I was up this morning at 8:30AM Eastern and saw the notes that the iPad was now available for pre-order. So I went through the process, updated my credit card on Apple's website, changed the address and phone number. The total price was a bit of a shocker -- approx $650 including tax. I hesitated. I was typing the order on a $350 Asus Eee PC that I had bought a long time ago. It gets about 8 hours on the battery. It has a 160GB hard drive, three USB ports, Ethernet, webcam builtin. Real keyboard. No DRM. I went to Amazon to see what I could get for $650. Lots of stuff I'm not buying that I'd like to have. A nice Polk Audio soundbar is about $500. I could fly roundtrip to San Francisco for that amount. I thought about which I would bring with me on a trip to San Francisco, an iPad or the Asus. No doubt, I'd bring the Asus. I have no idea what I can do with the iPad, and most important, I have a pretty good idea that I won't be able to run my software on it, or watch a movie I ripped from a DVD. Or listen to a podcast I downloaded with non-Apple software. I decided that no matter how important it is for my work to understand what Apple's product does, it can wait until I find out what the product is. I guess I no longer have the Apple bug up my ass that says I have to get one of everything they make on the day it comes out. So for now at least, the answer to the iPad is "no." Update: People say here and on Twitter that you'll be able to watch movies you rip from DVD or lis

Just read an article by Felix Salmon in response to a decision by Gawker to stop pushing the full text in their RSS feeds. I've heard this argument over years, from many people, but I've never agreed with it. I prefer if publishers include thoughtfully written synopses in their feeds, with links to the full articles. The reason I prefer this is that I am probably one of the few people to use River of News approach to feed reading, which imho is the only rational way to read feeds. I skim. I don't need the full text of each article, in fact I was so annoyed by feeds that publish full text that I made my aggregator truncate the articles at 500 characters. My eyes are very good at scanning. I can quickly tell whether I need to read the full article. This allows me to consider orders of magnitude more stories than I would if I had to wade through feeds with full text. Another point of view that's rarely considered in these debates. BTW, everyone reads a River of News these days. It's called Twitter. Mine is better. (No 140-character limit.)

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 reviews, but do show up in various support forums). After all these problems I'm reminded how scanners really should work. Thus: 1. It has a power cord and an Ethernet jack. 2. You plug the power cord into the wall and the Ethernet jack into your router. 3. A new device appears on your LAN called "Scanner." 4. Type http://scanner.loc/ into your browser and a simple configuration screen shows up. It lets you change the name of the device, turn security on, give it a username and password. 5. The device has about three buttons on it. The first turns the power off and on. The second creates a JPG image, the third creates a PDF. How to use it: Lift the lid, put a document in. Close the lid. Press a button. Refresh the home page of the scanner and click the Docs link. A list of docs in reverse chronologic order appears. To view a doc, click its link. To download, right-click its name an

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 Fillmore was. I tweeted back that I had read somewhere that that was where the Ratner's was, next to the Fillmore, and if you go in there you can even see a giant R on the floor. Ratner's was a great Jewish dairy restaurant. Until I read the article (can't remember where it was) I only knew about the now-gone Ratner's on Delancey St. I once took a blonde shiksa VP-Marketing from California to Ratner's on Delancey, and the waiter yelled at me for bringing such a fine woman to such a lousy neighborhood. That was before it all got gentrified and yuppified. Both Ratner's are gone now. Anyway, the same guy dug up a picture of the old Fillmore just before a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert. My theory was correct. It's the site of the bank. I went to the Fillmore a few times. The most memorable concert was a Grateful Dead show with a surprise toward the end. A bunch of dirty hippies with long hair and beards come out and jam with the Dead. The music

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 protect this excellent distributed technology.

