Soft Landing?
I’m not a fan of roller coaster rides, so this is almost comforting compared to California, Florida, or Arizona.
Thanks to Mark Perry for the pointer.
“It’s been devastating to innovation”
While listening to John Gruber & Dan Benjamin’s - The Talk Show #24, I was reminded about one of my pet peeves with all the free software - it completely kills the innovation1.
John and Dan were talking about email.
I feel the same way about email clients as I do about feed readers - they’re water.
And by water, I mean money.
By money, I mean: my wallet is open for something better than Mail.app.
Elsewhere:
1. I’m calling web browsers the exception that proves the rule. For some reason, there are plenty of desktop options for web browsers, each fairly distinct and interesting from the other. Throughout the day, I regularly alternate between Safari and Camino while usually touching Internet Explorer and Firefox every other day.
I’d Rather I Could Read You Here
If services like Friendfeed, Twitter, etc, have an innovation, it’s in present reading and publishing in the save view. This single view - often described as ‘presence’ or ’social-ness’ - makes it easy to write a comment or publish a new idea quickly.
The 2…3…4? blogs I maintain is where I feel the most comfortable exploring and archiving ideas1. Yet the one (apparently killer) feature the popular weblog tools lack is this combined view. I’m thinking of the ability to easily initiate a reply on one weblog/service that can be read in its entirety on another weblog/service - without a click.
Separate places distracts and dilutes.
Now, imagine loading up feeds into a WordPress install and reading them the same way you read things within FriendFeed or Twitter or WhatHaveYou2.0. The writing process would remain the same, and when a post is published - it’s sent to all the other sites/services that are subscribed to the feed.
Weblogs today aren’t far off. The difference is immediacy and a read/write combined presentation. There’s nothing requiring a weblog post to; be larger or smaller than some arbitrary number of characters, have comments, categorization, or any number of other things that separate it from ‘microblogging’ tools.
Perhaps you feel more comfortable publishing through Twitter or YouTube or Utterz than a weblog proper. This difference should be as meaningless as our respective carriers when we’re chatting on the phone.
1. This post originally started as a comment on FriendFeed, but the lack of paragraphing and a few other annoyances sent me here.
Are Some RSS Formats More Reliable/Faster than Others?
via Twitter, I was asked the above question.
It’s a good question, cutting to the core of my ambivalence over the religious wars between RSS, Atom, etc.
The flavor of XML a feed is published in shouldn’t matter.
Neither to the publisher nor the receiver.
Any parser able to handle multiple flavors should be able to parse all flavors equally fast. Some parsing engines are built for one flavor of XML or another - rather than abstracted to parse XML in general. Then again, it’s trivial to spit out one XML format as another, so, maybe format is a conversation between the user agent and the server.
Eh. (Get a smarter parser, jeeez.)
From my studying of both RSS and Atom, comparing them is like comparing the UIs of Windows and Macintosh. They do feel different. One puts window buttons over here, one puts them over there. One is this color, one is that color. One prefers the Control key, the other prefers the Command key. Some people prefer this one, others prefer that one. One says ‘potahtoe’. One, ‘potaytoe’.
From my I understanding, Atom was developed due to perceived deficiencies and ambiguity in the RSS 2.0 spec. Perhaps RSS 2.0 is guilty of being open to interpretation. I don’t know. I’ve found it to have logical places for everything I want to publish. Same for Atom.
Last I checked, Cullect was parsing somewhere north of 8100 feeds. Cullect doesn’t and shouldn’t care if a feed is Atom or RSS or RDF or filled with crazy namespaces. Cullect has 2 jobs when it comes to feeds; parse XML tags in a smart way, publish out useful feeds in whatever flavor the user agent requests.
The biggest issue I’ve found in parsing thousands of XML feeds is badly published XML. Feeds using the tags in bizarre ways. Feeds just not conforming to any spec. Feeds published in a way that just makes parsing hard.
Both RSS and Atom publishers are equally guilty. My Wacky-Feeds-That-Won’t-Parse list of contains just as many RSS feeds as Atom feeds.
A year ago, I wrote up my thoughts on publishing RSS 2.0 for easy publishing.
Presentation for MIMA’s Info Overload Panel
4:30 minutes of my own back channel. Quicktime
Here’s the recording of the full event:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/563535
Snippet: Copy MySQL Databases Over SSH
I needed to copy a database and the idea of backing it up just to re-import1 seemed like double the work. Here’s a snippet to pipe a mysqldump into a remote database. Keep an eye on the user names and passwords - you’ll need 3 sets; one for the database your copying, one to get into your remote server, and one for the remote, target database.
mysqldump -v -uUSER -pPASSWORD --opt --compress DATABASE_NAME | ssh REMOTE_SERVER_USER@REMOTE_HOSTNAME mysql -uREMOTE-MYSQL-USER -pREMOTE_MYSQL_PASSWORD REMOTE_DATABASE_NAME
1. Backing up is a good thing. Why aren’t you doing it? Here’s a script for that.
mysqldump -h HOSTNAME DATABASE_NAME | gzip -9 > BACKUP_DIR/DATABASE_NAME.sql.gz
Ruby on Rails Snippet for Changing Relative Paths to Absolute
If you have a bunch of text containing relative path hyperlinks, and you’d like to change to them to absolute paths, you might find this snippet helpful.
