Today's trip: Headed uptown toward the George Washington Bridge.

Got to 110th St near Columbia Univ, took a break and turned around.

Only one stop in each direction. 11.6 miles, 1.25 hours.

Weather was perfect. Sunny and mild. Felt like 80 with a nice breeze.

Legs feel great, butt hurts a bit, at the end I was ready to go another hour (or so I felt at the moment).

Tomorrow is a Saturday geek ride up Park Ave and into Central Park.

 8/13/2010; 12:20:32 PM.   .

Got an email yesterday that turned out to be spam or hoax, but at first looked like I had scored big. It was from Jeffrey Walker, executive producer at Voice America Talk Radio Network.

"You have been on our 'radar' as a talent for the possibility of hosting a show on the network."

At first I thought he meant he was from Voice Of America, a US-govt-run radio network that grew during World War II as a counter to Nazi propoganda in Europe and Latin America. After the war it broadcast western news into the Soviet Union and Soviet-occupied Europe. In Cold War terms, "behind the Iron Curtain." .

Today it operates in 45 languages, and broadcasts via satellite and on FM, AM, and shortwave radio frequencies. It is also available through the Internet in both streaming media and downloadable formats at voanews.com

I sent a response to Mr. Walker, asking: "Are you the same thing as the Voice Of America?"

He said no.

Anyway, I just wanted to put this out there. If you're a podcaster and you get an email from this outfit, they should be disclaiming upfront that they have nothing to do with the Voice of America. Pretty sure they got my email address by scraping BlogTalkRadio, which has a much more legitimate claim, imho, at being "The World Leader in Live Internet Talk Radio."

And these guys would look a lot less sleazy if they changed their name to something that wasn't so readily misunderstood.

 8/13/2010; 3:37:16 AM.   .

On Twitter I asked a question out of frustration about Afghanistan.

2 hours ago: "Does anyone have even a theory why we're still in Afghanistan? Even a paranoid one?"

Apparently people in my circle have been thinking about this!

silencematters: "The oil and gas pipelineand mineral deposits."

joemoreno: "In theory, you don't want a failed state that's a safe haven for unlawful activity. But, who signs the peace treaty?"

scootinater: "it's all about the poppy's!"

mrDarcyMurphy: "Too lazy to get out?"

anildash: "Maybe everyone is ready to leave, but the security line is just really slow?"

redeye: "Lithium."

tolles: "politicians are seldomly rewarded for losing a war."

arjunram: "cuz u continue to fund pakistan and by it the ISI."

mattburrows: "oil."

BF191: "Obama decided to buy his own Buick (Afghanistan) and rejected Bush's Caddy as no good (Iraq) gotta show cars are good."

AdamBagwell: "didn't some geological survey find that Afghanistan is sitting on insane amounts of precious metals?"

dkato: "keep unemployment numbers as low as possible? Skyrocket when vets and stop-lossed come home."

SimonZerafa: "There after that huge Lithium deposit they discovered recently; easier and quicker to extract and will make money "

Soulati: "If we leave Afghanistan, the Taliban is poised right now to zoom in and undo everything. It's a can't win, don't you think?"

Alt_010: "Something to do with Anchor Baby's I think."

mcarvin: "if there were no bad guys in Afg., the Military-Industrial Complex 2.0 loses a large part of it's raison d'etre."

Jason: "my guess is we are secretly deep into Pakistan (with their permission) and we need Afg. as cover for those operations."

kidmercury: "profit for war biz; profit for CIA drug running (check afghan heroin production); part of NWO agenda (world govt)"

justinlfowler: "Minerals."

null_ptr: "The bad guys (Taliban) are there. Left Iraq and went there/Pakistan."

matthovey: "re-read the Plan for a New American Century, Dave."

flowchainsensei: "Nuclear weapons."

carlacasilli: "They have things we want. Things like natural resources."

lakesunrise: "B/C there are no jobs for vets. Our economy can't handle the extra war-hardened soldiers. They'll be forced into idleness- scary."

briantroy: "I'm gonna go with winning elections and ego."

