In Park City, the only cable news was: 1. CNN Headline News (stories about missing American children). 2. Fox News (a confusing mishmash of news video and narcissistic commentary). Internet access fairly pathetic, so there really was no option for other flows of news.

Now I'm in NYC with FIOS-level Internet, and am finally able to see the images so many others (on Twitter) have been seeing.

Here's something to think about. We heard a lot of people speak of the "historic" shutting-down of the Internet in Egypt, but realize that we're in a permanent news blackout in the US, the supposed "land of the free and home of the brave." We are not brave, we don't trust ourselves with the same news the rest of the world gets, and as long as we're having our flow of news curtailed (by whom?), we sure ain't anything like free.

Meanwhile the personal trashing of Julian Assange in American media continues. It's really embarassing. What is it they are so afraid of?

 1/30/2011; 6:07:00 PM.   .

I'm zooooming my way to Salt Lake to see new movies the Sundance festival.

NakedJen says there's going to be a blogger's reception this afternoon in Park City. I'll try to be there for that.

If you're in Sundance I'll be the geek in the baseball cap grinning from ear to ear.

 1/25/2011; 9:26:27 AM.   .

I've gotten a request to produce a version of EC2 for Poets for people in Europe. Of course I will do it, but it never occurred to me that an AMI that runs in the US won't run in Europe.

Skimming the docs that are available, it seems this is a security thing. If your servers in the US go down, they won't necessarily take down your servers in Europe? Not sure.

Anyway, if anyone has any tips on how to create a European fork of a Windows-based AMI, please post a pointer as a comment. Thanks!

 1/25/2011; 8:50:33 AM.   .

Two great flavors taste better together!

I am very happy to see EZTV is taking the lead in smoothing out the way BitTorrent uses RSS.

TorrentFreak reported on this development yesterday.

I've since looked at the feeds (an example), and they look pretty good. I know there are some people asking stylistic questions, but that's all they are. The way they're doing looks perfectly workable.

This is an excellent development!

Bravo!!

 1/24/2011; 12:42:44 PM.   .

One of the things I love about the NY Times are the little NYC stories they publish, sometimes on the editorial page, sometimes elsewhere.

Yesterday they interviewed New York-based actor John Hawkes in Park City at the Sundance Film Festival. How could such a nice young man play such an excellent villain, they wanted to know. "I think we all have it in us," he said. "You live in New York? You want to slug people every day."

It's true.

Yesterday I was buying coffee at a Dunkin Donuts on Third Ave. Taking out my wallet, another patron rushes past me to the counter. On his cell phone. Sticks out his cup and mouthes the word "Milk" to the counter guy. Keeps on with the phone conversation. The clerk pauses our transaction (I guess cause I'm not on a phone?) and adds milk to the guy's coffee and then comes back to me

This is why, when casting a movie, if you're looking for a good villain, seriously consider hiring a New Yorker.

 1/23/2011; 10:46:41 AM.   .

I just finished a book that someone sent me by email in mobi format. Works quite well with Amazon's Kindle software on my iPad. Written by a famous author, he withdrew it from publication after the events it depicted came close to happening in the real world. It's not a happy story. But it's quite well-written, and for those of us who aren't going to go out and commit the crimes, reading the book is a very harmless act. And if you, like me, have read everything by this author, you want to read this too. It's an early book, and as I said, a good one.

Okay, what happens now is nothing. I can't upload it anywhere for you to download. Not necessarily because I do or don't respect the author's wishes. For all you know he or she might be dead. But, if there were a leaks site, like the one run by WikiLeaks, or the ones being started by so many others, that specialized in apolitical leaks, I might have an option. I couldn't tell you about it here on Scripting News, but at least I could help other people who love this author's work find the book.

Sorry to be so cryptic, but I want to get this idea out there without stepping on any specific toes.

PS: I'm clearly not the first to think of this.

 1/23/2011; 10:18:56 AM.   .

Just finished The Big Short by Michael Lewis, and it ends with a chilling thought about how fucked we are. There's no other way to put it.

