Welcome to Trade Secrets!

We did our first show today, after three takes, it was a bit of a burnout, but we’re rolling now. Now I have to get the RSS 2.0 feed configured, even though Manila doesn’t have direct support for enclosures. (Postscript: Got it done. Now I have to do the user interface, but the backend part works. Jake let me know if you want the code.)"

The first day got an email from a fan saying that Dave knows his tech stuff, but he hopes I won’t say the same things about President George W Bush on Trade Secrets that I say on Scripting News. I responded with a disclaimer, you don’t want to listen to this if you’re voting for President W. Or, if you’re smart, you should listen to it. Never hurts to get another point of view. But we’re not nice guys, or overly sensitive to the feelings of Republicans.

Okay so Kerry changes his mind. We’ll work on that after he’s elected. Bush is much worse. He does crazy illogical and super-dangerous things. He should change his mind, the problem is he doesn’t. Anyway, we think Bush will make a great former President and look forward to throwing a great going-away party for him on November 3.

(Music) Throw ’em up! It’s Trade Sec rets now! The doobiest crew’s getting beats for you, boy! It’s Trade-N-N-N-N-Secrets! Trade secrets! Trade secrets! These heads will finally peep this! Trade secrets! Trade secrets! You don’t need converse speakers! Trade secrets! Trade secrets! These beats blow up your speakers! Trade secrets! Trade secrets! These wonders fill my peeps on the streets, that’s how it’s meant to be Sonard your heads and feel the beat with taste and victory Erase the macrolicious with beats delicious, no negative vibes here We’re playing this fear, know my style is so high tech you catch a critical beat down Hip-Hop’s ill-ass sound will burn your lyrical streets down I wanna bake my cake and eat it too These golden beats will see us through the trade secrets volume 2 Trade secrets! Trade secrets! Hi everybody, this is Trade Sec rets! I’m Adam Curry, sitting here, nice and pretty in Curry Castle in Belgium Hey, it’s Dave Weiner here, I’m not very pretty but I’m from Seattle, Washington I said I was sitting pretty and you said I was pretty You were very pretty! I’ve heard people say that about you All the girls at BloggerCon, they all crowd around Adam and I asked them why, oh, well he’s so pretty Yeah, but you know what, no one makes any indecent proposals to me ever! Never, never ever Unfortunately, it’s probably that sort of blonde wholesome look that you’ve got They’re more likely to offer you a milkshake Hey Dave, fuck you very much So this is our… Not really, thank you, you’re not gonna get my time But I’m blonde, come on So here we are, self congratulations, they’re all in order We finally, after much trial and error, we think now, knock wood, praise Murphy, I’m not a lawyer, my mother loves me, etc , etc All other disclaimers apply We’ve been spending most of today, it’s now 11. 37 a. m.
Most of today from my point of view, most of the evening from Adam’s To try to get this cross-cont inental internet radio program thing working And perhaps now we actually have it working, what do you think? It seems to be, although the magic moment is about 6 minutes and 22 seconds That’s when a wire tap, which I ’m using to record the signal of both my microphone and the signal that’s coming in from Seattle from Dave That was kind of like the Max and it would just flip out and freeze up and it did some nasty stuff But it seems to be working now, we switched, we were doing it with Skype Which although has a beautiful sound quality and the latency is very low I think probably because it’s beta on the Macintosh and I’m running a Mac and Dave’s running Windows But for that reason, it’s doing something that the 6 minutes was the magical moment and it just wasn’t working But this really, from a broadcast perspective, this is blowing me away because when I was doing radio or television for that matter If you wanted to bring someone into the show, you either had to call them via phone Which is that very definite phone sound, or you have to get a satellite uplink, get someone to go sit in the studio Or if you’re really lucky, then you can put in a lease line And the internet has always been the promise for broadcast, like hey, we can connect everyone everywhere from any place I haven’t seen much more in technology when it comes to stuff like this than the video phones on CNN I don’t think many people are using the technology this way, but it seems to be working And the idea is that we’ll do, I’m going to be very careful and say, a weekly program and just shoot the shit together We’ve been friends for a number of years and we’ve been talking about doing a show like this for a number of years We’ve been talking about working together for a number of years Well, you know, it’s our phone conversations generally sound like they would be good things to share with other people But we put things on our to-do list, our respective to-do list , but somehow don’t seem to ever get them done So this way, the ideas that we have, they get out there, and maybe we’ll have some fun with it along the way And so we’ll see what happens First of all, a reminder that all of our listeners are under non-disclosure That’s what trade secrets is all about Yeah, we’ll get to that at some other point in time, but just for now, you’re not allowed to tell anybody about this or what we’re talking about Anything you tell us, of course , anything that other people tell us, of course, is not confidential No, we’ll obviously discuss it together Everything that we tell you, however, is confidential That’s the premise of the trade secrets We’re going to trade secrets here quite out in the open, but they’ll be your secrets, not ours So today being September 16, 2004, it’s Thursday evening where I am, it’s about 8. 40 now , PM And we’ve spoken a couple times in the past two hours, and now we’re finally recording everything But you’ve been really excited, Dave, about what’s been going on with Bush Well, mostly, it’s been what’s been going on with CNN I mean, they’ve been intermix ing CNN coverage of Hurricane Ivan with coverage of the campaign, the president’s campaign And when we were talking before , it was like this wonderful magic little moment They had President Bush climbing the stairs to Air Force One, and his shoulders were slumped And he turned around, he looked really tired and kind of confused, and he waved And as he was waving, the headline comes up on the screen , “The Future of Iraq” And I thought, wow, well, this is what lives in the future of Iraq But you know how that works, Dave? You know how that works? They’re sitting in the control room, right? And there’s a million things going on And someone says, “All right, bring up the lower third of Iraq, all right, go Kyron!” But somebody, they must have a resident comedian, taking the exact moment to put that on, don’t you think? Well, he’s surely the same guy who, I put that on my web blog, who identified the Czech Republic as Switzerland on a nice slide on CNN That was good Yeah, it was also the guy that played the Howard Dean’s Dream 80,000 times and knocked him out of the race Well, that’s exactly right I think something happened in the last 24 hours or whatever, sometime pretty recently I think CNN decided that they want Kerry to win the election, and so now the spin is heavily, heavily in favor of Kerry And heavily against Bush, they make Kerry look good in every chance they get, and they make Bush look like a complete loser Which, you know, not totally appreciated I mean, I thought about this in between our various meltdowns that we had today, is like, you know, he is our president And, you