1. To influence.

2. To be influenced.

Hopefully, in both cases, for the better. I want to learn things that make what I do better informed, more valuable (however that is defined) and more timely. And I want to reciprocate, to give others the benefit of what I am learning.

The people who read this blog, by and large, are really smart. I’m learning that because, after turning off the comments, I’m hearing from people about my blog that surprise me. People I didn’t know read it. If I knew they did, I might ask them what they think about this or that. Or to fill in a bit of knowledge that I am missing and don’t find online. But if I don’t know they’re reading, I don’t know to ask.

Further, they read the comments too. That’s a surprise. But they don’t contribute. Now, to me — that’s not good. In fact, that’s bad.

And some read the comments because they like to see my response to off-topic stuff. To that I say *@#$*(&@#. What a waste. I work so hard, really — every damn day — to create software that makes this stuff work better, and that’s what you look to me for? To those people, hope you find some other place for your emotional thrill. I’m not in that business.

The Mail Pages, very early in the evolution of Scripting News, were the ideal. They were a lot of work, a lot more than comments. But the result was incredible. It was like the stage at a really good conference. The people had important information and perspectives to share, and lots of them shared. They were excited about a new medium and it showed. It was the kind of excitement you see in basketball players the last few weeks, the thrill they’re experiencing, that they were always capable of, catalyzed by an improbable star. Newness brings out goodness, it seems.

I hear that some people feel there’s a virtue in being silent. I don’t. I see it as selfishness. You’re willing to take but you’re not willing to give. Not a big fan of people who do that.

It’s the same gripe I have with the tech investors. When the holes are being dug they don’t have any help to offer, but when the ideas are ready for commercializing, they are happy to take the work and run with it. Great. Where’s the profit in figuring out what’s next? Where’s the incentive? Having been around this block repeatedly and seeing unbelievable selfishness, I find myself wishing there was a way to say No, you didn’t help so you can’t have the benefit.

I’ve actually had people say, to my face, that my job is to work for free, and their job is to make the money. How could someone actually let those words come out of their mouth, with a straight face, with any honor or self-respect? These are people with kids, who presumably teach them to share what they have, and to help run the house. Yes people do things they don’t want to do, because they need doing. So, as adults, why don’t they roll up their sleeves and help?

Think about what you want from the net. And what you’re willing to give up for that. Perhaps a few of your ideas? Or nuggets of truth you learn by doing what you do? Or if you spot an error in someone else’s work, are you willing to help out by writing a great bug report? Think about it when you look for the comments and don’t find them. They’re not here now quite possibly because you weren’t willing to contribute.

If you are willing to help, if you are a generous person, then what’s stopping you?

PS: I love that the rotating header for today is the BSOD. Totally random. I had no role in chosing it other than writing the code that uses a random number generator.

Well, I wouldn’t be known on other nets as @davewiner, instead I would be known as dave.scripting.com. That name would be a CNAME for Facebook, if I was using Facebook to guarantee I really am who I say I am. But if, in five or ten years, I decided to use another service, one with a neat feature Facebook doesn’t offer, I could point dave.scripting.com at the other server.

It would be like changing your credit card number, something we have to deal with from time to time. Not a great thing, but then not too bad either. You get reminded of all the things you’re paying for automatically. I actually like to go through that ritual from time to time. In this case you’d be reminded of all the services that have access to your personal stuff.

I doubt if Facebook would do this, but then a commercial ID hosting service, one that charged me say $10 a year to be my identity server, might be willing to offer such a service and make it easy for me to switch.

And here’s the funny part. Such services already exist and they work really well. They’re called registrars.

That was already twelve years ago, but I’ll never forget it. All of sudden something wonderful and unexpected had happened. Outside the normal. It wasn’t planned by some marketing guy. The world had changed and it was great, and we didn’t know what the limits were. Or how it would end.

I remember thinking — I wish Jerry had been here to see this. The other day at the Knicks game I said to one of my friends that this was the first huge thing Steve Jobs missed. (Later I realized that he more or less missed Occupy too, which was just as big as either Napster or Linsanity).

So this led me to a tweet this morning, where I compared the the opportunity the Knicks and basketball have to the opportunity presented by Napster, and realized they’re going to blow it. When we were at the game the other day, they had the usual things to keep fans entertained during timeouts. But we didn’t need them! Here we were soaking up something as great as Beatlemania or Napster, and they’re shooting cheap t-shirts — advertising for crying out loud — into the audience as if we needed anything to occupy us.