Before I read this book there was something I didn't understand about Credit Default Swaps, or CDSs, which are insurance policies, hedges against an investment failing. They are a way to short things that aren't stocks. In fact you can by a CDS for anything. You can buy a CDS against the Yankees losing the World Series.

But they are a weird kind of insurance. You don't have to own the Yankees to insure them. And both you and I could insure against the Yankees losing the World Series. Hundreds, thousands, even millions of people could do it. There's no limit to the exposure. So if the Yankees were to fail, i.e. fail to win the World Series, theoretically they could take the US economy with it, because of the way they were writing these policies in the days before the real estate bust.

Another example, fire insurance. You could insure someone else's house. Even if it was already on fire. And it would be priced as if fire was only a remote possibility.

And since credit default swaps are unregulated (thank you Reagan, Clinton, both Bushes and the U.S. Congress) no one knows how many CDSs have been purchased against any event. So you end up with the prospect of a small company being too big to fail.

BTW, this is why the US taxpayers had to back the investment banking industry with over $1 trillion of our money. The same people who are buying our government all over again.

Question: Did we outlaw Credit Default Swaps or at least regulate them? (Heh.)

 1/22/2011; 9:34:02 PM.   .

A special comment.

I say this to every bigtime oldstream media celeb that I care about when they get booted out on their butts.

They did you a favor.

But they sure didn't do the rest of us a favor.

What interest do your followers have in you being booted off the air? How exactly does that help them?

To be honest, I stopped watching you on MSNBC after the Obama inauguration. I figured you were going to stay with Washington politics, as you did. I figured that was as good as it was going to get, and all the lobbying and cajoling wouldn't do a bit of good from that point on. I don't have any regrets. Obama isn't much better than Bush unfortunately. That was obvious a few days after the inauguration.

I felt then as I feel now, that the future of communication is not about the bottleneck that MSNBC and their competitors control. I don't think you really need them. Unless of course you need to make $5 million a year, in which case you probably do need them. But if what you're interested in is power to influence public opinion, and becoming more relevant over time, not more niched over time -- if being influential is what you're about, they really did you a favor.

So here's what I recommend. Borrow a page from Conan O'Brien's playbook, and use the social network to communicate with your fans.

Get a video camera and put it in your living room or den at home. Hit Record. Sit down in front of the camera and rant for 15 minutes. You can do that, I'm sure. Then without any production at all, upload it to YouTube and send the link around on Twitter. The first time you do it, it will be the most watched video of the day. Far more people will see it than used to see you on MSNBC, or O'Reilly or Beck or any of them. Depending on how fresh and interesting it is, and how real it is, and how compelling you really are (I know that's a lot of "depends") there won't be much of a dropoff on Day 2 and 3 and so on. Now you've got your own network. And no one can shut you down. And you'll have a lot more people watching you.

You might even get a chance to open people up to some new ideas and god forbid change a few minds.

And when something dangerous and outrageous or just obnoxious happens, we'll know where to find you. That's kind of important.

Good night.

And good luck.

 1/22/2011; 1:00:12 PM.   .

This post is for Scripting News veterans, as well as the River-of-News group that formed around wikiriver.org last month.

We used to do show notes and directories in the podcast world with OPML, because both were booting up at the same time. Every time we did a podcast, we'd do an OPML version of show notes.

We were also trying to keep track of all the programs, so we'd have a directory of directories, each in OPML. I had software that browsed these networks of OPML directories.

You could do inclusions -- where I link to your outline, but when a user expands it, it appears to open in mine (it actually does).

I eventually stopped trying to make this work, but all my tools still do it. In fact in OPML 2.0, the protocol for inclusion was streamlined, to follow the practice that had developed.

Now here's something I just realized that's fairly interesting. I bet in today's browsers it would be fairly easy to implement this kind of OPML directory. Javascript programmers would rather have it delivered in JSON. Of course it doesn't matter what the format is, what's needed is a community of authors building a great wandering world directory that is open to anyone, where we hold hands in cyberspace with new power.

This is a big honking idea. If this were to actually happen, it would be an incredible complement to Wikipedia. It probably would help search companies build new engines that give us not just answers, but context. And choice of context. Unlike Wikipedia there could be many ways to arrive at a spot. That would be subject to editorial judgement, and would not require consensus. I think that's a huge deal, and would increase participation. But I'd love to do it mostly cause it would be huge fun.

