February 2008
70 posts
Tonight's debate →
We’re following the debate on Twitter and there’s a chatroom…
irc://irc.freenode.net/debatefest
Dave
January 2008
100 posts
Who is Gore for? →
David Weinberger asks a question I’ve been wondering about, who does Al Gore endorse for President in 2008?
Micro-Digg, oy -- honeypot for idiots →
I should have known…
The idiots want to rule the Reddit I started for Scripting News readers. I couldn’t figure out how to delete it, and while trying, I deleted my account, so forget the experiment, and if anyone at Reddit is listening, could you please delete it for me. (I sent an email but there was no response.)
Still diggin!
Why does Twitter go down? →
Over the last 24 hours Twitter has been down as much as it’s been up. As always this gives us a reason to think about what the world would be like without Twitter and then those of us who are engineers or would-be engineers, start thinking about ways to fix the problem, whatever it is.
The Twitter folk say that the recent problems are related to an infrastructure overhaul. Of course I...
Covering eTech in March →
I’ll be covering the eTech conference in San Diego in early March. It’s been a few years, last time I went was just before my surgery in 2002. I’ll be going as a blogger, not presenting. Many thanks to O’Reilly for approving the press pass, and I look forward to catching up with many old friends.
FlickrFan belongs in schools →
Lance Knobel: “I’d install FlickrFan in every middle school and high school social studies class. I guarantee it would provoke endless discussion and ensure engagement in the issues of the day.”
I totally agree. It would be great to see it at checkout lines in supermarkets and on kiosks in BART stations too.
Light posting →
I have a juicy project I’m working on, a new source of great pics for FlickrFan. In the meantime Stan Krute did a new version of the Obama poster, to the right, with the “Progress” swapped out and “Make change” in its place.
I'm a California voter for Obama →
I’ve got an Obama poster in the right margin of the home page of Scripting News. It’ll stay there for the duration as a virtual equivalent of one of those signs people put on their front lawns. I live in California, one of the Super Tuesday states and I’m an Obama voter. That’s what the poster means. Pass it on.
After Google indexes Scripting News, this query will have...
Chris Matthews said something intelligent →
Most of what Chris Matthews says is mindless trash, but today he pulled out a great analogy immediately after Ted Kennedy’s stirring endorsement of Obama. He compared Hillary Clinton to the character Salieri in the movie Amadeus. Until Mozart came along he was the leading composer in Vienna, but he was just a workman, a technician. Mozart had inspiration, feeling, the spirit. Salieri, even...
Bill Clinton as Trent Lott 2.0 →
Yesterday’s piece, lightly edited, on the Huffington Post.
http://x98.us/jz
I think it looks pretty good over there!
A Reddit for Scripting News →
Here’s the new Reddit for Scripting News…
http://reddit.com/r/scripting/
Please, if you’re a regular reader of this site, bookmark it, and when you want to contribute a link to the community, add it there. Do the normal thing you do with Reddit or Digg, move articles up or down, according to your opinion of how relevant they are to the community defined by this weblog. ...
Find a shared vision, v2.0 →
It was an interesting election until the Clintons started calling Obama the nice young African-American candidate. Yeah, I lived in the south long enough to understand what that means. When I went to Tulane I was often explained as soandso’s Jewish friend Dave. It meant that I could come over for dinner, but there would never be a marriage.
I should say The Old South. The problem for the...
Hitchhiker's Guide to Twitter →
If there were such a book, it would say, instead of Don’t Panic: No need for anyone to suffer.
Twitter is not a mail list or a chat room. No one has an investment in anyone else’s manners. If what someone says causes you too much angst, just unfollow. It’s a single click.
Got other advice for Twitter newbies? Post a comment.
Barack Obama for President →
Find a shared vision →
Now after a few days at Davos our correspondents, Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington, are starting to get into the groove. I’m sure much has changed there since I went, in 2000, but I can tell that some important things haven’t.
For a first time Davoser, the most important thing is to build your network. Until you have a way to share the experience, you’re not really there yet....
Everybody's diving bell →
I met an old friend for coffee in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, and had a few hours to kill before stopping in at the Wired reunion party. I didn’t want to drive back to Berkeley because the weather was so crummy, and I was just across the street from a movie theater and was just in time for the start of a movie that lots of people had been telling me to see. So I went. The movie...
Tennessee Rex →
Hammock: “My blog still doesnÕt ÒcarryÓ advertising — it is advertising.”
Same here!
What woke me up about the Clintons →
A couple of weeks ago I didn’t really think Bill Clinton would be a problem if HIllary was elected. I thought he might be a curmudgeonly joke of a First Lady. “There he goes again, he’s so funny.”
Yeah uh huh. Sure.
I didn’t think it was an issue until Bill started throwing the mud so aggressively. Then I noticed that Hillary was talking about the first two terms...
