Here’s my Janu­rary 2003 primer in the Online Jour­nal­ism Review: News that comes to you. RSS feeds offer info-warriors a way to take the pulse of hun­dreds of sites.

After the arti­cle came out, Dave Winer of Script­ing News wrote: “RSS is not just for geeks anymore.”

Dave also wrote: “JD does some­thing extremely cool, on his weblog he pro­vides full tran­scripts of the inter­views he did for the piece. Much more inter­est­ing. Very nice. Some­day all reporters will do this.”

Here are the extended tran­scripts of com­ments by inter­view sub­jects on RSS.

Here’s my arti­cle in the Online Jour­nal­ism review on Tools for the info-warrior: RSS read­ers ride to the res­cue of heavy news graz­ers. A look at RSS news read­ers (such as Feed­De­mon, Net­NewsWire, Blog­lines), other RSS news ser­vices, RSS feeds, and soft­ware tools such as Active­Words and Hot­Bot Desktop.

No blog­ging (or email) for the next week. We’ll be on vaca­tion in San Diego and out of reach of the Inter­net. Have a good week! Back on July 5.

The mad­ness con­tin­ues. From Larry Lessig: At Amazon.com, you can pur­chase an elec­tronic ver­sion of the Con­sti­tu­tion, fit­ted very nicely to a Microsoft Reader (not Mac com­pat­i­ble), and pro­tected quite com­pletely with DRM. The descrip­tion says you’re not per­mit­ted to print it.

Joe Cona­son in Salon: Bill Clin­ton. The for­mer pres­i­dent blasts the Bush-Cheney rush to war, explains why Gore lost in 2000 and tells how Kerry can win in 2004.

From the Daily Mis­Lead:

Bush admin­is­tra­tion lied about secret Saudi flight

The Bush admin­is­tra­tion and its right-wing allies are launch­ing an all-out assault on Michael Moore and his new movie, attempt­ing to dis­credit the film before it opened.

Now the smear cam­paign is focused on cre­at­ing the pub­lic illu­sion that Moore lied about a secret Saudi flight that was per­mit­ted after 9/11 when most U.S. air­space was closed. But, accord­ing to one new report, the Tampa Inter­na­tional Air­port “con­firmed that the flight did take place” — despite three years of Bush admin­is­tra­tion denials.

Accord­ing to the St. Peters­burg Times, “two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of the nation’s air traf­fic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa Inter­na­tional Air­port, picked up three young Saudi men (includ­ing one thought to be a mem­ber of the Saudi royal fam­ily) and flew to Lex­ing­ton, Ken­tucky. From Ken­tucky “the Saudis then took another flight out of the coun­try.” As the news­pa­per reported, “for nearly three years, White House, avi­a­tion and law enforce­ment offi­cials have insisted the flight never took place and have denied pub­lished reports” about the flight. But now, at the request of the National Com­mis­sion on Ter­ror­ist Attacks (9/11 Com­mis­sion), the Tampa Inter­na­tional Air­port acknowl­edged the flights hap­pened. For its part, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion “is still not talk­ing about the flights.”

Accord­ing to the St. Peters­burg Times, the Com­mis­sion has now sent a for­mal let­ter to the Tampa Inter­na­tional Air­port ask­ing for more infor­ma­tion about “a char­tered flight with six peo­ple, includ­ing a Saudi prince, that flew from Tampa, Florida on or about Sept. 13, 2001″ The com­mis­sion “appears con­cerned with the han­dling of the Tampa flight.” Mean­while, for­mer FBI agent Manuel Perez, who accom­pa­nied the for­merly secret flight, said the order to allow the flights “must have come from the high­est lev­els of government.”

Just pub­lished a photo album of shots I took at Super­nova on Thurs­day. Some other good cov­er­age and/or pho­tos here: Phil Wind­ley, Matt, Jason and, of course, the Super­nova blog.

Also, here’s the first half of the first draft of an arti­cle on the goings-on that I just filed. Mind­jack has just pub­lished the full story.

Blog­ging, social soft­ware (for bet­ter and worse), and col­lab­o­ra­tive work tools from the edges of the net­work were the stars of 2004 Super­nova.

The third annual tech-in-the-workspace con­fer­ence — leg­end: “Where the decen­tral­ized future comes together!” — drew more than 150 tech­nol­ogy thought lead­ers, soft­ware startup CEOs and other heavy hit­ters (alas, fewer than 20 of them women) to the Westin Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif., on June 24–25.

Con­tinue reading »

I met Michael Sippey (man­ag­ing direc­tor of Quris) at Super­nova for the first time ear­lier today. He had the best post­ing of the day on the Super­nova blog, so I’ll repro­duce it here:

Where’s the rip, mix & burn?

So I walked in a bit late and may have missed the Big Ideas, but from the 2nd half that I heard the syn­di­ca­tion panel just blew it. We need to wake up to the fact that RSS does not equal blogs. If we keep talk­ing about RSS as the equiv­a­lent of blog­ging, then of course we’ll be stuck in the same old bor­ing con­ver­sa­tions about adop­tion curves, audi­ence size and whether Jane or Joe blog­ger will ever be able to have an ad– or subscription-supported busi­ness model. What, is this 1996 all over again? We’ve been down this road before.

What I had hoped to hear was some dis­cus­sion about how XML-based con­tent syn­di­ca­tion can cre­ate recom­bi­na­to­r­ial media. As I’m sure every­one here knows, the trend in media con­sump­tion is hyper-fragmentation. Cable, web, gam­ing, music dis­tri­b­u­tion, etc. With time– and context-shifting tech­nolo­gies peo­ple are able to cre­ate their own real-time media mix — whether it’s the ran­dom func­tion on the iPod, or the Tivo to-do list, or the book­mark file, or the email sub­scrip­tion list, or, yes, the XML syn­di­ca­tion client.

If XML-based con­tent syn­di­ca­tion is only about cre­at­ing another vehi­cle for sin­gle chan­nel con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion (and ad dis­tri­b­u­tion, etc.), then YAWN. For­mats like RSS & Atom cre­ate the pos­si­bil­ity for recom­bi­na­to­r­ial media. If all the RSS/Atom pro­po­nents want to use these feeds as a replace­ment for email, then good luck. You have a hard road ahead. What’s needed is some new think­ing about rich clients that enable users to cre­ate NEW things out of the pub/sub network.

Rip, mix, burn, baby.

Com­mon Dreams pro­gres­sive newswire: In Major Vic­tory for Local­ism and Diver­sity, Fed­eral Court Over­turns FCC Deci­sion on Media Own­er­ship. I was going to link to this Forbes arti­cle on same, but the ads are just too intrusive.

At Super­nova, Doc Searls men­tioned to me that he had posted this the other day after he stum­bled upon an old Wired piece by Jon Katz, When Will Old Media Grasp the Rev­o­lu­tion?, which in turn was a riff on my 1996 cover story in the Amer­i­can Jour­nal­ism Review about changes the estab­lish­ment media needed to make to remain rel­e­vant in the dig­i­tal age. “It’s amaz­ing how well it holds up,” says the Doc.

Speak­ing of Super­nova, I’ll post some­thing on it tonight. Just got back after a 12-hour day there and back, and wi-fi prob­lems pre­vented post­ing dur­ing the sessions.