John Kosso, in the Millennium UN Plaza Hotel
“Yet another New York coffee notes, this one with Kosso, live from the bar in the Millenium UN Plaza Hotel. We talked about tools for creating and managing podcast feeds in Flash, and lots of other random stuff. Goofy and technical.”
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Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated.
Well good morning everybody
this is Dave Winer coming to
you from the basement of the UN
Millennium Plaza Hotel in a
lovely New York City and I’m
here with John Jonathan, is it
Jonathan?
Jonathan?
Jonathan Casso.
Jonathan is a great- Just Casso.
Casso? Just Casso.
Casso.
Okay I just call you Casso.
Just Casso, what’s your name? Of course the secret’s out right now.
I don’t know.
Everybody knows you all.
And so John Casso is a British, we’re going to talk like who remembers as the British royal family today and I won’t be able to do it but he can do it.
I can’t.
Yes.
And so Casso, I met, how did we meet actually? When did you first, you got in touch with me and said that you wanted to do a podcast with me right? Or was that what it was? No, no, I don’t know.
I was like direct.
You had something.
I think it was just something interesting, I just emailed you with some interesting link to go, hey.
Oh, that’s right, no, no, you were doing the logo for Morning Coffinus, and I totally didn’t understand but it was pretty spacey and I didn’t use it, did I? Well you haven’t used it yet.
I haven’t used it yet.
There you go.
That’s the optimistic look.
I haven’t fully assimilated you yet.
Ah, that’s right.
So can you talk in that squeaky voice that you do? Unfortunately not.
But you see, I am already talking in my funny voice.
I’m actually already talking in my funny voice.
So the theory is that your name isn’t Casso at all.
What was it? Blurg.
Blurg, right.
Blurg, yes.
And your girlfriend is? The doctor.
Doctor.
But she’s really Joe, right? Yeah.
Joe is a scientist, right? Oh, I’m not supposed to, oh, no , never mind.
She’s a real doctor.
She’s a real doctor? But not like a health doctor.
She’s a doctor of themes and web.
Okay.
So we have to be careful what we talk about here, guys.
We’re doing my usual M-O for life because I’m usually, like, you lose a cannon.
So anyway, we have absolutely no idea what we should talk about.
We’re going to talk about podcasting, right? Because that’s what we’re doing .
That’s what anybody ever talks about when they’re podcasting anyway, right? Exactly.
And since we’re in New York, obviously, we have to talk about podcasting.
So what do you think about podcasting? Well, I think it’s recreated my love of radio that I had long forgotten.
Is that right? Yeah.
Especially talk radio.
And company.
You know, people like radio for company.
I mean, some people like listening to music.
I like listening to people talk .
You know, I like people watching as much as I like people hearing.
Right.
People listening, isn’t it? Yeah, there’s lots of little sounds going on here in this room.
And that’s great as well.
It is.
There’s dishes clanking.
And there’s a guy over there.
We’re actually sitting in a bar in the middle of the morning and it’s very dark.
And Danny Glover was having breakfast in the corner.
Danny Glover was sitting right there in the corner where we were eating breakfast.
I’m too old for this shit.
No, actually, I rode up in an elevator with Danny Glover, or rode down in an elevator.
And so I was being really cool, like not going, “Hey, you’re Danny Glover, aren’t you?” He said, “You’re the one. " Yeah.
Actually, it occurred to me that maybe, oops.
Sorry.
There goes the microphone.
He’ll be like, “Who the fuck are you?” Well, it’s funny.
You were, yeah, so I played it really cool.
But the mirrors in this hotel, there’s mirrors everywhere you look in this hotel, including the elevators, right? Yeah.
And so I looked, just looking ahead of me, but I could see what he was doing.
And he was making faces.
Like, you know, seeing his teeth and just making sure he looked, like, it looked at me like he looked like he was like making sure he looked really good because he’s like an actor .
If I had talked to him, you know what I would have asked him about? And he would have said, “What do you think about what Mel Gibson is doing with the Passion of the Christ and all that stuff?” Right.
Because, you know, he did all those… What was the name of the movie? The Lethal Weapon.
Lethal Weapon movies with him, where Mel Gibson played the druggy, crazy, Three Stooges guy.
Yeah.
And now, all of a sudden, Mel Gibson’s a very serious guy, right? Yeah, right.
Very.
So, podcasting.
And, see.
So, what should we talk about? I had a whole bunch of things in my head that I spaced out.
Well, that kind of… So, you listened to yesterday’s podcast, right? Yeah.
The one of you and the guys in Starbucks.
In the Starbucks.
Yeah.
Starbucks are getting a lot of mileage out of podcasting.
I think they should be sponsoring podcasts, actually.
Do you? Yeah.
Well, I think… I mean, well, not McDonald’s, but the whole Wi-Fi… Yeah.
Ubiquity.
And the… I mean, not that you need some connectivity to do a podcast.
You obviously need it.
You need connectivity to upload it.
Yeah.
So, ironically, they didn’t have enough connectivity in the Starbucks for me to upload it.
However, the place we’re sitting in right now, which is the basement of the… I’m not… Where did I say it was? Where the Millennium… The Millennium.
You have not been able to get on? No.
It says, like, not on it.
No Wi-Fi phone.
I’ve got it.
You’re… You’re installing it from me.
I’ve not.
I mean, you have free… Well, I was going to say, we have free Wi-Fi here and I get a log on the screen, you can see.
And then $0, wireless access one hour, so I click on access the internet and then it gets me this agreement, which of course I don’t read and then I accept it because I want to give them all my money and make them my errors and… Oh.
What was that? Something didn’t work here.
Oh my… Let’s see if I can go to script ing.
Yeah.
You know, I’ve just got… I’ve got no wireless networks we’ve found in, right? Strange.
Yeah.
Well, you bought a cheap computer, I guess.
Oh no.
Yeah.
So here’s… I’m going to show Casso.
We went to dinner at the 2nd Avenue deli at last night.
That was cool.
That Diana was cool.
I wish… You have a lot of clips of her, don’t you? Yeah, I do.
I wish I’d taken some photos of her.
Well, would you post them up when you get back to… Yeah, we’ll be.
Yeah, yeah.
When you get back to… I thought that was a nice picture of you.
That was me being very worried about the doctor.
Yeah.
And then there’s Edwin Newman, and some asshole complained that he thought my pictures were too orange.
But I actually like orange pictures.
He’s just a lot of ideas, yeah.
He says that any fool, except of course, except me, knows that there’s a filter.
Any fool says you can get rid of that shit.
I also got an email last night from Corey Doctro, a very snipp y little email saying that any idiot knows… People call me an idiot a lot.
Maybe I should take that to heart, but basically saying any idiot would know that what you want to do is fraudulent, but what Google wants to do is cool .
So what is it you want to do? What is it? Well, what I propose to do… I don’t really actually want to do it, but he’s released his book under the Creative Commons, and so I offered to download it and change his name , replace it with mine, and then go print out a bunch of copies and sell them, and then go find a publisher who could publish my book, and Corey says , “Oh, no, no, no, that would be fraud.
You can’t do that.
Oh, I see. " Okay, good.
That’s good to know.
There is a line in there.
I thought that was good news.
Right, right.
So you’re obviously just trying to kind of kick the boundaries around a bit? Well, I’m trying to find out where the boundaries are for these people, because basically they’ve been sort of pretending, I guess, that there aren’t any boundaries.
I didn’t believe really that it would be all right with Corey, because I can imagine that he had to go through some kind of a struggle with his publisher to get permission to do this, because his books are published by a real publisher that distributes it in bookst ores, and when they look at the idea of uploading the full text of a book to a website, they must think, “Well, that’s crazy .
Why would I want to do that?” And this is probably their worst nightmare, so Corey kind of has to say, “You can’t do that. " Well, as soon as there’s an e- book out there, you just go to alt. bindingweebooks, and you’ll be downloading it for free the next day, you know? Right, right.
And I think you could do that right now.
With anything.
But the thing that I don’t want is, you know, I used to write for a magazine, and they used to change my writing, so that I would be saying things that they wanted me to say, instead of things that I believed to be true.
And I’d always ask them, “Well, why do you do that?” And they would say, “Well, we ’re just making it better,” or " They never would have understood what you were saying,” so we made it so that they would understand it, but of course in the process, change the meaning .
It meant so much to me to be able to talk directly to people and say exactly what I meant to say that I quit, and I don’t get paid for writing, and now the ultimate insult is that this big, heartless company, Google, wants to put ads in the middle of my copy, not off the side somewhere, which I wouldn’t like either.
But they want to put it right in the middle of my copy, and I ’m sorry, it’s over the line for me.
So I said to Puri, I said, " That’s fraudulent,” since that’s a word I clarify.
Clearly that’s not a good word.
The big issue I take with that is, you’ve got no control over what these things are going to be linking to, so somebody could be reading your blog and think, “Hey, Dave likes that enough to put a link in. " Right.
I mean, obviously, there’s no point in re-explaining it, obviously, but the audience, yeah, it could be anything.
Yeah.
Dave likes.
You know? The Christian Coal.
She did.
Adolf Hitler.
Yeah, whatever.
Yeah.
For that matter, Corey Doctra.
Yeah.
Well, Corey’s a little heavy.
He told Scoble, every time Sco ble said, “What about this?” Corey’s answer was, I didn’t listen to him, but apparently people tell me, “Corey’s answer was tough shit. " Yeah.
Yeah.
And the Supreme Court of Corey is a pretty tough place.
So I mean, is it going to happen? People tell me.
Our blog is a blog power, podcast power, is this going to put a stop to Google’s auto- thinking? Apparently, people have told me from the inside of Google that it is not going to actually make it out.
And sort of the really weird thing is that Google isn’t communicating that, but that’s Google, right? Right.
Google doesn’t say very much.
But I’m pretty optimistic that, you know, the whole goal here is to make it so painfully obvious that this isn’t going to be popular, that they say, " Well, it’s not worth the trouble to do this. " I don’t know.
