Anil Dash is Wrong About Treehouse Clubs
In a post about how the Twitter API is becoming a de facto standard, Anil Dash derides the impulse of groups to work together to create web standards:
The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here's my recommendation: Don't. Don't do any of that ----, and don't run off to make membership badges for the Treehouse Club quite yet. Instead, just iterate and ship. ...
The good news is, consensus around evolution of the Twitter API can happen simply by saying to each other, "If two application developers who share no common investors or board members can reach agreement around an extension to the API, and between them they have a significant enough number of users to be relevant, then we should all just adopt their work."
This is important because it reframes the conversation from being about technical merits, and all the boys who like to play with APIs always think they know what's "better". I'm sure if I wanted to waste an afternoon, I could tell you a dozen ways in which the Twitter API could be "improved". But guess what? That ---- does not matter. Adoption matters, and I'm heartened by the fact that people seem to be getting that.
As he suggested in our prior discussion of RSSCloud, which currently is being revised unilaterally by one person with no public process to ensure its soundness, Dash believes there's value in "simple, human-readable but potentially ambiguous specs."
I used to think that too, but after spending so many years involved with RSS, I have a better understanding of the costs that developers incur because of half-assed specs. During the 18 months in which the RSS Advisory Board drafted the RSS Best Practices Profile, we accumulated more information on how RSS has been implemented than anybody else on the planet. It's never a good thing for a specification to be "potentially ambiguous." If two developers disagree on what a spec means, their software will not interoperate. And once their software ships, they'll be mad as hell if the specification is revised to make their interpretation the incorrect one.
This leaves you with a situation where you know that a spec is confusing people, and you know that developers are implementing it in incompatible ways, but the most you can do is offer advice like this:
Support for the enclosure element in RSS software varies significantly because of disagreement over whether the specification permits more than one enclosure per item. Although the author intended to permit no more than one enclosure in each item, this limit is not explicit in the specification.
Blogware, Movable Type and WordPress enable publishers to include multiple enclosures in each item of their RSS documents. This works successfully in some aggregators, including BottomFeeder, FeederReader, NewsGator and Safari.
Other software does not support multiple enclosures, including Bloglines, FeedDemon, Google Reader and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. The first enclosure is downloaded automatically, an aspect of enclosure support relied on in podcasting, and the additional enclosures are either ignored or must be requested manually.
For best support in the widest number of aggregators, an item SHOULD NOT contain more than one enclosure.
So when somebody asks me if an RSS item can contain more than one enclosure, I give that long-winded answer. When I'm asked the same question about Atom, the answer is this:
Yes.
Guess which one was created by a Treehouse Club?
Dash's vision of a Twitter API that evolves every time two developers agree on a new feature would rapidly devolve into an unworkable mess.
Book Giveaway: Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours
My newest book, Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours, Fifth Edition, recently hit bookstores. The book is a for-absolute-beginners guide to programming Java, and this section from chapter one's Q&A section shows how much license I get from the publisher to have fun with the series:
Q. Do you only answer questions about Java?
A. Not at all. Ask me anything.
Q. Okay, why is Prince mad at the Foo Fighters?
A. Prince is unhappy that the Foo Fighters performed a cover of his song "Darling Nikki" and released it as a B-side single in Australia. He told Entertainment Weekly they should write their own tunes and wouldn't let the band release it in the United States. This became a pretty meaningless distinction as the song became a radio hit around the globe and was played regularly during their concerts.
When Prince performed at Super Bowl XLI a few years later, he covered the Foo Fighters' "Best of You," an artistic decision that surprised the Foo Fighters as much as everybody else.
"It was pretty amazing to have a guy like Prince covering one of our songs," Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins told MTV, "and actually doing it better than we did."
Although playing someone else's music is an odd way to exercise a grudge, this was a better option for the 5-foot-2 Prince than challenging the band to a fight.
Every chapter ends with one reader question that has bupkiss to do with Java. I used to be the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Ed Brice, an answer man who fielded random questions, so old habits die hard.
My book has been fully updated for Java 6 and has new chapters on JAX-WS and game programming. I have 20 copies I'd like to give to people who want to learn Java, and there's still time for me to mail them before Christmas.
If you know someone who wants to learn Java, or you can make a convincing case for why Santa owes you this book after the year 2009 you just endured, please leave a comment here on Workbench or in a Twitter post to rcade. Make sure I have some means of contacting you, so I can get the address of the person getting the book.
I'm planning on mailing these out on Wednesday morning in the pre-Christmas scrum at the post office. I will mail the books directly to the people receiving them and can put your name and address as the sender and wrap them if necessary. No one needs to know I was involved.
