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I've now seen two movies that had bloggers in leading roles.

1. State of Play. A remake of a brilliant BBC series that was so bad, that portrayed the blogger in such a superficial and humiliating fashion, that I actually walked out in disgust. (A movie has to be very bad for me to walk out on it.)

2. Julie and Julia. I saw it last night, and stayed to the end. I was just as angry at the way they portrayed the blogger, but it turns out for an opposite reason. In this case the dishonesty was reversed, the blogger wasn't at all heroic, and they misrepresented the hero, Julia Child, who was, in many ways more of a true blogger than the blogger! Kind of funny how that works.

A blogger isn't just someone who uses blogging software, at least not to me. A blogger is someone who takes matters into his or her own hands. Someone who sees a problem that no one is trying to solve, one that desperately needs solving, that begs to be solved, and because the tools are so inexpensive that they no longer present a barrier, they are available to the heroic individual. As far as I can tell, Julia Child was just such a person. Blogging software didn't exist when she was pioneering, but it seems that if it did she would have used it.

Julie used blogging, but Julia was a natural-born blogger.

The dishonesty in the story was how they portrayed Julia Child's reaction to Julie Powell's writing. They didn't explain why she disapproved. If you just went by what the movie said you could easily think she was bitter or closed-minded or jealous of young Julie. Luckily the archive is still on the web, and a simple Google search turned up the answer. Julia Child considered The Julie/Julia Project a stunt. She said of Powell: "She would never really describe the end results, how delicious it was, and what she learned." There's a lot more in a Publisher Weekly interview with Judith Jones, Child's editor at Knopf. Now, that makes sense!

I'd love to see a movie that captures the heroic spirit of blogging. Like all inspiration, it's rare, but that's why it's worth making a movie about. The story of the nobility of blogging largely remains, imho, untold.

A few notes about the propriety of reporters accepting free followers from Twitter.

1. On Friday, in an interview with Twitter COO Dick Costolo at a TechCrunch conference, Mike Arrington observed that when TechCrunch ran a piece about Twitter Corp they didn't like, they were taken off the Suggested User List. I wrote this up here on Scripting News. Costolo didn't comment, but the issue is clearly on Arrington's mind, as it should be. They're back on the list. Does this influence their coverage and if so how? (TechCrunch people should note this is a question, not a statement.)

2. Will a NY Times columnist be more likely to write about Twitter, if they've got a million followers from placement on the SUL? Is there an appearance of impropriety? Is appearance enough of a reason to opt out? In an article in today's NY Times, they say that Times reporters are not allowed to accept free trips to cover production of a television show in Bora Bora. "The New York Times and many other media outlets ban the acceptance of these freebies on ethical grounds, because there could be an appearance of buying favorable coverage." To me, the free placement on the SUL and the benefits it bestows, are exactly equivalent. Elsewhere in the Times, and in many other media outlets, the number of followers is treated as a measure of relevance.

Pieces like this always provoke challenges from people at the publications such as the Guardian and the Times. So be it. I think they are clearly wrong in accepting the free boost from an important and growing media network like Twitter. In the old days they were gatekeepers and could suppress a story like this if they didn't like it. Thankfully we don't live in the old days.

Further, I think political candidates who accept promotion from Twitter are going to have problems down the road. They operate under special rules, and I'm sure that there will eventually be a monetary value placed on SUL placement and it will count as a campaign contribution. Imho there will be even more serious consequences for incumbents who accept free followers from Twitter and other networks.

Think about how handicapped the news organizations are going to be in covering this story when they have their own issues around placement on the SUL. The only ones who will be able to cover this story without the appearance of being in Twitter's pocket are ones who opted out. As far as I know, no reporters, columnists or news organizations have opted out.

Jay Rosen sent a link to a post on a BusinessWeek blog: "Does anyone know how to preserve and store our four and a half years of blog posts and comments?"

Not sure what kind of blog it is, but saving the posts to a PDF (as mentioned on the site) isn't much of a solution.

We hope each of us is creating a record. The time to think about how your words will last over time is before you're leaving the job. Think about it and do something while you're writing. Choose software that's easy to archive. Ideally you should just have to make a copy of a folder to back it up. Most bloggiong software is nowhere near that simple.