Yeah.
I feel out there, kind of all doing this, and I’ll do the best I can if it doesn’t work.
I’ll start using carrier pigeons to just send out my writing and fly and up-stream.
So tell me about your vision for how we’re going to be editing and uploading our podcasts.
How would you like to be editing and uploading your podcasts? Well, the way that I’m going to do it, it’s a pain in the ass at the moment, obviously.
And I think if people in the go , they read these news articles, they listen to the news, they read the paper, and they go, “Like, let’s say your dad,” he goes, “Hey, I want a podcast . " So he calls up his son and says , “Let’s assume he doesn’t have the feed father for a son. " So what’s he going to do? Is he going to hunt around a search engine to find out the answer and maybe have to install something nasty or get an FTP client, know all these various little details.
And I think what you just need is a very, very simple desktop application where you just, like the Flickr uploader, I think is a very neat little kit.
So what would it… I’m sorry, go ahead.
Because with the Flickr upload er, all you’ve got to put in is … Well, tell people about the Fl ickr uploader.
There might be one person in Antarctica who doesn’t know how that works.
Or a Linux user, it’s available , it probably runs on Flickr.
It probably will be, because I ’m sure it’s just written in Flash anyway, it’s just a Flash wrapped up.
But really, they do their stuff in Flash, is that right? Well, it looks to me like Flash , but in the interface.
So basically you’ve got this desktop application, this little square, tiny little square box in it, in obtrusive, and the first time you run it, you put in your login details that you would otherwise use to go to Flickr. com.
And you just drag your JPEGs into this window, and then you hit upload.
And that’s it.
And in fact, at that point when you upload, you can then choose to batch tag everything.
So like when I upload stuff from my phone, I just go like " moblog”, and that’s it.
And they’re away.
Pretty cool.
Yeah.
And would you know what the interface is like, at a technical level, how it communicates? Yeah, what goes on in the background? I think it’s just FTP.
Do you think it’s FTP? Well, mind you, actually, because when you get… So it’s very similar to upstreaming, then.
In a way.
But when it finishes the upload of your images, and you go, " Okay, are you done now, or do you want to go to a big page of all the photos you just did?” And if you just uploaded 100 photos, you got a long page to download that will then put every title and description form field in there for you to fill in and tag on every picture.
And the URL string, it’s like that image, that image, that image, that image, that image, that image.
You know, it sort of gets on the… Right.
Yeah, yeah.
And the… I have something like that, actually.
Because I think it’s just FTP.
I have something like that that I call “pixorter”, and I think I wrote it before Flickr existed.
So that’s one of the reasons why I was such a late adopter to Flickr, because I had my own tools.
Right.
And that is, I basically, it knows where my camera is.
So I dock my camera, and I double click on the script, runs the script, it swaps out, takes everything that’s in the “pixorter” folder and archives it, and then takes all the new shit off the camera and puts it in that folder, and then it displays them on a web page, the pictures themselves, with checkboxes next to each one of them.
And they’re all checked by default, and then I uncheck the ones that I don’t want to be uploaded.
And then there’s a button at the top and the bottom, and I click, and it uploads them.
And then what it gives me, what it’s finished, is the HTML that ’s ready to paste into a web page for all those pictures.
So I go straight from the upload process to, you know, select all, copy, do a new blog post over there, and I know that they have an interface in blogging.
See, this seems to me to be the whole trick between… But it gets complicated at this point, isn’t it? Wait, wait, let me just get this thought out.
Sorry.
Yes, it does become complicated .
Yeah, yeah.
So what I found out here, for me at least, was that you want … The next thing you want to do after doing this, well, what is the next thing? For some people, I guess the Fl ickr approach is like, “Okay, I want to go to Flickr, right?” In my case, what I want to do is do a blog post.
That’s why I put those things … That’s why I put the pictures up there in the first place.
So it’s sort of like two different approaches.
That’s why Flickr is surprising me that Flickr doesn’t have a blogging tool in it.
It does.
It does, yeah.
You can go to an image and you can go blog this.
No, that’s not what I mean.
It can interface to my blogging tool.
In other words, I use either Manila or Radio or something like that.
Anything that supports the Meta -Weblog API, right? But why didn’t they actually make it a blogging tool? Why isn’t there… That’s what… Why aren’t they competing with TypePad? Probably because they didn’t want to compete with TypePad specifically, because they wanted to partner with them.
But it seems to me they did everything, but the blogging tool, the blogging tool in Fl ickr would be the tiniest little corner of the functionality of … The Flickr is this mega-model, I mean, it seems like they must have had 100 programmers working on it.
Well, oh no, there’s a very clever guy, something else.
Stuart Butterfield, right? There was a guy called Cal Henderson, who’s been involved in all sorts of projects.
You go to imcal. com.
Where? I am Cal.
I am cal. com.
Cal. com, yeah.
I’ll go there, yeah.
Which is cool.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of a site called beta. com, B3TA, and it’s kind of all memes and goofy Photoshop postings, Photoshop re-workings of images , and it’s all nonsense, basically.
Some of the stuff that comes out of that kind of this long forum is hilarious, but yeah, Cal Henderson is the, I believe , the web, although the main kind of web level developer for Flickr.
I see, really? Yeah.
And the one thing I really like with Flickr is what they do with the DHTML where if you’re logged in, the text, the title, the description, everything, you click on it, and it turns into a form in front of your eyes, you know? We’d say it again, what happens when you’re… If you log into your Flickr account and you look at one of your old posts and you’ve got a title and description, you know, it looks like it’s just in plain HTML, but you click on it and it turns into a… So you can edit it, it turns into a form, right? It turns into a form field.
That’s very rational, and that ’s probably why you click on it, right? But what I mean is it’s not like with some interfaces where you would have to click it, you’re effectively clicking your URL, you’re reloading the whole page, and then you’re coming up with a form and then you’re posting that form.
It does it on a layer above that, a little bit of Gmail is doing things, and these sorts of very clever use sign of dynamic HTML and JavaScript sign is really good, and I think Yahoo are now going to employ a lot more of that kind of stuff.
Right.
Well, of course, the big question everybody’s asking is, well, not everybody, but many people are asking why didn’t they just like… Why did they do 360 when they also were buying Flickr? It seems like there’s so many of these community systems, and they’re really… You need just one, right? I know I said I wasn’t going to mention Evan Williams and Odeo, but I got to say this.
It seems like they’re doing the same thing, that a lot of what they want to do is basically reinvent Flickr, which seems really weird to me.
If Flickr works where the other social networking systems didn ’t work, because it has a purpose, because the purpose is photo photography, and a community built around photography can be a very rich community, and perhaps a community built around podcasting, but is so fundamentally different from photography.
People say, if you’re looking at it from a programming standpoint, oh, okay, big media objects.
Oh, well, they’re kind of the same thing, right? But that’s only from that angle , because a photograph is sort of rockable in an instant.
Because our brains are built to rock photographs, basically.
Explain rock.
Rock is a word that, as far as I know, came from a book by Robert Highline, A Stranger in a Strange Land, and there was an alien in that book named Valentine Michael Smith, and he came from Mars, and in Mars they had a concept called rocking rock, and to rock something is to appreciate the fullness of it.
And it’s not just an intellectual understanding of it, it’s to appreciate the fullness.
It’s not a, you know, so rock is like a deep understanding.
How did I just use it? I said, well, anyway, oh no, you can rock a photograph in an instant, right, whereas a podcast, you can’t, a podcast , who knows, I can’t, we’re doing a podcast right now, I don’t know how it’s going to end, right, and I’m doing it.
I can’t tell you.
We’re live.
I can’t tell you what we’re going to say.
I mean, although I’ll tell you, it’s actually to get really meta, I think this has been very interesting so far, because we’re talking about things, you know, we kind of don’t, it was the first time we ever met face-to-face, but we share these interests and these sort of software things and why they work and why they don’t, and, you know, podcasts is just about that, you know, every week probably would be a very good podcast.
It’s quite a relief to actually communicate with somebody who actually understands what I’m talking about.
Same here, absolutely.
At times I kind of, I say things and you can just see it fly over that.
Yeah, because most people just use stuff and like it and don’t like it, but don’t know why they like it or don’t like it, but if you want to make software, then you’ve got to understand why people like it and why they don’t.
So my guess is that we don’t need another, that a community built around podcasts like Flickr isn’t going to be the freewheeling, fun, interesting place that Flickr is, just simply because building a community around photographs is great.
And then of course why Yahoo, you know, we know why, because they didn’t know that they were going to acquire Flickr while they were developing Yahoo 360, they didn’t even know what Flickr was until somebody knocked at their door and said, “Hey, you know, we’ve got eight billion members here and they’re all getting ready to buy stuff from us. " Do you think they bought it just to kind of snuff it out? I hope not.
That would be really bad.
It would be.
I think that Yahoo got their mo jo back, I think they ought to go look up the word mojo.
It’s not about snuffing things out.
It’s about making love, it’s about making babies, it’s about , you know, being sexy.
Your mojo work.
Yeah, it’s like not how, it’s not the shape, but it’s how you shake it.
So anyway, so if you were to like cut to the core, I want to steer us back around to the little tool.
Well, right, the thing is that you could take a monolithic view towards, you know, what do people need for podcasting? They need basically everything under the sun or maybe they just need a little tool, right? You can’t create a podcast in communities, even podcasters without these people being at, you know, people can find a way to record an MP3 file.
I think that’s probably the easiest part.
Once I found a tool that could do it, yeah, it was easy.
I mean, I mean, I would like a Windows machine.
You’ve got to speak up sound recorder so you can record a web and then you could find a way of converting that.
I couldn’t believe that Windows didn’t have one built in, they, my machine has a microphone built into it.
Why doesn’t it have a piece of software? I don’t know whether it might be a licensing issue with Fraun hofer, maybe.
