Friday, July 02, 2004

Doc Searls: Quit Envying the Dead. 

William Sloane Coffin: "Most necessary evils are far more evil than they are necessary." 

Scott Rosenberg: "The Squeezebox -- a small black box about the size of a book, with a bright, readable display -- sits at your stereo and pulls in, over your existing Wifi network, any music file or playlist sitting on your computer's hard drive." 

Joe Costello: "Well one of the greatest problems with the Senate at this point is the states of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa and Connecticut have a combined population equal to California's 34 million people." 

Another RSS-related venture capital investment.  

I'd like to remind people who say that RSS needs advertising that the whole equation is flipped upside down, and advertising is the least interesting way to flow information via RSS. Consider that I might subscribe to feeds that contain commercial information that one might otherwise see as advertising. For example, I'm in the market for a bunch of products that don't exist yet. I'd love to be able to subscribe to a feed that alerts me when they exist. Then of course I'll pay money, and someone will profit. I'll write about it again, in the meantime, if you want to brush up, read The Cluetrain Manifesto and repeat after Doc Searls: There is no demand for messages. There is no demand for messages. There is no demand for messages. Remember folks, you're not living in the same economy, this one is decentralized, not a monoculture, and doesn't follow the same rules. Them that invest in buggy whips are going to to have buggy companies. 

BTW, two excellent feeds for watching for products as they are being invented are Gizmodo and Engadget. For a long time Gizmodo was the only act in town, and didn't have an RSS feed for many of the reasons Jeff Jarvis lists here. Then along comes Engadget, and supplies a feed, so all of a sudden Gizmodo does too. Guess what, now they both get links from my blog and many others when they run something that fits into our respective world views. In the old days a PR person would call you up, or you'd have to drag your ass to a press conference. Today, my aggregator does the drudge work, and I get to have all the fun.  

One more thing. Both sites/feeds owe some legacy to the Fetish column in Wired, inaugurated by my very good friend David Jacobs, the guy who's still looking for a kidney. Fetish was great because Big Dave is a totally obsessed gadget guy, and pours hours and hours into studying them. Of course so are the editors of Gizmodo and Engadget. I am not, but I love to use cool technology, so I hang around people who put the time in. It's the old formula that worked so well, back when journalists would report based on love of information, not nightmares.  

Okay I'm almost done. I just got back from the Barnes & Noble in Burlington, MA. I loaded up on audio books, which I'm going to convert to MP3 so I can listen to them on my Rhomba. I love having audio books when I'm driving a lot, and it seems like I'm going to be doing a lot of driving soon, because I'm homeless (in a good way) again. So here's the question. Larry Lessig's book is available in audio, as a community thing. It was an incredible barn-raising. Why don't we do the same for The Cluetrain Manifesto? It's an important book. And after that, maybe I should do audio of some of the bigger DaveNets. Maybe I should do that while I'm driving. Just a thought.  

Just FYI, I think I've heard Halley say Go Fuck Yourself once or twice.  

Glenn Fleishman on trackback spam. 

Geek News Central got hit by trackback spam too. 

CSM: Michael Moore's showing in Show Me State. 

NY Times: Marlon Brando dead at 80. 

Time profile of Marlon Brando. 

Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, one of Brando's big roles, died five years ago today. 

And on this day in 1997, Jimmy Stewart died. 

6/7/96: "I wish DaveNet were a TV show so I could show you a clip from one of my favorite movies, The Godfather, starring Marlon Brando and eighteen other great actors doing their best work." 

Last year on this day, I was playing with an open subscriptions harmonizer. It's still a problem that needs to be solved across aggregators. A few developers have solved it for their own products, but there's a problem with that approach.  

Phil Ringnalda: "Googlebot's got a serious jones for my comments." 

Okay, Murphy-willing, I'm going to go see Farenheit 9/11 today. And I'm also going to see the new Spiderman movie.  

Charles Cooper: "Scrolling through countless 'political blogs' on the Internet, how many of them are authored by party operatives?" 

Brad Feld: Why I Invested in NewsGator. 

Adios and happy trails 

Last night was the end-of-year dinner at Berkman. It was my last event as part of the team. It was also the last Berkman event for Chris Lydon, Jim Moore and Diane Cabell.

At the dinner I sat across from John Palfrey and Mary Rundle and next to Terry Fisher. It was hard to hear, but we had some great talks anyway, no surprise there, because Berkman is a place for discussion, a place for intellect, but not idle thinking, thinking-with-doing. That's why I liked it there so much.

As I was listening to the toasts at the end, when it came time to thank John Palfrey, I didn't want to interrupt, but now, here on Scripting News, I can hold my virtual glass up to John, who is one of the best people I've ever worked for, one of the only people I've ever worked for, and someone who if you ever get the chance to, you should work for. Let me tell you why.

They recruit incredible talent at Berkman, the smartest, most passionate, most curious people. Now in a lot of places, it would stop there, a bureaucracy would develop among the permanents, and the temporaries, the fellows, would have to learn the ropes and it would take time before they were effective, and there might be limits on how effective one can be. Especially at a university, especially at an old university like Harvard. But John thinks like an entrepreneur, and tries to cut down obstacles, he encourages your outrageous ideas, when he finds out you want to do something, he pulls out all the stops to help you get there. In the 1.5 years I was at Berkman, I never once heard John say no. And believe me, I needed a lot of yes's to make two conferences happen, one on very short notice, a day after another Berkman conference run by Charlie Nesson. Yet John pulls off what must be a very complicated job without involving you in his cares, and that's important. The internal problems fade away, and things get done. Everyone says it, everyone knows it, this place works because Palfrey makes it work.

Anyway, I said goodbye to a lot of people last night, and closed the book on one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. I really appreciate the chance Berkman Center gave me, and thank Charlie, Terry and Jonathan for believing that a commercial software developer could make a contribution to an academic institution. Thanks to Wendy and Catherine for support at the two BloggerCons, thanks to Jesse and Hal for backing us up technically. Thanks to Diane for being a friend. Thanks to the people who aren't at Berkman now, but who, like me, are part of its incredible extended family. But I gotta say it, thanks most to John Palfrey for making it all work. I hope to get a chance to work with you all again some time in the future.