If you have any ideas how to creat a backup of that blog please post a comment here or there.

Update: The blog is in archive.org.

I have several accounts that I use for testing Twitter apps. One of them, bullmancuso, was shut down last October. A few weeks ago I petitioned to have the account restored.

This evening I got an email from the Twitter support person BFF, who explained:

"Your account was suspended because our specialists found that your tweets were primarily links to other sites and not personal updates, a violation of Twitter Rules."

http://help.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries/18311

It's true of that account but it's also true of the NYTimes and many other news oriented Twitter sites.

I suggest they take another look at this.

And it's a reminder once again that we're playing in someone else's ballpark here, and they make the rules. This is not in any way like the Internet.

Update: Alex Howard quotes Twitter co-CEO Biz Stone saying Twitter "has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates."

I watched the morning session of TechCrunch's second realtime conference, including the half hour interview with Dick Costolo, the COO of Twitter.

Of course Mike Arrington asked him the "Is RSS Dead?" question, and thankfully Costolo didn't want to go there. It would be ingracious of him, of course, because he made $100 million with RSS.

He said RSS had been "pushed down" the stack, and it was now a protocol like SMTP or HTTP.

In a way I agree with him, but only so far.

RSS was never anything more than a protocol like SMTP or HTTP. So it hasn't gone anywhere. It's still exactly where it has been since 2002, it's part of the fabric of the Internet, and is the standard format for news distribution. We're lucky to have a standard format for that.

But...

Had Arrington asked me the question, I would have answered it differently.

RSS will form the basis for the open distributed version of Twitter.

The loosely-coupled 140-character message network.

RSS already has everything we need, including a protocol for realtime updates.

Further, any vendor of a Twitter client would, imho, be well-advised to spread out to achieve independence from the Twitter company. One way to do that, and they should all do it, is to support Facebook on an equal basis with Twitter. But that isn't enough. They should all make an investment in the open distributed way of doing what Twitter does. What that means is to offer the user the option to create a backup of their tweet stream in RSS, as a publicly-accessible feed. And once there's a base of apps doing that, they should add a feature to subscribe to those feeds.

Key point: Once they're there, they can add core features without waiting for Twitter.

Of course Arrington didn't ask me that question, and that's fine -- that's his prerogative. But there's nothing to stop me from answering it anyway!

I had an interesting but somewhat disturbing exchange with a Google guy on Twitter today. It reveals a bunch of disconnects, that I'm going to try, in this post, to address.

1. Please take these statements at face value.

2. I am just a person, I am not in competition with Google.

3. I am a Google user. My primary email account is on GMail. I just bought a Droid, and started a Droid blog to help other people get started. I like it primarily because it connects so well with Google services.

4. I am a former Google shareholder. I made a shitload of money from my Google investment. Thank you.

5. I think Google is a big company. I think the people at Google, like most people everywhere, mean well. Like every big organization there are some who don't mean well. But I judge each individual as a person. I don't assume because a person works at Google that they are good or bad or otherwise.

6. I don't have the first clue what it's like to be inside Google, and honestly I don't care.

7. Now about PubSubHubBub. When I first looked at it I saw Atom all over it. I quickly hit the Back button.

8. There was a time when I seriously considered implementing it. But it required me to understand concepts I didn't understand and had no interest in investing in. It seemed to me that I would have to reimplement a lot of stuff I already had working. This is something big companies ask you to do a lot of.

9. One of the reasons I revitalized rssCloud was to influence Google to support RSS better in PSHB.

10. One of the clues that PSHB needs to be reconstructed is that it's so hard to describe. What's needed here is easy to explain: Instant updates for RSS. If you think RSS is a bad choice of terms, do some research. The world sees it that way. If you make that more general, you lose people. They get confused. PSHB is very very confusing to people. That hinders adoption.

11. Fostering adoption of complex technologies is something I know a lot about. I'm very good at it. You can ignore me if you want, but I usually am right about this stuff.

12. Switching gears, I like the Internet because it means I can ignore big companies and still create meaningful software.