With what? With Fraunhofer.
Fraunhofer Institute who developed MP3, so maybe it might have something to do with that because I think there’s some, some dues somewhere along the line to have to pay.
Right.
Well, Microsoft’s rich, why don ’t they pay the dues? They’ve got, you know, they’ve got WMA, so they kind of go, well, we don’t want to kind of… Because they, they should just ask the, they should call it like the king of pod, what? Yeah, yeah.
The kind of pod.
He’s podcasting.
He’s what? He’s podcasting.
He’s podcasting.
He looks like it.
He might be a similar reflection.
Oh, that’s interesting.
There’s a guy who’s wearing headphones and a microphone.
He’s probably on a, on a Skype call or something like that, we might ask.
If he’s podcasting, it’s like, we’re probably the only two people podcasting in the city right now.
There’s this interesting conversation going on in the background of my podcast.
So.
Sorry, right.
So.
It’s a destructive thing.
So tell us, okay, so what are the basic functions? Say, okay, you, you were saying recording is sort of difficult or not? Well, record.
Not difficult.
I mean, it’s, I would say it’s a, it’s a no-brainer for anybody to look at the model of the flicker uploader and translate that to uploading.
Right.
That’s what you’re saying.
That’s all it is.
Right.
The same functionality as the flicker uploader, except uploading MP3 files.
Right.
And the next step after that will be uploading video files.
You know, it’s, it’ll, there will be that natural progression.
It’s as simple as that.
And then one.
So what about ID three information? You want to, the ID three information.
Well then what could possibly happen is maybe you would obviously, okay, it’s going to be a simple tool.
And what about generating RSS? You’re going to do that too? Yep.
Okay.
Simple tool.
Let’s say I, I dragged an MP3 file onto the, onto my application and I hit the upload button.
When that file is uploaded, it goes, okay, so, or in fact, maybe before it uploads, it goes, so what’s the title? What’s my description? I already know what the date is .
I already know who you are.
I don’t know who the author is.
I know who the author is.
Do you want to add some tags to it, to it, to it now? Do you want to add any, any other metadata to it to, to, to , um, right, to make it, um, more, uh, or to make it better? Um, now, as far as the tools to write the ID three tags on the desktop, it would actually be easier for me to do it on the server.
And once it’s arrived.
Right.
Because you have a PHP tool that does that.
Yeah.
Well, there’s like, there’s, there’s loads of open source.
So what you could do then is like basically read the RSS file and take the data off of that and use, and do that on the server.
You know, I could generate the RSS and, um, either on the, either on the desktop or the, or the web.
So you’re going to, in, in kind of, you haven’t like, like actually done this work yet, have you? I’ve, I have, I have, I have, where would people go if they wanted to take a look at what it might look like? So keep an eye, keep an eye on podbat. com, P-O-D-B-A-T.
I see.
Okay.
Cool.
Um, yeah.
I’m sorry.
Because.
And the, well, the, the, the reason why it’s called podbat is because we’ve got podcatch ers out there and catchers.
What are they catching? You know, you have a batter.
You know, batter up.
You know, get up.
They knew that in Britain.
I thought that was, oh, it’s cricket.
Or you are.
Oh, yes.
It’s cricket.
Bowling.
You say building.
Yeah.
You know, whatever.
I can’t do that else.
They talking like an American.
So, um, yeah.
So you would read the RSS file information and throw that onto the ID, three tags and.
I mean, there’s no, I mean, originally, wouldn’t it, would you ping audio. weblog. com to it ? Oh, totally.
Yeah.
Totally.
I mean, you’d be at it.
All those kinds of things for people.
All that, all that sort of stuff could be either end.
Could be on the server end.
It could be on the, on the, on the, on the application.
What about, um, how about this? This would be cool.
How about, um, letting them categorize their, um, their, uh , their feed and categorize each post too.
Absolutely.
So that it could be routed to a directory.
It’s a directory.
Yes.
So, so you sort of like do a, what they call a folksonomy.
Folksonomy.
It’s a very nice sounding thing .
So yeah.
So you could do that too, right ? Yeah.
So it’s sort of like the, the front end for, and you’re going to also operate the back end too.
So it’s client.
It’s a client server.
What protocol did we talk about that? What protocol do you want to use between the two? Well, you see, this is why I was trying to work out what, um , what the Flickr uploader does.
And, and I, in fact, I was about to say that it uses FTP because I’ve, I’ve written a version of it that uses FTP because the , uh, the wrapper that I have for the, uh, for the flash, um, has, you know, has built in FTP functionality.
It’s a good email.
It could, it could email it if you want to do, but the simplest way to do it is actually FTP upload, um, and I got a feeling that’s what they do.
I, a couple of years ago, I wrote something called camovie.
com, which is C A M O B Y dot com.
And the when, basically when camera phones came out, I had one as soon as you get one and I wanted it to be called a camovie.
I don’t like, uh, in America, you call mobile phones, cell phones.
We don’t call them cell phones.
What are you calling? We have mobiles, you know, or M obi.
Oh, that’s right.
Everyone’s like, where’s my M obi? Where’s my mobile phone? It’s your mobile.
Right.
Um, in Germany, they call it handy, you know, it’s where it ’s, what, it’s mine handy.
Mine handy.
Mine handy.
It’s small.
It has a camera.
What MP3 would call that? It’s nothing about German accents to crack me up, like Dr . Strangelo.
Yeah.
It’s one of my favorite movies.
Really, I didn’t know.
So that’s what that means.
So they call them Mobi.
Mobi.
Yeah.
Some people, some people call them the Mobi.
That’s my Mobi.
But, but very few people call it their cell phone.
And we, that’s what we call it.
Yeah.
Yeah, call it our cell.
Um, so, so basically I, I, I went straight out and bought like camobi. com.
And every time I talk about a mobile phone with a camera, I don’t call it a camera phone.
Or, yeah, maybe, maybe I’d do, but what I wanted to do is make sure that every time I said the word or spoke about these camera phones that I had, because I was like the first person I knew of one.
Um, and then Joe, a doctor, um, had one.
And the, uh, and I wanted to just, you know, you keep saying things enough from people.
It’s like podcasting, you know, if somebody had said blog casting straight off the bat.
I like blog, blogcasting.
Yeah.
Well, because it, because it doesn’t have that horrible white plastic ring to it.
I know.
Well, this is something that you and I both agree on that, that it’s not a very popular thing is that, that the user interface of the iPod is like from hell.
The iPod is a great word.
Actually, something I wanted to say, you know, the, the invitation to serious, to serious.
Oh yeah.
Apparently, um, some people, some colleagues of mine where I was yesterday, they said, make sure you go because they have these pods, these audio booths where they record things and they’re like little pods and they’re all kind of like acoustic kind of.
Yeah.
Oh, pod is a great word.
I have a, I have a Lexus.
Yeah.
Well, it’s still around.
When I got my, uh, Lexus RX 300 , uh, SUV in 1999, uh, it has this sort of ovular rounded shape to it, sort of like an egg in a way.
Uh, it kind of looks like one.
And I felt like this was like my pod and that’s what I called it.
And, uh, I used to tell people that basically this is sort of like your standard issue car.
Everyone should be issued one at birth, basically.
It’s sort of like Lexus for our species.
It’s a transportation for our species.
In other words, I kind of liked it or whatever.
Some people get like silver bracelets and like, you know, and, uh, little, little white dresses, but give them a Lexus.
Well, you know, kids got to get around, right? Yeah.
Speaking of which, um, two of my creations are, have their birthdays today.
Oh yeah.
Scripting news is eight years old today and, uh, and frontier is 17 years old.
17 years old.
17 years.
And so as I said today in my post, uh, if it were a human being and 17 years old and be ready to reproduce, ready to drive and pretty close to leaving home.
Old enough to do a lot more.
And as a parent of such a 17 year old, one would have to say it’s time to let go.
It’s kind of a suspicious in a way that last year was the year that all this wonderful technology was released under the GPL.
And, uh, and slowly I think a community, a new community is developing around that.
And some cool things are going to happen there.
So let’s go back to your thing.
So you’re running a backend and a front end.
Your backend is just simply for processing the, uh, putting the ID three information and maybe maintaining a directory.
I did.
Hold on.
Doing some pings too.
The other thing is I have to say kind of step one will be, will be, uh, simple, um, simple client and simple desktop and even the, uh, um, I don’t know how to forget that the, the backend will do some processing.
But if I can do it so that there’s no backend processing, so all you need is red space.
Right.
That would be pretty good too.
Absolutely.
There you go.
That’s it really.
You know, if you can do that, then problem solved.
And if, and if it’s easy, there ’s no problem with the client doing the pinging and sorting things out for tags and stuff like that.
Yeah.
I mean, it’s a no brainer, but also the, um, uh, you mentioned , um, earlier about, uh, was it, um, what I was going to say is it could also be a catch er, this desktop client as well as being a batter could also be a catcher because as well as putting in my FTP details or, or, um, uh, the details to my website, um, I could also put in the drive letter that my media player plugs in out and bingo, I’m just doing a file copy.
You know, I, I can do, I can do download with nice, pretty progress bars and little, little aliens jumping around and bouncing around.
Well, let’s don’t underestimate the importance of aliens bouncing around.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The problem with a lot of these tools is that there’s like, there aren’t any good, we’re the good Easter eggs.
You know, it’s 2005.
Where are your Easter eggs? You know, we need to, there’s no problem.
We don’t need to have fun, but what the hell? Exactly.
Oh, that’s good.
Yeah.
Well, I think you’re going to do the, the, the creation tool first.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I’ve built, I’ve, I’ve already built half the, half the, well, I’ve built the, an upload of what I haven’t done is do the RSS beer and that’s great.
Right.
So you think like maybe like tomorrow or.
In terms of what I could get done on the plane, in terms of how much I sleep on the plane.
You might want to catch up on your sleep on the plane.
I might.
I might have to do a bit of that.
