Answers for Shel Israel about the origins of blogging and RSS
“Music and Red Couch answers about blogging, RSS, and who knows whatnot.”
Dave answers questions sent in by Shel Israel. He discusses his history with blogging and the origins of RSS. He started blogging in the late 1990s as a way to communicate with a community he had created, and saw blogging as a way to bypass the traditional media that he felt did not accurately represent the software he was developing. Dave was an early pioneer of RSS, working with Netscape to create a standard format, and he describes the process of collaborating with them to establish RSS as the dominant syndication format. He reflects on the challenges of establishing standards and the importance of being open to adopting others’ ideas rather than stubbornly pushing one’s own.
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Transcript
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Like this.
[MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] That’s sexy, that’s sexy music.
Hey everybody, it’s morning coffee notes with your host Dave Winer, coming to you from Florida.
Hey man, it’s a good day, it’s the 14th of April.
And that was Run DMC, playing an old favorite, title I don’t even remember, but it’s an old rock and roll favorite.
It’s an old rock and roll sort of major, some big hit.
And this is, I noticed this, I was like, I have a, what is it, hold on a second, let me just get this up here.
[MUSIC] Hey little bit, walk this, walk this way, it’s the name of the song.
And, hold on, give me a sec, don’t go away.
Don’t go away, anybody, don’t go away.
Instead of everybody, now we’re going to say anybody.
Don’t walk away, anybody.
So the music goes like this.
The music is from, I believe it ’s 1989.
Well, we’ll find out later.
It was a, early, Run DMC of course, is a hip hop band or rapper, I don’t even know what you call it, but.
And I wasn’t listening to this music back then, when it was coming out.
But I noticed it in Billboard, top 100 of Fill in the Blank, it’s either 1989 or 1986.
Which I picked up in CD form at a discount rack in a tower records or warehouse records or Walmart or tower, target, right , target.
Probably it was target.
Anyway, so the occasion of this podcast, this is what this is, being April 14th, is it really the 14th? That would mean tomorrow is the 15th, and I haven’t paid my taxes.
Oh well.
Well, okay, anyway.
Okay, so we’re going to get serious now.
Because I got an email from Robert Scoble, who’s the Scobal izer, and this is a forwarding of an email from.
Shel Israel, who I’ve actually known for a long, long time.
Shel says, Dave, I hope you’re doing well, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you live and in color.
Although I read your blog regularly, and Robert talks about you often.
Aw, that’s sweet.
Anyway, I like to email interview you for the book.
And I go, oh shit, I hate email interviews.
Why? Because I’m a writer, and it’s like, I can’t do it without writing it.
And writing it means like, well , they’ve just asked me to write it.
A lot of questions here.
It’s like a chapter of a book, basically.
Seems, I don’t know that they ’re not thinking that it is, but there’s a lot to say about all these things that they ask about.
So, what I did was I said, ha, I’m going to pull a fast one on you guys, and I’m going to do this as a podcast.
And, of course, since I know that Scoble and Shel sort of, like, they get the blogging whole thing, the whole blogging religion is that I’m also going to kill two birds with one stone, and I’m going to make this a morning coffee notes.
Right? That’s how we do things here in Bloggerland.
Anyway, so we are planning to use your answers in two sections.
They have a book that they’re doing together.
They’ve got a huge advance on this book, and all kinds of incredible things that the publisher is doing for them, which, of course, they totally deserve.
Anyway, so they want to know, the first chapter is on how blogging started, and then chapter four is called Direct Access, which is about people who use blogs to disintermediate.
That’s a good one.
Disintermediate the press to communicate with their audiences.
And, of course, audiences are a word that we’re actually trying to strike from the English language now, because it implies this sort of , you know, when people talk about grassroots or top or bottom up, it reveals that they have a picture in their mind of top and bottom.
And, of course, top is the most powerful people, and at the bottom are the, like , regular powerless, normally powerless people, who are now getting the tiniest little bit of power.
Right? Well, and, of course, with people who talk about grassroots and audience and stuff like that, of course, they don’t put themselves at the bottom.
They put themselves at the top.
The, right? I mean, of course, in your own mind, you know, you are, like, the center of the universe, right? I mean, you know that, right? Nobody is to tell you that.
It’s a great theme from a Kurt Vonnegut book.
I think it’s The Sirens of Titan, where a robot comes down to meet with the main character and informs him that he is the only sentient being in the universe, and that everybody else is just a robot sent down here to test him.
And it was funny.
I mean, you developed the whole , this whole theme pervades the whole book.
And why is it funny? Well, why is anything funny? It’s the truth we all believe deep down inside that the world , the universe, why bother with the world? The universe revolves around us .
And so, but of course, we know that it doesn’t really revolve around us.
And that’s the key to evolution .
That’s how we can get along with each other.
It’s like, because otherwise, we’re all just fighting to prove that you belong to me.
And I’m better than you.
I dominate you.
I’m here in the audience.
I’m up on stage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Hey, you know, what I say is there are no winning strategies because in the end, we all lose.
We all lose.
When you die, like, you know, they ever heard the phrase, like, you can’t take it with you.
Well, what do you think that means? You’re a loser.
So have fun.
You know, can you make losing fun? Sure.
So that’s what you ought to do.
Anyway.
So, Shell says, I would appreciate all the time you choose to give us in answering these questions.
Well, since the morning coffee notes, it’s probably going to be 40 minutes give or take.
It seems to be how long these things usually are.
And let’s see, we’ve been going for like about exactly eight minutes right now.
So I would guess Shell, I would think probably about 32 minutes or so.
Anyway, so first question might as well get right into it.
You’ve been blogging longer than anyone else.
We know.
Why did you start? Well, good question.
Why did I start? I started, big picture why I started was because my career as a software developer had come to a sad ending.
And I couldn’t, and the reason why was it wasn’t that I wasn’t willing to put in a lot of effort to make software and that I didn’t believe in the products that I was making.
And I hadn’t, it wasn’t that other developers weren’t making good products because they were .
It was actually that the press couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t carry the message of our products.
I mean, basically they would write stories.
I was a Mac developer then and they would write stories about the software business and they would say, well, you know, the Mac, not actually, they would write stories about the computer business.
And they say, you know, the Mac doesn’t have much of a future because there’s no new software for it.
So I’d call up the reporter, but I knew many of them.
I was in Silicon Valley and they were, of course, many of them were in Silicon Valley.
And I knew them and I’d call them and say, what are you talking about? I mean, you use a Mac and there ’s lots of new software for the Mac.
Don’t you know that? And you go, well, yeah, we know that.
