Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Just got a call from a reporter with news that Kim Polese will step down as chairman of Marimba. 

I am going to demo my new content system at the Thursday meeting, day after tomorrow. If you're in the area and want to see what's up, please be there at 7PM. I'll probably demo it Monday at Stanford Law School at noon. Boths sessions are free and open to the public. Weblogs, outlining, knowledge trees, RSS, OPML, XML-RPC.  

Berkman geek Ethan Zuckerman has a script that scans news sites and counts the number of times each country is mentioned. He used the script to create colorful maps of the world where blue is cold (not too many mentions) and red is hot (lots). No surprises, Western Europe, China, Canada and Australia are hot (he didn't rate the US) -- Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and South America are cold. Ethan has a plan, to use blogging in the blue places to increase their profile. He gave a brief talk about this today at the Berkman fellows lunch.  

Muscle-boy's fix for California's money woes -- get a loan.  

Don Park: "Ebichu is a cute housekeeping hamster who is fiercely loyal to her undeserving master." 

Daily Kos: Bloggers at DNC convention. "Handing out press passes to bloggers is a no-brainer, and something we could easily get from the DNC. However, we want to go one better, in effect putting together a convention-within-a-convention for left-leaning bloggers." 

Good thing the convention is in the summer or else you might have to suffer through Kerry playing hockey. (Enclosed in the RSS feed.) 

Andrew has questions about Apache and Windows. 

Wired: "Microsoft plans to introduce a song-downloading service next year that will compete with similar offerings from Apple Computer, Roxio's Napster and others." 

Ed Cone: The Marketing of a President. 

3 News: "I stepped out of the serene lake of Sufi Shire and, a few days later, found myself in the deal room of a $100 million corporate acquisition. Talk about whiplash." 

Idly.Org: Porn Sites Hiding Behind Blogs. 

Another summit you weren't invited to. 

Two years ago: "Of course if you don't even try to make software that other people use, it can't be very shitty." 

Three years ago: "Dimpled chads." 

Also on that day: "Dogma 2000 isn't worth to think about it -- it's just a behavior of well stuffed guys." 

That was quite a day. Al Gore looks snippy and Dubya looks dorky wearing a presidential cowboy hat.  

Weblogs.Com was hatched on this day in 1999. 

Last night I heard an interview with Zell Miller. Senator from Georgia, Democrat. He says because the nine Dems running for Pres don't have southern chops, he's going to vote for Bush. Man he must be the life of the party. And he says he respects Dean because he figured out how to raise money on the Internet. La-de-dah. Perhaps it's time for the Democratic Party to get just a little bit more picky? 

Jon Udell: "Every major software system has, at its core, what Dave Winer likes to call a lizard brain."  

Scoble says that MyWallop, Microsoft Research's foray into blogging and social networking, will support RSS 2.0. Another Scoble post that you shouldn't miss if you work at Microsoft. He's right. Microsoft should support RSS across all its websites, asap. It would be a communication revolution for the company, with key customers, developers, the press. The strange thing about it is that I know the day will come when they do this. When you know something, it's frustrating to have to wait.  

Update on categorizing in my new weblog authoring setup. I'm sticking with it, because it's just barely easy enough. I would like it to be easier. This might be the perfect place for a voice interface, because of the limited vocabulary. How that might work -- for example -- put the cursor on the post above. Hit the Voice-Cat button at the top of the window. Say "Technology slash Microsoft. Pause. Technology slash Blogging tools. Pause. Technology slash Formats and protocols slash RSS slash General." Click the button again. Would that be easier? I'd have to try it and see. 

BTW, to see the results of the categorization, click here. 

Brief Morning Coffee Notes 

Good morning spores fans. Pretty nice day. Drinkin coffee. Thinking about the day ahead.