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| Retired Belts |
| Dan Lyke: From Shadow: Worn-Out, Pre-Skidded Tires for ‘Fixie’ Fashion Victims. Yep, Retired Beltsis making belts out of worn out bike tires.Insert eye roll, followed by head slap because I didn't think of it first, here.
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| Normal social skills |
| Dan Lyke: The headline reads Study: Multitasking hinders youth social skills:Young girls who spend the most time multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online or watching video are the least likely to develop normal social tendencies, according to the survey of 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 who volunteered responses.Now I'm not one to suggest that technology mediated interactions are necessarily a good thing, but "normal social skills"are, even by the terms of this article, normal only in a world without "...various digital devices communicating online".
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| Dear All Things Considered |
| Dan Lyke: Dear All Things Considered. I haven't listened to you in a long while. I haven't been driving anywhere, and when I have, podcasts are generally much better quality than radio. However, I now have a real job, with a commute, and yesterday afternoon on the drive home the podcast wasn't making it for me so I switched on the radio for some variety.I tuned in in time to hear Billboards Slather On The Guilt With Anti-Cheese Campaign, in which the crank behind this campaign was complaining that:DR. NEAL BARNARD: If you look at the chemical makeup of what's in cheese, it's mostly saturated fats - the kind that's linked to heart disease. It's very high in cholesterol. Ounce per ounce about the same as any steak you can find, and surprisingly high in sodium. So, how often do you want to eat such an unhealthy food? I would argue never.You mentioned that Americans are eating 31 lbs of cheese a year. You then went on to call up the French Embassy, in which a charming cultural attaché said a few nice things but... well... It was all I could do to keep from grabbing my smart phone and fact-checking.You could have mentioned that U.S. cheese consumption isn't all that far out of line, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Greece, and more, all consume over 40 lbs of cheese per capita per year. You could have mentioned that the evidence against dietary cholesterol is kinda thin, and the war on salt is being reconsidered.In fact, you could have just dropped the story altogether, and filled those 5 minutes with something that made me smarter.Back to the podcasts.
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| iPad users |
| Dan Lyke: iPad users: DD vision impaired adult needs note pad app that can be configured to use large text. Recommendations?
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| Software which is expected to be a part |
| Dan Lyke: Software which is expected to be a part of a complex system and run indefinitely is very different from needing to ship for Christmas...
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| Continuous Delivery |
| ebradway: Last night, as Asha called me up to help her with a common task in Gmail, I
realized a major flaw in Google's Continuous Deliverysoftware
development model. Some people, especially computer programmers, are used to a
constantly changing environment. They know they that software A should have
feature X and that it may be hidden inside UI element Q (despite the fact that
it was in UI element P just the day before). It doesn't bother us that our
software is changing all the time.For people like my wife who just gave up her Windows XP laptop and Internet
Explorer only because I enticed her away with a Macbook, this change causes
constant reinforcement of their distrust of software. In my house, I hear "The
Internet is broke again"multiple times a day. Asha is always befuddled because
all that is needed for "the Internet to work again"is my physically standing
next to her or touching her computer. This, of course, one of the basic tenants
of Quantum
Bogodynamics. I am a bogon sink. When I step near her computer, I absorb the
bogons that are causing her computer to malfunction.I get annoyed when people ask me "How do you know much about computers?"or "How
did you learn to do XYZ?"I really know very little. What I do know is that if I
click a button on a computer, it probably won't blow up. So I just start
clicking buttons until I get the results I want. Nowadays we have
this wonderful thing called "undo"that lets me fix things when I get bad
results. It's not like you have to type your computer job on punch cards, submit
them to the system operators, and hope you get a print out in the morning that
matches your expectations. Click the button already!Why am I able to format Asha's documents in Apple Pages? I've never touched
the software before she did. But I know that there ought to be buttons somewhere
to make it work and I just need to find them and click them. It's not like the
DOS or Unix shell days when you needed to know these arcane incantations to do
simple things like navigate a folder hierarchy. Just start clicking buttons
already!And here's a secret that the geek intelligentsia will string me up for sharing:
If you can't figure out how to do something, just type a description of what you
want to do into Google. Want to know how to change a lightbulb?Want to know how to
change a light switch?Want to know how to format a table in
Apple Pages?And this continues just as complex as you want. Rocket Science, Brain Surgery, and even super complex subjects
like downloading pictures from email, are
just a Google search away. You can even click the "I'm feeling lucky button"if
you don't want to decide which search result to try first.So please, please, just start clicking buttons. Observe what the computer does.
If you don't like the results. Try another button. Eventually, you'll know what
the buttons do and not too long after, you'll be able to predict whether or not
the button should exist. And if the button doesn't exist, then notify the
software developers and we'll add the button you need. Unless, of course, all of
our time isn't spent helping our wives download photos in email attachments for
the ten thousandth time!
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| Packetizer OpenID |
| Dan Lyke: Packetizer OpenID Provider Server Softwareis a Perl/MySQL/Apache OpenID provider system. I'm not sure if OpenID has been completely run into the ground yet, but if it does become useful at some point I wanted this as a resource to look at. |
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| 2 wheeled transport |
| Dan Lyke: A bunch from Shadow(well, okay, two and one that I got to from following a link):Wired looks at Ritte Van Vlaanderen bikes, seems like they're primarily about the graphic design and marketing plan, but it's an interesting little look at even that.BOXX Corp makes a little box shaped electric motorcycle, although the Engadget post that sent me off looking uses "bicycle". There is, however, no "pedal it"option.Yike Bikeis a super lightweight folding electric motorcycle. |
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| GPS jamming |
| Dan Lyke: @midendian saysI missed this: truckers using GPS jammers to block their fleet managers prevented GPS approaches at EWR. About this article about the FAA gearing up to do GPS policingthat talks about problems near Newark International Airport with GBAS for tests using Continental Airlines equipment doing augmented approaches.I'm not sure where the "truckers"and "fleet managers"assertion comes from, but even if it's some other source it's still interesting that GPS jamming is an off-the-shelf thing.
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| First day in years at a "real job" |
| Dan Lyke: First day in years at a "real job": off to do amazing things in the operations group at Sonic.net!
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| Because my dad asked |
Dan Lyke:  Because my dad asked, picture of the garage reorg.
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| They say chicken soup feeds the soul |
| Dan Lyke: They say chicken soup feeds the soul, but they don't say what it feeds the soul to. Lovecraft was an optimist.
