Friday, January 14, 2005

Last night I got an email from someone I've been wanting to hear from for a long time. There's a problem on the Internet, a big one, that only one entity can solve. The email outlined the solution and asked what I thought of it, and asked me not to say what it is publicly. I can live with that. I just want to mark this moment. A milestone. Real cooperation. I immediately implemented the feature on one of my sites. The same message was sent to a bunch of other people by the same person. I hope they did the same. When this is announced users everywhere will smile. 

Greg Gershman: "There is no way to get your subscriptions out of Yahoo and into another aggregator." 

Via the Crimson, the editor of Think Secret is a Harvard undergrad. 

Predictably, my plan for solving The Yahoo Problem has spawned an avalanche of debate on the "right" way to do it, all of them rehashes of approaches that were debated extensively, in the past. The beauty of this process is that I only have to kick back and wait for them to run out of gas again (all require boiling the ocean, it's amazing how otherwise intelligent people just brush that aside) and then say "Okay, anyone want to solve the problem, I know how to do it." Engineers on the Internet believe anything can be solved on a mailing list or wiki, when experience totally indicates otherwise. BTW, while you're debating, Yahoo's lock-in strategy is still in place, and Microsoft is readying their counter-attack. Fiddling while Rome burns? Yup. 

Michael Rogers: "The best new technologies insinuate themselves. And then you don’t need to boil the ocean: you just need to make one good cup of soup." Amen. 

I was going to point to the Technorati feature called Tags, but the docs made me uncomfortable. Who cares if they're friends with Flickr, Delicious, Typepad, etc. What does it mean for two products to be friends anyway? What happened to open protocols and level playing fields? Sometimes I think these people don't understand the Internet. Wouldn't it be refreshing if Technorati said "Here's how we work with products we hate." Wouldn't that be reassuring? Don't you wonder sometimes about the backroom deals? Don't tech companies have to work at preserving their integrity and credibility? My suggestion: We don't care if you're "friends" with other products, just tell us how you support open protocols and we'll figure out how to plug you in. 

Had dinner with Nicco last night, he's a former Dean blogger, he has a software development company in suburban DC called EchoDitto, that helps Democrats get their online act together. I want to try to work something out here so they build on the open source release of Frontier. I think there's a lot of potential there.  

Tonight Nicco and I are going to drive out to see Joe Trippi. I want to do a podcast with him, especially now that the story is breaking that Dean For America paid independent bloggers like Kos. We had the link here earlier this week, today it's in the Wall Street Journal. Perfect timing, with a conference coming up on blogging, journalism and credibility. In case you're wondering: It is a problem. Kos couldn't take the money without disclosing it, apparently he did, once, but that probably wasn't enough. Of course professional journalists often fail to disclose their conflicts, so this isn't a problem that's exclusive to bloggers.