I cant figure out how the new a href=http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/03/11/twitter-turns-tweet-location-mapping-tweets-twittercom/location-based Twitter/a works. Firefox cant figure out where I am. No surprise, My 13-inch MacBook Pro doesnt have GPS. Is there some place I can click on a map to say This Is Where I Am? Not at all obvious. Other people say they see it. Not on my machine. brbr Anyway, that doesnt mean we cant have fun with location stuff.brbr On Twitter, I posted a a href=http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8hq=hnear=95+Christopher+St,+New+York,+10014ll=40.727421,-73.988543spn=0,359.984615z=16layer=ccbll=40.727536,-73.988445panoid=m1wGeJp0CgG8naEts_LDBAcbp=12,302.22,,0,-4.99link/a to a Google Map a href=http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/10300036299asking/a if this was the location of the Fillmore East. brbr a href=http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/03/11/twitter-turns-tweet-location-mapping-tweets-twittercom/img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/10/hippieVan.gif width=250 height=176 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named hippieVan.gif/aI got back an answer that it was close, but the a href=http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8hq=hnear=95+Christopher+St,+New+York,+10014layer=ccbll=40.727615,-73.988385panoid=WhDgvgo1ScQd50MCnQLUVAcbp=12,309.75,,0,4.05ll=40.727698,-73.988321spn=0,359.984615z=16supermarket/a next door is where the Fillmore was. I tweeted back that I had read somewhere that that was where the Ratners was, next to the Fillmore, and if you go in there you can even see a giant R on the floor. Ratners was a great Jewish dairy restaurant. Until I read the article (cant remember where it was) I only knew about the now-gone a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratner%27sRatners/a on a href=http://maps.google.com/maps?f=qsource=s_qhl=engeocode=q=138+Delancey+St,+NYCsll=40.733373,-74.004711sspn=0.007268,0.015385ie=UTF8hq=hnear=138+Delancey+St,+New+York,+10002ll=40.718201,-73.986869spn=0.00727,0.015385z=16layer=ccbll=40.718249,-73.986971panoid=otbdCtZFMQydyxOPEyDzDAcbp=12,21.96,,0,-4.92Delancey St/a. I once took a blonde a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiksashiksa/a VP-Marketing from California to Ratners on Delancey, and the waiter yelled at me for bringing such a fine woman to such a lousy neighborhood. That was before it all got gentrified and yuppified. brbr Both Ratners are gone now.brbr Anyway, the same guy a href=http://twitter.com/pheezy/status/10301109716dug up/a a a href=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/10/fillmore.jpgpicture/a of the old Fillmore just before a Crosby, Stills, Nash Young concert. My theory was correct. Its the site of the bank. brbr I went to the Fillmore a few times. The most memorable concert was a Grateful Dead show with a surprise toward the end. A bunch of dirty hippies with long hair and beards come out and jam with the Dead. The music sounds weirdly familiar but hard to place. They were being deliberately misleading. Then all of a sudden a rock and roll standard -- Good Vibrations. It was the all-new dope-smoking a href=http://members.tripod.com/~fun_fun_fun/4-27-71.htmlBeach Boys/a! Oh man those were the days. I also saw the Incredible String Band there. a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyNBV-BTzDwTen Years After/a. brbr Were getting ready to do an East Village blog for the NY Times. Going down memory lane is my way of getting ready.brbr PS: I read about a href=http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2008/04/ratners-of-2nd-ave.htmlRatners/a on a href=http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/Jeremiahs Vanishing New York/a, an intriguing blog with lots of great stories about the ever-changing and not-always-for-the-best New York Shitty. img src=http://www.scripting.com/gifs/QBullets/qbullets/sidesmiley.gif width=11 height=11 border=0 alt=smilebrbr

I was doing some research for a blog post and came across this folder of RSS enclosures from late 2004 and early-mid 2005.brbr These were the months when podcasting was beginning to take root.brbr I was doing Morning Coffee Notes. Adam Curry was doing Daily Source Code. Together, we were doing the Trade Secrets podcast.brbr Dave Slusher, Steve Gillmor, IT Conversations, Dawn and Drew, Tony Kahn at WGBH, Engadget.brbr It occurred to me that this slice of early podcasting might be worth preserving, so turned it into a torrent and have uploaded itbrbr a href=http://static.scripting.com/misc/earlyPodcasts.torrenthttp://static.scripting.com/misc/earlyPodcasts.torrent/a brbr If you have questions or comments, you can post them here.brbr PS: Another reason I like it is this is a non-infringing use of BitTorrent. We need more of those to protect this excellent distributed technology. brbr