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| Studio Lighting Qs |
| ebradway: I'm going to be doing some photography for one of Asha's projects - yoga, not
salads. I want to set up a good lighting system for the project. I could rent a
real studio kit for a reasonable amount but I'd also like to try to assemble a
kit using stuff that will see more use. I've done yoga photos for her before but
we used a studio and completely rearranged the track lighting. I don't think
Asha realized how lucky we were to have a space with 30-40 spots on tracks, so
her expectations are higher than she realizes.The crux of the question is:Can I get away with taking all our table lamps and placing them in the room
(with or without shades)?Should I get 3-4 portable halogen work lights? If so, should I add some
diffusion?If I use lamps, like clamp-on portable work lights, should I use
incandescent, halogen or fluorescent bulbs?And has anyone tried just using bed sheets for backdrops and diffusers as
opposed to hitting Michael's for a bolt of muslin? |
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| Off The Mark |
| Dan Lyke: My dad introduced Off The Markinto my regular morning comics, and it gets giggles. |
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| Truth in movie posters |
| Dan Lyke: If 2012's Oscar Nominated Movie Posters told the truth |
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| | Appropriation Art and Walker Evans |
| Appropriation Art appears to be the topic du jour. Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer devoted two posts to what James Danziger had called “the biggest photographic mystery of the 2008 [US] election”: who took the original photograph that Shepard Fairey used as the source for the Obama HOPE prints? [edited for clarity] Reading the [...] |
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| Cotoneaster Berries |
| Campbelltown, 1984 |
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| Petals |
| Windsor, 1984 |
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| Travelling on Foot |
| In my teenage years, desperate to bridge the gap between hope and fear, I would walk long distances. When I “should have been studying”, I would walk for hours. Perhaps, if I had been more willing to participate in team sports, I might have been too sore and weary to be so deeply troubled by [...] |
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| 300 |
| As I sat in the theater a few nights ago with my friends, G and P, desperate for 300 to end, I kept thinking of John Robb’s description of the film as absolutely amazing… So unrelentingly great that it has earned a permanent place in my top 10 movies of all time. Wherein lay the [...] |
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| Hello world! |
| It’s been two years to the day since my last post. I’d intended to come back to weblogging before this–especially since Dave Rogers predicted that I would “post something” before the end of 2006. For, even though I wasn’t writing for my own weblog, I never stopped reading weblogs. In fact, weblogs have been my [...] |
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| | Attack of the Return of the Kindle Plunging |
| A while back, I mentioned how I had ordered a $99 Kindle Touch, and said that I’d report back after I’d had it for a while. Here are my mostly positive thoughts. Size: I like this thing a lot. It’s smaller … Continue reading → |
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| iCloud: Visual QuickStart Guide is now available! |
| I’m happy and proud to announce that my latest book, iCloud: Visual QuickStart Guide, from Peachpit Press, is now widely available. It’s one of the newer breeds of Visual QuickStart Guides, with all-color screenshots. It covers virtually all of the aspects of iCloud, … Continue reading → |
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| Nuclear Weapons Storage |
| If you’ve ever wondered about where nuclear weapons are stored, here is an infographic that shows where they are (nothing too specific; no interest to spies here). There’s general info about the number of weapons storage sites per country, and … Continue reading → |
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| Taking the Kindle Plunge |
| I’ve written here about the Kindle twice before. When it was first released in late 2007, I predicted that it was going to be a hit, and many really smart friends (and my wife) told me I was dead wrong … Continue reading → |
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| Blogging from Worldcon |
| We’ve been having a great time here at Worldcon in Reno, and we’ve been writing about it, too, at Stack Exchange’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Community Blog. Check it out! |
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| Our Worldcon Schedule |
| Between August 17 and August 21, we’ll be attending Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention, in Reno. What started out as a pleasure trip has turned into business for both of us. I’m speaking on three panels. Dori is … Continue reading → |
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| If it ain’t one thing, it’s two things |
| We’ve been busy getting two book projects out the door (JavaScript: Visual QuickStart Guide, 8th Edition and Dreamweaver CS5.5: Visual QuickStart Guide). The latter is an ebook supplement to the printed Dreamweaver CS5 Visual QuickStart Guide. Between that work and … Continue reading → |
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| I’ve temporarily turned off commenter registration |
| The past day or so, we’ve just been slammed with obviously bogus user registrations. More than 400. I had previously installed the Stop Spammers plugin, which had done a great job, but something’s changed. Then yesterday I added the Register … Continue reading → |
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| Help me pick a new paperless office organizer |
| I’ve been a big fan of the journey (you never quite get there) towards the paperless office for years, since I first bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner. It’s a terrific device; you drop one or more sheets into its hopper, … Continue reading → |
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| Our 10th Wedding Anniversary |
| Ten years ago today, I was standing on the lawn at Madrona Manor here in Healdsburg, surrounded by our family and friends. I was about to marry the woman of my dreams. She was smart, funny, pretty, geeky, brilliant, thoughtful, … Continue reading → |
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| | SOPA/PIPA |
| Matt Haughey recounts how he almost lost the business he’d been running for over a decade due to a bogus copyright claim: “The formal retraction took nearly two weeks to secure and convince lawyers for my host that it was adequate for removing the DMCA claim. That’s two weeks into a 30 day window before [...] |
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| Snowgnarok! |
| Seattle is currently under a sheet of snowy ice! The back door to my house is literally frozen shut and I’ve been housebound for three days. Luckily I have soup, grilled cheese, a couch-cushion fort to keep away the ice weasels, and the new Kin to Stars single cookin’ up. We’re performing our third-show ever [...] |
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| Screens and headphones |
| I’ve decided that I don’t hate the new Van Halen song and video. The song is 100% not-great VH but all the familiar elements are there, except for maybe Wolfgang. Beyond the fact that I couldn’t stop singing “sexy dragon magiiic!” under my breath for a few hours, this song and video had very little [...] |
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| Thank God I am here |
| “During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as ‘undeliverable,’ and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support [...] |
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| The new Explone EP is coming. |
| (View this video at YouTube.) The new EP from Explone is on its way. Prepare yourselves! You may want to sit down. |
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| Things I’ve learned about the Seattle music scene |
| It’s pretty easy to get a gig. If you live here, there are hundreds of coffeeshops, open mics, art galleries, restaurants and other venues that will let you work your craft in front of an audience, without expecting you to pack the place. You might be competing with an espresso machine and people might have [...] |
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| Good enough to get out of the way |
| Last weekend I experimented with GarageBand’s built-in guitar amp modeling. My god. I could not believe the sounds I was getting, and just from default settings! I don’t know if Apple’s amp modeling is done in-house or not, but it certainly rivals anything I’ve heard from Line 6. I did some rock demos that to [...] |
