04 February 2002

Radio Subscription Count John Robb talks about Radio Userland subscriptions today and touches a point I've been wondering about this last week: "My page view traffic on the other hand is going down as people begin to subscribe to my Weblog.  180 people already get everything I post sent to their desktops via RSS and Radio." Just goes to show how little I understand about how this xml subscription thing works. I thought that Radio went out and read the contents of the RSS XML file at each site you were subscribed to. This would show up as a page read in that sites traffic logs. But John says his view traffic is going down as his subscription rises, so I have to find a better theory. I'm also wondering how John knows how many people are subscribing to his feed.  This data is even more valuable to Radio bloggers than straight view traffic, because a subscription shows so much more commitment to your writing on the part of your readers.  I'm sure Userland will find a way to make this data available eventually, but I suspect for the moment that John knows by virtue of being part of the Userland team. Is that right, John? 7:56:53 PM

Rushdie on perception of the US Glenn Reynolds points to Salman Rushdie in the New York Times. Rushdie speaks as ever with authoritative voice on the conflict, particularly about the relationship between the West and the Muslim world: "America-hating has become a badge of identity, making possible a chest- beating, flag-burning rhetoric of word and deed that makes men feel good. It contains a strong streak of hypocrisy, hating most what it desires most, and elements of self- loathing. ("We hate America because it has made of itself what we cannot make of ourselves.") What America is accused of — closed- mindedness, stereotyping, ignorance — is also what its accusers would see if they looked into a mirror." 7:08:48 PM

Spinsanity on GAO-Cheney Spinsanity maintain their own high standards, in a special article which strips the spin from the dispute between the General Accounting Office and Vice President Cheney over whether he should disclose details of his contacts with Enron: "Rational debate requires a clear understanding of just what is being debated. Cheney and Fleischer, however, intentionally and repeatedly exaggerated the nature of the GAO's request in order to make it appear more unreasonable. With little clarity being provided by the media, they have been largely successful in preventing the public from understanding just what is at stake in the GAO's historic lawsuit against the White House. Comptroller General Walker said in a recent interview with National Review Online that he does "not believe that Dick Cheney would knowingly lie." Even if we accept this most generous of interpretations, however, such dissembling from the Vice President and Presidential spokesperson is inexcusable and disturbing." As the GAO prepares to sue the administration to get the records, this is shaping up to be a battle royal.  Wasn't it Nixon who last went up against them over executive privilege? 3:29:55 PM

The Labels Still Don't Get It Perhaps that should be 'won't ever get it'?  Two more stories on how the record companies are placing their own interests first, and their customers a distant second. Not a strategy, you'd think, best suited for corporate long life and happiness. As you probably know, they have started releasing music CD's which have meaningless digital data written onto the CDs between the music, so that they cannot be read by computer CD drives. (What happens in computer CD drives that record companies hate, but their customers love?  People make duplicate copies of physical CDs and, even worse/better, depending on your point of view 'rip' them into digital formats like mp3. Once the music from a CD is converted like this into a digital file on your hard drive, it costs you nothing to share it with 1 or 1000 of your friends.) However, this bastardized format breaks the rules established for CD's by Philips and Sony years ago, and Philips is fighting the broken implementation.  "Suing Philips is not something that should be done lightly," says Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Copyright owners have been winning in part because they've been choosing opponents that are wildly overmatched. If a label like Universal were to sue Philips, that would be a fight between equals." One practical result may well be that stores on and offline label disks with the broken format, as in fact Amazon is already doing.  As an artist, would you want your record in the broken format ghetto? The second story I wanted to point to on the LA Times site, which I found on Boing Boing, talks about the unattractive implementation by the record companies of music download services.  The link doesn't work for me right now, although could well be because of my lousy connection. 11:25:25 AM

Weblog Tagline I changed the Throb tagline two days ago, and although the change (Ecuator to Equator) is reflected on Radio's desktop homepage, it won't show up on the public website. Any ideas? 10:59:13 AM

Shirly Shome Mishtake Who would you figure might say this? "Gates "is really annoyed by the incredible pain we put everyone through in computing"" The man is Richard Purcell, Microsoft Security Chief, and he was announcing a suspension of software development for a month, to focus on bug hunting. Did you ever think you'ld hear that kind of honesty from MS?  Let's look at that again: "incredible pain we put everyone through in computing".  These are the software 'issues' people... This is the first substantive evidence that Gates' campaign to prioritise security and reliability, that I first referred to here, is more than just marketing flak. But I'm not, how should I say, altogether convinced, that they're going to debug Windows XP in one month. 10:22:57 AM