Jay and I use WordPress to do the a href=http://rebootnews.com/http://rebootnews.com//a site.brbr Its a mixed bag. On the pro side, we both know how to use WordPress, and because Jay writes the show notes and I do the tech stuff, its a good tool to put between us. brbr But WordPress doesnt do podcast feeds well. brbr And thats being generous. brbr Heres how the UI works currently. You edit your post and link to an MP3 or a movie or an AVI or some other media object. The first one that WP encounters as it parses your text, it will supposedly turn into an enclosure. If you happen to link to two MP3s but the second is the enclosure, youre out of luck. And for some reason if you store the a href=http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar08.mp3MP3/a on Amazon S3, as we do, it usually doesnt even find the enclosure. But this is variable. Today theyve hacked up our link to point to some server on wordpress.com, totally without our permission. What a mess. And even so theres no enclosure in our a href=http://rebootnews.com/feed/feed/a for this a href=http://rebootnews.com/2010/03/09/rebooting-the-news-43/#commentsweeks/a show (which btw I think is one of our best, a href=http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar08.mp3one/a I hope everyone listens to).brbr For the last three episodes of our podcast, its failed to add an enclosure element to the feed. As a result none of our listeners get the podcast on time, and it always takes some fussing by the WordPress tech people to get it working, and for all I know a bunch of people inever/i hear the podcast. I suppose it depends on whether or not the client sees an item as read if the guid doesnt change but all of a sudden the item has an enclosure. Imho a proper podcast client would just watch the guid, and therefore would miss the enclosure. Regardless, its simply unacceptable that WordPress work this way and that Automattic doesnt do something to fix it.brbr This is how we did it in Radio 8, in 2002, eight years ago.brbr Heres a a href=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/10/radioForEnclosures.gifscreen shot/a. brbr a href=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/10/radioForEnclosures.gifimg src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/10/radioForEnclosuresThumb.gif width=200 height=157 border=0 alt=A picture named radioForEnclosuresThumb.gif/abrbr Click the screen shot for the full effect.brbr See the red arrow pointing to the box called Enclosure? Thats where you paste the link to the enclosure. Anyone no matter how technical they are not, could be taught to do that correctly. brbr We never had the problem WordPress is having. Granted a lot fewer people did podcasts then than now. Maybe. Id argue that the way WordPress works now is killing the art of podcasting because its so unpredictable and its virtually got the market cornered. Regardless, Im a paying customer, and Id like to continue to use WordPress, but eventually Im going to have to switch because its killing our product.brbr Please Matt and company, fix this!brbr PS: I wish Wordpress.com was more hackable, if there was a way for me to patch our feed I could fix this without their help. Alas its not something I can fix myself and I dont have any interest in running my own installation or fussing around with PHP etc.brbr

img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/09/santa.gif width=125 height=199 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named santa.gifIts been a while since we could announce new major support for rssCloud, but today is one of those big days well remember for a long time. brbr Status.net has now enabled rssCloud support in the RSS 2.0 feeds for all its users. brbr This means that identi.ca, the server operated by status.net, has the feature, as well as all other sites they operate. I assume it will be baked into a subsequent open source release (status.net is GPL software).brbr What does this mean? Well, when I post an update to my account on identi.ca, any cloud-aware aggregator will receive an update notification. River2, the aggregator Ive built for Frontier (it runs in the OPML Editor) has support for rssCloud.brbr For a demo heres a a href=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/09/identicaPost.gifscreen shot/a of an a href=http://identi.ca/notice/24239307update/a I posted to identi.ca. Note the time of the update. I immediately refreshed the home page of my River2 server, and a href=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/09/river2version.giftheres the update/a. Elapsed time == 12 seconds. Thats what real time means. img src=http://www.scripting.com/gifs/QBullets/qbullets/sidesmiley.gif width=11 height=11 border=0 alt=smilebrbr This is my a href=http://identi.ca/api/statuses/user_timeline/323.rssfeed/a. A source screen shot a href=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/09/cloudElement.gifshows/a the lt;cloud element.brbr Its also a holy grail for the idea of a idistributed loosely-coupled network of Twitter-like services, linked together in real time using RSS./i (What a mouthful!) Its very elegant and lightweight and it works today. brbr