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| PJ20 |
| Last night I watched the Cameron Crowe Pearl Jam documentary, Pearl Jam 20. Some thoughts: in hindsight, Mother Love Bone was a lot more glam than I remember. I had forgotten all that crazy climbing Eddie did during concerts. The shots of Jeff looking up at Eddie hanging overhead were great. there’s an early scene [...] |
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| “Well guys, looks like we are awesome.” |
| Drummer and good pal Josh Williams is moving to Boulder this week, thus leaving Explone to carry on without him. Patrick has written some words you should read about Josh over here — they’ve been friends for longer than I’ve known either of them and have a lot of shared history. Josh and Pat were [...] |
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| It’s the Kirby Krackle Xmas song giveaway! |
| Last week Kirby Krackle went in-studio and blasted out a version of “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” Foo Fighters-style in about two hours. It’s free! Go get it! Here are some making-of snippets (RSS lovers, you may have to click through to the post to watch the videos): Visit the site to watch this video. Visit [...] |
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| Useit.Com: The Power of Defaults. Users rely on defaults in many other areas of user interface design. For example, they rarely utilize fancy customization features, making it important to optimize the default user experience, since that's what most users stick to. |
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| | A standard for RT'ing? |
There's a feature in all my rivers that makes it possible to RT a post, directly from the browser to your linkblogging tool.  Here's an exampleof one of the rivers. It works with Radio2, and probably nothing else. But any other linkblogger could support it by accepting three parameters. They are: link, title, description.They came straight from the RSS item. The first time the user clicks a RT, a dialog asks for the domain name of their linkblogger. It stores it in a cookie, so the user never has to enter it again.If you have a blogging tool you can support this, probably in a few minutes (and you might already support it if you have a bookmarklet, in which case please let me know). |
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| I don't love Google but... |
| John Battelle is right. Google defined the web that we like, and the web we like defined Google.Having Google break the contract is not just bad for Google, it's bad for the web.Two take-aways from this:1. We should be more careful about who we get in bed with next time.2. We probably should help Google survive, but only to the extent that they support the open web that we love.Another comment.On Twitter, Om Malik saysthat he's following me by using a search engine I wrote about here. And while I did write about it, I don't use it. And I won't unless we can work something out with them that guarantees that they will not take us down the same path Google did. I don't see the point of endorsing a successor to Google, if it just takes us down the same path again.I use Bing on my iPad, and still use Google search on my desktop. Google for some reason decided that I need a special mobile version of their search engine on the iPad. That's crazy. It's got a full size screen. All they did was add a lot of whitespace. It's like building a car for the tropics with an industrial strength heating system and no air conditioning. Hello. If anything you'd want to reducethe whitespace on a smaller screen. But the brilliance of the iPad that software designers generally refuse to recognize, is that it has a no-compromise web browser (except for the still-irritating omission of Flash). Find other problems to solve. This one doesn't need solving.So Bing, while it comes from a company even more evil than Google (although their evil is older and they are more humbled), is a better iPad search engine, so it's a no-brainer for me to use it over Google, there. I've yet to find something that works well enough to replace Google on the desktop. |
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| A non-stop blast of tech news! |
 As you may know, I resigned from Facebook a few months ago. I don't miss it one bit. And while I get a good dose of tech news from Twitter, it isn't enough. So I'm an at-least-every-hour TechMemereader, even though I admit that it isn't really tech news. It's an addiction. So hat's off to Gabe Rivera for creating something I can't live without. But I want more! More! More!! Then the other day I was looking at the TechMeme leaderboard, and sawthat it lists the RSS feeds for most of the top sites. So I pulled them info into an OPML file, and created a river out of it using my River2software, and let it run overnight to see what it would look like after some stories had come in.No surprise -- it's pretty fantastic. I know you all love tech news, so I wanted to share.http://tech.newsriver.org/PS: I sent Gabe an email yesterday with a pointer yesterday asking if it would be possible to jointly provide this as a service on techmeme.com. He's probably busy creating new "meme"sites -- but the offer remains open. I'd love to see this as river.techmeme.com or something like that. I think everyone who wants to be blasted with tech news should know about it.PPS: John Battelleposted an excellent item yesterday asking what our vision is for the future of the web. I wanted to point out that all of these sites are totally on the web. So it ain't dead yet. And they all have feeds too. Just thought I'd mention that. |
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| Advice for new Facebook millionaires |
I just read a pieceon Reuters with advice for new Facebook millionaires, that is for the most part, totally right on. I have some of my own advice, based on experience.1. First and foremost, remember who you were before the money truck hit you. You're still that person. The money didn't change you-- even if it did change your circumstances. 2. The most important difference in your circumstances is that you now own yourself. It's the most important thing you can own, in fact it's the only luxury that's really worth it. You can only sleep in one bed every night, drive one car, eat one dinner, etc. There's a limit to how much happiness consumption can buy you. After a while your posessions start owning you. A cliche, yes -- but also true. 3. Practically speaking, the lockup period probably won't prevent you from selling stock. A lot of reporters don't seem to understand the purpose of the lockup period is to enable the managers of the IPO to control the flow of stock to the market. That's important if there's limited demand for the stock, which often happens with smaller companies that aren't so famous. It almost certainly will not apply to Facebook. The underwriters can release you from the lockup if they have a buyer for the stock and they don't think it'll screw up the price for the other shareholders. They wantto help you sell your stock because during the lockup they get all the commissions. After the lockup ends you can sell any way you want, and that can mean no commission for them.3a. One of my investors said all the money he ever made was due to lockups. What he meant is that he would have sold all his stock on the IPO if he had been able to. Because of the lockup he didn't, and the stock appreciated significantly in the first six months. I guess his underwriters didn't like him or there wasn't much demand for the stock in the first six months? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me that all of a sudden, once the locked-up shareholders were free that demand would go up.Seems it would go down. (I think he was giving me a peptalk to not worry too much about being locked up. But I had completely divested before the lockup was over.)4. Brokerage commissions are negotiable. That goes for buying andselling.5. Have you ever seen The Graduate where the old guy tells Dustin Hoffman to go into plastics. I'm going to say something like that now, so listen up. Diversify. It makes no sense to have your entire net worth in Facebook stock. Look at it this way, if you had $10 million in cash, would you put it all into Facebook? Of course not, no matter how good the company is, it's too risky. The same goes if you got lucky and got all this Facebook stock just for coming into work for a few years. Sell that Facebook stock and get other stocks and bonds, and in this economy, keep quite a bit in US dollars. 