Dave Jacobs needs a kidney transplant. "Can you imagine what it's like to bury a younger brother who died from the same disease that's almost certain to kill you?" [Scripting News]

Every day we are reminded that there's much more than RSS and weblogs. Let's hope that in this case weblogs will make a difference. Best wishes to Big Dave.

He started walking around the room, up the stairs, on the roof, I was watching a live "unplugged" video stream from Amsterdam, and Peter was using nothing more than the basic software that comes with any new Mac. Kewl

I used to consider Dave a friend. Recently this changed, but I still think that Dave Winer has a lot to teach to all of us and I respect him very much: I did learn a lot from him.

Dave writes:

Give it some thought. This is what it would look like if there were no Scripting News. What would it be worth to you, not in monetary terms, but in support terms, to keep this going.

I'm not sure it's only a matter of support, I think it's mainly a matter of respect. You might not agree with somebody, but nobody gives you the right not to be respectful towards somebody who did change things, for all of us.

There have been quite some nasty episodes recently. Right now I'm wondering if I should have taken a position and openly show support for Dave and what he has done. Also if this is what we did day by day with our work and our technical choices, it could probably have been clearer.

Also if this could sound too late: I do support Dave Winer, in any case, because he changed things. Think about it: nobody would be discussing RSS, Echo or whatever you want to call it if it wasn't for Dave. Think.

Recent history tells us that the main divide was between people saying "It has to be powerful and thus not necessarily easy to understand, we will build tools to manage the complexity" and others saying "It has to be simple so that anybody will be able to hack new solutions using it without being an expert".

Both positions make sense. You don't really need to understand how the jpeg format works to create cool images, but at the same time all of us learned html looking at other people's pages, because it was relatively easy to understand.

Ultimately it's only a matter of a very little number of tools vendors, most of them small companies, agreeing on a new standard and changing the world.

Jim McGee: "Sites that provide no RSS feed essentially don't exist for me." [via Scripting News]

It was the same for me. Until Blogstreet introduced their new rss generator feature, which works really well and allows me to read almost every weblog in my aggregator. They are RSS 0.92 feeds and not funky at all .

Like it or not, most of the world is using Windows, where the default conferencing application is NetMeeting. To be a truly succesful application I believe that iChat AV should be compatible with NetMeeting.

I do undestand that the high quality compression system is part of QuickTime, it would be okay to be able to have high quality videoconferencing only with other Mac users, but still, I'd like also to be able to have low quality jerky videoconferencing with NetMeeting.

I think that at Apple they are aware of this, and we are still at beta stage, and since they listened for Safari's tabbed browsing, they might still be listening.

PS: if you have downloaded iChat AV and want to try videoconferencing with me, I'm paolovalde on AIM.

Aaron Swartz: Time for Forward Motion.

Don Park: Here are some straight fast balls to clear up the confusion: RDF is fucked up, MT is fucked up, Six Apart is fucked up.

"The emperor is Naked!" .

Dasie's are for Peace, not war.. I can see a future where people will be able to select a theme for their blog, then simple make changes to items like the background pattern or color, and the images will be able to simply adjust to the new look. Imagine drop-shadows that look good on white, gray, blue, or plaid. The only browser at this point in the way of this utopian dream is IE of Windows. The fact that IE for the Mac was the first to deliver full PNG support, 3 years ago, make the sting even sharper. [BryanBell.com]

I totally agree that from a designer POV having 32bits images support in browsers would be a major improvement in how web sites are created and managed.

Back in the "CD-Rom days" we had to use all kind of tricks to create smooth 3D looking user interfaces. Than a Director plug-in came about that allowed importing 32bit alpha channel images into our projects and at some point Macromedia realized this and made the feature default in their multimedia authoring tool. This probably happened 10 years ago!

We have already gone through all this and it's really amazing how the major browser still doesn't allow this today, especially considering that today every single GUI component in every operating system user interface is sporting one of those cool soft shadows.

If you are not a designer most probably you don't know what I'm talking about, but believe me: when Microsoft will finally start supporting this feature you will notice it.

• Palm Desktop (the Mac side of my Palm)
• my Palm
• Email client
• Cellular phone

The only two syncronized address books were the Palm's one and its desktop counterpart.

Today all these address books are aligned thanks to iSync. It's something I've been dreaming of forever, it's good to see technology finally catching up.

As an added value of having a bluetooth enabled phone, I can control my Mac with my phone (thanks to Salling Clicker). I have just installed the utility and clicked trough all slides of a presentation with my phone (Salling Clicker allows also to control iTunes, the DVD player and several other applications).

