Social Graph Foo Camp 

The community system for DEMO

When I was in Boulder on Sunday, David Cohen and Brad Feld, the organizers of TechStars, kindly set up four meetings for me with Boulder startups t...

Arrest Bush

MP3s of DNC speeches?

David Morrison, via email: "I've been reading your site for a few years now, and couldn't think of anyone else to ask this question to. Are there ...

Anti-abortion protest at DNC

As we were going into the DNC this afternoon our path was blocked by a crowd of police, press and a handful of protestors and priests. #1: Roe v W...

This is a HAPPY convention

Just got a comment from Mark Dzmura saying that Fox and CNN are reporting that there is racial discord at the DNC, and I want to say that's absolu...

Evening pictures

I walked through a door I shouldn't have and all of a sudden I'm walking around among all these famous politiicans and news people. Only got a good...

FriendFeed updates

I'm sitting in the nosebleeds at Pepsi waiting for Jimmy Carter to speak, and then FriendFeed releases its new beta. Good timing! Gives me somethin...

First Biden appearance in Denver

I was walking on 16th St in Denver at noon and saw that there were a lot more people on the street than there had been a few minutes before; all wa...

The blogger space at the DNC

Here's a quick picture of the blogger's space at the DNC, and after working here for a few minutes I ache to get back on the road. This is a far cr...

Things I'm still trying to find

1. The Big Tent. 2. Google's tent. (Ahh, it's the same thing as the Big Tent.) 3. Where the bloggers are hanging out! 4. Friends from Twitter, Berk...

IRC space for the DNC

We clearly need an IRC space for the DNC. So here it is... irc://irc.freenode.net/#dnc08 Hope to see you there! PS: This could be an interesting ...

The NY Times is using the same tools I am to cover the DNC

They have a Flickr stream. And a Twitter feed..

5:30PM working inside the Pepsi Center

Uploaded a lot more pictures, and am about to upload a 2 minute tour of the inside of the DNC.

4PM touring the media tents

It's super hot outside, but the press puts on a good show. Found free workspace, fast Ethernet and power. Happy blogger. Now I'm looking for Goog...

Inside the Pepsi Center at 2PM

About to upload some pics and videos. I'm posting regular updates to Twitter. When I set out from Berkeley on Tues morning, this was my destination...

DNC 2008 sign-in

I'm over the first hurdle getting set up for the Democratic Convention. I've got my press credential for tomorrow. Later today I'm heading over to ...

Arrived in Boulder

Well, pretty much 1/2 my road trip is finished. Drove from SLC to Laramie yesterday, had dinner with Isobel & Brett, then drove from Laramie to Bou...

XP to Amazon?

I had a random thought today as I read the press release about Amazon's new Elastic Block Store. Once again, I wish the OPML Editor ran on Linux so...

This must be stopped

The WSJ reports that the Republicans will have press events in Denver during the Democratic Convention. They even say that the Republicans have fou...

Summer 2008 road trip

Good morning everybody! This is Dave coming to you from Salt Lake City, UT. I'm on my Summer 2008 road trip. Started yesterday at 4AM, and got me i...

Obama does mean change, here's why

It's so obvious it's almost mathematical. After eight years of Bush -- if Obama is elected, everything will be different. Instead of a President wh...

I've got a problem with Firefox 3

Now that the tool I use to manage S3 is available for Firefox 3, I have been able to switch to it, and I have. But there's a real problem with how ...

Catholic League wants offensive bloggers nixed by Dems

This is really ignorant and crude. There's a misunderstanding that bloggers somehow must have the same politics or even standards as the party who'...

A taste of FlickrFan

FlickrFan, like all rivers of news, is about flow. In this case it's a flow of pictures, from your contacts on Flickr, from AP and AFP, and from an...

Bear Hug Camp (click on the bear)

Dare left something out (and it's important)

I'm in the middle of a complex project or I'd take more time out to explain, but Dare Obasanjo left out the one thing in the history of SOAP vs RES...

This is a test

Hello.

More movement in TwitterLand

I love it when things change! And so far it looks like the Twitter folk did a good job with the features to support threading. This is a very ligh...

Russian general threatens Poland

It sure is escalating quickly. AP: "A top Russian general said Friday that Poland's agreement to accept a U.S. missile interceptor base exposes th...

Perfect timing!

I just read this interesting post on Louis Gray's blog. Essentially now any Twitter client can now associate another post as a reply to another exi...

The beginnings of community

Yesterday an update of FlickrFan shipped for the Summer of OPML project, and as we hoped, new users popped up and all of a sudden it's a teeny litt...

FlickrFan is converted

The Summer of OPML is rolling right along. The next app to be converted is FlickrFan. http://flickrfan.org/ Onward!

Which bank has the best online UI?

I had a huge problem last night with the online banking website at BofA. I needed to adjust a repeating monthly payment, the price had gone up, and...

The EFF position on Wikipedia

EFF: Wikipedia Wins Dismissal of Baseless Defamation Claims. While it may have been a good defense in court, their position is nonsense. Wales et a...

A brilliant idea at Harvard

Before I started blogging, I held many if not most of my good ideas in reserve because I thought some day I might do them as products. But as you g...

A memeplant that worked

Yesterday I pointed to a howto by Jay Ridgeway that showed how to connect two laconi.ca communities together. Today I'm going to try it myself. I f...

More random stuff

I admit I'm writing about some of this stuff so it'll get indexed by Google, then I'll be able to find it while I'm working. It's annoying not havi...