Right now, if you're a Javascript programmer, here are a bunch of links for what we were doing in 2003 and 2004. Have a read, and think about it, and let's discuss if you're interested.

June 2000: The first blog post here about the World Outline.

June 2002: The Googlish Way to do Directories.

Not sure of the date: Editing the SoapWare directory with Radio's outliner.

A Google search for "world outline" on scripting.com in chronologic order starting in 2000.

 1/22/2011; 10:51:34 AM.   .

There's an idea, emanating from New York, that if we somehow combine the talents of programmers and journalists, we'll figure out how to make news work in the age of the Internet. I haven't been sure what to call this, but I agree that there's a lot of power in the combination.

Justin Ellis, writing on the Nieman Lab site today, came up with a simple name that works, "the journo-programmer." Until a better term comes along, let's go with that.

One of the reasons it's important, here, is that two of the journalist-teaching universities, NYU and Columbia, have launched programs to create them. At NYU, Jay Rosen, my colleague and partner in the Rebooting The News podcast, is leading the effort with Studio 20. Columbia hired Emily Bell to lead their effort, a graduate program called Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

I visited with Bell last week at her office at Columbia. It was a snowy cold day, but what a beautiful place!

We talked about our histories (she had a career at the Guardian before coming to NY), and WikiLeaks of course (at the center of what we both do) and then to this idea -- the journo-programmer.

So...

What is a journo-programmer, and how does higher education create one? Or is it a god-given gift, and is our job merely to develop the talent where it already exists? Can you teach a programmer to be a writer, or a writer to be a programmer? It seems the first step is to ask people who have already made the journey. From both directions.

A quick story. I made a decision in late 1994 to dive into the web. The door was opened for me by the SF newspaper strike. I've written about this here many times. But here's something to focus on for this subject. The writers, who were professional news people of the mid-90s, largely before the big change swept through their industry, were very well-versed on the abilities of the web. Not all of them. But my best teachers were the ones who understood and used linking. And made it very clear that we, the unpaid production staff, were not to lose a single link. Made an impression. The same kind of impression that reading the source of Unix left with me when I was a grad student in the late 70s.

The importance of linking is comparable with procedures in programming languages. Imagine if every piece of code you wrote had to go all the way back to the beginning and define what it means to add two numbers. Same with writing. I don't have to write the Nieman article because it has already been written and I can link to it.

In that sense the web is a prior-art machine. A way of sharing know-how. There's another key, different concept. In the past, as a writer, it was easier to just reinvent than to reference earlier works. This came up in a Twitter exchange, where calixte said that WikiLeaks had liquified the press, turning it into a river. I love that. I think it's very true. Assange basically said that. Please focus on the cables, he urges, but don't miss that along the way I got the journos to work with each other. There's the liquification. It's one of the things you see very clearly through the lens of wikiriver.org. There's a lot of duplication in the press, for sure, but there's also a lot of linking and referencing.

The next question is how do we teach the journo-programmer. As you might imagine, I have a few ideas about that.

Here's what I say. Don't worry about how to do it, at first -- just start doing it. When we started blogging at Harvard, our first few approaches failed. They wouldn't have worked any better if we spent a year planning them. Better to try an approach, learn, get it out of the way, and come up with new approaches, until you find a way that works.

In most university departments there is permanent paid staff that manage the websites for the students and faculty. It seems to me, if your goal is to boot a new class of programmers and journalists, this activity should be brought into the curriculum, and every student should participate in managing and developing his or her own publishing infrastructure.

We're not ready yet to teach how to do this, but a few semesters after the students start, we will have a very good idea of how to accelerate the process, produce more reliable results. And eventually we will be able to teach it alongside the other skills that make a programmer a programmer and a journalist a journalist.

We will also have a much better idea where existing tools are insufficient, which will lead us to the next phase where the students not only manage the infrastructure, they develop key parts of it. At NYU we learned we have students that are this ambitious with the Diaspora project.