Ways we can help →
I had two ideas of ways people can help the US, maybe there will be more.
1. When the President and Congress announce their stimulus package immediately give your share to the Obama campaign. Even if you haven’t gotten the check yet. You can be sure that they’ll spend the money immediately, and that will stimulate the economy. And maybe we can get the candidate in the mood again to...
$100 to Obama →
Fed up with lies from the Clintons, I gave $100 to the Obama campaign.
I was totally on the fence until they started saying he said things he didn’t say. Maybe I could have ignored it if he hadn’t been saying things we need him to say, imho. The reason people running for office don’t try to express complicated ideas is because people like the Clintons will spin it with...
share.opml.org, retired →
We turned off share.opml.org yesterday, for good, as far as I know. It was a good idea, but we never got it together to make it the powerhouse I wanted it to be.
Now that Google and Bloglines both have discovery mechanisms, based on what you and others like, there would only be a future for SYO if it were a thriving and growing community, and it isn’t.
Normally, we’d leave a site...
Scaling is like memory management →
Continuing the thread on commoditization of scalable server software, the third installment. Matt Tucker said: “I’m not sure that S3 magically kills off the scaling priests. It certainly makes it easy to turn on more storage resources, but writing an application to scale efficiently across multiple virtual machines is no easy task.”
To which I responded… It won’t...
My Digg clone -- from Reddit! →
11/26/07: “I wonder if we could start a Digg-like community with the readers of Scripting News.”
It would be the editorial system of a community formed around this blog. Eventually, every blog with even a small number of regular readers would have one. The bigger the blog, the more like Digg it would be. That’s not necessarily a good thing, because as these things get large,...
Sit down Bill Clinton →
If Bill Clinton doesn’t get off the campaign trail, other leading Dems should get out and stump for Obama, to level the field.
I said this on Twitter and Adam Wygle sent a pointer to this site, that says it better than I could. 22nd Amendment: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…”
NY Times on the Internet →
AT&T makes a deal with the NY Times for their mobile site on their “operator portal.”
Curious speculation that Google could buy the NY Times.
They could, easily. Google’s market cap is $185 billion. The Times is worth about $2 billion.
FlickrFan update →
Change #28: Roll back the clock on updates.
A new page that lets you set the date for updating. We install all new or updated parts since that date. Screen shot.
iPhone as photo gallery →
Kevin Tofel explains how to use an iPhone as a portable handheld photo gallery using the beautiful AP wire photos and FlickrFan.
I did a Qik video demo using my Nokia N95. Lots of computers involved, the quality ain’t great but the idea is pretty neat.
The UGC limb, day 2 →
Following up on yesterday’s piece on UGC as a business model.
Lots of commenters, including John Furrier, who asked what I meant by: “We could and should be cutting more fair deals with the people who create the value on the net.”
Here’s what I meant…
We should be sharing more than kudos with the creative people and more than revenue too. That’s the next...
XMPP as the basis for interop in TwitterLand? →
Matt Terenzio: “Why we wouldn’t use XMPP as the basis for a decentralized microblogging platform?”
Good question. I’d like to play with some simple systems on XMPP. I tried to get started with some scripts connecting to Google’s Jabber server over the weekend but wasn’t able to get a conversation going. I’ll try again soon.
Tracking FlickrFan updates →
A long-standing loose-end. A feed that tracks changes to FlickrFan.
If you’re running the software you’ll get the updates automatically, this feed is for the documentation of the changes.
Out on the UGC limb →
About the business with Jason Calacanis last summer.
Let’s be clear about what happened there, because it happens so often.
He’s a vendor with a product.
I reviewed the product unfavorably.
His response was not about the product, it was about me personally.
At the time I said “I’ve never seen an entrepreneur with a product he’s supposedly proud of try so...
Almost ready to back Obama →
After listening to Meet The Press today I’m almost ready to support Barak Obama for President in 2008. Here’s why.
FlickrFan events navigator extended →
In previous versions of FlickrFan you could only see today’s picture downloads and code updates on the Events page. A feature request came in saying it would be nice to be able to go back in time, and I totally agreed. That’s the way it works in version 0.43, released this morning. Details, screen shot.
Update on NYTimes on iPhone →
Here’s something coool — I was able to give the NYTimesRiver an icon on the iPhone desktop.
Russell Beattie explains how it works.
Pretty simple. You just put a file named apple-touch-icon.png in the top level of the website. It must be a 57-by-57 png image.
If you added the icon before this update, you might want to do it again to get the graphic version.
NYTimes on iPhone →
With the new version of the iPhone software, v1.1.3, you can put web pages on the home page of the phone.
This is good news for NYTimes news junkies, because you can now put a river of NY Times headlines one click away at all times. It’s that easy to find out what’s going on in the world, just as easily as you check your email.