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 for some reason if you store the MP3 on Amazon S3, as we do, it usually doesn't even find the enclosure. But this is variable. Today they've hacked up our link to point to some server on wordpress.com, totally without our permission. What a mess. And even so there's no enclosure in our feed for this week's show (which btw I think is one of our best, one I hope everyone listens to). For the last three episodes of our podcast, it's failed to add an enclosure element to the feed. As a result none of our listeners get the podcast on time, and it always takes some fussing by the WordPress tech people to get it working, and for all I know a bunch of people never hear the podcast. I suppose it depends on whether or not the client sees an item as read if the guid doesn't change but all of a sudden the item has an enclosure. Imho a proper podcast client would just watch the gu

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 in the OPML Editor) has support for rssCloud. For a demo here's a screen shot of an update I posted to identi.ca. Note the time of the update. I immediately refreshed the home page of my River2 server, and there's the update. Elapsed time ==> 12 seconds. That's what real time means. This is my feed. A source screen shot shows the <cloud> element. It's also a holy grail for the idea of a distributed loosely-coupled network of Twitter-like services, linked together in real time using RSS. (What a mouthful!) It's very elegant and lightweight and it works today.

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 drove it, and where did they go? And on the Internet, there's no doubt, for example that Tim Berners-Lee had the first website. Unless someone else says they did. (Haven't heard anyone say that, btw.) I was glad to get credit for creating the first podcast. Who wrote the first blog post? They give credit for that to Justin Hall (and mis-spell his name). I wrote in the About page for weblogs.com that the first blog was also the first website. TBL's info.cern.ch was a reverse-chronologic list of new websites. That's how central to the web I think blogs are. But if that wasn't the first blog, let's see Hall's first post, and decide if that really was the first one. Who had the first feed? That's going to be an interesting debate for sure. I can show you mine, it was first published on December 15, 1997. But what makes something a feed? Can you have a feed with no aggregator? Is it the aggregator that makes s

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, and it doesn't generate feeds, so I can't subscribe to stuff from SnapGroups in other RSS-aware environments. But it does look nice, and Mark is the author of Bloglines, so we know he understands feeds. These days, you can't even get into the game without basic feed support. I'd of course also like to see him support rssCloud so the connections in and out can be real-time. Second, I just got an email from Zach Copley at Status.Net saying their software, which is an open source Twitter workalike, now supports rssCloud. That is very welcome news. I tested it with River2, and while the initial handshake worked, I'm not getting the realtime updates. I expect we'll figure out the glitch quickly and then we'll have another realtime connection. What can we do with it? We'll have to explore that. Meanwhil

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.

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

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.

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 write some software, or create a format. That was my role in blogging, RSS and podcasting. And the unconference format that Jeff was describing in his talk. I wrote that format up here a few days ago, because we're doing it again at NYU, but that piece was just an edit of a document that I wrote before the first BloggerCon. I sent links to all the discussion leaders. I talked with each of them before the conference. I knew the idea would be hard to get, because we all had a lifetime of training that said that conferences were mostly one-way affairs. I wanted to try something different, a conference where there were no speakers, no panels, no audience. I wanted the good stuff, the hallway conversations, to be drawn back into the formal conference. Even though we prepared, and knew the format worked (we were running the Berkman Thursday meetings with it) most of the discussion leaders didn't get it at first. When I walked into the room where Jarvis was preparing

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 patent, are better served if we all use the older one, including Google. That way we know that we won't be forced out of the market at some future date, when the cost of staying in is paying huge legal expenses, and royalties, for "technology" we could have had for free. Unless Google also adds a disclaimer of all patents on all the new stuff, I'd be very careful about which ones we adopt.

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. It's almost as if as they were nearing completion someone said "Hey wait a minute this doesn't have any Tim Burton stuff in it," so they quickly added a bit of buffoonery, but it is totally embarassing. 4. Hollywood has a formula that it can't seem to escape. A hero forms a posse of colorful allies with big hearts who are in love with the hero. There's an evil adversary and she has a posse of despicable, frightening and evil allies. The movie is a buildup to the final showdown. The two do battle. The hero wins. The adversary is humilated and most of his posse is killed. There's a closing scene where everyone agrees life is great and the credits roll. It's Star Wars meets Harry Potter, Avatar meets Indiana Jones. Every movie with a budget fits this template, with the exception of parts of recent Pixar movies (they always include the basic elements but it doesn't al

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 in the body of stuff they search. Now the alerts are mostly useless. So in this case, adding real-time stuff actually subtracts value. If Twitter wants to make money by inserting ads into search results, and all indications are that they do, they should seriously consider relaxing the 140-character limit, so tweets can carry information worth searching for. Update: Liz Gannes has the report too. Josh Young adds: "Yes, real-time results in search suck because the feed is what's important, not the individual tweet."