6. A good approach to selling is to sell a certain percentage of your stock every quarter no matter whether the price is up or down. That takes the stress out of it, and gets you the average of the price over time. On the other hand, if the broker calls you up some day and says he can get you a hundred million for all of your stock, and you feel like taking it -- take it! There's nothing like trading a risky high tech stock for good old American dollars. They may have downgraded our debt but it's still the safest form of money out there. (And remember the importance of #2. If you can get transcendentalabout your money, it doesn't matter whether you have $100 million or $10 million. You'll still be able to buy anything you could want, as if being able to buy luxuries was what life was about, it's not.)7. I remember learning that a friend, before I had my first windfall, was actually a rich guy who had sold a bunch of patents and was worth tens of millions. Yet he lived in a middle class home in a middle class neighborhood. He drove a modest car. He didn't act like a rich guy. That made a huge impression on me. Not enough to save me from the excesses of being a nouveau richemyself. I bought the 750ILand a mini-estate in Woodside. Later I learned to scale down my lifestyle, and I was happier! I was raised a middle-class guy and have middle-class values. Living like a rich guy is not so good, at least for me.8. One of the things you don't anticipate when you choose to live rich is that you're going to end up spending a lot of your time with people who work for you. My friend from #7 had it right. Much better to spend time with friends. People who like you because of who you are not for what you have. 9. What is money good for? Distance. It buys you distance from everyone else. But normal human beings like to be near other human beings. We are a social species. So not only can't money buy you happiness, it can buy you a lot of isolation and that's not happy. You'll likely be happier living in the middle of the noisy messy world than all alone at the end of a long driveway in the middle of nowhere. I agree with the theme of the Reuters piece. Don't expect the money to change you. To the extent that it does, you will probably have to unwind those changes later, so it's better overall not to make them in the first place. |
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| Florida campaign commercials? |
| Is there an archive of campaign commercials used in the Republican primary this year? |
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| More ideas for Hollywood |
Following up on Ideas for Movie Moguls, 1/25/12.Robert Goldman writesabout a nearby cinema that has reserved seats. And has eliminated the non-preview commercials. This is the big idea. Treat your customers like you care about them, and they'll be happier to pay money. The idea of paying $15 to see a movie and then having to sit thru commercials for soft drinks and real estate is really humiliating. Whoever had that idea should be sent off to the glue factory.  Another one. I discovered that somehow I'm not subscribed to HBO at home. That's news to me, since I get HBO on my cable box. So I went to the Time-Warner site to check it out, and if I wasn't paying for it, to pay for it. They want me to call them. Well, I'm not going to do that. You can have my money, but not my time and pride. When they get you on the phone get ready for the hard upsell. Someone calculated that if you don't mind wasting the customer's time, you can get an extra 10 percent revenue from them, as some will pay you to shut up. I don't happen to be one of those people. In any case I'm paying $119 a month, so I'm pretty sure that's covering HBO in addition to the standard cable package. You know that seems like an awful lot of money just to watch Boardwalk Empire and Homeland. Hmmm.One more idea, one that I was bouncing around with my friend Chris Dixonlast year. If one of us had the time to implement it we would. Maybe you'd like to? Here's the idea. Set up a trust for the movie industry. A bank account that we can deposit money into but only movie-makers can withdraw from. When you download a movie via BitTorrent that you watch all the way to the end, deposit $5 into the account for the movie. When the owners decide to accept BitTorrent as a legitimate distribution system, which someday they are sure to, they can have the money. The amount of money in the account is always public info. So it becomes an important statistic, part of the "box office"for a movie. Then you'd probably find a funny thing happening -- independent movie producers who can't get distribution any other way will start promoting this site as a legitimate way to pay for movies. It wouldn't take long before the MPAA realized that there are a huge number of people who want the convenience of watching movies at home on their own timetable, instead of having to deal with the inhumane system the movie industry created for them. Maybe then they will apologize for being such dicks. (But I wouldn't hold out for that.) |
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| Widget wars! |
| This is too funny not to say something.A few days ago I installed a widget that makes it easy to follow me on Twitter. When I looked at it in Firebug I was surprised at how they did it. They basically framed the whole page, just to get a tiny little thing in there. What are they doing? I have no clue. I don't like it. It looks nefarious. I like technology that, when I lift the hood, looks simple and understandable.But what the fuck. Everyone else is doing it. I'll let it be for a while. Then this morning I saw thiswhere it's supposed to show the number of Twitter followers.I clicked, and sure enough I could type some text. Hello. How did thathappen? And how is that even possible?As I said, I'm laughing about this because it's funny. We've been to this place so many times. Conflicting plug-ins. It's a sign of an architecture that people are pushing farther than it was capable of going. Maybe it's because they don't like my browser? I have no idea.But maybe it's time to get rid of all the hitchers, and just stick plain old HTML. |
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| Google's age-hate |
 I don't often use this space to condemn a person or company. I try to be understanding, see an issue from all sides. Or accept that it's just in the nature of big tech companies to be monopolistic and arrogant and closed-minded, and know that things will run their course, and eventually whatever they try to control will end up obsoleting them. But this bit about Googlebeing sued for age discrimination, with some horrific quotes from Google people, goes too far. "Some observers say much of this language is just code for age discrimination. They point to the case of Brian Reid, a 52-year-old manager who was fired by Google in 2004 -- nine days before the company announced plans to go public -- after his supervisors, including the company's vice president for engineering operations, allegedly called him a poor 'cultural fit,'an 'old guy'and a 'fuddy-duddy'with ideas 'too old to matter."Google doesn't deny or retract these statements. If you were to change those words from age to race, or gender, they would be ashamed. And they would apologize. But because it's age, the one ismthat's socially OK, they don't even admit that they were wrong.Even an open-minded person has to say this is over the top. Not only is there something wrong with the people who say these things, but there's something deeply wrong with a corporate culture that tolerates it.If one were to try to understand it, the story might go something like this. Big companies hire people who occupy seats, and their job is, as they see it, to keep the company from doing anything that might endanger their seat. They will use any irrelevant excuse to disqualify an idea they find threatening. Instead of finding the future exciting, these people, whatever age they may be (and they often are very young) try to hold back the future. The people who should be fired are not the people they are talking about, but the people who did the talking. PS: One thing's for sure, when I meet a person from Google now, I'm going to have a fairly good idea what they're thinking about me as I speak. |
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| Passive vs active news reading |
