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Thumbnails, rev #2 - 01/09/2009 10:56 PM

Earlier today I revised a proposal from December for including thumbnail images in HTML. I am now revising that proposal again to be compatible with Digg's (undated) proposal, which I just found out about.

I'm not going to add another format when one exists that differs from mine only by the choice of a name (they call it an image_src, I called it a thumbnail).

Their format doesn't call for a type, or height and width -- I'm going to include that info and hope that Digg ignores it.

You can see an example by viewing source on this page.

To test, I've submitted the example to Digg. They ask if it's an news article, video or image, I chose image. A few steps later and it's submitted, and apparently they picked up the thumbnail. Looks good!

Seems like a done deal!

Update: FriendFeed does support this format in their bookmarklet. I tested it, and it works. Happy! That's already a lot of compatibility for less than an hour's worth of work. My photo site plugs into Digg and FriendFeed.

Bootstrapping thumbnails, revisited - 01/09/2009 09:11 PM

Update: After posting this, I learned of a Digg-authored format that does the same thing, and I've adopted it. I'm leaving the rest of this here to form a record, but the format it describes is not implemented.

At the very end of last month I started a thread here about adding thumbnails to photo pages in such a way that web apps such as Tweetree, and others that can display graphics inline, can grab info about the thumbnail directly from the HTML of the page that the full image is displayed on. If we're going to have a future of graphics-capable Twitter-like services, or if Twitter itself is going to grok images, then thumbnails are not just nice-to-have but must-have. And a machine-readable way to link to them from the original HTML is needed.

My first impulse was to create a <link> variant, but to do so would have meant adding width and height attributes. I could have omitted them, but that's ridiculous -- all image processing apps have that information at-hand, and if you don't put it in the HTML, then the client has to do an HTTP reference to get the data, and that's a waste of bandwidth. Better to put the info in one place rather than have N clients fetch it for themselves.

However, Zach Beane objected that you can't just invent elements for <link>, so I took a different route and defined an XML namespace for a new thumbnail element. Later, Sam Ruby suggested that HTML allows for arbitrary attributes to be added where they make sense as long as their names begin with "data-". I didn't know about this. So I'm going back to the initial simpler approach and use a <link> element.

So here's the new template...

<link rel="thumbnail" type="image/jpeg" href="http://static.flickrfan.org/afp/thumbnails/2008/12/28/trpar2329681.jpg" data-width="150" data-height="87">

You can see an example by viewing source on this page.

Update: Over on FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit, one of FF's founders, says that Digg has a format that does most of what I'm doing here. There are some weird things about it, like why specify the title in a <meta> element when HTML already has a <title> but I think I have to go with the Digg format. The philosophy: "One way to do something, no matter how flawed that way is, is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is." It's a corollary to Postel's Law, being conservative in what you send. I asked Paul if FF is supporting the Digg proposal.

Harry Truman probably would have liked Twitter - 01/09/2009 07:06 PM

Harry Truman: "I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell."

80 characters, including punctuation.

It occurs to me this morning this is one of the most American ideas out there.

"If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," another Trumanism.

52 characters.

A picture named truman.jpg

At dinner last night in a discussion about the future of the University of California Journalism School, I figured something out. Journalism has always been about the sources, but somehow we lost our way and focused on the reporters, the conduits, the pipes. Okay, so the way we move news from sources to their destinations is changing, but when it's all done, the news process yields the same result.

So this explains why a 140-character limit in Twitter is so in tune with our times. It teaches us how to summarize, to condense, and it rewards those of us who are good at it by making our ideas go further.

It also levels the playing field. Last night there was a 5.0 earthquake in southern California. Not a big one, but Twitter had the full story within a minute. Was there more to say, for cameras and analysts to pore over? Not this time. 140-characters was plenty.

A better choice for Surgeon General - 01/09/2009 05:05 PM

Our future President (11 days!) is said to be considering a famous TV doctor for Sur-Gen.