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 a source and destination of thought. The format solves the problems of the typical professional conference, the problem of droning self-important speakers who bore the audience and force the good stuff out into the hallway. The first goal of the format is to suck the good stuff back into the room. Everything about the format is designed to eliminate the boring, self-serving droning. But to do it respectfully. We're not running the Gong Show. Fred Wilson wrote a piece this morning on Panels. He went on to say what he doesn't like about conferences. I am so sure that Fred would love the BloggerCon format. It was designed for people like Fred. The format is outlined on the BloggerCon site. But I'm going to reproduce that outline here, and edit it and bring it up to date. 1. We don't have speakers, slide shows or panels. 2. No Powerpoints. 3. Every room has a discussion leader, a reporter who is creatin

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 list of ideas that I shared with them and the readers of this blog. The most important idea was this -- Google could pay special attention to RSS and OPML files when they encountered them in their indexing of the web. They contained rich data which could be used for two purposes: 1. To make searches more current, what I called just-in-time, what people are calling realtime now. This has always been a big deal for me. I wanted search to be part of news and that means new -- and the faster the indexing happens, the more useful it is as news. 2. Use OPML to allow anyone to create Yahoo-like directories. Open that process up, let a billion flowers bloom. I suspected there was a lot that could happen with organizing information on the web. The right place to present it, I felt, was in Google, not in a separate directory structure. And with users actively r

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 models as California tech parties. Thanks! I had a lot of fun last night, and it gave me a good warm feeling about what we can get done in the coming months and years. I'll have more about that in the next piece. PS: One surprise was how many of the people read this blog, and were prepared to discuss the post on local business models I had written about an hour before the party. I'm always surprised by that. I don't get a lot of mail, and I know the numbers aren't even remotely in the same league as the big blogs. But when it comes to interesting people, well I guess it makes sense that I'm biased about that, but my readers are the best.

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 supplied is inadequate. That's not restaurants and entertainment. When I started looking for an apartment in Manhattan, one of my requirements was FIOS. I naively assumed I'd be able to get it because my mother had it in Queens. Manhattan is a bigger, more lucrative market than Queens, so of course Verizon has it covered. Turns out, for a variety of reasons, it's not true. There's almost no FIOS in Manhattan. But if you went to the Verizon site you'd never find that out unless you punched in every address in Manhattan and found out that very few return positive. Time-Warner Internet is not bad, in some parts of the city, and awful in others. If you want great Internet service, where should you be looking? The only way to find out is word-of-mouth. Business on the Internet is driven by finding places where dollars are spent, where people need lots of good i

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.

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 a big breakthrough. All of a sudden all the music was there for the asking, whenever you wanted. People were talking about music in supermarkets and on airplanes. We all bought iPods. Charles Mann called it the "heavenly jukebox." I found I could listen to a Cat Stevens song about fathers as many times as I wanted. "I don't just want to listen to music, I want to study it, and let it really sink in, soak it up, and then go on. No medium before the Internet made this so easy." I had a phone talk with John Gruber from Daring Fireball the other day, which I requested, after reading a piece he wrote suggesting that Apple's closing of the Flash hole in the iPhone/iPad was a way to enforce "web standards." I said it's a lot simpler and more insidious. Apple doesn't care about web standards, nor do any other large companies. That term, and "open" are jus

Not sure what's going on, if this is for everyone, or just a few, or just me. The last update in my timeline is 8 hours old. But some people are getting updates, because I've gotten replies to some of my messages. No mention of the problem on status.twitter.com. Update at noon: They have something about it at the status site. 1:PM: My timeline is back.

