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

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

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

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

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

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

1. How would you feel?

2. What would you do?

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

Food for thought.

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

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

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

 12/2/2008; 11:10:06 AM  

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

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

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

 12/2/2008; 9:50:15 AM  

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

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

I stopped using it when:

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

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

The biggest problem with Pownce was:

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

The one thing Pownce got right was:

1. It had payloads!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



 12/1/2008; 1:22:17 PM  

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

 11/30/2008; 11:10:40 AM  

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

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

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

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

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

 11/30/2008; 9:07:56 AM  

Update: Obama uses a Mac too.

 11/30/2008; 8:04:21 AM  

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

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

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

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

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

Update: I hear that Graphicsmagick is faster than Imagemagick.

 11/30/2008; 7:42:37 AM  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 11/29/2008; 12:30:50 PM  

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

 11/29/2008; 5:56:43 AM  

 11/28/2008; 3:03:50 PM  

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

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

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

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

 11/28/2008; 9:52:48 AM  

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

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

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

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

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

 11/28/2008; 9:27:59 AM  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 11/27/2008; 9:52:40 AM  

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

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



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

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



 11/27/2008; 7:57:41 AM  

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

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

I'm already there.

 11/27/2008; 6:46:58 AM  

What you see on Twitter, when:

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

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

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

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

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

See also: Mike Arrington, Mathew Ingram.

 11/27/2008; 6:28:05 AM  

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Incredible flow from Mumbai on Twitter this evening.

 11/26/2008; 10:45:12 AM  

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

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

Oh the humanity!

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

That's right. Citi Field. Appalling.

God speaks to us in mysterious but clear ways.

Repent ye sinners!!

 11/26/2008; 12:38:13 PM  

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

Did I remember this correctly?

Pointers would be most welcome...

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

The answer is yes. Next year.

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

 11/26/2008; 2:32:41 AM  

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

 11/26/2008; 2:37:38 AM  

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

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

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

1. People with news.

2. People who want news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 11/25/2008; 11:54:16 AM  

Update 8:40AM. I got hMailServer to work on one of my Windows servers. I had tried it before but couldn't get it to work. Seems perhaps as if the problem is solved.

I was over at Fred Wilson's blog and saw something interesting I hadn't thought of as an alternative to managing an email server. For background see yesterday's post.

Right now we're using Google Groups to send email to people who want to subscribe, but even that depends on us having a working mail server for us to send mail to from a script.

This is basically the only function I need a mail server for, so I was wondering if there's a web service somewhere I could use for this function? Fred uses FeedBlitz. I'm going to check it out, but I'm not sure if it'd work for me. They make users get an account. That sounds like too much of a committment.

Do any of you have any recommendations? Barring that, does anyone have a mail server I could use? I know that sounds pathetic, but I'm so fed up with mail servers. It used to be so easy, but then the spammers ruined it.

 11/25/2008; 7:49:34 AM  

Okay we could bail out the newspaper business, I'm sure that's what the owners of the newspapers are thinking, but this can't happen -- not in the United States. The day the government owns the newspapers would be the exact moment there stopped being a news business. If it happens we will immediately be on our own.

Anyway, after all the perspective-altering news last week about the economy, reading Jeff Jarvis's essay on how to cure the ills of the news business was a bit of nostalgia for the good old days and showed me why Jeff has good attendance at his conferences among people who want to believe in The Long Tail, and in the primacy of the 20th century model for news and entertainment, but it was very clear to me why that point of view is now completely irrelevant.

This is the point of view of news that's relevant: the point of view of the user of news.

A user wants to know how he or she is going to get news.

And when they see lies and BS in the news, they think about how they can get accurate information.

Watch the Frontline episode on the life of Lee Atwater for a reminder of the value of what we call news. In 1988, the Republicans figured it out -- the industry view of news is a story, the story need have nothing to do with reality. The news organizations don't care. When a series of "facts" about Michael Dukakis scrolled in front of a video of him riding in a tank wearing a funny helmet, the news guys made a note they should check out these facts, but they never did. They have a news reporter on the record saying that. They turned out to be nonsense, yet the news guys played the ad over and over for free cause they enjoyed making fun of Dukakis who they thought was pompous and they wanted to take him down a notch. Some way to choose a President, eh?

Think about news as its constituent components, not in the bizarro news world we live in, think about news in the actual world. The components are: sources, facts, ideas, opinions, readers.

The challenge of the news industry, to the extent that there is one, is to connect the first four items with the last item. I don't think you need a reporter and editor to do that. I don't think they were doing their jobs anyway, they were being very selective about what sources, facts, ideas and opinions we could have.

I want it all, and I don't want anyone saying what I can and can't have.

That's why Jarvis's outline of the salvation of the news industry is a nightmare, an old nightmare, one that we're finally waking up from.

