Friday, October 7, 2005

Cruisin' bookmarks

Galleries from GeekCruises in 2001, 2002 and 2003. I'm on this one right now.

A post of thanks...

... to Dave Winer, not only for getting me into blogging in the first place, but for putting this blog up on Weblogs.com for its duration (and where I expect it will remain, on a server operated by Userland).

I've said it before, When they scroll the credits of my life, Dave's is going to be one of the first names on the list.

And when they scroll the credits for blogging, outlining, writing, scripting, journalism, XML, RSS, SOAP, podcasting and a pile of other technologies, standards and practices we will all eventually take for granted, the same will be true for those as well.

Dave's a hard guy for many of us to appreciate, because he's fearless about calling bullshit on anybody and anything he thinks are misleading, misled or just plain wrong. It's hard to find anybody of prominence in a subject Dave cares about whose feathers Dave hasn't ruffled.

But Dave is like Harry Truman, who said "I give them the truth and they think it's hell."

That doesn't mean Dave is always right. Just that he's always honest. Or as close to always as anybody I've ever met. That's far more important than, say, whatever he got paid for Weblogs.com. (Which I don't know, and don't care about, either — beyond knowing it's worth far less than what Dave has been giving us for a generation or more.)

I just hope he doesn't retire.

[Later...] Here's a piece in Netcraft (an authoritative source) about the sale. There's encouraging stuff there about fighting "splogs" (fake or spam blogs, created mostly to game PageRank and siphon off Adsense dollars).

And the word straight from Verisign.

Loose links

I can "TiVo" TV programs on my DishTV PVR (or DVR... .they use both terms), but TiVo gets nothing out of it. That's because our DishTV PVR is a TiVo knock-off. Same with DirecTV's new non-TiVo PVR.

While on the one hand I feel bad for TiVo, which invented the whole category, on the other hand I recognize that the whole issue hardly matters as long as the data from one PVR can't be transferred to another anyway. Every legal PVR, far as I know, isn't just a data silo; it's a data prison. You might be able to make an analog copy with a VCR, but the data isn't really yours. You just get to use it inside the silo/prison of your cable/satellite/equipment provider. That's DRM for ya.

David Berlind is becoming, in the space of little more than one (other blogger's) Geek Cruise, a champion of in the War against DRM (which he artfully redefines as "Digial Restrictions Management". Bonus link: Jonathan Schwartz on the Open Media Commons, referenced by David. And a transcript of Jonathan's latest talk.

Thanks to Lonster for the nice review of Cluetrain, among other things.

As more people and companies get into blogging, and the population of blogs continues to blast through every new roof, members of the "A-list" are bound to move in a long-tailward direction. I'm down to #68 on Technorati's Top 100 (and sure to fall off eventually). I'm #117 on Feedster and #316 in AdsOnBlogs. And couldn't care less.

I've been amidst Hanan's bookmarks for four years.

Here are some interesting stats about bloggers from Edelman.

When I got to Belize, I missed hearing this.

At (almost) last

I'm onshore for a few hours, at an Internet cafe near the pier in Cozumel, downloading a couple thousand emails while uploading some pix to Flickr and making a couple of blog posts while not doing the Main Thing, which is finishing my work for the next Linux Journal.