Does it have an API?

Funny thought perhaps, or maybe only in the Bay Area -- but our subway system -- BART, has an API. And it's kind of fun. I spent a couple of hours today hacking together an application, it's not all that useful, but one of these days something else will get an API that plugs in nicely and something interesting will happen.

Here are the docs for the BART API.

And the docs for the real-time ETA feed.

And the ETA feed itself.

Clearly it's a straight dump of the database of the BART trains that are running right now, and the time of their expected arrival at the various stations on the network.

I wrote an app that loads the XML into a database on my server once a minute, it's quite quick -- and then it looks for trains that are arriving right now, and sends a tweet saying something like: "The train to Richmond is arriving at the Downtown Berkeley BART station."

This would generate far too many tweets to be humane, no one in their right mind would want to follow a user that was announcing the arrivals of every train in every station on the BART network, which isn't even that big a network. You can imagine what a PITA that app would be for a subway system like NY or London. Not cool.

So instead I had it only report on trains arriving from any direction at the three Berkeley BART stations, Ashby, Downtown and North Berkeley. That's a manageable number of tweets. And that suggested a name for the feed: BerkeleyBart. Which sounds like something from a cowboy cartoon or a Henry Fonda western starring Jimmy Stewart and Raquel Welch with Buddy Hackett as the kooky sidekick. Okay enough of that.

It's a cute little thing, nothing earth-shaking, but I wonder if it's correct. Next time I'm at a Berkeley BART station I'll check it out and see if it correctly calls the arrivals of trains.

Also it seems like just the thing Scoble will like. He's into trains and Twitter and really strange things. I've also set it up so it works with FriendFeed.

 12/8/2008; 5:54:32 PM  

Intelligence and creativity are great, highly valued by our civilization, and so is vision; and when we think of vision, we usually think of far-reaching vision, but... The hardest stuff to see is often the stuff in front of your nose, in plain sight. Your eyes gloss over it, seeing only what you expect to see. So when you look at the world, you see a reflection of what's inside yourself. The world could change, but the change goes unperceived. Or flipped around, something about you changed, and you think (incorrectly) that the whole world changed.

Programmers, as I've said many times, learn this over and over. We can't bury our mistakes, unlike other vocations. If you want to move on you have to figure out what's wrong. And almost always the mistake is one of your perception. Your eye glosses over the code and you see what you expect, even though what you actually typed is different. You can't move on until your vision improves.

I love puzzles that reveal this. I love Don's Amazing Puzzle, first shown to me by Don Brown, a programmer in Iowa. You try to count the F's in a sentence. It's just an ordinary sentence, swear to god there's no trick. But when I tried it, I got the wrong count. I repeated it over and over, still got the wrong answer. I swore it must be a semantic game, that the answer was zero or Tuesday or something stupid like that, so I wrote a script to count the F's and the script got it right! Oy.

Two people I knew at the time got the correct answer right away, one of them was a professional editor, and had developed a technique for doing this kind of review. Knowing that the human mind glosses over surprises, he reads sentences backwards. Ahh! When you break the routine your filters can't engage.

I've noticed another trick that doesn't make me more intelligent or creative, rather it increases my awareness, and the net effect is that I am more creative and smarter. When I'm out for a walk, waiting for a light to change, I watch my feet when I step off the curb. I always step off with my right foot. So I try instead to step off with my left foot. It requires some serious work to do this. But I find that I'm more aware as I walk if I do.

Another one, I could stare at a piece of code and swear the machine wasn't processing it correctly, but I know that's not the correct answer. Instead, I get up, refill my water glass, or walk around the block, or write a short post, and come back, then all of a sudden the bug pops out at me. Taking a break, taking your eyes out of context and bringing them back also improves your vision.

Anyway, back to my busy day!

PS: If you like this story, you'll probably like the story about the kids in a circle and the heads and the feet.

 12/8/2008; 7:40:53 AM  

I'm a longtime Twitter user, and as you may know a very regular user of FriendFeed. Each has its strengths but if I had to choose, sort of like Sophie's Choice, I'd have to go with FriendFeed. I finally figured out why this is a few days ago as I was experimenting with a real-time photo-flow app. It could be done in either Twitter or FriendFeed, but in FF it's graphic and in color, in Twitter, it's like a command-line operating system. Then it hit me, Twitter is to FriendFeed (in 2008) what MS-DOS was to the Mac (in 1984). Have we come full circle? Amazingly I think we have.

