Morning Coffee Notes

A short test of Cinch, a product from BlogTalkRadio.

“A rare thing – a Dave Winer soliloquy – about the line between people who welcome WikiLeaks and those who fight it. And the distractions.” Dave’s thoughts on the ongoing WikiLeaks story and how it represents a “reformation of journalism”. He argues that there is a clear divide between those who are willing to use the leaked information and those who are not: Dave is firmly on the side of using the information. He criticizes the New York Times for not being more supportive of WikiLeaks and the First Amendment, and calls out the hypocrisy of companies like Amazon and PayPal for banning WikiLeaks while allowing other news outlets to cover the leaks. Dave believes the leaks could expose important information that the public needs to know, even if it makes some powerful people uncomfortable. Overall, Dave sees the WikiLeaks story as a pivotal moment that will reshape journalism going forward.

“Dave Winer on Twitter’s new @anywhere identity system extension. What is @anywhere? Here’s my best guess…” @Anywhere was a new feature announced by Twitter that allows websites to integrate Twitter functionality, such as displaying user profiles and enabling commenting, without users having to leave the website. This is Twitter’s answer to similar features offered by Facebook, where users can use their Facebook login to interact on other websites. Dave suggests that @Anywhere appears to be part of a broader trend of technology companies trying to extend their reach and integrate their services across the web, though the long-term impact and usefulness of such features remains to be seen.

Long polling is a technique used by Dave to receive real-time updates from websites that support RSS cloud or Pub/Sub/Hubbub protocols, despite being behind a firewall that prevents direct access. Instead of just getting the URL of the updated feed, he also receives the actual content of the updated item. This “fat ping” approach reduces the number of feed reads required on the server side, which is beneficial for sites with a lot of user-generated content.

“Megan had some questions about River2 which I answered in this brief podcast.”