So why do you say that there’s no new software for the Mac? And well, everyone knows there ’s no new software for the Mac.
So it’s this kind of delusional thing that was going on.
It still goes on in the press.
They sort of get caught up in a piece of mythology and they report the mythology, not the facts.
In other words, if you call them up and say, wait a minute, which you just said there was wrong, but it’s what everybody knows is true, then the facts, no, it ’s not a few facts interfere with the storytelling.
So reporters have a pattern and all sort of like tell the same story that the other guy said.
So if one guy gets to go first in an area, like whether it be podcasting or aggregators or R SS or blogging, or like go through the whole series of different stories that have come out in the last X years, there really isn’t a whole lot of variety in terms of what the reporters report.
So that was a big picture of why I started blogging.
A small picture was, well, I was doing a project for, when I was at Wired, when I was writing at Wired Magazine, I was contributing editor at the website, HotWired .
And I was doing a project called 24 Hours of Democracy, which was in response to the Communication Decency Act.
And if you look this up, I’ve told this story like a dozen times, if you look up Communication Decency Act, or 24 Hours of Democracy with my name, you’ll probably get more details than I’ll tell you here.
But basically, we had a mail list and we had sponsors, and like AOL sponsored us, they were very, very generous.
And now there are a bunch of others, I don’t remember who they all were.
And the mail list was like all mail lists, very active at the beginning and very positive, lots of good things getting done.
And then it got very flaming, and sort of like, well, that’s what mail lists do, right? I mean, as soon as people feel like I’ve got so much invested in this, it has to go the way I want it to go, then the mail lists sort of don ’t work very well.
And so, but I was the leader of this little community. It was a very temporary community.
It wasn’t intended to be anything very long lived.
We took, I think, maybe 40 days or so, 45 days to plan it, to get ready for the day when basically, it was a website where basically anybody could write an essay for us and we would publish it.
And we would link all these sites together and get all these cool, it was sort of like a moon mission, which I love.
The idea of a technology moon mission where you have a fixed date and everybody’s excited about that.
And sort of like, there’s no time really to argue, of course , then people make the time, of course, to argue.
And anyway, so to make a long story short, I needed a way to communicate with this group of people.
And they were flaming out on the mail list.
So I decided to help with that.
Let’s use the website. And I had a website going for this.
I was working within a content management system that I put together. It was called ClayB asket.
ClayBasket’s view of the web, a website, was that it was like a productivity application, like a spreadsheet or a word processor.
Actually, it was an outliner.
That was sort of like, you know , I tend to view everything as an outline.
And I just started putting in these links in reverse order.
And very quickly, I remember the moment, I don’t remember exactly what had happened, but I remember the moment looking at this and saying, you know, this is an interesting way to do things.
I think I’m going to come back to this after this project is over.
And that was the weblog. It was reverse chronological links to other pages, on-site, off-site, tying a community together.
It had all the basic elements, maybe not all the basic elements from a technology standpoint.
I noticed that later on in the questions you asked, well, why not stick with DaveNet? Why start blogging when you already had DaveNet? Which was an email circulated newsletter that started a couple of years before I started blogging.
And the answer to that is, well , first of all, it’s a completely different distribution mechanism.
And as it turns out, one that wasn’t going to survive because email has become so dysfunction al now because of spam.
But on the other hand, I actually think of DaveNet as being a blog.
I mean, it has, you know, what ’s important about a blog? Is it the form? Is it the fact that it’s reverse chronologic and it has links and all the rest? Yeah, I guess it’s important, but what’s more important to me ? And when I sat down to actually write my definition of what a weblog is when I started my fellowship at Berkman Center, the conclusion I came to was it ’s not about the form, it’s about the unedited voice of an individual.
In other words, it’s not an organization talking, it’s not trying to be anything more than just a person.
You know, I came up with a way of saying, come as you are, we ’re just folks here.
That it’s informal and we’re interested in what you have to say.
We’re not interested to polish if you make a spelling error or grammar.
I actually prefer if people make spelling or grammar.
It’s not on purpose, okay? But if just, I don’t care if there are a few errors and mistakes because to me, that’s the reminder that it is just a human being speaking and that’s what I like.
I don’t like sterile writing.
I don’t like thinking that, you know, sort of reflects lowest common denominator, political correct.
I like interesting ideas that stimulate new ideas.
I don’t believe in talking just for the sake of, you know, of hearing your voice or whatever.
So anyway, hopefully I’ve answered the question.
It was to round around the press, big picture, to create my own platform for speaking.
That was the big picture.
The big picture is it really worked well for tying together communities.
And those are actually, I don’t know, that one is bigger or smaller.
Okay, number two, why did blog ging happen? Why didn’t we all use GeoCities or Macromedia’s Dreamweaver or MSN’s free websites or something else? Well, good question.
And the answer is, I’m going to answer a different question because people ask me, I think what you’re asking me is this, is that, you know, why aren’t personal websites, what’s the matter with personal websites? Well, then I say that blogs are personal websites now.
That’s what a personal website is in 2005.
GeoCities and didn’t become, I think, what everybody thought it was going to become, but Blogger did.
And MovableType did.
And, you know, the whole blog ging world sort of became what GeoCities, I mean GeoCities had a sort of gimmick to it.
They said, we’ll sort of create a grid, just like, you know, a logical grid, just like you have in the physical world.
You know, and it’s hokey, it was wrong.
And basically, the internet has its own sort of grain.
It has its own lay of the land, its own kind of geography, not kind of an after-earth geography, a terrestrial geography.
It’s not the same thing.
I mean, all the geography that we have, with the exception of time zones, is melting.
I mean, the geographic dist inctions, I have friends that live in Europe, and they stay up until five in the morning, and we hang out.
I mean, you know, if I like it, I wouldn’t stay up until five in the morning, but they do.
So, you know, it kind of works out okay.
So, that was not a great idea.
Dreamweaver built, and I hate to be critical of somebody else .
I mean, it’s a good piece of software, right? But I don’t think it was really , like, clear on who it was for.
And it was, again, it was a mistaken idea that early on was very popular.
People thought that it would be desirable to turn the web into a word processor, or into a design environment.
And Dreamweaver kind of falls somewhere in between the two.
But in fact, the web is its own thing, and it’s more, if anything, like groupware.
You know, in the ’80s, and Shell remembers this, I’m not sure Skobel does, but in the ’80s, everybody, the holy grill, the elusive holy grill, was groupware.
Everybody wanted to do group ware, right? Well, guess what? We’re doing it.
It took a while, and all of our conceptions of groupware, turns out, were wrong.