In the 80s, MS-DOS users argued whether or not we needed a graphic operating system. "Need" was the big idea. They said they could do everything you could do with a Mac on the PC, and they were more than right about that -- they could do more on the PC than you could do on a Mac because there was more software for it. In 1984 the Mac had a lousy spreadsheet and a cheap word processor, and whole categories completely missing like databases. This is analogous to the correct argument that Twitter has more people to connect with, and of course that's the whole point of both products -- connecting with people. Twitter wins that one, hands-down, nolo contendere. And FriendFeed, even in its name, admits that this is the game, after all it's called FriendFeed, not CoolFeaturesFeed, although of course, that's why I like it.

But it's undeniable, when a picture shows up in FriendFeed it looks like a picture, not like a url. And when a YouTube video appears, yup -- it looks like a video not a url. MS-DOS users sniffed at WYSIWYG back then, as Twitter users today sniff at a visual twitstream, but the MS-DOS users were wrong, history proved that, and I think the Twitter users are wrong too.

I've been calling this The Graphics Gap, with a hat-tip to Dr. Strangelove, a satire of the nuclear arms race of the 60s and 70s, when the Russians and Americans worried about a missile gap, space gap, doomsday gap, and eventually (according to the satire) a mineshaft gap.

Now, on the other hand...

Yesterday I went into the city for a chat with tech industry guru Om Malik. Of course the conversation turned to Twitter and FriendFeed -- Om said something I hear a lot. When he goes to FriendFeed he doesn't know what to make of it. I totally understand, there are still parts of FriendFeed that I, a devoted user, have never explored. It took me months to realize that "Like" was the feature I kept asking for. It's hard to find things I post there, even something I posted yesterday. An item I posted two months ago all of a sudden pops to the surface because someone commented on it or Liked it. Unless you're very curious, or devoted to understanding this category, as I am, FF often remains a puzzle, where -- as Om noted -- Twitter is so simple anyone can understand it in a few minutes.

Hence the premise of this piece. I believe that there is space between Twitter and FriendFeed for a service that's dumber than FriendFeed and richer than Twitter. Start with what Twitter does and add the graphics that FriendFeed has. I know some people will say that's Pownce, but it's not (though Pownce was pretty nice). I don't want full blog posts, I like the 140-character limit, and I can skip out on the discussion features that FF has that Twitter doesn't. But I think a graphic and visual Twitter would kick ass, the same way the Macintosh eventually kicked MS-DOS's ass in the 80s and early 90s.

 12/7/2008; 7:40:27 AM  

Here's how the tech industry cycle goes.

A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch. They find that they can make things happen that the previous generation couldn't cause they were so mired in the complexity of the systems they had built. The new systems become popular with "power users" -- people who yearn to overcome the limits of the previous generation. It's exhilirating!

Some of those power users are venture capitalists, they're hanging around looking for things to invest in, and they pick a few things that look like winners. When I was fresh and dewy, part of the new crop of techies, these people were Mike Markkula who funded Apple, and Ben Rosen who funded Compaq and Lotus. In later generations they were different people, of course.

So the new folks, freshly funded, hire lots of people, young'uns like themselves who are doing it The New Way. They ship some products, and while the users are happy and excited about all the cool new things they can do with the new generation, now that they're freed of the limits of the previous one, they still want all the features they had come to expect in the old days. No problem! The new companies hire more people and they add all the features of the old generation. Feature wars follow, and the users get bored, and a new generation of techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch.

Round and round and round we go.

We're now reaching the end of a cycle, we're seeing feature wars. That's what's going on between Facebook and Google, both perfectly timing the rollouts of their developer proposition to coincide with the others' -- on the very same day! I don't even have to look at them and I am sure that they're too complicated. Because I've been around this loop so many times. The solution to the problem these guys are supposedly working on won't come in this generation, it can only come when people start over. They are too mired in the complexities of the past to solve this one. Both companies are getting ready to shrink. It's the last gasp of this generation of technology.

But the next one can't be far away now. It will be exhilirating!!

Remember how great Google was when it first appeared?

Remember how great Netscape was, and before that Apple, and I know you guys won't like this, but Microsoft offered us some great new places to play. I remember finding out that their OS address space in 1981 was 640K. That was a lot to guy who was spending huge amounts of time trying to cram a 256K app into 48K.

The trick in each cycle is to fight complexity, so the growth can keep going. But you can't keep it out, engineers like complexity, not just because it provides them job security, also because they really just like it. But once the stack gets too arcane, the next generation throws their hands up and says "We're not going to deal with that mess."

We're almost there now.

Update: For a clue to how deeply mired in crud we are right now, check out this discussion among users and developers about OpenID. No one has a clue what problem its supposed to solve.

 12/4/2008; 6:43:19 PM  

When we talk about news on the net the conversation is dominated by the interests of news organizations. The stories we tell are from their point of view. The vexing problems we face are their problems, not ours. That's been the point of the series of pieces I've been writing about news. I do care about the people of news, as I care about the people of the car industry and the people who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers. And the 10K contractors who may be laid off at Google. But for the sake of this discussion, what I really care about is news and how it's going to get from them that have to them that want.

