Thursday, July 20, 2006

I'll be at Wikimania, Aug 4-6 in Cambridge. 

Dana Gardner: "Dave Winer and a burgeoning chorus of supporters are proposing a fresh go at a community directory for podcasts. What an excellent idea." 

Lessig: "I'm sitting at a hot Internet cafe in Costa Rica..." 

Progress on the static rendering of OPML weblogs. 

Scott Gatz on how RSS was adopted at Yahoo. Note how they didn't try to improve it. A case study on how a BigCo can move fast, and win. 

Eric Rice gets behind the community podcast directory. I feel a consensus building here.  

Wes Felter also bought a house on Monday.  

Jon Udell puzzles over how Google News decides what is and isn't a news source. For what it's worth, I subscribe to a bunch of Google News searches, and they don't really implement rule #2, "It is managed by an organization (not an individual) and includes organizational information on its site." I get lots of results written by individual bloggers beacuse lots of "organizational" sites include the work of bloggers, and I don't think there's any editorial review process (rule #4), but I don't know for sure. It's still useful. BTW, when I wrote for HotWired, a publication that would surely pass any reasonable set of tests, I had a deal with them that they wouldn't change my writing without my permission. I had the same deal when I wrote for Fawcette, briefly. I'd imagine any other quality publication would work the same, so Google's rules are kind of naive.  

New header graphic. A restaurant on the beach in Florida. 

Scripting News search for "header graphic." 

A Scripting News header graphic from July 1997. 

Okay it's finally too hot here, so I took a break to go to the movies, but the air conditioning wasn't so great, and I got itchy sitting in one place for so long so I got up and left. Capsule review of the Pirates of the Caribbean Part II, don't bother, the plot is about as interesting as King Kong was. They resorted as heavily to aggravating chases. No suspension of disbelief, no story to keep the interest. Does Hollywood still make entertainment, or do they just make the same old thriller over and over, to the point where there's no thrill left.  

Boston Globe: "A noisy and lazy stopgap movie that goes absolutely nowhere and takes 2½ hours to get there." I left after 1 hour. 

Todd Cochrane supports trying again with the community podcast directory.  

Amyloo: "No podcaster wants the distinction of becoming the first one to kill a listener." 

I was just reading Amanda's post saying that she's coming to Blogher next week. I'll be there too, but I wish they afforded men a special status, like guest, or observer, because I felt really weird when I read that Amanda was looking forward to having "fun with 'the ladies.'" Since this is my space, still, I gotta say there ain't no ladies here and them that say there is are going to get a punch in the nose!  

Seven years ago: "Nothing like a big blank machine to get you going in the morning."