img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/09/crumb.jpg width=150 height=199 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named crumb.jpgI stumbled across this very a href=http://www.techreaders.com/2010/03/18-interesting-firsts-on-the-internet/interesting list/a of 18 firsts on the Internet. Its a good way to look at things. You could argue who invented what first, and you often get nowhere that way, because invention is such a poorly understood concept. Everyones work builds on other peoples. The guy who invented the car used a lot of other peoples work to create something with four wheels and an engine. Did it have to have a steering wheel to be a car? We could argue about that, and that would change who the inventor was.brbr It may be more useful to say who had the first car. Who drove it, and where did they go? brbr And on the Internet, theres no doubt, for example that Tim Berners-Lee had the first website. Unless someone else says they did. (Havent heard anyone say that, btw.)brbr I was glad to get credit for creating the first podcast. brbr Who wrote the first blog post? They give credit for that to a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_HallJustin Hall/a (and mis-spell his name). brbr I wrote in the a href=http://web.archive.org/web/20000621141352/www.weblogs.com/aboutAbout page/a for weblogs.com that the first blog was also the first website. TBLs info.cern.ch was a reverse-chronologic list of new websites. Thats how central to the web I think blogs are. But if that wasnt the first blog, lets see Halls first post, and decide if that really was the first one. brbr img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/09/typewriter.jpg width=150 height=150 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named typewriter.jpgWho had the first feed? Thats going to be an interesting debate for sure. I can show you mine, it was first published on a href=http://www.scripting.com/davenet/1997/12/15/scriptingNewsInXML.html#3December 15, 1997/a. But what makes something a feed? Can you have a feed with no aggregator? Is it the aggregator that makes something a feed? If so, well have to figure out who wrote the first aggregator and when, and what feed(s) it read.brbr One of the criteria for being first is, imho -- Did your work lead to other people imitating you? That test says whether or not your work commercialized or popularized the concept. The implies hitting the spot where being the only one seems, somehow, less significant. Thats one argument against Hall as the first blogger, but in favor of TBL. As far as I know there were no bloggers that formed a community in the aftermath of his Links from the Underground. brbr Pretty sure the first blogging community, in the sense that we think of blogging today, was formed around Scripting News. Most blogs today can trace their roots back to Scripting News, if you go back far enough. I suppose some communities are disjoint. Did LiveJournal spawn out of a blog that spawned out of something that came from Scripting? I have no idea. But I do know that most of the early bloggers were readers of this site, and many participated in the discussion group here. There was a website that traced the lineage, called BlogTree, and it verified that the root of the tree was Scripting News. This is something Im proud of, I think justifiably.brbr One of the reasons Im proud of it is that blogging was created without the lock-in you see in systems like Twitter, Facebook and though theyll argue for sure, Buzz. Even Posterous, Tumblr and Wordpress.com dont give you easy ways off their servers. Blogging started without the concept of a single server, so there was no place to get off of. The whole point was to be as distributed as the web itself, to give people independence, to let billions of websites bloom. This is such an obvious feature of blogs that people dont usually see it. But its there, and its hugely important.brbr There are a lot of very vocal people who work to remove credit rather than give it. Im sure some of them will comment here. As long as their comments are respectful they will stand. brbr

Several interesting half-developments in the competitive landscape from non-dominant tech entities. I believe in a href=http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/02/25/bigChangeInTheTechWorld.html#p7supporting/a the second and third tier companies and startups, when they offer alternatives to the BigCos. I like the little guys because they have an incentive to listen to and please users, without the a href=http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ascripting.com+%22strategy+tax%22strategy taxes/a almost always imposed by the big guys. brbr img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/09/loverss.jpg width=150 height=150 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named loverss.jpgFirst, there is Mark Fletchers a href=http://www.snapgroups.com/SnapGroups/a. Its basically a threaded discussion group with a modern browser-based UI. Its perhaps a framework that something like FriendFeed can develop from, although its just a framework. There are no feeds in either direction -- you cant subscribe to feeds from within SnapGroups, and it doesnt generate feeds, so I cant subscribe to stuff from SnapGroups in other RSS-aware environments. But it does look nice, and Mark is the author of Bloglines, so we know he understands feeds. These days, you cant even get into the game without basic feed support. Id of course also like to see him support rssCloud so the connections in and out can be real-time. brbr Second, I just got an email from Zach Copley at a href=http://status.net/Status.Net/a saying their software, which is an open source Twitter workalike, now supports rssCloud. That is very welcome news. I tested it with River2, and while the initial handshake worked, Im not getting the realtime updates. I expect well figure out the glitch quickly and then well have another realtime connection. What can we do with it? Well have to explore that. Meanwhile, its nice to have a reason to get a href=http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ascripting.com+identi.careacquainted/a with a href=http://identi.ca/Identi.ca/a, which is the mother ship of Status.Net. And thanks to Zach for sticking with it.brbr Finally, a href=http://marshallk.posterous.com/tech-startups-exclusivity-and-our-competitorsMarshall Kirkpatrick/a, who writes for ReadWriteWeb, says the big players in his market, TechCrunch, Mashable, AllThingsDigital, dont pick up stories once RWW has covered them. This gives vendors an incentive to give exclusives to the big pubs, assuming they want coverage from them. Vendors who buy that are making a mistake. The news will find the people who need to know it, more now than ever. Pick a reporter who you think will understand your product and give them enough time. Thats one approach, if you think you can get the attention. Otherwise, just write your own blog post, and send the links around to all the reporters, and hope they find it interesting. I know this isnt the standard advice, but the a href=http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/08/14/gatekeepingIsALosingStrate.htmlgatekeepers/a figure you need them a lot more than they need you, and act accordingly. Its hard to get insightful reporting from them, and I think the readers have figured that out. All pubs should follow this simple rule: write up whatever you find interesting, whenever you discover it, no matter who has already written it. Anyone who plays it differently will eventually pay a penalty. And these days eventually is a lot sooner than it used to be. brbr a href=http://www.scripting.com/2005/12/12.html#howToMakeMoneyOnTheInternetVersion3Remember/a: People come back to places that send them away.brbr

a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/karmagrrrl/Zadi Diaz/a got this a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/karmagrrrl/4416474706/sizes/l/great picture/a of Steve Jobs on the red carpet at the Oscars last night. brbr a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/karmagrrrl/4416474706/sizes/l/img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/08/jobsTux.jpg width=238 height=283 border=0 alt=A picture named jobsTux.jpg/abrbr Click the thumb above for the full effect.brbr