Paul Krugman explains why he's not a good choice, and I concur, but something has been bothering me about this, and an email from a friend helped nail it.

If you really want to turn things upside-down for the better, instead of a healthy young doctor, how about an older person who is not a doctor, who has health problems and has been treated by the system, someone who has actual experience being a user of American health care.

Then let the doctors and insurance companies and HMOs listen a bit. There's no doubt the other users would hear what this person says. (There's a scene in the latest Clint Eastwood film that illustrates this principle beautifully.)

I am not suggesting an average or ordinary person, not a Joe The Patient, not a knucklehead or idiot, rather someone with a life of accomplishment, a passion for living, but someone who hasn't lived the perfect life and paid a price, and maybe someone like the future President who saw a relative die sooner or suffer more because of deficiency in the system.

That would signal a very pragmatic change -- from health care defining an ideal most of us won't achieve, to improving or just sustaining the reality we make the best of.

Thanks to Ann Greenberg, a longtime friend and Berkeley neighbor, for the perspective-shifting email.

Palm Pre a possibility? - 01/09/2009 02:58 AM

I left a comment on jkOnTheRun about the new Palm Pre that was announced today at CES.

First question: Can it tether?

That is, can it play the role of the Cradlepoint router I just got, and the Sprint EVDO modem plugged into it?

Are they going to be as locked down as Apple is with the iPhone?

When and how can I get one to play with?

This morning I couldn't imagine why anyone would even go to a Palm press conference, and now I'm on the edge of wanting one of these to try. I'm ready to get off my iPhone, I'm sick of the locked up mentality. If this thing pairs nicely with a netbook, I might just switch to it for a year or so.

The next step in the evolving netbook is the cellphone that pairs with it. Whatever it is it must be reasonably debugged both in software and philosophy. Apple has the software but their philosophy is totally up a creek.

Now I'm looking for some Palm Pre clipart.

Conclusion of the Feedburner latency test - 01/09/2009 12:33 AM

It appears that it takes FB some amount of time to recognize a feed once its been registered, but that once it does, it's pretty close to perfect at caching a feed for 30 minutes before refreshing its copy from the original.

A table that reports on the test.

Notes on the test when it started are here.

Here's the original feed and here's the Feedburner version.

I looked for docs on how to ping Feedburner, but came up with confusing and contradictory instructions, none of which worked. They all got Java errors from the server. I tried pinging using their form and through pingomatic, neither of which had any effect on the latency.

I tried adding a <ttl> element to the feed, set it to 1 minute to see if that had any effect. I'll let you know.

Update: Apparently Feedburner ignores <ttl>.

Update: I turned the test off for now.

Measuring Feedburner's latency - 01/08/2009 05:56 PM

Yesterday I listened to a Gillmor Gang podcast that focused on one issue -- how much time does it take Feedburner to reflect the changes in a feed they're hosting. Steve had some evidence that it was taking as much as three hours for it to reflect changes in his feed at techcrunchit.com.

Being an engineer, I wondered what was going on, so I constructed a test with a feed to see what Feedburner would do with it.

Here's the original feed and here's the Feedburner version.

Here's what my test does. Every minute it reads the Feedburner version and compares it against the original. If they don't match, it does nothing. When they do match, it notes the time in a log, generates a new version of the test feed and repeats the process.

I'm going to let the test run for a few hours and then make one change -- I'll ping their server when I create the new version.

And of course I'll report the results here when they are available.

A note: I ran the test overnight and got what to me are astonishing results. Feedburner never noticed the change in the original feed. Anyone who was subscribed to it would not have known there had been news. I couldn't believe this, I felt there had to be a bug somewhere in my test, and it could be that there is. That's why I'm re-running it this morning while I'm working and can keep an eye on it.

Update at 11:10AM Pacific: First results after running the experiment for almost 2 hours: It took the following amount of time for Feedburner to reflect a change in the original feed: 24 minutes, 31 minutes and it's still returning old results after 61 minutes. This is without pinging.