No kidding I really got this fortune cookie

New Disqus

Good to see lots of improvements in Disqus today. Looking for docs that explain how you export comments for offline archiving.

What goes around

On FriendFeed, Andrew Baron notes that, according to compete.com, Mahalo stopped growing six months ago. Proof that the shut-them-up-with-flames a...

Followups

Om Malik followed up with Evan Williams at Twitter and corrected the assumption behind my piece published yesterday about new limits in Twitter. Al...

How to Demo at DEMO

I wrote the first howto for demoers at DEMO in 1991. And unlike some people's howtos, this one is still on the web. Yeah, a lot of the ideas that p...

Random stuff

Interesting email today speculating that Wes Clark will be the VP nominee. If so, I like this choice. I know Clark said that being a prisoner of wa...

Twitter limiting followers to 2000

Just read in various places that people are getting messages from Twitter saying that there's a limit of 2000 followers per account. Lots to say a...

Obama strikes back

;

How viral is GPL?

A couple of disclaimers up front: 1. I love to stir the pot cause that's how we all learn, by pushing up against the boundaries of what people thin...

New HowTos

I've spent the last month working on a new release of the OPML Editor for Mac and Windows. The goal is to ship with an empty Tools folder, and make...

Disconnecting the 'Annex'

On 2/7/06 this blog got an annex on wordpress.com that mirrored the content here. The purpose was twofold: 1. It allowed people to comment on my w...

Edwards scandal idicts MSM and political bloggers

This morning two editorials one in the LA Times and the other in The Moderate Voice, a political blog, provide a fresh perspective on the Edwards s...

What if Country Joe was right?

What if Edwards had been the nominee?

Shudder to think what would have happened if Edwards had come out on top after the primaries. No doubt he would have had to withdraw in disgrace, t...

Could Vista fail?

I was thinking about Vista yesterday when I was working on my Asus Eee PC, getting it ready to be my media workstation during the Democratic Conven...

Next stop Denver!

I've got about one and a half weeks before I start the roadtrip to Denver, and in that time I want to do some prep, if there's interest, with other...

Did you wonder what #dontgo means? (I did.)

I've found the hash tags people were putting on their twits really annoying, never thought they would catch on, until a few days ago I started hear...

Let's pick a day and all inflate our tires together

I love how Barack Obama picked up the ball and threw it back in the Republican's faces. Indeed, they do annoy with their ignorance, they're not rea...

Landing at Logan

Knol is Google's Wikia

Wikia is Jimmy Wales' dream of doing to Google what Wikipedia did to Britannica. Unfortunately for Wales and his investors, Google had a 10-year le...

Random stufffff

Via Doc Searls, Google runs a registrar, without the gunked-up cross-selling choked process of other registrars. I've gotta try this out, I'll tran...

Wifi in BART

I rode the BART into SF last night for a dinner near Moscone, first BART trip I've taken with the new Asus Eee PC 901 with XP. It's a fine little c...

My to-do list for Identi.ca

I had a great phone conversation yesterday with Evan at Identi.ca. It was just an hour, but we covered a lot of ground. And Evan is an open kind of...

Disabling Sprint interference with wifi

I posted yesterday, in desperation: "So far I love the Sprint 3G EVDO modem. Works great on Mac and Windows, no install CD, comes built-in. But... ...

The coolest thing about DirecTV

At first it was a little unsettling getting used to a new way of watching TV, but I'm beginning to like the way DirecTV works. The coolest feature ...

Micro-blogging meetup in September?

Following up on yesterday's piece about fragmentation in the micro-blogging world; on my walk yesterday I took a Steve Gillmor podcast with me, an ...

Listening, respect and teamwork

Scoble writes about Silicon Valley VC disease. I almost wrote a comment there saying that I've tried many times over many years to get VCs to inves...

My kind of blogging and the 2008 campaign

Not that anyone is paying attention, but I seem to disagree with almost everyone about what blogging is. To me it's the empowerment of the individu...

Airport Extreme router question

Posted on FriendFeed: "Most routers give you a way to see a list of attached devices, a feature I need to locate some devices with web interfaces o...

Heads-up to OPML Editor users

I'm guessing that there aren't many people using the OPML Editor on a daily basis, but to those who are, I'm about to make some changes in the menu...

American Airlines wifi?

I heard that AA has wifi on some cross-country flights. Thinking I'm going to NY sometime in the next week or so -- therefore -- I want to figure o...

I bought a fun domain!

I bought a fun domain just for fun. http://rep.ublican.com/ Started it off with Joe Trippi's post today, whcih was most excellent!!

Twitter will kick themselves for missing this

Imagine if the world of Instant Messaging had been under one roof, if one vendor had invented it, and had 100 percent market share. Further, what i...

Nice to get support from the Guardian

We're all on our own when a BigCo decides to throw its weight at us, but being a well-read blogger has its advantages, esp when a columnist at a bi...

Chin-dropping photo

An astounding AP photo of Barack Obama waving to his fans in Berlin earlier today. I saw this one scroll by on a large HDTV and couldn't believe my...

Is this Rocketboom 2.0?

If so sign me up!

A word about Comcast

Technology is fragile. Systems go down all the time because someone forgot to maintain something, or someone deleted a file or a variable that they...

Make some of your own

Scoop Nisker said, famously: If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own. That could be the anthem of blogging. With the tools so...

Playing the race card

Obama plays the race card when he takes the stage. Look at his face. He's an African-American. There's the race card. Can't be hidden. It's right t...

