This Week in Tech 249 – Drama Hobbit

Quote
""

Download
Audio: MP3 (49 MB) Video: Small, mp4 (246 MB). Large, mp4 (432 MB)

Published
May 23, 2010

Website
twit.tv

About
«Facebook privacy and Zuckerberg's feedback, Google I/O TV and Android/Froyo announcements, Skyping naked, and more.»

License
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives 4.0 International license

Transcript
Transcript taken from the TWiT wiki, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International

Leo Laporte It’s time for TWiT, this WEEK in TECH, this week’s tech news digested and spewed forth by our resident pundits. Today we are welcoming back and we’re so glad to have – haven’t been on a couple of years, Cory Doctorow.

Cory Doctorow Yeah. Those two years coincide with when my daughter was born.

Leo Laporte Yeah. How is she doing?

Cory Doctorow She is awesome. Two and a half years old, turning into a little Disney nut. We put her to bed at night and we go out 15 minutes later and she’s standing on the edge of the her quip holding the rails and shouting ‘yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!’ Leo Laporte Now she hasn’t read ‘Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom’ yet, I would guess?

Cory Doctorow No. Two and a half, she’s more into the apple! Doggy! But she does know we go – her first word was Chewbacca.

Leo Laporte Yeah. Now we’re talking.

Cory Doctorow Yeah. And when you say, Posy, what sound does Vader make? She goes [does impression of Darth Vader breathing].

Leo Laporte Very good.

Cory Doctorow So it’s pretty cool.

Leo Laporte You’re raising an appropriate child for the 21st Century.

Cory is of course, everybody knows, a great science fiction author. And his newest book just came out, FTW – For The Win, it’s juvenile. And we’ll talk about it in just a little bit. He’s on tour, right now in North Carolina on tour, doing readings. So it’s great to have you back.

And former EFF Europe guy and still very active in Internet freedom and boy, you hadn’t been here for so long, there’s so much to talk about. I want to cover some stuff that might be old news, things like net neutrality with you as well.

Robert Scoble Sure.

Leo Laporte But today our big story will be Facebook. And there’s a guy here who can help us with that, and that’s Robert Scoble, the Scobleizer. Hey, Robert.

Robert Scoble Hey, how are you doing?

Leo Laporte Great to have you. Robert’s been in the center of a little maelstrom that’s been going today over Facebook, we’ll talk about that. But you were also at Google I/O, the big Google conference this week.

Robert Scoble And I got a new phone for free. Disclosure, I got it for free.

Leo Laporte You like your EVO?

Robert Scoble Yeah. It’s dramatically better than the iPhone in a lot of places, and we can talk about that later.

Leo Laporte Yeah, yeah. You wrote a good post on Buzz, pros and cons of Android. I’m starting to become a big Android fan. And everybody here is an Android user. I know, because Cory you use a Nexus One.

Cory Doctorow Yeah. I tell you, it’s been game-changing on the tour between the really awesome turn-by-turn directions which has saved my media escort’s bacon more than once, going out to some school for a visit. And really good functional email, and tethering. Tethering has been amazing.

Leo Laporte Yeah.

Cory Doctorow Normally what happens on tour is, you’re out from like 7 in the morning until 10 at night, four schools, four media events and a book signing. And you go back to the room and you do email till 3 in the morning. And then you get up at 5 the next day. I mean, it’s crazy.

And with tethering, basically every time I’m done with a signing, I just jump on my laptop and get some work done. And I’ve been getting like almost five, six hours sleep at night, it’s been wicked.

Leo Laporte And that’s even without the 4G.

Cory Doctorow Yeah.

Leo Laporte Imagine if you’re in one of the 27 cities that have 4G, you’ll have even better results.

Robert, do you get 4G in Half Moon Bay? I know [ph] some in Saint Hose (4:23) has it now.

Robert Scoble 3G here and I didn’t get it. I didn’t sense that I was getting it, and – but I think last night I figured out how to turn it on. So you actually have to go in and actually opt-in to 4G before you can use it.

Leo Laporte Right. Right.

Robert Scoble But we were driving down freeway 280 by Apple’s campus and we were on 3G and my son and I were iPadding in the car and watching videos and listening to music, and it was working just fine.