Please note that I'm expecting the people who get this free book to teach themselves Java in a single contiguous 24-hour period. For too long, Sams has coddled readers who devote one hour a day to a subject and learn it at their leisure.
Homeless Man Performs Radiohead's 'Creep'
On Friday, the Opie and Anthony radio show invited several homeless men they pulled off the street into the studio to promote their annual "homeless shopping spree" bit. When they learned one of the men was a musician who had written some songs, they procured him a guitar and he performed Radiohead's "Creep."
There's more details on Daniel Mustard's appearance on Sports Inferno and Reddit.
RSS Advisory Board Becomes Publisher of Media RSS
Last night, I finished creating a copy of the Media RSS Specification as part of its move from Yahoo to the RSS Advisory Board. We found out 21 months ago that Yahoo was amenable to the idea of finding a custodian to publish the spec, so several board members and I have been working with them to make it happen.
Media RSS is a namespace that extends RSS to support sophisticated distribution of audio, video and image files. In the five years since it was created by Yahoo, it has become extremely popular with podcasters and other multimedia publishers. It is supported by Yahoo Search, Bing, Wikipedia, Flock, Picasa and a lot of other sites and software.
Because version 1.5 of the specification was just released in October, I expect the first priority of the board will be to help developers implement the new features such as user ratings of media content, the ability to define scenes, Creative Commons licensing and support for geolocation. Our first job should be to ensure that the Feed Validator for Atom and RSS can validate all of the elements in a Media RSS feed.
This move wouldn't have happened without Sapna Chandiramani and Nilesh Gattani at Yahoo and Randy Charles Morin and Ryan Parman on the board, so I'd like to thank them for their efforts.
In the nearly four years since the board went public with its votes and deliberations, we've been entrusted by Netscape to publish the first two versions of RSS -- RSS 0.90 and RSS 0.91 -- and now by Yahoo to publish Media RSS. I'm glad that we've gained the trust of the RSS development community for projects of this kind. The board can assure the permanent availability of any namespaces, documentation or services related to syndication, and we are an independent group with members who have been involved in syndication going all the way back to its creation in 1999.
Before I worked on moving the Media RSS spec this week, I didn't notice that it contained an example that only would make sense to people who grew up in Texas in the '80s:
<media:title type="plain">The Judy's -- The Moo Song</media:title>
The Judys were a twisted bubblegum pop band that toured Dallas, Austin and Nacogdoches when I was in college and had no money to see them. A few of their songs, though not "Moo," can be heard on MySpace. The Judys fan at Yahoo turns out to be David Hall, the author of the original version of the spec. He graduated from Berkner High School in Richardson, Texas, seven years after I did.
Photographer Makes Weighty Request
Philip Greenspun, an MIT computer science teacher who founded the photographic community Photo.Net, has posted an unusual request on his weblog:
I'd like to get some pictures of fat people eating (example1; example2). I'm in Orlando and it seems like an ideal opportunity to combine two quintessentially American themes: obesity and theme parks. Also, a theme park is a great place to walk around with a big camera and lens without attracting attention. I would like to find a theme park where there are a lot of restaurants, a lot of fat people (aside from myself), and most of the restaurants have outdoor seating.
He believes that diet pills will emerge in the future that make today's fat people a historical curiosity in the year 2100.
I've been to Orlando dozens of times. When you need to add blubber to prepare for the harsh Florida winter, the best places I've found are the Chevy's Tex-Mex at the Crossroads shopping center on State Road 535, the Wolfgang Puck Cafe at Downtown Disney and the Rainforest Cafe outside Animal Kingdom.
Crash Kills 2 Teens in Jacksonville
There was a terrible two-car accident in Jacksonville Sunday night that left two teens dead and five other people hospitalized with serious injuries. Around 8:30 p.m., a Chevy Silverado going north on Phillips Highway near the Avenues Mall collided with a southbound private ambulance turning left near Interstate 95. The truck's driver, 19-year-old Michael Linder, and his 18-year-old girlfriend Megan Bunn died from injuries sustained in the accident. Florida State Highway troopers told News4Jax that no one in the truck was wearing a seat belt.
I was driving north on Phillips Highway at the same time as the teens, and at around 8:30 I was turning onto Southside Boulevard no more than 1,200 feet before the intersection where the crash occurred. I didn't see or hear a collision. When I returned to the highway 30 minutes later after an errand, the road was completely shut down and police and ambulances were all over the place.
Megan Bunn had an active MySpace page with lots of pictures of a person just getting started in her life. One titled Me and You is presumably her and Linder. The page records her last login as 11/29/2009, the day of the accident. One of her recent status messages reads "my life makes me laugh till the day im dead."