You hear this a lot -- I don't seek out the news, I assume that if something is important it will find its way to me. The other day I heard a famous VC say he gets most of his tech news from TechMeme. Add in a smattering of news from Twitter, and that's it. The problem with this approach, as I'm sure you know, is that you've given gatekeeper-like power to others. And they have their biases, conflicts, goals and business interests that keep some stories from getting to you. And you've allowed them to define what "tech"means. Like most conferencesthese days there isn't a lot of actual technology on TechMeme. Again, not their fault. If you want a real tech river, we can create one. But TechMeme is what it is, and it's not technology-heavy. I don't blame anyone for being a gatekeeper, just as I don't blame Twitter for bending to the will of governments that want to censor ideasthat reach their people. So who or what is to blame? No one really. It's just that if you want to be informed, it involves more work than just accepting what the most powerful gatekeepers are willing to give you.Another example to consider is Facebook. No one outside Facebook understands how their algorithm works. How do they decide which stories you'll see and which aren't important enough for you? I suspect it has something to do with what will make them money, both short-term and long-term. How they decide is completely opaque.Here I practice what I preach. Of course, like everyone else, I delegate my reading to gatekeepers. But I have over 400 of them! When any of them pushes a story it shows up in my river. I'm sure you've seen this, because I point to it all the time, as a way of enticing you to create your own river, and share it with others.http://daveriver.com/If you want to get one set up, you can do it for free for a year on Amazon EC2. Just follow the EC2 For Poetstutorial, and then install River2on the server it creates. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes. And it's a unique experience, not like anything you've likely done before.I'd love to see tech pubs create rivers that include not only their stories but the stories of their competitors and individual bloggers. Remember the old adage, People come back to places that send them away.It's still true, and it works! |
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| Haiku street sign |
100,000 years from now historians will debate the purpose of this street sign, discovered on the south cornerof Central Park South and Columbus Circle.  Was Earth occupied by a race of poets? |
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| Get the tech back in tech |
There was a time when you went to a tech conference and many if not most of the speakers knew how computers work. Some of them even knew how to program, and some of them were actually programming on a daily basis. I know it sounds outlandish, but think about it this way. How many medical conferences have no doctors on stage? How many architecture conferences have no architects? Yet it's considered normal to for tech conferences to have no technology. I was lucky to be invited to speak at a flash conference about Wikileaksin December 2010 in NY. I asked for a show of hands, how many people in the room are programmers? A lot of hands went up. So we're getting at least some techies in the audience. Why are there none on stage? I believe this is responsible for a very dangerous situation we find ourselves in now. We're quite vulnerable to a few very large companies who control most of the flow for most people on the Internet. Most of the messages flow through their servers. It's possible to argue that this isn't the Internet at all. Because one of the best features of the Internet was its decentralized nature, its resistance to censorship. When everything flows through a few company's servers, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, and a few others -- it's much easier to shut things down. And it's also possible to shut things down without anyone knowing. And it's possible to shut things down with no possible recourse. This is an unacceptably dangerous situation.So I propose three changes for tech conferences, akin to the changes brought about by women noticing that almost none of the speakers at tech conferences were women. 1. There ought to be at least one active programmer speaking at every tech conference.2. If there are tutorials at the tech conference, there ought to be a tutorial that shows people how to operate their own server with a few apps running on it. Blogging software perhaps. Or their own news aggregator. Or their own Facebook or Twitter clone (those might come later with an installed base of users who know how to run servers).3. If a conference is promoting APIs, it should in addition to promoting proprietary APIs, give equal time to open APIs that are not owned by any single corporation. Anticipating the objection that programmers are not suitable speakers because they are not good communicators, that's simply not true. It reflects people's fear more than reality. There are plenty of programmers who are great storytellers, and who are passionate about their work and able to tell you about other people's work, and what it means to people. There are far more programmers that I would like to listen to than venture capitalists or corporate CEOs. Programmers can get you excited about networks. CEOs tell you how great they are and how they're going to kill their competition. VCs tell you how much they love their CEOs. All this leaving users feeling like they're forgotten, which they truly are. About tutorials, we achieved great results at the Bloggerconconferences teaching people how to edit their own websites, at a time when it was considered just as weird to want to do that as it is today to want to run your own server. I promise you it's no more difficult to run a server, and it's just as satisfying, and opens your mind to a lot of new possibilities. And it weakens the grip of the big companies on their users if people aren't mystified about what it takes to run a server. The mystique is the problem. The fact that you think you can't run a server is the problem. All the money that's been made on the Internet owes a tremendous amount to the open APIs that made it all possible. It's also fair to ask the big companies to give back to replace the open-ness that they're taking out of the Internet. I like to ask VCs and company execs if they tip waiters at restaurants. Of course they all do -- but they don't haveto. We do it because -- well -- why do we do it? Probably because we appreciate good service. So we should all be giving back to the Internet. And one good way to do that is to demystify and promote the technology that made it all possible. In the hope that perhaps we'll get more.Looking at it another way, the Internet was one of the most successful development projects of all time. Why don't we continue the project instead of assuming that everything good will come from corporate developers. |
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| Macros in the worldoutline |
 Over the last few days the worldoutlinegot its basic macro facility. This is at least the seventh time I've implemented this, but it's the first time that CSS and JavaScript played a role in it. We've had support for CSS in the past, but this time we're depending on CSS as part of the runtime environment. Still feeling my way around and going slow, because the decisions made at this stage have to be lived-with for a long time to come. I was also able to build off Andre Radke's excellent workfor Manila macrosthat run code. So we start off with very powerful and safe macros that can call each other and even have logic and certain kinds of arithmetic. As usual for Andre's work it's done with precision and completeness and it's stood up over time.Here's a pagewith links to all the worknotes for this little project.And here's the leading edge, being able to include expandable outlineswithin any kind of object. The cool thing about macros, if they're designed with care, it's like swinging a huge ball at the end of a long chain, just by flicking your finger. I'll see if I can find an image that conveys the feeling.There's a macrothat allows includes a Glyphiconfrom a page.  The cool thing about this project is that it was not hard work, it was not a stretch. Part of that is because this the seventhtime I've done a macro system that renders in a web page. AutoWeb, Clay Basket, NewsPage Suite, WSF, Manila, Radio8 all came before. You think I'm in a loop? Obviously... Hopefully this is the last one. |
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| Ask not what the Internet... |