This weeks Rebooting The News podcast, recorded in the studio at NYU, was particularly good. It starts off a little slowly, but picks up speed.brbr a href=http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar08.mp3http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar08.mp3/a brbr

Tomorrow night they announce the winners of the Academy Awards, and for the first time in a long time, I dont really think there is a movie up to being called Best Picture. brbr The only one I havent seen is Precious. So it might be the exception. brbr Of all the a href=http://oscar.go.com/nominations/nominees#category_best-picturenominated pictures/a I have seen, if I had to choose one, Id go for a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_%28film%29Up In The Air/a. Great acting, interesting plot, well done all around. Second choice: a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_EducationAn Education/a. brbr Each of the others has something to recommend it, but none of them put enough of the pieces together to qualify as a Best Picture. brbr Curious what other people think.brbr

img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/06/umbrella.gif width=150 height=181 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named umbrella.gifI just watched the live webcast of two friends, Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis, give talks at a href=http://tedxnyed.com/TEDxNYED/a. They both did well. At the end of Jeffs talk he told a story about about a big moment in our friendship. Of course he tells it from his point of view. Im sure theyll release a video of the talk so you can hear it. This is the story from my point of view.brbr I am an evangelist. I think I see how things are going, then I want to show other people, so we can get there faster. Sometimes if I have to, to get the idea going, I write some software, or create a format. That was my role in blogging, RSS and podcasting. And the unconference format that Jeff was describing in his talk. brbr I wrote that format up a href=http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/03/04/renewedEvangelismBloggerco.htmlhere/a a few days ago, because were doing it again at NYU, but that piece was just an edit of a document that I wrote before the first BloggerCon. I sent links to all the discussion leaders. I talked with each of them before the conference. I knew the idea would be hard to get, because we all had a lifetime of training that said that conferences were mostly one-way affairs. I wanted to try something different, ia conference where there were no speakers, no panels, no audience./i I wanted the good stuff, the hallway conversations, to be drawn back into the formal conference. brbr Even though we prepared, and knew the format worked (we were running the Berkman Thursday meetings with it) most of the discussion leaders didnt get it at first. When I walked into the room where Jarvis was preparing to lead a a href=http://bloggercon.org/day2/weblogspresidentialpolitic.htmldiscussion/a at BloggerCon, I saw that he had put a set of chairs in front of the room, and people were sitting in the chairs. It was an awkward fit, there wasnt enough room in front, but despite all the preparation, there was the old format trying to boot up!brbr So I asked the people sitting in the chairs to rejoin the rest of the people in the classroom. Then I said to Jarvis, This is your panel... -- and I opened my arms to embrace the whole room. From this point our stories are in total agreement. God you could almost see the light bulb go on over Jarviss head. Immediately he started leading the discussion, and to this day he is one of the best practitioners of BloggerCon format, and is evangelizing it too. brbr This blog post is an instance of the philosophy that says that everyones point of view is valid and should be heard. In the old world, the speakers version would be the only one to get out there. Or the professors or the reporters. But in the new world, each of us have a platform to tell our story. That same principle can be applied to conferences, and if its done well, and Jarvis does it well, with spectacular results. brbr

img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/05/elephant.gif width=125 height=90 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named elephant.gifGoogle has been pitching its use of open standards as a way to insure yourself against Google going away. Thats much appreciated, no sarcasm. All companies should plan for their users data surviving them. But my concern is what if Google idoesnt/i go away. This is a company thats at least heavily influenced by lawyers, if not run by them. They aggressively patent. Personally, Id rather not build a new ecosystem out of Google patents. brbr If you have a choice of using an already-existing format or protocol that works just as well as the new one Google is trying to replace it with, the rest of us, who dont patent, are better served if we all use the older one, including Google. That way we know that we wont be forced out of the market at some future date, when the cost of staying in is paying huge legal expenses, and royalties, for technology we could have had for free.brbr Unless Google also adds a disclaimer of all patents on all the new stuff, Id be very careful about which ones we adopt. brbr

