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Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.
 

3GB of SXSW music Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jim Posner sends a link to a torrent of 3GB of music from the SXSW festival in Austin. All legal, non-infringing, a wonderful application of BT. I'm downloading it now, you should too.

Hello from Santa Cruz Permanent link to this item in the archive.

This post is coming to you from Naked Jen's house in Santa Cruz, California. We're sitting on a couch in their living room. "And drooling over your new laptop," says Dear Sweet Dave, Jen's husband (who is fully clothed, at this time.) "As is Jen, at the moment," he continues.

Another historic milestone? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named silo.gifYou'd think after Tim O'Reilly over-hyped Yahoo Pipes he might tone down expectations a bit on the latest half-baked idea to roll through the tech blogosphere. But not this time. Here comes another historic milestone in the history of the Internet, Freebase.

But wait a minute, where's the beef?

It sounds like a flat-file database that's open to the public. Not clear if there are rules about who can edit what, how they insure quality. Who does the reverts? How do they keep the spam out? Trolls?

And while they say there's an API there doesn't seem to be any information about what the API does and who can use it on what terms. So it's hard to judge how much an innovation this is for the Internet and how much it is a way to capture UGC in a VC-owned data silo.

Mike Arrington likes it too. Why exactly will Google people be slapping their foreheads saying they could have (or should have) done this. It seems like a secret rehash of GoogleBase, which hasn't exactly been revolutionary.

It's Web 3.0! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named bowler.jpgNick Carr notices something about the hype of Freebase that I had missed.

John Markoff wrote the article in today's NY Times announcing Freebase. It reads like a corporate press release, not even one naysayer, not one qualification, not even a competitor, though there are many. This is the greatest stuff ever, period. Fluff. How that made it through the Times editorial process is a question for another day.

In an earlier piece, on page 1 of the Times, Markoff used the term Web 3.0, to describe almost exactly what Freebase purports to be. So it stands to reason that we're looking at two points of vaporous hype that will someday be connected, probably by Markoff. Or maybe Tim O'Reilly, seeing the writing on the wall, will concede that Web 2.0 is yesterday's news, the real exciting stuff is Web 3.0, and btw, look there never was a bubble pop!

I almost put a smiley at the end of the last paragraph; it would be funny if it weren't so how the hype machine of Silicon Valley works. There's nothing substantial about any of this, if there were, you'd be able to use the software today and some of the benefits it promises would be visible, today.

     

Last update: Friday, March 09, 2007 at 6:45 PM Pacific.

Dave Winer, 51, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

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Things to revisit:

1.Microsoft patent acid test.
2.What is a weblog?
3.Advertising R.I.P.
4.How to embrace & extend.
5.Bubble Burst 2.0.
6.This I Believe.
7.Most RSS readers are wrong.
8.Who is Phil Jones?
9.Send them away.
10.Negotiate with users.
11.Preserving ideas.
12.Empire of the Air.
13.NPR speech.

Teller: "To discover is not merely to encounter, but to comprehend and reveal, to apprehend something new and true and deliver it to the world."

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