know, why, you know, I ’ve spent a lot of time in the last few months reading books about the American presidency And, you know, dignified people like George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, even Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, even Ronald Reagan You know, that they sort of had a presence that you kind of, you know, you don’t want to, I mean, they are the president of the United States And, you know, it’s disrespectful to the United States However, Bush is such a lout, he lies to me so much, and he clearly doesn’t want, he wants support without deserving support Whereas a guy like Truman had to put up with a lot of crap from McCarthy and from Mac Arthur, and, you know, through all of it, he kept his head, you know, high And, you know, he always said things like, “The buck stops here,” and I think Kerry’s lying about how, you know, Bush just, the buck just cruises right by his death Dude, you know what, Kerry should do that, he should just say, “The buck stops here,” why is he, he can hijack that? Yeah, I think that, I think Kerry has, is getting some good advice, I think he’s got some people sitting next to him on the campaign playing who are not just sort of, I don’t think Carl is actually on the plane I think a lot of that is, I think it’s the guy that was in the Dukakis campaign, which everybody sort of, you know, laughed at, but he got fired from the Dukakis campaign for being too aggressive So I think it was Dukakis' fault that he got, you know, they got pulled out of there I think Kerry’s going to pull it out, I think Kerry’s going to win, and I think he’s going to win with the help of CNN, and, but it feels like nobody’s , or I don’t know, feels like nobody’s buying Bush’s bulls of anyone Can I throw a conspiracy theory on you there for a second day? Sure, sure So, maybe, and this is only because I was listening to that BBC radio documentary about Sk ull and Bones, could it be? I haven’t heard that one, but I know Oh, okay, yeah, I had on the source code, you haven’t heard my source code for today yet No I found this half hour documentary that BBC actually went to Yale, went to the campus and knocked on the door at Skull and Bones, and, you know, of course they weren’t let in, but they talked to different people They had audio of one of the initiation rites, which is, you know, guys screaming like, sque aling like pigs, but that’s pretty typical, shocking for the British, no doubt But, you know, the I mean, the British never do that [Laughter] Well, they don’t know that I’m sorry, I’m being your sakes , man, here No, no, no, they don’t, the British don’t know about college initiation, you know, it’s like, that’s a very foreign concept to them Yeah, they don’t have that Well, the idea was that they’re all, the Skull and Bones guys are all sort of on the same team, and no matter what happens, I don’t believe that for a second No, okay I don’t believe that now, I don ’t think so, I mean Well, CNN will only do this if they have something to gain, and if they really made such a radical switch that you’re seeing, and I don’t have it on here, there’s got to be some kind of gain in it for them, you know, someone behind the scenes is saying something to make them do that Yeah, they made some kind of a deal with Kerry, probably, you know, it may not have been, yeah, I mean, that I don’t doubt, but that kind of stuff happens, of course it does, I mean, you know, I can extrapol ate from my experience in the tech industry that, you know, the other time, I mean, it’s a time-warner publication, right, CNN has Yeah There are other time-warner publications that if you want to get on the cover of, you have to, you know, first of all , they have to do a deal with you, and they’ll never present you in a negative light Right And then you have to do a deal with them, is that you give them a certain amount of access Or how about deregulation? Yeah, any number of different things, you know, I think in the case of CNN, they’re sort of scrambling to try to kill Fox, or get on top of Fox again , you know, and so, you know, if they’re going to compete with Fox, and Fox is going to be with the Republicans, then they kind of have to be with the Democrats, and I don’t really care how they do it Dave, listen to what you just said, that sounded like fucking science fiction The Democrats of CNN and the Republicans of Fox, I mean, that’s so surreal At the same time, well, okay, so we envision a better future, right, one where, you know, the people are running this show that we fulfill all the promise of the founding fathers and whatever, but we need to survive to get to that Right, and so being highly pragmatic about this, you know, what scares the Jesus out of me is the idea that Bush gets re elected, and all of a sudden, you know, that next domino in the axis of evil is North Korea , and you know that’s going to be fought with nuclear weapons, right? It is, well, you know that my uncle is now, well, not anymore , but was doing all the negotiations with North Korea Really? Yeah, he’s Donald Greg Uh-huh Look him up And so what would he say? He hates the whole Bush administration, he’s a very sta unch Republican, he was a personal advisor to Bush Sr.
when he was VP And then he was ambassador to Korea Remember when they were throwing rocks and shit over the wall in the embassy in Korea? Uh-huh Yeah, well, my uncle was living there at the time Oh, really? Yeah, and so he heads up the Korean Society, KoreanSociety.
org, and he’s told me literally, I’ve seen him on CNN a couple of times as well, he’s told me literally, he said, “Anim, they have the capability and they will use it because they’re just making money. " They will use it because they ’re just being pushed into a corner Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that too , but you know, if you stop and listen to what the North Koreans say, they actually is a logic to it, and they’re pretty freaked out, and they didn’t like it when Bush called them the Axis of Evil Axis of Evil, yeah, of course And then when they, when we invaded Iraq, of course, that convinced them that they were next, and you know, I think that actually that’s fairly rational, I think they’re in a pretty good chance they are next And so with the second Bush administration, you know, we’re going to see this successor to the Patriot Act, and we’re going to see this successor to the war in Iraq And he’s not going to have any troops to send into Korea because they’re all committed in Iraq, so what choice does he have but to send in the bombers and the heavy, you know, the heavy bombs, and does he have any compunction about that? And no, I don’t think he has any filters to say, you know, this is a line that we won’t cross. I’d love to hear him say that, I’d love to hear him say, you know That’s a line we won’t cross, yeah He won’t say it, in fact, I think he said the opposite, that, you know, basically all of our tools are on the table and we’ll use them all if we feel we need to, so, and you know, so we’re not doing any of the things, you know, they give carry shit for having, you know , voted for energy conservation and higher taxes on gasoline and stuff like that, but you know, stop and think about it I actually think we should be paying more for gasoline and I think that we’re selling our country, you know, we’re selling out real cheap, you know, by, you know, using more gas than we can afford to use, so anyway, so we’ll buy a little bit of time The bottom line is, or my bottom line, is that no matter what’s being said, what documentaries are being made, you know, what allegations are being thrown out there, what military service records, I don ’t have one, by the way, are being disputed, refuted, etc.