Update at 2:20PM Pacific: Here's a table that summarizes the results.

Friends Of Dave - 01/07/2009 07:31 PM

A Twitter feed with the blog updates of 15 of my friends.

http://twitter.com/friendsOfDave

A picture named sprint.jpg

A dynamic list of the feeds.

.

This post is basically a test of the dynamic list. Let's see if the sucka works!

Update #1: It works. I have to add that having jkOnTheRun at CES makes it mostly unnecessary for me to be there. I've already learned about a new Netgear 3G router. They pretty much precisely care about the things I care about. Keep up the great work. Speaking of which, I had the opportunity to really use the new Cradlepoint router last night at a dinner party, and it works fantastically. Very fast. Super nice to just put the hotspot in the knapsack, turned on, nothing extraneous hanging off my netbook.

Update #2: I added Betsy Devine. I must add some more people I used to hang out with in Boston. The whole point of this exercise is to keep in touch with people I lose touch with. It's possible to do this if we have blogs, and some of them, like Betsy, do.

Update #3: http://identi.ca/friendsofdave

Update #4: http://friendfeed.com/friendsofdave

Friends Of Dave for Identi.ca - 01/07/2009 10:22 PM

Just added a way for identi.ca users to follow the Friends-Of-Dave feed.

There's no other way to test it -- I have to push an item through and see if it makes it over to identi.ca in addition to the Twitter place. Let's see if it works...

http://identi.ca/friendsofdave

It does! Cooool.

Friends Of Dave for FriendFeed - 01/07/2009 10:59 PM

Just one more service, I promise. A test to see if it works...

http://friendfeed.com/friendsofdave

It works!

Blog clip art - 01/07/2009 08:37 PM

This is a post I've been meaning to write for some time, but this blog post, reviewing the interesting practices of bloggers finally got me off my butt.

If you've been reading Scripting News for a while surely you've noticed the graphics that often appear in the right margin of stories here. Sometimes they are directly related to the story, and other times only artistically. They are meant to invoke your own thoughts and feelings, to show you something about yourself. Whatever they are you can be sure that I found them interesting. Beyond that, what they mean is up to you. That's what art is about, always -- don't let anyone tell you otherwise. That's why artists cringe when people ask them what the art is about or say that a piece does nothing for them. They'll always come back and ask what it means to you, or say that nothing is something. They're not just saying it to be difficult (although people always think artists are difficult).

Anyway -- the point...

Many times the art I use is commercial, pictures of products. My suggestion is that the companies behind the products should make the clip art easy to find and re-use. Think of it as free brand advertising. Often it's amazingly difficult to find a clippable picture of a product. Examples. Every airline should have an iconic picture of an airplane with their trade dress, on a pure white background. TV sets or laptop computers should come with blank screens, making it easy to superimpose a picture of a dead relative or someone you want to make more interesting by putting them on TV.

The SEO and PR people are all over the place, so guys and gals -- get to work. Every brand should have great clip art for bloggers to use and re-use. It's free advertising. And you guys like free, don't you!

Some babies are destined for greatness - 01/07/2009 05:49 PM

I met Nicco (center) on my first day at Dean For America in Burlington, VT at the end of the campaign for Iowa. Since then we've been friends, across generations -- and I've become friends with his lovely Morra, and his puppy Rascal (pictured at the left). I've always expected great things from Nicco, but that's nothing compared to the feeling I get about his newborn son, Asa Archibald Mele (who will be known as Archie, I hear). I've only seen him in pictures, and it's probably only through knowing his family that I sense the greatness in this young man.

Born on January 3 of the New Year, in Boston, a warm welcome to Master Archie!

Turning Twitter into my friend-feed - 01/07/2009 05:37 AM

I was doing a little work on a tool I wrote in April 2007 that pushed RSS content to Twitter, and made a simple enhancement: instead of having a Twitter account reflect the content of a single feed, I made it reflect the content of an arbitrary number of feeds.

