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 Many years ago I wrote about an idea for simplifying hardware devices that scan stuff producing digital images. They shouldn't require any drivers and they should work effortlessly. But the architecture they use for these devices is still rooted in the 1980s, when it should have and easily could have made the transition to HTTP.
I'm thinking about it again because I wasted a bunch of time on a Canon 700F scanner that, because of driver problems, just won't work with my Mac laptop. Now that I've got the problem I see that dozens of other users had it too (the problems didn't show up in the Amazon...
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I can't figure out how the new location-based Twitter works. Firefox can't figure out where I am. No surprise, My 13-inch MacBook Pro doesn't 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.
Anyway, that doesn't mean we can't have fun with location stuff.
On Twitter, I posted a link to a Google Map asking if this was the location of the Fillmore East.
 I got back an answer that it was close, but the supermarket next door is where the...
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I was doing some research for a blog post and came across this folder of RSS enclosures from late 2004 and early-mid 2005.
These were the months when podcasting was beginning to take root.
I was doing Morning Coffee Notes. Adam Curry was doing Daily Source Code. Together, we were doing the Trade Secrets podcast.
Dave Slusher, Steve Gillmor, IT Conversations, Dawn and Drew, Tony Kahn at WGBH, Engadget.
It occurred to me that this slice of early podcasting might be worth preserving, so turned it into a torrent and have uploaded it
http://static.scripting.com/misc/earlyPodcasts.torrent
If you have questions or comments, you can post them here.
PS: Another reason I like it is this is a non-infringing use of BitTorrent. We need more of those to...
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Jay and I use WordPress to do the http://rebootnews.com/ site.
It's 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, it's a good tool to put between us.
But WordPress doesn't do podcast feeds well.
And that's being generous.
Here's 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, you're out of luck. And...
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 It's been a while since we could announce new major support for rssCloud, but today is one of those big days we'll remember for a long time.
Status.net has now enabled rssCloud support in the RSS 2.0 feeds for all its users.
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).
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 I've built for Frontier (it runs...
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 I stumbled across this very interesting list of 18 firsts on the Internet. It's 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. Everyone's work builds on other people's. The guy who invented the car used a lot of other people's 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.
It may be more useful to say who had the first car. Who...
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Several interesting half-developments in the competitive landscape from non-dominant tech entities. I believe in supporting the second and third tier companies and startups, when they offer alternatives to the BigCo's. I like the little guys because they have an incentive to listen to and please users, without the strategy taxes almost always imposed by the big guys.
 First, there is Mark Fletcher's SnapGroups. It's basically a threaded discussion group with a modern browser-based UI. It's perhaps a framework that something like FriendFeed can develop from, although it's just a framework. There are no feeds in either direction -- you can't subscribe to feeds from within SnapGroups,...
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Zadi Diaz got this great picture of Steve Jobs on the red carpet at the Oscars last night.
Click the thumb above for the full effect.
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This week's Rebooting The News podcast, recorded in the studio at NYU, was particularly good. It starts off a little slowly, but picks up speed.
http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar08.mp3
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Tomorrow night they announce the winners of the Academy Awards, and for the first time in a long time, I don't really think there is a movie up to being called Best Picture.
The only one I haven't seen is Precious. So it might be the exception.
Of all the nominated pictures I have seen, if I had to choose one, I'd go for Up In The Air. Great acting, interesting plot, well done all around. Second choice: An Education.
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.
Curious what other people think.
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 I just watched the live webcast of two friends, Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis, give talks at TEDxNYED. They both did well. At the end of Jeff's talk he told a story about about a big moment in our friendship. Of course he tells it from his point of view. I'm sure they'll release a video of the talk so you can hear it. This is the story from my point of view.
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...
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 Google has been pitching its use of open standards as a way to insure yourself against Google going away. That's much appreciated, no sarcasm. All companies should plan for their users' data surviving them. But my concern is what if Google doesn't go away. This is a company that's at least heavily influenced by lawyers, if not run by them. They aggressively patent. Personally, I'd rather not build a new ecosystem out of Google patents.
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 don't...
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I am a big huge fan of Tim Burton movies.
He's right up there with Quentin Taratino and Martin Scorcese. When one of these directors ships a movie, I'm often the first person in line on opening day.
So this morning I took off and went to the 11AM showing of the newly released today Alice in Wonderland, at 850 Broadway.
First a caveat. Don't read this if you haven't 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.
1. The Times review is right. The movie is pointless, lifeless.
2. It's not even remotely a Tim Burton movie.
3.
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 Kara Swisher reports on a study that shows people are ignoring "real time" search results. This matches with my experience.
The reason? It's 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 you're looking for information you don't have but want.
I have a collection of Google Alerts that report once a day or immediately, via email, telling me about occurrences of my name, products I've made, other topics I'm interested in. These used to be pretty useful until they started including tweets...
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 Ask anyone who was at BloggerCon I and BloggerCon II to explain the format that evolved there, and you're likely to see their eyes light up, as they wave their hands, but until you've experienced it, they'll just be words. I hope to renew the evangelism for this format while I'm at NYU, and have access to the meeting facilities of the university.
The format is not far from the Socratic 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...
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 The first years of Google's 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 Google's ranking algorithms, and we bloggers loved Google, and we gushed over them here in the one and only year we gave awards on Scripting News.
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...
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 Last night Nick Denton and Jonathan Glick co-hosted a party at Nick's fabulous SoHo apartment to welcome me back to NY.
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 aren't Harvard and MIT, or Stanford and Berkeley. This is the big city, but tech here isn't 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...
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 I'm 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 I'd just write a blog post that explains where I think the money is in local.
First, where I don't 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.
Instead, pick the businesses that generate billions of dollars in the local economy that are information-based, where the information currently being...
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This is a continuation of the Big Change in the Tech World thread, February 25.
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.
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 didn't do it, so they looked the other way. Napster was...
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WordPress announced today that they've added support for PubSubHubBub to their product.
This is great news. More realtime support is a good thing.
I'm sure some people will use this moment as an opportunity to say bad things about RSS, that's just the way it goes. I've always encouraged people to see more realtime support as a just plain old good thing.
I would love to see Google support rssCloud in Google Reader and their other products. It would show that they support all ways of doing this stuff.
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Copyright 1997-2010 Dave Winer
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