content = "some text with a <a href='/path/to/relative_link/'>relative link</a>"
link = "http://somedomain.com/"
content.gsub(/=('|")\//, '=\1*/').gsub(/\*\//, link.match(/(http|https):\/\/[\w.]+\//)[0])
The asterisk ‘*’ is a hackey placeholder for the actual link swapped in with the second gsub. If you know of a way to pass in the link without needing the placeholder, awesome - paste it in the comments. Thanks.
Book Curation
BTW - I found this link on my economics reading list in Cullect which proves (at least to me) that good curation is about both depth and discovery.
Quoted in APM’s ‘The Pork Wars on YouTube’
As part of APM’s Public Insight Journalism program, I was interviewed as about the use of sites like YouTube for political issues (vs. campaigns) - specifically in the context of the recent tennis match between animal rights groups vs farm industry groups.
Here’s the bit of my interview they used on-air and online.
Jon Gordon’s Twin Cities Coffee WiFi Google Map Started
Jon Gordon’s going to be in the Twin Cities for a while and he thought it’d be fun to review the local selection of independent coffee + wifi shops.
As part of that effort, I’ve started a Google Map for listing and pin-pointing these places. There’s also a handful of invites floating around to for those that want to help.
Want one?
Update 07 July 2008
I just cracked open a PBWiki for this project: http://twincities-coffee-wifi.pbwiki.com/
Something New In the Air
Two of my favorite people are starting new podcast projects in the next week.
- Kris Smith formerly of Croncast will be launching Life in the Can next Friday, still with Betsy on the other mic.
- Dave Slusher is launching the Reality Break podcast a couple days later.
Both projects are aiming to be more sponsorship-friendly than their preceding productions and I think that’s interesting. To date, sponsored showed haven’t kept my attention, but that had more to do with me being uninterested, not an aversion to sponsors. I trust Dave and Kris will be doing some interesting things to make it a win for everyone.
Kris, Betsy, Dave, congrats on the new production.
They’re both already in Cullect.com/33.
Diversified Rhino Guarding
A year ago, I wrote about my hesitation of building on someone else’s platform. Since then, I launched Cullect. Which is nothing if not built atop OPP [1].
When I first started development on Cullect - it only supported OpenID. Only. Less popular and less understood than many other services. Today, Cullect extends 3 different platforms (4 if you count OpenID). Feels right. Feels successful. Tomorrow, I see that number increasing.
Will some services fall away? Maybe. I’m not married to any of them.
So, Cullect doesn’t care if you stop using your Twitter account and move to Tumblr. As I wrote then, I’m not interested in building on a single platform. There’s plenty of rhinos to guard.
Elsewhere:
1. Other People’s Platforms 
The State of Dense Comparisons
One of my biggest pet peeves is comparisons of the U.S to other countries - especially European countries - to show how the U.S. is “behind” in some nationwide attribute like healthcare, broadband speeds/adoption, public transit.
My first issue with these comparisons is one of scale. The United States is closer to the European Union in structure than any individual European country and multiple times larger in geographic area than either. We should be comparing individual states against individual states by GDP.
- Minnesota ~= Norway
- California ~= France
- New York ~= Brazil
- Illinois ~= Mexico
My second issue is one of population density. Lots of people in a small space increases the demand and makes it logistically easier to deliver public transit and high-speed internet access to more people faster. If nearest neighbors are 40 acres and a mule away, connecting them is far more expensive than if they live on top each other.
Ranking countries by their population density puts the US 180th (31 people/km2).
“Behind”
- Netherlands: #25 - 395 people/km2
- Belgium: #31 - 341 people/km2
- Japan: #32 - 339 people/km2
- United Kingdom: #51 - 246 people/km2
- Germany: #53 - 232 people/km2
- France: #95 - 110 people/km2
Imagine seeing 10x the number people around you everyday. Our towns, cities, and attitudes would have to dramatically change to support that. Just as they have to support their current densities (e.g. Minneapolis got a light rail train).
The US is closer by comparison to Madagascar (32 people/km2) and Estonia (29 people/km2).
I don’t remember the last time I’ve heard the US compared to those developing countries. Though from what I’ve heard about Estonia’s electronic government, there’s some interesting stuff going on there.
Again, individual state level comparisons are more appropriate here as well.
- Minnesota ~= Somalia[1]
- California ~= Greece
- New York ~= Kuwait
- Illinois ~= Spain
For the densities greater than 100 people / km2 we need to move to New England:
- South Korea ~= New Jersey
- Netherlands ~= Rhode Island
- Belgium or Japan ~= Massachusetts
- United Kingdom ~= Connecticut
- Germany ~= Maryland
- France ~= Ohio or Florida[2]
Looking at these numbers it’s clear why Thomas P. M. Barnett says the U.S. has more in common with emerging markets like Brazil and Russia than Western Europe and Japan.