And luckily, just at the moment the news industry is breathing its last breath, we have the tools to build our own. I hope we have the will to use them. They are the tools we call Web 2.0 -- blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Delicious, wikis, etc.

Now, I'm not glad to see the news industry go that way, I've been pleading with them to embrace the future, to stop fighting it, to accept the changes, to give up their point of view. I think it's still possible to do it, and save some of what they've built, but not so much anymore. But it's going to take some major shifting of point of view to get there. And us users don't really have much reason to care anymore.

 11/24/2008; 3:04:49 PM  

Bloomberg says the US bailout so far is costing us (the taxpayers) $7.7 trillion.

$7,700,000,000,000.00
I just had to type that number in it's so astonishing. Where are we going to get that much money? Are the Chinese really going to lend us that much? And when we come back to them in April looking for $77 trillion, what will they say?

One plus to all this michegas, it makes the Iraq debacle seem like an absolute bargain! Good going Bushie and Cheney. Look at how much money you didn't waste.



It's really hard to laugh about this. Oy.

 11/24/2008; 1:51:44 PM  

Of all the techniques offered for stopping and starting Apache on Windows, the one that worked the best was using a batch command: net stop apache2.2 to stop it and net start apache2.2 to start it.

It's not perfect, because the batch file runs asynchronously from my script call, so it's hard to know when it's okay to proceed, since the call to stop Apache returns long before Apache is stopped; same thing with restarting. But this approach is much better than all the other suggested approaches. Still wish there were a program I could send a message to, which waits until Apache is stopped before returning. And it, predictably, took hours to sort through all the options.

Another problem in switching servers to EC2 is getting a mail relay agent running, so NewsJunk can send emails to people following it via email. When spam became a big issue it became harder to set up mail servers as they tried to defend against people using them for spam. So I thought I had stumbled across something excellent, Godaddy, which is registrar for many of my domains, offers SMTP mail relays. So I set it up and tried a one-line script calling tcp.sendmail but I'm getting an error message that's hard to parse.

553 Sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts.

I called their support line, but they have no clue what it means. They say I should use Outlook or Entourage or AppleMail. I said I'm doing it from a script inside my web app. They say they don't support that. Okay, but they're a registrar that doesn't serve people who run websites? They usually have smart, polite support people -- but this time they were trying to BS me. Not appreciated, Godaddy.

Anyway, I trawled around looking for a clue what that error means, and it's hard to parse. It could be that something hasn't propogated through DNS or it could mean their defenses think I'm a spammer (I'm not).

So I may be back to zero again. Can't run the IIS mail server because of a weirdness of EC2, life gets more complicated if you depend on configuring the OS and I want to keep it simple, using an off the shelf image of Windows rather than customizing one.

 11/24/2008; 1:32:53 PM  

BM stands for Business Model, not what you think.

Steve Gillmor has the Gillmor Gang and he uses that pulpit to push a future of ideas and truths flying around the Internet, our ideas -- with all kinds of pipes and funnels to catch the stuff we want and let the other stuff flow by. We're going to need it now that the newspapers are evaporating at the same time as the banks. Unfortunate timing.

Steve wants Track. The FF guys say they'll give it to him, and I believe them. Their philosophy is to pass back everything they suck in. Good philosophy. So far they've stuck to it, more or less. Meanwhile, reading the tea leaves I'd guess that Twitter is going to sell track to consumer marketing companies, based on the model that we're eyeballs on couches and there's $$$ value in selling what we're talking about to BigCos. To me, this is very sad old thinking and doomed to fail, like people living off the rise in equity in their houses. Much better to go direct, get and give money to and from users. There are a lot more of us, and we've got better ideas.

Here's my recipe for Twitter's business...

1. Acquire a couple of the add-on vendors, to send the signal to developers -- they're looking to buy.

2. Open up the APIs fully, limited only by technical realities, don't hold anything in reserve.

3. Offer the add-ons to users at a price. The basic service remains free forever, but the add-ons cost. Kind of like wordrpess.com. It works for Apple with their app store. Amazon charges for their web services. We're in the period after the second Internet tech crash now, thinking must be adjusted.

4. Go to step 1, acquire more add-on developers. Then go to step 2, add more APIs, then step 3, offer more for-money features to users, who then can (likely) build businesses off the new features.

This is Twitter as coral reef, an idea that held promise many months ago but has faded as things have more or less stagnated in TwitterLand.

Observation -- everyone who has a website that survives will be in competition with Amazon. Start now, don't be thinking about competing with Google for ads, that model is disappearing, just like people who were paying credit card bills by taking out third, fourth and fifth mortgages, only to make their next down payment with a credit card!

Otherwise, I'd advise the S3 people to get a Twitter-like notification system ready asap. You know what -- I'm pretty sure they have one in the pipe.

Update: Steve also has a nice pulpit at TechCrunchIT.

 11/24/2008; 7:39:37 AM