Thursday, June 24, 2004

Dinner tonight, Bombay Club, Harvard Square, 7PM. Please RSVP. 

Wes Felter: "I wonder why people who are actually working on open-source Java are not on the panel." 

Bob Stepno: Five More RSS Feed Readers. 

One year ago today the BBC released 68 new RSS 0.91 feeds, with an open, permanent and free archive, no membership required. This changed the syndication world in a big way. And the fact that they were 0.91 and not 2.0, I would come to learn, made not one bit of difference. The way the BBC publishes, there isn't anything in 2.0 I can think of that would improve on their feeds.  

On this day five years ago I explained how syndication and aggregation works to DaveNet readers. There were three Manila sites at that time. Scripting News, Buck's Woodside, and The Great VaVaVoom. Quite a bootstrap would happen in our world in the coming year.  

Talking with Mark Berstein yesterday, he was the first person to talk with me about the central role Scripting News has played in bootstrapping the weblog community. I've been aware of it, of course, when I started there were no weblogs, but every other blog after mine had an example, either this site, or some site or sites that learned from it. But the really chilling thing Mark noted was that when people break away, they often do it in a way that seems vengeful, which is where the No good deed goes unpunished feeling comes from. Lots of examples of this. I said to Mark I don't begrudge people their need to break away, but why not do it in a nice way, like point back to me as you pass me in the Technorati rankings? Send some flow back to your old teacher? Then I remembered, that I wasn't entirely without a mentor in this. I owe many of the ideas and encouragement I received to Doug Engelbart, an engineer who, whether you know it or not, you owe a lot to, too. When you want to change the world, I've noted, the best way to do it is to lead by example. So thanks Doug for being not only a great generous thinker, but a personal inspiration. Your work has made a huge difference to me and many others. A true bootstrap. With much love, thank you. 

Which reminds me, I must show Philip Greenspun an outliner. It's possible he's never seen one! 

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

AP: "All is right again in blog land." Whew. 

Thanks to Wired and AP for their help getting the news out. The blogs carried rumors and panic, and when it was clear that the panic was wrong, didn't carry the correction. This time the pros beat the crap out of the blogs in a story about blogs. Something to think about. This time they fact-checked your ass. Am I angry about this? Yeah, you bet I am.  

Technology.Updates.Com looks interesting. Lots of RSS feeds.  

Reuters: "Jason Smathers of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, has been charged with stealing a list of 92 million AOL customer screen names and selling them to Internet marketer Sean Dunaway of Las Vegas." 

ComputerWorld: "Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president, has said he is concerned that Java might fork into incompatible versions if it were made open-source, undermining Java's 'write once, run anywhere' capability." 

Ralph Nader "...abhors high-tech, uses a manual typewriter..." 

Wired: "What was decried as the death of a blog universe when Dave Winer shut down free blog host Weblogs.com turned out to be little more than a four-day server outage surrounded by a heck of a flame war." 

News.Com: "Computer trade show Comdex, once the biggest event on the tech calendar, has been canceled this year," 

Tomorrow at 7PM, a bloggers dinner in Cambridge. It's kind of sad, this will be my last Thursday at Harvard, but what the heck, we had a dinner when I came to town, let's have one as I leave. It's at the Bombay Club in Harvard Square. Please post a note here if you're coming, we'll call the restaurant tomorrow afternoon to tell them how many to expect. We'll sing a song, make a toast, praise Murphy. 

BBC: "Dr Mockapetris came up with the DNS system 21 years ago while he was a scientist on the Arpanet project." 

Hacking Netflix: "I think most companies don’t get blogs yet." 

Don Park: Murder She Wrote. 

Mark Bernstein on comments and trackback. A thoughtful post but I don't agree, last week's events happened on blogs, not in comments or through trackback.  

One difference between what happened to SixApart and what happened to me, is that I came to their defense, and they joined the mob. I'll still come to their defense in the future, when I think the community needs moderation, but I won't forget what they did, trying to hustle new business with the people whose sites were stranded. That totally increased the pressure, because the users were the ones who weren't freaking. And how much was at stake? Hmmm. Project the revenue from a couple hundred people with free weblogs. Some kind of gold mine? An amazing lack of perspective. I saw other competitors do horrible things that week. Only Evan Williams did the right thing, he did what he could to put it in perspective. I won't ever forget that either. Thanks again. Mark, this is what we need more of. People with the courage to stand in front of the mob and tell them to stand down. You want to solve the problem? That's how. 

Another difference was they were talking to customers about money, and I was finished hosting free sites after four years of free service. Another diff: SixApart is a company and I'm a person.  

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

An important note about weblogs.com redirection.  

Perrspectives: Google's Gag Order. 

Nick Bradbury: "The error message only appears if you upgrade a cracked version of FeedDemon 1.0." 

One hundred and ten Supernovans are meeting to eat dinner tomorrow in Santa Clara, CA. $25.  

Doc Searls is considering a BloggerCon-like con for ITers. 

Jason Kottke: "Get the hell out of my way, I'm coming through." 

Ed Foster: "In a recent weblog item, I talked about the owner of a new PC who had to pay $149 for Dell support to tell her how to change a default setting in Outlook. This spurred quite a debate among readers about just who was to blame." 

Rogers Cadenhead: "When Buzzword.Com was launched last week, I had a feeling that the good news about restoring service to Weblogs.Com users would have more trouble getting around than the original, over-the-top reports of a blogger's 9/11." 

Two years ago, a site hosted by Paolo Valdemarin with get well messages. Last week's shitstorm exactly coincided with my health failure two years ago. Maybe the echo chamber of the blogosphere is deeper than we previously thought? 

SpaceShipOne launched the "first private manned mission to space." 

Paul Boutin will moderate the syndication panel at SuperNova on Thursday with Scott Rosenberg, David Sifry, and Tim Bray, who is one of two chairs of the Atom working group. 

Halley Suitt: Blog Murder.