Sunday, May 23, 2004

Something I didn't know. According to op-ed columnist Jim Kennedy, former Clinton communications director, Colin Powell's "wild" press agent, Emily Miller, tried to terminate Tim Russert's interview with Powell because the interview's ground rules were broken. Raises a question -- why doesn't NBC disclose the ground rules to viewers? 

I'm getting a sense that some of the newer aggregators have a funny way of handling time. Not sure exactly what's going on. I've gotten one complaint about the NY Times feeds which include the items in the order the NY Times provides them. It's never been a problem in Radio's aggregator, it knows if it has seen an item before and if it has, it doesn't present it to the user. I gather some reading software isn't keeping track of what they've already shown the user. This is not a bug in the feeds as some people believe, rather a missing feature in the aggregator. However, I haven't got enough data to be sure, I'm just guessing. We've talked about starting to track features in aggregators and blogging tools at the Berkman Thursday meetings. This is an affirmation of the need of an independent view of the various categories of software in the blogosphere. 

I went to the ballet yesterday, and saw a great movie.  

Saturday, May 22, 2004

WordPress 1.2 is released. 

I'm still in NYC where it's hot and muggy. Back home in Boston, it's collld. 49 degrees. Sounds great. I'll be back tomorrow.  

Brent Simmons continues to think out loud about prospects for the open source release of Frontier. This kind of open narration is very useful. I also got a lot out of Mark Pilgrim's piece about GPL vs BSD, linked to below. 

Rogers: Publishing MySQL Data in RSS 2.0. 

Andrew is getting ready for Iceland. 

Adam Curry: "In about 20 hours the crew and I will be in Las Vegas for a week of live shows and plenty of fun." 

RSSQuotes "allows you to create and save a list of stocks, then delivers the quotes to your favorite RSS Reader during market hours." 

Mark Pilgrim on open source licensing. "A GPL advocate is a BSD advocate who has had their code used against them." 

Friday, May 21, 2004

Editorial: It's lame to charge for weblog software based on how many weblogs you make and how many authors there are. A weblog isn't that big a deal. Manila lets you make as many weblogs as you want with as many authors as you want. Today's modern $2K computer can manage thousands of weblogs. Charge a fair price and don't fuss over how many blogs they make or how many people edit them. 

eWeek: "The technology at the heart of one of the most popular Web-logging tools is about to go open source." 

Rogers Cadenhead: "...an integrated development environment, persistent object database, outliner, dynamic scripting language, Internet client and server, and Web services platform that supports TCP, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, XML, XML-RPC, SOAP, and RSS." 

Brent Simmons: "Before Frontier was Frontier, its name was Cancoon." 

XML.Com: "The majority of RDF editors available today continue to confuse the user with predicates, reification, ontology editors, 3-dimensional webs of orbiting triplets, and other low-level data and terms." 

ComputerWorld: "Wi-Fi wholesale network operator Cometa Networks Inc. has announced that it's suspending operations, citing a lack of money." 

BBC: "The official title of the record was Most Naked People on a Rollercoaster." 

Yahoo Maps shows WiFi hotspots now. Quite useful! 

BBC: "In a speech to an audience of chief executives, Mr Gates said the regularly updated journals, or blogs, could be a good way for firms to tell customers, staff and partners what they are doing." 

Shouldn't Google execs be explaining blogs like Gates is? Isn't that why they bought Blogger? Or did they just buy Blogger to break RSS? 

A story about big Silicon Valley companies 

In 1990 we were licensing the UserLand IAC Toolkit to other developers. Our first and only licensee was Claris, an Apple subsidiary run by Bill Campbell, Yogen Dalal and John Zeisler. Their products included MacWrite, MacPaint, Hypercard, maybe Filemaker? Not sure. They were a friendly company, nice guys. I'd meet with them from time to time to talk about how apps would work when they could be connected by a scripting system. I was working on such a system, the software that would become Frontier. (When it's open sourced you'll see that the toolkit is still in there.)

Anyway, Apple decided to compete with our scripting system, and began by creating a clone of our interapplication communication toolkit. They were having a big sales meeting in Hawaii to demo the new stuff, but sadly it wasn't ready. So our friends at Claris demo'd our software, and told everyone it was Apple's.

How inconvenient it would be for our competitors to actually have to implement the software they were going to use to compete with us. Heh. Sorry for the sarcasm. That's big Silicon Valley companies for you. A smaller company might have been embarrased that they didn't come up with the idea themselves and had to demo a developer's product and had to lie and say it was theirs, to their own sales people. Maybe they would even be ashamed.

Reminds me of a Michael O'Donoghue song that Doc Searls posted on his blog on 2/12/03 (sung to the tune of I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke).

I'd like to give the world a hug
And tell it jokes and stuff
Then pull its pants down to its shoes
And chase it through the rough
I'd tie it up with bonds and straps
And check its purse for change
Then leave it out at Moose Grin Hall
With our cousin who's deranged.

Also reminds me of the HL Mencken quote. When someone says it's not about the money, it's about the money.

So of course, when they say Don't Be Evil -- they're being evil.