| On Twitter, with its 140-character limit, there's little focus to the discussion about the new filitering they just announced. Here are some of my comments, in bullet form, hopefully to add some more substance to the discussion..1. We don't know very much about what they're doing, and it's not clear that we ever will. 2. The examples they cite, laws in France and Germany that prohibit pro-Nazi speech, are somewhat reasonable. But I suspect this will be used in the future to prevent leaks of information they don't want leaked. If Twitter-like tech is the new world stage, and I think it is, they want to control who has what access to it.By "they"I mean the unspecified governments and companies that can tell Twitter to make something inaccessible somewhere.3. The Internet is nota law-free zone. 4. I am not passing judgment on Twitter. I will gladly concede they have no choice.5. What we're deciding, by our actions, is whether the Internet will be like TV, a medium where individuals can perhaps comment on what's being broadcast (that would be the innovation, the interactivity) but without the ability to organize ourselves outside of the control of huge corporations and governments.6. Yes, the governments can shut down anything they want.7. But, as I've pleaded previously, if we force them to shut down the Internet to control the flow of information, everyone will know. If there is an ability to shut off communities selectively, that would be hard to detect.8. Clarity on whether the Internet is up or down is something we should value and protect. 9. It's possible today to be on a decentralized network and still participate in Twitter. If large numbers of us do it, Twitter won't be able to quietly turn this feature off, or limit it, without lots of real users feeling it. 10. We should have tutorial sessions at every Internet policy conference that show people how easy it is to operate your own infrastructure. It's really therenow, ready to teach users how to do it. But you have to make a commitment to standing up for the Internet. It will never be as easy as Twitter. However, if Twitter shuts you off, it won't effect your presence. That's worth a little more complexity. (And the complexity is all in setup, not in posting. Once set up, it's faster than in Twitter itself.)11. If you work or study at a university in compsci or journalism, learn how to run a server, and then teach others how to do it. If you want to make a real contribution to the Internet, that's how to do it. Signing petitions or forcing minor movement in Washington really isn't that effective. 12. Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet.Anyway, that's it for now. |
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| EC2 for Poets in 2012 |
 Three years ago, I wrote a tutorial called EC2 for Poetsthat made it relatively easy for a technically proficient user to set up a Windows server in Amazon EC2. A few hundred people tried it, and were able to get servers running. They could install apps, and run web apps that they then could access from home or on the road. Having your own server "up there"can be pretty cool, makes a lot of things possible that otherwise would be hard. For example you can run a personalriver of news. That's what I do on one of my EC2 instances. Not only for myself but for a few friends at universities and publications. I'm now working on one for a friend who teaches at Harvard. And there's a biologist at Columbia who's using Radio2 to keep a linkblog running. This stuff really works, and is not so hard to set up. And once it's set up, it pretty much runs itself. Running a server may sound hard. But in practice it's as easy as running a laptop. In some ways it's even easier.And Amazon and Microsoft just made it possible to run an EC2 server for a year for free! That's a pretty big deal if you were thinking it might be too expensive just to play around. So in summary:1. EC2 for Poets.2. River2.3. Amazon EC2 pricing page.Just to be sure everything is working, I set up a River2 installationon a micro EC2 instance, and it really went smoothly. |
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| What could Nancy Pelosi know? |
| I know the Repubs like to demonize Nancy Pelosi, but I really like her. Check out this exchangewith John King at CNN.Fascinating. What does she know?Some possibilities...1. Newt is secretly a Democrat.2. Newt is secretly a woman.3. Newt secretly slept with Nancy P.4. Newt is secretly Osama bin Laden's long lost brother.5. New paid no taxes until he was 45 years old.6. Instead of fighting in Vietnam, he signed up for the Khmer Rouge. He's Prince Sihanouk's long lost brother.7. He was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. In fact the bay was named after him. He's Fidel Castro's long lost brother. (Hence his hatred of Fidel.)8. ??? |
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| Ideas for movie moguls |
| President Obama asksthat we suggest ways for the movie industry to control the Internet that we might not find so objectionable. Nat Torkington tells an old jokein a new context. It's a good one. God already gave the movie industry the Internet and it's been shown you can make many billions of dollars selling things there. So why not sell movies too? I think the President asks the wrong question. What can the movie industry do to freshen up their productin the age of technology to make it more fun and interesting for their customers. Rather than try to destroy the new playground, how about coming out to play!So here are some ideas.1. The best suggestion I've heard is to make it impossible to use a cell phone or send or receive text messages in movie theaters. Just block the incoming signal. True, some people might stay home because they always want to be online, but I bet a lot more people would come back.2. Work with Apple and others to emit a special "no alarms allowed"signal to be broadcast in the movie theater. That way the user doesn't have to do anything to turn off the alarms. The owner of the venue could do it.3. I find it's hard to hear dialog sometimes in movies. Maybe it's because my hearing isn't so good. I like the sound systems they have. But I could use my mobile device and headphones to tune into an audio track that's broadcast locally to those in the theater. Sure hackers could use this to get a great recording of the sound of the movie. So what. It would make the experience better for the people who pay. Those people are your customers. 4. Open the theaters to amateurs. Have contests for local creative movie people in your neighborhood. Have Saturday showing for the kids in your area. Get involved with your community. They could be a source of ideas. And we could find out where the great movies are coming from, geographically. 5. Why aren't there cafes in the lobby of at least some theaters. Aren't we always looking for a place for a snack or coffee after the movie? A place to talk about what we just saw with people we came with? Or a place to talk about the movies with people we saw it with. Instead they just move people in and out. Missed opportunity, imho.6. Make the theaters more attractive and comfortable! Upgrade the experience. You're competing against my home theater which isn't really that great compared to the theater. But it is much more convenient. 7. Stretch the genres. So many of the movies are stupid rehashes of stories that weren't that great in the first place. Movies like The Artist show that there are still a lot of ideas that are not fullly explored. Challenge the movie-makers to be more creative. I think that's a big part of the problem.8. Start a dating sitebased on people's like and dislike of movies. Anyway, just some ideas. Feel free to share your ideas in the comments. |
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| Can we buy your search engine? |
 In yesterday's pieceabout wanting an exit from Google, I mentioned that I might use DuckDuckGo, but had reservations because it's "another Fred Wilson company."Fred, who is a very cheerful dude (no sarcasm) respondedwith evangelism, which is what I like about Fred. Of course he can handle criticism, even when it's as vaguely defined as the bit in my blog post. Come right back with a great product pitch. I wouldn't expect any less. Even though I know Fred personally, he has a bigger presence in the tech world. Like it or not he now is the leading tech VC. He occupies a slot that John Doerr used to. Who came before? Not sure -- Don Valentine? Arthur Rock? Eugene Kleiner? I've heard about them. But they're not of my generation. I'm a little younger than Doerr, and a little older than Wilson. And I know JD as well. He bought a company of mine, I served on a board with him, and he lived on the same street in the 90s (not bragging, I lived a little beyond my means, and Doerr is more modest than his).Both Doerr and Wilson are genial, charming, politically active, and I think for the most part share the same values I do. However, where we part is on the role of users in tech. I have chosen to identify with them. And while Fred does as good a job as he can, given what he does, of understanding the user's perspective (I'd say this is the reason he rose to be #1 in his field) he really is sitting on the other side of the table, business-wise, from the users. I doubt if he views it this way, but I do.The way to align our interests is to own a common stock. Back in 1998, it turns out, it would have been a good idea to not switch to Google unless we as users could buy it. I think the Google guys