In a comment yesterday I said it's often overlooked that while the Internet makes some things that we used to do diseconomic, if you took the Internet away some things we've come to expect would go away too. All the stuff people call "crowd-sourcing" -- the million eyeballs that are constantly watching, and the thousands of them that are there when news happens.

I watched a bunch of campaign events this year, and one of the things that's largely been unreported is how much reporting goes on at them. I first noticed it when Hillary came out on stage to make her concession speech. Immediately every pair of hands in the room goes up, not in salute, not cheering -- each pair held a digital camera, and they were capturing images of the Clinton family. There's no doubt if you wanted a picture of that event you could get many to choose from.

It was something else at Mile High Stadium for the Obama acceptance event. It seemed everyone there was taking in the history of it, and again, the cameras were everywhere.

Look at this striking picture of the audience at the Obama rally in Berlin, taken from Obama's perspective. This is what he must have been seeing as he went across the country. Recording devices of every kind, all pointed at him. (A fair number of American flags too, which gave me goose bumps.)

Now if there isn't something we can do with the next generation of networking tools that's truly exciting and enabling, then we need to hang it up and let someone else drive for a while. In a couple of years every one of those devices will be replaced (knock wood, praise Murphy) and will they communicate better? I hope so! At the same time, we need to work on software and networking tools that allow us to process millions of pictures of an event and do intelligent things with it. When I was in Boulder in August I saw such a tool.

Update: VentureBeat has an excellent description of Occipital. "If multiple people upload multiple photographs from the same event around the same time, Occiptial will figure out that an event just happened and classify the photographs accordingly. Doing this right is really, really hard, yet with two people, Occipital seems to have done it. This team is scary good."

I've also been playing with a flow of thousands of professional photographs every day. It's really something to wrap your mind around, but after almost a year, I'm beginning to understand what kind of editorial tools you need to make sense of such a flow.

And that's always the tough problem, in my experience, making sense of the information. That's what reporters do. But it's all happening now on such a huge scale, we need new systems to grapple with it.

Do I think there could be money-making ventures built off this flow? Absolutely. What are they? Not sure yet.

 12/3/2008; 7:12:19 AM  

TechCrunch: "TechCrunch readers can now use their Facebook accounts to sign in before leaving comments."

Interesting. And it integrates with Facebook's news feed.

I left a comment suggesting they do the same for Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Very easy to validate a name with any of those services, though the companies didn't make a big deal about it. I'd like to see some of the smaller developers get a chance to play in league with the big guys. They could also share a pointer to your comment in the flow of any of the services, their APIs make it brain-dead simple to do.

Update: There's another reason for a site like TC to federate with the three sites above. Some of us don't use Facebook, but are regular readers of TC. I do have an account on FB, of course, but I almost never check it. I get FB friendship requests from people I haven't seen in years, and care about, and it makes me sad that I don't have the bandwidth to add Facebook to my rotation, I just don't think about it. But... I recently added a connection between Disqus and Friendfeed, and I like what's happening there. I am a constant user of both software tools, so connecting them makes a lot of sense. Any time I post a comment anywhere on Discqus's network, it propogates to FriendFeed. TC is not on the Disqus net, but I would like it to be on the FF net. I think it makes sense for TC to support any site that a significant number of their readers use.

 12/3/2008; 10:59:18 AM  

 12/3/2008; 2:46:23 PM  

Its been a long time since I written about XML-RPC, it's one of those things that when I do, the flamers show up and get all personal. I shouldn't let that get in the way, of course; and while I wasn't looking, for example, Mozilla baked-in support for XML-RPC. Not sure what you can do with that, but I'm sure someone will explain.

The other day when I asked about an XML-RPC interface for ImageMagick, Justin Walgran took me up on it, and deployed one on Google AppEngine. Now that makes sense for so many reasons. A perfect application for AppEngine, and since its native language is Python, and Python has great XML-RPC support (we upgraded ours in Frontier based on their inspiration, the highest form of respect), it was not a very large programming project.

Hopefully I'll be able to test it out today, once we know the name of the procedure, what server its running on, and what parameters it takes.

I made a suggestion in the comments that where the procedure calls for the image itself, that it accept the URL of the image. This would work better for my app because by the time it needs the thumbnail it has already uploaded the image to an HTTP-accessible server. It would work better to not have to upload it twice.