On the way out of the Garden you could see the signage hadn’t changed yet. They had huge pictures of stars, who were still technically playing for the Knicks, but they weren’t the story. Don’t they have any actual fans working for the team? Yeah they were selling Lin jerseys, the street-level marketers knew how to adjust, but the corporate ones? Imagine what their meetings must be like. Imagine all the sleazy promotions they must be planning.

But they didn’t create Jeremy Lin. They didn’t even see him. Are they going to define them? Are we going to hate them? (Of course, the only question is what exactly will they do to make us hate them.) This is still America, and we’re still run by lawyers and accountants. We just had a breakout of soul, a lot like the joy people had with Napster. Bloomberg shut down Occupy. This too will end. But for right now — it sure is wonderful!

BTW, a few days ago I wrote about the Beatles, and what happened with them, how Beatlemania ended. One of the four really wanted to be a Beatle. That wasn’t enough to drive them forward.

I’ve asked them, many times, why I was never invited to speak, they haven’t been willing to answer. They’ve asked me to apologize for offering my own explanation, in a comment a few years ago on Marc Canter’s blog — and I’ve said I would be happy to, if they would tell me the real reason I’m on their short blacklist (maybe at the top of it).

I know you can apply to speak now, I even started to fill out the forms last year, but they asked so many “Who Are You” kind of questions, and my pride kept kicking in. Why don’t you know who I am? I am willing to play the hamster up to a point, in some contexts. But this is so totally over the top.

There were years, at the beginning, when you had to get an invite and they weren’t willing to provide one. They still invite people to speak on their keynote stage. Ahh, I’m not important enough. But they’ve invited people, many of them, onto that stage to talk about my work, my contributions — so why can’t I speak for them too?

I know it’s supposed to be a lot of fun, and some of the participants have been very nice to me, offered good places to stay for free, etc. But I want to get past the gatekeepers. I’d like to be invited, for real, by the people who run the show. I think they’ve benefitted from my generosity, why not reciprocate?

Update: Paul Ford says the theme of the web is Why Wasn’t I Consulted?

I figured something glitchy happened, and shrugged it off. Sometimes people adjust their content management system, and the feed guids all change, so the aggregator thinks they’re all new. It’s a bit more expensive in the case of podcasts because it downloads them all, and it wipes out all the other MP3s in my Podcatcher folder, because it’s managed by the software to only use a fixed amount of storage. So every time a new podcast is downloaded, the oldest one is removed.

But then it happened again. And again. So I had to do something about it.

I was busy with another project so I did the simplest quickest thing, I unsubbed. But this meant I had to go to the FreshAir site to manually see what’s new, because I like to listen to FreshAir on my daily walk. Not always, but often.

This morning I didn’t feel like tackling my next big project, so I did something “lite” — I made a change to the way River2 works to allow for this quirk in the FreshAir podcast.

Here’s how it works.

This keeps the flow marching forward in time, not backward — but allows items to appear out of order in the feed, and for items to be published a bit after the feed’s pubDate for that item.

Now I’m going to see if:

Here’s the worknote for this item.

When you cut the taxes of people who supposedly create jobs to encourage them to create more jobs, you’re stimulating them, whether they create jobs or not. I believe they mostly just pocket the profits, and don’t worry too much about creating jobs (I’ve got personal experience with this, when I pay very low taxes on windfalls, I don’t generally think that any obligations come with the lower taxes, I don’t even see it as lower taxes, just low taxes). This theory seems quite Keynesian to me.

But when the stimulus is in the form of paying teachers, cops, sanitation workers, construction crews, etc — that’s socialism! And supposedly discredited because it’s Keynesian. But what’s the difference? You’re just choosing to stimulate different people. Never mind that it’s likely to create more jobs because the people you’re stimulating can’t afford to pocket the profits, they have to spend it because they don’t have much of a surplus.

The Repubs, who are I assume educated people themselves, act like the elites they decry, by ignoring their education, and pretending there’s a difference between subsidizing the rich and subsidizing the working classes. There are differences, but they’re not moral, just pragmatic.

Glad I don’t have comments so I don’t have to hear about how I’m a liberal (I’m not, I’m actually very conservative). But what the heck, why not call people names before even beginning to find out who they are?

Anyway…

One of my favorite movies of all time is As Good As It Gets.

I like it because it’s like an inkblot test. Depending on whether you’re male or female, gay or straight, young or old, even black or white, you see something different. For each of us the story revolves around a different character. Even though the story is, imho, how they really aren’t as different as you might think.

My point of view. Women tend to look at men in a very superficial way. I know because, like Melvin, I’ve been having this conversation with women my whole life. They think we do things “because” of other things, and when you find out what those other things are, you find out how low an opinion they have of us.

