Person of the Decade?! 

You aren't going to believe this.

Slate's culture podcast chose three people as Person of the Decade and they were: George W. Bush, Paris Hilton and Dave Winer.

It's the weirdest thing.

They said my name and no one said Who dat?

I don't think it was a joke.

And it was for a good thing, podcasting -- and they're right about how nice it is to have all those great podcasts to listen to.

I didn't make a dime off podcasting, but in a more important way I did get rich from it. There's an incredible wealth of great stuff to listen to. It really took off, and it's something I'm really proud of.

Here's the full MP3. The segment starts around minute 27.

And here's the 3.5 minute excerpt where they talk about the Person of the Decade.

Update: Another honor. :-)

New core Frontier feature: S3 Prefs 

I hit the same wall I always hit when looking for a place to store the users' content.

It's not much of a problem when you're running the server for them, but when the server is running on their desktop, as it is in River2, where do you put the publicly accessible content? I could operate a storage system for them, but what happens if the service doesn't take off and never becomes a business? At some point I have to punt, and that leaves users with data that goes missing. Thinking long-term I don't want to set another one of these up.

The right answer is to help them get their own storage working. And Amazon has made that relatively easy, so I spent the time to make it really work.

The users' feeds are stored in Amazon S3. For this I need three pieces of data. The "Access Key ID" (which is the equiv of a username), "Secret Access Key" (password) and a default bucket. That's explained on the Frontier News site.

Frontier News: New preferences for Amazon S3.

I created my own feed using the new tool, you can see it's on Amazon. I wouldn't subscribe to it, while it should keep updating, I'm going to merge it with my lifeliner feed.

It works! 

My tweeting-in-the-river project has yielded a stream.

Witness...

In this screen shot I am composing a tweet to be published. Self-explanatory.

Then a few moments later, it appears, as if by magic, in its own river.

I am speechless.

Beating the drum for Realtime RSS 

People always get tripped up on what I had to do with RSS. One thing I did a lot of, for sure, is beat the drum. Every little development, every new source that came online, I'd hail it here on Scripting News as the greatest thing that ever happened.

That's how you do it. The theory of the world beating a path to the door of the guy who invents the best mousetrap is just a story, albeit a good one. Never happens. That's why Who Invented RSS isn't a very interesting question. The hard part wasn't inventing. What was hard was getting people who are set in their ways to consider a new way of doing things.

So now, once again, it's time to beat the drum, for the next layer in RSS -- Realtime RSS. The first people we need to convince are the people with the feeds. They're the chicken without which we can't make eggs. With RSS, the original feeds were Salon, Red Herring, Wired and Motley Fool. I'll never forget them. Without them we couldn't have booted it up. Then each victory added more power to the flow. It will be the same with Realtime RSS.

So if you want to know why I'm so darned excited about Realtime RSS and related technologies, here's the piece to read:

12/29/09: Why it's smart to publish Realtime RSS now.

Dave Winer
Berkeley CA