sort of intuited this, because when they finally went publicin 2004, they cut out the investment bankers, and went with a very web-like approach to stock called the Dutch AuctionIPO, invented by Bill Hambrecht. What a pioneering idea, it paved the way for  Kickstarter, which is growing like a weed, and changing the way we think about funding startups (Kickstarter is Fred Wilson company, btw, and Google is a John Doerr company).So Google started out on the right path, but eventually they went wild and desperate, and did all the things with their product that users probably thought they would never do. So now I'm shopping for a search engine to invest in. DuckDuckGo could be that, except for this one problem. Imho, it's inexorably on the same path that Google was on. That means they're going to spend years of our time pretending that they are still on our side, until one day it'll be blatantly obvious that we just wasted years waiting for them to give take us somewhere we'd want to go . They are using us as pawns, as big techco's always do. In other words, I want to use a search engine that I, along with you, and everyone else on the web, own. In the same sense that we own the web. Can we operate our own search engine? Can the developers who lead us there get unreasonably rich even if they don't control our future? These are all questions that I believe we can address. I think we can all win. And I think that until we do this, and do it right, we'll be stuck in the same infinite loop we've circling as long as I've been in tech.This isn't intended to generate an action item on anyone's todo list (to use tech management terminology) rather to raise the question, once again, how we can build a future with technology that is allied with the interests of users. That's where I want to invest my most precious resource -- time. |
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| We need an exit from Google |
Google's feature-creepis creeping me out. I did an image search the other day and it made me stand up and pace. They were showing me posts on Google Plus with pictures from people they know I know because I email with them in Gmail. I don't want to go there. I want search to be search and just that. I want the same search everyone else gets unless I specifically ask it to search images from people I know who are using Google-Plus. There are times I don't want to be marketed to.Like when I'm using image search. That's almost always part of creative work. I will do the driving Google. Thanks.Maybe it's time to use DuckDuckGo, but honestly that's another Fred Wilsoncompany, and even though he returns my calls and answers my emails, I don't want to be so dependent on him. I already us Twitter, Tumblr and Disqus. That's enough. One thing is for sure, the Internet experience which has been pretty steady for the last five years or so is about to upheave. I'm planning on doing some of the heaving myself. |
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| Code nodetypes in World Outline |
I've got three main projects and lots of little utilities that tie them together.They are River2, Radio2 and World Outline.River2 and Radio2 are at 1.0 level. Totally functional, polished UIs, but they're still being worked on. There will be new major versions.World Outline is rock and roll. But it's coming out soooo nice. I love this product like I loved outliners in the 80s and blogging tools in the 90s and 00s. As you might imagine, outlines play a big role in the World Outline. And when you can make an outline behave and look like an outline, well that's strictly good. In December I finally invested in making outline objects work just like outlines. That meant rolling up my sleeves and making no apologies for my Javascript coding. And it came out nice. Then I rested on that front for a while, let it burn in and dug some new holes over the holidays. Now on my todo list is to roll up the outline rendering tool so it's used to render other forms of outlines. And in my world, scripts are outlines. So what the hell, let's make it so that script code renders as an outline. There are good reasons to do this. For one it makes the code more readable. And I have lots of code. And I want to send pointers to code to Frontier newbies who are coming up now (yay!) and I didn't want to send them pointers to flat text. That would seem to miss the point. Yes? Yes!So here's an exampleof what a code object looks like now. As you might imagine, to expand something click the blue wedge. Text in italics are comments. One of the cool things about programming in an outliner is that the comments collapse up to a single line. So there's no penalty for explaining what's going on. As a result, some of the scripts in our world are really blogs! Here's an example, tcp.httpClient. It started out in 1998 as a utility to replace code that was being replicated all over the place. Over time we realized that this was a pretty central piece of code, and invested in it. And from time to time it needed a new feature or a new optional parameter. Naturally we documented the changes in comments at the top of the script.And because we love CSS you can control the look of code objects by editing the template. Here's the default templatefor code objects in the world outline. But I imagine that these templates will be traded like themes in Manila or templates in Tumblr. I love investing in template languages because it's where geeks and designers meet. Power meets power. (The template is an outline, so you should open it in an outliner that understands OPML.)And all this has Bootstrap baked in, and it surfaces at the top level. When this is done, I think it'll be the easiest and most powerful Bootstrap prototyping and design environment in addition to all the other stuff it does. Just wanted to mark this milestone here.... |
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| Newt the dog whistler |
Good evening everybody. It's time to watch football. And inbetween plays a place to write some notes. Not necessarily about the game.I had a thought about Apple's hype that their products "just work"and how it causes pain for the support system for their products. The users hear how easy everything is, but when they go to their spouse or child or parent or S.O. to get help they make it sound so complicated. Hand-waving and exasperation. This disconnect causes infinite angst in family relationships. I guess it's part of life. But it would help if Apple told users that their friends who try hard to help really aretrying to help. (Assuming they are.) Or they could do more to realize the "just works"promise. Last night Newt Gingrich gave a disgusting victory speech, which is why we tune into Newt. To see how low he can go! And he can go pretty damn low. He helped me see how Republicans use ideas that no one understands and make them sound evil the way they use the terms. The Republican fans tune in. Oh Sharia Law. That's great I mean awful! Can you just imagine the Supreme Court taken over by Sharia lawyers. What will the liberal elites think of next! Answer: Saul Alinsky. A Jewish communist who worked against "racism."What could be better for a Southern racist than getting to hate a Jew who loves blacks. Oh Newt! You know just what to say to get us excited. The silver lining? Republicans outside the South aren't quiteas low as Newt. And some of them are even Jewish, African-American or Muslim.Yes, I hate the Republicans. Delete the party and start over. That business with driving the country to the brink of default after running up the deficit for so many years, that was a line they shouldn't have crossed. That kind of arrogant anti-Americanism deserves the death penalty. As Newt saysit's as close to despicable as anything I can imagine! |
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| Snowy Central Park today |
 Central Park was absolutely lovely, with kids sledding and everyone out to experience the snowy landscape and really cold air. Wonderful. |
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| The disneyfication of tech |