Puppet finds new home

Comcast shut me down again

Oy. This is probably the end of the line for me and Comcast. About an hour before today's Obama speech, I was upstairs, with Slingplayer on the 2nd...

Inching toward federation

I have a problem that a lot more people are having. I use three "micro-blogging" platforms. 1. Twitter 2. FriendFeed 3. Identi.ca Each has strengt...

Losing followers on Twitter?

I stopped keeping track of the number of people following me on Twitter, I know it was pretty high, but I also know it wasn't a true measure of how...

I feel great!

Point of View!

It's all about where you're lookin at it from. Remember that awesome picture of Obama speaking in Berlin on July 24? Did you see all those digital ...

McCain runs a cowardly sleazy ad, early

0. Here's a blogger doing what a blogger should do. 1. McCain is running an ad that, without saying anything that can be rebutted, shows images of ...

Streamfile looks really cool

It solves a problem we all have. http://www.streamfile.com/ I want to send a big file to someone who may or may not be very tech savvy. Look at a...

Obama to announce VP pick tomorrow night?

If so Tim Kaine, the governor of Virginia looks like the choice.

What is a liberal?

I listened to part of Fresh Air today in the car and they were talking about arms control in Reagan's presidency, and were throwing around terms li...

Instant history

The campaign was getting pretty dull until this New Yorker cover appeared. At once funny, provocative and inspiring, it captures the personalitie...

A demo of something that's not crowd sourcing

To Jay Rosen, here's an example of two people collaborating to make an interesting story that neither of us would likely make on our own. Notice th...

Foreclosures in your neighborhood?

Next week the financial crisis in the US reaches a new level with a major bank failure and two others being bailed out. There's lots of macro news...

Obama's FISA screwup

First, the conservative pundits who say that Obama turned his back on the extreme left by voting for the new FISA bill have it wrong. He turned his...

Why I don't like 'crowd sourcing'

On Twitter, Jay Rosen asks why I don't like the term crowdsourcing. (He says hate, but that's way way too harsh.) Anyway, he's right -- I don't lik...

Another tale of woe of Apple

These monolithic, upgrade the world in a day rollouts of Apple may not be such a great idea. And this is a reminder to myself never to be tempted b...

Good afternoon from California

I'm back in California, feeling pretty good. Listening to the original version of For Free by Joni Mitchell from Ladies of the Canyon. There's a la...

Bit.ly launches today

First, go read Marshall Kirkpatrick's awesome writeup of bit.ly. I was part of the team that defined the product, the development was done at Betaw...

Which way will Twitter go?

Biz Stone posted yesterday about the status of services connected to Twitter via their XMPP gateway. We knew about Summize, suspected that FriendFe...

How to think about identi.ca

First, about an hour ago, identi.ca got a major feature, that makes it about a billion percent more useful and a billion percent less shitty. Ther...

Why FriendFeed is growing faster than Twitter

The tech blogosphere loves to study itself in a herd-like fashion. Back in the old days we used to call this "Watching us watch them watch us watc...

Announcing Tech.NewsJunk.Com

There's a new site on the net today: http://tech.newsjunk.com/ It's the counterpart to the political NewsJunk, which is focused on news of the 20...

Independence Day

It's the day when we say we're not dependent on Great Britain. Of course that part of the holiday long ago lost its meaning. But maybe the whole th...

XMPP and Twitter, coming back on?

This post on the Twitter status blog, gives hope to developers wanting to hook into the full Twitter flow, the same flow that now only Summize has ...

Federating identi.ca?

I note that a number of programmers I respect are trying to launch instances of the software behind identi.ca. If they're successful, and if there...

RMack on Internet freedoms

I was catching up with On The Media earlier this week, and who comes on but my friend and former Berkman colleague Rebecca MacKinnon. I love those ...

Oh happy day!?

A Twitter clone that's all-the-way open? Did Christmas come early this year? http://identi.ca/doc/faq Marshall has a writeup. I am dave over there...

Social cameras, on the way

Bijan got a preview of the iPhone 2.0 software, which adds location to the camera. It's a piece of the social camera puzzle. When you come back fro...

How to stop chasing the news

My Internet writing is so distributed these days, there are five main places I write, and a host of others where I write peripherally. Here are the...

Podcast with the Gnip guys

I caught up with Eric Marcoullier and Jud Valeski of Gnip in Eric's car, this afternoon. http://mp3.newsjunk.com/interviewWithGnip.mp3 Earlier to...

I wish Twitter would partner with Gnip

Yesterday I wrote a teaser piece masquerading as a vision piece. The vision is not mine, it's Eric Marcoullier's, a very affable and brilliant entr...

A way for Twitter back in the pink?

I'm not sure how much of the stress in Twitter is caused by the services that poll its API on behalf of thousands of users, but it's got to be a lo...

Looking for a few good feeds

I'm revamping my feed reading. FriendFeed has made me (and apparently others) much more aware of how I get my news. I've also learned a ton from ...

Web 2.0 gas prices

Earlier today we were having a hot debate about how John McCain doesn't know how much a gallon of gas costs. A Republican thinks we're being too ha...

More than meets the eye

This morning, the story I've been tiptoeing around here appeared for the first time in the business press. Guardian: Shel Israel puppet show bites ...

State of the Twitter, June 2008

June was a terrible month in TwitterLand. The service was down a lot. It's basically down right now, has been for days -- since the Replies tab doe...

Classic geek video

Much-discussed today on FriendFeed, with art.

10 great movies in 10 genres

From today's Fresh Air, a selection of 10 great movies in 10 genres from the American Film Institute: Animation, Romantic Comedy, Western, Sports, ...