So you’re flying tonight.
You’re flying across the ocean tonight.
Yeah.
I’m going to take off at about 10.
And you arrive at 7 in the morning? 9.
And I arrive at, I arrive at 10 , I think Saturday.
Is that right? Saturday morning.
Right.
So I’m just, I’ll fly through the night and chase the sun.
That’s pretty easy.
New York to London is easy.
San Francisco to London is not.
So what you’ve got, we did Vegas, Vegas to London from CES .
And that was, I’ve never done, I’ve never been west coast before.
Really? I’ve never been to San Francisco yet.
And that’s where I, I had an ambition to go and work there.
You know, that was, that used to be my ambition.
I was like, okay, I’m going to do this.
Establish myself and what, in what I, in, in my realm of what I’m good at.
Workout work.
You’re just a few years too late.
You would have, they would have welcomed you with open arms during the dot-com boom.
Exactly.
And spit you right out.
Yeah, maybe, yeah, yeah.
Maybe I would be really.
You’re probably better off having been where you are and get a real job.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we’ve been doing this, this is 34 minutes into it.
So I think we said that we would, yeah, I think you said that we would try to keep this in, you know, because we both, I have to check out of my hotel , you have to check out of yours.
I gotta get back over and check .
Um, just a little bit of housekeeping.
What’s your email address? Uh, hotbat@gmail. com.
Hotbat@gmail. com.
And a lot of people asked me for my dad’s email address in the last one that I didn’t want to put it on scripting news because I didn’t want to like subject him to the spam and whatever.
I would have happily put it into the podcast that he did, um, because that would have sort of meant that people would have had to listen to the podcast.
And just say things.
No, I just want to say his email address now.
So if anybody wanted to write him, it’s Lwiner9@yahoo. com.
Interesting.
I was just thinking of with Gmail.
You listen, by the way, you listen to my dad’s podcast.
Yeah, yeah.
He thought it was pretty good.
Hello, the guy.
I got so much positive feedback on it.
Yeah.
My brother from, yeah.
He said, I’m just listening to Dave’s dad.
We’re going to try to do one with my mom and my dad tonight.
That was good.
Yeah.
We kind of said hello briefly to your mom.
When you Skype with her, you just played the, the, the, the blood cast.
Oh, she listened to it.
I don’t think you ever talked to her, but she listened to it.
Oh, I thought she was there in the background when you said.
No, no, I was in Florida, but no, my mother listens to all the podcasts.
She’s a real, real, you know, she’s probably listening to this right now.
You know, hi mom.
Hi Dave’s mom.
And so yeah, I’m going to try to do one with both of them or maybe just her tonight or whatever.
So you get to meet the whole clan.
There was, there was something else I was going to say then, but it’s slipped my mind.
Maybe he’ll keep.
I’m sorry for, I interrupted you.
Oh, we can wait.
It’s okay.
We have nothing better to do.
That’s true.
Kelly time, drinking coffee.
Oh yeah.
This is really morning coffee notes after all because we, they gave us a full pot of coffee here.
So we feel obligated.
I was, I was, I had just said your email address, which is h odbat@gmail. com.
I was going to say the Gmail thing.
Yeah.
Obviously, you know, like the, the darling of the web mail now , obviously the, uh, now are they going to be putting author linking into the email copy? Yeah.
Is that, I mean, I know.
Oh yes.
Of course they are because, because they have had since, I mean, I, I like the ads that they put on in Gmail because they are relevant to something I might be talking to somebody about.
Right.
And what if I’m talking to somebody about.
And they’re easy to do now.
Right.
Well, that’s exactly it.
You know, it’s like you can, you know, you don’t notice them unless you kind of just, oh, look, there’s ads and the, the, uh, but if links start appearing in my email.
Yeah.
No kidding.
You know, get out of here.
Yeah.
Get off my email, you know, that’s like, that’s, that’s.
That’s the funny thing about the auto link thing is that it ’s going to creep up on people and they’re going to wonder why nobody complained about this when the first appeared.
Would you mind if, would, would you be less, what about the argument about if they would use like dotted lines, wavy lines.
No, I wouldn’t, that would not be enough for me.
And in fact, what I have suggested to them, although they didn’t really want to hear this is that, um, is that they do the links off on the side the same way they’re doing the linking and ad copy, you know, um, in other words, create a frame over on the right-hand side of the page, if you must do this and just say related links and then boom, boom, boom, boom, you know, link to things that you need, absolutely need to link to so that they’re segmented so that it’s very clear that this isn’t part of my content.
It’s in a frame off by itself.
Uh, I, I still wouldn’t like that because they’re not, because I don’t have ads on most of my web pages.
The ones that I do have ads on, sure.
That’s fine.
See, Google AdSense is all opt- in, right? And I’m a member of it.
I use it.
I get my check every month.
I deposit it.
It helps to free my costs of web hosting, but I only put it on non-editorial pages.
I put it on weblogs. com.
I put it on, you know, like XML or PC, which is by the way, really high flow site.
So I put an ad on that because there’s basically just an archive.
There isn’t a whole lot of new stuff being posted in, you know , so I make my choice about where the ads go and I put them there.
And I’d be perfectly happy to, to continue doing that.
Why they’re not, I think it’s kind of obvious.
They want to make more money.
And they, if they can cut me out of the equation, they’ll make my money and their money.
Number one.
Number two is if they can put ads everywhere and when I will only put them some places, then, you know, then that makes them more money too.
But I would vastly prefer that to the idea of them messing with what I write.
Messing with what I write is just totally non-acceptable.
We’re going to have to, if that is the way the web is going to work, we’re going to have to leave the web.
And not only am I going to have to leave the web, but any publication with integrity is going to have to leave the web because the reader simply isn’t going to know who’s saying what anymore.
Well, people won’t trust the, won’t trust the HTML, won’t trust the web browser anymore.
What they’re seeing.
What they will trust is smart little bouncy applications written in flash that are really good at reading RSS feeds.
So there’s the data, there’s your content, your content’s there.
Well, that opens the whole, everybody, this one, when people really… The browser is dead, everybody.
Well, now, I don’t want to go that far because you can just leave it there and see if you take it back after I say this though.
Is that when people really give this discussion serious thought and don’t just dismiss it out of hand, the issue, next issue that comes up is, well, what about blog lines? Like, when they put ads on your copy, how do you feel about that? And, you know, blog lines is showing up more and more in my referral logs.
I mean, there’s a lot of people reading my stuff in blog lines.
And so, you know, I’ll tell you , the answer is I don’t think that’s as objectionable as what Google does because there ’s no question when people are reading it in blog lines that they know that they’re reading something that has been processed.
So, they’re less likely to believe that I put the link there.
On the other hand, you know, I don’t think it’s a good idea and I don’t want them to do it.
And would it stop me from publishing an RSS? Probably not.
Would it lead me to do something like blocking blog lines from subscribing to it? In other words, all that this is going to accomplish in the end, all this crap that these technology companies want to do, or at least Google, you know, let’s not, like, speak on behalf of the other technology companies so far, it’s just Google, is that they want to just balkan ize the web.
They want us to put up a, you know, we’ll put up a Berlin Wall.
We’ll try to keep them in, you know? They already have phenomenal problems right now with, I mean , Google, actually, very few people are focused on this and it’s kind of hard to switch the focus without sort of sounding a little alarmist, but Google’s having a lot of trouble keeping maintaining the integrity of their index because people have become so good at spamming it.
And so, you know, you’ll do searches on things that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with Viagra, but somehow Viagra will be the first hit.
Boy.
That was a good one.
Right on, everybody.
Yeah.
Oh, I don’t want to say what I was thinking, but yeah, everybody.
Sorry.
Boy.
Yeah.
Anyway, so everybody, we are now at 42 minutes.
Wow.
Wow.
So we’re going to have to do this again sometime.
We’ll have to do it.
You know, we have, this is our second podcast, right? We have Skype.
Yeah.
And I’m going to, the last one we did, it kept kicking out.
My Skype kept kicking out.
We’re going to have to figure out how to do that.
Or I’ll come to London and we can do one over there on the other side of the earth.
Well, I think there are some people who may be wanting to see.
Even if they don’t want to see me, I can afford to pay my own way.
You know, that happens sometimes too.
And you’ve got a big birthday coming up too, haven’t you? I do, but I also have to get eye surgery.
So that’s sort of sitting in the middle of it.
Right, when’s that going to happen? I haven’t scheduled yet.
So, you know, I’m going to try to leave myself free to go have , yes, I have the big 50th.
So today’s 17th frontier.
It’s eight for scripting news, but that’s nothing compared to the next one.
Which is coming up in a month and a day, which is my 50th birthday.
In fact, there’s a guy, there’s a guy, when you do come over, because, oh, yes, you will be coming to London.
You know, you will.
How about the girls who are saying, oh, yes, he will be coming to London? Oh, yes, you will be coming to London.
The girls don’t talk that way.
The girls talk like that.
Oh, dear.
Tangent.
We’re having too much fun here.
That’s 43 minutes.
43 and 17 seconds, 18 seconds.
This guy, there’s like one day between your birthdays.
Yeah, that’s interesting.
Now I have a story to go with that, too.
They were trying to have me born on my grandfather’s birthday.
I think you’re only a week away from my father’s birthday, actually.
Yeah, I was one day away from my grandfather’s birthday.
He was born on May 1st.
It’s not Gemini, is it? Taurus, which means obstinate and pushy.
Yeah, I’m Gemini.
And what does that mean? Diplomatic.
Some people would say two-faced .
I would say diplomatic.
No, but I avoid arguments by trying to see both sides of the problem.
No, I think it’s good to have people like that around.
I mean, that’s kind of… You also digress. You should have that on your business card .
I digress.
Me? No, I don’t.
I’m just like this recurring, this there.
Recursive.
It’s okay. You need somebody around.
You need somebody to tap on the table.
That’s right.