And then when the finally the moment came, when it was time, when the world really needed groupware, okay.
And that was, by the way, the epiphany that I had going from Claybasket to the content management system in Frontier, which came very shortly after that, was that I was wrong.
The web is not a productivity app, okay. It’s groupware.
And that turned out to be exactly right.
And the ideal groupware is, as David Weinberger says, “Small piece is loosely joined.
A blog is a piece. " Okay.
A person, therefore, is a piece in the whole sort of picture of the web.
And a blogging tool evolved from that premise.
It didn’t start off being everything that it is today, and it isn’t today everything that it’s going to be five years from now.
It started off in an evolutionary sense. Doug Engel bart calls us a bootstrap.
And a bootstrap says you build tools, you use them, and you use them, in turn, to design the next tools.
And that’s sort of the magic of blogging, is that without the blogs themselves, we couldn’t have done anything like RSS.
Couldn’t have done it on a male list. Couldn’t have done it with a standards body.
Couldn’t have done it with the tools that existed before blogs . Yet it’s incredibly relevant to blogs.
And so it’s a bootstrap. This is Doug Engelbart’s vision in sort of inaction.
Doug’s brilliant guy. I met him once. I had dinner with him once. It was a wonderful, wonderful time.
To me, I felt like the student meets the teacher. And I don’t get too many experiences like that, but that was certainly one of those experiences.
Anyway, so it’s a bootstrap.
And that’s why it sort of works , because it isn’t based on like the sort of head trip that GeoC ities and Dreamweaver were based on.
Okay, so we’ve got a number three. What was, by the way, what is the role of Weblogs. com ? Because Weblogs. com is very much there and doing its job.
It’s kind of quiet. People don ’t pay a whole lot of attention to it.
But without Weblogs. com, you wouldn’t have a Tecnerati, for example.
A lot of the real time services , Pub/Sub, Feedster, things like that, they use the results of Weblogs. com.
But Weblogs. com is sort of like the peering point of the Weblog world, sort of like on the internet itself.
If you think of sort of, and people do talk about this, Internet Web 2. 0 or Internet 2.
0, I actually called it two years ago.
I called it Internet 3. 0, because I thought this was the third incarnation of the internet.
Basically, first being the pre- web internet with email and FTP, Gopher, all that kind of academic stuff, right? But then very much formed the flavor of the net. And then the second one was the web, and the third one was the two-way web.
Which is the web basically turned into a publishing environment for everybody.
Everybody can use it.
Whereas in the first web, it was sort of the web modeling, the internet modeling, the print publishing world.
And it was probably a necessary step, technologically not necessary, but perhaps from a social and human standpoint, necessary, perhaps.
So, the role of Weblogs. com is to be the peering point. It’s the place where everybody shows up.
And if you want to find out who ’s changed, who’s updated, what ’s available, what’s new, that’s where you go.
And it has, like the peering points on the internet itself, it is open on both ends.
It’s open basically. Anybody can ping it. Anybody can say, " Here I am. I want to be part of this little network that you’re running here. " And anybody can find out who is on that network because both ends are open.
You’ve got the ping on the one side. You’ve got changes. xml on the other side.
And, you know, when Technorati says they know about 8 million Weblogs, interestingly, interestingly, that’s the same number of Weblogs that Weblogs.
com knows about.
And we just don’t push it. And probably it’s a mistake.
Probably should have raised, you know, lots of VC money and started a company around it or whatever.
But frankly, it didn’t really, like, it initially didn’t need that.
And today, it probably doesn’t need a company, but it certainly needs more than what it has.
Right now, Weblogs. com is getting about half a million p ings a day.
Should I say that again? Half a million Weblog updates every goddamn day. That’s 10 per second.
Think about it. That’s a lot of growth. Believe me, it wasn’t doing that a couple of years ago.
Anyway, so, like, next question . Oh, we got that one done quickly. We’re only up to question number four, and there ’s a bunch more.
So what made you initially interested in RSS and Weblog ging software? I think I’ve already answered the second part. But RSS started, I know this is very controversial, but the people who make it controversial, like, didn’t do it and weren’t there.
You know, I was, and I did do a lot of what made RSS successful , and when I was doing that, nobody else was doing it.
So, sort of kind of gives me a certain, like, sort of credibility, I think, here that maybe other people don’t have.
I started working in that area in December 1997, and Adam Bos worth from Microsoft had been coming down.
He’d come down to see me, I think it was like three times.
He’s pitched me on XML.
He thought for some reason I would be a good guy to work with XML.
And I resisted. I said no the first X time. I don’t remember the number of times he came to visit, but I absolutely said no .
And, you know, I think for the right reasons in retrospect is that I thought it would be a corporate battleground.
You know, it was sort of like an attempt by the big technology companies to try to regain the control that they lost when the internet sort of wiped out their entire landscape in the few years that preceded that.
I think before 1994, I would say, was the sort of crucial year. They were, like, busy working on all of their huge, I mean, I would just unbelievably complicated and convoluted protocols for application integration.
That was the big deal. So, there was Olay and OpenDoc.
Those were the two things that were sort of competing for attention.
There was Taligence and Pink and Blue and Cairo and Mappy and basically IBM, Borland, Microsoft, Apple, Novel.
I’m sure I’m leaving some important people out.
Sun wasn’t really in there actually. Sun kind of was quiet in those days.
And then I remember when I got my first glimpse of the internet, I wrote a piece called Bill Gates vs. the Internet.
I mean, I had an epiphany. I said, “Geez, everything that they’re trying to do now is completely going to get wiped out by this. " And then I got a sort of whiny email back from Bill Gates saying, “Hey, come on, you’re full of shit. " Turns out it was true. It did wipe out everything, did level the playing field and set everything back to a very rational place where basically anybody could compete and you didn’t have to be a huge company or work at a huge company in order to create relevant software.
And this is, of course, something that people that worked at the big companies didn’t like very much because, you know, why had they gone to the trouble to climb this big, huge corporate ladder and kiss all that ass and make all those compromises if in the end it wouldn’t end up meaning anything.
So, to me, XML looked very much like the idea of XML was to sort of get back all the power that they lost in the rise of the internet.
Internet 2. 0. You might think of it as Internet 2. 0.
And so I didn’t want to do that . I said, “I like what I’m doing . " And, you know, I saw the internet as the platform without the platform vendor and I was free, nobody was in my way.
Why would I want to get involved in that mess again? And Adam, you know, kept pounding on me, kept saying, " You know, it’s not what it’s going to be.