Like 23K others, I'm watching a live stream of a Honolulu television station previewing the tsunami that's likely to hit Hawaii in the next couple of hours. I wondered on Twitter if any of the news orgs are launching helicopters to provide a view of the surge making landfall. Brian Stelter of the NY Times notes: "we're about to watch a tsunami reach shore live on TV via Hawaii's local stations. Has that ever happened before?" Tommy Russo is going to stream the tsunami landfall from Paukukalo on Qik. I started a photo feed that tracks "tsunami" -- there are already 3 pics in the feed. If you have any info on media coverage of the landfall please post a comment here. Obviously safety comes first. But it also seems like an opportunity to make some media history.

As you may know I'm a big fan of Battlestar Galactica, as I'm sure many of you are. I was satisfied with the ending of the series, but of course disappointed that I had to give up the habit. There really hasn't been anything to fill the void. Now I'm starting to watch the spinoff series, Caprica, which is a prequel to BSG. In it, the lead character Bill Adama is a little boy. There are lots of interesting characters, and they show you how Cylons got started, we're even there for the moment when the term was coined. Very nice touch. But there's something very clever in the series that just hit me, when I was thinking about something we could do with EC2. And it's also like the little podcasting experiment we did in May 2005, with two songs -- Dixie and Green Acres. Let me explain. It started with a website for kids that has beautiful MIDIs of famous songs for kids to sing along with. I'm kind of a big kid, so I played Dixie during one of my podcasts from the beach in Florida, and sang the words over the melody. Then Rogers Cadenhead had a great idea -- he joined me in a chorus. Then Kosso joined in. Amy Bellinger and on and on. Most of the intermediate versions are gone, but Rex Hammock's survives. It's really something. Then I found a version of the Green Acres theme song. I played it on my stereo and sang the male part. Then I uploaded it. (I said in the blog post, "don't worry you'll know what to do.") Amy Bellinger played my version, and recorded the female part. It's al

The moral of the story of the Facebook patent and all the recent news from Apple and Google: Tech companies are no better or worse than big companies in other industries. They are all about keeping the stock price high, growing at the expense of their competitors, and the role of users is the same as customers in other industries, you're a source of revenue. Something wonderful happened when the Internet broke through a similar logjam in the early 90s. But that's now a distant memory. A new generation has come of age. The students I work with at NYU were small children when the Web grew out of the ruins of the PC business. They don't have any memory of what it was like before. Further, the tech companies of today are much larger and more influential than the leading tech companies of the early 90s. Today the music industry's content flows through Apple's servers. Apple is poised to play a large role in the distribution of all other forms of media. Google is huge, as is Amazon and Facebook. And the people running these companies are far more experienced and/or competent than those who were running the industry the last time there was a user takeover. My thinking has changed recently, as Google's moves with Buzz have surfaced, and Apple's moves to control sexual imagery in the the app store, as they embark on an ugly and dishonest campaign against Flash. Patents are nothing new. Last year, Google patented some very basic technology we created in the first wave of RSS apps. Ano

One of my favorite phrases in tech, after "really simple" is "just works." Here's a story of some stuff that took about five minutes to hook together, and of course as you must have guessed, it "just works." If you recall, we have an experimental feed of photos from Agence France-Presse. They are available through the River2 aggregator, which in addition to being a news reader is also a podcatcher and a photo-catcher. It's all really simple, I just use RSS and enclosures as we do for podcasting, and it all "just works." Another thing that "just works" is Dropbox. It's such a great product. I keep thinking of new uses for it. I had a thought last night, wondering if there was a way to allow everyone to have access to one of my folders so I could flow pictures from the Olympics, for the next few days, out through the web. I poked around the site and found they planned for this. So here's a folder that's updated as pictures are available, with photos from the Olympics. http://r2.ly/z2fk It's got a long url, so I shortened it (hint to Dropbox, it might be nice if these had shorter URLs). You may see some pics with question marks, that's because my machine is still synching up with Dropbox. Refresh the page, it should clear. PS: I really hope Google doesn't buy Dropbox, but I fear they will. :-(

When I started at NYU, I said there was a project I was going to help with, but I couldn't talk about it. Now it's been announced. Here's the press release: NYTimes.com to Collaborate with New York University for 'Local' East Village Community Site. That's why I started an East Village aggregator, to follow what the local bloggers are writing about. The community site will incorporate work of NYU journalism students and members of the community. Further, there are computer science students from NYU participating in the project. My role is simply to help the students when I can, and of course to learn from the process myself. Jim Posner asks the question I would probably ask if I were outside this project -- what about the paywall. I've never asked the question myself. I assume this site is outside any NYT paywall. My own opinion is that the Times will never actually implement the paywall. That's the nice thing about being in academia, I can say what I believe.

