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Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.
 
Permanent link to archive for Monday, June 10, 2002. Monday, June 10, 2002

DaveNet: What I'm learning about journalism

A couple of months ago, Peter Day from the BBC came to my house for an interview. It's part of a four-part series on Silicon Valley, airing this month. 

Update to the Radio implementation of the MetaWeblog API. The struct returned from metaWeblog.getPost now includes a string called permaLink. I can imagine Sam Ruby nodding his head in approval.  

SaferSex and Web-Pages-That-Suck are nearly tied for first place today on the Radio Top-100.  

John Robb: "Hey. Stock options." 

Deborah Branscum: "Call me crazy, but I really like these California girls." 

Tom Matrullo: "When quality, independent thinking, and honest speech are so unthinkable as to seem silly in an organization, it doesn't take a visit from Dr Freud to figure out where the real problems might lie."  

Ed Cone reviews Radio: "I would recommend Radio to both the power blogger and the hobbyist. And I would recommend it to business users looking for ways to reach their customers, partners, etc. I would also recommend that UserLand continue to make the product simpler and more intuitive, and the help files easier to use for the mass-market audience." 

Hats off to the Blogroots people. Look at how they break down weblog management tools. You can see that Radio is doing something new. Thanks for noticing. And Manila and Movable Type are comparable. We see it the same way. 

Michael Wolff: "The music industry is becoming, in size and profit margins and stature, the book business." 

BBC: "John Ashcroft says a plot to attack the country using a radioactive 'dirty bomb' has been prevented." 

Sean Gallagher: "What does an editor-in-chief do if he or she knows his magazine is two ads short of making its nut, and the suits are sharpening their axes?" 

Rogers Cadenhead: "How likely are you to have sex during next month's July 4th weekend?" 

When people say Scripting News takes too long to load, I send them a pointer to the lightweight version. It's totally OK to read that one.  

NY Times: "Etherlinx has taken the 802.11b standard and used it to build a system that can transmit Internet data up to 20 miles at high speeds -- enough to blanket entire urban regions and make cable or DSL connections obsolete." 

The First Movement is a Flash-based weblog browser. Nice. It displays RSS feeds. It'd be interesting to see what my new RSS feed looks like in this browser.  

Mark Pilgrim: "Jackie can not read Braille at all." 

A new XML-RPC client/server for PHP from Keith Devens. 

Press release: GoUpstate launches new Weblog. "In real life, the TechGoddess is Jenny Levine.." This is so interesting. Jenny's Shifted Librarian is one of our favorite weblogs, and GoUpstate is doing some very interesting stuff in their community with Radio. Andy Rhinehart is our contact there. If things go as I think they will, the state of South Carolina may be the most weblog-wired state in the union in a few months. Keep on truckin. Jenny will be a great pied piper. 

BTW, here's a good question. Why is South Carolina one of the most important states in the union? It's the only state that can throw Ernest Hollings out of office when he comes up for re-election. I believe in the corporate death penalty, and I also believe in the political death penalty, for representatives who try to steal what's not theirs for greedy idiots in Hollywood.  

Rick Castello: "When you read a blog, you are seeing the world and they events described through that person's point of view." 

Saltire: "Today's way of doing business is not sustainable." 

Work continues connecting Groove to Radio. Radio is all about publishing. The root of that word is "public." By design, Radio makes it easy to make things public. On the other hand, Groove wants to keep everything private. The connection between the two products should reflect their respective nature. Publishing should be an overt act in Groove, something you do deliberately. "I want to publish this," says the Groove user. He must have permission to do that, whatever that means in GrooveLand. John Burkhardt, who works at Groove, says "This is something that freaked me out too."  

Jon Udell has much more today on the Groove-Radio connection. 

Thinking about the NY Times piece. I said a lot more than what I was quoted as saying, as I'm sure Kottke, Cam, Ken Layne, and Glenn did. I would really like to read what they said. Transcripts would be nice for people who want to know more. The Web has that ability, even if print doesn't. And while the story was "nice" -- it was another clubby piece about weblogs-- not really very serious. Basically this seems to be the nugget of news. Kottke got irritated about something that was irritating. Is that major news? Hmmm. Now, another question that we all should have asked the reporter. Where's your weblog? 

Thanks to Meg for the pointer to the Gallagher's weblog. Hehe. I love this medium.  

BTW, an intellectual, not clubby, treatment that followed on their lead paragraph would go like this. Weblogs are different from Usenet. The old techies had good cause to be irritated by the newbies, because they made a mess of a world that used to work. But weblogs are different. A lot of new weblogs doesn't make it harder to read your favorites. This technology is different. That's the answer to the question raised by their lead paragraph. The answer is not in the Times piece, as far as I can see. 

Here was the lead: "It is one of the enduring cycles of the Internet: the techies build a utopia and then complain when noisy crowds crash their party." 

Doc has some great comments on the Times piece. I laughed five times reading it. 

Another note. Ken Layne's comment really stings. "There's nothing novel about the tech bloggers, beyond the fact that a few of them made simple tools for updating Web sites." It's very hard work to make things simple, especially when lots of people want to do it. And there's more to personal publishing on the Web than reverse-chronologic posting. Further, the tech blogs are not limited to discussion of technology itself; we're people -- just like you. When Sept 11 happened, we were all affected. And if we work together, with respect, you may find that technology is even more relevant now that tens of thousands of people are writing publicly on the Web.  

To be honest, until this piece was written I had never even heard of Ken Layne. That's how big the world is. I'll start reading his site now, and see if there's anything interesting there, and I'll let you know what I think.  

On this day last year, I wrote about the death penalty in the US and my Uncle Sam who was murdered. See Ken, this is how it works. We're people too. I don't like being dismissed or trivialized by professional journalists, and I equally don't like it when another blogger does it. Thanks for listening. 

     

Last update: Monday, June 10, 2002 at 7:52 PM Eastern.

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