We all look at Carol the Waitress, at first, and see a saint. But if you look at it from the man’s point point of view, you see that she’s not really giving Melvin a chance to be himself. I like her, but I want her to be nice to Melvin! And despite herself, she actually likes the part of the guy she thinks she doesn’t. Or whatever. It’s soooo confusing, which is the best part of the movie, because all this stuff, when you’re in the middle of it, is very very very confusing (in a wonderful way of course, or we wouldn’t bother).

I thought of this movie today because the Republicans are reminding me of Melvin Udall, the character played by Jack Nicholson. Carol Connelly would, it seems, have a question to ask the Republicans about this vaginal ultrasound law they want to have in Virginia for women getting abortions.

“Do you have any control over how creepy you allow yourself to get?”

I’m sure the Republicans, as a party, somewhere inside their collective, tortured soul, think they’re doing something good here. But.. I don’t know where to begin, so I won’t.

The first option was not actually an option because I don’t have the ability to change Disqus, the commenting software we were using. And while I have written commenting software, and even have debugged source code available for download (it’s part of manila.root), I don’t have any interest in trying to fix commenting software. We know where the problems are. And Disqus and the others have done a good job of taking these things to their logical conclusion. From here on it looks like they’ll be refining, adding features, debugging and scaling. Not taking a fresh look. (If they are, we can hopefully connect our efforts. I love working with others on open formats and protocols.)

Now, relative writing. WTF is that.

Start off by what is not relative writing.

I had a sandwich for lunch.

That’s about me and my sandwich. It’s not about someone else’s writing. It’s not relative.

Joe wrote a wonderful essay about the sandwich he had for lunch. I thought it was very expressive and colorful. He really captured the flavor of the sandwich. And he expressed a vision for the future. Tomorrow he’s planning on having tuna salad. And on Thursday he expects it will be hot pastrami.

In that example, I’m writing about someone else’s writing. That’s relative.

The first bit doesn’t need to be connected (or related) to any other writing, although I might want to link to a story about sandwiches or food, or maybe someone reading it doesn’t know what lunch is, so I might link to a definition of lunch. But you can understand what I’m saying without reading someone else’s writing.

I’m of the opinion that the best, most powerful, most useful writing is non-relative. That too much relative writing is of the form: “I have an opinion about something like this.” They don’t often express the opinion very well. And quite often it’s confused with the person writing it. For example, when I say hackathons are nonsense, a lot of people respond as if I said you are nonsense, or the hackathons you love are nonsense. Obviously my experience is colored by the hackathons I’ve been to or heard about. And my view of them is based on who I am, not who you are. A lot of what people had to say about it helped me see how they view the world, and how different it is from the way I view the world. That’s good! But the confusion isn’t so good. It’s why people try to hurt others, because they’ve confused the other person with their own feelings. But I’m rambling.

Let’s say I see something on Twitter that I’d like to do some writing about. That of course would be relative. Somehow I want to attach my writing to the tweet. They offer almost no good way of doing that. Same with Facebook and Google and whatever. Same with the comments I had here on Scripting News.

What I’m hoping is that we can develop good ways of connecting writing, on a consensual basis. I’d like to team up with people whose writing complements mine. People who have ideas that I would like to see gain more exposure. Without opening it up to spammers and emotional thrill-seekers. That’s the challenge, to strike a balance, to create something new and better.

Once a long time ago I wrote about how when a big tree falls it creates room for lots of new growth. It’s always that way. One door closes and another opens. Carmelo Anthony is injured — and — Jeremy Lin! Just one example. I actually had a big tree fall near my house in California right around the time Jerry Garcia died. It helped me understand that this is the way things are and it’s neither good nor bad. But comments going away here immediately gave me ideas on what could take their place. That, to me, is purely good.

There may be times in the future when I want to solicit input from readers. I’ll find another way to do that.

BTW, as I sat down to actually turn them off, a comment on my whimsical post about Jackson Pollock came in that confirmed I’m making the right decision.

Why did the college basketball teams miss his talent?

Why did the NBA?

Really simple. People see what they expect to see.

Great quote in Moneyball about this.

“People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins.”

This lesson doesn’t just apply to basketball or baseball or sports, it applies to everything.

And btw, the reason people didn’t expect he’d be a great basketball player was his race. So we’re going to get a chance to clear up some racism now, so that’s another good thing.

PS: I went to the Knicks game today and he’s every bit as exciting a player in person as he is on TV. What a gift!