Developing is not something to rush into expecting success from your first efforts. From the outside shipping useful software looks easy. It's an illusion created by the ease-of-use of the resulting product. If the product is easy, the process of creating it must be too. When I say it that way you can see it's not true. It would be like telling the parent of a wonderful 20-something that raising a child must be easy, because look at how pleasing the end result it. Never mind all the problems along the way, that becomes hidden. Same with software.

Okay that's how a department at a university might approach it. But what if we let this problem liquify the individual campuses, the same way WikiLeaks is liquifying journalism. What if trying to go it alone is as un-Internet as trying to lock your users in, or not allowing off-site pointers. Well, we got a good start at this sharing process, in the mid-2000's, when the goal was to bring blogging and podcasting to academia. We did a series of academic conferences that covered blogging from a variety of angles. We looked at how to help people start blogging (that must come first), how to bring new technology to blogging, and the beginnings of blogging as a cultural, political and journalistic process. There were lots of other topics, but these were the main threads.

Every journalism department should learn the art of aggregating. One of the small things I've been able to do to enrich the program at NYU is provide an East Village aggregator. The students should be learning how to create these sites. When I leave, what will happen if they want another aggregator. This technology is now fully mature and any student with reasonable technical ability (i.e. almost all of them) can be taught to manage such a site.

I truly hope the hackathon approach falls away. Not much is ever accomplished in intense social programming. Writing code, like writing long essays like this one, is not something you can do in an environment with lots of interruptions. One interruption at the wrong time can set you back by hours as the map falls out of your head. Programming and writing are both intellectual acts. So why would you expect great results from a crowded, smelly room that people have been living in for 24 hours. What you end up with is a bunch of tired, smelly and basically dishonest people (the most impressive projects are done in the weeks and months before the hackathon and just use the event to promote the work).

Instead take a step back, and envision the big problems we need to take on. Let's break them up into manageable components, and start to solve them with our most talented students, in an interative open source fashion. Very quickly we'd bootstrap a system that works as well as the initial Internet did in the 70s. I was there at the tail end of the Unix bootup. It wasn't a hackathon, it was more like a marathon. We have to teach our young people to think and work for the long-term. And we start by understanding the process and what yields useful long-term results and what just makes good demo.

I would also insist that every student, without exception, run their own server. Bursting the mystique of the cloud is the easiest first step. That server will play the same role that a cadaver plays for a medical student. It's a place for them to make mistakes, to gain experience, to gain rational and realistic fears, but not unnecessary ones.

I've written a tutorial called EC2 For Poets introduce Amazon EC2. In about 1/2 hour the student sets up and launches their own server in Amazon's cloud. For many it's an eye-opening experience.

Running software on the server is no different from running software on the desktop. The priesthood would like you to believe otherwise, but it's not our job to reinforce the priesthood. Quite the opposite, our job is to explode it.

Part of the brilliance of univervities is their iterative nature. We need to do a lot of iteration in pursuit of the journo-programmer. Every semester is a new beginning. Every new student is a chance to try a new approach.

 1/21/2011; 11:09:43 AM.   .

One of the huge pieces of prior art for my minimal blogging tool is the What's Happening? box on Twitter. It's almost like magic, esp combined with a bookmarklet. You're on a web page that you want to link to from Twitter. Click the bookmarklet. The title and a shortened link appear in the What's Happening box. Edit. Submit. Back. You're in and out real quick.

It's why Twitter is, for me at least, what del.icio.us is for others. No problem sharing the link, but I'm primarily motivated to save the link as places I want to come back to later.

So as I've been honing my.reallysimple.org, I finally had to deal with this. How to reconcile two aspects of the app:

1. It's designed to output RSS.

2. I want the stuff to flow through Twitter.

Turns out this is a bit of a difficult question.

What it boils down to: If you had to map the Twitter "What's happening" box onto a feed, would it be the title or the description?

I think it's clearly the description. Because titles are (intuitively) one-line things. The Twitter box is multiple lines. That's the description.

I wrote up the problem in more detail on my changes page.

Comments, respectful of course, and not personal -- are welcome.

 1/19/2011; 12:45:52 PM.   .

I chuckled when I saw this. Had to take a picture.

