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Permanent link to archive for Friday, March 02, 2001. Friday, March 02, 2001

DaveNet: Me and Microsoft.

News.Com: "Napster said it has created a way to screen individual file names that would likely go into effect this weekend. Potentially millions of files will be blocked at that time, Napster attorney David Boies said."

Tim O'Reilly interviewed Microsoft's Jim Allchin. Here's the gist of Allchin's statement. Microsoft is opposed to the US government investing in software licensed under the GPL, since it would not allow Microsoft, a US company that pays taxes, to use the software. He didn't say it's un-American to do so, but I do. It's a simple obvious point. Software created by the public must be accessible to the public.

Andrew Gore: Requiem for a Magazine. A bit of our youth goes poof. I remember when MacWEEK started up. For 10 points who was the founding editor? No, it wasn't Dan Ruby or Dan Farber.

Dan Gillmor found this wonderful one-month old story about Jeff Bezos. It begins "One of the great mysteries of the day is why any investor anywhere would continue to listen to Amazon.com, Inc. chairman, president and CEO, Jeffrey Bezos, about anything anymore.."

Hey I got Slashdotted again! Yow. Thank you thank you.

Seems like Tom Bradford is sticking with the XML Bastard theme.

I knew I'd get pushback from today's piece, but it's my truth. It took me a long time to realize how deep the resentment had set over Microsoft control of the Web. Now that doesn't mean I don't want to work with Microsoft -- I do. But before that could really happen, I needed to let them know who I am and where I stand. A lot of the discussions lately have been unrealistic.

See yesterday's piece for a metaphoric version of the story.

Also, as the SOAP communities develop, let's get connected. The tendency at large companies like Microsoft is to work within their own boundaries, and to value relationships with other companies their own size, and for indies that's basically a one-way flow. That's OK of course, but if they won't budge, the only chance we have, the independent developers, is to work with each other.

BTW, I just read the SlashDot discussion and it's fantastic. Learning a lot.

Mail starting 3/2/01.

Remember when we debated What is .NET?

Hilary Rosen: "If there is a vacuum in the marketplace, it will be filled by pirates."

Steve Jobs: "We're going to let them grab it out of our hands."

David Wheeler: "Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection."

Guy Kawasaki: "Suddenly I've been portrayed as Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein all rolled into one!"

Queue: "A long braid of hair worn hanging down the back of the neck; a pigtail."

Evan Williams: "I guess we'll probably be blogging from hovercraft and wearing shiny suits."

UserLand's inner-Microsoft? Permanent link to 'UserLand's inner-Microsoft?' in archives.

Radio has Blogging tool (its name changed to "Weblog" late in the process, which makes me sad, but it was the right decision). So I'll continue to call it the Blogging tool for a bit longer. Maybe I'll never stop!

Anyway. Radio can save your blog to your local hard drive, in the www folder, and this works because Radio is also a Web server, and if you have a high-speed line and a fast computer and like to live close to the edge, this can be fun. There's no simpler way to run a Blog.

You can also upstream your blog to a UserLand server, which gives you a long-but-free URL. You can also FTP your blog to any server you want. And as a bonus, you can mirror your blog on the home page of a Manila site. And it's not an either-or thing, except for the first rendering to the local system, they are all optional.

Now, focus on the last option, blogging from Radio to a Manila site. This is actually our own inner-Microsoft speaking. Every platform vendor feels as if the world revolves around them, and of course it's not true, although it can seem that way. Let me be the first to puncture our little balloon. Our marketing people (me) decided to call this feature "Mirroring to Manila". Now our lead designer (also me) wants you to know that this connection is done with XML-RPC. So, that means if you write a server that mimics what Manila does you can plug your server into Radio.

In fact, I think this is what Mike Krus is doing, his Handsome Radio Blog is running in PHP. Even if he's not doing it this way, I thank him for giving me the idea.

Postscript: Mike is not using XML-RPC, he's using FTP to connect Radio to PHP. That works too!



     

Last update: Saturday, March 03, 2001 at 11:43 AM Eastern.

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