Truth is this -- users are caught between tech and media. Neither of them is looking out for our interest. Each of them own politicians each owns tech. The tech industry is better at tech (no surprise) and the media industry is better at a lot of other things, including getting Congress to do their bidding.I've been warning the news publishers to be careful about viewing Twitter and Facebook as if they were equivalent to the web. This would be like Kodak trusting Apple to handle its digital photography strategy. We know now how that turned out. Twitter and Facebook are rich and getting richer. Either of them could easily buy a struggling but independent news organization. Then where would you be if you were dependent on them to distribute news? It would be like the Times depending on Murdoch to print their daily paper. Instead the Times invested in their own printing plant, presumably so they could have better control of the product, both from a creative and tactical standpoint. If Murdoch owned the presses and the trucks, who do you think would deliver the most timely news? They have to think about Twitter that way. At some point they will come to see themselves as a media company, if they don't already.Caught in the middle is the original idea of the Internet and the web, that people could bemedia instead of just consuming it. For that to continue, enough people have to see their future as publishing independently, and enough people have to read indpenedently of corporate media, neither originating from Silicon Valley or Hollywood, to keep the flame alive.I still hope that there's a remnant of the idealism of tech. That there was value in the personal-ness of PCs. The net is the same way. We need to make it always-easier for people to own and run their own infrastructure. People think it's hard, but it doesn't have to be! Each of us can have the equiv of a printing plant, that's the magic of tech. No harder to keep running than a laptop. To those people in tech who still hold to the ideal of free communication unrestricted by government or corporations, pleaseuse some of your profits to help guarantee the future of an independent Internet.Otherwise, I think we can all see this clearly now, the net will be a single amorphous disneyfiedmess, not too far down the road. |
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| Setting up an iPad in 2012 |
 I remember reading an article in the NYT magazine that had a picture of a young woman who had been horribly disfigured in a fire when she was a kid. They showed her the picture. She didn't know she looked like that. They asked what she saw when she looked in the mirror. She said there was a way of tilting her head and looking only at certain features that made her appear attractive. That's how she hid the truth from herself. This made an impression, obviously, since I read that piece many years ago, but the story stays with me. Yesterday, I tried to configure an iPad with my mother, for my mother, and we failed. And in the process I saw clearly how awful the process still is, even though you no longer need to tether the iPad to a computer to set it up.I understand it can be a hard problem, but I also see evidence of different teams working on different parts of the setup and not talking to each other. What else could explain why you have to enter your email address twice in the process?And why exactly do they need to know her email address? And why does it need to be verified? We paid good money for this device. It's ours, isn't it? How does Apple justify getting in the way of our using it whatever way we'd like to? (Yes, I know that shows how naive I am and what a throwback I am to the days when computers were really ours, when they were personalcomputers.)They didn't like the password she chose. It was a good password given that she just wants to play a game with it. But it required 8 characters, at least one had to be uppercase and one had to be a number. The chance of her remembering the password we created? Pretty slim. (And what good is a password that the user can't remember?)They use so much techinical jargon in the setup process that a normal person couldn't possibly be expected to understand. I didn't write it all down. I knew what to do because I have almost 40 years experience using computers and a couple of degrees in computer science. But if they commissioned a study at Apple to evaluate the setup process, by someone who didn't have a stake in "it just works"as applied to Apple, they would have their eyes opened. This thing is not easy to set up or use. (It iseasy to buy, however. That process they have invested in streamlining.)All I wanted to do was give my mom a way to play Words With Friendswith her friends. She's a lifelong Scrabble player, and I think she would enjoy it. But we didn't have a way to access her email from the Starbucks where we did this work, so she left without the iPad. And she's not good at following instructions over the phone. I had reservations about giving her something that would further complicate her computer life. Now I can see what a bad idea this was. But what if Apple lived up to their claims? What if the iPad really were easy to set up and use? What if they streamlined it so that all unnecessary steps were taken out of the way of a user who just wants to have fun?I read a quote from Steve Jobs where he said he didn't want to compete with Dell and have the computers delivered by UPS or Fedex because he wanted to experience the joy of an impulse purchase. He wanted to get the credit with his family for bringing home something fun, powerful and easy. I agree. But today's Apple doesn't deliver on that. My mom says that all her friends who have iPads had to go to the Apple store to get them set up. I'm not surprised. I can't imagine how it could be otherwise. |
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| Wordpress.com's new RSS aggregator |
| I've known this was coming, Matt told me about their RSS aggregatorwhen he told me they were supporting rssCloud.So theoretically, I should see this update over there immediately because I'm subscribed, and of course scripting.comsupports rssCloud.A couple of problems off the bat.1. I tried subscribingto my linkblog feed, which is valid RSS, but got an errorsaying it couldn't find a valid feed.2. I don't see any way to import or export an OPML subscription list. Not saying they don't have it, I just didn't find it.And of course it's good news that Wordpress is embracing RSS fully, as a way to connect reading and writing. It's what I wish Twitter and Facebook had done from the beginning. They said it wasn't possible. It's good to see that Matt &Co didn't fall for that. Also interesting to see that they subscribed me to some stuff before I had ever been there. They areblogs I'm interested in. How did they know?Update: Apparently you can only subscribe to a blog, not to a feed. I have quite a few feeds that don't have blogs. No reason to. Here are a couple of examples: NYT firehose, Hacker News firehose. Thee are two of my most-used feeds. Update: I tricked it into subscribing to Hacker News by creating a pseudo-blog"wrapper"for it and asking Wordpress to subscribe to it. However, it did not like the wrapperfor my linkblog. Weird and frustrating. |
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| Matt Waite's excellent post |
Matt Waite, a professor at University of Nebraska, has written a very timely postabout the dearth of student developers to work in newsrooms and j-schools. I wrote a comment, but my browser crashed as it was submitting it. Then I posted another comment, but I put it under the wrong post. Serves me right. I should have made my rather longish comment a blog post, as I so often recommend to others. So here goes.First read Mr. Waite's post. If you're a regular here, you will find it on-topic, in many ways. Now, my observations. Lots to say on this subject, but most to the point -- I have lots of working code that's relevant to journalism, and lots more ideas. Also have a track record at getting ideas adopted. Not only am I available to work with academics who want to get stuff done, I have experience at it. Just finished a two-year fellowship at NYU J-school, and also worked as a fellow at Harvard Law School to get blogging adopted across the campus.However -- it's been over 30 years since I was a student. There are plenty of 50-somethings like me, with lots of relevant experience who are looking for ways to contribute.Based on my experience at NYU, I think what the young folk are mostly distracted by are the VCs, who believe the way to riches in software is through people in their early 20s. It's hard to keep them interested in school, or anyhting other than being "the next Zuck."One more thing I wrote a piecelast year about educating the journo-programmer. To summarize, I think the one skill we should be teaching all journalists is how to manage their own infrastructure. And we should help compsci students learn how to make that easier and more powerful for the journos. And the ones who have talent at the intersection will be fairly obvious. |
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fase4 RDF Error: http://www.seabury.edu/MT/akma/index.rdf is not available fase4 RDF Error: Cannot write to: 3d8ffc979017dd237a55e55467926fb9
Exception at Line: 921
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fase4 RDF Error: http://webaccess.mozquito.com/features/index.xml is not available fase4 RDF Error: Cannot write to: 349b7741fd428e82f7c6897bcd7d039e
Exception at Line: 921
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