AndyBold: "Oil, again. Afghanistan is a major gateway to the sea in that area which is why Russia went in. Think oil pipes & Asian continent."

adamkmiec: "we used MapQuest for directions on how to get out?"

rbonini: "We have yet to find Bin laden?"

jeremyfelt: "Manifest Destiny (squared)"

 8/12/2010; 3:16:02 PM.   .

Here's the trip report on EveryTrail. 10.0 miles. 1.25 hours.

I rode up 8th Ave, cross town on 20th, joined the East River bike trail at Stuyvesant Point, went under the Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, South Street Seaport, round the Battery, up the Hudson and across the Village.

There were signs of heavy rain most of the route, but I never got more than a few drops.

The heat wave is over, it's in the mid-70s. Perfect riding weather.

The pedestrians are the worst in Battery Park City, sometimes blocking the whole super-wide path with dogs and baby carriages, not moving. The best bike trail is just north of there, betw the top of Battery Park and 46th St. It's a straight shoot the whole way.

Today the leg pain and tiredness are gone, endorphins flowing make me happy!

 8/12/2010; 10:37:19 AM.   .

A few followups to recent programming pieces.

1. As a warmup project I added three new verbs to the OPML Editor glue script table for Flickr. Together they make it possible to easily download all the pictures in a Flickr group to a local disk.

2. There's a new realtime-over-the-Internet manager in the OPML Editor based on long polling and XML-RPC. I believe it's the foundation for instant RSS-like apps, and a chance to revisit all that's klunky or ineffective about RSS (notably how awkward subscribing is). There's very little code in this package, a good omen! You work hard for a very long time to find these nuggets. It's designed to be easily cloned, and I hope to start an open source project in the fall, to clone, document and evangelize it.

3. The realtime manager was developed for yet-another instance of the Instant Outliner. This one really is instantaneous, and should scale well. You'll find the code for it at builtins.io. (The code for the realtime manager is at builtins.realtime.)

4. Chuck Shotton took the tin-can-and-string idea and ran with it, not only implementing but also specifying a federatable social messaging app. I've worked with Chuck on and off for 15 years (gulp) and respect the hell out of him. I'd look carefully.

5. Had a fun, spirited phone talk yesterday with Blaine Cook, who works on realtime stuff for British Telecom and was one of the original guys at Twitter. I still think DNS is the right technology to manage identity, and can't support "activity streams" as long as it is Atom-only. Even so, there may be possibilities for connecting our work.

6. Not really a programming thing, but on Saturday, New York City is opening Park Avenue to bikers, runners and walkers (as it was last Saturday, and will be next Saturday). There are lots of related special events. If you're in the city it's a great idea to get out and get some blood flowing. It'll make you smarter! And it looks like the heat wave has broken just in time.

 8/12/2010; 6:02:37 AM.   .

After two days off biking due to a Boston trip, I'm riding again.

Today's trip was quite a bit shorter than the last one. Not sure why, but my energy is a bit lower and my legs hurt more.

Rather than push too hard, I took a couple of breaks during this ride, and only got as far as 70th St. A total round trip of 7.9 miles. 55 minutes.

I turned around at the south end of Riverside Park, where there's this great long pier with views north and south.

As I passed 46th St, I took a picture of the bike with the USS Intrepid.

 8/11/2010; 9:52:37 AM.   .

I've been re-reading Ted Nelson's great books, ordered copies for myself and Nicco, who gave his to EchoDitto. They say it's such an eye-opener (knew it would be) that they want to scan it and upload it. I understand the sentiment. I think everyone who uses computers should have Nelson's books and refer to them often.

One of the big ideas in Computer Lib is the bootstrap. Maybe it's the biggest idea of them all. A bootstrap is a process which, in order to create an X, you need one or more X's. The chicken-and-egg conundrum is an example of a bootstrap. Humanity is a bootstrap -- can't make a human without a human (two in fact).