Okay, so everybody, this is now 43 minutes, so we’ve talked enough.
Thank you.
Coming to you from New York City, the basement of the U. N.
Millennium Plaza Hotel.
This is Morning Coffee Notes for April 1st, 2005.
It’s all been a joke.
(laughing)
Jonathan is a great- Just Casso.
Casso? Just Casso.
Casso.
Okay I just call you Casso.
Just Casso, what’s your name? Of course the secret’s out right now.
I don’t know.
Everybody knows you all.
And so John Casso is a British, we’re going to talk like who remembers as the British royal family today and I won’t be able to do it but he can do it.
I can’t.
Yes.
And so Casso, I met, how did we meet actually? When did you first, you got in touch with me and said that you wanted to do a podcast with me right? Or was that what it was? No, no, I don’t know.
I was like direct.
You had something.
I think it was just something interesting, I just emailed you with some interesting link to go, hey.
Oh, that’s right, no, no, you were doing the logo for Morning Coffinus, and I totally didn’t understand but it was pretty spacey and I didn’t use it, did I? Well you haven’t used it yet.
I haven’t used it yet.
There you go.
That’s the optimistic look.
I haven’t fully assimilated you yet.
Ah, that’s right.
So can you talk in that squeaky voice that you do? Unfortunately not.
But you see, I am already talking in my funny voice.
I’m actually already talking in my funny voice.
So the theory is that your name isn’t Casso at all.
What was it? Blurg.
Blurg, right.
Blurg, yes.
And your girlfriend is? The doctor.
Doctor.
But she’s really Joe, right? Yeah.
Joe is a scientist, right? Oh, I’m not supposed to, oh, no , never mind.
She’s a real doctor.
She’s a real doctor? But not like a health doctor.
She’s a doctor of themes and web.
Okay.
So we have to be careful what we talk about here, guys.
We’re doing my usual M-O for life because I’m usually, like, you lose a cannon.
So anyway, we have absolutely no idea what we should talk about.
We’re going to talk about podcasting, right? Because that’s what we’re doing .
That’s what anybody ever talks about when they’re podcasting anyway, right? Exactly.
And since we’re in New York, obviously, we have to talk about podcasting.
So what do you think about podcasting? Well, I think it’s recreated my love of radio that I had long forgotten.
Is that right? Yeah.
Especially talk radio.
And company.
You know, people like radio for company.
I mean, some people like listening to music.
I like listening to people talk .
You know, I like people watching as much as I like people hearing.
Right.
People listening, isn’t it? Yeah, there’s lots of little sounds going on here in this room.
And that’s great as well.
It is.
There’s dishes clanking.
And there’s a guy over there.
We’re actually sitting in a bar in the middle of the morning and it’s very dark.
And Danny Glover was having breakfast in the corner.
Danny Glover was sitting right there in the corner where we were eating breakfast.
I’m too old for this shit.
No, actually, I rode up in an elevator with Danny Glover, or rode down in an elevator.
And so I was being really cool, like not going, “Hey, you’re Danny Glover, aren’t you?” He said, “You’re the one. " Yeah.
Actually, it occurred to me that maybe, oops.
Sorry.
There goes the microphone.
He’ll be like, “Who the fuck are you?” Well, it’s funny.
You were, yeah, so I played it really cool.
But the mirrors in this hotel, there’s mirrors everywhere you look in this hotel, including the elevators, right? Yeah.
And so I looked, just looking ahead of me, but I could see what he was doing.
And he was making faces.
Like, you know, seeing his teeth and just making sure he looked, like, it looked at me like he looked like he was like making sure he looked really good because he’s like an actor .
If I had talked to him, you know what I would have asked him about? And he would have said, “What do you think about what Mel Gibson is doing with the Passion of the Christ and all that stuff?” Right.
Because, you know, he did all those… What was the name of the movie? The Lethal Weapon.
Lethal Weapon movies with him, where Mel Gibson played the druggy, crazy, Three Stooges guy.
Yeah.
And now, all of a sudden, Mel Gibson’s a very serious guy, right? Yeah, right.
Very.
So, podcasting.
And, see.
So, what should we talk about? I had a whole bunch of things in my head that I spaced out.
Well, that kind of… So, you listened to yesterday’s podcast, right? Yeah.
The one of you and the guys in Starbucks.
In the Starbucks.
Yeah.
Starbucks are getting a lot of mileage out of podcasting.
I think they should be sponsoring podcasts, actually.
Do you? Yeah.
Well, I think… I mean, well, not McDonald’s, but the whole Wi-Fi… Yeah.
Ubiquity.
And the… I mean, not that you need some connectivity to do a podcast.
You obviously need it.
You need connectivity to upload it.
Yeah.
So, ironically, they didn’t have enough connectivity in the Starbucks for me to upload it.
However, the place we’re sitting in right now, which is the basement of the… I’m not… Where did I say it was? Where the Millennium… The Millennium.
You have not been able to get on? No.
It says, like, not on it.
No Wi-Fi phone.
I’ve got it.
You’re… You’re installing it from me.
I’ve not.
I mean, you have free… Well, I was going to say, we have free Wi-Fi here and I get a log on the screen, you can see.
And then $0, wireless access one hour, so I click on access the internet and then it gets me this agreement, which of course I don’t read and then I accept it because I want to give them all my money and make them my errors and… Oh.
What was that? Something didn’t work here.
Oh my… Let’s see if I can go to script ing.
Yeah.
You know, I’ve just got… I’ve got no wireless networks we’ve found in, right? Strange.
Yeah.
Well, you bought a cheap computer, I guess.
Oh no.
Yeah.
So here’s… I’m going to show Casso.
We went to dinner at the 2nd Avenue deli at last night.
That was cool.
That Diana was cool.
I wish… You have a lot of clips of her, don’t you? Yeah, I do.
I wish I’d taken some photos of her.
Well, would you post them up when you get back to… Yeah, we’ll be.
Yeah, yeah.
When you get back to… I thought that was a nice picture of you.
That was me being very worried about the doctor.
Yeah.
And then there’s Edwin Newman, and some asshole complained that he thought my pictures were too orange.
But I actually like orange pictures.
He’s just a lot of ideas, yeah.
He says that any fool, except of course, except me, knows that there’s a filter.
Any fool says you can get rid of that shit.
I also got an email last night from Corey Doctro, a very snipp y little email saying that any idiot knows… People call me an idiot a lot.
Maybe I should take that to heart, but basically saying any idiot would know that what you want to do is fraudulent, but what Google wants to do is cool .
So what is it you want to do? What is it? Well, what I propose to do… I don’t really actually want to do it, but he’s released his book under the Creative Commons, and so I offered to download it and change his name , replace it with mine, and then go print out a bunch of copies and sell them, and then go find a publisher who could publish my book, and Corey says , “Oh, no, no, no, that would be fraud.
You can’t do that.
Oh, I see. " Okay, good.
That’s good to know.
There is a line in there.
I thought that was good news.
Right, right.
So you’re obviously just trying to kind of kick the boundaries around a bit? Well, I’m trying to find out where the boundaries are for these people, because basically they’ve been sort of pretending, I guess, that there aren’t any boundaries.
I didn’t believe really that it would be all right with Corey, because I can imagine that he had to go through some kind of a struggle with his publisher to get permission to do this, because his books are published by a real publisher that distributes it in bookst ores, and when they look at the idea of uploading the full text of a book to a website, they must think, “Well, that’s crazy .
Why would I want to do that?” And this is probably their worst nightmare, so Corey kind of has to say, “You can’t do that. " Well, as soon as there’s an e- book out there, you just go to alt. bindingweebooks, and you’ll be downloading it for free the next day, you know? Right, right.
And I think you could do that right now.
With anything.
But the thing that I don’t want is, you know, I used to write for a magazine, and they used to change my writing, so that I would be saying things that they wanted me to say, instead of things that I believed to be true.
And I’d always ask them, “Well, why do you do that?” And they would say, “Well, we ’re just making it better,” or " They never would have understood what you were saying,” so we made it so that they would understand it, but of course in the process, change the meaning .
It meant so much to me to be able to talk directly to people and say exactly what I meant to say that I quit, and I don’t get paid for writing, and now the ultimate insult is that this big, heartless company, Google, wants to put ads in the middle of my copy, not off the side somewhere, which I wouldn’t like either.
But they want to put it right in the middle of my copy, and I ’m sorry, it’s over the line for me.
So I said to Puri, I said, " That’s fraudulent,” since that’s a word I clarify.
Clearly that’s not a good word.
The big issue I take with that is, you’ve got no control over what these things are going to be linking to, so somebody could be reading your blog and think, “Hey, Dave likes that enough to put a link in. " Right.
I mean, obviously, there’s no point in re-explaining it, obviously, but the audience, yeah, it could be anything.
Yeah.
Dave likes.
You know? The Christian Coal.
She did.
Adolf Hitler.
Yeah, whatever.
Yeah.
For that matter, Corey Doctra.
Yeah.
Well, Corey’s a little heavy.
He told Scoble, every time Sco ble said, “What about this?” Corey’s answer was, I didn’t listen to him, but apparently people tell me, “Corey’s answer was tough shit. " Yeah.
Yeah.
And the Supreme Court of Corey is a pretty tough place.
So I mean, is it going to happen? People tell me.
Our blog is a blog power, podcast power, is this going to put a stop to Google’s auto- thinking? Apparently, people have told me from the inside of Google that it is not going to actually make it out.
And sort of the really weird thing is that Google isn’t communicating that, but that’s Google, right? Right.
Google doesn’t say very much.
But I’m pretty optimistic that, you know, the whole goal here is to make it so painfully obvious that this isn’t going to be popular, that they say, " Well, it’s not worth the trouble to do this. " I don’t know.
Yeah.
I feel out there, kind of all doing this, and I’ll do the best I can if it doesn’t work.
I’ll start using carrier pigeons to just send out my writing and fly and up-stream.