13. I think Google doesn't like RSS. I see that in a lot of things Google does.

14. I wish Google would give up on fighting RSS. I think it's pointless. I don't think defeating or blunting or obviating RSS has anything to do with Google's business.

15. You can argue with me on any of these points, but remember #2. If you convince me I'm wrong (which is unlikely, btw, I'm no different than anyone else in that regard), you still have just convinced one person.

16. All this disclaimed, we have a common interest, I think. I don't want to pretend to speak for Google, so I don't want to try to say what that is.

Everyone's asking questions about the decade that's coming to a close, I'd like to ask what's the coolest software you used this decade?

For me, it might be Dropbox. I keep thinking of new uses for it.

For a guy with a huge number of computers (I don't even want to count them), it's not only a lifesaver but an idea factory. I've already built utilities on it. The basis: polling a folder is incredibly low-cost. You can do a lot of it without impacting the performance of your machine. That was true in 2002 when we made Radio do upstreaming. It's even more true today.

Because Dropbox wires together folders on any machine you link into it, it's a very simple content distributor. You can have 18 computers looking for something, when one finds it, they all find out and get the thing. It could be large or small.

Like all cool things, it's fairly obvious, and has probably been done many times before. But they put it together now and it works and is trivial to set up. I keep thinking of things to use it for. All of which makes it very cool. Unless I'm missing something, it's my CSOTD.

Update: There's a thread on this topic on Ycombinator.

I sort of understand why people don't like the new retweet, but I like it very much, and probably for many of the reasons they don't like it.

If you follow me on Twitter you know that a lot of my tweets are links to stories on the web. I would probably forward other people's links more if there were a way to give them credit for the link without adding all that overhead to the text. I find that once you add a bit of text to a tweet you dilute its meaning. Do it two or three times and its a confusing mess. I don't know who said what.

Worse, often the meaning of messages are reversed when they're retweeted. Not only does the person show off that they didn't understand what was said, but they propogate the mistake by sending it to all their followers.

In the new method, forwarding a link through Twitter is error-free, no noise is added because it can't, and the lineage is carried as metadata, and doesn't take up any of the 140 characters.

I applaud features that don't use up the 140 characters, and like even more features that give them back to us. I think Twitter should be encouraged to do more to pull data out of the text of a tweet and carry it as metadata, so apps can do stuff with it, and so people get to use the 140 chars to say what they have to say.

I do almost no retweeting in the old regime. But I already do a lot more now, and will do even more once everyone has the feature. Once it's been out there for a few weeks I think we'll wonder how we ever lived without it.

One of the cool things about riding on a train is that you meet a lot of people.

There are Europeans who are visiting the US and have the train riding habit from home.

There are people who remember the golden age of trains and can tell you how this or that is a shadow of its former self.

And there are people who are afraid of plane travel and prefer trains to buses.

There are also people like me who had a cross-country train trip on their bucket list, and found that the fantasy was better than the reality. (Partially because this trip follows the route of I-80 and I-70, which for me is well-traveled, by car.)

When you're sitting with strangers in the dining car, conversation turns to What You Do, and part of my story is Rebooting The News. In explaining what was happening with the news system in the US, I came up with a new analogy this time, which I told in Rebooting The News #33, and thought I should repeat here.

Journalism is like skiing in the 50s or 60s. Previously it had been a sport that very few people enjoyed, and they were all very good. But now the doors were opening to amateurs, as it did with skiing. The pros are going to have to share the slopes with people who don't take the sport as seriously as they do. They're still going to be able to ski, but the rest of us are not just going to admire them for how skilled they are, we're going to do it too. They can even earn a living as ski patrol and ski instructors. Or lift operators or more mundane jobs like people who work in hotels and drive the shuttle bus. There are still jobs in skiing after the arrival of the amateurs. But the exclusivity is gone.

My chin fell to the floor this morning as I read a BBC article quoting Twitter co-CEO Biz Stone advising Rupert Murdoch to be more open.

This got me to think about where Twitter is and where they're going and how similar it is to where Murdoch's newspapers are.