This let me do something I've been wanting to do for a while, but never thought of using Twitter for -- I set it up to reflect the content of my blogging friends, people like Doc Searls, Scott Rosenberg, Scoble, Sylvia Paull, Andrew Baron, NakedJen, Nicco Mele, Michael Gartenberg, Marc Canter and a few others.

As usual with experiments, I'm not sure if this is going to amount to anything, but I thought it was worth noting. The tool is twitterRiver.root, and the feed it's associated with is friendsofdave:

http://twitter.com/friendsofdave

You may of course choose to follow this feed if you find it interesting, and I will probably release the tool at some point in the future.

PS: Arrington and Calacanis will find it gratifying that this is an aggregation of blog posts not Twitter fire hoses. That's why it's possible to include Scoble alongside Andrew Baron and Scott Rosenberg, without drowning them out.

Julie and Julia - 01/06/2009 11:06 PM

Just got an email from Andrew Grumet with an amazing story.

He writes: "Julie Powell, who blogged her way through a Julia Child book on blogs.salon.com. Then the blog got her a book deal and some minor celebrity. Now they're making a movie out of it... with Meryl Streep!!! (in the role of Julia Child).

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1135503/

Chris Lydon did a podcast with Julie Powell in his pioneering 2004 series where he interviewed many of the early bloggers.

How newspapers tried to invent the web - 01/06/2009 09:06 PM

Fascinating Slate article about how Newspapers "tried to invent the web." A lot of it absolutely true -- I thought I was in the "videotext" industry when I started out in tech in the early 80s, so much so that I named my company Living Videotext. I made countless trips back to NY to meet with people at CBS and Dow Jones, to try to anticipate the kinds of authoring tools we'd need, and how news would flow in the new system we were anticipating. That's why I wrote ThinkTank, I thought of it as an environment for authoring and reading news.

I became a netizen on Compuserve's CB radio, and wrote my own bulletin-board software, LBBS, which then became TankCentral, a way for ThinkTank users to share outlines. When we merged with Symantec, I was still hung up on the idea of the outliner as the way of modeling online discourse, that's why I pushed for us to merge with Think Technologies, and also another company which we didn't get a deal with, who went on to become Microsoft Mail. I felt that MORE was the best way to do networking.

Had Sidhu done a halfway decent job with the Mac networking APIs, I am sure the web would have happened on the Macintosh in the mid-late 80s. We spent countless man-months trying to get MORE to network. When it finally happened, Unix was the central OS for our communication future, and low-tech interfaces took the place of Apple's much more sophisticated networking.

You know it would be great to have a conference someday with all the people who tried to make the web happen before it happened. I'd see a lot of old friends there.

One thing I love about Twitter - 01/06/2009 07:35 PM

Is the way they display individual twits so bold and big.

http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1099906420

The other guys should follow this cue.

Apple keynote on Twitter? - 01/06/2009 06:13 PM

How are you getting the latest news on the Apple keynote on Twitter?

Who are you following?

Here are some of the people I'd watch...

http://twitter.com/appleinc

http://twitter.com/Gartenberg

http://twitter.com/gruber

http://twitter.com/Veronica

http://twitter.com/LeoLaporte

http://twitter.com/ryanblock

http://live.gdgt.com/2009/01/06/live-macworld-2009-keynote-coverage/#sort=desc

Chris Pirillo has the audio. What a trip. You get his editorial comment and the applause is deafening. Hilarious!

I'm in heaven - 01/05/2009 09:44 PM

The Internet has many wonderful applications, but I doubt if people think of it as a romance platform, but it is.

Case in point. I was looking for some music to play for my friends on Twitter the other night, and I don't remember how I stumbled on this wonderful recording of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing Gershwin's Cheek To Cheek, but it is something else. I recommend putting aside a bit of time later if you don't have time now, and play it on a nice sound system, and get ready for your heart to go to heaven.

But that's not the end of the story.

I remembered seeing the same song sung by Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers, in the movie Top Hat. Now Fred's not really a singer like Louis & Ella -- but boy can he dance. The yin and yang! Cheek To Cheek reaches places with Fred & Ginger that you're just going to love.