So tell me about your vision for how we’re going to be editing and uploading our podcasts.
How would you like to be editing and uploading your podcasts? Well, the way that I’m going to do it, it’s a pain in the ass at the moment, obviously.
And I think if people in the go , they read these news articles, they listen to the news, they read the paper, and they go, “Like, let’s say your dad,” he goes, “Hey, I want a podcast . " So he calls up his son and says , “Let’s assume he doesn’t have the feed father for a son. " So what’s he going to do? Is he going to hunt around a search engine to find out the answer and maybe have to install something nasty or get an FTP client, know all these various little details.
And I think what you just need is a very, very simple desktop application where you just, like the Flickr uploader, I think is a very neat little kit.
So what would it… I’m sorry, go ahead.
Because with the Flickr upload er, all you’ve got to put in is … Well, tell people about the Fl ickr uploader.
There might be one person in Antarctica who doesn’t know how that works.
Or a Linux user, it’s available , it probably runs on Flickr.
It probably will be, because I ’m sure it’s just written in Flash anyway, it’s just a Flash wrapped up.
But really, they do their stuff in Flash, is that right? Well, it looks to me like Flash , but in the interface.
So basically you’ve got this desktop application, this little square, tiny little square box in it, in obtrusive, and the first time you run it, you put in your login details that you would otherwise use to go to Flickr. com.
And you just drag your JPEGs into this window, and then you hit upload.
And that’s it.
And in fact, at that point when you upload, you can then choose to batch tag everything.
So like when I upload stuff from my phone, I just go like " moblog”, and that’s it.
And they’re away.
Pretty cool.
Yeah.
And would you know what the interface is like, at a technical level, how it communicates? Yeah, what goes on in the background? I think it’s just FTP.
Do you think it’s FTP? Well, mind you, actually, because when you get… So it’s very similar to upstreaming, then.
In a way.
But when it finishes the upload of your images, and you go, " Okay, are you done now, or do you want to go to a big page of all the photos you just did?” And if you just uploaded 100 photos, you got a long page to download that will then put every title and description form field in there for you to fill in and tag on every picture.
And the URL string, it’s like that image, that image, that image, that image, that image, that image.
You know, it sort of gets on the… Right.
Yeah, yeah.
And the… I have something like that, actually.
Because I think it’s just FTP.
I have something like that that I call “pixorter”, and I think I wrote it before Flickr existed.
So that’s one of the reasons why I was such a late adopter to Flickr, because I had my own tools.
Right.
And that is, I basically, it knows where my camera is.
So I dock my camera, and I double click on the script, runs the script, it swaps out, takes everything that’s in the “pixorter” folder and archives it, and then takes all the new shit off the camera and puts it in that folder, and then it displays them on a web page, the pictures themselves, with checkboxes next to each one of them.
And they’re all checked by default, and then I uncheck the ones that I don’t want to be uploaded.
And then there’s a button at the top and the bottom, and I click, and it uploads them.
And then what it gives me, what it’s finished, is the HTML that ’s ready to paste into a web page for all those pictures.
So I go straight from the upload process to, you know, select all, copy, do a new blog post over there, and I know that they have an interface in blogging.
See, this seems to me to be the whole trick between… But it gets complicated at this point, isn’t it? Wait, wait, let me just get this thought out.
Sorry.
Yes, it does become complicated .
Yeah, yeah.
So what I found out here, for me at least, was that you want … The next thing you want to do after doing this, well, what is the next thing? For some people, I guess the Fl ickr approach is like, “Okay, I want to go to Flickr, right?” In my case, what I want to do is do a blog post.
That’s why I put those things … That’s why I put the pictures up there in the first place.
So it’s sort of like two different approaches.
That’s why Flickr is surprising me that Flickr doesn’t have a blogging tool in it.
It does.
It does, yeah.
You can go to an image and you can go blog this.
No, that’s not what I mean.
It can interface to my blogging tool.
In other words, I use either Manila or Radio or something like that.
Anything that supports the Meta -Weblog API, right? But why didn’t they actually make it a blogging tool? Why isn’t there… That’s what… Why aren’t they competing with TypePad? Probably because they didn’t want to compete with TypePad specifically, because they wanted to partner with them.
But it seems to me they did everything, but the blogging tool, the blogging tool in Fl ickr would be the tiniest little corner of the functionality of … The Flickr is this mega-model, I mean, it seems like they must have had 100 programmers working on it.
Well, oh no, there’s a very clever guy, something else.
Stuart Butterfield, right? There was a guy called Cal Henderson, who’s been involved in all sorts of projects.
You go to imcal. com.
Where? I am Cal.
I am cal. com.
Cal. com, yeah.
I’ll go there, yeah.
Which is cool.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of a site called beta. com, B3TA, and it’s kind of all memes and goofy Photoshop postings, Photoshop re-workings of images , and it’s all nonsense, basically.
Some of the stuff that comes out of that kind of this long forum is hilarious, but yeah, Cal Henderson is the, I believe , the web, although the main kind of web level developer for Flickr.
I see, really? Yeah.
And the one thing I really like with Flickr is what they do with the DHTML where if you’re logged in, the text, the title, the description, everything, you click on it, and it turns into a form in front of your eyes, you know? We’d say it again, what happens when you’re… If you log into your Flickr account and you look at one of your old posts and you’ve got a title and description, you know, it looks like it’s just in plain HTML, but you click on it and it turns into a… So you can edit it, it turns into a form, right? It turns into a form field.
That’s very rational, and that ’s probably why you click on it, right? But what I mean is it’s not like with some interfaces where you would have to click it, you’re effectively clicking your URL, you’re reloading the whole page, and then you’re coming up with a form and then you’re posting that form.
It does it on a layer above that, a little bit of Gmail is doing things, and these sorts of very clever use sign of dynamic HTML and JavaScript sign is really good, and I think Yahoo are now going to employ a lot more of that kind of stuff.
Right.
Well, of course, the big question everybody’s asking is, well, not everybody, but many people are asking why didn’t they just like… Why did they do 360 when they also were buying Flickr? It seems like there’s so many of these community systems, and they’re really… You need just one, right? I know I said I wasn’t going to mention Evan Williams and Odeo, but I got to say this.
It seems like they’re doing the same thing, that a lot of what they want to do is basically reinvent Flickr, which seems really weird to me.
If Flickr works where the other social networking systems didn ’t work, because it has a purpose, because the purpose is photo photography, and a community built around photography can be a very rich community, and perhaps a community built around podcasting, but is so fundamentally different from photography.
People say, if you’re looking at it from a programming standpoint, oh, okay, big media objects.
Oh, well, they’re kind of the same thing, right? But that’s only from that angle , because a photograph is sort of rockable in an instant.
Because our brains are built to rock photographs, basically.
Explain rock.
Rock is a word that, as far as I know, came from a book by Robert Highline, A Stranger in a Strange Land, and there was an alien in that book named Valentine Michael Smith, and he came from Mars, and in Mars they had a concept called rocking rock, and to rock something is to appreciate the fullness of it.
And it’s not just an intellectual understanding of it, it’s to appreciate the fullness.
It’s not a, you know, so rock is like a deep understanding.
How did I just use it? I said, well, anyway, oh no, you can rock a photograph in an instant, right, whereas a podcast, you can’t, a podcast , who knows, I can’t, we’re doing a podcast right now, I don’t know how it’s going to end, right, and I’m doing it.
I can’t tell you.
We’re live.
I can’t tell you what we’re going to say.
I mean, although I’ll tell you, it’s actually to get really meta, I think this has been very interesting so far, because we’re talking about things, you know, we kind of don’t, it was the first time we ever met face-to-face, but we share these interests and these sort of software things and why they work and why they don’t, and, you know, podcasts is just about that, you know, every week probably would be a very good podcast.
It’s quite a relief to actually communicate with somebody who actually understands what I’m talking about.
Same here, absolutely.
At times I kind of, I say things and you can just see it fly over that.
Yeah, because most people just use stuff and like it and don’t like it, but don’t know why they like it or don’t like it, but if you want to make software, then you’ve got to understand why people like it and why they don’t.
So my guess is that we don’t need another, that a community built around podcasts like Flickr isn’t going to be the freewheeling, fun, interesting place that Flickr is, just simply because building a community around photographs is great.
And then of course why Yahoo, you know, we know why, because they didn’t know that they were going to acquire Flickr while they were developing Yahoo 360, they didn’t even know what Flickr was until somebody knocked at their door and said, “Hey, you know, we’ve got eight billion members here and they’re all getting ready to buy stuff from us. " Do you think they bought it just to kind of snuff it out? I hope not.
That would be really bad.
It would be.
I think that Yahoo got their mo jo back, I think they ought to go look up the word mojo.
It’s not about snuffing things out.
It’s about making love, it’s about making babies, it’s about , you know, being sexy.
Your mojo work.
Yeah, it’s like not how, it’s not the shape, but it’s how you shake it.
So anyway, so if you were to like cut to the core, I want to steer us back around to the little tool.
Well, right, the thing is that you could take a monolithic view towards, you know, what do people need for podcasting? They need basically everything under the sun or maybe they just need a little tool, right? You can’t create a podcast in communities, even podcasters without these people being at, you know, people can find a way to record an MP3 file.
I think that’s probably the easiest part.
Once I found a tool that could do it, yeah, it was easy.
I mean, I mean, I would like a Windows machine.
You’ve got to speak up sound recorder so you can record a web and then you could find a way of converting that.
I couldn’t believe that Windows didn’t have one built in, they, my machine has a microphone built into it.
Why doesn’t it have a piece of software? I don’t know whether it might be a licensing issue with Fraun hofer, maybe.
With what? With Fraunhofer.
Fraunhofer Institute who developed MP3, so maybe it might have something to do with that because I think there’s some, some dues somewhere along the line to have to pay.
Right.
