Saturday, August 09, 2008

Scripting News

My thinking on the options backdating mess has been heavily influenced by Mark Anderson, who runs the Strategic News Service. Mark and I have become friends, at the urging of a mutual friend. He's a really interesting guy, with a huge and influential following, but almost (until now) no connection with the blogosphere. I spoke at his conference in May, along with Dan Gillmor. I am now on the Advisory Board of SNS, and at our meeting last week in Seattle, I urged Mark and his team to start a weblog, and now they have done so. I think he'll be an important contributor to the tech blogosphere, and I'm proud to have played a role in helping him get his blog up and running. 

Mark Anderson: "Apple will end up being a model case of how NOT to handle such affairs, and Intellectual Dishonesty will have cost the company more than dishonesty itself." 

NY Times: "Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to campaign on phony issues against fake enemies." 

UK quiz show: "What XML formatted files are used on web sites to provide machine readable content summaries and are often visuaally marked with an orange box?" 

Michael Markman: "The Bush communications strategy has long been to make up false Democratic positions and then ridicule them." True true true. And then if the Republicans really wanted to turn things around, they'd tell Bush to go home and shut the door and talk to no one until Wednesday-next. Every time he opens his mouth and gets on TV that keeps the focus on Iraq, and the basic weakness of the Republicans, most of whom are trying to get their constituents to overlook the fact that they're Republican (or forgive them for it). Famous Democrats should keep baiting Bush, drawing him and Rove out, and let them make the headlines and to remind the voters that we're just getting deeper into the Bush mess, and we'd better start cleaning it up soon, and no matter how much you like your local Republican incumbent, he's not very likely to help clean things up as long as Bush is in office. 

PaidContent has the scoop, Daylife will soon announce that the New York Times Company is leading its first round. I am also an investor in Daylife. 

Grace Davis: "I strongly believe that all children under the age of six should have a pair of cowboy boots." 

Opportunity knocks 

I'm looking to hire a part-time developer, possibly on a venture-development basis (that is, partial or full payment in the form of equity), to work on a series of projects, starting with work on the SYO project (a PHP/MySQL app).

Important qualifications: 1. Professional approach to work. 2. User focus (preferrably someone who uses RSS or OPML-based apps him or herself). 3. Local to the Bay Area (even better if East Bay, and/or near BART). 4. Experience in building commercial quality scalable apps.

I prototype in Frontier, but we will deploy apps in LAMP-based environments (although I'm also interested in commissioning a port of Frontier to Linux). What matters to me in choosing platforms is that the code be maintainable and the environment popular enough so that if we need to grow a devteam it'll be easy to find the people.

My track record is well-known, I hope, I've created many of the apps, formats and protocols that are the basis for what people call "Web 2.0," in addition to pioneering outlining and presentation software.

I have some more ideas, some quite powerful, imho, and I'm aiming high, I only want to work with great people. I also invest in the people I work with, you'll learn new skills, and I'm a demanding boss, but if you stick with it, the rewards are great. If you meet most or all of these qualifications, send me an email with a pointer to your resume. Thanks.

Charles Jade: Why can't Apple blog? 

I'm with Josh Marshall, Kerry has nothing to apologize for. 

Olbermann: "Kerry called them stupid and they were too stupid to know he called them stupid." 

I think in retrospect, the Democrats came to life when Bill Clinton did the interview with Chris Wallace at Fox. Throwing punches is something people don't expect from Demos, and it's refreshing. Kerry said something that is totally, obviously true. Bush better watch out if he decides to make this an issue, it's likely to backfire. All Kerry has to say is that he'll apologize after Bush apologizes for the deaths of 2800 young Americans in Iraq. 

Hil introduces the RSS Pumpkin. Ha! 

I was going to pre-order a Zune player, but I checked to see if it would work with a Mac, and apparently not. Arrrgh. What kind of competitor has Microsoft become. What if someone prefers a Mac desktop, thinks it's possible to do better than the iPod, and wants to give Zune a whirl? I have to use a PC? Oy oy. NFW. What if my opinion influences others? I imagine that many of the opinion leaders in this market already use Macs. I doubt if I'm willing to dust off the PC just to try out their audio player. 

There was a political bloggers meetup at Berkman last night in Cambridge. 

Ed Cone interviews PodShow CEO, Ron Bloom. 

HDMI question 

I bought and HDMI to HDMI cable to connect my Denon DVD player to the Sony TV.

I tried hooking the two together, but no luck, when I clicked through all the video sources on the TV, the output of the DVD, which I could hear, never showed up on the screen.

I've read all I could find in the two manuals with no clues. Any ideas?

SlingPlayer for Mac OS X Public Beta Download. 

Scoble: "I don't read separate feeds anymore. I just read everything in one long continuous scrolling Window." 

There's a lot of back-channel discussion of Apple's option backdating problem, and the extent to which it involves Steve Jobs. Late last week, I heard that a major business publication is working on this story, but they're hesitating, for fear of jeopardizing their relationship with Jobs.