We’re definitely behind Brazil in open source software adoption.
1. Interesting considering the recent influx of immigrants from that country into Minnesota
2. Yes, I know Ohio and Florida aren’t in New England. I found the comparison of France with Ohio & Florida entertaining so I wanted to keep it in.
For Sale: Lief’s Green House in Nordeast Mpls
Looks like Leif Utne bought a 1-way ticket on the high-speed underground tunnel between Minneapolis and the Pacific Northwest.
“Pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested in a beautifully-remodeled, energy-efficient home close to bus lines on a safe, quiet street in an artsy neighborhood. It has a brand-new kitchen and furnace (95% efficient), and in 2002 we did a complete attic remodel, including bamboo flooring, new windows and skylights, super-efficient Icynene insulation, and a 50-year metal roof. The remodeled attic master suite (from architects Otogawa-Anschel) has won numerous design awards and was featured in two Parade of Homes tours, as well as the StarTribune home section, HomeTime TV, and an architecture book about attic remodels” - Leif Utne
2518 Cleveland St. NE Minneapolis, MN, $250k, 3bd/2ba.
Full details at Edina Reailty
iPhone: Must Have Show Stoppers
Last week, I wrote: “For every really cool thing the iPhone has, there’s a really lame thing. 3G even more so.”
Abi Jones asked me to draw up the list.
This is the first pass at the list. I’m expecting corrections and additions, especially post-July 11.
| Cool | Lame |
| From Apple | From AT&T |
| Lower device cost | Can’t purchase online. Higher monthly rates. |
| Custom, iPhone-specific Apps | Delivered via iTunes |
| Syncs data with other computers | Except for iCal To Dos and iPhone Notes |
| Internet connection when outside of wifi | No tethering internet connection to a laptop |
Dave Just Got a New Phone
There was a time when, if you wanted telephone service, there was one model that AT&T leased to you.
Today, there’s no requirement that you and I must use the same phone when we talk to each other. Just as there’s no requirement that we must use the same email or IM client.
This weekend, Dave Slusher announced he left Twitter.
But not really.
I’m still receiving his messages at Twitter.com, just as I’m receiving Evil Genius Chronicles at Cullect.com.
That’s the beauty of the platform-agnostic publishing Twitter showed us. How and where I publish a signal is as inconsequential as where your receive it.
The important thing is that the signal is received and appropriately responded to.
Now That It’s Either Obama or McCain….
The 2 parties have a 6-month opportunity to show the American public how serious they are about solving this country’s problems.
I have a hard time imagining people are waffling between the Obama or McCain. I have an even harder time imagining anything either of these campaigns do will pull people from the other camp (negative advertising, etc). Hell, I doubt there’s anything the RNC or DNC could do that would cause Bob Barr supporters to defect.
If there was. Anything. That could cause someone to switch affiliations between now and Nov. It would be using campaign dollars to solve problems today. Instead of betting that they won’t actually need to.
Fore
Tim Brunelle passed me the baton
- 4 jobs I’ve had (and would be even less good at today):
- graphic design
- laser printer repair
- baling hay
- hand-milking sick cows
- 4 places I’ve been (and anxiously await returning):
- Brussels
- Hamburg
- All those waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge
- That hill I used to spend winter afternoons hiking up and snowboarding down.
- 4 bands or artists I am listening to:
- Lucero
- Centro-matic
- Two Cow Garage
- Gentle Reader
- 4 of my favorite foods (that I either don’t or can’t eat anymore):
- Anything from Krispie Kreme
- Cake frosting on graham crackers
- Unpasteurized cheeses
- Sandwiches from the Acoustic Cafe in Menomonie, WI
I Bet It’s Self-Fulfilling
Back in May, Barry Ritholtz bet James Pethokoukis that we are in a recession.
From my view and the numbers I’ve seen, the downturn is concentrated in the housing sector. A good thing. Unfortunately, housing is a huge percentage of our overall GDP and it completely collapsed.
Reminds me of early 2001, when the tech sector collapsed and slowed down the economy. Other sectors (even specific areas within the tech sector) were still growing.
We’re fortunate that our economy is so diversified that when one area collapses, other sectors can soften the blow.
Taking me back to the bet between Ritholtz and Pethokoukis. I find the bet quite amusing for two reasons;
- How specific the bounds are in defining “winning”. Because anything less specific is the equivalent to “I know it when I see it.”
- That the amount of money spent by the “loser”. It could easily approach, if not surpass, the ‘economic stimulus’ tax rebates. An amount designed to get us out of any recession we might be in.
First Green Light for High-Speed MSP - MKE - ORD AMTRAK
Big thanks to Tom Elko over at the Minnesota Independent for bringing me the best transit news I’ve heard all year.
The promise of cutting 2.5hrs off a trip to Chicago, while not driving myself and not being stuck in the Illinois Tollway Parking Lot is pretty attractive.