I am a big huge fan of a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Burton#Director_filmographyTim Burton movies/a. brbr Hes right up there with Quentin Taratino and Martin Scorcese. When one of these directors ships a movie, Im often the first person in line on opening day.brbr So this morning I took off and went to the 11AM showing of the newly released today a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_%282010_film%29Alice in Wonderland/a, at a href=http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8client=firefox-aie=UTF8q=850+broadway,+Nycfb=1gl=ushnear=cid=0,0,4900013324254305635ei=fWyRS5XvDcbflAen_oH8AQved=0CAkQnwIwAAhq=850+broadway,+Nycll=40.735275,-73.990774spn=0.007495,0.01384z=16iwloc=A850 Broadway/a. brbr First a caveat. Dont read this if you havent already seen it. No matter what anyone said about the movie I would have seen it, even though I did read the NY Times review before going. brbr 1. The Times a href=http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/movies/05alice.html?hpwreview/a is right. The movie is pointless, lifeless. brbr 2. Its not even remotely a Tim Burton movie.brbr 3. Its almost as if as they were nearing completion someone said Hey wait a minute this doesnt have any Tim Burton stuff in it, so they quickly added a bit of buffoonery, but it is totally embarassing.brbr img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/05/beetlejuice.jpg width=150 height=178 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named beetlejuice.jpg4. Hollywood has a formula that it cant seem to escape. A hero forms a a href=http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=posseposse/a of colorful allies with big hearts who are in love with the hero. Theres an evil adversary and she has a posse of despicable, frightening and evil allies. The movie is a buildup to the final showdown. The two do battle. The hero wins. The adversary is humilated and most of his posse is killed. Theres a closing scene where everyone agrees life is great and the credits roll. Its Star Wars meets Harry Potter, Avatar meets Indiana Jones. Every movie with a budget fits this template, with the exception of parts of recent Pixar movies (they always include the basic elements but it doesnt always completely dominate the plot). Once you realize this is what youre watching, unless you really get off on special effects, you might as well walk out.brbr 5. A few people walked out. I stayed to the end, but I started checking email on my Droid during the movie. brbr 6. Zero suspension of disbelief. I was always thinking Im in a movie theater watching a dumb movie. The plot never sucked me in. brbr 7. Next time let Tim Burton do a Tim Burton movie. Break new ground. Big Fish was great. At least the parts that sucked represent risks taken. This movie took no chances, it was boring. I want great acting, and stuff to think about and to laugh about. I like dark comedy. Sweeney Todd and Alice in Wonderland were great titles, but neither produced an interesting Tim Burton movie. brbr 8. If you like Tim Burton, go see it anyway. The next movie you see can only be an improvement.brbr 9. Probably because its a Disney movie, the characters lacked the usual Burton depravity, seen in Beetlejuice, Nightmare Before Christmas or Corpse Bride. The ghoulishness in Burtonia can be very friendly, like the zombies in Corpse Bride. Or musical like a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw0aoVpFCDwOogie Boogie/a in Nightmare. Or humorous like the cigarette-smoking a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy6OEEhWqR0angel/a of death in Beetlejuice. Or the poor misunderstood Frankenstein -- Edward Scissorhands, who was only trying to do good, yet was run off by the villagers. Other reviewers say that Burton movies lack plot direction, but I disagree. The plots dont always end happily, but they often end with a song, nonetheless. I doubt if Disney would let the film be anything but colorful, but even children like a little depravity as long as its not too dark. brbr 10. Wait a minute -- I dont think there were any songs in Alice! WTF.brbr

a href=http://www.elmers.com/img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/05/elmersGlueAll.jpg width=114 height=271 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named elmersGlueAll.jpg/aKara Swisher a href=http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100305/the-eyes-have-it-real-time-search-is-still-kind-of-invisible-to-users/reports/a on a a href=http://www.oneupweb.com/landing/10_realtime_results_eyetracking/?source=sus_realtime_030310guid=97A9C954-EE26-DF11-811E-00A0D1E31666study/a that shows people are ignoring real time search results. This matches with my experience. brbr The reason? Its impossible to convey much information in 140 characters. So when a search hits a tweet you get at most a soundbite, telling you something you probably already knew. When you search youre looking for information you dont have but want. brbr I have a collection of a href=http://www.google.com/alertsGoogle Alerts/a that report once a day or immediately, via email, telling me about occurrences of my name, products Ive made, other topics Im interested in. These used to be pretty useful until they started including tweets in the body of stuff they search. Now the alerts are mostly useless. So in this case, adding real-time stuff actually isubtracts/i value. brbr If Twitter wants to make money by inserting ads into search results, and all indications are that they do, they should seriously consider relaxing the 140-character limit, so tweets can carry information worth searching for.brbr Update: a href=http://gigaom.com/2010/03/05/real-time-search-better-for-news-than-products/?utm_source=feedburnerutm_medium=feedutm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%29Liz Gannes/a has the report too.brbr a href=http://twitter.com/jny2/status/10040028849Josh Young adds/a: Yes, real-time results in search suck because the ifeed/i is whats important, not the individual tweet.brbr