So the procedure would look something like this:

imageMagick.createThumb (image, height, width) returns binary

Where image can either be a binary type containing a JPEG, GIF or PNG graphic; or a string that contains an HTTP URL to the graphic. Height and width are numbers that reflect the desired height and width of the thumbnail. It returns a binary type containing a PNG (?) thumbnail.

Of course if there's an error it uses the XML-RPC exception mechanism.

Needless to say this is a very interesting project to me. And if someone wants to create an equivalent REST application, I will promote it alongside the XML-RPC application.

Update: Imagin appears to be exactly what I was looking for. It's fast, flexible, takes a URL as an image parameter. Very nice. What's not clear is how hard you can drive it without pissing him off.

 12/3/2008; 3:13:46 AM  

Jeff Jarvis responds to my series of pieces about news after the hypothetical collapse of the news industry. I wrote a comment there, which I'm reproducing here, with some light edits.

Jeff, the stuff you're justifying is the stuff that's going away, that there is no money to support. If we all care about the news, and making sure that it gets from the people who have it to the people who want it, we're going to have to learn how to do it without all the heavy iron. It seems to me the responsible thing for the news industry to do, while it is laying off its reporters and editors and the rest, is to help us come up with a Plan B -- what we will do for news once all that is gone.

An analogy -- imagine a group of doctors knew that the hospitals and pharmacies were about to shut down. What would they do? Might they do something to make sure their client's health needs were at least partially attended to?

The same would presumably apply to many other professions, whose services are in some way necessary for life: police, fire, bus drivers, teachers, garbage collectors.

We're often asked to believe how noble the profession of news is -- now that is about to be tested in a whole new way. Are we just supposed to cry for this industry and throw our hands up and wait for the collapse before starting to put it back together, or would they like to help while they're still here?

Here's a question I ask people privately to help focus their thinking... Suppose there were no NY Times tomorrow, and you heard somewhere, maybe on Politco or Huffpost or Memeorandum that it had gone out of business and was never going to publish again.

1. How would you feel?

2. What would you do?

3. What should the Times have done but didn't do before they shut down?

Food for thought.

It's time to have this conversation Jeff. Imho.

Update: Scott Rosenberg checks in on the thread. "Victimhood is written deeply in the culture of the newsroom."

Newsosaur: "A newspaper that cannot sell enough advertising or cut enough expenses to sustain profitable operations is not likley to make it to the other side of 2009."

 12/2/2008; 11:10:06 AM  

On Sunday, I wished for a web service that would take an image, a height and a width, and return a thumbnail for the image.

Andrew Burton put up a service, I gave it a try, with no luck. Maybe we can get this working. Ideally, I'd like to run it on the same machine as the application that calls it, since the images can be fairly large.

Here's a text file containing the text, and the picture I used.

 12/2/2008; 9:50:15 AM  

I was a Pownce user. (Ack it can't find my page -- and I was a premium, paying user! Oy. When did that happen?)

There were some things I liked about it, but I agree it's time to pull the plug.

I stopped using it when:

1. Twitter got its act together and stopped acting like a Norwegian parrot pining for the fjords.

2. FriendFeed occupied the space above Twitter, as the messaging system with more (than Twitter). FriendFeed has never had trouble staying up.

The biggest problem with Pownce was:

1. It couldn't handle even a modest load. It would get very very slow when anything interesting started happening, therefore keeping anything interesting from happening.

The one thing Pownce got right was:

1. It had payloads!

Three things that slowed adoption of Pownce beyond the inability to handle a load:

1. It was in private beta for a long, long time.

2. It took forever for it to get an API.

3. When the API finally came it wasn't compatible with anything.

Net-net, there were interesting things about Pownce, and we'll remember it with a certain amount of fondness.

Hopefully Leah can take what she's learned and turn out something great at SixApart.

I'd recommend: Twitter-Plus-Plus. (With lots of interop, and do the payloads thing again, they need a kick in the ass over there at Twitter to get it into their product.)



 12/1/2008; 1:22:17 PM  

I've always been a bit puzzled about how FriendFeed does RSS, but I've never (until now) taken the time to find the source of the puzzlement. I've always just fumbled my way around, sort of approximating what I wanted, and when I couldn't get it, falling back to the API. But now I've hit a wall, and taken the time to understand the nature of the wall. Let me explain.

Consider this screen (click on it to see the detail):



Suppose you used a photo site that wasn't one of the ones listed, but you had an RSS feed for your photos and favorites on that site. What are you supposed to do? I always assumed you should just add the feed under "Blog" but then your readers will start asking why your pictures don't do all the neat things that happen automatically with Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug or Zooomr sites. I have such a site, and I don't want them to do anything special for it, I just want to tell FF that it's a photo site and have all the cool special goodies they have for Flickr kick in automatically.

