Tuesday, August 29, 2006

I'm still hoping Republicans for Cut and Run takes off as a community project. Let's look for Republicans who have decided we've wasted enough lives and money on trying to turn Iraq into the United States. If you participate in the political discussion, let other people know we're looking for Republicans who have or are likely to speak out on the war. It seems with the election approaching there will be more. 

Last night I went to the Oakland Coliseum to see the A's beat the Red Sox, 9-0. 

Om Malik: "Today's news of Google CEO Eric Schmidt joining the board of directors of Apple Computer portends potential headaches not just for Microsoft, but for anyone with digital media ambitions." 

BBCriver.com got a nice mention on Rocketboom today. Thanks. These guys are champs.  

Yesterday, perhaps in an awkard way, I asked a question, curious to know how Feedburner calculates the number of readers they report for a site like TechCrunch. Clearly the number of hits they're getting for Mike's feed must be going up, and perhaps the number of unique IP addresses is going up too. Do they count all the readers at Microsoft as 1 subscriber? Is that just the number of times the feed was requested per day? How then would they factor in people who read it more than once. My aggregator reads it 24 times a day, am I counted as 24 "readers?" Bloglines just reads it once for N people who subscribe, how do they factor that in? Just curious to know what the method is. Since no one has to sign up for anything they can't directly count the number of subscribers.  

Mark Fletcher writes that Bloglines reports the number of subscribers each time it requests the feed.  

Lorenzo Viscanti: "Feedburner's count is just an approximation." 

Feedburner: "Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed." 

Revisiting another question I asked clumsily, about restrictions on speech that you accept when you participate in an invitation-only event, I posted a comment on David Weinberger's blog this evening that attempts to explain the issue in 1-2-3 fashion. To be clear, although the questions are about Foo Camp, it's really more general. 

EJ Dionne: "By Election Day, how many Republican candidates will have come out against the Iraq war or distanced themselves from the administration's policies?" 

Duncan Riley names "kvetch" the word of the day. 

kevetch.com is Derek Powazek's weblog, since 1995.  

goooooooo...ooooooooooooogle.  

Four years ago today: "I would love it if the source for MORE were released. I think it would be a humantarian contribution of the first order, but it's not mine to make." 

Hurts so good 

Without comment, here's a recent post from Tim O'Reilly.

David [Weinberger] -- I'm curious about the ambivalence you express here. It sounds to me like you're trying to curry favor with the well-known critics of FOO (and obviously, you failed) rather than giving us real insight.

Yes, FOO Camp is exclusive in the sense that it's invite-only, but if you're honest, you'll have to admit that it's one of the most diverse technical conferences you're ever likely to attend. We make a real effort to invite people from different technical communities, people who ought to know each other, but don't. One of our goals is to create new synapses in the global brain, so to speak. This is way more diverse than an open-to-all comers event that draws from the same community. And it's precisely because we limit attendance that we're able to manage that creative mix. Do you bake a cake by using whatever amount of flour, eggs, sugar, and chocolate you happen to have in your kitchen? There's a range of experiment, but in the end, you control the mix because you know that some combinations are essential for the cake to work at all.

This is not to say that an open-to-all comers event can't also work (assuming you have either a narrow topic that doesn't draw a huge crowd, or else a venue that can hold all comers, and a set of goals that will work for a very large event.) But it would be a very different kind of event, and for our purposes, much less successful.

Stop worrying about what Winer thinks. He's perfectly happy to attend exclusive events, as long as he's invited. He has a grudge against me, for reasons only he understands, and despite his many other virtues, on this subject, he just needs to be ignored.

There are lots of ways to do great events. FOO is one. Bar Camp is another (and we're honored to be imitated, and in fact have invited some of the Bar Camp people this year to be sure that they learn as much as they can about how we do it.)

Tim O'Reilly

If only... 

One year ago today: "Good morning. It seems New Orleans has been spared the disaster. That's cool, it's a very nice city, and so far has been totally lucky. Knock wood, praise Murphy, seems the luck has held."