One of the spookiest bootstraps is the process of writing a Pascal compiler (or any language, nothing special about Pascal). You start by writing a very simple compiler in assembly language. Get it working with some sample programs, then start writing a new Pascal compiler, in Pascal, and compile it with your compiler written assembly language. Keep working on it until you have enough features to comple the compiler with itself. Then you can throw out the assembly language one. That story really spooks people, but swear to god, that's how compilers are built.

That little story explains the trick of how bootstraps work. You start with a very simple subset that you know you can use. Then you use it. Then refine it, and use it some more. Repeat until you're ready to use the tool to create itself. In groupware apps, which is what blogging tools are, the bootstrap happens at step one. You always use the tool to organize the work of developing the tool. Same with outliners and BBSes. Basically everything I've ever worked on works that way.

Since my work and Doug Engelbart's have huge amounts of overlap, it should come as no surprise that Engelbart was the guy who focused our attention on the bootstrap concept. And it was Nelson, writing about Engelbart, that made them famous.

Some tools are built without the benefit of a bootstrap. Twitter for example -- but that's just how it appears. They used the results of a lot of research done by others who were bootstrapping.

Podcasting is a form of blogging, think of it as a weblog for the ears, that couldn't have happened so quickly if blogs didn't already exist. Same with almost all the new tools of Web 2.0.

Go back to the web, of course it's a bootstrap. But if you had listened to Ted Nelson, he would have told you that TBL's web is wrong, it's missing the features that Nelson felt the web must have. There's an irony. The teacher doesn't follow his own lesson! What TBL was doing was what he knew how to do, not waiting for the grand vision to appear. What Nelson was doing, with his Xanadu project, was waiting for perfection to emerge from the labs before offering it to the world (and presumably using it himself). He's waited forever. He should read his own book on that subject.

Anyway, to answer the question posed by this piece -- you bootstrap the federated 140-character loosely coupled network the same way you boostrap anything. Let's start with something very very simple, like two tin cans separated with a string. Something that is useful, perhaps minimally so, and can be federated. Then we use it. Then we think. Then we improve it. Start with working code. Start tomorrow, not next month.

So many people want to start by boiling the ocean.

 8/10/2010; 7:12:16 AM.   .

As I posted yesterday, Twitter's new suggested users feature continues to impress.

Gotta wonder what if they had done this to begin with, how much more useful Twitter would be today. All the michegas about celebs using Twitter missed the point as far as I was concerned. I used Twitter. I didn't want Twitter to become TV. I don't have any use for TV except, very rarely, as entertainment. I value Twitter most when it connects me to intelligent people who have something to say. Now, with the new feature, at last they're trying to help me do that.

A couple of things came up in the meantime:

1. I wondered if there is an API for this feature. I want to write some custom tools to explore its suggestions. Apparently one was promised on the developer mail list as the feature was initially rolling out. Looking forward to trying it, when it's available. I think mashups of this feature will be interesting.

2. Chris Baskind asked a very important question. "Twitter's new Follow recommendations are an improvement. But I'd like Twitter to publicly disclose whether any are sponsored." I admit that when I saw them recommending products and companies I wondered too. A few minutes after he asked, we got an answer from Josh Elman, at Twitter: "The suggestions are not sponsored. Our only advertising products are promoted trends and promoted tweets as labeled."

 8/9/2010; 5:06:22 PM.   .

I don't know what to make of all the publicity that's been appearing in the mainstream media about Craigslist.

I worry that these organizations have huge conflicts of interest when it comes to reporting news about CL, which has single-handedly undermined many of their business models. The articles I've read so far don't seem skeptical enough, and don't answer obvious questions that any intelligent reader would have.

Who paid for the ads in the Washington Post? Certainly not the underage prostitutes.

