Friday, November 26, 2004

Gary Price on "impeccably maintained" web directories.  

Nicco broke a tooth at our lunch today. But that wasn't the end of the story. Here's the voicemail he left this afternoon. He said he wants to do podcasts. Hey he just did one.  

I notice people are using the term interopathon, a term which I coined, in an incorrect way. It's fair approach to interop, it treats big software companies with patents and open source projects with large installed bases, and smart consultants with their own implementations, as equals. Basically the door is open to all, the playing field is totally level, and interop with each one is considered important, and until it's reached, no one gets to claim interop. Unfortunately Microsoft and IBM didn't want to play by these very fair rules, and went ahead worked privately with each other and tried to force it on everyone else. The usual way interop is not achieved in the software biz. Eventually interop came to mean "Works With Microsoft" but since Microsoft's architecture astronauts were in charge, well, SOAP is pretty dead in 2004, sadly, because a handful of people spoiled it for everyone else. When I resigned as Chief Hardass, I felt like a kindergarten teacher, a failed one.  

Bertolt Brecht: "[Radio] is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes." 

Had a great lunch with Nicco Mele, former blogmaster at Dean For America. We talked about so many things but one of the last ideas was the best, imho. I said we need something like The League of Women Voters for 21st Century voters who want to think about their decision and need information and other points of views. That led to the The League of Blogging Voters. LOBV. Nicco said he'd grab the domain.  

Blog Torrent is "software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the bittorrent protocol." 

Draft spec for the BitTorrent RSS module. We plan to use this for Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, The Dawn and Drew Show, and a newly formatted Morning Coffee Notes (with its own feed and an easy way to find back issues, for all). We expect lots of growth in the coming months, and we want to help produce more feeds in the future, so we're getting ready, as are so many others. The combination of BitTorrent and RSS is all over the place these days, and that's super-exciting, and right on.  

Joel Spolsky: "When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all."  

A test file for the BitTorrent implementation of Daily Source Code.