a href=http://pics.scripting.com/0024/0005.jpgimg src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/04/classroom.jpg width=150 height=113 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named classroom.jpg/aAsk anyone who was at a href=http://bloggercon.org/day2/grid.htmlBloggerCon I/a and a href=http://bloggercon.org/II/schedule.htmlBloggerCon II/a to explain the format that evolved there, and youre likely to see their eyes light up, as they wave their hands, but until youve experienced it, theyll just be words. I hope to renew the evangelism for this format while Im at NYU, and have access to the meeting facilities of the university. brbr The format is not far from the a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_methodSocratic/a classroom, a discussion leader who pulls the interesting bits from the minds of the people in the room, with no sense of one person being a speaker and another being audience. Everyone is both a source and destination of thought. brbr The format solves the problems of the typical professional conference, the problem of droning self-important speakers who bore the audience and force the good stuff out into the hallway. The first goal of the format is to suck the good stuff back into the room. Everything about the format is designed to eliminate the boring, self-serving droning. But to do it respectfully. Were not running the Gong Show. brbr Fred Wilson wrote a a href=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/03/panels.htmlpiece/a this morning on Panels. He went on to say what he doesnt like about conferences. I am so sure that Fred would ilove/i the BloggerCon format. It was designed for people like Fred. brbr The format is a href=http://bloggercon.org/II/newbies.htmloutlined/a on the BloggerCon site. But Im going to reproduce that outline here, and edit it and bring it up to date. brbr 1. We dont have speakers, slide shows or panels. brbr 2. No Powerpoints.brbr 3. Every room has a discussion leader, a reporter who is creating a story with quotes from the people in the room. brbr 4. The discussion leader is also the editor, so if he or she feels that a point has been made they must move on to the next point quickly. No droning, no filibusters, no repeating an idea over and over.brbr 5. The discussion leader can also call on people, so stay awake, you might be the next person to speak! img src=http://www.scripting.com/gifs/QBullets/qbullets/sidesmiley.gif width=11 height=11 border=0 alt=smilebrbr 6. Think of the conference as if it were a weblog. At the beginning of each session, the leader talks between five and fifteen minutes to introduce the idea and some of the people in the room. Then shell point to someone else. She may ask a couple of questions to get them going, then shell point to someone else, then someone else, then make a comment, ask a question, etc. Each person talks for two to three minutes. Long enough to make a point. brbr 7. The attention is focused on the discussion leader. You can ask questions, you dont necessarily have to wait to be called on, use your judgment. But ask the question of the Discussion Leader, and let him find the answer for you in the room. Experience has shown that when others in the room assume the moderation function, the ground rules break down, and droning happens, and people move into the hallway.brbr 8. The leaders job is to keep it moving. Sometimes this means cutting people off. Dont take it personally if it happens to you, any more than you would if a reporter only quoted part of what you said in the article. Lifes not perfectly fair. You dont have a right to be heard. Sorry. (But you do have a right to get new ideas, meet new people, have new experiences.)brbr 9. Since every person in a session is considered an equal participant, everyone should prepare at least a little. Think about the subject, read the comments on the conference website. Follow weblogs from other people who are paticipating. Think about what you want to get out of the session, and what questions you wish to raise, and what information or points of view youd like to get from the session.brbr 10. This is an unusual conference in that almost everyone participating writes publicly. So we assume that everyone present is a journalist. Every badge is a press badge.brbr 11. All conversations, whether to the entire room or one-to-one, unless otherwise stated, clearly and up front, are on the record and for attribution. You do not need to ask permission to quote something you hear at BloggerCon. Of course you may ask for permission to quote, and you may choose not to quote things you hear.brbr 12. Where I come from, the technology world, most conferences are centered around the vendors. This is not like those conferences. Here, vendors are welcome, and we hope they will help by sponsoring a party, dinner or brunch, but they participate mainly by listening. brbr 13. Most of the people who are talking are users. In my opinion, these are the revolutionaries. Vendors make a living by creating tools that these people use to change the world. So much attention is focused on technology, too much imho. At this conference we turn it around and focus on what people are idoing/i with the technology. So if you hear someone say its about the technology, expect me to challenge if Im present. If not, stand up and say Thats not correct.brbr 14. If they say the technology is too complicated for a user to understand, ask them why, and if they could simplify it so we can understand. And if not, why should we use it? Perhaps a new user-centered philosophy will emerge.brbr 15. Sometimes conferences bog down in meta-discussions, discussions about what its okay to discuss. I want to try to head some of that off in advance by stating some assumptions, and asking people who want to discuss these things to either discuss them here on the Web beforehand, or to find another venue to discuss them.brbr 16. Weblogs iare/i journalism. Not all weblogs, and not all the time. People have said weblogs arent journalism, and that seems foolish, as strange as saying telephones arent journalism. Its kind of a moot question. Weblogs can be used for journalism, or not. When people say theyre not journalism, I think they havent thought it through well enough.brbr 17. What is a weblog is an interesting question. Ive heard people say its not a good question. At BloggerCon if you have an idea that requires you to say or ask what a weblog is, please go ahead. Its totally on-topic. I would consider the conference a success if thats the only thing we figured out. (Chances are we wont, btw.)brbr 18. No commercials. This is a users conference, its non-commercial, you may not promote products. If a discussion naturally turns to products, its okay to talk about them, but its probably not okay to talk about your product, unless the discussion leader asks you to. No matter what you must ask for permission, and dont be surprised if the answer is no. There are good reasons for this, if one person talks about his or her product, then their competitors will feel they are entitled to, and pretty soon the users needs are drowned out by the needs of the vendors. The point of this conference is to focus on users.brbr 19. You are welcome to bring your own recording equipment, cameras are allowed, basically the rules allow Grateful Dead/Phish style recording. Bring your microphone or camera and recording device, and record it and broadcast it any way you like. Be innovative, but please dont interfere with the sessions.brbr