If you pop up a higher level, you'll see that this is actually contrary to the whole idea of feeds, which were supposed to create a level playing field for the big guys and ordinary people. That's why a guy like Mike Arrington was able to start TechCrunch and eventually be a competitor of CNET. The fact that RSS didn't favor the big guys made that possible. In fact the whole web is like that. You don't need a special client to read the NY Times and another to watch videos on YouTube. Any browser will do, for any site, no matter who's writing and who's reading. It's why many of us fell in love with the web, at first sight. In the software world before that, it mattered who you are or who you worked for. Kind of like FriendFeed. :-(

It's also against the level playing field idea to favor people, like me, who can program to the APIs. The point of feeds was to make the technology transparently understandable to people who just had brains, that you wouldn't need to understand anything deeply arcane to make RSS work. Since FF is about feeds, it seems to me that it ought to be consistent with the philosophic simplicity of feeds. Again, this is just another application of a principle of the web -- you could always View Source to see how a website worked, and if you were willing to do a little trial and error, and head-scratching, you could make your site work the same way as any site you could view in your browser. This was a good thing.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like APIs, I even love APIs, but only when a feed won't do. There are cases where the API shows more power than the feeds, where feeds can and should have the same power. For example if I want a description to come along with a picture, I have no choice but to write a program to push the content to FriendFeed. That seems wrong to me. RSS and Atom both have description elements, why ignore them? Also, I can if I want make sure the content arrives in a timely manner, but only through the API. The functionality of a web app shouldn't unnecessarily favor programmers. That's unweblike imho.

Now I wouldn't make these criticisms if I didn't think FF was an excellent web app. But like all technology it can be better. That's why I make the suggestions.

 11/30/2008; 11:10:40 AM  

It's impossible to tell how tech companies will take feedback or advice, I just give it as it occurs to me. I don't try to sugar-coat it, but then I don't think that there's anything wrong with providing an imperfect or incomplete product or service.

I was the guy who said "We make shitty software" to his developers as he passed them in the hall. To which the standard response, which always got a laugh, was: "With bugs!"

It's a joke, but not really. We know our software sucks. But watch, we'll make it suck less.

Anyway, offering advice to most developers is a waste of time, and only makes them hate you. But what are you supposed to do if you want to build on their product and keep hitting the same brick wall, month after month. Is there a polite way to express frustration? If so, I'd like to know what it is.

In Thursday's piece I said developers are every bit as insistent about ignoring users as news people are. I see it happen every damn day. It's just as bad no matter where it happens.

 11/30/2008; 9:07:56 AM  

Update: Obama uses a Mac too.

 11/30/2008; 8:04:21 AM  

I love ImageMagick, it's creating thumbs for me, night and day, day in and day out. The feed that's using the thumbnails is up and working.

But I'm still bugged that: 1. It seems slower than it should be. 2. A window flashes every time it creates a thumbnail.

People have suggested that I use PHP to interface to ImageMagick, but no slight to PHP, I already know too many languages, I'm trying to forget some!

Then I got a message from Phil Pearson, a guy who helped a lot in the early days of XML-RPC, and that triggered a thought -- you know what I really want -- an HTTP interface right into the ImageMagick engine. I'd accept a REST interface, but I'd be ecstatic about an XML-RPC interface. Truly.

Then you could put the engine where ever you wanted and call it from anywhere. If it started consuming the whole CPU, then fork off another one. I know you can probably do this with PHP, but I'm picky. I want my XML-over-HTTP. That's my comfort zone.

Update: I hear that Graphicsmagick is faster than Imagemagick.

 11/30/2008; 7:42:37 AM  

I just re-read the Rosen thread over on FriendFeed and another irony struck me. The argument is over things that I didn't say in the piece they're arguing about.

The piece is about listening, and they didn't listen.

Listening is hard. When you respond after listening make sure you aren't responding to something that came out of your head because you're having that argument with yourself, not the other person. And they're likely to get confused, or angry.

You never know what you'll learn if you listen. Maybe the people who want to say something to you might just make the difference between driving off the cliff and finding a new future. Maybe it'll help you find the great idea that cracks the nut. Or maybe what they want is something you can give them, maybe it's something you'll want to give them. Some users are pretty smart, I've found.

Knowing how other people see you can be disturbing, but it can also be eye-opening.

In 1986, I had a meeting with Guy Kawasaki when he worked at Apple. I showed him an early version of one of our products, we had thrown the kitchen sink into it, every half-baked R&D; idea, cause our company was failing and this was our last chance. One idea intrigued him. He said everyone at Apple was hand-designing foils to print on Laserwriters (they were new then). He took a piece of paper and drew a box around one of our pages, and asked if we could do that. Of course we could, and we did, and we immediately sold 1K copies of the product for Apple people, but more importantly, they were so excited by it, they in turn sold many more thousands to their customers, and our company went from being in the brink of shutting down to gushing cash. All because (drum roll) we listened to a user. Ask Guy if you don't believe me, he's on Twitter.