Leo Laporte They’ve turned on – in Froyo 2.2 on the Nexus One now, they’ve got free tethering built-in, T-Mobile doesn’t charge extra for it. You have to pay 30 bucks a month extra for it on the EVO. So this is definitely where Android’s going, and it’s in stark contrast to the iPhone where tethering has been promised by AT&T for more than a year. And someday, maybe.

Robert Scoble Yeah, I expect that will come this summer when the 4G iPhone comes out. I mean, Steve Jobs has been writing his own slew of emails to bloggers today saying, just wait and see that we haven’t been leapfrogged by Google. We’ll see.

Leo Laporte Yeah. We’ll see, right.

Cory Doctorow Well, even if they roll out tethering now, I mean clearly they’ve been leapfrogged by Google because there’s been tethering for a while on Nexus One.

Leo Laporte Right.

Cory Doctorow But I love the idea that AT&T and these other carriers offer unlimited Internet, but don’t let you plug it into a device into of your choosing. It’s kind of like unlimited Internet, all you can eat, provided you’re not very hungry.

Leo Laporte Right. Well that’s the iPad, isn’t it? I mean, you get – and AT&T has said this again and again, no, we’re not going to limit the Internet on the iPad. Well of course not. Because you can only use it on the iPad. How bad can it be? Although there are hacks that allow you to tether the iPad. So maybe it could be bad, maybe it can get worse.

Let’s talk about the Facebook thing. Now, Cory, you – The Economist had an article about Facebook – what do we call them? The Facebook refuseniks, those of us who’ve deleted our Facebook pages. They mentioned you and me. Mine will be effectively deleted on Wednesday, it takes two weeks, because they only deactivate it in case you want to come back.

You deleted yours as well?

Cory Doctorow Yeah. And it was actually a little lazier for me I think, because I created a Facebook account just like I created a SixDegrees account and a Friendster account and so on. I created it, used it for a week or two and abandoned it, and didn’t have anything to do with it. And just wrote a kill file in my mailer so that I didn’t have to see it anymore when it sent me messages.

So I just basically forgotten I had a Facebook account. And then I started using my Nexus One and K9 Mail, which is a great little mailer for it. And because I don’t have any in my kill files on K9, I was starting to see all those messages from people who are friending me on Facebook. And I realized hey, there’s some people who for at least part of the reason for being on Facebook is that they’re able to hook up with me. Let’s see if I can remove that incentive. Let’s see if I can stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution. So I resigned my Facebook account.

It was funny, I did it because I had, like, 10 minutes extra at an airport. I don’t even remember which airport. And within ten minutes, like as I was getting on the plane, I got, like, nine press calls. I just tweeted kind of randomly along with all the other stuff that I was tweeting from the lounge, you know, resigned my Facebook account. And ABC News and CNN and everybody was like, ‘you resigned your Facebook account! Call us up because it’s a thing of moment.’ Which was really funny, I should resign my Facebook account more often.

Leo Laporte I know, I got more publicity I’m sure quitting Facebook than I ever got on Facebook. And I’m with you, Cory. It’s hard for me to tell people, you should do the same thing. Because let’s face it, Facebook is hideously useful for a lot of people, including businesses. And there isn’t really much of an alternative. I don’t miss it at all. But I’ve got a website, I’ve got Twitter, I’ve got Buzz, I’ve got plenty of ways to connect with people. I use Google profiles as kind of a Facebook clone in the sense that if you Google me, you’ll find that and that will tell you where else to go. But are you saying…

Cory Doctorow I’ve got that vanity site.

Leo Laporte What’s the vanity site?

Cory Doctorow Yeah, I’ve had Craphound forever.

Leo Laporte Yeah. And so people Google Cory Doctorow, they’re going to find you.

Cory Doctorow If you Google Cory, I’m like the first three results for Cory.

Leo Laporte Yeah.

Cory Doctorow So I’m pretty to find, I don’t really have to worry about it. So you’re right, I have a different circumstance from everyone else.

Leo Laporte What about people who use it to meet old friends or maybe they’re small businesses that can’t afford or don’t want to take the trouble to do website. They’re going to stick around, aren’t they?

