There's a Reason RSSCloud Failed to Catch On
WordPress and Dave Winer are working together to bring real-time, Twitter-style updates to RSS feeds using the cloud element and the accompanying RSSCloud Interface. Yesterday, WordPress added RSS cloud support to "all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com." Winer's documenting the ongoing work at RSSCloud.org.
Although some tech sites are reporting this as a new initiative, cloud has been around since RSS 0.92 in December 2000. I was getting real-time RSS updates as a Radio UserLand blogger back then, and it was a great feature.
However, there's a reason that UserLand turned off cloud support in its products several years ago and shut down all of its cloud notification servers. The approach has massive scaling and firewall issues.
To explain why, it's worth looking at an example. I publish the Drudge Retort, which has around 16,000 subscribers, including 1,000 who get the feeds using desktop software on their home computers. If I add cloud support and all of my subscribers have cloud-enabled readers, each time I update the Retort, my cloud update server will be sending around 1,050 notifications to computers running RSS readers -- 1,000 to individuals and 50 to web-based readers.
That's just for one update. The Retort updates around 20 times a day, so that requires 21,000 notifications sent using XML-RPC, SOAP or REST.
On Internet servers it's extremely expensive to request data from clients, in terms of CPU time and networking resources. You have to make a connection to the computer, wait for a response and deal with timeouts from servers that are unavailable or blocked by a firewall.
RSSCloud also requires that all desktop software receiving cloud notifications functions as a web server. So if an RSS reader like BottomFeeder or FeedDemon adds cloud support, it must show its users how to turn off firewall ports to accept these incoming requests and possibly turn them off in their router as well. UserLand's attempt to put web servers on user desktops failed because it was too cumbersome to support. Back when I was writing the book Radio UserLand Kick Start and working closely with UserLand developers, their biggest customer service issue was helping users open up their firewalls so that Radio UserLand could act as a web server.
I don't mean to be a dark cloud, because this functionality could be a nice improvement for web-based RSS readers, letting services like Google Reader and Bloglines receive much quicker updates than they get from hourly polling.
But if the effort to make RSS real time extends to desktop software and mobile clients, cloud won't work. I think that RSS update notification would require peer-to-peer technology and something like XMPP, the protocol that powers Jabber instant messaging.
Obama's Speech to Schools No Reason to Freak Out
The lead story in today's St. Augustine Record feeds the hysteria over President Obama's planned speech to the nation's schoolchildren Tuesday. "Parents may pull kids from Obama talk," the headline reads, "Some St. Johns parents fear political message." Instead of covering what Obama's going to say to students, which will be a non-partisan call for kids to study, do homework and help the country by bettering themselves educationally, the Record leads with idiotic spin from Florida Republican Party chairman Jim Greer, who claims without any evidence that "taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology."
Aside from a comment by the White House press secretary calling it "silly season when the president of the United States can't tell kids in school to study hard and stay in school," reporter Marcia Lane doesn't quote a single person to explain or defend the speech. Instead, she quotes Greer, the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, a Republican school superintendent in Arizona, unnamed critics and St. Johns County School Superintendent Joe Joyner, who acts as if an attempt was made to sneak this event past him. Neither this story nor others I've read mentions the fact that past presidents also addressed schoolchildren.
I'm a St. Johns parent, and I fear a country that has become so cynical about politics that people don't trust the president to give a speech to schoolkids, simply because they voted for the other party.
I don't know what it is about President Obama that inspires such irrational panic among Republicans. Whether it's the scope of federal intervention in the nation's massive economic crisis, the presence of the first liberal president in the White House in 28 years, the endless stream of opportunistic attacks by the still-formidable right-wing media machine or discomfort over his race and background, Obama faces so much mistrust in everything he does that I fear the country is becoming ungovernable.
On the Drudge Retort, Yav did a good job today of running down all the false, misleading or crazy stuff that's been flung at the president lately:
- Death panels.
- Pull the plug on Grandma.
- Death panels for the disabled.
- Forced euthanasia for our Veterans.
- Breast cancer patients to be killed off.
- Obama's a socialist. No, he's a marxist.
- He's a radical christian. No he's a secret muslim.
- He's actually a Kenyan, not a U.S. Citizen.
- He's an illegal alien.
- He's coming for our guns.
- He's implementing a civil military force.
- He's going to indoctrinate our children.
Every week there's something new that cycles through the Drudge Report, bloggers like Michelle Malkin, radio gasbags like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, each outlet amplifying the last one until it's another "major controversy" that tells the right wing what they want to hear -- which is that they were right all along about Obama. Work people into a lather, rinse and repeat.