To Obama: I'm not an ATM

I just got an email from David Plouffe, the campaign manager for Obama. Click on the image below to read the email. I've underlined in red the par...

What is whoisi.com?

This site showed up in my referrer logs. http://whoisi.com/p/216 http://whoisi.com/p/755 Not sure what to make of it. Looks quite interesting. I...

Some things shouldn't be joked about

It's been suggested that McCain made a good choice in hiring a comedian to write about Barack Obama for their campaign webiste. I humbly disagree. ...

Good news or bad?

I just signed on to Twitter and there were Josh Bancroft. This is a new idea. An interesting plot for a science fiction movie? Or a sad comment on ...

John McCain's RSS feed

I forget how I stumbled across John McCain's RSS feed, but I've been reading it regularly for some time. Occasionally they have a post written in t...

Silicon Valley as second grade

Posting a link to Shel Israel's piece here yesterday accelerated the discussion, of course. Most of the discussion that I've participated in has be...

California weather

Just a few days ago we were sweltering with near-100 degree heat, and today, it's so cold out we have the furnace on. I'll take the cold weather an...

Arrington, Feldman & Israel

I'm forwarding this link to my readers, without comment, at this time. Please read it and give it your consideration. Shel Israel: About Loren Fel...

Can Twitter become ubiquitous?

First today's news: Twitter announced investments from Spark and Bezos. Bijan Sabet will become a Twitter board member. They haven't announced a bu...

Getting NewsJunk through IM

I haven't tried it, but this comes recommended... http://www.imfeeds.com/ Since there's a NewsJunk RSS feed, it should work. I'm going to try it n...

How to push stories to NewsJunk using del.icio.us

Underneath its simple user interface there's a lot of RSS that goes into NewsJunk. It's like flour to cake or ice to hockey. The product is more th...

I may have found Scoble's hook

Heh. I've been wondering when Scoble would discover NewsJunk. I think today I finally baited the hook, dropped the line, and he took the bait. Mayb...

del.icio.us question

I've started to use del.icio.us recently, as part of the editorial flow for NewsJunk, and it's making me think of ways of integrating the two. Now,...

Rethinking the conference

"Why are you going to that conference?" asks Jack. "Just to hang out with the people," says Jill. It's a cliche and nothing new. As long as I've be...

Dancers in the park

Morning coffee notes

It's going to be another scorcher here in Berkeley and the rest of the Bay Area. You can just feel it. Everything is still hot from yesterday, no t...

Update from Doc Searls

Doc says he's not being courageous, just fighting for his life in a Boston hospital and blogging the whole thing, trusting the universe that everyt...

Heat wave

It's not usually this hot in Berkeley. Four or five days like this a year. Whew. Hard to stay cool. Not used to this.

Newsweek poll results

I don't generally report polls here, but this one is too stunning not to report. The link came to us via Pollster.com, it's currently the top item ...

DNC plan B -- It worked!

I want to go to the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August -- where they will nominate Barack Obama. It was only four years ago when Ob...

Hat's off to Doc

Doc Searls has been fighting to regain his health in a Boston-area hospital. You can read all about it on his blog. I admire his courage in exposin...

When Twitter is down...

You can go to the beach, take a walk or climb a tree. Or quietly go crazy. Or you can use http://twitabit.com/ -- a sweet little tool from the f...

The AP mess, day 4

I gotta say the AP guys are digging the hole deeper every time they communicate. But the bloggers aren't helping. Almost everyone seems to be maki...

AP mess, day 3

I spoke with Jim Kennedy at AP this afternoon and talked about the controversy over how bloggers should link to and use information published by th...

NewsJunk on Facebook!

Facebook is the 8th way to follow NewsJunk.

Reddit goes open source

A very welcome development, as I've written here earlier, I am interested in one-off special micro-community news voting systems. I wonder how eas...

$99 for 500GB at Amazon

I subscribe to a feed of top electronic products at Amazon. In my River of News aggregagtor, I see a few products showing up every day, most are re...

New NewsJunk Junk

There's a certain symmetry to the headline of this piece. Anyway... We're working on a bunch of stuff that's almost ready to release. I'm taking n...

Remembering Tim Russert

Tim Russert died on Friday. I never met the guy, but I sure was familiar with his work. I thought he personified what was wrong with the political...

AP pay-to-quote, day 2

A commenter named Billenator says it's all about money. It's a good essay, and worth thinking about. But what's been missing in much of the discus...

Where's your data?

Earlier today I asked for advice -- should I use Yahoo or Google Groups or something else to distribute email to NewsJunk readers? In the discussio...

Yahoo Groups or Google Groups or ?

We're adding a 7th way to get your fix of NewsJunk politics -- email. Yeah, it's old and boring, but lots of people still use it! Of course we'd l...

AP objects to quoting-and-linking

This morning the top story on both TechMeme and Memeorandum is about the AP and its opinion that quoting and linking is a violation of fair use. T...

One word to describe John McCain?

Pew Research did a survey where they asked people to provide one word to sum up their feelings about John McCain. You can read this Baltimore Sun p...

Who will fill Russert's shoes?

We're sitting around NewsJunk HQ, talking politics and wondering when the discussion is going to turn to the game of musical chairs that must be pl...

MP3 of Olbermann's special comment

Here's an MP3 of Keith Olbermann's special comment tonight to John McCain, re getting out of Iraq.

Caught in Comcast's gears

Another Comcast user is nabbed for using too much of their service (top tenth of one percent). He doesn't use Twitter so he doesn't know how to get...