The scariest thing we can do is promise to go vote Yeah That’s gonna scare anybody Yeah, for now at least, I mean, you know, some people think that if Bush loses the election , then well, you know, the vote didn’t count for some reason Oh, you think there’ll be another 2000 moment there? Well, I think it’ll be interesting to see if Bush actually goes to Alabama and Mississippi, which were both, or Alabama especially, which was hit by this hurricane, but if he only goes to Florida, you know, I mean That’ll be pretty transparent if he does that Yeah, he’s going to Florida for sure though, I mean, that’s where all the votes are, so anyway, so let’s see, what else should we talk about today? Well, there’s something I want to talk to you about Um, because, what? Go for it Yeah, what, because we touched on it briefly in a phone conversation a couple days ago about A9. com, the new search engine from, was it, is Amazon and Alexa? Yeah, and I think it’s built on Google On Google, yeah, it seems like I’m getting kind of the same results Did they license that from Google? They have to, I guess, don’t they? Yeah, oh yeah, it’s built right on top of Google, yeah Okay That’s why it’s so weird that people say that this is like, you know, threatening to Google in some way, because it looks like Google has all the upside Amazon does, you know Now, have you used it? Uh, enough to know that, yes, I have used it enough to know that I’m not interested in it, yeah I mean, it, you know, it’s hard to, somebody asked, like, why I still use IE after all of the, you know, spyware and adware and all that crap, I’m still dealing with it, it’s not over All the assholes that, you know , I figured out how to invade before service back to or, we ’ll get back to you Are now invading SP2, right? Oh yeah, they’re totally there, they’re all over it And now I heard there’s this, there’s this, you can get a virus through J-Bus Did you, did you, uh, that, I didn’t know that, did you hear a beep just now? No Oh, I just heard it, okay You have call waiting? No, I don’t have call waiting, but it was really interesting, now my email, my email just checked itself, right? Oh, okay, you got a, you got a beep, yeah Yeah, but you didn’t hear the beep, did you? No, because that’s not running through this, I’ve learned about this, that’s not running through your audio driver Right, because if you did hear the beep, that would mean I could play music on the set Oh, I wish And you would hear it, yeah, it would have been something, right? I wish, I wish, now that does it Because, you know, the song for the day, the song for today is, I, I mean, I stumbled across it , it’s legalized, but it’s not Legalized Don’t criticize it Legalized, yeah, yeah, and I will advertise it Some call it time to kill Some call it to weed Some call it marijuana Some of them call it ganja Legalized, legalized And don’t criticize it Legalized, yeah, yeah, and I will advertise it Singer’s Smokage And players of instrument too Legalized, yeah, yeah, that’s the best thing you can do Dr. Smokage Nurse’s Smokage Judges Smokage Even the lawyer too So you got to legalize it And don’t criticize it Legalized, yeah, yeah, and I will advertise it It’s good for the soul It’s good for asthma Good for tumor colosis Even tumor opacoscosis Dr. Legalized Don’t criticize it Legalized, yeah, yeah, and I will advertise it Birds And sea love it Fousy day Goes left to play with it So you got to legalize it And don’t criticize it Legalized, yeah, yeah, and I can’t imagine the RIA suing you for using that one This is coming to you from Belgium where everything’s legal Yeah, exactly, this is coming to you from the United States where absolutely nothing is legal My daughter’s sitting here, she ’s in the other side of the room , she said, “No, it’s not” She’s sitting behind her computer downloading MP3s Yeah, that’s amazing You let her do that Do I let her download MP3s? Yeah, do you? Yeah, absolutely Well, we talk about this a lot, she’s a big fan of Good Charlotte And I mean like a really big fan I buy the legal MP3s of the new CD Yeah, she has, okay, so that’s Christina in the background She always buys the CDs, in fact What did she say? She said, “I’m downloading illegal MP3s of the new album as we speak” But she’s going to go out and buy the album because she likes them, she supports them, I didn ’t force her to do that She buys CDs, why do you buy, Christina, come over here for a second, come over here for one second Hold on a second Dave, let’s get her in here Hey, Christine, nice to meet you Do you really think that you’re , do you think… You know what, I just realized something, I just realized something that her voice may not have been recorded So I’ll just recap what she said, she said that it’s taking so long for the album to come out That she’s downloading MP3s of people who’ve recorded it And when it does come out, she ’s going to buy the album, she always does Now, do you think that that’s typical or do you think she’s unusual in that? I think she’s very typical, I think that’s what most kids do I mean, the thing is, they get all this entertainment through MTV And I’m sure, I don’t know what it’s like in the States, but here we have four different music video channels You know, it’s like she sits in front of the TV with MSN, she’s chatting to her friends You know, they can SMS onto the screen, I don’t think she does that But you know, people, there’s a lower third banner running across the screen So people basically chatting via SMS, that’s then broadcast on television So they’re watching the videos and they’re consuming it, you know And then they only buy the stuff that they really, I think really want to support that they’re big fans of They don’t just go out and buy stuff I got to interrupt you, I got to interrupt you for a second They’re running a great ad for Carrie on CNN right now, which you can see it You use a technique that is incredible, I just tuned into it They have a picture speaking at the beginning, sort of saying something really stupid about it It’s an economic program, but they have this picture postage stamp size And it’s kind of grainy And then they get the citizens come on and comment, they’re full screen and it’s all high fidelity They make this tiny little idiot But that’s how it works, man, that’s how it works I know, I know it’s beautiful, it’s great, we got to copy that shit We’re going all the way with this thing at them We’re going to do like, you know, radio broadcast, radio, and then we’re going to go for TV too Why not? As long as I can stay at home and use my webcam, that ’s fine Yeah, well, I mean, you might have to have a camera crew there along with your webcam Oh boo, bah-hum-bah You don’t think so, huh? Well, no, we don’t need that You’ve been there since that We did our reality show that was broadcast here And we got humongous ratings, even on the third repeat of the show We did it with one cameraman who was using a DV cam, which is basically a prosumer device We had two sets of wireless mics, one of which I’m still using now And we did the whole show with one editor on Max with Final Cut Pro and was broadcast nationally You know, it didn’t hurt the ratings that it was done on prosumer Alright, so you know how to make it look good with… Yeah, yeah, definitely With people’s hardware, basically But that’s what it is, all this stuff with these radio shows or audio shows, it’s the same thing You’ve got to know what you’re doing, it’s all in