So the Internet is a history and heart machine. It's love and life. Flirting, dancing, swing, and yeah kisses.

Rethinking authentication - 01/05/2009 05:16 PM

First a caveat, this is going to be a technical post, so if you're not interested in techie stuff, you can skip it. However, I'm going to try to make it understandable to smart users who are willing to scratch their heads and read it two or three times, if you care to.

There's been a persistent problem in the twittersphere when developers have wanted to enhance the service but require access to the user's account. There's no other way than to ask for the user's login info: their username and password. If the developer is ethical, this is not a problem, it's much like giving credit card information to a vendor. But you can get in trouble when the developer isn't trustworthy and uses your information in malicious ways. We got a taste of this, this weekend.

Immediately people in the know say Use OAuth! -- believing that will solve the problem. I understand OAuth, I've implemented Flickr's authentication system which was the inspiration for OAuth. It's a complicated dance for the app developer, but it provides the user with an important ability that's supposedly available no other way. The user can de-authorize one app without de-authorizing all others. It's true, you can do this with OAuth, but it's not the only way to do it, and it's more complicated for users and developers than the other way, which I'm now going to explain.

I got this idea when Twitter rate-limited me yesterday. I was debugging some code, and I guess I made more than 100 calls in an hour. Now I can't make any more calls from my LAN (even though it's been almost 24 hours since the offense). This showed me one very important thing -- Twitter has the ability to block calls by IP address. That's the key.

A picture named wimpy.gif

Okay, so now assume I've given my username/password to Wimpy's App Shop, who has a neat little Twitter add-on gizmo that I love, and everything's going great until one day Wimpy, whose shop is suffering in the recession, decides to make a little extra money by selling my login to Bluto's Greasy Spoon Spamporium, who proceeds to send huge numbers of phishing messages to Chris Brogan, Kevin Marks, Chris Messina and Guy Kawasaki. This is very annoying. We must stop it at once!

Now imagine that Twitter had a page that showed all the IP addresses that have used your login in the last 30 days, with a start date for each and a count of calls made. I bet you could figure out which one was The Greasy Spoon Group, pronto. Further suppose there was a checkbox next to each IP address. You could uncheck that one, click Submit, and voila, no more spam from your account. You just did everything that OAuth promises to let you do, and no one had to implement the dance. It worked with today's simple and klunky worse-is-better authentication system.

Now IP addresses are ugly and not informative, so add a little enhancement, and have Twitter do a reverse DNS lookup for each one. If something simple came back, like appshop.com and not adsl-86-229-2-19.dsl.pltn90.sbcglobal.net, display it instead of the IP address. Now it would be even easier to spot the nasty dude.

That's it, that's the idea. I think this works -- do you see any problems??

Update: Great comments. Over on the Twitter blog, Biz says they're going to release a closed beta of OAuth this month.

Why our customers are smart - 01/05/2009 05:50 AM

I often tell stories about companies who treat their customers or developers as if they were idiots. But that's not to say my own company, the one I started, didn't do this too -- it did. It's human nature, but it's bad human nature, it's self-defeating, it's dysfunctional.

When I heard someone say a customer was stupid, I said if that's true we're really fucked.

Here's how I reasoned...

1. We have to believe our customers are the smartest people, because they were smart enough to choose the best product.

2. If they were stupid, then they chose the wrong product and we're dead, so you'd better start looking for a new job

The only logical way to proceed is to:

1. Make the best product.

2. Find the smartest customers.

3. Treat them like the geniuses they are.

4. And earn their respect. (Which they never failed to give us, as long as we did 1, 2 and 3.)

Our customers really were the smartest people -- we made products that you had to be smart to want. But I think every company has to feel their customers are the smartest, or else why bother coming to work?

Further, we don't look for "feedback" from customers, we look to learn from them. Feedback is what you ignore. Learning is how you build.

"cheesecake"