Top-5 stories on NewsJunk.com

Picture of the day

Now remind me, how many trillions have we borrowed to install and prop up the guy on the right? And what were we told about people who talk to th...

A few random thoughts

1. Wouldn't it be cool if the vetting process for potential VP's were an open process, blogged about by the parties in real-time? Remove indirectio...

Who owns your comments?

Last week, in the rush of news and new features in NewsJunk.com, I got an email from Daniel Ha, the guy who develops Disqus, the commenting softwar...

Breaking news: There are crazy people on the Internet

I loved the headline on this Salon piece so much I had to retweet it. And I'd add -- this article explains why the only people who pay attention to...

Not live-blogging the SteveNote

I'm probably the only one who isn't. And I'm probably going to have to buy a new iPhone later today, I have no idea. In the meantime it's really ...

Signs of life at Twitter

It's great to see Twitter preparing for the onslaught of traffic that's certain to come with tomorrow's Apple event in San Francisco. Update: Somet...

McCain gets a free ride?

I was just talking with Nicco about next steps with NewsJunk and the conversation turned to a piece that ran today in the Daily Mail in the U.K. ab...

Blow up the Beltway

In US politics they talk about Inside The Beltway the same way the tech industry talks about Silicon Valley. Now, people may question whether Bara...

IRC for Hillary Exit Speech

Are you watching Hillary's speech this morning? irc://irc.freenode.net/#exitHillary Come join the IRC channel!

Plan B

On May 22, I wrote: "I must have a Plan B, because I intend to build a business that depends on this service." I was referring to Twitter, and the ...

Is Microsoft reinventing upstreaming?

Amyloo thinks so. It's ironic, and a shame, that this didn't happen much sooner. Upstreaming was built on XML-RPC, a technology we co-developed wi...

Did HRC lose to sexism?

This question will be asked for years to come, no doubt. I don't have any deep insights to offer, at least not at this time, but I do have a super...

My first 'Get A Clue' post for Obama

Dear Mr. Obama, I applied for credentials to the Democratic Convention and was turned down. Okay, I can accept rejection -- have a great party, I'...

NewsJunk.com update

What a week! I've been having the time of my life this week, writing code and watching the political news fly by. So much to think about and ponder...

New York is Hillary Country

When I arrived NY in mid-May, I asked the cab driver, a black man, who he voted for in the primary. He said Hillary. Of course, I thought. He said ...

Yahoo Address Book API

This looks interesting, making a note here because I want to come back to this. Is anyone building on it? If so, how's it going?

Why gas is so expensive

We're sending all the dollars we can print to China. What do you think they buy with the dollars? 1. Cars. 2. Highways. 3. Gasoline. 4. Inflation ...

The Jackie Robinson of Politics

It's hard for a man to compete against a woman. You can see it in the speech that Obama gave tonight, he went right at McCain, in a way he never co...

It's all happening right now

Superdelegates are announcing for Obama. http://newsjunk.com/ Calif Senator Diane Feinstein says it's time for Clinton to quit. (She's a Clinton s...

Bill Clinton's Macaca Moment

Yesterday during the rush of news and the initial rollout of NewsJunk.com a story flew by that Bill Clinton had said some pretty nasty things about...

NewsJunk.com

My next big project is NewsJunk.com. The name comes from the people it is designed to serve, news junkies. So we've gone beyond mere users, now we'...

Owen Thomas speaks in Berkeley

Just got an email from Sylvia... Why does Silicon Valley need its own gossip rag? Come find out Wednesday, June 18, from noon to 1:30 at the Berkel...

NASDAQ goes real-time

As if on command, this press release dropped this morning. We're getting real-time stock quotes. Great. Now think about it -- how much like Twitte...

What Twitter did for Scripting News

We spend a lot of time talking about the technology of Twitter here, because tech is the root of Scripting News, it's how the blog got its start in...

Bill Clinton's Nixon moment?

Bill Clinton: "I want to say also that this may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of this kind. I thought I was out of politics, 'til...

Cousin Mikey is taking an interest in Twitter

Mike Arringtoh wrote a post yesterday about architecture issues in Twitter which was mostly pretty good, though his last question is very lawyerly ...

We're angry, uneducated and unhealthy. Now what?

Jeff Jarvis said something that got my fur up: Only Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan had an irrefutable point. 'We've got a totally irrational system of...

NewsJunk podcast with Joe Trippi

We just did a podcast with Democratic consultant Joe Trippi about today's Democratic Rules Committee meeting, and the next steps in the nominating ...

IRC for Democratic Rules Committee Meeting

Fascinating stuff coming up during testimony at Democratic Party Rules and Bylaws Committee today in Washington. Since we had IRC for each of the ...

More Twitter humor

Comment thread on Flickr.

Photos of downtown Oakland

Here's a set of photos I took yesterday in Oakland.

Overlooked in the McLellan coverage

The coverage of the McClellan tell-all book has focused on the White House spin, which amid all the bluster about surprise and how this isn't the S...

Overlooked in the McClellan coverage

The coverage of the McClellan tell-all book has focused on the White House spin, which amid all the bluster about surprise and how this isn't the S...

Jury Duty, day 2

I have another day of jury duty. I haven't been selected, but the voir dire is going into a second day because we started so late yesterday. I am n...

From the Mind of Hugh

An open source Twitter client?

There have been a lot of back-channel conversations about the future of Twitter, and one subject that keeps coming up (I keep bringing it up actual...