When big pieces of our culture flow through one company's servers. And when suddenly, that company takes an interest in the ideas that are expressed in that culture, shutting off certain ideas, without explanation, without answering questions. And when that company shuts off alternate channels for that culture to flow, with nonsense like they're being "open..." That's when it's probably beginning to be too late to be worried.

It would be easy to read this and feel superior, but don't. Imagine you knew nothing about computers and somehone handed you a Macintosh and told you to figure it out. How long would it take you to figure out what each of the applications did, or even what an application is, and how they differ and how they're similar. Suppose you found your way all the way to WordPress, think about how many layers of menus and user interfaces you had to master just to get there. There's the menubar at the top of the screen. The dock at the bottom of the screen. Then, when you launch the web browser, there's a new menu at the top of the screen (and did you notice or did you just think it was the same menu). Then when you get to WordPress, it has its own menu at the top of its screen. But above that menu there are things you click that kind of act like menus that take you away (toolbar icons). WordPress has several kinds of menus. The one running across the top of its screen and the one running down the left. Okay, someone told you to click OK when the machine asks you to install new software. You have to enter your special password to get it to do that. But don't click OK when you're at a web site or in an email. How do you know which you're in? And icons. Sometimes you click them once and sometimes you click them twice. You don't see all of these layers of complexity either because you were around when each one came online (I was) or you just forgot what it was like to be presented with it

We had an interesting meetup at NYU last night, the first in what may become a series of Thursday night meetups patterened after the meetups we had at Berkman in 2003 and on. The meeting was supposed to follow the BloggerCon rules of moderation, but most people don't know about these, so it takes a while before it feels normal. I had that experience trying to boot up BloggerCon-style meetings in Nashville and Palo Alto. If the people don't know how it works, it just doesn't work. So about half-way through the meeting I stopped moderating and let the discussion go where it would naturally go. And I learned something from this. I guess that's not surprising. In Silicon Valley, if you let a discussion wander, it ends up centered on the point of view of the technology industry. You have users and they generate content. Everything revolves around that model. It's pretty inhuman, because the people who do the generating are sometimes "experts" who invest their whole lives in understanding stuff, and then want to share it with others because that's what humans like to do, even if they aren't being paid. Of course the tech companies are all about being paid, for doing what they do. The users are like hamsters on a treadmill. Do you ever think about paying hamsters? I don't think so! Okay, everyone says NY is where the future is. I'm afraid this might become hype just like the story you hear about Silicon Valley. It's a way of saying the rest of the world doesn't count. Of course

I stopped using it when I saw all the stuff it dropped in my inbox. But I'm still curious -- are you using Google Buzz? Have you had any good discussions? Please add links to threads on Buzz you think are interesting, so those of us who are just lurking can learn.

Sitting in a Starbucks on 2nd Ave at 9th St. I knew this place was here cause I used to stop in after eating at the 2nd Ave Deli, which used to be a block away. What's there now? A Chase branch. The kind with no people in it. Not saying anyone did anything wrong, just thinking about how the universe allocates real estate, and how it's changing. I know the 2nd Ave Deli re-opened uptown, on 33rd betw Lex and 3rd. Not on 2nd Ave. It's a Jewish soul food restaurant, very much about people. Chase? Who knows what that is anymore. A subsidiary of JP Morgan? A bailed out government agency with the name of an old bank. Where was the government when the matzoh ball soup and pastrami needed bailing out?

