Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Here's a great idea. RSS 2.0 feeds for kids, from Yahoo! Nice. 

Jonathan Schwartz of Sun has a weblog. He's the #2 guy. 

Okay here's an idea. I'm going to be in NYC much of July. Who wants to go to a Mets game? 

Outliners.com poster: "I am re-posting this which was posted just prior to the whatever-it-was-that-happened of outliners.com." It got knocked off the air by the problems with weblogs.com, and the resulting flood of traffic.  

Metafilter thread: "Pompous sociopath or not, you've got to admit, he pretty much has us pegged." 

BTW, the topic of discussion on Metafilter has meandered into a quote of mine from a MF thread in Y2K where I introduced myself by saying everyone there is full of shit. I'm afraid they might have misunderstood me. All my friends are full of shit at one time or another. All of yours are too. I did a search of the term on this weblog and came up with some good hits. Some people are proud to be full of shit (these are people I admire, like Scoble) and then some people will take offense if you say they're full of shit (names withheld). My attitude is that if you say I'm full of shit that's a sign of respect, because you're acknowledging that I exist.  

9/20/03: "There's little point arguing about whether I'm full of shit or not. I am. It's demonstrable." 

See, Don Park says I'm full of shit, and I point to him. There's some kind of invisible brotherhood between Koreans and NY Jews. Not sure what it is, but we get along in some basic way that's very mysterious. 

Dan Gillmor reports on Apple's announcements. 

I like William Grosso and point to him often, at least in part because he might be the only O'Reilly author who reads my site, but every time I link to him, I'm reminded that O'Reilly doesn't support RSS 2.0. On Sunday I asked "What are you going to do help the tech-weblog world get back on its feet?" One thing O'Reilly (the company) could do is accept that RSS 2.0 is here to stay, and help to close the wounds that keep us all from working together. "Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet." 

Grosso is great because he notices irony in software. For example, yesterday he found out about Apple's RSS reader that might crowd NetNewsWire, by reading about it in NetNewsWire. The software is fair, and has no ego. "There's something spiritual about computers," 1997. 

News.Com: When standards don't apply. "A growing roster of de facto standards is testing the need for bureaucratic agencies and design-by-committee technologies." 

Gary Lerhaupt writes: "Etree.org has converted their RSS feed to support BitTorrent enclosures. Etree is an awesome repository of legal concerts (Phish, Grateful Dead, etc). I'm downloading my last Phish show from my TV as we speak." 

News.Com got it right. The current standards organizations have the wrong strategy, they get in the way of progress instead of fostering it. After years of studying this, I now think we need a new standards organization that adopts de facto standards, like BitTorrent and RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, the ones with market momentum, that have proven their value. The current SO's form committees and bureaucracies, that's their purpose it seems, and by the time they're ready with a format or protocol, their proposal is too complex and too late.  

Dan Bricklin: "I've just posted the 1.0 version of my ListGarden RSS Generator Program." 

eWeek on Apple's RSS offerings, announced yesterday. 

I got an email from Scott Love who I used to work with at Living Videotext in the 80s. He said something really nice and I want to thank him, but there's no return address on the email. So Scott if you see this, send me your email address or phone number, I'd love to catch up.  

Yesterday I posted a note saying I'm looking for work. I've gotten a bunch of interesting responses, not with offers, but with ideas about what I should do next. Someone said I should be an entrepreneur-in-residence at a VC firm. Interesting idea. Yesterday I had dinner with a friend who's well-connected in financial circles in Boston and Silicon Valley to talk about something like that. We surveyed the landscape of companies doing stuff in and around the technologies I've worked on. Aggregators, blogging, formats, protocols, etc. It turns out I do have a pretty good understanding of the companies, products and individuals. But I'm not sure if EIR is the right thing, because honestly I don't see myself putting in the 18 hour days, seven day weeks, to crank out the 1.0s. I said I wished we had hooked up five years ago when that's what I was doing. I've also got a possible career in academia, with a good credential on my resume, the 1.5 year stint at Berkman Center. It's true, I love to teach. Maybe some place exotic like New Mexico or Geneva. I leave Boston on Sunday. It's making me sad. Really, no shit. But it's also exciting. When a big tree falls, it leaves room for new growth. Someone said that once..  

8/14/98: "Like the big tree that fell last March, the death of a huge human being like Jerry Garcia frees up a huge amount of space. Once there was a tree, now there are seedlings. After the sadness, there will be huge creativity." 

CBS Marketwatch profile of Craig Newmark of Craigslist. 

Chris Heilman comments on the lack of user interface consistency in today's Mac apps. "But connecting diverse software is RSS's main job, right?" he asks. Yes, and that's a good way to put it, and that's why UI consistency is so important.  

What to do when the platform vendor "validates" your product by copying it and announcing it will bundle the copy with the OS. I love what Konfabultor did, kick them in the ass, hard, with their own humor. "Cupertino, start your photocopiers." It's funny because that's what Apple said yesterday to poke Microsoft in the ribs (in a nice way of course). That's often been the lie around Apple, that they invent and Microsoft steals. I like to tell the story of how Mac scripting software came to be. I was in the audience at a Bill Gates speech in the early 80s in Palo Alto where he described a system-level scripting language for a personal computer, connecting various apps, a spreadsheet, word processor, plotting app. I made a note. That's a good idea. A few years later I started work on such a program. Showed it to Apple. Next thing you know, Apple has this great idea. A system-level scripting language for a personal computer, connecting various apps, a spreadsheet... 

5/6/98: "Competition with humor is the best idea." 

From the If It Weren't So Sad It Would Be Funny Department 

NY Times: "They're copying our concepts," Mr. Jobs said. "I'd kind of like to get credit sometime."

The irony gets deeper and twistier. Paul Boutin notes that the NY Times misquoted Apple's ripoff of "Gentlemen start your engines." I suppose he gave Indianapolis 500 appropriate credit for copying their concept?