Then I saw this piece in the Guardian.

Guardian: "Craigslist is hub for child prostitution, allege trafficked women"

Oy. The first part is an assertion, the second part qualifies it. The story is the allegation, not that CL is a hub.

The story is flimsy. This, from a news org that doesn't have a conflict. The Guardian is not commercial. It's supported by an endowment.

I don't know what to make of it.

 8/8/2010; 4:52:54 PM.   .

Chris Gulker tells a story of Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa about forgiveness.

It's a big thing to forgive. It cleanses you of life's biggest burdens. It's how you move on without having to process every last unhappy detail of your life.

I wrote a piece in 1995 about forgiveness that, in the spirit of curation, is worth linking back to and quoting.

It goes like this...

What if instead of greeting people with 'Hi how are you?' we said 'Hi I forgive you.' It would get routine. It would be impossible to carry guilt or a grudge, all you'd have to do is shake hands and you're absolved and have given absolution. I'm OK and so are you.

How do you spell relief? 'Hi, I forgive you,' says Jeff. 'Thank you. And I forgive you,' says Judy. 'Thank you,' says Jeff.

Check it out. I think there's something here.

I forgive you!

Dave

 8/8/2010; 10:12:57 AM.   .

This time I used an iPhone app called EveryTrail to track my trip.

This time I got up to 94th St on the Greenway.

10.0 miles, 1.25 hours. Feel even better than yesterday.

Lots of pictures.

Here's a fantastic map of NYC bike paths and greenways. I want a hard-copy of this map. Any clues?

I've been intrigued by Pier 66a. There's a really funky old boat parked there and what appears to be a restaurant or a club. Looks quite Amsterdamish. Wonder what it is. (It's a bar!)

 8/8/2010; 9:40:16 AM.   .

With my new Kindle, I've become a more avid reader.

I'm sure there are thousands of books on Amazon that I would love. But how to find them?

It seems some of the answers are locked up in the New York Times Book Review, but so far I've been too lazy and too cheap to buy a copy of it. This is the one product where the Times change the way it pays, and give it away like the ubiquitous AOL disks a couple of decades ago, and get a cut of the revenue from every book they sell. Book reviews should be free, because the books they sell make lots of money. Probably the same with the collection of NYT movie reviews.

The trick is to maintain the separation of editorial and publishing, as they do now with advertising. Except change the way you view the editorial product. It's not a way of drawing in eyeballs to ads, instead it's a way of selling books. And once the money is flowing, they could build the business by creating tools that improved the process, made it easier to find books you like.

I've always felt that news organizations have certain very valid conflicts of interest, conflicts we want them to have. Lke the difference between good cholesterol and bad. Think of it this way. What would be wrong for the San Jose Mercury News thinking that San Jose is a great place, and doing things to promote it? In the same way, we know the NYT thinks books are great because they publish a book review. They're not saying you should buy just any book -- you should buy the books they like, and not buy the ones they don't. The reviews have that bias already, so there's absolutely no problem basing a business model on it. (But in this model they'd get a cut off any book you buy through the review, even if they panned it.)

Now books aren't a huge business, but they got Amazon launched a few years ago, and today it's a big battleground that the Times already has a big position in. Their name is plastered right there on the cover of every book that makes its best-seller list.

If the Times got in the business of telling us where to live if we want really great Internet service, it seems they would be entitled to a percentage of the rent we pay on the housing we buy based on that recommendation. Now we're talking some very serious money. And the incentives would now be there for landlords to upgrade the Internet service in their buildings. It's a pretty "green" technology, so where's the harm? And doesn't the Times have a stake in New Yorkers getting better Internet access? Wouldn't that endear us to them? Make us want to give them more money? And how many new bloggers could they hire with that money? Done right, quite a few!

Eventually this is the way it's going to work, I'm absolutely sure of it. In programming we call this refactoring. You move code around, put this piece over there, that piece here, until eventually it's structured in a wholly different way. But still does the same thing.