img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/04/rsspizza.jpg width=150 height=128 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named rsspizza.jpgThe first years of Googles existence and the first years of blogging coincide. Google started in 1998, shortly after I started blogging (depending on what you consider the start, which is always a subject of debate). Then blogging begat RSS, and then OPML and podcasting -- and so on. And blogs became influential in Googles ranking algorithms, and we bloggers loved Google, and we a href=http://www.scripting.com/2002/01/10.html#yupTheUsersCaredgushed/a over them here in the one and only year we gave awards on Scripting News. brbr They were a small company, very excited. Great food in the cafeteria, and our meetings were always interesting, high energy affairs. Coming out of those meetings were a list of ideas that I shared with them and the readers of this blog. brbr The most important idea was this -- Google could pay special attention to RSS and OPML files when they encountered them in their indexing of the web. They contained rich data which could be used for two purposes: brbr 1. To make searches more current, what I called just-in-time, what people are calling realtime now. This has always been a big deal for me. I wanted search to be part of news and that means new -- and the faster the indexing happens, the more useful it is as news.brbr 2. Use OPML to allow anyone to create Yahoo-like directories. Open that process up, let a billion flowers bloom. I suspected there was a lot that could happen with organizing information on the web. The right place to present it, I felt, was in Google, not in a separate directory structure. And with users actively relating topics on the web, that long-term probably could help search engines make sense of the information. Another, more deliberate, form of linking.brbr Now, in 2010, Google is going to start reading feeds, but if I understand correctly, theyre going to ignore the billions of RSS feeds out there, and ask everyone to convert to Atom to get more currency in search. You can imagine that I dont like this. I wouldnt like it even if I didnt play a big role in getting those billions of feeds out there. I wouldnt like because I have thousands of RSS feeds on my servers, and believe me -- they are not changing to Atom anytime in the next few decades. I dont think Im alone in that.brbr Now a little preaching. Big companies always feel they can push the rest of us around, but I gotta say -- Ive never seen it work. Usually the lesson they learn is that they would be better off if they would just Go With The Flow, and let the users guide them. Nothing wrong with reading Atom feeds, but to ignore RSS, well guys thats just plain dumb. brbr Give up the fight Google. You dont have to acknowlege me, but RSS -- thats a force of nature. Thats why I did rssCloud -- for you -- to give you the impetus to do what you should have done naturally, support the formats that the users have chosen. Its not too late to get our relationship back on track. Im not your enemy, Im just one guy in an apartment in the a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_VillageWest Village/a writing on my blog. Im not Apple, suing you for patent infringement, or whoever else you are worried about. Worrying about me is a waste of energy. brbr

img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/04/glass.jpg width=125 height=364 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named glass.jpgLast night a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_DentonNick Denton/a and a href=http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/we_just_dont_know_an_interview.phpJonathan Glick/a co-hosted a party at Nicks fabulous SoHo apartment to welcome me back to NY. brbr There were about 100 people from media, some entrepreneurs, academics, financiers, lawyers, writers. Some very well dressed, and some like me, in more comfortable clothes. It was unmistakably NY, as Boston has its signature, as does Silicon Valley. Columbia and NYU arent Harvard and MIT, or Stanford and Berkeley. This is the big city, but tech here isnt yet so cut-throat, media still is a much larger business. I found it was more of a party and not so much a chance to share business models as California tech parties.brbr Thanks! I had a lot of fun last night, and it gave me a good warm feeling about what we can get done in the coming months and years. Ill have more about that in the next piece.brbr PS: One surprise was how many of the people read this blog, and were prepared to discuss the post on local business models I had written about an hour before the party. Im always surprised by that. I dont get a lot of mail, and I know the numbers arent even remotely in the same league as the big blogs. But when it comes to interesting people, well I guess it makes sense that Im biased about that, but my readers are the best. img src=http://www.scripting.com/gifs/QBullets/qbullets/sidesmiley.gif width=11 height=11 border=0 alt=smilebrbr