I’m making sure,” Adam would say, “I’m making sure that Microsoft won’t play those games. " And they’d go, “Yeah, yeah, you ’re a good guy, Adam, but you know what? You’re not going to be at Microsoft forever.
Somebody’s going to push you out and they’re going to take over what you’re doing and they ’re going to turn it into battle .
Of course, exactly what happened. I mean, totally.
Always has to happen.
If a big company guy says, " Adam means well. Adam is a brilliant guy,” but he’s not as powerful as, you know, the people who really play the organizational politics at a big company like Microsoft.
They can make happen what they want to make happen.
Usually, it’s like they can stop things from happening. It ’s not like they make stuff happen.
They just like get things really complicated and make a lot of, you know, sort of like have meetings and fly all over the world.
And of course, at the end, they have to redo it when they bring IBM into it.
And they have to redo it when they bring Sun into it.
And everybody, you know, bringing in all these other partners.
All of a sudden, you end up with bookshelf size specifications that are impossible for anybody to implement, which is the idea.
Anyway, I have no time for that . I want to build things.
I don’t care so much about the formats and protocols other than what you can do with them.
So I have this impatience that says, “Hey, come on. Let’s get on with it. This works. This is good enough. Let’s go. " And so XML looked like there would be a lot of, like, whatever, breaks put on it.
Well, anyway, I went for it anyway.
And in the end of 1997, it was really a very simple idea.
I went looking for data that I could XMLize.
And I found a few things.
Like, I had the changes to my website.
I created an XML file that was updated regularly every day.
And it would contain a list of URLs of files that had it updated in that day.
And so if a search engine wanted to avoid crawling my entire site, they could look for the existence of this file.
And if they found it, then I would be telling them, “You don ’t need to look at any other files. These are the only ones that change today. " And, you know, it would still be a good idea.
And since almost all the content on the web these days is managed content, it would be very easy to do this.
It wouldn’t have to be done manually.
Every time I tried to raise the issue of the search engine guys , they treat me like I’m a, you know, like, “Oh, what do you know? What do you know about search engines?” Or, “Who the hell does he think he is?” I don’t know. They never listen .
So I stopped pushing it.
And I also said, “Oh, wow, you know, I’ve got a blog. " That looks like something I could XMLize.
I didn’t call it a blog then.
It was 1997.
I think we called it a weblog then. I think I called it a news site.
I think that’s what it was.
But it was a blog.
And so I produced a format called Scripting News Format, which was, to the best of my ability, an XMLization of my weblog.
And I said, “Cool, now who wants to do something with this ?” So I announced it.
I kept it updated so that my content system would regenerate it whenever I updated my site.
And there were a couple of trials.
People tried stuff out with it.
But it wasn’t until, like, over a year later, in early 1999, I got some emails from people at Netscape asking me questions about the feed and how it worked.
And then they sent me a link to a page that showed what they were doing with it.
And I thought, “Wow, it’s cool.
They’re doing something with it . " And I thought, at that time, I had the wrong idea.
I thought they were building on my format.
It turns out, yeah, their thing could read Scripting News Form at, but they were really creating another format altogether that just did pretty much exactly what mine was doing, but did it differently.
And I got angry because, geez, why can’t we be compatible out of the box? Why does the second guy coming into the damn market have to be incompatible? Why don’t you be compatible? Why don’t we have a standard? Why don’t we just do it the same way? Huh? What do you think? And, no, they said no.
So I sort of went for a walk and thought it over and said, “This is a really, really key point because anybody that gets to this place, you have incredible power if you just change your point of view.
And say, “Okay, what if I throw out what I’ve done and I just adopt what they’re doing?” And maybe then we can have a standard.
In other words, it’s infinitely better to have one way to do something than to have two.
And if you can swallow your pride and say, “Okay, it doesn’t have to be the way I designed it.
I can adopt somebody else’s design.
As long as I think it can work, why not do it?” And so that’s what I did.
I took their format, which was called RSS, and I adopted it.
And then at the same time, I also updated scripting news formats so that it had all the features that RSS had.
In other words, it was strictly a superset of RSS.
And they saw that happen.
I wondered what they would do and they did the right thing.
What they did was the exact inverse of that.
They looked at scripting news format and they took all the features that were in that weren’t in RSS and put it in R SS.
And at that point, I did the thing that the word that I don’t like so much, I said, “Let’s deprecate scripting news format. " And let’s just go forward with one format called RSS.
And that was RSS 091.
And I built an aggregator called my. useland. com.
And it was the first River of News style aggregator, which I still think is the most useful kind of aggregator.
And Netscape had something that was quite similar to what my. us eland. com is.
That was my. useland. com.
And that was like May of 1999, maybe June.
And then very shortly thereafter, they just evapor ated.
The whole team that was working on RSS there just left the company, laid off or went to work in other parts of I think they were at that point owned by AOL.
They had sold out to AOL.
And then RSS was on sort of precarious ground.
That’s why I only claimed to be a co-inventor.
People call me the inventor.
When they do that, that’s wrong .
I’m a co-inventor of RSS and ended up being the only one that was still in the game after the initial work was done .
And if I had it to do it over again, I think I would have done it differently.
But hey, that’s just whatever it is.
Anyway, let’s see where we’re at in terms of time, because I’m starting to feel a little tired here.
I have 34 minutes.
Yep, yep.
Maybe I’ll answer one more question and then I’ll do another podcast, maybe tomorrow to answer the rest of these.
I’m looking at the rest of the questions now.
Yeah.
Well, let’s see.
I think I’ve answered five and six.
I have not answered seven.
Yeah, I’ll tell you what.
What I’m going to do then is I ’m going to do another episode here, because this is, it’s wiped me out for some reason.
Anyway, maybe we should play the rest of it.
Let’s see what I’ve got here on this.
I’ve got this new $49 MP3 player here.
It’s real cheesy, but you know, it works.
And it’s, it’s kind of nice after the iPod, because it’s so simple.
It’s so easy to use.
Let’s see if we can get that song back here that we had before.
And John Krueger Mellencamp.
Um, do doom, do doom, do doom, do doom, do doom.
Michael McDonald, right? Now we don’t want to listen to that.
Don’t pass me by.
Oh, it’s the Beatles.
Don’t pass me by.
Don’t make me cry.
Bill Gross.
Oh yeah, I have to listen to that Bill Gross thing.
Don’t you love this part? This is what they call dead air .
Oh, this is the Honey Drippers.
Oh my God, this is a great song .
Okay, let’s just do the beginning of this song.
Let’s see if we can get it to cue up here for us.
Okay.
All right.
Uh, hold on.
I need to like turn the volume.
Oh, there we go.
There we go.
