Thursday, June 24, 2004

Dinner tonight, Bombay Club, Harvard Square, 7PM. Please RSVP. 

Rogers: "How many other stories are hiding in the 20 databases, 3,000 sites, and 50,000 pages that made up Weblogs.Com?" 

Ed Cone blogs Al Gore saying the Bush foreign policy is failing because Dubya loves bumper sticker slogans and fails to grasp subtle ideas. It's also why Silicon Valley is lost somewhere between Dubuque and Detriot, floating down the river to Bangalore. 

Christoph Jaggi writes: "Infoweek.ch, the leading Swiss bi-weekly IT-magazine now supports RSS due to reader requests!!!!" 

Hospitality Net supports RSS.  

Just got back from Lexingon, MA; home of the shot heard round the world. Myself, I got four shots, of novicaine, in my mouth. I talk like half my mouth is filled with cotton. That's how it feels too. What was remarkable about Lexington today is how overflowing with teens it was. I guess today was the last day of school. They were all out with their yearbooks, and bikes, shorts, summer clothes, buzzing with excitement about the first day of summer vacation and their lives ahead of them. It was hot. These are the princes and princesses of the United States, going to good colleges, all of them. With straight teeth and all their shots, they're as ready as any children to take their place in the global economy.  

My keynote speech for the Supernova conference, which begins in Santa Clara today. I couldn't be there, but thanks to the blogosphere I was able to give a speech anyway, a virtual one. Please read it, and consider that now might be the time for the blogosphere to change Silicon Valley, to add integrity, to return to "an engineering mecca, a land of the truth revealed by the ones and the zeros." 

Zawodny: "RSS looks like one of the better bets this year." 

Wes Felter: "I wonder why people who are actually working on open-source Java are not on the panel." 

Bob Stepno: Five More RSS Feed Readers. 

One year ago today the BBC released 68 new RSS 0.91 feeds, with an open, permanent and free archive, no membership required. This changed the syndication world in a big way. And the fact that they were 0.91 and not 2.0, I would come to learn, made not one bit of difference. The way the BBC publishes, there isn't anything in 2.0 I can think of that would improve on their feeds.  

On this day five years ago I explained how syndication and aggregation works to DaveNet readers. There were three Manila sites at that time. Scripting News, Buck's Woodside, and The Great VaVaVoom. Quite a bootstrap would happen in our world in the coming year.  

Talking with Mark Berstein yesterday, he was the first person to talk with me about the central role Scripting News has played in bootstrapping the weblog community. I've been aware of it, of course, when I started there were no weblogs, but every other blog after mine had an example, either this site, or some site or sites that learned from it. But the really chilling thing Mark noted was that when people break away, they often do it in a way that seems vengeful, which is where the No good deed goes unpunished feeling comes from. Lots of examples of this. I said to Mark I don't begrudge people their need to break away, but why not do it in a nice way, like point back to me as you pass me in the Technorati rankings? Send some flow back to your old teacher? Then I remembered, that I wasn't entirely without a mentor in this. I owe many of the ideas and encouragement I received to Doug Engelbart, an engineer who, whether you know it or not, you owe a lot to, too. When you want to change the world, I've noted, the best way to do it is to lead by example. So thanks Doug for being not only a great generous thinker, but a personal inspiration. Your work has made a huge difference to me and many others. A true bootstrap. With much love, thank you. 

Which reminds me, I must show Philip Greenspun an outliner. It's possible he's never seen one!