a href=http://www.google.com/search?q=pizza+near+10014img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/03/pizza.jpg width=150 height=128 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named pizza.jpg/aIm sitting in a class at NYU listening to a discussion about local blogging and the NY Times. Rather than speak up to the room, I thought Id just write a blog post that explains where I think the money is in local.brbr First, where I idont/i think it is -- getting ad dollars from the local pizza parlor or stationery store. There may be nickels and dimes there, but the mega-dollars come from slicing the pie differently from the geographic way people are slicing local news up now.brbr Instead, pick the businesses that generate billions of dollars in the local economy that are information-based, where the information currently being supplied is inadequate. Thats not restaurants and entertainment. brbr When I started looking for an apartment in Manhattan, one of my requirements was FIOS. I naively assumed Id be able to get it because my mother had it in Queens. Manhattan is a bigger, more lucrative market than Queens, so of course Verizon has it covered. Turns out, for a variety of reasons, its not true. Theres almost no FIOS in Manhattan. But if you went to the Verizon site youd never find that out unless you punched in every address in Manhattan and found out that very few return positive. brbr Time-Warner Internet is not bad, in some parts of the city, and awful in others. If you want great Internet service, where should you be looking? The only way to find out is word-of-mouth.brbr Business on the Internet is driven by finding places where dollars are spent, where people need lots of good information to make a decision theyre going to spend a lot of money on. Become ithe/i place where people go for that information and then sell space on your site to businesses that sell products and services in that space. brbr This is local. But its local on a wide scale. This is where I think the money is.brbr

WordPress a href=http://josephscott.org/archives/2010/03/pushpress-a-pubsubhubbub-plugin-for-wordpress/announced/a today that theyve added support for PubSubHubBub to their product.brbr This is great news. More realtime support is a good thing. brbr Im sure some people will use this moment as an opportunity to say bad things about RSS, thats just the way it goes. Ive always a href=http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/10/16/aNoteAboutEvangelism.htmlencouraged people/a to see more realtime support as a just plain old good thing. brbr I would love to see Google support a href=http://rsscloud.org/rssCloud/a in Google Reader and their other products. It would show that they support all ways of doing this stuff. brbr

This is a continuation of the a href=http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/02/25/bigChangeInTheTechWorld.htmlBig Change in the Tech World/a thread, February 25. brbr We may look back at these as the Good Old Days before the tech guys clamped down and closed off all the loopholes that allowed us to create and share our own content, as well as program our own use of the content created by the entertainment business.brbr The norm in entertainment, the system I grew up in -- the entertainment industry controlled what you watched and listened to, and when, where, and how much you paid for it. You could make your own special mix tapes, but that was hard and most people didnt do it, so they looked the other way. Napster was a big breakthrough. All of a sudden all the music was there for the asking, whenever you wanted. brbr People were talking about music in supermarkets and on airplanes. We all bought iPods.brbr Charles Mann a href=http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/09/mann.htmcalled/a it the heavenly jukebox. I found I could listen to a Cat Stevens song about fathers a href=http://scripting.com/2000/07/07.html#musicAndTheInternetas many times/a as I wanted. I dont just want to listen to music, I want to study it, and let it really sink in, soak it up, and then go on. No medium before the Internet made this so easy. brbr a href=http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Intellipower-Desktop-WD20EADS/dp/B001RB1TIS/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8s=electronicsqid=1267633555sr=1-3img src=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2010/03/03/twoTerabyte.jpg width=165 height=235 border=0 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5 alt=A picture named twoTerabyte.jpg/aI had a phone talk with John Gruber from Daring Fireball the other day, which I requested, after reading a a href=http://daringfireball.net/2010/02/flash_sagapiece/a he wrote suggesting that Apples closing of the Flash hole in the iPhone/iPad was a way to enforce web standards. I said its a lot simpler and more insidious. Apple doesnt care about web standards, nor do any other large companies. That term, and open are just fig leaves that cover up what theyre reallly doing. Instead of opening things up, theyre doing just the opposite. Closing as many holes as they can as quickly as they can. Because theyre doing what the media business wants to but hasnt been able to do, yet -- control and monetize user programming of content. Apple and many (if not all) of the tech companies want to get the control back from the users. Of course they cant say this, and they wont. But actions speak louder than words.brbr Then I read this a href=http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10462562-261.htmlarticle/a in CNET that says Apple wants to cut a deal with the entertainment industry to store all their content on Apple servers. Theres a chilling comment in the middle of the story saying they want to get rid of hard disks. That, my friends, is Hollywoods dream. The real culprit, the real cause of their economic problems isnt the Internet, it isnt the wires that connect computers. Its the a href=http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_p_36_2?rh=n%3A172282%2Ck%3Atb+external+hard+drive%2Cp_36%3A1253505011bbn=172282sort=pmrankkeywords=tb+external+hard+driveie=UTF8qid=1267634834rnid=386442011under-$100/a terabyte hard drive. With a terabyte you can store hundreds of hours of movies and TV shows. That enables you to do your own programming.brbr To Hollywood, a perfect world would be one without hard disks. brbr To Apple, a perfect world is one where every moment a user is reading, listening or watching causes cash to flow back to Apple.brbr