublesome, headstrong writers. Either that or brandish a handgun." Ouch.

4/4/00: "Free the MSIE development team at Microsoft. Cut it loose. Give it a lot of money. Let someone outside of Microsoft drive it. Someone that Web developers, including Microsoft, could talk with. And make it a profit center, so that it will enable competition."

Dan Gillmor: "Another nutty proposal would require Microsoft to sell off the browser software." Why nutty?

Dueling weblogs. Dan sent me an email, and said it would be easy for the OS company to screw the browser company, but I disagree. The OS company would not be free to compete in browsers. Easy to enforce. The only way they could get HTML rendering is through third parties, such as the MSIE company. And if it's hard for the OS company because of sloppy engineering, well them's the breaks. (Get a Mac.)

BTW, Dan's proposal that they split between OS and Office is nutty. (Sorry I couldn't resist.)

Washington Post: Write Here. Libel There. "Americans may not always like how the First Amendment protects others (their neighbors, TV tabloids, Matt Drudge), but they care deeply about their right to free expression. They may take it for granted that this right will follow along with the words and images that they now send effortlessly (and sometimes inadvertently) across national borders. They shouldn't."

Chuck Shotton posted the source for his BIAP Chat Applet. Later in the week he'll release the source for NetEvents. BTW, BIAP stands for brain-in-a-pan.

NY Times essay by venture capitalist Tim Draper. "Creative marketing doesn't have to be expensive, but I know that when a company has a breakthrough and customers are anxious to buy, it is time to pour in the rocket fuel."

Hey Tim, if you've got a minute, here's an idea for you. Think about starting a worldwide ISP that has really high integrity and big pipes with replicated data and automatic switchover when there's an outage. And one other very important thing. No interest in the content it carries, so we can resell the service, without adding impossible limits to our user agreement. Now that would be a viral app! (Futuristic too, all the vendor agreements we've seen so far take out all 4000+ of our sites if one of them breaks the agreement. Not something an Internet entrepreneur can build on.)

Hey email works. Dan Lynch forwarded my email to Ellen Hancock, and she responded. Good!

BTW, I didn't get a response to my email to Conxion's John Seamster. Less than a week until we move the remaining servers to Exodus. We're reviewing all the scripts that make up UserLand.Com and finding code that depends on IP addresses beginning with 206.204.24. Put this on the best-practices list. No more hard-coded IP addresses, just symbolic names. In the meantime, if you're running an ETP site, think if you have any of these in your sites. They won't work after the switchover.

And if you want to know why we do it, why we go through all this angst and michegas with ISPs, read this DaveNet piece. The writer's web. We are the only software company who cares to build systems for writers. From top to bottom, soup to nuts.

You know why information about outages is so scarce? Because the people who are out can't talk. And when they come back online they're so busy catching up they don't have time to document the experience.

I got an idea, Weblogs.Com might be able to spot outages elsewhere. I whipped up an outages page that shows the weblogs it thinks are currently out. As you might imagine, it shows problems with the weblogmonitor app too, not just with other servers and ISPs. Investigating..

blivet: "The ISP services in Las Vegas really are in sore need of some competition"

DSL Reports reviews ISPs and monitors outages.

Speaking of outages, everyone wants to know what happened to Carpe Diem. No posts since March 17.

Christopher Hanson, the first baby born in our community, is starting to look like a person.

Sheila took pics at Seattle's Safeco Field, which is very much like PacBell Park in SF. PacBell sucks.

Philly Future: Sports Stadium Update.

I spent much of the afternoon rebuilding the Scripting News-via-email server. I'm fairly confident the emails will go out at 10PM tonight.

More attic cleaning, came across this hilarious animated gif.

Marc Canter in Trieste.

     

Last update: Monday, April 24, 2000 at 4:10 AM Eastern.

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