there You can achieve the same, if not better results as you could in a professional setup There’s no two ways about it Alright, let’s go through some of the hot items for today Like, I want to talk with you a little bit about the Firefox R SS controversy that sort of popped up today Do you know what that is? Yeah, I’ve been following the … Now, let me see if I understand what’s happened That Firefox, which is… Is that a Mozilla derivative? Is that what that is? Yeah Okay, so it’s a web browser and it now can recognize RSS feeds And from what I understand, it ’s doing kind of like half or maybe even one-eighth of what Apple is planning with Safari and RSS We can basically bookmark an R SS feed and then from that book mark, you get a hierarchical menu with new elements that have shown up Is that kind of what it does? Yeah, it sounds like we finally got to the bottom of it and that’s pretty much what you’re seeing And they only understand feeds that are the title, link, description format And so if you, like with my blog, only some of the items actually have titles and almost never have links So if you’re missing one of those elements, then it doesn’t take I’m not exactly sure how cripp led it is, but yeah It either doesn’t recognize the feed at all or it only recognizes items that have those three elements But it’s like, you know, I don ’t know how to say this politely Don’t, this is what trade secrets are supposed to be about there Well, I know, but people get sensitive and they think that if I say something that isn’t positive about their irrigator or whatever Well then just don’t say something negative, it’s positive criticism, come on, this is what people want to hear about that No, thanks for that, it really helps, but it reminds me of what happened with Outliners in the 80s I mean we came out with an Out liner and designed a product for organizing your thinking And that was the center of what we were doing Everything was judged, every feature was judged by how well it suited that application And then the word processor guys, WordPerfect first, and Microsoft, they all added features that they called Out lining But didn’t do that, they didn’t support the ideation creative process And they were basically formatting, I mean WordPerfect basically, what they called Out lining allowed you to put Roman numerals And then section headings, they basically used the Harvard Out line format, it was a printing formatting thing But they called that Outlining and people got really confused, which was really unfortunate And the whole idea got diluted and, you know, I think it turned into PowerPoint, Outlin ers turned into PowerPoint Right, so even that was a better Outliner than Word Perfect was, or Word, at least they were doing what Outliners were roughly supposed to do Although not all that well But the same thing is happening with aggregators now, and I’m really… Now this is the extreme example , that’s not an aggregator, it’s not even very useful It’s sort of a gimmick to be able to say… To say RSS inside, that’s what it’s for Yeah, we do RSS, but what happens is people look at it and they go, well, jeez, that doesn’t seem very useful And then they conclude from that that RSS is very useful RSS sucks, right, right, right Right, and I hate to see that happen So, and I think that, you know, if they want to support RSS in the browser The way to do it is to basically emulate a web server inside the browser And do a real aggregator that goes and gets the news every, you know, period of time, every hour And then it goes to you in reverse chronological order so that you can actually get the leverage that an aggregator provides So, you know, this is like… Once we get to the bottom of it , I go, oh jeez, here we go again, you know But, you know, I don’t think that the feature is worth bending the feeds for I mean, the feeds are doing something useful and if the tool doesn’t want to do something useful with it, well, you know Maybe they can try again, and you know, since it’s still a course, of course, maybe somebody else can help them out there Right, well I am… I certainly do want to help there myself Yeah, just from looking at the screenshots, I immediately knew this is something I did not need to download, you know I was like, no, that’s not going to do it for me It’s one billionth as interesting as what’s going on in the enclosures world Excuse me, we’re also running into similar issues there Although from a different vantage point where on iPodder.
org Where, you know, the iPodder is just intended to be very simple You know, all it’s intended to do is to bring in these enclos ures from feeds that are subscribed to and drop them onto your MP3 player That’s it And since there’s basically a lack of RSS feeds with enclos ures A couple of developers have said, oh, well look, I’ve modified this now, so it scrap es the HTML Which, although a great feature , you know, it does not… it totally detracts from what we ’re trying to accomplish Yeah, that’s a sophisticated thought that you want to sort of be a little picky about what you’re doing Because you’re not just looking for the functionality, right? You’re actually trying to evangelize a format You’re trying to get people up to a certain level so that then , presumably, we can ask them to do more, right? That shouldn’t necessarily be the end of it, you know But they have to basically support RSS 2. 0 and the enclosure feature And then, you know, then we’re starting to get somewhere I also see that you’re, you know, and I think you’re doing this the right way That part, it’s hard because what you’re trying to do there is say, hold on a minute This isn’t, you know, let’s not go that route And I heard you say that in the source code that I listened to last night I haven’t listened to the current one yet, but… Don’t worry, I said the same thing again Yeah, and you’re gonna… but that’s gonna be the harder one The one that’s easier is to continue drill on the need for easy installers Oh, man, yeah Right, and that’s also very important is because the expectation of a user is that, you know There’s a certain level of professionalism that they expect And if they don’t see it, they don’t trust it Right And, you know, it’s not entirely logical You know, the inference isn’t entirely logical But the people think that way and programmers generally don’t understand that They don’t get it, that people … that they have to cater to people’s irrationalities That that’s, you know, the unfortunate or fortunate, actually There’s nothing wrong with giving people what they want If it doesn’t get in the way of , you know, of making the whole thing work The problem is, of course, is when people want things that break Want features that break the basic idea Like, for example, people wanted WYSIWYG with the web, you know That was the first thing, you know, as the web came along, it was the first thing everybody said Well, you know, let me know when this is WYSIWYG But the problem is the web wasn ’t a WYSI environment So it couldn’t ever be WYSIWYG But marketing guys hired programmers and they said basically if you… Go make it WYSIWYG Right, we’ll fire you and the programmers will come back and say “Well, we can’t because the web isn’t a WYSI environment” And they go, “There you go, programmers are so difficult” You know what I mean? I hear you, actually, it’s so funny because I listened to the interaction between you and Andrew Grummit yesterday And, you know, as the day before that