Thursday, May 19, 2005

A podcast from the beach with thoughts on what makes a good platform, an intellectual life for Silicon Valley, beach philosophy; a picture and a movie where today's cast was empodded.  

Sunrise over the Atlantic this morning.  

An Italian blog gets the scoop on today's announcement by Google that they're becoming another boring portal just like all the others. Follow-on report by Search Engine Watch. Now, the big question, when will a new aggressive startup with a laser-like focus on search come along to do to Google what they did to everyone else? That's obvious now, isn't it? 

If Santorum didn't just commit political suicide this country is a political disaster area.  

Zawodny is right, Google should embrace RSS already, it's getting late.  

eWeek: MSN Gets Ready for RSS Push. 

News.com: VeriSign sees business in blogs. 

Infoworld reports that Yahoo is getting into VOIP.  

audio.weblogs.com got a brain transplant today. Please let me know if there are any problems. 

Tod Maffin is a fantastic source for new podcasts. We ought to organize this better. Somehow we built a centralized system, and we already know that centralized systems suck the life out of communities. How can I ask this question. Tod, I have an hour to spare. What should I listen to? Or alternatively, let's say I want to give Tod my Tuesday walk-time. Every Tuesday he's got something good for me to hear. He had to make a gut-wrenching decision because there are really 18 things he knows I should hear, but I'm only giving him one hour per week. I have six other days. Who else should I give a day to? 

Apparently I am psychic. Maybe just intuitive? 

Dare is a nice guy, but I'm going to criticize the way he develops software anyway. (Ditto for Mike Torres.) Go study the competition guys. A few days of using software and thinking will save you years of figuring it out on your own. We did this investigation years ago, and you can skip all the way to the end of this exploration, and do the River of News, and be done with it. It's so painful watching you learn re-invent this stuff. "Only steal from the best," boys! 

Bram Cohen: "We've created a 'trackerless' method of publication." 

Om Malik: "BitTorrent’s new version is easier, better and well simpler." 

Steve Gillmor is back podcasting again. Yowza.  

A good movie is often worth seeing twice. 

Accordion Guy: "If you check the right-wing pundits, you'll see that a number of them have commented negatively about the unsubtle jabs that Revenge of the Sith takes at the Bush administration." 

Jason on Om 

Jason Calacanis is on a rampage, and I'm sure he means well, but he's wrong.

Please read on.

Om Malik possibly had the first word on the net about the deal between FeedDemon and Newsgator. But he surely wasn't the first to know. Many, including yours truly, were respecting an embargo, and waiting for the companies to announce. Well, once Chris Pirillo published his interview with Nick Bradbury, I felt safe in publishing my own thoughts, because I knew that Chris was also under embargo.

This embargo stuff is tricky business, but I agreed to it because I've come to respect Nick, and think he's a fair-minded person, and wouldn't give me a lot of grief in a situation like this, where I didn't particularly care about being first, but didn't want to be last, if you know what I mean.

So of course I pointed to Om's bit, when he was the only one out there with the news, but I didn't get the news from him, so I'm not under any obligation to credit him in my own writing, and neither is News.Com, assuming they had more than one source which seems reasonable since the Newsgator guys were being so free with the embargoed information.

Also, it gets ridiculous sometimes to link to the full chain that a story came to you through, and I often don't get that kind of credit, and while it pains me, I accept it, because really, most readers couldn't care less, and the readers are important, of course. Now, when I get something from someone I try to reciprocate. Again, back to Om, I subscribe to his feed and he gets great stuff, and I point to him regularly. I think I point to him more than vice versa and a link from me delivers more traffic, but who cares. I feel that once in a while I can take a link I got from him and point to it without attribution, because in balance I feel I've delievered more flow his way. Maybe it's like peering arrangements among backbones on the Internet. Who knows, but it's not so black and white, and basically I think News.Com didn't hurt anyone in this case.

More Adam 

For now, I'm not going to go deeper into the rift between myself and Adam Curry, only to acknowledge that now he's saying more things that are untrue in press interviews, punishing me for thinking he was ever a friend. My generosity with him is, in an ironic and unfair way, a gift that keeps on giving.

I guess it's not surprising that the mainstream press only talks with him, even when they acknowledge that there's another side to his story (as News.Com did). It's not surprising because if there was ever any doubt that he is one of them, there's no doubt anymore. He's a salary-man, working for a major broadcasting company, presumably trying to climb their ladder. They're paying Howard Stern $100 million a year. Presumably Adam would like that kind of compensation, or something approaching that kind of compensation. Lying about someone he probably once actually did think of as a friend (just guessing here) seems a small price, to Adam.

I believe the ladder is gone, it's like the Road Runner character in Warner Brothers cartoons, when he runs off a cliff, he keeps running for a while, until he looks down. Then, beep-beep, he goes into a nosedive. I think Elmer Fudd does this from time to time too. When there is a podcaster on every block, then one on every blog, who will have time to listen to Howard or Adam or Elmer Fudd? Hollywood's characters can't compete with the real characters in our lives. That's why Adam's trading us, the early podcasters, for the love of a big corp seems so utterly dumb. He had it, I was working for him for free, so were all of us, dammit. But this is what he wanted? Talk about snatching defeat from the mouth of victory.

Xeni Jardin is every bit as much a short-term mainstream animal as Adam and the reporter at News.Com. They've taken the blue pill, they're in the matrix, dumbing it down for job security and a chance for a career path, or at least another freelance job. We're on different sides. She calls me a dinosaur. I think that's a bit of wishful thinking. I'm one of the people, pretty defenseless against attacks from the press, but there are millions of me, eventually, if they trash us one by one, they'll run out of ink, and run out of advertisers to pay their salaries. We can't all be the flawed human beings they make me out to be.

I guess Adam will keep accelerating the lies, and the pro journos will keep reporting them. At some point it will be easy for me to say what Adam is afraid I might say. I tried recording a MCN about it yesterday, but decided not to run it. It didn't sound right, I was too angry. I have to wait for that to abate before telling the story.

Of course I could end up forgetting the story, but as long as he continues to say really nasty shit about me personally I don't think I will.