Jury duty

I got called for jury duty in Oakland. They have wifi here but it's $5.95 per day. Can you imagine, here we are doing our civic duty, taxpayers al...

Spewage update

Update: JR suggests adding a column to the Twitter spew report that shows the percent of total spew each person is responsible for. Good idea! Done.

Should Twitter charge high-spew users?

Om Malik asks if Twitter should charge users like Scoble who have huge numbers of followers. It's a fair question because these users are super-ex...

How to do data portability

I've heard a lot about data portability conferences and workshops, I've even been criticized for not going to one which happened on the west coast ...

The 16-year rewrite

In February 1992, I started work a piece of Frontier called the scheduler. It's the equivalent of what they call "cron" in Unix-Land. You can put s...

Rowan & Martin

Monitoring Twitter's down-ness

I've been thinking about writing an app that would check Twitter every ten minutes to see if it's down or up, and track it over time. Today, being ...

Her political career is over

This time Hillary Clinton has gone too far. Strike 1. Positioning Barack Obama as the black candidate after the South Carolina primary. Strike 2. R...

FriendFeed gets rooms, so does Scripting News

An interesting but mysterious new feature appeared today in FriendFeed, rooms, and of course we have to try it out. I created a room for Scripting...

Twitter begins to communicate with their users

Today Twitter began to communicate with their users, which they are to be commended and congratulated for. A journey of a thousand miles begins wit...

HRC's historic opportunity

Hat's off to David Gergen, who until now I thought was just another empty suit talking head. Turns out he's got some guts. On CNN on Tuesday night...

Podcasting and RSS at Berkman

I mentioned here my surprise and pleasure that, at the Berkman\@10 conference, Harvard Law prof Terry Fisher claimed, in his opening remarks, that ...

Furious digging happening

Sorry for the lack of updates here the last few days. I'm working on a new project I find very interesting. Not sure if it's going to pan out, but...

nytimesriver.com back

While I was traveling the machine that was generating nytimesriver.com overheated and stopped running the app. This morning the first thing I did ...

Nothing from nothing leaves nothing

Mark Evans asks a provocative question -- are pro bloggers going to be extinct soon? If you were to ask a pro blogger this question, they would say...

Sites that trust their users

I've been writing about locking users in by holding their data for a long time from a number of different angles. 1. Sites that have my data, but ...

Gillmor Gang food fight

Finally broke down and listened to the latest Gillmor Gang on the michegas with Facebook and Google and Plaxo. These guys are fucking crazy. Steve ...

Back in California

When I get back to California I always queue up this Beach Boys song. Puts a smile on my face and gets me back in the spirit. It's a great song cau...

Twitter status? Yeah it's down. Again.

What are you doing now? There's no words there!!! Fill in the appropriate four letter word.

Switching to SwitchABit

The SwitchABit platform was developed because we noticed that an ever more complex flow of ideas and information is being facilitated by editorial ...

Berkman @ 10

Today I'm at the Berkman @ 10 conference in Austin Hall on the Harvard Law School campus. It's a reunion of sorts, of people who have been part of ...

Comcast is a very strange company

They just announced that they bought rolodex company Plaxo. Price rumored to be betw $100 and $200 million. Media sharing? Comcast? You gotta be k...

Edwards endorses Obama

And fucking Twitter is fucking down. Fuck!

$1000 reward

See also: Interview with Nicco Mele, the man behind the $1000 reward.

Seesmic and Disqus sittin in a tree

I like video comments, didn't think I would but I do. I think people are more responsible and throughtful when their words are backed by their voic...

Photos/Videos from NY/Boston trip

I'm accumulating a photo log of my east coast trip on Flickr. There's a puzzle on one of the pics. Why are bus signs so high off the ground? Hint...

Tuesday political notes

Tuesdays bring political news and today is no different. First, an op-ed in today's New York TImes from 1972 Democratic presidential candidate Geor...

Demo of Firefly

I'm at the offices of Betaworks in New York, meeting with CEO John Borthwick who I know for many years from AOL. They have built a product called ...

What do the images mean?

From time to time people ask what the images in the margins of Scripting News mean. I don't think I've ever answered the question on the blog itsel...

Why decentralizing Twitter is hopeless

To every yin there's a yang. Here's a brilliant counterpoint to what I've been writing here about decentralizing Twitter. I've excerpted the last p...

What will Hillary do with her power?

Oh the political debate is getting interesting! Assuming the Democratic nomination is actually decided, then what is Hillary Clinton's future role?...

When Obama wins...

There's a game being played on Twitter that goes like this. "When Obama wins..." The game is to fill in the blank creatively. . Here are some exa...

How tech wars end

The tech industry is organized around the concept of wars. In recent memory, the browser wars, the Java wars, before that there were wars over emai...

Coming soooooon

We're working to build a scalable, beautiful new TwitterGram, an application built on the super-powerful SwitchAbit platform.

Is MySpace opening?

This post on TechCrunch started a bit of discussion. Ben Metcalfe posted an interesting video comment there, embedded below.

Testing Pownce public downloads

I just uploaded a song I recorded on Tuesday to Pownce. After two tries, it worked. You have to be logged in to download the song but anyone can pl...

Comments in Twitter?

I just posted a Tweet: "After seeing comments blossom in FriendFeed, it seems either Twitter should have comments, or extend the API so someone els...

Pownce becomes more useful

Twitter is still my mainstay in microblogging, but I'm using FriendFeed more, and today Pownce removed an important limit that will make it useful ...