I have a rule, formed by many years of experience, that I wait for 20 minutes, then I leave. Before I had the rule, I'd never know when to leave when someone was late because it's impossible to know how late they're going to be. A couple of extreme examples. 1. In 1990 or 1991 (approx) I had a meeting with a vice-president of Apple. It was hard to get the meeting, and my company desperately needed their cooperation because Apple was fudding our product, basically keeping developers from building on it. I flew back to Calif just for the meeting. I was on time. His secretary kept calling the restaurant saying he was on his way, but he never came. I waited three hours before giving up. 2. A few years later I had a meeting with a division manager of Microsoft at a Portola Valley restaurant. I waited and waited. A half-hour after the appointment I ordered. Ate my lunch, left an hour after the appointment. An hour after that I get a call from the restaurant asking where I was. (This was a meeting I totally didn't need, I was having lots of success without Microsoft. I felt I was doing him more of a favor than he was doing me.) Those were two extreme examples, but people are regularly late. I am late too, sometimes, and sometimes I'm more than 20 minutes late, but it's very rare. In my experience you have to mean it to be that late. So I have a hard and fast rule. After 20 minutes I leave. That takes the guesswork out of it. There's a very practical reason. If someone is very la

"Privacy" seems like such an abstract concept. So your privacy was violated. Get over it. Here's what happened. When Google rolled out Buzz last week they activated an unknown number of users and chose people for them to follow automatically based on who they email most frequently with. Presumably these people had to also be on Gmail. And the list of people you follow is public. Therefore the list of people you email with most frequently is now public. They are now trying to close this hole as quickly as possible. But the damage is done, people have to realize that -- the information was already disclosed. You can close the door after the horse gets out but that doesn't get the horse back. This never should have happened. But now that it has, it requires a CEO-level apology and statement of contrition and an explanation of what policies he's putting in place to be sure this never happens again. That has not happened, and does not appear likely to. What if it were Eric Schmidt's privacy. I wonder if he'd feel differently. I wonder if he uses Gmail, and if he does, did they reveal the list of people he emails most frequently? I can think of all kinds of problems that might cause, with the stock market, or the SEC, partners, wives, despots, girlfriends. I imagine Nick Denton at Gawker would like to see that list, and that Schmidt would not want him to. We all have those kinds of concerns. People might get the wrong idea if they saw the list of people I email most frequently.

I walked the length of the (unfinished) Highline today. It was great. Just wish it went all the way to 34th St. Much easier walk than on sidewalks. You don't have to stop for anything. :-)

Been a while. Google says there's been over 9 million Buzz posts and comments so far. Impressive. But there hasn't been a single link in my tweet-stream from Buzz, except for the one I posted, when I first tried it out (and quickly shut off when I saw the mess it created in my Gmail inbox). What does this mean? Well, it hasn't gone viral, at least to the people who I follow on Twitter. Fred Wilson, an investor in a bunch of companies in the BuzzSpace, has his review. Wondering if anyone is thinking of creating a wonderful webmail product that's just webmail, no tricks. With Google-quality spam filters. I'd pay $100 per year for the service. But no tricks! I don't want any new products to launch through your product. I don't want to reach into my email box one day and find a snake! In other news, Mike Arrington says TED is a sleeper. Last night Twitter sent out an update on oAuth. They saved the best for last. In June they plan to turn off Basic Authentication in favor of oAuth. They say developers should hurry up and switch now so they don't have to panic come June-time. But they don't say which oAuth developers should adopt. Problem is there are three, and Twitter says, in the very same email, that they like all three. I hear that a lot of people at Twitter read my posts, so please read this: I suppose it's okay to turn off Basic Authentication, if you really must. You're going to lose some apps when you do. I won't convert very many of mine, but at least I can since I'v

Something I threw together for some friends who are interested in news of the East Village. http://east-village.org/ If you know of any blogs that cover the East Village, please post a link here. Thanks!

This is a great essay by Doc Searls. Read it. Eventually advertising will evolve into information, companies with products will go direct, they won't need go pay Google to reach them When that happens who will pay for the millions of Google servers and the electricity and cooling they consume?

I was out in the snow today taking pics and shooting video.

I welcome comments that add other perspectives especially those that actively disagree with me in a vigorous way. However, I don't allow negative comments about people. There are plenty of places on the Internet for you to express those opinions. If a response to your comment must either be defensive or explain how offensive your comment is, I just delete your comment and block you from further participation. As long as you stick to discussing issues and products, no problem, but as soon as it gets personal -- goodbye, and there are no appeals. Another thing I don't like is talking about me in the third person in the comments. Think of a comment here as a Letter to the Editor, and on this blog, the editor is me. If you're talking about me to someone else, either take it offline or skip it. Update: If a comment is sarcastic or devoid of information or ideas, especially if it is anonymous -- I delete that too. There's no point blocking anonymous people, for obvious reasons. You think someone is talking gibberish but you don't have the guts to put your name on it -- why should anyone care?

