I’ve just upgraded this site to use Movable Type 3.2. If you see any glitches, please leave me a note in the comments.

The esteemed Professor Froomkin regales us with an anecdote that is all too close for comfort:

Self, for it is he: Yes, lots of cultural references get lost in class. For example when I talk about Nixon, to a good chunk of the class it’s as much history as if I were talking of Ulysses S. Grant.

Youthful colleague: I wasn’t born yet at the time of the Nixon administration.

Self: Might as well shoot me now.

Youthful colleague (twisting the knife): I wasn’t even born in the Ford administration.

Next month, I reach one of those milestones. Well beyond 40, far short of 60, I’m sure you can figure it out. I marched in demonstrations against Nixon in 1969 and 1970 and 1971, and I danced for joy when he resigned in disgrace in 1974. To learn that an entire generation thinks of him as some abstract historical figure … well … please pass the tequila, someone.

Mike Torres spent a few minutes putting together a list of companies that don’t use the term RSS. Firefox. Bloglines. SixApart. Etc. He concludes:

I didn’t spend more than three minutes because after about three minutes, I realized Microsoft isn’t trying to rename RSS and I stopped.  RSS stopped being used long ago…

Conclusion: RSS is a great technology and a lousy brand. If you want people to actually use the technology, you need to find a better way to explain it to them.

(Background here.)

Mike Torres spots a trend:

Would anyone like a lesson in how FUD spreads in the blogosphere?  Start here, then go here, here, here, and then finally here.  When you are finished, email me a list of the people (with URLs) complaining they "don’t like the name RSS and propose to change it to something better." 

Good luck.

A little background: Dave Winer has done much of the development work to bring the RSS format to its current state. He is a pioneer in the software industry. He deserves his own page on Wikipedia, and sure enough, he has one. Dave has a history of complaining, loudly and repeatedly, when others step into the field he claims is his own. He has carried on a running feud with Google and Blogger over their attempts to develop a new syndication format called Atom instead of using RSS 2.0. (You can read a balanced description here and a less balanced but much more entertaining account from Ben Hammersley here.)

In the first beta release of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft has added a Feeds button to the standard toolbar and a Web Feed Discovery Settings dialog box to configure how it works. As you can see from this screen shot, it doesn’t use the RSS brand anywhere.

Winer sees this as a slap in the face and a deliberate attempt by Microsoft (and Google) to co-opt the RSS brand. I can’t understand why Dave Winer continues tilting at this windmill. (This post in particular is really over the top.)

Personally, I think Web feeds (oh, and did you notice the lower-case “w” in the IE7 dialog box?) is a much more descriptive term than RSS. If I see that term on a Web page, I can probably suss out what it means, whereas if I see RSS I need to find an encyclopedia article to explain it. Scoble notes that non-techies seem to have adjusted to terms like CD and DVD (he doesn’t mention VHS or USB, although those would also be good examples). The difference? All of those terms were pushed by large corporations intent on establishing a brand so they could sell products. The CD came from Philips Electronics in partnership with Sony. DVDs came from the DVD Forum, which was founded by 10 very large corporations, most of them in the consumer electronics business. VHS is a JVC invention, and USB is another technology that comes from a consortium.

The important point here is that brand names get established because people want to sell stuff, and brands help them simplify the process of explaining what the stuff they’re trying to sell is for. If RSS is really a great brand, as Dave Winer insists, then it should be easy to find big organizations that will put their market weight behind that brand.

I’m currently using FeedDemon to subscribe to Web pages that offer their content in a compatible format. Would Dave insist that Nick Bradbury change its name to RSSDemon? This technology is still in its infancy. It’s not even a blip on the radar of the vast, vast majority of people on the Internet, much less on the planet. Insisting that RSS is the one true name for the technology is a little premature.

In another overwrought post, Winer speculates on what would happen if Microsoft tried to change the names of some companies that compete with it, like Yahoo and Google and Netscape. Huh? Please send a baggie of whatever you’re smoking my way, Dave. It must be really awesome.