Oh.
Okay, everybody, we’ll see you next time.
Bye.
This is Morning Coffee Notes.
April 14th.
2005 www. morningcoffeynotes. com /rss. xml to see, to see, to see our world.
I will tell you just how much I love you.
I will tell you just how much I love you.
I will tell you just how much I love you.
I will tell you just how much I love you.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
[MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] That’s sexy, that’s sexy music.
Hey everybody, it’s morning coffee notes with your host Dave Winer, coming to you from Florida.
Hey man, it’s a good day, it’s the 14th of April.
And that was Run DMC, playing an old favorite, title I don’t even remember, but it’s an old rock and roll favorite.
It’s an old rock and roll sort of major, some big hit.
And this is, I noticed this, I was like, I have a, what is it, hold on a second, let me just get this up here.
[MUSIC] Hey little bit, walk this, walk this way, it’s the name of the song.
And, hold on, give me a sec, don’t go away.
Don’t go away, anybody, don’t go away.
Instead of everybody, now we’re going to say anybody.
Don’t walk away, anybody.
So the music goes like this.
The music is from, I believe it ’s 1989.
Well, we’ll find out later.
It was a, early, Run DMC of course, is a hip hop band or rapper, I don’t even know what you call it, but.
And I wasn’t listening to this music back then, when it was coming out.
But I noticed it in Billboard, top 100 of Fill in the Blank, it’s either 1989 or 1986.
Which I picked up in CD form at a discount rack in a tower records or warehouse records or Walmart or tower, target, right , target.
Probably it was target.
Anyway, so the occasion of this podcast, this is what this is, being April 14th, is it really the 14th? That would mean tomorrow is the 15th, and I haven’t paid my taxes.
Oh well.
Well, okay, anyway.
Okay, so we’re going to get serious now.
Because I got an email from Robert Scoble, who’s the Scobal izer, and this is a forwarding of an email from.
Shel Israel, who I’ve actually known for a long, long time.
Shel says, Dave, I hope you’re doing well, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you live and in color.
Although I read your blog regularly, and Robert talks about you often.
Aw, that’s sweet.
Anyway, I like to email interview you for the book.
And I go, oh shit, I hate email interviews.
Why? Because I’m a writer, and it’s like, I can’t do it without writing it.
And writing it means like, well , they’ve just asked me to write it.
A lot of questions here.
It’s like a chapter of a book, basically.
Seems, I don’t know that they ’re not thinking that it is, but there’s a lot to say about all these things that they ask about.
So, what I did was I said, ha, I’m going to pull a fast one on you guys, and I’m going to do this as a podcast.
And, of course, since I know that Scoble and Shel sort of, like, they get the blogging whole thing, the whole blogging religion is that I’m also going to kill two birds with one stone, and I’m going to make this a morning coffee notes.
Right? That’s how we do things here in Bloggerland.
Anyway, so we are planning to use your answers in two sections.
They have a book that they’re doing together.
They’ve got a huge advance on this book, and all kinds of incredible things that the publisher is doing for them, which, of course, they totally deserve.
Anyway, so they want to know, the first chapter is on how blogging started, and then chapter four is called Direct Access, which is about people who use blogs to disintermediate.
That’s a good one.
Disintermediate the press to communicate with their audiences.
And, of course, audiences are a word that we’re actually trying to strike from the English language now, because it implies this sort of , you know, when people talk about grassroots or top or bottom up, it reveals that they have a picture in their mind of top and bottom.
And, of course, top is the most powerful people, and at the bottom are the, like , regular powerless, normally powerless people, who are now getting the tiniest little bit of power.
Right? Well, and, of course, with people who talk about grassroots and audience and stuff like that, of course, they don’t put themselves at the bottom.
They put themselves at the top.
The, right? I mean, of course, in your own mind, you know, you are, like, the center of the universe, right? I mean, you know that, right? Nobody is to tell you that.
It’s a great theme from a Kurt Vonnegut book.
I think it’s The Sirens of Titan, where a robot comes down to meet with the main character and informs him that he is the only sentient being in the universe, and that everybody else is just a robot sent down here to test him.
And it was funny.
I mean, you developed the whole , this whole theme pervades the whole book.
And why is it funny? Well, why is anything funny? It’s the truth we all believe deep down inside that the world , the universe, why bother with the world? The universe revolves around us .
And so, but of course, we know that it doesn’t really revolve around us.
And that’s the key to evolution .
That’s how we can get along with each other.
It’s like, because otherwise, we’re all just fighting to prove that you belong to me.
And I’m better than you.
I dominate you.
I’m here in the audience.
I’m up on stage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Hey, you know, what I say is there are no winning strategies because in the end, we all lose.
We all lose.
When you die, like, you know, they ever heard the phrase, like, you can’t take it with you.
Well, what do you think that means? You’re a loser.
So have fun.
You know, can you make losing fun? Sure.
So that’s what you ought to do.
Anyway.
So, Shell says, I would appreciate all the time you choose to give us in answering these questions.
Well, since the morning coffee notes, it’s probably going to be 40 minutes give or take.
It seems to be how long these things usually are.
And let’s see, we’ve been going for like about exactly eight minutes right now.
So I would guess Shell, I would think probably about 32 minutes or so.
Anyway, so first question might as well get right into it.
You’ve been blogging longer than anyone else.
We know.
Why did you start? Well, good question.
Why did I start? I started, big picture why I started was because my career as a software developer had come to a sad ending.
And I couldn’t, and the reason why was it wasn’t that I wasn’t willing to put in a lot of effort to make software and that I didn’t believe in the products that I was making.
And I hadn’t, it wasn’t that other developers weren’t making good products because they were .
It was actually that the press couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t carry the message of our products.
I mean, basically they would write stories.
I was a Mac developer then and they would write stories about the software business and they would say, well, you know, the Mac, not actually, they would write stories about the computer business.
And they say, you know, the Mac doesn’t have much of a future because there’s no new software for it.
So I’d call up the reporter, but I knew many of them.
I was in Silicon Valley and they were, of course, many of them were in Silicon Valley.
And I knew them and I’d call them and say, what are you talking about? I mean, you use a Mac and there ’s lots of new software for the Mac.
Don’t you know that? And you go, well, yeah, we know that.
So why do you say that there’s no new software for the Mac? And well, everyone knows there ’s no new software for the Mac.
So it’s this kind of delusional thing that was going on.
It still goes on in the press.
They sort of get caught up in a piece of mythology and they report the mythology, not the facts.
In other words, if you call them up and say, wait a minute, which you just said there was wrong, but it’s what everybody knows is true, then the facts, no, it ’s not a few facts interfere with the storytelling.