Maybe this is why I like NY. People hardly notice. Certainly no one has the time or attention to be upset by this. In Calif, such a mailbox would get people all agitated. "Why is he so difficult."

It's not an angry thing -- it's informative. I think that's what you have to know to get NY. Look, life isn't easy. Let the small stuff roll off you. And you feel good about that.

Not victimized. Victorious.

PS: As if to prove my point.

 1/19/2011; 12:19:21 PM.   .

I've known John Brockman and Katinka Matson, NY book agents extraordinaire, for over 25 years. I first met them when I was the CEO of a software company making tools for visualization and organization of ideas. We called them idea processors. The category eventually was known as outliners. In the mid-80s, there was an idea that software might be like books, with publishers and agents. So the big NY book publishers came to Brockman to see if he could put something together. That's how we met.

They're an odd couple, for sure. Brockman is a Jewish guy with a Boston accent, and a past rooted in 60s counter-culture, but these days he hangs with the richest and most famous of the tech and academic world. His annual dinner at TED (which I have never attended) is thought to be a ticket to party with the elite insiders of tech. Katinka is a statuesque beauty with a fierce intelligence. She is an artist. John often wonders how a guy like him attracted a woman like that. It's part of what makes them such a memorable couple.

I love them because they are so weird and interesting, but also because they encourage me as a writer. I think they genuinely enjoy good writing, especially stuff that reaches into the heart. And while I'm not famous or popular enough to get a ticket to TED, I was profiled in Digerati, their original book, given the title of The Lover. I think that was an inside joke, because at the time I, like Brockman, was dating way above my level. Or maybe it was because in the early DaveNets I wrote about love and respect, a lot. Who knows. Steve Case was quoted saying I was the poet of cyberspace, but I don't think the top guys at Apple or Microsoft thought that about me. And I imagine John Perry Barlow might take exception.

Anyway -- at the end of every year Brockman circulates The Question to an elite list of scientists and tech leaders. I've been on the list for many years, but this is the first year that I wrote an essay. What inspired me? Jay sent me a copy of his essay, and I thought, that looks easy, and a few minutes later I had mine. It's about social connections in the big city, but it's really about intimacy. You see, there I go again writing about people instead of science!

I told Brockman, it's too late. I'm a populist. Can't help it. That means I am mainly interested in people. Pretty simple.

Anyway, I'm proud to be in great company this year. There are so many famous and wonderful essays by people I love and respect. I hope to have the time to read them all very soon.

PS: The title of this piece is a play on the name of my high school, which I visited on Monday. Fresh memory.

 1/19/2011; 9:42:18 AM.   .

For inspiration, please read the 50,000 foot piece.

Here's what I did today in EC2-for-Poets land.

1. I wanted to get an idea of how many servers were running, so I pushed an update that has each server ping one of my servers once a minute. I keep a table there indexed by IP address with the number of times it pinged and when it last pinged.

2. I am now running a micro-instance, based on a discussion in the comments under the Howto. I'm going to leave it running a while and see how it performs. Micro-instances are much cheaper than "small" ones.

3. I started a mail list for users and developers. Please read the initial message before signing up.

 1/18/2011; 4:50:02 PM.   .

Well, we're over the initial hump.

A bunch of people ran the new EC2 for Poets tutorial and got all the way to Hello World. So I'd say the new instructions work, there are still a few things to smoothe out, but we're up and running.

Now I can tell you where we're going on this little trip.

We're going to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where our forefathers, here in the USA, decided to be independent from Great Britain. We appreciated the training wheels they provided when we were a very young country, but now it's time for us to be on our own.

In other words...

I'm pretty sure we know how to create a micro-blogging community with open formats and protocols and no central point of failure.

The goal is to create many places where blogging and journalism can occur. Where we pay for the servers ourselves, so the terms of use make sense for the high-integrity work we do. We have choice. If we don't like the service we get one place, it's easy to pick up our stuff and work somewhere else.

So we've got a start. There's a River2 aggregator running on each of the EC2-for-Poets machines. It's the same feed reading tool we had in Radio 8, a few years ago. There's a lot more stuff working in there, it's faster, and we've got a little community doing skins for it. It's a start.