Cory Doctorow Yeah, I guess until the number of people kind of reach – the number of people leaving reaches critical mass. I was talking with someone else about this a little while ago, about what it would mean to actually have some viable alternatives. And I think if you actually did have a viable alternative, something that was more privacy respecting and so on. You might – could do something where – since Facebook is so aggressive about slurping information in from elsewhere, but doesn’t allow any information out, maybe those of you who are kind of off Facebook could export your information to the people who are on Facebook somehow. I’m not really sure how that would work, but it’s seems to me that there’s probably some meat on that bone. If you wanted to start a service to kind of help people solve the collective action problem of ‘I can’t leave Facebook until like, at least 20 other people do.’

Robert Scoble But Leo, isn’t this the real problem? 13,000 people are on the Facebook group of quitting their Facebook on May 31st.

Leo Laporte That’s probably fewer people than will join in five minutes on May 31st.

Robert Scoble Maybe 20. It’s not a huge number of people. And when I talk to normal people outside the bubble, outside the mediasphere and outside the geeksphere, I just don’t hear the outrage. They – people have already resigned themselves to the fact that privacy is changing. In fact, I just interviewed the guys who do the calendar, tungle.me, and they’ve just turned on a feature where they give people a choice of being public or being private. And something like 89% of the people turn on the public part. And they were shocked by that. They thought my, a calendar is the most private thing that they could think of, and they were shocked that people were sharing, now there are services like Blippy where you share your credit card.

Leo Laporte Yeah, I share on Blippy.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, I think our problem with privacy is it’s a little like the problem with, say, smoking, where the consequence of the decision is really far removed from the decision itself. So you do something that comes back to bite you in the ass. But the actual biting takes place really far in the future.

Leo Laporte [Laughter] Right.

Cory Doctorow So it’s really hard to learn from that stuff, right? Like think about shooting with film cameras, right. Back in the film camera days, excuse me, I’m going to try and get my camera lined up here. Back in the film camera days, the average family would shoot like, three roles a year. And you’d shoot one on Christmas, one on holidays – one on Christmas, one on birthdays, one on vacation. And if you got your roll of your film back and you looked at the pictures, you go, well, I don’t know what I did to this one to make it look so good and I don’t know what I did to this one to make look so crap. And you never got to be a better photographer...

Leo Laporte Right.

Cory Doctorow And just shortening that feedback loop, without anyone actually sitting down and going, well now I’ve got a digital camera, I better be a better picture taker. Shortening the feedback loop between taking and seeing made a huge difference.

And privacy, it’s really hard to ever learn to be a better privacy person. Because by the time the consequence of your action rolls around, it’s been so long you don’t even remember what you were thinking when you made that calculus.

I’ve got a story about this. When I was in a elementary school, I had a teacher who had a child who was born and then died shortly afterwards. And it was just – it was heartbreaking for him and his wife. When the kid was born, they couldn’t see any reason not to give the marketing companies that were giving out free diapers and so on, their child’s information and birthday and their address. But 18 years later, when they were still getting annual birthday cards from a hundred marketing companies along with baskets of stuff for their kid, they were really regretting having made that calculus.

It’s a very hard thing to judge in advance. I mean I think we go – people don’t care about privacy, and what we can’t disentangle from that, is whether people just can’t make good decisions about privacy in the moment.

Leo Laporte Yeah, I told my kids that, I said – and this is actually what prompted me to delete the Facebook account. I was talking to my kids and saying, you can keep your Facebook account – you should understand that everything you put there ultimately could be public, so you shouldn’t put anything there. Or anywhere, frankly, on the Internet, that you wouldn’t want parents, teachers, future employers to see. And they didn’t get it. Facebook’s private, and so I’m going to continue to do this kind of thing, because it’s so useful and I can’t deny that it’s very useful.

And so that’s when I started really getting worried, that what we are – and I had the same exact reaction as you did, Cory, which is – we are coercing people into using Facebook with – merely by having a presence there. So I just decided, I don’t know to play there and I’m not going to play there and – but now there’s been a bit of a –

Robert Scoble See I went the other way...

Leo Laporte What did you do, Robert?

Robert Scoble I set all my privacy settings to as public as they can be. In other words, I took all the sliders and made them as public as I could be. And then...

Leo Laporte Well I did that too, but that’s not the point. I know the difference.

Robert Scoble I know, but therefore I’d behave in a way that I know that it’s going to be as public as can be. And anyways look at how we treat Steve Jobs, right? He emails people privately, in a private email, and we take his emails and post it on our blogs.