So reporters have a pattern and all sort of like tell the same story that the other guy said.
So if one guy gets to go first in an area, like whether it be podcasting or aggregators or R SS or blogging, or like go through the whole series of different stories that have come out in the last X years, there really isn’t a whole lot of variety in terms of what the reporters report.
So that was a big picture of why I started blogging.
A small picture was, well, I was doing a project for, when I was at Wired, when I was writing at Wired Magazine, I was contributing editor at the website, HotWired .
And I was doing a project called 24 Hours of Democracy, which was in response to the Communication Decency Act.
And if you look this up, I’ve told this story like a dozen times, if you look up Communication Decency Act, or 24 Hours of Democracy with my name, you’ll probably get more details than I’ll tell you here.
But basically, we had a mail list and we had sponsors, and like AOL sponsored us, they were very, very generous.
And now there are a bunch of others, I don’t remember who they all were.
And the mail list was like all mail lists, very active at the beginning and very positive, lots of good things getting done.
And then it got very flaming, and sort of like, well, that’s what mail lists do, right? I mean, as soon as people feel like I’ve got so much invested in this, it has to go the way I want it to go, then the mail lists sort of don ’t work very well.
And so, but I was the leader of this little community. It was a very temporary community.
It wasn’t intended to be anything very long lived.
We took, I think, maybe 40 days or so, 45 days to plan it, to get ready for the day when basically, it was a website where basically anybody could write an essay for us and we would publish it.
And we would link all these sites together and get all these cool, it was sort of like a moon mission, which I love.
The idea of a technology moon mission where you have a fixed date and everybody’s excited about that.
And sort of like, there’s no time really to argue, of course , then people make the time, of course, to argue.
And anyway, so to make a long story short, I needed a way to communicate with this group of people.
And they were flaming out on the mail list.
So I decided to help with that.
Let’s use the website. And I had a website going for this.
I was working within a content management system that I put together. It was called ClayB asket.
ClayBasket’s view of the web, a website, was that it was like a productivity application, like a spreadsheet or a word processor.
Actually, it was an outliner.
That was sort of like, you know , I tend to view everything as an outline.
And I just started putting in these links in reverse order.
And very quickly, I remember the moment, I don’t remember exactly what had happened, but I remember the moment looking at this and saying, you know, this is an interesting way to do things.
I think I’m going to come back to this after this project is over.
And that was the weblog. It was reverse chronological links to other pages, on-site, off-site, tying a community together.
It had all the basic elements, maybe not all the basic elements from a technology standpoint.
I noticed that later on in the questions you asked, well, why not stick with DaveNet? Why start blogging when you already had DaveNet? Which was an email circulated newsletter that started a couple of years before I started blogging.
And the answer to that is, well , first of all, it’s a completely different distribution mechanism.
And as it turns out, one that wasn’t going to survive because email has become so dysfunction al now because of spam.
But on the other hand, I actually think of DaveNet as being a blog.
I mean, it has, you know, what ’s important about a blog? Is it the form? Is it the fact that it’s reverse chronologic and it has links and all the rest? Yeah, I guess it’s important, but what’s more important to me ? And when I sat down to actually write my definition of what a weblog is when I started my fellowship at Berkman Center, the conclusion I came to was it ’s not about the form, it’s about the unedited voice of an individual.
In other words, it’s not an organization talking, it’s not trying to be anything more than just a person.
You know, I came up with a way of saying, come as you are, we ’re just folks here.
That it’s informal and we’re interested in what you have to say.
We’re not interested to polish if you make a spelling error or grammar.
I actually prefer if people make spelling or grammar.
It’s not on purpose, okay? But if just, I don’t care if there are a few errors and mistakes because to me, that’s the reminder that it is just a human being speaking and that’s what I like.
I don’t like sterile writing.
I don’t like thinking that, you know, sort of reflects lowest common denominator, political correct.
I like interesting ideas that stimulate new ideas.
I don’t believe in talking just for the sake of, you know, of hearing your voice or whatever.
So anyway, hopefully I’ve answered the question.
It was to round around the press, big picture, to create my own platform for speaking.
That was the big picture.
The big picture is it really worked well for tying together communities.
And those are actually, I don’t know, that one is bigger or smaller.
Okay, number two, why did blog ging happen? Why didn’t we all use GeoCities or Macromedia’s Dreamweaver or MSN’s free websites or something else? Well, good question.
And the answer is, I’m going to answer a different question because people ask me, I think what you’re asking me is this, is that, you know, why aren’t personal websites, what’s the matter with personal websites? Well, then I say that blogs are personal websites now.
That’s what a personal website is in 2005.
GeoCities and didn’t become, I think, what everybody thought it was going to become, but Blogger did.
And MovableType did.
And, you know, the whole blog ging world sort of became what GeoCities, I mean GeoCities had a sort of gimmick to it.
They said, we’ll sort of create a grid, just like, you know, a logical grid, just like you have in the physical world.
You know, and it’s hokey, it was wrong.
And basically, the internet has its own sort of grain.
It has its own lay of the land, its own kind of geography, not kind of an after-earth geography, a terrestrial geography.
It’s not the same thing.
I mean, all the geography that we have, with the exception of time zones, is melting.
I mean, the geographic dist inctions, I have friends that live in Europe, and they stay up until five in the morning, and we hang out.
I mean, you know, if I like it, I wouldn’t stay up until five in the morning, but they do.
So, you know, it kind of works out okay.
So, that was not a great idea.
Dreamweaver built, and I hate to be critical of somebody else .
I mean, it’s a good piece of software, right? But I don’t think it was really , like, clear on who it was for.
And it was, again, it was a mistaken idea that early on was very popular.
People thought that it would be desirable to turn the web into a word processor, or into a design environment.
And Dreamweaver kind of falls somewhere in between the two.
But in fact, the web is its own thing, and it’s more, if anything, like groupware.
You know, in the ’80s, and Shell remembers this, I’m not sure Skobel does, but in the ’80s, everybody, the holy grill, the elusive holy grill, was groupware.
Everybody wanted to do group ware, right? Well, guess what? We’re doing it.
It took a while, and all of our conceptions of groupware, turns out, were wrong.
And then when the finally the moment came, when it was time, when the world really needed groupware, okay.
And that was, by the way, the epiphany that I had going from Claybasket to the content management system in Frontier, which came very shortly after that, was that I was wrong.
The web is not a productivity app, okay. It’s groupware.
And that turned out to be exactly right.
And the ideal groupware is, as David Weinberger says, “Small piece is loosely joined.