Although I describe myself as a "yellow-dog Democrat," I've always tried to take an open-minded approach to politics and be receptive to other viewpoints. That's one reason the Retort has more conservative and libertarian members than other liberal political sites. But these days, it's hard to take anything coming from Republicans seriously because there's such a flood of BS coming from Obama haters.
Political consensus requires an assumption of good faith. The approach many Republicans are taking to Obama's presidency, in which every single thing he does is portrayed in the worst possible light, is extremely destructive to the well-being of this country because it makes consensus impossible. There will be a Republican president in the White House soon enough. The approach being taken today against Obama will be used against his successor. Obama and the Democratic leaders of Congress will stop looking for common ground with people who believe they want to kill grandmothers and the disabled, set up FEMA detention camps and turn the nation into North Cuba. You can't compromise with crazy.
Gawker Takes Shots at Company's Early Skeptics
In a post bragging about how great Gawker Media is doing, company marketing strategist Erin Pettigrew takes shots at a few bloggers who were skeptical seven years ago that a professional weblog network would make money:
... when the controversial Gizmodo launched (laying the foundation for Gawker Media), the self-important digital punditocracy debated this 'commercial experiment' in blogging as a viable, interesting, useful, or scalable business:
Dave Winer: It's such a stale idea. The Web is distributed. Try to get the flow to coalesce in a premeditated way. Not likely to work.
Anil Dash: Will it be profitable? I think it's possible but it's much more likely to break even long-term. Which, for the publishing industry, ain't too bad.
Matt Haughey: It's still too new of a site, but I'm looking forward to seeing how well written it is, and if it keeps me coming back. If so, and it makes the people behind it money while doing it, maybe professional blogging can work afterall.
It's fun to look back at those comments, but calling the bloggers "self-important" suggests that Gawker has been nursing a grudge all this time, which is weird considering the tone of the comments that were quoted. Most people were skeptical back then that a pro blog network could work. This was a good thing for Nick Denton's company, because otherwise he would've faced more early competition.
Gawker's also the last place in the world that should be offended by critical bloggers, considering the hard-edged writing that typifies its blogs. The Gawker Media empire is fueled by snark, cheap shots and venom. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
Last Day to Enter Television Death Pool
Today's the last day to enter the Ted Marshall Open Television Death Pool, a contest to predict the shows most likely to be cancelled during the fall TV season. To play, you must predict 10 comedies, dramas, games shows or news programs on the five major networks -- ABC, CBS, CW, FOX and NBC -- that will be cancelled by Aug. 31, 2010.
Last year I finished in a tie for 24th place by picking eight shows that went to their doom:
ER(NBC)- 90210 (CW)
Opportunity Knocks(ABC)- The Mentalist (CBS)
Life On Mars(ABC)Privileged(CW)Eli Stone(ABC)Easy Money(CW)My Own Worst Enemy(NBC)The Ex List(CBS)
My biggest miss was The Mentalist, the cop drama with Simon Baker playing a former fake psychic who uses his keen powers of observation to fight crime. The show was an enormous hit, averaging 15.9 million viewers, and one of the top 10 shows of the entire season. I also missed on 90210, a show I'm ashamed to admit I watched four times.
This year, I'll be blogging about the contest and the new TV season on Mister Television, a new blog I'm launching with Television's Jonathan Bourne.
KCRA Journalists Giddy After Child Kidnapper's Call
Phillip Garrido, the 58-year-old sex offender in California accused of kidnapping Jaycee Dugard as an 11-year-old in 1991 and being the father of her two children over the years she was held in captivity, called Sacramento TV reporter Walt Gray yesterday.
During the call, Garrido urged Gray to pick up a document from the FBI that will explain his actions. "Wait until you hear the story of what took place at this house," he said. "If you take this a step at a time you're going to fall over backwards and in the end, you're going to find the most powerful heart-warming story."
KCRA ran the full audio of the call, but they made a mistake and kept the recording going for some conversation between Gray and others in the newsroom.
After the call with Garrido ends, the following conversation takes place:
Woman's voice: Save it. You gotta save it.
Man: You know what you're doing?
Walt Gray: Yep.
Man: Alright. Don't mess up.
Gray: This is the biggest moment of your life.
Woman: And yours.
Hearing that audio is like catching Harry Potter and Hermione Granger discussing spellcasting among muggles.
Little-Known Blogger Got William Calley Scoop
You may have heard last week that Lt. William Calley, for the first time ever, publicly apologized for his role in the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which 350 to 500 Vietnamese -- mostly unarmed women and children -- were killed by U.S. troops under his command. Calley was sentenced to life in prison for 22 murders, but his sentence was commuted by President Nixon to three years of house arrest.