you were describing , you know The automated process for creating an RSS feed from a folder of Mp3 files, right? Using the ID3 information, which was something we had talked about And you sort of said, “Well, you know, this has just got to be made easier” And, you know, I’m sure somebody will figure this out And as I was thinking it through, I was going, you know, it’s just simply… There’s something that just can ’t be made easier And that’s one of them So, you know, Andrew basically said that But there’s this moment where the user has to create the association Between the name of the folder on some hard disk somewhere and a URL As you use to access that folder over the web And I think probably, if I understood what Andrew was saying correctly I think he probably found the sweet spot in it However, it’s got a flaw to it Which is that you have to be able to run software on your server And probably so many people don ’t have the ability to do that That there’s probably not… The only way to get around this one, I think, is to offer a hosting service for this stuff And I don’t want to do that Well, I think there’s another way around it Because now you hit on three points First of all, I think Andrew hit the brilliance of what his DIR2 RSS script is The fact that it’s doing exactly that It’s sitting in a folder If you understand the concept of that Then you can understand what’s kind of needed The big problem that we’re running… I’m not running into, but that we’re going to run into With anyone who does something like this regularly And doesn’t have money to fuck around with Is bandwidth Storage is one thing I’ve just been doing this for a couple of weeks And I already have half a gig of mp3 files that I’ve created But bandwidth You get one slash dot And people say, “Oh, well, let me go listen to all these shows " Or “Let me install iPodder” And then you get the 10 most recent entries Or I think I even said a little bit smaller The five most recent entries Times an average of 20 megs But you’re on your way to solving this problem Here’s how that’s working The way you’re going to solve it, as I see it, is with this mail list that you’ve got going What’s it called? iPodder developer? Yeah, it’s a Yahoo group Here’s the steps that we go through to solve the bandwidth problem We know that BitTorrent is at the core of the solution here The problem with BitTorrent And I found this after I finally decided to use it I was in Madison, Wisconsin, a few weeks ago And I was getting ready to go into the Netherlands Not your Netherlands, but the wilderness of the matter This is where you ping me and you say “Honor the BitTorrent” I try to find something that I can download Because none of this shit is downloadable They make this big promise that “Hey, BitTorrent is so cool” But nobody actually is hosting enough of the content for me To be able to download the things that I want So, right If we want to use BitTorrent, and I think we do Because that’s how we solve the problem Then we have to solve the next problem How can we be sure that there’s at least five places to download it from On a given day? Yeah I’ve been thinking about this because You’re absolutely right Let me just recount what happened there You wanted to download some movies Specifically, you wanted to download some old SNLs Saturday Night Live Which I don’t think there are hardly any Saturday Night Live BitTorrents But I said, “BitTorrent really works best When something is new, something is fresh And everybody wants it because what you get then Is asking people to keep their application open To see the file is horseshit That’s almost like saying “Pain ty” Because you’re using bandwidth, etc And you can’t count on people to do that They’re going to leech But with BitTorrent, from what I understand The brilliance of it is that if you download one megabyte You’re probably pushing up a meg and a half Okay? So there’s a formula in there And if on one day, across a 24- hour spectrum People say, “Okay, we all want this show” I’m right there with you, I’ve already figured that out We’ve already got that I know, but our listeners haven ’t, Dave Oh, yeah, I forgot about them Go ahead, go ahead Yeah, I guess you’ve got to include them in here What the hell? Let them figure it out Yeah, you figure it out We’ll clutch here ourselves Let me just summarize what Adam was going to say Don’t forget to mention the part Yeah, well, there’s a lot of porn involved in this Okay? But here’s the deal You need to have places that are actually… A current thing, like your source code is perfect for BitT orrent Right? Because at any given moment, there’s one current one Same thing is true with this show There’s only going to be one current one So what we have to make sure is that Before or concurrent with the release of it We’ve got five people, maybe on a rotating basis Who are willing to have it open In other words, premeditate that I’ll give you another case in point The other day, Boing Boing had a BitTorrent of… I forget what it was, but it was… Yeah, I wish I remembered what it was, but I can’t But it was something that was mildly instinctive I said, “Okay, Boing Boing is a high-flow block, right?” So I figure if I click on the link I’m going to be able to download this thing No way It missed the bootstrap, it didn’t have enough So in other words, to make BitT orrent work It’s not enough just to put up the torrent file And hope for the best You actually also have to get five or whatever the number is Let me throw this at you for a second I’ve posted a couple of BitTor rent RSS feeds Just testing stuff And what I found… The bootstrap that I would use in this case Is I have a BitTorrent client and server Running on a server in my data facility So I upload my torrent And it’s basically sitting there open So it always has one node My theory was there should be no difference Between me having a web server With an mp3 file on it That people can click and download it To me having a file on a web server That you get to through BitTor rent It should make no difference, right? You don’t need five people And get it? Yeah, no, I’ve had no problems at all But that is a bootstrap Because the ultimate fantasy Is to just have my computer at home Just let that be the one node if I’m publishing And if you’re publishing If you want to broadcast There’s gotta be some pain somewhere, right? I don’t have a problem with that I think that I’m willing to do an experiment with this If you want First of all, let me ask you a question Are you willing to host these things On a torrent server up on your place? Yeah, these shows? Of course Okay, definitely Of course, you’ve been doing it with the daily source code The source code isn’t… Exactly, that’s not a BitTor rent download But of course, I have it all set up Why not? For exactly the reasons you just mentioned I didn’t want people to fall off the edge of the map I want them to get the fucking show Yeah, well, okay Maybe we ought to do both, though So that people want to help bootstrap I mean, the beauty of the mail list that you’ve got there Is that it is sort of… It’s like the early days of Frontier The mail list, we went for like two years without a single flame It was just like this great community And everybody was pitching in to help Actually, it was more than two years And so it’s a great time to say Okay, let’s do some things that are good for the internet And they’ll go for it, I think And this is a beautiful thing because it