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Scripting News

Dave Winer's weblog, started in April 1997, bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

TechCrunch federates with FacebookToday

TechCrunch: "TechCrunch readers can now use their Facebook accounts to sign in before leaving comments."

Interesting. And it integrates with Facebook's news feed.

I left a comment suggesting they do the same for Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Very easy to validate a name with any of those services, though the companies didn't make a big deal about it. I'd like to see some of the smaller developers get a chance to play in league with the big guys. They could also share a pointer to your comment in the flow of any of the services, their APIs make it brain-dead simple to do.

New news flowsToday

When we talk about news on the net the conversation is dominated by the interests of news organizations. The stories we tell are from their point of view. The vexing problems we face are their problems, not ours. That's been the point of the series of pieces I've been writing about news. I do care about the people of news, as I care about the people of the car industry and the people who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers. And the 10K contractors who may be laid off at Google. But for the sake of this discussion, what I really care about is news and how it's going to get from them that have to them that want.

In a comment yesterday I said it's often overlooked that while the Internet makes some things that we used to do diseconomic, if you took the Internet away some things we've come to expect would go away too. All the stuff people call "crowd-sourcing" -- the million eyeballs that are constantly watching, and the thousands of them th

XML-RPC updateToday

Its been a long time since I written about XML-RPC, it's one of those things that when I do, the flamers show up and get all personal. I shouldn't let that get in the way, of course; and while I wasn't looking, for example, Mozilla baked-in support for XML-RPC. Not sure what you can do with that, but I'm sure someone will explain.

The other day when I asked about an XML-RPC interface for ImageMagick, Justin Walgran took me up on it, and deployed one on Google AppEngine. Now that makes sense for so many reasons. A perfect application for AppEngine, and since its native language is Python, and Python has great XML-RPC support (we upgraded ours in Frontier based on their inspiration, the highest form of respect), it was not a very large programming project.

A Plan B for news?Yesterday

Jeff Jarvis responds to my series of pieces about news after the hypothetical collapse of the news industry. I wrote a comment there, which I'm reproducing here, with some light edits.

Jeff, the stuff you're justifying is the stuff that's going away, that there is no money to support. If we all care about the news, and making sure that it gets from the people who have it to the people who want it, we're going to have to learn how to do it without all the heavy iron. It seems to me the responsible thing for the news industry to do, while it is laying off its reporters and editors and the rest, is to help us come up with a Plan B -- what we will do for news once all that is gone.

An analogy -- imagine a group of doctors knew

An image processing web serviceYesterday

On Sunday, I wished for a web service that would take an image, a height and a width, and return a thumbnail for the image.

Andrew Burton put up a service, I gave it a try, with no luck. Maybe we can get this working. Ideally, I'd like to run it on the same machine as the application that calls it, since the images can be fairly large.

Here's a text file containing the text, and the picture I used.