One more thing -- when did listening become "listening in the aggregate." If you know anything about me, you know that I don't think of users as couch potatoes, passive participants. At the same company, we designed regcards to solicit original thoughts, not just box-clicking. When a new batch of regcards came in I grabbed them and studied them for interesting comments. They told me how our new stuff was being received, what they liked and didn't like, what was missing that would make the difference for them. When I had a question, I called and asked. It's also good for business if people get that you care what they think, if you really do. They can smell it when you're being patronizing.

It really is long past the time for the news industry to listen to its users. We've been trying to start this conversation since the first blog post, but there's not been much listening. That may turn out to be the epitaph of the news industry, the users did care, but the industry never listened.

 11/29/2008; 12:30:50 PM  

Jay Rosen argues with journalists, who explain why they shouldn't listen to users (sources and readers). I'll probably write more about this later, but for now, read the thread, it's fascinating. Here's the piece they're responding to.

 11/29/2008; 5:56:43 AM  

 11/28/2008; 3:03:50 PM  

Everything is such a futz, but it's nice when these things have happy endings. I have my thumbnail creating app up, and while it's not linked into the RSS its going to be used in, that's the easy predictable stuff, the stuff that requires no futzing, at least not for me.

Here's a folder of thumbs that ImageMagick is adding to every five minutes.

I'm doing it by launching the ImageMagick convert app, once for each picture. The fixed width is 100 pixels, I compute the height to be proportional. My script makes sure not to start another conversion until the previous file exists, because the process is unfortunately asynchronous. However it is easily synchronized. I have a 15 second timeout. Then I wait 5 seconds between conversions to let the CPU catch up processing other tasks. Image processing, esp for very large images, is a very CPU-intensive thing, apparently.

I hooted out loud (HOL) when I got it working. This one has been on my to-do list for a very long time!

 11/28/2008; 9:52:48 AM  

CNet: "If you've ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size -- it's fine for an hour. It's not something you're going to use day in and day out."

To which I say -- well hmm. I think the first part is right. And you will use your netbook every day, for about an hour or so, sounds just right. Inbetween things. Kind of the way you use an iPhone, but for people who like more of a computer.

For real work, I use a full setup with lots of hard drive space, and two big screens and comfortable seating.

A netbook is for the coffee shop or airplane or subway ride. For watching a movie, checking email, updating Twitter, fast, mobile stuff.

But it's good that Intel is checking in with the users. And eventually I think netbooks will evolve into market-expanding machines. We're still in the first year of netbooks. Give it a chance.

 11/28/2008; 9:27:59 AM  

Michael Fraase tries to explain what I've tried real hard to explain for the last N years (where N might be as many as 15 believe it or not) that news, like any other business, is about the users.

I do this with programmers, with about as little success as with people in the news industry. People who write software invariably think the users' job is to give them "feedback" which they are free to do with as they please. Of course they are free to ignore the users, but eventually that results in the users (er ahem, drum roll please) ignoring them. If you want to keep their interest, you need to be interested in them.

I once went to a lunch at the University of California School of Journalism, where I mouthed off on this subject, more or less, and was greeted with a stunning idea -- it was largely considered unethical for a reporter or editor to know which sections of the paper were most read by users of the paper. If the reporter knew, the story goes, he or she might be influenced by peoples' interests in deciding what to write about.

To which I said (and say) loudly -- OY!

Or another way --> THERE'S THE BUG.

Fraase says I think like a programmer. I suppose. I didn't always. When I was younger I wasn't going to be a programmer. I became one out of necessity. I had ideas that expressed themselves in software, and I couldn't interest any "real" programmers in making the ideas real, so...

But all along I've been a glutton not just for feedback, but to know how the ideas I had would be used. I never create any software that I myself don't want or need, because I wouldn't know how to do it. My method of development depends on me being a user. So do I listen to the users? Yes. If I listen to myself, which I try to (it's harder than it might appear at first).

Listening is hard. But all people who create products for users must listen if they want to do well at making products. That includes doctors, bus drivers, mailmen, entrepreneurs, programmers, and yes, reporters and editors too. Because if you don't listen you might miss a corner-turn and end up going off a cliff, just like the news industry is doing. They see the cliff, they know they're headed for it, but they don't ask how to turn the car. They don't really want to know. I think sometimes what they want is to be missed when they lie dead in a crumpled car at the bottom of the cliff. But we don't want that to happen. Not because we love them, but because life without them is pretty hard to imagine. They should turn the corner, no matter how painful it is. But in order to do it, they're going to have to look out the front window and the mirrors and listen to the person in the passenger seat.