A blog is a piece. " Okay.
A person, therefore, is a piece in the whole sort of picture of the web.
And a blogging tool evolved from that premise.
It didn’t start off being everything that it is today, and it isn’t today everything that it’s going to be five years from now.
It started off in an evolutionary sense. Doug Engel bart calls us a bootstrap.
And a bootstrap says you build tools, you use them, and you use them, in turn, to design the next tools.
And that’s sort of the magic of blogging, is that without the blogs themselves, we couldn’t have done anything like RSS.
Couldn’t have done it on a male list. Couldn’t have done it with a standards body.
Couldn’t have done it with the tools that existed before blogs . Yet it’s incredibly relevant to blogs.
And so it’s a bootstrap. This is Doug Engelbart’s vision in sort of inaction.
Doug’s brilliant guy. I met him once. I had dinner with him once. It was a wonderful, wonderful time.
To me, I felt like the student meets the teacher. And I don’t get too many experiences like that, but that was certainly one of those experiences.
Anyway, so it’s a bootstrap.
And that’s why it sort of works , because it isn’t based on like the sort of head trip that GeoC ities and Dreamweaver were based on.
Okay, so we’ve got a number three. What was, by the way, what is the role of Weblogs. com ? Because Weblogs. com is very much there and doing its job.
It’s kind of quiet. People don ’t pay a whole lot of attention to it.
But without Weblogs. com, you wouldn’t have a Tecnerati, for example.
A lot of the real time services , Pub/Sub, Feedster, things like that, they use the results of Weblogs. com.
But Weblogs. com is sort of like the peering point of the Weblog world, sort of like on the internet itself.
If you think of sort of, and people do talk about this, Internet Web 2. 0 or Internet 2.
0, I actually called it two years ago.
I called it Internet 3. 0, because I thought this was the third incarnation of the internet.
Basically, first being the pre- web internet with email and FTP, Gopher, all that kind of academic stuff, right? But then very much formed the flavor of the net. And then the second one was the web, and the third one was the two-way web.
Which is the web basically turned into a publishing environment for everybody.
Everybody can use it.
Whereas in the first web, it was sort of the web modeling, the internet modeling, the print publishing world.
And it was probably a necessary step, technologically not necessary, but perhaps from a social and human standpoint, necessary, perhaps.
So, the role of Weblogs. com is to be the peering point. It’s the place where everybody shows up.
And if you want to find out who ’s changed, who’s updated, what ’s available, what’s new, that’s where you go.
And it has, like the peering points on the internet itself, it is open on both ends.
It’s open basically. Anybody can ping it. Anybody can say, " Here I am. I want to be part of this little network that you’re running here. " And anybody can find out who is on that network because both ends are open.
You’ve got the ping on the one side. You’ve got changes. xml on the other side.
And, you know, when Technorati says they know about 8 million Weblogs, interestingly, interestingly, that’s the same number of Weblogs that Weblogs.
com knows about.
And we just don’t push it. And probably it’s a mistake.
Probably should have raised, you know, lots of VC money and started a company around it or whatever.
But frankly, it didn’t really, like, it initially didn’t need that.
And today, it probably doesn’t need a company, but it certainly needs more than what it has.
Right now, Weblogs. com is getting about half a million p ings a day.
Should I say that again? Half a million Weblog updates every goddamn day. That’s 10 per second.
Think about it. That’s a lot of growth. Believe me, it wasn’t doing that a couple of years ago.
Anyway, so, like, next question . Oh, we got that one done quickly. We’re only up to question number four, and there ’s a bunch more.
So what made you initially interested in RSS and Weblog ging software? I think I’ve already answered the second part. But RSS started, I know this is very controversial, but the people who make it controversial, like, didn’t do it and weren’t there.
You know, I was, and I did do a lot of what made RSS successful , and when I was doing that, nobody else was doing it.
So, sort of kind of gives me a certain, like, sort of credibility, I think, here that maybe other people don’t have.
I started working in that area in December 1997, and Adam Bos worth from Microsoft had been coming down.
He’d come down to see me, I think it was like three times.
He’s pitched me on XML.
He thought for some reason I would be a good guy to work with XML.
And I resisted. I said no the first X time. I don’t remember the number of times he came to visit, but I absolutely said no .
And, you know, I think for the right reasons in retrospect is that I thought it would be a corporate battleground.
You know, it was sort of like an attempt by the big technology companies to try to regain the control that they lost when the internet sort of wiped out their entire landscape in the few years that preceded that.
I think before 1994, I would say, was the sort of crucial year. They were, like, busy working on all of their huge, I mean, I would just unbelievably complicated and convoluted protocols for application integration.
That was the big deal. So, there was Olay and OpenDoc.
Those were the two things that were sort of competing for attention.
There was Taligence and Pink and Blue and Cairo and Mappy and basically IBM, Borland, Microsoft, Apple, Novel.
I’m sure I’m leaving some important people out.
Sun wasn’t really in there actually. Sun kind of was quiet in those days.
And then I remember when I got my first glimpse of the internet, I wrote a piece called Bill Gates vs. the Internet.
I mean, I had an epiphany. I said, “Geez, everything that they’re trying to do now is completely going to get wiped out by this. " And then I got a sort of whiny email back from Bill Gates saying, “Hey, come on, you’re full of shit. " Turns out it was true. It did wipe out everything, did level the playing field and set everything back to a very rational place where basically anybody could compete and you didn’t have to be a huge company or work at a huge company in order to create relevant software.
And this is, of course, something that people that worked at the big companies didn’t like very much because, you know, why had they gone to the trouble to climb this big, huge corporate ladder and kiss all that ass and make all those compromises if in the end it wouldn’t end up meaning anything.
So, to me, XML looked very much like the idea of XML was to sort of get back all the power that they lost in the rise of the internet.
Internet 2. 0. You might think of it as Internet 2. 0.
And so I didn’t want to do that . I said, “I like what I’m doing . " And, you know, I saw the internet as the platform without the platform vendor and I was free, nobody was in my way.
Why would I want to get involved in that mess again? And Adam, you know, kept pounding on me, kept saying, " You know, it’s not what it’s going to be.
I’m making sure,” Adam would say, “I’m making sure that Microsoft won’t play those games. " And they’d go, “Yeah, yeah, you ’re a good guy, Adam, but you know what? You’re not going to be at Microsoft forever.
Somebody’s going to push you out and they’re going to take over what you’re doing and they ’re going to turn it into battle .
Of course, exactly what happened. I mean, totally.
Always has to happen.