Fred Wilson on Bootstrapping

Fred's heart is in the right place. He puts money behind technology he likes. This is bootstrapping. Then he bothers the developers with features h...

Soup

Obama, the Democratic nominee

1. There's no doubt now, Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee, and very likely the next President. I doubt if McCain has the sense of entitl...

Comcast's 250GB limit?

DSLreports piece says Comcast may impose a 250GB monthly limit for customers. If you go over, you pay $15 per 10GB. Since I got shut down last mon...

Gary, Indiana

By popular request, my ode to Gary, Indiana -- the town that is turning the world upside down tonight.

Japanese Twitter has ads

Gotta admit Twitter has interesting bugs! A few minutes ago, while tracking election returns (Obama wins NC yesss!) all of a sudden the Twitter UI ...

Breaking news on Twitter

Read this post from John Borthwick, my partner in Switch-A-Bit. http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/05/06/future-of-news/ Breaking news covered b...

IRC for Indiana/North Carolina

I started a chatroom for tomorrow's primaries. irc://irc.freenode.net/#indianaNorthCarolinaPrimary Please join if you want the firehose conversati...

If the Dems didn't have Superdelegates...

I was wondering if the Democrats, like the Republicans, didn't have superdelegates, where would the race stand right now. Here are the numbers... A...

Boostrapping a decentralized Twitter

Overnight Mike Arrington weighed in on the decentralized Twitter discussion. I'm glad he is getting involved, he's a smart guy and is now using Twi...

Is Obama black?

Yesteray at breakfast at the Sunnyside Cafe in Albany, we arrived late, all the indoor tables were taken so we sat outside. It was frigid cold, for...

Put this one on the calendar

We had RSS Awareness Day, that was fun, so let's have another new holiday, next Thursday, May 8 is Chickens Come Home To Roost Day. You have to fi...

Sunset over the bay

Taken last night on Indian Rock. A view of the back of Indian Rock on Google Maps.

Why decentralizing Twitter is so important

At dinner last night, Scott Rosenberg, researching his history of blogging book, said he couldn't find any trace of the original version of Tim Ber...

A new web service for Twitter clients

Yesterday I wrote about a way to prepare to decentralize Twitter, in the event of a lengthy outage. The goal is to create no extra work or complexi...

Sunset at Indian Rock

A bunch of us went up to Indian Rock to see the sunset. Click here for the set.

Microblogging should be decentralized

Scott Hanselman asks the question that should be on all our minds, as we come to depend more and more on Twitter. We need to do something about our...

Rev Chickens-Come-Home-To-Roost

We wasted another week on Rev Wright, hopefully the last one. No it didn't drag Obama down, though the right wing is spinning their wish that it wo...

What is a Dual-WAN Router?

Imagine that water pipes were a new thing, and therefore not reliable. They work for most people most of the time, but sometimes they go down, and ...

Yes Virginia, there's oil in Iraq

And we wouldn't have our military there if there wasn't. Everyone knows the war in Iraq is about oil, but if a Democrat were to say it the Republic...

Local fiber

Lots of information in the comments on yesterday's post about city-owned fiber in Berkeley.

UPS truck came

And it delivered two geekish presents. I'm installing the Eye-Fi card right now. Wish me luck! It's going pretty well. Now they want me to connect ...

Tom Hunt's FlickrFan discovery

The other day fellow Berkeleyite Tom Hunt, who uses FlickrFan, came up with a neat way to solve a common problem that I thought I should share. Her...

Government could help us use less oil and save money

McCain and Clinton propose a moratorium on Federal gasoline tax for the summer to give the "average American" a break. It must test well with focus...

Interesting meeting today

I had a chance meeting with some people today who wanted to talk about bringing fiber to Berkeley. There's an idea that it could be done in a very ...

Snicker snicker heh

Twitter broken?

It's been hard to get through to Twitter today. Calls through the API fail. Most accesses to the site get an internal server error. Nothing abou...

Happy RSS Awareness Day!!

Everyone should be aware of RSS today. Tomorrow? It's probably okay not to be aware of RSS tomorrow, but there's no law that says you have to forg...

The wish list thing is working!

Today I got two gifts from the Amazon wish list I started. As items come off the list, I add more items. They were much appreciated! I got the McC...

Tales from the Bizarro world

Why the press likes Obama again

First, I've given Obama another $100 today for a total of $900. It's the 30th, the end of a month. Of the three remaining candidates, he's still by...

Funky Time cover

Buffet of human fool

Yesterday I had an epiphany that Rev Wright might not be any more of a problem for President Obama than Billy Carter was for President Carter. To w...

Berkeley street at dusk

Click on the pic for details.

Is Rev Wright the new Billy Carter?

I've heard Rev Wright compared to Al Sharpton, after his clowning answers to questions at the National Press Club early today. I wondered, then I r...

Overlooked detail?

I was going to ask Gabe Rivera if he watched Twitter accounts to influence TechMeme. What got me on this train of thought was a piece on TechCrunch...

Om blesses our humble startup

Om Malik writes about SwitchABit, BetaWorks, Twittergram, John Borthwick and myself. I have a meeting to go to, I'll write a blog post about Switch...

My Amazon wishlist

From time to time people have asked me to start an Amazon wishlist. I don't know why I never did it, but last week I was undecided whether I should...

Twitter spewage among my contacts

On a lighter note... Everyone loves lists that rank people based on popularity and how much UGC the U generates. And of course everyone loves Twitt...

The mea culpas didn't come

At best the MSM got the Wright story wrong, at best it was a mistake. But if it were a mistake, there would have been some mea culpas today, after...