Well, Microsoft’s rich, why don ’t they pay the dues? They’ve got, you know, they’ve got WMA, so they kind of go, well, we don’t want to kind of… Because they, they should just ask the, they should call it like the king of pod, what? Yeah, yeah.
The kind of pod.
He’s podcasting.
He’s what? He’s podcasting.
He’s podcasting.
He looks like it.
He might be a similar reflection.
Oh, that’s interesting.
There’s a guy who’s wearing headphones and a microphone.
He’s probably on a, on a Skype call or something like that, we might ask.
If he’s podcasting, it’s like, we’re probably the only two people podcasting in the city right now.
There’s this interesting conversation going on in the background of my podcast.
So.
Sorry, right.
So.
It’s a destructive thing.
So tell us, okay, so what are the basic functions? Say, okay, you, you were saying recording is sort of difficult or not? Well, record.
Not difficult.
I mean, it’s, I would say it’s a, it’s a no-brainer for anybody to look at the model of the flicker uploader and translate that to uploading.
Right.
That’s what you’re saying.
That’s all it is.
Right.
The same functionality as the flicker uploader, except uploading MP3 files.
Right.
And the next step after that will be uploading video files.
You know, it’s, it’ll, there will be that natural progression.
It’s as simple as that.
And then one.
So what about ID three information? You want to, the ID three information.
Well then what could possibly happen is maybe you would obviously, okay, it’s going to be a simple tool.
And what about generating RSS? You’re going to do that too? Yep.
Okay.
Simple tool.
Let’s say I, I dragged an MP3 file onto the, onto my application and I hit the upload button.
When that file is uploaded, it goes, okay, so, or in fact, maybe before it uploads, it goes, so what’s the title? What’s my description? I already know what the date is .
I already know who you are.
I don’t know who the author is.
I know who the author is.
Do you want to add some tags to it, to it, to it now? Do you want to add any, any other metadata to it to, to, to , um, right, to make it, um, more, uh, or to make it better? Um, now, as far as the tools to write the ID three tags on the desktop, it would actually be easier for me to do it on the server.
And once it’s arrived.
Right.
Because you have a PHP tool that does that.
Yeah.
Well, there’s like, there’s, there’s loads of open source.
So what you could do then is like basically read the RSS file and take the data off of that and use, and do that on the server.
You know, I could generate the RSS and, um, either on the, either on the desktop or the, or the web.
So you’re going to, in, in kind of, you haven’t like, like actually done this work yet, have you? I’ve, I have, I have, I have, where would people go if they wanted to take a look at what it might look like? So keep an eye, keep an eye on podbat. com, P-O-D-B-A-T.
I see.
Okay.
Cool.
Um, yeah.
I’m sorry.
Because.
And the, well, the, the, the reason why it’s called podbat is because we’ve got podcatch ers out there and catchers.
What are they catching? You know, you have a batter.
You know, batter up.
You know, get up.
They knew that in Britain.
I thought that was, oh, it’s cricket.
Or you are.
Oh, yes.
It’s cricket.
Bowling.
You say building.
Yeah.
You know, whatever.
I can’t do that else.
They talking like an American.
So, um, yeah.
So you would read the RSS file information and throw that onto the ID, three tags and.
I mean, there’s no, I mean, originally, wouldn’t it, would you ping audio. weblog. com to it ? Oh, totally.
Yeah.
Totally.
I mean, you’d be at it.
All those kinds of things for people.
All that, all that sort of stuff could be either end.
Could be on the server end.
It could be on the, on the, on the, on the application.
What about, um, how about this? This would be cool.
How about, um, letting them categorize their, um, their, uh , their feed and categorize each post too.
Absolutely.
So that it could be routed to a directory.
It’s a directory.
Yes.
So, so you sort of like do a, what they call a folksonomy.
Folksonomy.
It’s a very nice sounding thing .
So yeah.
So you could do that too, right ? Yeah.
So it’s sort of like the, the front end for, and you’re going to also operate the back end too.
So it’s client.
It’s a client server.
What protocol did we talk about that? What protocol do you want to use between the two? Well, you see, this is why I was trying to work out what, um , what the Flickr uploader does.
And, and I, in fact, I was about to say that it uses FTP because I’ve, I’ve written a version of it that uses FTP because the , uh, the wrapper that I have for the, uh, for the flash, um, has, you know, has built in FTP functionality.
It’s a good email.
It could, it could email it if you want to do, but the simplest way to do it is actually FTP upload, um, and I got a feeling that’s what they do.
I, a couple of years ago, I wrote something called camovie.
com, which is C A M O B Y dot com.
And the when, basically when camera phones came out, I had one as soon as you get one and I wanted it to be called a camovie.
I don’t like, uh, in America, you call mobile phones, cell phones.
We don’t call them cell phones.
What are you calling? We have mobiles, you know, or M obi.
Oh, that’s right.
Everyone’s like, where’s my M obi? Where’s my mobile phone? It’s your mobile.
Right.
Um, in Germany, they call it handy, you know, it’s where it ’s, what, it’s mine handy.
Mine handy.
Mine handy.
It’s small.
It has a camera.
What MP3 would call that? It’s nothing about German accents to crack me up, like Dr . Strangelo.
Yeah.
It’s one of my favorite movies.
Really, I didn’t know.
So that’s what that means.
So they call them Mobi.
Mobi.
Yeah.
Some people, some people call them the Mobi.
That’s my Mobi.
But, but very few people call it their cell phone.
And we, that’s what we call it.
Yeah.
Yeah, call it our cell.
Um, so, so basically I, I, I went straight out and bought like camobi. com.
And every time I talk about a mobile phone with a camera, I don’t call it a camera phone.
Or, yeah, maybe, maybe I’d do, but what I wanted to do is make sure that every time I said the word or spoke about these camera phones that I had, because I was like the first person I knew of one.
Um, and then Joe, a doctor, um, had one.
And the, uh, and I wanted to just, you know, you keep saying things enough from people.
It’s like podcasting, you know, if somebody had said blog casting straight off the bat.
I like blog, blogcasting.
Yeah.
Well, because it, because it doesn’t have that horrible white plastic ring to it.
I know.
Well, this is something that you and I both agree on that, that it’s not a very popular thing is that, that the user interface of the iPod is like from hell.
The iPod is a great word.
Actually, something I wanted to say, you know, the, the invitation to serious, to serious.
Oh yeah.
Apparently, um, some people, some colleagues of mine where I was yesterday, they said, make sure you go because they have these pods, these audio booths where they record things and they’re like little pods and they’re all kind of like acoustic kind of.
Yeah.
Oh, pod is a great word.
I have a, I have a Lexus.
Yeah.
Well, it’s still around.
When I got my, uh, Lexus RX 300 , uh, SUV in 1999, uh, it has this sort of ovular rounded shape to it, sort of like an egg in a way.
Uh, it kind of looks like one.
And I felt like this was like my pod and that’s what I called it.
And, uh, I used to tell people that basically this is sort of like your standard issue car.
Everyone should be issued one at birth, basically.
It’s sort of like Lexus for our species.
It’s a transportation for our species.
In other words, I kind of liked it or whatever.
Some people get like silver bracelets and like, you know, and, uh, little, little white dresses, but give them a Lexus.
Well, you know, kids got to get around, right? Yeah.
Speaking of which, um, two of my creations are, have their birthdays today.
Oh yeah.
Scripting news is eight years old today and, uh, and frontier is 17 years old.
17 years old.
17 years.
And so as I said today in my post, uh, if it were a human being and 17 years old and be ready to reproduce, ready to drive and pretty close to leaving home.
Old enough to do a lot more.
And as a parent of such a 17 year old, one would have to say it’s time to let go.
It’s kind of a suspicious in a way that last year was the year that all this wonderful technology was released under the GPL.
And, uh, and slowly I think a community, a new community is developing around that.
And some cool things are going to happen there.
So let’s go back to your thing.
So you’re running a backend and a front end.
Your backend is just simply for processing the, uh, putting the ID three information and maybe maintaining a directory.
I did.
Hold on.
Doing some pings too.
The other thing is I have to say kind of step one will be, will be, uh, simple, um, simple client and simple desktop and even the, uh, um, I don’t know how to forget that the, the backend will do some processing.
But if I can do it so that there’s no backend processing, so all you need is red space.
Right.
That would be pretty good too.
Absolutely.
There you go.
That’s it really.
You know, if you can do that, then problem solved.
And if, and if it’s easy, there ’s no problem with the client doing the pinging and sorting things out for tags and stuff like that.
Yeah.
I mean, it’s a no brainer, but also the, um, uh, you mentioned , um, earlier about, uh, was it, um, what I was going to say is it could also be a catch er, this desktop client as well as being a batter could also be a catcher because as well as putting in my FTP details or, or, um, uh, the details to my website, um, I could also put in the drive letter that my media player plugs in out and bingo, I’m just doing a file copy.
You know, I, I can do, I can do download with nice, pretty progress bars and little, little aliens jumping around and bouncing around.
Well, let’s don’t underestimate the importance of aliens bouncing around.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The problem with a lot of these tools is that there’s like, there aren’t any good, we’re the good Easter eggs.
You know, it’s 2005.
Where are your Easter eggs? You know, we need to, there’s no problem.
We don’t need to have fun, but what the hell? Exactly.
Oh, that’s good.
Yeah.
Well, I think you’re going to do the, the, the creation tool first.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I’ve built, I’ve, I’ve already built half the, half the, well, I’ve built the, an upload of what I haven’t done is do the RSS beer and that’s great.
Right.
So you think like maybe like tomorrow or.
In terms of what I could get done on the plane, in terms of how much I sleep on the plane.
You might want to catch up on your sleep on the plane.
I might.
I might have to do a bit of that.
So you’re flying tonight.
You’re flying across the ocean tonight.
Yeah.
I’m going to take off at about 10.
And you arrive at 7 in the morning? 9.
And I arrive at, I arrive at 10 , I think Saturday.
Is that right? Saturday morning.
