onfocus

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post dissects the evasive tactics used by Ari Fleischer in his final meeting with the press. If you're thinking about becoming a public spokesman that has to continually evade subjects in the midst of difficult questions that it would be better not to answer, you may want to see how he does it. [via blargblog]

Ted, the Amazon blogger I posted about a few days ago turns out to be a PR experiment rather than a real person. Seattle Post Intelligencer: "'Without going into whether the content is factually accurate or not, what I can tell you is that it was not an individual's personal blog. It was a recruiting message that we put in the form of a blog to experiment,' Curry said." They've taken the fictitious blog down. Maybe "Ted" was an acronym for Targeted Enlistment Device.

I updated ORblogs a bit. The site now has a weblog called ORpost that grabs the latest posts from Oregon weblogs' RSS feeds.

Lawrence Lessig is going on vacation so he found a guest blogger to fill in while he's gone: Presidential candidate Howard Dean.

Tom Tomorrow's weblog is driving book sales. [His new book.] (He needs an associates account so he could make some extra money from those links. Which is explained in detail in another new book that will be available soon.)

It feels to me like the weblog developer (and user) community could learn a lot from the Open Source community's struggles with closed vs. open standards. This afternoon, Peter Saint-Andre gave a talk about the state of IM, the various protocols (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) with varying degrees of openness, and the emerging standard XMPP (open) protocol that he's involved with. Just because there's a standard in place doesn't mean it's necessarily developer-friendly, especially if controlled by a large commercial interest. I could imagine a talk four years from now that is essentially the same, but replacing "jabber-based protocol" with "n(echo)". In addition to an open standard, and supporting open source code, he listed an open community (with a standard process for extending/improving) involved with guiding the standard as an important requirement. It'll be interesting to see if weblog software follows the same path as IM software because there are already quite a few parallels. Will n(echo) eventually move to the IETF, IBM, Google, Six Apart, or will there always be a loose consensus guiding it? I'm not involved with that project, and maybe these sorts of questions are already answered. It just seems like there are several similarities between weblogs and IM, with a chance to learn from the recent past.

How many people are blogging? In what languages? NITLE's Blog Census has hard data. The guy who wrote this (didn't catch his name) gave several interesting bits of data, including this gem: 2% of Icelanders have a Blog*Spot blog. There's an API. They also track weblog tool usage stats.

Update: Blog Census is by Maciej Ceglowski. Thanks Anil!

Some interesting points from the conference so far today:

• Developing countries equate software and Microsoft. They don't know about alternatives.
• Bradley Kuhn noted that most of the world isn't using computers yet—which means they haven't chosen an operating system yet. He argues that free software needs to expand to developing countries.
• Technologies like VXML (Voice-XML that powers automated phone systems) are more critical in non-literate societies.
• 33% of eBay's listings come in through their API. (That's millions of listings.)
• There's an analogy between the Domain Name System and current Web Services. Users and developers need to guard against lock-in points like the DNS government-granted monopoly to NetSol.
• Tim quoting Lao-Tzu: "Losing the way of life, men rely on goodness. Losing goodness, men rely on laws." Licensing agreements change. Company's strategies change. Since we're not following The Way, how do we hold on to the current Web Services goodness?
• The business case keeps the goodness according to Amazon and eBay. Both companies feel the economic pain when their developers fail, so they want to keep the developers successful. (Unlike traditional software platforms.) [My note: Though traditional software vendors do feel the pain of developer failures in the form of lost future revenue—unless you're a monopoly. But those are illegal anyway. heh.]
• Google declined to participate in the Web Services Bill of Rights talk.

This afternoon you can probably find me at:

• Emerging Topics Lightning Talks
• Open Source and Open Standards
• Amazon Web Services: Past, Present, Future
• Transforming XML for Web and Print

whew!

I had a great afternoon at the conference. As someone who codes in isolation for days/weeks/months on end, it's nice to see powerpoint slides that show real live code by other people. Though the Filtering Email with Perl session turned into a bit of a code-critique by the audience. (Tough crowd.) It was still fun to hear a bunch of Perl hackers discussing how to best optimize the script in the presentation. In fact, they could turn that into a session: Let the OSCon Audience Optimize Your Script. You could get five minutes on stage: one minute to show/explain your script, four minutes to hear people fight about how they would improve it. That would be quality geeky entertainment.

I'm here at OSCon in Portland enjoying the wireless access. I just overheard a reporter talking on his cell phone with his editor (I presume) about how there's nothing "mind shattering" at the conference yet—and stories are hard to come by. He did say he was going to put together a story about the fact that Microsoft is buying lunch for everyone at the conference. You can't buy press like that. Oh wait...

This conference is quite a bit bigger than those I've regularly attended in the past: eTech, SXSW, etc. There are eight sessions or so going on in each time slot, and the trade show has around 25 vendors. I missed the sessions I wanted to see this morning, but I'm hoping to make up for it this afternoon. If you're here I'll probably see you at one or more of the following:

• Intro to Web Services with PHP
• Perl Lightning Talks
• MS Office Files Exposed
• XML Security Standards
• What the X is XQuery?
• Filtering Email with Perl

It should be a mind shattering afternoon. ;)

Highway near Philomath