Hope is what we have, Hillary

She did it again today, made fun of the idea of hope. She says that she and John McCain know how Washington works, and if hope had anything to do w...

Why so quiet?

I expected a roaring debate in the political blogosphere this morning, and on cable news after the Friday night Bill Moyers interview with Rev Jere...

Wright interview in audio

I was able to watch the Wright interview on adamdeyong's Slingbox in Newport News, Virginia. I recorded it, but now the video is available on the ...

Tonight's news

Bill Moyers Journal this evening will have Rev Wright as his guest, and it won't be broadcast in the Bay Area until 10PM Pacific. It will air at 6P...

TwitterOutliner

There might be two or three people who can use this tool. I'm one of them, that's why I developed it.

The crazy baseball fan rule

Every so often a beer-drunk fan will run on the field during a baseball game causing a delay while the cops chase him down. Back in the days of str...

What to do about Rev Wright

Rev Wright was interviewed by Bill Moyers, an interview that will air tomorrow and will certainly restart the pundit-mania over all things Wright a...

John McCain a Martian? You decide.

San Francisco from Indian Rock

Obama leading McCain in Minnesota

Rasmussen Minnesota poll: Obama 52%, McCain 38%.

Hillary explains what superdelegates do

HRC: "Voters are an important part of the process." http://sundaygang.com/clinton/2008/04/24/hrcOnVoters.mp3 For the full context see Jon Stewart ...

John McCain, spawn of the devil? You decide.

Bush 1.0

Nancy & Newt siting on a couch

More fun, less stuff

Spooky white plant

Dusty Miller is "grown primarily for its attractive silver-gray foliage..."

IRC for Pennsylvania Primary

I started a chatroom for tonight's primay. irc://irc.freenode.net/#PennsylvaniaPrimary CNN, MSNBC say it's too early to call but HRC is leading.

How to follow me on FriendFeed

I'm designating FriendFeed as my backup, when Twitter goes down, you can catch my stream, uninterrupted, over there. Here's how to follow me on Fr...

How to decouple from Twitter, now

Twitter is still out. Mike Arrington posits that because they have a monopoly there is no reason for them to hurry to get back online. I agree. Th...

A new strategy for Twitter outages

Okay, I've bit the bullet, I'm going to change what I do when Twitter is down. 1. When Twitter is down I will post updates to an RSS feed.http://tw...

If this were a normal day on Twitter...

It wouldn't be a normal day, because tomorrow is the Pennsylvania primary and a lot of polls are coming out right now, and they're presenting an in...

The Twitter outage persists

Monday morning, the outage that started Friday night, is still going on. As a test, I posted a picture last night before signing off, only 62 read...

What does an algorithm think?

The only person who knows what it means to be on Techmeme is a former roommate of the person who has always been at the top of every list ranking p...

ReadWriteWeb turns 5

Congratulations to founder Richard MacManus and the team at ReadWriteWeb for achieving five years of technical excellence. Keep up the great work!

A new kind of Twitter outage

I wasn't sure there was an outage until I read this post on ParisLemon and then this on CNET. I noticed it last night when I came back from a seder...

Suspension of disbelief applies to networking

Every creative endeavor involves the concept of suspension of disbelief in some way. I suppose they call it different things in different areas. Wh...

Comcast is down again

For the third time in three days, my Comcast service is out. I'm posting this using my EVDO modem. The first time it was deliberate. The second ti...

Barack flips off Hillary!

Okay my inner-8-year-old really likes this one! Here's a YouTube video of Obama speaking yesterday. At 1 minute 20 seconds in, while he's talking...

Why I say I'm a blogger

There's been some confusion about why I tell company reps, when I'm pretty sure I'm going to write up the experience, that I'm a blogger. I say it ...

Links for 04/18/2008

NakedJen is featured in a NY Times article about people who write about divorces on blogs. 

I got something to say

A ten-minute quickie rant. http://sundaygang.com/dave/cn08Apr17.mp3 Hey Barack Obama was really saying something important in the "bitter" quote a...

Doc's brush with mortality

A couple of evenings ago I got a call from Nicco Mele, who now lives in Boston with his lovely wife Morra Aarons, and is my partner on the Sunday G...

Getting started with dev_appserver.py on a Mac

I want to work my way through the AppEngine tutorial on google.com. I've got a sub-folder set up in my Documents folder that contains the Helloworl...

Why I didn't delete my Twitter account

Hugh MacLeod is a great idea provocateur. Today he explains why he deleted his Twitter account. I love social experiments, and this one is a doozy....

Early notes on GoogleApps

The last few years when something new hits the tech blogosphere, I usually kick back and think while so many others scramble for position on Techme...

Man I love that li'l old pig

He sure knew what he was talking about! Hope he didn't get into too much trouble.

Why the Bear Sterns bailout was a good thing for small investors

First, a caveat, I am far from a financial expert, so I may have some of this wrong, if so, please set me straight. The cable news shows didn't do ...

Burnout in the blogosphere

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselved to death. This was one a...

Wish I had something to write about

I had a really bad cold all last week and through the weekend, but it's better this morning, I believe the sickness is gone, but the symptoms linge...

Why this is the end for the Clintons

Yesterday we got our first look at the Clinton's tax returns, and the top line is a stunner. $109 million over the last seven years. Before that I ...

Why did Seesmic buy Twhirl?

Yesterday Seesmic announced that they're buying Twhirl, the AIR-based Twitter client. I usually don't comment on acquisitions, but this one is righ...