1. Click on the Safari icon
2. Visit...
No one asked this question →
Amazingly no one asked this question at the meetup, but it just came up in an email from a famous journalist who works at a gadget site you’ve heard of and probably read.
The question goes like this.
Now that Apple is reading Flickr feeds in AppleTV, maybe there’s no point continuing to develop FlickrFan.
I always wonder what’s behind this question. Does the person think...
Thanks to Yahoo! →
Thanks to everyone at Yahoo who helped make the first public demo of FlickrFan a success on Thursday night. The meetup was well-attended. There was only one glitch in the demo, otherwise every feature showed off well. There was a lively discussion. Got some great feature suggestions, met some cool new people and reconnected with some old friends.
Yahoo had a video camera there, not sure when...
What is Coral8? →
Continuing the thread on decentralized Twitter…
I read this story on DBMS2, as part of the initial discussion, that explained there is commercial-grade software used by the financial industry that they believe can handle, reliably, much greater traffic than Twitter is handling now.
The category is called CEP, an acronym for Complex Event Processing.
This evening, a comment from Mark...
FlickrFan for iPhone? →
I was talking with Bijan Sabet, an early user of FlickrFan, and he asked a question that I didn’t know the answer to. Bijan: “I’d love a way to have FlickrFan photos on my iPhone.”
Early-on, I turned off synching for my iPhone, but it should be possible to synch one or all of the FlickrFan folders with the iPhone. I’ll investigate, but I’m interested in knowing...
FAQ: Is decentralized Twitter just IRC? →
In the recent vigorous discussion about decentralizing Twitter, a frequently asked question was What’s the diff betw that and IRC.
Now I could be missing something, if so, I apologize in advance, but I think the answer is No. Something that’s fascinating about Twitter is that everyone’s experience is different. Some people subscribe to 100 people, others 5000, I’ve even...
A blog post in a comment →
Doc Searls: “My main long-term concern is with The Environment.”
Decentralized Twitter, day 2 →
Interesting comments continue to appear in the thread we started yesterday.
How are you feeling? →
Okay, if the mind is powerful, how is your mind making you feel today?
It’s worth thinking about — with the stock market down this year, every day worse than the last, many of us are losing lots of money, I know I am, and it’s not a good feeling.
I keep arguing with myself, even though I’m losing money at a huge rate, I’m still in good shape financially, I have a...
The power of the mind →
I heard a report on NPR a couple of weeks ago, and thought it was very interesting.
A study of a group hotel maids found that even though they lead active lives, get lots of exercise, their health isn’t good. High blood pressure, overweight, body-mass index, the usual signs of a sedentary life.
They interviewed them, asking if they were active — no. Did they get exercise? No. (The...
FAQ: Why only 20 pics? →
When you first subscribe to a feed in FlickrFan you generally will get 20 pictures in the folder for the feed. People wonder why this is and how they can get more.
The reason for this is that Flickr keeps the 20 most recent pictures in the feed for each account. So when I post a new picture to my Flickr account, it replaces the oldest picture in my feed. Then, anyone who has subscribed my feed,...
Library of Congress Flickr feed →
Wow, this is really really coooooool.
The Library of Congress is partnering with Flickr, releasing pictures that it believes are not copyrighted, through Flickr.
One of the fantastic side-effects of that is that there’s an RSS 2.0 feed of those pictures that connects perfectly to FlickrFan. If you click on this link on the machine that FlickrFan is running on, you’ll automatically...
Video for tomorrow? →
I know it’s the last minute, but it’s worth a try…
A number of people have asked if there will be live or recorded video for tomorrow’s FlickrFan demo at Yahoo in SF.
The answer — yes, if we can find a way to do it.
If you have a camera and laptop and are willing to webcast it tomorrow, please post a note here in the comments, or just show up tomorrow a few...
A decentralized Twitter? →
Andrew Baron is a smart guy, and he’s not a techy, so when he explains technical issues he does it in a way non-technical people can understand. Dembot: “If you hosted your own Twitter, just like you host your own website, you could put your twitter anywhere.”
Twitter is doing us a service, with its lack of stability, in illustrating the dangers of centralized systems. We do...
Today's links →
Tomorrow in SF: First public demo of FlickrFan. Congrats to Scoble on his new job at Fast Company. Gcast: “Record your podcast via a toll-free call from any phone.”
Mac fatigue →
Initially I wrote in my keynotepost that I’d buy one of the new MacBooks for sure, then a minute later I selected the sentence, hit backspace and save. A commenter asked why. Mac fatigue. 2007 was a fun year, I spent a lot of money on Mac stuff, and then found at the end of the year that they’re a shit company that treated me like shit. Left a really ugly feeling, really sore about...