Winer thinks this is a battle, and that Microsoft is trying to change the name of a feature because they want to screw him. (I’m not making this up. That’s really what he said.) News flash: Microsoft is in business to sell software. The reason some people at Microsoft are exploring alternatives to RSS is because people don’t understand the term. You put an RSS button on a Web page, and most ordinary people just slide right by it. I’ve been to Microsoft’s usability labs, where they test features like this. My guess is that they’ve been testing RSS features in the labs, and they’re trying to find the words that will help people understand and use this technology. Software developers who’ve seen their features go through usability testing usually get a big wake-up call from the experience. Dave, you should schedule a visit to the usability lab and see for yourself.

I acknowledge my geekiness, and the proof is in this post at Boing Boing. I read all the comments, and I knew exactly what they were talking about!

Thanks, CoffeeGeek, for the education.

Oh, and if anyone wants to get me the Jura Capresso Impressa S9 for my birthday … well, I won’t ship it back.

It took a while longer than it was supposed to, but I’m back online.

Tips and other content will resume shortly.

I’m stuck on dial-up for a few more days. My notebook has a 56K modem, but my desktop machine has a rusty old 28.8K Supra external faxmodem, which I keep around because it supports distinctive ring, and how often do I need to do dial-up, anyway?

A quick rant about Comcast. I placed an order for service two weeks ago. We agreed on an appointment window between 8 am and 12 noon yesterday. The guy showed up at 11:59 (of course) and told me, apologetically, that he couldn’t do a thing because their underground folks need to come out and run a wire from the cable tap across the street to my new house. That will take 7 to 10 days, he said. The surly service guy I talked to an hour later (to see if that could be expedited in any way), said it could be up to 15 days.

Excuse me? Could no one have foreseen this two weeks ago? Comcast is living up to its reputation for terrible customer service.

Meanwhile, Qwest says they can have 7Mbps DSL installed on Friday, and they’ll match Comcast’s price. It’s a deal! I’ve had Qwest DSL before, and it worked just fine. If they can deliver the speeds they promise, I’ll take it. I should have a week or two to evaluate it before Comcast shows up.

And if Comcast doesn’t have an HD-DVR here by the end of the month, DirecTV might get a call.

For the next two days, though, I get to experience the 2005 Web at 1995 speeds.

The truck filled with furniture and computers arrives today. High-speed Internet access will replace this poky dial-up connection tomorrow. Anything interesting going on in the world?

If you’ve tried to post a comment here and you don’t see it, sorry.

The Movable Type/CPanel screw-up continues, despite good-faith efforts from everyone involved to get it fixed. The glitch means I have to rebuild the site manually every time I post anything, which sucks. It also means that the scripts which are supposed to notify me when a comment needs approval (and any comment that includes a link is held for approval) aren’t working either. I just went through the list and manually deleted more than 300 pieces of what appeared to be comment spam, and I approved about 20 comments that were being held. If yours doesn’t show up, it might have been deleted accidentally. Like I said, sorry.

Just to add to the festivities, I received an avalanche of comment spam (all of it blocked by MT-Blacklist, thankfully), a Slashdotting, and a Scobleizing or two over the past 48 hours.

The two hamsters who run this site are spinning themselves into a frenzy.

Oh, great. Now everything’s broken. The main page looks OK, but the individual pages for today’s entries are blank, and I can’t fix them.

Oh well, I’ll worry about this next week.

Aha. 1.7GB of core dump files from CPanel had used my entire disk quota. As soon as I deleted them, things returned to normal.

Update 7/12 6:00 p.m.: Continuing to get HTTP 1.1/500 errors. Core dump files continue to fill server space. Oxygen running low. Hamsters begging for relief. WordPress looking better and better. This should be trackback #11 on SixApart’s ProNet. Anil, what’s going on?

Packing. Moving. Unpacking. Finding stuff.

If you want tips on how to wrap a flat-screen monitor so it will survive an interstate move, I might be able to help.