The cause of Sunday's crash has yet to be determined. The ambulance driver has reportedly told police he had a green light when he turned and the damage to the truck indicates that it must have been going pretty fast. Police are looking for eyewitnesses, but I did not notice any vehicles driving in an unusual manner.
I used to read about tragedies like this and see myself in the participants. Now I think more about how my oldest son is two years from legal driving age. I don't know how parents muster the courage to send their children out in motor vehicles. When you are a teen, it's difficult to let go of the idea that you are indestructible. I'm a neurotic person with a highly developed sense of caution, but at age 18 I can recall being stupid a few times behind the wheel. One incident in particular -- when I was leaving the Starck Club in Dallas and had a near-miss accident on Interstate 30 in the middle of the night -- convinced me to never drink as much as a single beer if I'm going to be driving. My heart goes out to the families of the people involved in this accident.
The First Coast News story I linked contains a lot of unkind speculation from readers, which seems to be the norm on newspaper and TV station web sites. I don't understand why there's so little humanity in the reader forums of local media. Even though several friends of Been and Linder have participated in the discussion, it hasn't stopped some people from being incredibly cruel.
Media sites attract vicious commenters. When my college friend Bill Muller died two years ago, he was the longtime film critic for the Arizona Republic and the paper ran a feature obituary about his many accomplishments in journalism. Here's the first comment it received, which is still online today:
While my sincere condolences go out to Mr. Muller's family & friends, it is my greatest hope that the paper will replace him with a film "critic" who actually LIKES movies that normal people go to see rather than the "artsy-craftsy" c-r-a-p that always get rave reviews. ...
I don't understand why blogs like this one attract kinder communities than the ones on local newspapers, where the audience is an actual community. You'd think people would be nicer to their neighbors.
I Ruined Blogging for the St. Augustine Record
Peter Ellis, the editor of the St. Augustine Record, recently began a blog with an angry post that suggests he is starting his new site under duress:
My first encounter with a blogger was a miserable experience. He reported stuff on his blog about The Record that was wrong and then urged bloggers across the country to write me to complain. Many of them did, even though most of them had never heard of the St. Augustine Record.
That left a bad taste in my mouth about bloggers. Since then, I've read quite a few blogs and, with some delightful exceptions, most are awful. So I enter the world of blogging gently, knowing that many who have gone before me have failed.
My goal is to write about what happens in the newsroom, why we make the decisions we do and, I hope, get into a conversation with you about The Record and our work. I won't write about my family, my dog, my old convertible and my golf game. They all fascinate me, but I'm pretty sure they won't do the same for you.
What I will talk about is journalism at The Record. I hope you'll join me in the conversation.
He's talking about me. In 2007, I wrote about the Record when it tried to expose the identity of a local blogger who was critical of a county commissioner, and my story was linked by Romenesko, attracting attention from some journalists and bloggers across the country. I posted a follow-up about how Ellis was telling people that the blogger was a front for an organized group but the paper never ran a story revealing his identity or that of the supposed group.
As a longtime reader of the Record, I thought it was inappropriate for the paper to release its own security video of the unnamed blogger, who had bought a display ad in the paper to get his message out, and conduct a manhunt as if he was a criminal. The factual basis for the ad was backed up by the paper's own reporting.
When Ellis posted a comment on my blog, I contacted him to confirm his identity and we got into a bitchy email exchange. He told me "you don't have a lot of credibility with me," I responded that my web traffic could beat up his web traffic and he kept telling me that my blog was incorrect without pointing out any actual error. He finished the exchange with this comment: "You're wrong across the board, and you know it. Please don't write to me anymore."
So now I learn that not only was I wrong in some still-unspecified way, but my wrongness proved to be a formative experience for him.
This isn't the first time I've made a professional journalist mad about what I wrote on Workbench, which I enjoy because turnabout is fair play. But I didn't encourage people to complain to Ellis. I just related the facts as I knew them, gave my own opinion and some bloggers evidently contacted him because they objected to what his paper was doing. It's ironic that a journalist with 37 years experience would play shoot the messenger when he doesn't like the consequences of somebody else's reporting.
Although this would appear to be another battle in the war between journalists and bloggers, as I begin my eleventh year of blogging I don't think the distinctions matter any more. He appears to see bloggers as a self-fascinated and awful group, but these days millions of people have blogs, Twitter accounts and social media sites. Everybody gathers and shares information. The world I went to college for, in which a trained priesthood of journalism school graduates are the primary dispensers of the news, doesn't exist any more.
I enjoyed the days when profits were fat and journalism jobs were plentiful, but I'm glad to live at a time when any outspoken person with a web site has the opportunity to put the local newspaper editor on the defensive.
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