If a big company guy says, " Adam means well. Adam is a brilliant guy,” but he’s not as powerful as, you know, the people who really play the organizational politics at a big company like Microsoft.
They can make happen what they want to make happen.
Usually, it’s like they can stop things from happening. It ’s not like they make stuff happen.
They just like get things really complicated and make a lot of, you know, sort of like have meetings and fly all over the world.
And of course, at the end, they have to redo it when they bring IBM into it.
And they have to redo it when they bring Sun into it.
And everybody, you know, bringing in all these other partners.
All of a sudden, you end up with bookshelf size specifications that are impossible for anybody to implement, which is the idea.
Anyway, I have no time for that . I want to build things.
I don’t care so much about the formats and protocols other than what you can do with them.
So I have this impatience that says, “Hey, come on. Let’s get on with it. This works. This is good enough. Let’s go. " And so XML looked like there would be a lot of, like, whatever, breaks put on it.
Well, anyway, I went for it anyway.
And in the end of 1997, it was really a very simple idea.
I went looking for data that I could XMLize.
And I found a few things.
Like, I had the changes to my website.
I created an XML file that was updated regularly every day.
And it would contain a list of URLs of files that had it updated in that day.
And so if a search engine wanted to avoid crawling my entire site, they could look for the existence of this file.
And if they found it, then I would be telling them, “You don ’t need to look at any other files. These are the only ones that change today. " And, you know, it would still be a good idea.
And since almost all the content on the web these days is managed content, it would be very easy to do this.
It wouldn’t have to be done manually.
Every time I tried to raise the issue of the search engine guys , they treat me like I’m a, you know, like, “Oh, what do you know? What do you know about search engines?” Or, “Who the hell does he think he is?” I don’t know. They never listen .
So I stopped pushing it.
And I also said, “Oh, wow, you know, I’ve got a blog. " That looks like something I could XMLize.
I didn’t call it a blog then.
It was 1997.
I think we called it a weblog then. I think I called it a news site.
I think that’s what it was.
But it was a blog.
And so I produced a format called Scripting News Format, which was, to the best of my ability, an XMLization of my weblog.
And I said, “Cool, now who wants to do something with this ?” So I announced it.
I kept it updated so that my content system would regenerate it whenever I updated my site.
And there were a couple of trials.
People tried stuff out with it.
But it wasn’t until, like, over a year later, in early 1999, I got some emails from people at Netscape asking me questions about the feed and how it worked.
And then they sent me a link to a page that showed what they were doing with it.
And I thought, “Wow, it’s cool.
They’re doing something with it . " And I thought, at that time, I had the wrong idea.
I thought they were building on my format.
It turns out, yeah, their thing could read Scripting News Form at, but they were really creating another format altogether that just did pretty much exactly what mine was doing, but did it differently.
And I got angry because, geez, why can’t we be compatible out of the box? Why does the second guy coming into the damn market have to be incompatible? Why don’t you be compatible? Why don’t we have a standard? Why don’t we just do it the same way? Huh? What do you think? And, no, they said no.
So I sort of went for a walk and thought it over and said, “This is a really, really key point because anybody that gets to this place, you have incredible power if you just change your point of view.
And say, “Okay, what if I throw out what I’ve done and I just adopt what they’re doing?” And maybe then we can have a standard.
In other words, it’s infinitely better to have one way to do something than to have two.
And if you can swallow your pride and say, “Okay, it doesn’t have to be the way I designed it.
I can adopt somebody else’s design.
As long as I think it can work, why not do it?” And so that’s what I did.
I took their format, which was called RSS, and I adopted it.
And then at the same time, I also updated scripting news formats so that it had all the features that RSS had.
In other words, it was strictly a superset of RSS.
And they saw that happen.
I wondered what they would do and they did the right thing.
What they did was the exact inverse of that.
They looked at scripting news format and they took all the features that were in that weren’t in RSS and put it in R SS.
And at that point, I did the thing that the word that I don’t like so much, I said, “Let’s deprecate scripting news format. " And let’s just go forward with one format called RSS.
And that was RSS 091.
And I built an aggregator called my. useland. com.
And it was the first River of News style aggregator, which I still think is the most useful kind of aggregator.
And Netscape had something that was quite similar to what my. us eland. com is.
That was my. useland. com.
And that was like May of 1999, maybe June.
And then very shortly thereafter, they just evapor ated.
The whole team that was working on RSS there just left the company, laid off or went to work in other parts of I think they were at that point owned by AOL.
They had sold out to AOL.
And then RSS was on sort of precarious ground.
That’s why I only claimed to be a co-inventor.
People call me the inventor.
When they do that, that’s wrong .
I’m a co-inventor of RSS and ended up being the only one that was still in the game after the initial work was done .
And if I had it to do it over again, I think I would have done it differently.
But hey, that’s just whatever it is.
Anyway, let’s see where we’re at in terms of time, because I’m starting to feel a little tired here.
I have 34 minutes.
Yep, yep.
Maybe I’ll answer one more question and then I’ll do another podcast, maybe tomorrow to answer the rest of these.
I’m looking at the rest of the questions now.
Yeah.
Well, let’s see.
I think I’ve answered five and six.
I have not answered seven.
Yeah, I’ll tell you what.
What I’m going to do then is I ’m going to do another episode here, because this is, it’s wiped me out for some reason.
Anyway, maybe we should play the rest of it.
Let’s see what I’ve got here on this.
I’ve got this new $49 MP3 player here.
It’s real cheesy, but you know, it works.
And it’s, it’s kind of nice after the iPod, because it’s so simple.
It’s so easy to use.
Let’s see if we can get that song back here that we had before.
And John Krueger Mellencamp.
Um, do doom, do doom, do doom, do doom, do doom.
Michael McDonald, right? Now we don’t want to listen to that.
Don’t pass me by.
Oh, it’s the Beatles.
Don’t pass me by.
Don’t make me cry.
Bill Gross.
Oh yeah, I have to listen to that Bill Gross thing.
Don’t you love this part? This is what they call dead air .
Oh, this is the Honey Drippers.
Oh my God, this is a great song .
Okay, let’s just do the beginning of this song.
Let’s see if we can get it to cue up here for us.
Okay.
All right.
Uh, hold on.
I need to like turn the volume.
Oh, there we go.
There we go.
Oh.
Okay, everybody, we’ll see you next time.
Bye.
This is Morning Coffee Notes.
April 14th.
2005 www. morningcoffeynotes. com /rss. xml to see, to see, to see our world.
I will tell you just how much I love you.
I will tell you just how much I love you.
I will tell you just how much I love you.
I will tell you just how much I love you.
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