A very brief piece with some initial thoughts. I wanted to live in NY because I always wanted to live here. This is where I grew up, where my roots are, where I fit in. I've already made friends with the owner of a local hardware store and coffee shop. Their ethnicities are different, but fundamentally they share the same approach to life -- that of a New Yorker. If you came from Chicago, that's where you'd fit in, probably. Same with any other place, Florida, Paris, Costa Rica, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Sydney, Mumbai, Egypt or Israel. But that's not all. All my career there's been a tension between technology and media. Very early in my career I saw they'd meet, and I made a good choice to put myself firmly in the technology world, because that's where the growth was. I don't think that's where it is anymore. I also don't think the growth is in media, believe it or not. I don't think the big organizations are going to turn the corner. I think they're finally coming around to that belief too. But if it isn't tech and it isn't media, what is it? Ahhh. We don't have a name for it yet. I call what I do "media hacking" and like the new Japanese doctor on Lost, I am using a phrase that only approximates what's going on. Here's what's going to happen, imho. There are a bunch of smart, mostly young, people who work either in tech startups or inside big publishing companies who will, in a few years, form the companies that are hybrids of technology and publishing that will lead us i

There are a lot of mottos that when you actually think about them, teach you not only how to behave, but how to change. For example -- "Only steal from the best" might sound like an admonition to steal, and it is, but there's more to it. It says you should acknowledge those who inspire you. They're the best. It's important to reward people for letting you stand on their shoulders because it will encourage more people to give generously, believing the generosity will be reciprocated. Another famous motto: "Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer" has a surface meaning, it appears to be practical, and it is -- but at a sub-surface level you learn that enemies brought closer can become friends. Someone you're close with is someone you share intimacies with, that's what closeness is. And over time that develops into trust. Most people you think of as an enemy are probably more like you than you can see. Bring them closer and you see they mean well. Keeping them at a distance preserves their enemy-tude (yeah I've been watching The Big Lebowski). Which brings me to a parable that I tried to relate this morning on Twitter and raised more questions than I answered. Here, in the longer form, I'll try to leave nothing to the imagination. It's a story of drawing your enemy closer, and getting a benefit. Early in 2001 I got an email from someone whose name I don't remember (I immediately forgot it) who worked at the NY Times. The email included a link to a public folder on

The other day I snapped a picture out the window of a sunny sunrise. This morning, it's a different picture. Snow! Not a lot, at least not yet. But it's here. So Manhattan is not immune, but so far a snowstorm is a lot like a rainstorm. I'll keep you posted as it develops.

I only know about first impressions of Google Buzz because once I saw what it did to my Gmail inbox, which is a mission-critical app for me, my mission became How do I turn this off? This came after I learned that it made no attempt whatsoever to be Twitter API-compatible. It violates the prime directive of new software. It starts turned on, and the way to turn it off is all-but invisible. And it invades a space that heretofore Google helped to protect. One of the big values of Gmail is its spam filter. Now all of a sudden it's as if the exhaust was reversed, and it was spraying dirt into my message stream, instead of filtering it out. New software should be easy to try out, and there should be no penalty for doing so. Here, they didn't even give us an option, I was automatically signed up, and the way out was hidden. The first bit, which is fun -- create a new post -- is followed by a flood of new messages in a semi-sacred private place, my email inbox. Bottom-line: There's no good reason why Buzz (terrible name, btw) should be integrated with Gmail. The company showed the worst judgment. It took what was the industry leading web mail product and turned it into a lab experiment. Once I turned it off (it's not hard, there's a switch at the bottom of the Gmail home page), Gmail went back to being Gmail, and not a nightmarish ad for Google's software design ineptness. After all that, Kevin Rose's analysis is right on. He calls them feature requests -- clever -- but his concern