In a newspaper, reporters get the prime space with the big headlines, and the readers are placed in a corner, Letters to the Editor. Or represented by a "Public Editor" who does a better job of representing the editors and owners.

In Twitter there's a similar hierarchy developing, pretty rapidly.

The prime space is allocated, in a totally non-transparent way, to certain people, and the rest of us are mostly talking to ourselves, in very small numbers.

I was having coffee the other day with a former colleague at Berkman, Ethan Zuckerman, who said he would try to do something special if he had the millions of followers you get when you're on the Suggested Users List. I've seen people go that route. All of a sudden it's not good enough to be yourself, now you have to do something to take advantage of the flow you're able to generate. I wonder if that distortion, when it all shakes out, will be all that different from the feeling a reporter gets that he or she is more than a person writing from their own point of view. My guess is that it's more or less the same thing.

Stone has made a mess of something that could have been great by not being tranparent. How ironic that he advises Murdoch on something he himself so badly needs to do. Pretty typical of the way the tech industry relates to media.

Anyway, I think it's inevitable that Murdoch and many others in the media business will see the need to challenge Twitter for dominance in the realtime message distribution network. I don't see Twitter as being any more or less open than Mudoch's company. The basis for success will come elsewhere.

One of Jay's ideas for rebooting professional news applies equally, imho, to personal news. I wrote it up over at rebootnews.com.

See the Droidie site for observations on the tools I carried with me on my latest trip.

Tim O'Reilly is going to give a keynote at the Web 2.0 conference about the War of the Web. You should read his piece, many good points, I agree with most of it.

The tech industry sure loves its wars.

And death. This is dead that is dead, everyone is dead, but me.

Isn't that every child's fantasy -- to have all the world to himself, to be able to drive any car, eat any food, play with any toy, and not have to share with anyone?

The other day I read that the URL was dead.

Anyway one thought I'd like to share.

If there's going to be a war for the web, fine, I already know what I'll do. I'll build the refugee camps. They will be very nice. Hiltons. You can have a beautiful ocean view or a view of the battlefield.

We'll all take pictures from our balcony.

So have a nice war, techies.

In the early part of this decade, after the first dotcom crash, a lot of us thought that we'd all have personal servers by now.

We called them fractional horsepower servers because the issues were different. Ease of use mattered more than scalability. And communication between servers and authoring tools was also essential. Hence XML-RPC, OPML and RSS.

Instead, user generated content emerged as a business model, and many people went with the free hosting offered by startups. I never have depended on it, I've been inside too many tech companies to be willing to trust my writing with them, esp not long-term. The UGC business model only seems good for the users -- as they say if the offer appears too good to be true, it probably is. If you read the user agreement, they have no long-term obligation to host it. They probably don't even have to give you a copy of your own stuff.

People ask how I use River2 while I travel. Well, my ISP, AT&T, offers a plan where you get five static IP addresses. I'm pretty technical so I know how to set it up, and I have an old laptop in my house that runs River2. I log into it even when I'm getting on from the house, but I can check what's new from an airplane at 35000 feet, where I am right now. I've not mentioned this before, but a couple of people asked me how I do it, and I told them, and neither thought I was crazy. That's a good sign.

Not that Google Reader isn't an excellent product, it is. But it isn't what I like. It's okay, not everyone drinks the same beer or drives the same car. And with broadband becoming more popular, and computers cheaper, and old laptops lying around doing nothing, maybe for some people now's the time to start looking at having your own server running in your own house.

It'll be interesting to see what kinds of comments this post gets.

PS: There's a thread on this topic at YCombinator. Major misunderstanding, by personal server I mean one that you pay for or own, it doesn't have to be running in your house. If you pay for a server at Rackspace or EC2, that's fundamentally difference from the UGC model. That's the important difference.

Woke up in the middle of the night in Salt Lake City, went back to sleep, and by dawn we were in the middle of a whiteout with snow on the Wasatch front. Headed east from there, roughly following the path of Interstate 70, through Green River and Grand Junction. We'll get to Denver at about 7PM, which is where I will get off the train, and head to the airport tomorrow for a flight to an unnamed destination to hang with friends for a few days.



Taking pictures all through the day!