And it's in a different place now. Instead of running on your desktop, it's in the cloud. Where one installation can serve many users. It's like having your own Google Reader running in the cloud. Where you can customize it to work the way you work.

Next we'll have simple blogging and synchronization tools that run in this environment.

And all of it will be built around an open format called RSS. That's how all the components talk to each other.

So if you want to use someone else's software, god bless, please do.

This is a very deliberate attempt to create a coral reef. I will put all the pieces together. I hope to make a little money from this work at some point. But I don't expect or want to make all the money. I'm more interested in creating a wonderful environment for sharing our thoughts, images, music, sounds, ideas and code. Places we can work together.

It's the same idea we started blogging with in the mid-90s, but freshened up for the way we do it in the teens.

 1/18/2011; 4:26:14 PM.   .

Yesterday afternoon I went to see Inside Job at the Village East Cinema on 2nd Ave in NY. It's a haunting movie. It fills in a lot of missing pieces on the meltdown of 2008, vs what we were hearing on TV and NPR and reading in the news. Not that any of the journalists did anything wrong, they didn't. It's such a complicated story and the misdeeds are so enormous and on such a huge scale, that it takes some time and probably a few tellings for it to sink in.

At the same time I'm reading The Big Short by Michael Lewis, which is filling in the details about how the idea of CDO's and CDS's developed. What's amazing about it is that, according to Lewis, the people doing it were fully aware of how depraved and immoral it was. (It would be hard to see how they wouldn't be aware of it.) How they were deliberately creating bad products to sell to their customers, and then betting against them. The worse they were, the more money they made! And they were doing it on such a massive scale that the only way to clean it up would be with public money.

It's as if you are selling $100 notes for $1 and getting a 20 percent commission on each sale. The notes come due in two years, but you get your bonus at the end of this year. Who cares? You're selling off your own employer, knowing that when this process unravels, and it will unravel, they will die. That's not old-fashioned free market goodness, that's new-age cocaine-inspired depravity. (And yes they were doing coke.)

BTW, one thing I didn't understand about credit default swaps, which is simply insurance on a bond becoming worthless (simple enough idea), is that I could take out insurance on a bond I don't hold. It's as if you could take out insurance on my house. Hundreds of people could. And you can bet as much as you want! I might have built my house on a hill where it rains in winter. And the guy selling you the insurance didn't even look to see where the house was. Unbelievable as it may be, that's the story.

We tend to believe the free unregulated market is the best, and maybe it was when we were trading goats and wheat, and selling our own goods, not our neighbor's. But computer networks and creative lawyers and people with no pride, honor or empathy have made it possible to pervert that so that even if there were laws to protect us from them, there would be no one to enforce them. That's made totally clear by Inside Job.

I think of my former colleagues in Silicon Valley who are understandably proud of their Davos invitations. You guys should watch the movie before you go, and know that's who you are hanging out with. It's playing at the Bridge Theater, 3010 Geary Blvd, San Francisco. I think they should have a showing of the movie at Davos, it's so important. Might really change the discussion.

And the academics, well I'm proud to say that the only academic they interviewed with any integrity was Nouriel Roubini, from NYU. The others, from Columbia, Harvard and elsewhere, were on-camera saying some very awful things about their own ethics. Just awful. These people have a lot of explaining to do.

As do the members of Congress. The movie shows some of the most famous ones, of both parties, grilling execs from the banking industry after the meltdown, asking the right questions, and not accepting bullshit answers. You want to cheer for them, except now it's 2011, and they're in the pocket of the banking industry again, pushing more deregulation, gutting more investigations, putting the same foxes in charge of our hen house.

It looks very much like it's happening again, and we're in the dark. Hopefully there will be enough left of our economy after they rape it this time for Charles Ferguson and company to do another chilling expose like Inside Job. Or you all could watch it now, and let's figure out how to put a stop to this, before it's too late.

Krugman: "I think this film will stay with us; when you ask how the even worse crisis of, say, 2015 happened, the fact that these people got away with it will loom large."

 1/18/2011; 12:36:34 PM.   .