In the future news organizations will still get us news, and they will still follow the same rules that let us trust them. But the way the money flows, that will be a whole different thing. Everyone knows that. I'm pretty sure this is how it will work.

 8/8/2010; 5:52:21 AM.   .

Following up on two recent posts.

Observations on Twitter's newest iteration on suggesting people to follow.

1. They're not just suggesting people with mega-inflated follower lists by the SUL mess. Some of the people they're suggesting have small lists, so what they're saying is inherently more interesting to me. People with a million followers tend to run ads, whether they're directly paid for them or not.

2. The seeds they are using appear not to be random. In other words, somehow they've figured out who I'm related to professionally and intellectually. I have tended to follow a fair number of people who are random, just based on them saying something interesting. Those people don't seem to be playing a role in who they choose to recommend.

3. Many of the people they suggest are people I am actually interested in following, though I'm not yet doing it, I already have an overloaded Twitter stream. As some have noted they recommend people I know who I have deliberately chosen not to follow. But they are easily removed from the list and once-removed it stops suggesting them.

4. Anticipating that more people are seeing my profile now in a semi-serious mode, I've made mine more factual and less snarky.

Some suggestions for the suggestions:

1. I'd love to see know who Twitter is recommending me to. And are they subscribing?

2. Even better I'd like to have a way to walk the network of recommendations to see who they're recommending to the people I follow, and the people they follow and on and on. Is there an API for this? (Admittedly I haven't looked at the Twitter API in quite a while. Not interested in firehoses, and the rest of the movement seems to be pointless make-work for developers. Something like a server software dead-man switch. Ugh.)

Hey it's been a while since Twitter did something interesting. This qualifies.

 8/8/2010; 5:02:33 AM.   .

Rex Hammock, my Republican blogging buddy in Nashville, recalls that in 2005, Forbes (a Republican tool) ran a cover that announced the "attack of the blogs" and warned that they "destroy brands and wreck lives." Now in 2010, they run blogs themselves. Heh. Whatta you know!

So... Are we bloggers or the The Borg?

Recall, they were the alien race in Star Trek whose motto was We Will Assimilate You. They were truly scary, and for a while it looked like they would indeed assimilate the human race.

Blogging is everywhere nowadays. Not everyone does it. Just NBBs, but there are lots of them. The cost of publishing is down pretty close to zero. As Papa Doc used to say in the early days: We'll fact check your ass. And I forget who observed that we're watching you watch us watch them watch us watch you watch them, but we're still watching them watch us watch them watch you watch all of that.

 8/7/2010; 6:04:23 PM.   .

This one was huuuuuge.

Started at Sheridan Sq, rode east to Lafayette, turned north, up Park Ave all the way into the 70s.

Turned west, then south at 5th Ave, down to 60th. Entered Central Park, rode back up to 72nd, turned south down to 59th.

South on Broadway to 57th, west to the Hudson Greenway, south to 10th St, east to 7th Ave, south to Sheridan Sq.

How many miles is that? A lot!

1.5 hours and I feel grrrrrreat.

Time for a shower and head out to Queens.

 8/7/2010; 11:09:22 AM.   .

I finally got fed up with people using Scripting News to post the same off-topic comments over and over. It's not just that one person is being a broken record, there's a whole cadre of people who feel they need to be heard yet have nothing to say. They repeat themselves with very simple thoughts. Apple is great, Flash sucks, etc etc ad nauseum. They can "prove" it. If you don't like it it's because they disagree with you not because you've heard it a million times and didn't care the first time.

So if I ask a question that isn't resolved by a simple Neener Neener response, yet people post them -- my solution is to do what Apple does with Flash content -- off to the bit bucket. If, after I ask you to stop, you continue to do so -- I block you. If after blocking you here, you hassle me on Twitter, then I block you there. I don't give a shit who you are, if you're the Pope's long-lost brother, or the Dalai Lama or the chairman of the Republican Party. Goodbye. Please!