Right.
So I’m just, I’ll fly through the night and chase the sun.
That’s pretty easy.
New York to London is easy.
San Francisco to London is not.
So what you’ve got, we did Vegas, Vegas to London from CES .
And that was, I’ve never done, I’ve never been west coast before.
Really? I’ve never been to San Francisco yet.
And that’s where I, I had an ambition to go and work there.
You know, that was, that used to be my ambition.
I was like, okay, I’m going to do this.
Establish myself and what, in what I, in, in my realm of what I’m good at.
Workout work.
You’re just a few years too late.
You would have, they would have welcomed you with open arms during the dot-com boom.
Exactly.
And spit you right out.
Yeah, maybe, yeah, yeah.
Maybe I would be really.
You’re probably better off having been where you are and get a real job.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we’ve been doing this, this is 34 minutes into it.
So I think we said that we would, yeah, I think you said that we would try to keep this in, you know, because we both, I have to check out of my hotel , you have to check out of yours.
I gotta get back over and check .
Um, just a little bit of housekeeping.
What’s your email address? Uh, hotbat@gmail. com.
Hotbat@gmail. com.
And a lot of people asked me for my dad’s email address in the last one that I didn’t want to put it on scripting news because I didn’t want to like subject him to the spam and whatever.
I would have happily put it into the podcast that he did, um, because that would have sort of meant that people would have had to listen to the podcast.
And just say things.
No, I just want to say his email address now.
So if anybody wanted to write him, it’s Lwiner9@yahoo. com.
Interesting.
I was just thinking of with Gmail.
You listen, by the way, you listen to my dad’s podcast.
Yeah, yeah.
He thought it was pretty good.
Hello, the guy.
I got so much positive feedback on it.
Yeah.
My brother from, yeah.
He said, I’m just listening to Dave’s dad.
We’re going to try to do one with my mom and my dad tonight.
That was good.
Yeah.
We kind of said hello briefly to your mom.
When you Skype with her, you just played the, the, the, the blood cast.
Oh, she listened to it.
I don’t think you ever talked to her, but she listened to it.
Oh, I thought she was there in the background when you said.
No, no, I was in Florida, but no, my mother listens to all the podcasts.
She’s a real, real, you know, she’s probably listening to this right now.
You know, hi mom.
Hi Dave’s mom.
And so yeah, I’m going to try to do one with both of them or maybe just her tonight or whatever.
So you get to meet the whole clan.
There was, there was something else I was going to say then, but it’s slipped my mind.
Maybe he’ll keep.
I’m sorry for, I interrupted you.
Oh, we can wait.
It’s okay.
We have nothing better to do.
That’s true.
Kelly time, drinking coffee.
Oh yeah.
This is really morning coffee notes after all because we, they gave us a full pot of coffee here.
So we feel obligated.
I was, I was, I had just said your email address, which is h odbat@gmail. com.
I was going to say the Gmail thing.
Yeah.
Obviously, you know, like the, the darling of the web mail now , obviously the, uh, now are they going to be putting author linking into the email copy? Yeah.
Is that, I mean, I know.
Oh yes.
Of course they are because, because they have had since, I mean, I, I like the ads that they put on in Gmail because they are relevant to something I might be talking to somebody about.
Right.
And what if I’m talking to somebody about.
And they’re easy to do now.
Right.
Well, that’s exactly it.
You know, it’s like you can, you know, you don’t notice them unless you kind of just, oh, look, there’s ads and the, the, uh, but if links start appearing in my email.
Yeah.
No kidding.
You know, get out of here.
Yeah.
Get off my email, you know, that’s like, that’s, that’s.
That’s the funny thing about the auto link thing is that it ’s going to creep up on people and they’re going to wonder why nobody complained about this when the first appeared.
Would you mind if, would, would you be less, what about the argument about if they would use like dotted lines, wavy lines.
No, I wouldn’t, that would not be enough for me.
And in fact, what I have suggested to them, although they didn’t really want to hear this is that, um, is that they do the links off on the side the same way they’re doing the linking and ad copy, you know, um, in other words, create a frame over on the right-hand side of the page, if you must do this and just say related links and then boom, boom, boom, boom, you know, link to things that you need, absolutely need to link to so that they’re segmented so that it’s very clear that this isn’t part of my content.
It’s in a frame off by itself.
Uh, I, I still wouldn’t like that because they’re not, because I don’t have ads on most of my web pages.
The ones that I do have ads on, sure.
That’s fine.
See, Google AdSense is all opt- in, right? And I’m a member of it.
I use it.
I get my check every month.
I deposit it.
It helps to free my costs of web hosting, but I only put it on non-editorial pages.
I put it on weblogs. com.
I put it on, you know, like XML or PC, which is by the way, really high flow site.
So I put an ad on that because there’s basically just an archive.
There isn’t a whole lot of new stuff being posted in, you know , so I make my choice about where the ads go and I put them there.
And I’d be perfectly happy to, to continue doing that.
Why they’re not, I think it’s kind of obvious.
They want to make more money.
And they, if they can cut me out of the equation, they’ll make my money and their money.
Number one.
Number two is if they can put ads everywhere and when I will only put them some places, then, you know, then that makes them more money too.
But I would vastly prefer that to the idea of them messing with what I write.
Messing with what I write is just totally non-acceptable.
We’re going to have to, if that is the way the web is going to work, we’re going to have to leave the web.
And not only am I going to have to leave the web, but any publication with integrity is going to have to leave the web because the reader simply isn’t going to know who’s saying what anymore.
Well, people won’t trust the, won’t trust the HTML, won’t trust the web browser anymore.
What they’re seeing.
What they will trust is smart little bouncy applications written in flash that are really good at reading RSS feeds.
So there’s the data, there’s your content, your content’s there.
Well, that opens the whole, everybody, this one, when people really… The browser is dead, everybody.
Well, now, I don’t want to go that far because you can just leave it there and see if you take it back after I say this though.
Is that when people really give this discussion serious thought and don’t just dismiss it out of hand, the issue, next issue that comes up is, well, what about blog lines? Like, when they put ads on your copy, how do you feel about that? And, you know, blog lines is showing up more and more in my referral logs.
I mean, there’s a lot of people reading my stuff in blog lines.
And so, you know, I’ll tell you , the answer is I don’t think that’s as objectionable as what Google does because there ’s no question when people are reading it in blog lines that they know that they’re reading something that has been processed.
So, they’re less likely to believe that I put the link there.
On the other hand, you know, I don’t think it’s a good idea and I don’t want them to do it.
And would it stop me from publishing an RSS? Probably not.
Would it lead me to do something like blocking blog lines from subscribing to it? In other words, all that this is going to accomplish in the end, all this crap that these technology companies want to do, or at least Google, you know, let’s not, like, speak on behalf of the other technology companies so far, it’s just Google, is that they want to just balkan ize the web.
They want us to put up a, you know, we’ll put up a Berlin Wall.
We’ll try to keep them in, you know? They already have phenomenal problems right now with, I mean , Google, actually, very few people are focused on this and it’s kind of hard to switch the focus without sort of sounding a little alarmist, but Google’s having a lot of trouble keeping maintaining the integrity of their index because people have become so good at spamming it.
And so, you know, you’ll do searches on things that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with Viagra, but somehow Viagra will be the first hit.
Boy.
That was a good one.
Right on, everybody.
Yeah.
Oh, I don’t want to say what I was thinking, but yeah, everybody.
Sorry.
Boy.
Yeah.
Anyway, so everybody, we are now at 42 minutes.
Wow.
Wow.
So we’re going to have to do this again sometime.
We’ll have to do it.
You know, we have, this is our second podcast, right? We have Skype.
Yeah.
And I’m going to, the last one we did, it kept kicking out.
My Skype kept kicking out.
We’re going to have to figure out how to do that.
Or I’ll come to London and we can do one over there on the other side of the earth.
Well, I think there are some people who may be wanting to see.
Even if they don’t want to see me, I can afford to pay my own way.
You know, that happens sometimes too.
And you’ve got a big birthday coming up too, haven’t you? I do, but I also have to get eye surgery.
So that’s sort of sitting in the middle of it.
Right, when’s that going to happen? I haven’t scheduled yet.
So, you know, I’m going to try to leave myself free to go have , yes, I have the big 50th.
So today’s 17th frontier.
It’s eight for scripting news, but that’s nothing compared to the next one.
Which is coming up in a month and a day, which is my 50th birthday.
In fact, there’s a guy, there’s a guy, when you do come over, because, oh, yes, you will be coming to London.
You know, you will.
How about the girls who are saying, oh, yes, he will be coming to London? Oh, yes, you will be coming to London.
The girls don’t talk that way.
The girls talk like that.
Oh, dear.
Tangent.
We’re having too much fun here.
That’s 43 minutes.
43 and 17 seconds, 18 seconds.
This guy, there’s like one day between your birthdays.
Yeah, that’s interesting.
Now I have a story to go with that, too.
They were trying to have me born on my grandfather’s birthday.
I think you’re only a week away from my father’s birthday, actually.
Yeah, I was one day away from my grandfather’s birthday.
He was born on May 1st.
It’s not Gemini, is it? Taurus, which means obstinate and pushy.
Yeah, I’m Gemini.
And what does that mean? Diplomatic.
Some people would say two-faced .
I would say diplomatic.
No, but I avoid arguments by trying to see both sides of the problem.
No, I think it’s good to have people like that around.
I mean, that’s kind of… You also digress. You should have that on your business card .
I digress.
Me? No, I don’t.
I’m just like this recurring, this there.
Recursive.
It’s okay. You need somebody around.
You need somebody to tap on the table.
That’s right.
Okay, so everybody, this is now 43 minutes, so we’ve talked enough.
Thank you.
Coming to you from New York City, the basement of the U. N.
Millennium Plaza Hotel.
This is Morning Coffee Notes for April 1st, 2005.
It’s all been a joke.
(laughing)