It was freaking cold today, so I stopped in at 2 Brothers Pizza on St Marks Place. It's a small store, open to the outside. No door, no front window. A huge pizza oven in front.

The place is frigid, so you leave your jacket on. They give you a $1 slice and you go in back and sit down. You can take your gloves off cause the pizza keeps your hands warm. And the pizza is very very very hot. Delicious too, I might add.

After finishing my first slice I got another. Just $1 per. Excellent.

 1/17/2011; 8:24:58 PM.   .

I created an account on Memolane (my username is davew) and added a couple of my feeds, the one for Scripting News and my linkblog feed.

And this is what it produced. Now there's something you don't see every day -- a new way to view RSS.

Click through for a full size shot.

However, I then added Flickr to the mix and now my timeline goes all the way back to 1965 (I have a Beatles picture from back then). Nice, but how to scroll to the present day? Not obvious.

But it's nice to see something truly innovative with RSS.

And it's pretty.

PS: I found the global timeline at the bottom of the screen. So I was able to get to the most recent stuff.

PPS: Zach Seward likes it too.

 1/17/2011; 7:50:51 PM.   .

I've spent the last few months, in the middle of all the other projects I've been working on, getting a new version of EC2 for Poets ready. And as of today, it's reached a certain level of ready-ness. So here goes!

http://ec2.scripting.com/

If you're an adventurous soul, and don't mind encountering and reporting bugs, please give it a try.

This version, unlike the previous one, is a baseline package, a requirement for other server software to come. A platform.

The idea is simple: Keeping a server in the cloud should be no more difficult than keeping a computer on your desk. The same issues apply. The only difference is that you keep the server running most of the time. (You can shut it down if you know you aren't going to need it.) And the cool thing is that you can access it over the Internet. It can be doing things on your behalf while you're out and about. And it doesn't cost very much to run, esp if you can share it among several people in a workgroup, a class or department.

For example, when I was testing this installation, I put up a server and accessed its It Worked page and its Hello World page. You can see the raw IP address in those URLs. It took about 15 minutes to set up the server, and most of that time was waiting for the virtual elves at Amazon to do their thing (called "provisioning").

I will write about this package many times in the future. It will be a requirement for my minimal blogging software. And a bunch of other servers I'm thinking about. So don't expect me to run servers that you access for free, that's against my religion. I believe you should pay for your servers, and thereby control your destiny. The challenge is to make the experience as good as, or better than the service you get from the corporate silos.

 1/16/2011; 12:02:57 PM.   .

These are just three of many blogs that have sprouted up in the last few years covering localities. These are the ones that I am connected to because they cover areas I care about because I live there or have lived there.

Also I have peripheral involvement with #2 and #3, but none of it longterm. I have no financial interest in any of them, and none are running my software.

1. EVGrieve. A super-snarky blog, written by an anonymous person whose name is EVGrieve. I have no idea who it is. But in two years he or she has created a network of people in the East Village who contribute. If there's a fire in the middle of the night, they have pictures in the morning. That's sort of the benchmark for hyperlocal. It's very very pro-east-village, they don't like bar noise (a huge problem here) and are constantly railing against gentrification. But it's very opinionated and I love it. They do about 5 posts a day, wish they did more. I wrote a piece for them that hasn't run yet. Grrr. (Okay a little snark back atcha.)

2. Berkeleyside. It's a long story but I helped found this one when I lived in Berkeley, but it has since changed its name and has grown a million percent, and most important -- has found itself. Seriously, I'm not kidding. It feels somehow "real." Very different from #1, written by pro freelancers who live in Berkeley. These are mature people, with a large view of the world, and are thinking not only in terms of reporting on the news of Berkeley, but also want to develop business in Berkeley's slumping economy. Get this -- on Jan 24 they're having a local business conference. They're doing a wonderful job with no money, just vision and passion. Of the three I think it looks the best. Like EVGrieve, they are slowly extending their reach into the community for photos and copy.

3. LEV which stands for Local East Village, a joint effort betw NYU and the NY Times. It's in the part of NYU where I have my current fellowship. I think they've done a good job. You can see they cover mostly the same business as EVGrieve, after all they are covering the same locality. But they do it with an educational flavor and minus the attitude. Both approaches are, of course, completely valid.