And when I receive a phone call, the caller's name appears on my Mac's screen, I can send SMS directly from my address book, and I guess there are still several cool interactions that I have to discover and many others that have to be invented.

All pieces are joining, very, very cool.

Update:  I am alive.  More to come later today.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Good.

Backend.UserLand is now a weblog. Now when something of interest happens in the community, there's a place to point to it. There's also an RSS feed, so you can subscribe.

Very cool! Btw, the RSS feed has an empty title tag, which make it looks weird in my aggregator. Kind of funky, uh?

While at the beginning there were pages that required me to switch to IE to get their content, I don't recall doing anything similar for a long time now. I almost never open IE, which, by the way, unlike Mozilla and Safari has not got any improvement or new feature for years.

So, as far as I'm concerned, Microsoft dropping IE development is completely irrilevant. Actually, I think that did this quite some time ago.

From time to time (not very often) Word hangs and there's no way to kill it. Not using the force quit dialog, not using the "kill" command from the terminal. It just sits there, not letting you even hide the crashed window. The only way out is restarting.

Does anybody has any different idea on how to kill Word?

Marc Canter: For those Dan Gillmor watchers out there - I think this may be the FIRST time Dan has included an image in one of his posts.

No, it's at least the second. I know because I was watching while he was posting it.

You'll get an idea you wouldn't have otherwise gotten. A business contact. A bug report. An old friend finds you. You get a job. You hire someone. You get an answer to a question. These are the benefits of running a weblog.

It's very true, every single item of this list happened to me at least once in the last year.

But blogging can also be hard.

First you need time. Unless you are "blogging only for yourself" or you want to post totally boring stuff, you need to spend some time every day thinking about what would interest your readers, doing some research and reading other people's blogs. I didn't post anything for a week here and I lost approximately half of my visitors (thanks to the few of you still here :-).

Weblogs are also the ultimate reputation building tool. It's true that hey tend to be authentic (as Phil Wolff said "I don't write to be authentic. I am authenitc when I'm writing.") it's still tricky to write on a weblog trying not to get flamed, not to piss off anybody, to be smart, accurate and correct, and possibly to get linked from somebody in order to get some additional visibility.

If you happen to get into troubles with some A-List blogger your life could become miserable because of the amount of traffic, visibility and attention they control (like it or not, this is how it works).

Being a social environment with possibly a very wide reach you need to be careful about how you use it.

Not everybody can or want to deal with all this, many people I like and respect have stopped blogging in the last year, I don't know why they did but it probably has something to do with the challanges above.

But anyway, if you have never tried you should absolutely open a weblog now, it's the most rewarding experience you can get on the web.

Don Park: When you are relaxed and comfortable, you are more forgiving.  When you don't understand what is going on and terrified of the future, you start talking non-sense.

We went pretty far with the development, we were actually using the tool internally, until our company's downsizing forced us to freeze the project (we didn't have the necessary resource to finish it nor enough tasks and people to manage).

I had totally forgot about this tool until a few days ago I received an email from Robert Barksdale asking me about it.

We still have no time to work on it, but maybe somebody out there is willing to work a little on it or simply use it (it already works).

So, just as a test, we are releasing it under a Creative Commons License.

Feel free to contact me () if you have any idea about this cool tool.

News.com: "As part of the OS (operating system), IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation," Countryman said in the the May 7 interview.

IE will continue to evolve? It might start evolving again, but I have not seen much evolution in browsers technology for the last 4 or 5 years. Browsers have barely been fixed, but since CSS, back in 1998, we have not seen significant new features.

And also if the latest releases from Microsoft are supporting CSS almost as they are supposed to, there are still no authoring tools to take full advantage of this new technology.

I've seen oustanding examples of what can be achieved with CSS, but all of them have been authored using text editors. It's like CG back in the '70s or Linotype applications before the desktop publishing revolution.

We've been asking for some basic features to manage rich text within browsers for years, but still there's no mainstream implementation of a technology that does not seem rocket science and that with CMS and weblogs booming would be welcomed but many users (no, Microsoft's one just doesn't cut it).

I don't care if Microsoft is willing to release their browser as a standalone application or as part of their operating system, Apple has been doing that for a while: no new cool applications unless you are using the lastes version of Mac OS. So what? It's their market and they will get away with this. What I would like to see is some real innovation, new features, new tools, not just bug fixes.