That's why it's not enough for the NY Times to have a Public Editor, they have to have the Public itself on the op-ed page. That should start on Monday. There's no reason to wait for that. The Times should have more branded blogs, given to people whose opinions they value. Want a list of 5000 such people? Make a list of the people the Times has quoted in the last year. I bet it's more like 50,000. At this point, the Times is still reputable enough and alive enough that they would want to be under the Times umbrella. Immediately you have a reason to survive for between 5000 or 50,000 people.

We can save one newspaper that way. One newspaper is infinitely better than zero. We can probably save a few magazines too. The key thing is to incentivize people to make them survive. Open the doors as wide as you can imagine, and let the world flood in. It should have happened slowly and carefully over a decade, I told you so back then but you didn't listen. Now you have to achieve what would have been accomplished in that period in the space of a few months. It isn't going to be easy or anything like pain free. But it can work. I'm sure of it.

Seth Godin: "The only reason to answer the phone when a customer calls is to make the customer happy."

 11/27/2008; 9:52:40 AM  

Either Thanksgiving is a mad dash to get 18 different dishes ready, all at the same time (never works, something's always cold, something burned) or, you sit around wasting time until it's time to go to a dinner where you eat someone else's labor of love. This year, for me, it's the latter.

NakedJen has a wonderful tradition for Christmas Day, to spend the day at the movies, watching the new releases. Christmas is always a big day for new movies. In Santa Cruz, where we did it last year, a surprising number of people did it too. We saw Sweeney Todd, the stupid Tom Hanks movie about the politician who supposedly saved Afghanistan, and The Savages, which was, imho, by far, the best of the three. Sweeney starred two of my favorite actors, Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp (with a small part for Sacha Baron Cohen!) and directed by Tim Burton -- it should have been great, but I could hardly stay awake during the movie. This year I'm going to Salt Lake City to join NakedJen in my second NakedJen Film Festival.



BTW, when NJ writes about "Dave" -- it's not me. I want to be clear about that. It's some other guy named Dave, who wasn't very nice to her.

See this is why NakedJen and I get on so well. She says everyone she knows hated Burn After Reading but she liked it. Well I have news for you -- I really liked it too. Yes it was stupid, but sometimes stupid is just the thing. The Coen Brothers rarely fail to entertain. I had a strong feeling about this movie, that it was the counterbalance to No Country For Old Men, which was very very very serious (and unprecedented for the Coens). The CIA Director and his report seemed to speak for us and for the Coens, asking WTF just happened? No one knows. (And you wouldn't believe it if I told you, and you wouldn't even care.) But as long as everyone who was involved is now dead, why should we care? Seems to me a perfect explanation for NCFOM.



 11/27/2008; 7:57:41 AM  

In case there's an interest in IRC for news around the Mumbai terrorism:

irc://irc.freenode.net/#mumbaiTerrorism

I'm already there.

 11/27/2008; 6:46:58 AM  

What you see on Twitter, when:

1. People witness events that others are interested in; and

2. They're posting about it on Twitter; and

3. The interested people are reading their posts...

It certainly is news. Whether it's journalism or not isn't a very interesting discussion, to me.

To the user, both extremes, Twitter and the most vetted pro news, require skepticism. The reader triangulates.

See also: Mike Arrington, Mathew Ingram.

 11/27/2008; 6:28:05 AM  

A terrorist attack in Mumbai is on the other side of the world, but it's all surprisingly connected. India and Pakistan are constant bitter enemies. Both are nuclear powers. Pakistan may be on the verge of becoming a failed state. Their new PM is the widower of a recently assassinated leader and the Taliban, which is encamped in tribal areas near the Afghan border, are wielding more power in Pakistan. There's fear they might get control of one or more of Pakistan's nukes.

Also camped out in the tribal areas are Al Qaeda, and if he's still alive, almost for sure Osama bin Laden.

Meanwhile, the Taliban are patiently fighting the US and its allies to regain control of Afhanistan, and they're winning. Our puppet, Karzai wants to negotiate with them. I wonder why? (Perhaps he'd like to live to old age?)

On Afghanistan's western border is Iran. An oil giant, and for sure a country you need no introduction to.

So it's not that many steps, chaotic ones, from an attack in Mumbai, which probably is somehow connected to Pakistan and the Taliban, to nukes in Pakistan, and oil in the Middle East.

Update: Incredible flow from Mumbai on Twitter this evening.