 1/15/2011; 10:43:21 PM.   .

1. I use Firefox.

2. I really depend on the RSS icon in the address bar.

3. I understand they're planning on removing it.

4. This is an unnecessary step backward.

5. I want it to get easier not harder.

5. It's going to really screw with my workflow.

6. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

7. Please don't flame me, I'm just a user.

8. Could we have it as a pref, at least?

9. If you must, default off.

Thanks in advance.

Update: There's an interesting Hacker News thread on this topic.

Update: Les Orchard shows how to find feeds in the new version.

 1/15/2011; 10:45:26 AM.   .

Developing this stuff is like having a lot of pockets, and putting notes in each pocket about a tool you need someday to make the whole thing work. Every day you try to take a note and replace it with an actual tool. Sooner or later you look around and every pocket has a tool, and you figure what the heck, let's start building the thing.

Joe Moreno got the "silo-safe" ball rolling with Adjix, preparing for his own demise, and being sure that our links would still work, even if his server went permanently kaput. It's possible to do this from Day One. That was one of the tools.

So I started working on the Minimal Blog Editor, all the time planning to use the tool to make it store your feeds where you want them, not necessarily in my space. Pretty important idea.

Today I got it working.

That's the prefs page in my.reallysimple.org where you tell it that you want it to publish the feeds into your own space on S3. It works.

PS: I bought a new domain today. There's a hint in the screen shot.

 1/13/2011; 11:01:55 AM.   .

Interesting piece on TechCrunch today about Instagram blocking a scraper that turns its data flow into RSS. Here's what I would do if I were Instagram and wanted to fend off competition from the open web on one side, and Twitter on the other.

1. Offer the user the option to store their pictures in an S3 bucket or an FTP site, or do a deal with Dropbox and have an option to store the pictures in the user's public Dropbox folder.

2. Also write an RSS feed to that folder that anyone can subscribe to if somehow they can find their way to it.

This is good for a couple of reasons.

1. It gets rid of some nasty potential competition.

2. It helps develop new systems for feed discovery.

3. It builds independence of Twitter, now, while they still have the market relatively to themselves. It will all change, dramatically, when Twitter introduces its own picture-sharing, integrated with their iPhone and iPad apps. The iPhone camera will appear to be part of Twitter.

One way or another, the time to bootstrap silo-free picture sharing is now.

PS: Refer to the schematic. Instagram is one of the etc's on the left side of the diagram.

PPS: I wrote this quickly before heading out for lunch uptown. Please read it with considerable slack-cutting.

PPPS: The mistake my VC friends make is they think it's either/or. Either you support the open web and are a charity, or you build a silo, monetize it, and get rich. What really happens is that the silos are eventually undermined by the open web. This happens when the market is choked with startups with nothing to lose. Some of them are going to successfully differentiate by offering users freedom. We're coming up to the part of teh cycle where the users value it. The opportunities to lock-in will come again, but first this cycle has to complete.

 1/12/2011; 11:26:59 AM.   .

Never mind the violent language, we can talk about that later.

But surely we can agree that guns have no place at political events.

A campaign event should be like an airport.

Leave your weapons at home.

Can that be part of the good that comes from the events in Tucson, which everyone seems to agree is some kind of a wakeup call. Right?

PS: The lunacy of politicians bringing their own weapons to political events. Play that out. How long before one of them shoots a constituent.

PPS: If we don't stop the guns at campaign events, the next thing is going to be militia in uniform showing up at the events.

 1/11/2011; 8:26:10 PM.   .

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Facebook

Twitter

Friendfeed

Changes

DaveRiver

Droidie

East Village

EC2 for Poets

Frontier News

Great VaVaVoom

Leon Winer

Links

Listings

NY Times River

OPML Editor

opml.org

Outliners.com

Protoblogger

ReallySimpleSyndication

Realtime RSS

Rebooting the News

River2

RSS spec

rssCloud

Tech River

Tech Without Borders

Unberkeley

WikiRiver

XML-RPC

My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks.

People are always asking about my bike.

Here's a picture.

FYI: You're soaking in it. :-)