doesn’t require That you be a developer to do it You just have to be a technical user To set up BitTorrent on your desktop That’s not a big deal If you’ve got a good pipe to the internet Then that’s great I now have a great pipe I’ve got a high band with a cable set up here I’m smoking a great pipe, Dave Yeah, you’re… Oh, yeah, well, you know God will get you… Maude used to say that Walter God will get you for that one Oh So we got a couple of questions I want to switch Can I just finish up on the Bit Torrent really quick Because I think that I’d love to do that And of course I’m going to host all the tests that we’re going to do But I think the real, as we say , the egg of Columbus Is combining iPodder with publishing and receiving And BitTorrent all in one I mean, if we can have one thing And you have two folders on your desktop One is for receiving, one is for sending And the stuff that comes into the receive folder It may go automatically somewhere else But I think it’s got to be that simple It does And I would encourage you at this moment Not to worry too much about the brain dead simplicity I think what you’re doing is incredibly valuable You’re defining the feature set Of what the ideal product will be And I plan to work on this once we… I mean, and that doesn’t mean I ’m the only one that plans to work on this But after the open source release of Frontier has happened I hope to get some developers to work with me on this I’ve already talked with a few people On exactly that And create something that’s r ommable That can be put onto, you know What do you mean rommable? I mean, rommable in the sense that I don’t literally mean nothing is really rommable anymore Rommable means… It used to be, well, you know, you’re… I don’t know if your Mac has a ROM BIOS But my PC does A read-only memory? Yeah, what? It’s read-only memory, right? And it’s like the lizard-lizard brain It’s the lizard brain or the lizard brain of the PC, right? I mean, there’s still bosses sitting in there Okay, that’s where all the core shit sits, right? Yeah, it’s like, you know, you build… These things are all piles of stuff built on top of each other And the beauty… Why the ROM BIOS was so important And when it came out, which was like 81 Or something like that, was that you could be Absolutely sure that it was the same on every computer And Compact sort of like, you know, created the mold They didn’t break the mold, they created the mold By directly emulating the ROM BIOS Without using the ROM BIOS And… Do you know Rich Levent ov? No, no Rich is… He’s in sort of like … He’s in your sixth degree I mean, he’s a friend of mine So it’s like second degree for, you know, whatever Like six degrees of separation Yeah, right, Rich was one of the original authors Of the ROM BIOS He’s a friend of a friend He’s a friend of a friend, and he’s a VC in Boston I just got an email from him, actually And I also got an email from Joshua Allen at Microsoft Reminding me He says, “Welcome to Seattle You’ve only got a week or two to register to vote So your next first priority should be to register” Yeah, good point Send me a link, and I’ll absolutely… I have to get a library card, too And, boy, anyway, that’s a whole other subject Listen, I wanted to ask you… Let’s come back, we’ll probably do another one of these We’ll probably do this every fucking day, you know what I mean? We’ll do it as often as we’ve got them well pleased, Dave There you go, right? So the thing I want to ask you now is First of all, okay, so we’ve got this Apparently have this working Your machine didn’t blow up, right? Oh, God, you’re inviting Murphy in the door No, no, it didn’t, I’m not going to… I’m standing under garlic Wouldn’t it be horrible after 41 minutes if it crashed? No, no, no, we don’t want that to happen No, we don’t want that to happen I didn’t crash, and we’re very pleased that it didn’t And we’re totally not worthy, and we don’t deserve it So it seems like this much works So now the question is Could we have a second, a third person Involved in this conversation using this technology Could we… The answer is… We’re going to do something… What? You ready for the answer? The answer is yes I’m sitting down… Whoa, hell… The answer is yes, and… Because actually, I’m using i Chat AV Which is Apple’s instant message client That is compatible with AOL’s Instant message client Which is how we’re setting up this conversation But iChat AV has the capability To bring up to ten different people in a voice chat Yeah, so… Another question, next question Could we listen to a tune right now? We could listen to a tune, the only problem is You wouldn’t hear it, and that ’s the part that I’m working on Because… Right, but do you have one que ued up right now by any chance? Oh, I can have one queued up Well, see now, the only thing is I’m really worried about doing this during our first show Let’s not do that Okay, this first one is going to be plain Jane’s Yeah, but we’ll try that on the next run Yeah Okay, next one, we’ll do it early So that if it screws up… But here’s the problem Dave Let me just explain the problem Because this is… It’s driving me… I wake up in the middle of the night Thinking about how to solve this fucking problem Let me see if I can approach this Okay, so the Mac has… Uses drivers for audio I think that’s the same with any computer You can choose between your internal microphone Or your line in And then you can set up these Virtual devices That let you… And this is the crazy part Because I’m familiar with it The concept from the studio You can patch audio for one application to the other So, what is needed Is I need to patch The output of anything that I play So let’s say I use iTunes Or QuickTime Player I have to patch that output Into the input Of my iChat AV client So that it’ll be acting like a microphone Sending that down the line to you Which also means I have to patch my microphone through To you At the same time, I have to patch my microphone To the speaker so I can record my mic I mean, it’s driving me fucking crazy Because I can record everything I can play a song now And I’d be jamming around with it But A, I’d have to find… I’d have to have a way to mute you Because if you don’t shut up Then you’re going to be talking through the record B, I’d like you to hear it You look so bad about that I don’t see my problems As long as you’re singing on key It doesn’t matter, you’re right I never sing on key What are you talking about? No, but I love doing a little … I love sort of like… I’m emulating you I’m trying to learn how to do this You have to talk through at least the beginning Oh yeah, you got to talk up the intro Yeah, definitely See, that’s the whole trick The trick, this is what DJs in the 80s Totally, totally were into And I still do… It’s crazy, I still do this in the car So you hear a song And what you want to do is you want to be talking Then you hit the song and it starts And you know roughly how long the intro is So you can fit your story in And then you kind of want to end up with saying “Well, everybody, here’s Madonna” And then the minute you shut up You want the vocals to start Which is a very, very 80s DJ way of doing it Which a lot of people hate So really, I love it And I love the way you do it too It’s been you’ve been getting better and better And better on a daily source code I find iTunes, by the way It was an article in the New York Times Where people were like infer ring Mystical qualities to the choices their