During an Aug. 19 speech at the Columbus, Ga., Kiwanis Club, Calley said, "There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."
This story was the exclusive scoop of a blogger, but when Associated Press ran its story on Calley's apology, it used the blogger's quotes without crediting him.
Dick McMichael, a retired broadcast journalist, was one of 50 people in attendance at the Kiwanis Club when Calley made a short speech and answered questions. McMichael wrote about the appearance on his blog, a personal site that primarily covers Georgia and Alabama topics. No professional media were present.
Calley refuses to talk to the media, so all of his quotes from the AP story came from McMichael, but he isn't credited. Instead, AP cited the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, which asked McMichael to write up the story for the paper after it found out about his incredible scoop.
I'm not clear on whether AP had the legal right to run McMichael's quotes or anything else from his story. The wire service can legally make use of the copyrighted work of local newspapers that belong to the organization, but his byline is "Special to the Ledger-Enquirer," which means that he wrote it as a freelancer.
Last year, a site that I publish, the Drudge Retort, was embroiled in a copyright battle with AP over 33- to 79-word snippets of AP articles that were posted by users on the Retort. We resolved the matter amicably, but in a phone call with me, AP's attorneys took an extremely narrow view of fair use when it came to the headlines and leads from its stories. AP maintained that any verbatim quote of its headlines or leads is a copyright violation.
One of the ironies of that conflict -- and the aggressive stance AP has continued to take since then -- is that the wire service has an extremely expansive view of its own reuse rights. AP regularly turns the work of local newspapers into wire service stories without giving the originating reporter or newspaper any credit at all -- something we grumbled about when I was a reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the '80s. AP also runs photos of people in the news copied from places like Facebook and MySpace without permission and can be stingy about crediting anyone else for breaking news.
In this case, McMichael's role in bringing Calley's remarks to light was an important element of the story wrongly omitted by AP. McMichael got one of the biggest scoops of the year -- reporters have tried for decades to get Calley to talk, and when he finally did we were fortunate a blogger was in attendance. Some other media outlets did credit him, including reporter Ernie Suggs in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
The appearance might have gone unnoticed, if not for Dick McMichael, a retired journalist who now blogs in Columbus. McMichael attended the meeting, blogged about it and his story was picked up by the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer.
"The questions were asked respectfully and politely, which could give the impression they were softball," McMichael blogged later. "I don't think that was the case. The questions got right to the crux of the matter, in my view, and Calley didn't dodge any of them."
Rewatching 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off'
"I did not achieve this position in life by having some snot-nosed punk leave my cheese out in the wind." -- Dean of Students Ed Rooney
In 1965, an outdoor amphitheater was built in Anastasia Island, Florida, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of St. Augustine. The site, which was part of a state park, had been a coquina quarry used centuries earlier to build the city. The amphitheater was open 10 weeks each summer for performances of Florida's official state play, Cross and Sword, which lasted 31 years until the state decided it wasn't worth $27,000 to keep going.
Since that closed, the St. Augustine Amphitheatre has been upgraded into a 4,500 seat outdoor concert venue that occasionally hosts free showings of classic movies. We took the kids last night to see Ferris Bueller's Day Off at the amphitheater, figuring they were now old enough to appreciate the angst-ridden teen comedies of John Hughes.
Ferris holds up pretty well after 23 years and is still funny, particularly the scenes involving Jeffrey Jones as Dean Rooney. I loved the film as a 19-year-old in Hughes' target market, but now that my struggles of adolescence are old enough to have adolescents of their own, I thought the story held up. Hughes was the poet laureate of the 'burbs.
I noticed a few new things this time around. Near the end, Ferris recaps the marvels of their day by telling his friends, "We ate pancreas." This line, which refers to their lunch at the snooty French restaurant, is about a deleted scene, according to IMDB:
Ferris orders something in French on the menu, and after everyone at the table tastes it, he is informed by the snooty waiter that he ordered "sweetbreads", which is a French dish made from the thymus gland. It was removed because it showed the waiter getting the better of Ferris ...
Also, Ferris complains repeatedly about not owning a car, but he has an expensive music synthesizer in his room he uses to simulate coughing. IMDB states that it's a E-MU Emulator II that cost around $8,000 in 1984. That buys a lot of crappy first cars -- my 1966 Dodge Dart cost me $500.
The crowd loved the movie, applauding the last scenes of Cameron, Sloane and Ferris. They also applauded enthusiastically at the cameo by Charlie Sheen as the teen druggie at the police station. The popularity of Two and a Half Men has turned Sheen from being a former drug- and sex-addicted manwhore to America's most beloved former drug- and sex-addicted manwhore.
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