Bonus link: Krugman re upgrading discourse on his blog.

 8/7/2010; 9:05:43 AM.   .

Quick followup to yesterday's post on Amazon and web hosting.

So close yet so far.

Turns out by coincidence Amazon had announced, the very day of my post, that their CloudFront service would support index files.

The economics are pretty attractive. The cost of the first access, assuming the index page is the only thing accessed via CloudFront, is about the same as S3. For the first access of the home page you pay double, once for CloudFront and once for S3. All subsequent accesses, until the cache expires, cost 1X an S3 access.

But there's the rub. For a blogger, the home page is a rapidly changing page. I sometimes update the home page several times a minute while I'm tweaking up a story. CloudFront, by its nature, must cache. And caching is what you don't want to do with a potentially rapidly changing resource.

It's the wrong solution.

People say S3 is just a storage service. But I'm not buying it. Why shouldn't a storage system also work as a web server? So much of S3 is useful for that, it's only natural to add the one final feature necessary to make it work. Or please let us know why. It's just a curiosity, is there some reason Amazon doesn't want us hosting full static sites in S3? (Please, unless you have a creative non-obvious answer, let's wait till (and if) we hear from Amazon.)

 8/7/2010; 8:57:56 AM.   .

Yesterday I wrote a quick piece about visualizing failure, and didn't explain something important.

First, recall that failure was imminent. It was the expected outcome. The board had washed its hands, told me to shut it down (why they did this in retrospect is a mystery, they had no upside in shutting it down other than a possible tax loss).

The problem for me was I couldn't imagine going on with my life, facing my family -- who had said it would never work and I should just get a job. Or my friends, who I had been neglecting, for a very long time, because I was hunkered down trying to make this thing work. And how would I get work after this failure? And if I could, what would it be like to work for someone else, having failed at entrepreneurship? But even more ominous than facing family and friends or finding work was how would I face myself? I had been holding on to this dream of myself as a success, a self-made man, a person who creates his own destiny. I had had this feeling when I was a student that I had discovered my purpose. What would it mean to have failed at my purpose? How could I live with that? I didn't think I could.

I think in general, except in some very lucky circumstances, success requires that level of determination. To just wish for success is not enough. To want it is not enough. To deserve it is not enough. You need a word that's stronger than wish, want or deserve -- perhaps that word is "require."

Over on Ycombinator one of the commenters, TotlolRon, quoted Apollo 13 Flight Controller Jerry Bostick. "When bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them." I think that's pretty close to the sentiment. You're out there, you're alone, and if you fail, you aren't coming back. That is the feeling I had outside the office that night.

Maybe it isn't that I couldn't visualize failure, but in some sense I could visualize it all too well.

I'm going to keep working on this.

 8/7/2010; 5:50:45 AM.   .

 8/6/2010; 9:38:33 PM.   .

I've been hearing all this happy talk about how great it is for Google that Wave failed. The theory being that if you fail that means you took a chance, and taking chances is good therefore failing is good.

This is really convoluted and it's really wrong.

The only way to succeed in my opinion is if you cannot visualize failure.

I've been there. In 1986 my company was in very deep shit. One night I was leaving the office and I knew the next morning I was going to lay off a quarter of the company and cut the salaries of everyone else in half. Even after doing that I still didn't think we could make it. My board had told me to shut the company down and I told them to STFU.

As I locked the front door I stopped and thought, how would it work if we did fail? Would I lock the front door one last time and then walk away? I literally couldn't visualize it. As I drove home I resolved that I would never do that. Somehow we'd get through this crisis and we'd make it work.

Later, when it did work, I realized that moment, while locking the front door that night, was when the company turned around. When we went from being in crisis mode to being a winner, for one very simple reason. I tried to visualize failure, and couldn't do it.