iTunes Was making, their iPod was making When you put the random song on I’ve been finding it that’s absolutely true Oh, when it opened up When it’s the next song it plays on random Yeah, well when I play my own recording Like today I had the not a morning coffee note So that was the title of it, right? And so the song it played right after that Was “Nowhere Man” Now of course the iPod didn’t pick that It was an alphabetical order, right? But boy, was it perfect, I mean , wow You know, here’s this guy making all these Animal sounds and barnyard sounds And what’s the comment on it? “Well, he’s a Nowhere Man” Like, okay, got it Well, but see, I use my iPod differently I can’t do that Because if I put it on random If I just let it scan through the library I’m going to pick up Christmas songs I’m going to pick up different audio Yeah, stuff that I don’t want to listen to No, no, that didn’t happen I didn’t use the random, I don ’t use it either I can’t for that reason Because it’s not, you know, whatever Although I wouldn’t put it past Apple To have some kind of algorithm In their quote-unquote random izer That may even look for genres or something It’s certainly something that would be a nice feature I mean, I think you and I have talked about this before Radio stations have formats You know, they play a 60 song at the top of the hour Followed by an 80 song, then a new song Whatever, depends on what the format is What a great feature to have Formats generated in your MP3 player Well, you know that someday we ’ll be doing that for sure There’s no question about it Well, we can do it now I created a whole thing in Radio Userland That did just that You did? Yeah, don’t you remember that script That copy-paste script that had windows flying All over the place? Oh, yeah Okay, put a bookmark down on it I want to tell that story someday Because that’s an amazing story I mean, well, whatever That is, to me, the essence Of where the users and developers get together At that point, we’re a user And now you’re on your way to becoming a developer But you were a user that was so motivated That you didn’t take no for the answer, right? Well, I’m still doing that Exactly, and that’s the charm That’s why I like you, that’s why you’re my buddy A lot of love in the room I know, guys, I’m sorry We have a… Why did I say that? I don’t know, it was quite disgusting So, right back at you So we have like 12 minutes to go until we’ve recorded a whole hour I think we should limit ourselves to an hour Oh, is that our budget? We’re only doing an hour? Okay, great Whatever you want My car is great I gotta actually do some stuff today Well, I wanted to entice you To talk about BloggerCon So that that way you’re not trying to promote it yourself But fuck, I want to talk about it Because, you know, all I know is November 6th I know it’s a Palo Alto I know what I’m doing But what the hell is going to happen? No, you don’t, you don’t know Let’s talk about what you’re doing Let’s do that This is the perfect time to do that So I tell you what I thought I was doing? Well, let me just sort of go over Just a refresher You have been to BloggerCon But you didn’t go to the second one, right? Well, my wife became ill So I had to turn around I couldn’t get into the second one No, no, no, right Obviously, there was a good reason for you not to go to the second one But things sort of changed at the second one Okay Or the whole concept got refined more And then after the conference Len Pryor from Microsoft wrote a piece called He described it as the “Uncon ference” What does he do with Microsoft? He’s Skobel’s boss That’s probably the best way to do it That’s a heavy job, dude Yeah, I know Danger pay Yeah, somebody’s got to do it, I guess I’m sure he would like to be known as something other than Skobel’s boss I’m sure he actually is I’ve actually known him for quite a while And he’s a really good guy And you really understood it I thought, put it very well, what the whole thing was Basically, it’s a conference, right? It’s called BloggerCon And the Con stands for conference or convention Whichever you like better And there’s no audience, there ’s no speakers, there’s no panels Which sort of forces you to think about Well, what is it if there’s no audience And there’s no speakers, and there’s no panels But it’s very consistent in my mind with how blogs work Which is that basically, it’s not hierarchical There’s no blog that’s more authoritative than any other blog Or at least not no formal structure that dictates that that should always be so Obviously, some blogs have more readers than others But there’s nothing in sort of the structure of the blog is here that makes it that way So while at one time, I’m sure I had more readers than Glenn Reynolds does I’m sure now Glenn has an order of magnitude more readers than I do Or as we say, more hits than Adam Curry has in a coffee shop in Amsterdam There you go, that’s a good one And that’s the way it should be , right? I mean, it wasn’t designed to make, for the greater glory of any person That the idea is bigger than any one person And so that, and then, you know , I also wanted to try to solve the problem that most conferences have Which is that all the interesting stuff happens out in the hallways, you know I wanted to make it more likely that the interesting stuff would happen in the room So we said, okay, great, basically we just want to have discussion leaders and topics and rooms And basically, we’ll try to work to get the people who we would put on a panel in the room But we don’t give them any special recognition Nor do we preclude possibility that there will be other people in the room who may have more to contribute than those people Do I get a badge? Of course you get a badge, everybody gets a badge That says speaker? No, your badge does not say speaker No, I hear you Your badge may say discussion leader You know, and the idea is that basically you stand up in front of the room And you give a few minutes worth of, you know, introduction to the topic And then, you know, you call on somebody and you say, okay, what do you think about this? And then you call on somebody else Now, they don’t even have to put their hands up In fact, you should call on people who don’t put their hands up So that sort of keeps everybody sitting on the edge of their chair Now, will it be like the first year? Because I went to one of the sessions, the first blogger con And which was very, I think it was Joey Ito It was very informal The thing that was, I had never seen before, apparently, it’s pretty normal Was there was a projector, had an IRC chat up on the screen behind him And people were conversing about what was going on in the room in, you know, in like their own chat Is that something that happened at the second blogger con as well? I don’t think it happened that much at the first one But it’s more of a decision that Joey made that we wanted to do I didn’t like it It certainly, yeah, to be truthful, I mean, but then, you know, it’s very much, I mean, you know, after we do the prep And we’ll talk about it a few times before Yeah, that’s good, let’s use trade secrets for that as well, Dave, just to make sure we do that But I just want to get this across, that after we’ve talked about it, it’s your show I had that happen, for example, with the second blogger con Where, you know, one of the things I wanted to come out of that conference with Was an idea of what the relationship between blogs and journalism