onfocus

Speaking of the State of Web, some people in congress are standing up for Internet radio. U.S. Reps. Jay Inslee (D-WA), George Nethercutt (R-WA), and Rick Boucher (D-VA) have introduced the Internet Radio Fairness Act. It will reduce the outrageous fees to costs more in line with traditional radio stations. Sounds fair to me...especially since there can only be a limited number of airwaves stations due to FCC restrictions, but the number of Internet stations is potentially unlimited. (for now.) [via MeFi]

Not everyone is thrilled about Web Services. Here's a less enthusiastic view on ASPnews.com: Show Me the Money: "Yet there's still a vital ingredient missing before this new wave of service component providers can become a sustainable model. How are they going to make money?" Many companies profit from specialized application development and integration, and the idea of Web Services is pretty scary to them. Like those CRM/ASP folks: Will Web Services Kill Packaged CRM Apps? It seems like whenever you reduce friction in a process, there are people who profit from that friction who will be upset.

The Weblog Bookwatch (found on this site) was mentioned in Slate today, along with Erik Benson's BookWatch Plus. It's a brief article explaining what Web Services are, why you should care, and why everyone's going to be doing it. This article doesn't go into any technical specifics—or mention any standards or protocols. They do describe why people are excited about them: "Web services are like LEGOs: They snap together in almost limitless combinations. As the big sites bring their Web services on board it's easy to imagine your home page summarizing the items you have for sale on eBay, displaying whether you're available to chat via AOL or Yahoo!, and mapping the current location of the airplane you're on via Expedia." Web Services = Application Syndication.

An article by Kevin Werbach in 2000 titled, The Web Goes Into Syndication pointed out that Amazon has always seen syndication as a good strategy; at that time through its affiliate program, and ZShops. He says, "By acting as a syndicator and a distributor of e-commerce, Amazon is turning the absence of scarcity on the Web from a threat into an advantage. The multitude of other sites that users visit are no longer alternatives to Amazon; they are opportunities for Amazon to expand its presence -- and its earnings." Web Services are just their latest effort to push out instead of trying to attract and hold. In other words, they get the Web.

Doc Searls transcribed some of Lawrence Lessig's keynote at OSCon. I've seen him speak a few times, and it's always been inspiring. I hope he wasn't serious about ending his public speaking as Doc noted. This time around he said,

"Yes, we have sites and blogs and Slashdot stories. But nothning in Washington. If you don't do something now, this freedom will be taken away — either by those who see you as a threat and invoke the system of law they call patents, or through copyright enforcement. If you can't fight for your freedom, you don't deserve it...How many have given more to the EFF than they've given their local telecom company for shitty DSL service?"

It reminds me of Bruce Sterling's keynote at SXSW last year. He said that we had millions of Napster users, but no one in Washington willing to stand up and defend it. He asked, "Where is our representative from the state of Napster?" If a national politician could tap into this loosley connected state of Web, I bet they'd find amazing support. But it's a two-way street. The state of Web also needs to find, court, and support politicians who share their views. As hackers (in the larger sense of the word), we like to think we can route around the idiocy of Washington. Based on what Lawrence Lessig is telling us though, it's time to route through Washington while we still can.

geez, Wget/1.7, let my server be! Don't make me block you. The same goes for you Hatena Antenna/0.3, I'm keeping an eye on you...

We Blog Chapter 8 Now Online!

We put up a full chapter from We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs on Blogroots tonight. It's a look at how businesses can use weblogs both inside and outside the organization. It includes an interview with John Robb (President of Userland) about K-Logs (knowledge management weblogs) and Sylvia Clark (a project manager at Cisco Systems) about using weblogs on an intranet. The chapter is appropriately called Using Blogs in Business.

It's fun to start sharing some of the work we've done. Like we said on the site—we're used to the quick feedback that Web publishing provides, so waiting to share longer form writing like this is something new. We'll be adding more chapters soon, and eventually the whole book will be online. We hope you'll like what you read and pick up the print version. It should be available in a few weeks.

This is somewhat old news, but you can now sign up for a weblog on Salon without the hacking that was required last week. $39.95/year, powered by Radio UserLand. I'm surprised they didn't tweak the interface so it is integrated even more into Salon's design. The UserLand look/feel seems out of place on Salon.

TrackBack Redux

Matt has added TrackBack functionality to Metafilter as an experiment. I've done the same here as an extension of my previous experiment. Now, if you blog with Movable Type via a bookmarklet while on this page, you'll get a list of the posts that you can TrackBack. It's pretty cool.

It wouldn't be very tough to write a TrackBack Blogging extension for any tool that supports the Blogger API. That way people with other tools could participate. It's definitely easier when it's built directly into the tool, though.

I looked at this site on a friend's Mac yesterday, and what I saw wasn't pretty. For some reason the stylesheet for IE isn't working the same way across platforms. If you're reading this right now on a Mac, this font shouldn't be Times, and the posts should be indented. There should also be a top margin to space the post away from the date. Please switch back to a PC. Thanks.

Recently updated blogs on TV via TiVo. Now that's convergence. [via Anil] If he could just get the most recent posts scrolling across the bottom like a news ticker, he'd have a new product. (Then you could get just those posts that mention the show you happen to be watching.)

Oh great, this is just what we need to strengthen communities: the possibility that we're all spying on each other for the government. Do people get payed for being in the Citizen Corps and reporting on their neighbors? Do they get patriot points they can eventually trade in for a better community to live in? I guess this post goes in my file, eh?

I don't have a Radio Userland or Manila account, so I haven't been able to test BookPost with those tools. I know it works with Blogger and Movable Type. If you happen to try it out with Radio or Manila, let me know how it works for you. I've found the implementations of the Blogger API are all different. I tried to keep my code as generic as possible so it would work with them even with the differences, but you never know until you test it out.