It didn't really sink in until my second company washed up on shore and couldn't get back to sea. We didn't have that feeling that failure wasn't an option because the way it was set up was the way big companies set up projects. None of us could lose our jobs. We had enough money to try again and again. I think this is why real startups have a chance to do something truly new and established companies can't. Because not only is failure a real option, it also is pretty inevitable.

In any case, it's pure nonsense that failure is a good thing. It isn't. It happens a lot, that's for sure. But it's good if you risk and win. If you risk and lose, that's the definition of "bad."

 8/6/2010; 6:21:13 PM.   .

Google Finance says the wonderful version of their graphs are only available if you have Flash installed.

How do I know? Well I'm an iPad user.

I was interested to see that San Francisco is shutting down the Transbay Terminal today, getting ready to demolish it and replace it with a wonderful new commuter center, right on Interstate 80. I would have loved to have seen the interactive rendering of the new terminal but I couldn't. I was using my iPad and they did it with Flash.

Maybe they didn't get the memo.

Or maybe they don't care.

I think pretty soon Apple has to scare off all the Flash content or the users are going to be asking why there all these holes in their iPad browsing experience.

I have my own industry-insider reasons for despising what Apple is doing with Flash, even though I'm not a big fan of Flash. I despise it because they're using the users as pawns in a business chess match. Using us because they could have written a Flash emulator. That would have been the user-loving thing to do. I don't like to be seen as a tool to win a victory that I don't understand and I don't care to understand. That's me wearing my user hat. I'd just like to see the spiffy graphs and learn about the plans for the new Transbay Terminal.

 8/6/2010; 3:14:05 PM.   .

Here's the problem.

I always get requests from people who remember a piece I wrote about this or that, but can't find the piece in Google.

I know how they feel, because this happens to me all the time.

For example, I wrote a piece once that explains how engineers inside big companies feel about "outside" developers. Can't find it.

Someone asked for a pointer to a piece I wrote about eliminating clutter. I think I wrote it just in the last few months. Can't find it either.

The inverse also happens. Someone posts a link to a piece on this site, but I don't have any memory of writing it. After reading it, it all comes back -- yeah -- I put a lot of time into thinking about that and writing about it.

Basically this stuff needs to be organized and categorized and cross-related.

I have great tools for that, and where they're lacking I don't mind writing more tools. That's what I love to do. But sifting through all the back issues of this site -- well I know I have to do it, but somehow I never have the time.

If you're the kind of person who loves to organize written work, and have been reading this site for a while, let me know, and let's see if we can get something going. Obviously whatever we learn here can be applied to other bases of writing.

 8/6/2010; 8:36:53 AM.   .

Om Malik has an interesting piece today about Amazon web hosting.

I'd love to see them do it, then I could move my archived static sites up to S3 and forget about them.

But they're missing a key feature for web hosting -- index files.

Suppose I put a website on S3 and map a domain to it:

http://hello.newsriver.org/

Try going there, you'll get an XML error return.

But... it does have an index file.

http://hello.newsriver.org/index.html

All Amazon has to do is make the first URL work, which is how web servers work by default, and boom they're in the web hosting business.

Without it, all we can use it for is to store images, MP3s, JavaScript snippets, archives.

 8/6/2010; 7:56:01 AM.   .

We are so pathetic, addicted to Twitter, yet helpless to do anything about it when it goes down. This is what the Internet comes to.

Make a movie about it. "Great acting, unbelievable plot," writes AO Scott in the NY Times. The human race goes down in flames. When aliens discover the ruins of our civilization it turns out Twitter went down and never came back. All the iconography in our churches replaced with images of whales and cute blue birds.

 8/5/2010; 7:11:37 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

Droidie

Frontier News

Great VaVaVoom

Leon Winer

OPML Editor

opml.org

Outliners.com

Protoblogger

ReallySimpleSyndication

Realtime RSS

Rebooting the News

River2

RSS spec

rssCloud

Unberkeley

XML-RPC

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