was And I had the kickoff session be led by Jay Rosen, who’s the chairman of the Journalism Department at NYU And an authority on journalism, if there ever was one And instantaneously, as soon as he took, you know, started up the discussion He started with a premise that completely made it impossible for my goal for the whole conference You know, it’s like, I’m sitting there, but nah, I didn ’t say a word And my body language, hopefully , didn’t communicate I participated in the discussion, and it’s sort of like a blog, you just accept what you get You don’t know who’s going to show up in the room, you don’t know what they’re going to say You don’t even know what the discussion leader’s going to do And whether they’re going to follow There are some very basic rules , however, though, if they get broken, we will stop the session People are not allowed to do advertising, you know I forget, so I’ll have to review it Advertising is a big one, because that’s what most conferences are Is people talking about their own shit that they’re selling Yeah, you’ve got to be really careful about that I mean, if you feel at some moment that there’s, you know, a vendor in the audience Derek, see, I do it. If there’s a vendor in the room Right I have to teach myself, right? Discipline myself, right? But if there’s a vendor in the room and you feel at this moment You need to have something about their product come into the discussion That’s your call. You can call on them and ask them to talk about it Right You know, but it’s not their choice to do it, it’s your choice You know, so it’s a… think of yourself as a reporter Okay, and the room is your sources They’re the people you’re interviewing Right, so I can pick from them and do stuff with them Right, and you’re there in service of the room Right In other words, you’re trying … and in this case, clearly I think what we want you to talk about is, you know, is this what we’re doing right now Which is sort of like, how does the, you know, blogosphere get, you know How would you describe what we ’re doing right now? Uh… I don’t know That’s what you’re gonna have to do, that’s your homework assignment I know one thing, I get to drop a Silicon Valley name on you John Gage from Sun Once Told Me Yeah How was that? How cool was that John Gage from Sun Once Told Me ? Excuse me while I genie-fiked He said, you know, if you gotta stand up in front of audience and talk about anything Make sure you just talk about something you know a lot about You know, you can twist that into any topic Yeah, but you see, we’re not doing any of that You’re not talking here, and there’s not an audience, so John Gage, thank you very much I think what I’ll do is, I’m gonna bring in a boombox I’m gonna lead off with a song of the day That’s how I’m gonna start my discussion Actually, you could… there you go Yeah, that’s what I wanna do Basically, if you look at the session at the big blog post Then you’re doing great, and of course your blog posts are audio, so you’re all set Yeah, good, so November 6th We need November 6th, Stanford Law School, Palo Alto, California Can you still come? Where’s this thing booked? What ’s the… It’s pretty booked We can probably make some room for people It kind of depends My job for the next couple of weeks now is to fill out the grid And then work with the discussion leaders such as yourself Do we want to set up an RSS feed with enclosures with audio of the sessions? Or is that too much? Yeah, well we still haven’t quite figured out how we’re doing the audio broadcast yet And yeah, I’m gonna need help with that So yeah, I better get busy, you know Now I’ve got my living things settled here in Seattle Now I’m pretty much… that’s what I have to do When you go up to… well, when you go to Palo Alto Well, I’ll be making probably maybe three… between now and then To me, this is like… I’ve set it up so that going to… The Bay Area is like going to New York when I was in Boston It’s a very easy trip, so I’ll be probably going a few times But yeah, we need to get a write-up Why don’t we announce your session first? Why don’t we like… Okay You know… Well, give me until Monday and then I’ll write up my session We’ll figure it out. I think I have a write-up of the session that you didn’t do at the last session That was personal TV networks, although it’s changed a little bit I’m really wary of talking about video at this moment Because you see how much confusion there is with MP3 Well, you see, there’s so much confusion with MP3s by itself Just people understanding what this is When you get to video, streaming and video on demand and all these buzzwords pop up Forget about that shit. We’re only interested… MP3 is very important. We can’t give on that one Because that gives us the control that’s what we want It sure does It means we can put the stuff wherever we want to So that’s how we… Okay, we can edit it. Let’s just see what we have We’ll go from there. Thanks for bringing this up I really need to get working on this, so you can help me do that I’m here for Dave. Just… I’m your personal little tickler Thank you Remember those? Those… Those… was it the TSRs? Yeah A DOS tickler? Yeah, those were the days Terminate, stay ready? Was it terminate, stay ready? Is that it? Yeah, that’s what we should do with Bush Yeah, TSR and Bush Developers, TSR and Bush I didn’t say that, actually No, no, no, I didn’t say that I did, I did Hey, I’m voting. I’m an American. I can vote Yeah, I’m an American. We like to mis-state residents Yeah, well, we… He would make a… he would make a great former president Really Alright, now we’re getting silly. Now we’re really getting going Yeah, right at the last minute Well, next time we’ll… you know, the next time we have it to look forward to There’s no more… we won’t be far out when we start it Yeah, we lost a lot of energy in the first hour of dicking around We’ve got to talk about the whole concept behind trade secrets We’ll do all that on the next show And I’m really looking forward to some feedback So you can send it to DavidS cripting. com Or AdamCurry. com Yeah, we’re going to start a blog for this I got to go reserve a domain name. I’m not going to say what it is Yeah, yeah, yeah I’m going to get that all set up right now Yeah, okay, so I’ll take care of the audio hosting and all that crap Will you do the weblog? Totally, I’m all over it Now, let me just say that we’ve been talking for an hour A normal phone conversation would have cost about $40 To call from Belgium to Seattle We don’t have a friends and family plan yet together, Dave and I Although we have considered it And we’ve recorded this The quality, I got to listen to it on some speakers But I think it was outstanding And as a broadcaster, I’m amazed what we’ve just done And the fact that within probably an hour or so It’ll take me a little while to upload on my cable modem People will be able to listen to it from Venezuela to God knows where To Palo Alto Exactly, and New York City and skyscrapers and everything Hey listen, great show Adam Did he crap out? Did you go? Hello? Hello, hello, hello Bing, bing, bing, bing Okay, you’re not going to believe what happened It is time to end the show because the battery on my mic died So now I’m on the internal mic Oh God, I thought you were going to tell me we lost the whole damn thing Alright Adam, I’ll see you on the web, thanks very much Goodbye everybody Okay, and we’ll talk to you next time on trade secrets, bye bye [no audio]