 11/26/2008; 10:45:12 AM  

The cause of the crumbling economy is the city of NY where all the banks are located, the ones that are crumbling. I know this may sound silly, but I believe that when a city destroys a baseball stadium, nothing but bad things happen. Look at Seattle's Kingdome for an example. I don't need to say any more. The meaning is obvious.

Well this year NY is destroying two stadiums. Two! And they are two very historic stadia. Okay one not quite as historic as the other. There were a few interesting games played at Yankee Stadium over the years, but that's nothing compared to the history of Shea Stadium, where the hapless Mets of the 60s played and the Miracle Mets of 1969 won it all. Mookie Wilson and the 1986 Mets beat Bill Buckner and his Red Sox.

Oh the humanity!

Now if you want the proof, the absolute incontrovertible proof, check out what the name of the new stadium is.

That's right. Citi Field. Appalling.

God speaks to us in mysterious but clear ways.

Repent ye sinners!!

 11/26/2008; 12:38:13 PM  

I have an idea for a business built around a new Top Level Domain or TLD. It wouldn't matter what the name is, it could be .xyz or .x98 -- I'd just like to plunk down some money and create a little economy around domains all ending with the same three letters. I seem to remember reading somewhere that ICANN was going to open this up, that you'd have to make some kind of relatively large payment to them, and offer a business plan that indicated you were doing something honorable.

Did I remember this correctly?

Pointers would be most welcome...

Update: Thanks to Daniel Bruce for the pointer on FF.

The answer is yes. Next year.

6/28/08: "The new decision will allow companies to register their brands as generic TLDs. For instance, Microsoft could apply to have a TLD such as .msn and Apple apply for .mac."

 11/26/2008; 2:32:41 AM  

Another thing I have a vague recollection of was an announcement in August or September that Asus was going to offer an Eee PC with a built-in EVDO modem and a service plan. This started the thread about $99 netbooks. The product was supposed to ship in October but I can't find any evidence of it. Do you know what happened? Did they ship? If not, is it still planned?

 11/26/2008; 2:37:38 AM  

Yesterday I wrote a piece saying that point of view is everything when thinking about the future of news.

The newspapers always approach the question of their continued existence from their own point of view, which of course is understandable. But it doesn't yield an answer, because that point of view is what's disappearing.

If they could consider other points of view, two in particular, they might get somewhere.The two points of view are:

1. People with news.

2. People who want news.

Source and destination. Reporters are distributors. And editors are facilitators of distribution.

If the people with the news can publish it themselves, and they can; what's to stop the people who want the news from reading it directly.

When professional news people consider the Internet they think of it replacing them. Not so. It reduces their role to a bare minimum, makes them less necessary. I still want soundbites from the sources, but I want them to link to the full blog post behind the quote. Too often, in the past, reporters played funny games with partial quotes, or by quoting one person after another as if they were speaking in sequence, when in reality neither had any idea that the other was being quoted. I want the collection of wisdom, I'll draw my own conclusions, as a reader that's my right. (I'll do it anyway, even if the reporters try to mislead me, that's why we're all so suspicious of the news, we were trained to be.)

If reporters are to remain relevant they have to recast themselves, more humbly. Don't think about "deputizing" us to do what you do. Instead think of the value of your rolodex, your sources. Cultivate and develop that rolodex. To the extent that you know who to call when a bit of news breaks, that's the extent of your value in the new world, the one we live in now.

An example I often cite. When there's a fire in Santa Barbara, I know where to go. Doc Searls has staked out that turf in the blogosphere. When there's a breaking story on his beat, his blog has all the pointers you need to get quickly informed. Pictures too.

Another example. Paul Krugman's blog. When the economy is crumbling, as it is now, he reads a lot of other blogs and points to the ones I need to read to stay informed. Sharing this kind of stuff is a human impulse. I doubt if Dr. Krugman gets paid extra to do this, and I know Doc doesn't. This is the amateur spirit. And it's how we're going to route around the outage if the news industry collapses. (However it would be better if the news industry didn't, which is why I bother to write these missives, for over a decade now.)

To the news industry, I suggest that instead of having another brainstorming session among news people, instead let's convene a conference where the people who speak are news users, the #1s and #2s, and the reporters, editors and owners do what they're supposed to do, sit in the audience and take notes. Later they can tell us what we said. Sounds boring perhaps? Well folks, that's what reporters do.

The solution to the puzzle is in the minds and hearts of the people who want to tell a story and the people who want to listen. And of course some days we might be in one category and the next day in the other. Or I might have expertise in one area, and need to acquire it in another.

So the first step in solving the problem is understanding what the users want from news. This is knowledge the news industry has carefully avoided attaining. Seriously. I'm not kidding. And it seems to me there's the problem.

Hank Williams asks if the papers are reaching The End Of Days?

 11/25/2008; 11:54:16 AM