Leo Laporte Yeah, I thought that was interesting, because I hadn’t really thought about that. You posted this morning on your blog, why is it – because Zuckerberg sent you an email, which we’ll talk about in a bit, responding on this whole Facebook thing. And you asked him for permission and noting in the blog post that why is it that others are so blithely willing to publish their emails exchanges with Steve Jobs, as an example, isn’t – are shouldn’t those be private as well. I think it’s pretty clear now that Steve understands that this going to get published, he’s been using it, frankly.

Cory Doctorow Yeah. We’re public figures, right? That’s different. The information about kind of what you’re doing and who your friends are and so on, you’ve – we’ve kind of all made that decision to do that, same as Steve Jobs. And there’s actually something different at work when Steve Jobs emails you or me or Mark Zuckerberg does, in that if you email someone as a reporter working for a journalistic organ and say, do you have a quote about this, and then they send you an email back, you don’t – you shouldn’t have email up and then say, do I have your permission to publish the quote that you just gave me? I mean that –

Leo Laporte I am sure Mark had the expectation that you would publish it, Robert. I think it’s not wrong to ask for permission.

Robert Scoble Yeah.

Leo Laporte I’m glad you did, I think it’s appropriate.

Robert Scoble When I interviewed him right after the f8 conference, in fact he went through this quick negotiation. Do you want to have a chat with me, which will be a little bit more open, or do you want to turn on your camera. And I find a lot of people really don’t understand Mark and don’t understand where he’s coming from. And so it will be really interesting to see what he does this week, because I think he has a very intimate sense of privacy and where he – where the world is going with this and what – where Facebook is going and where the world is going. And I haven’t heard him speak about that openly. And I wish he would. I wish he would come out just say, hey, here’s my views on privacy and here’s where I messed up because he messed up in some ways that are really interesting by ruining our trust.

Leo Laporte Facebook has done some bad things. They change their policy multiple times. Then they didn’t communicate very effectively about it. And I think that’s really where they got in trouble, they didn’t step forward – I mean look Google had problems with Buzz – stepped forward, Google had problems with collecting this Wi-Fi data, stepped forward and spoke about it and I think defused it. Facebook has – it’s ironic for a company that’s promoting public, has this very private point of view, like they’re hunkered down.

Now here’s what happened today, and this – we can talk a little about this. I got an email from the general manager from one of our radio stations. I do a radio show that’s heard in about 111 stations. And one of them in Texas, KNOI, has a two Facebook pages for the talk station and for the rock station, both of which were disabled. And the general manager believes it was because he posted links to me deleting the Facebook page, links to Facebook privacy issues, and links to Diaspora, one of the – a Kickstarter project that purports to be an open replacement for Facebook for – some NYU students are starting it.

Robert Scoble And I am linked to the same things and I am –

Leo Laporte Well it’s consistent. I mean we – there’s no question – look, there’s no question that Facebook is deleting and censoring some people. So I went on a rampage. I said look, this is – there’s one thing to change your privacy policy, another thing to actually actively disable or delete comments that are not favourable towards Facebook. They have the right to do it, but boy, you really want to think now, do I want to play this space? This is actively, seems actively evil to me.

And then I asked our people and the listeners and the audience, said, let’s see if this works. Post ‘I’m thinking of deleting my Facebook page, I found a link on how to do it in the wikiHow page on how to delete your Facebook page.’ About half of our listeners reported that that post had disappeared within minutes of posting it. About half say, no it’s still there.

Cory Doctorow Yeah.

Robert Scoble I’m wondering if they have some weird spambots – because every time – forget the political implications of deleting this content, I’ve heard this complaint over and over and over for the last three years. Because remember, when I broke the terms of service, I got kicked out for 24 hours. And so I’d become a place to complain about getting your –

Leo Laporte They’re not going to mess with your site, Robert, that’s a little too obvious.

Robert Scoble No, they deleted me for 24 hours. And later I found out it was an automatic bot that deleted me based on the behaviour I was exhibiting. And I wonder if that’s what’s going on here, is somebody is copying and pasting the URL or a same kind of text and they’re thinking it’s spam. Because every time I ask a Facebook staffer about this, they always come back and go, yeah it sort of sucks that we don’t have a good way to get back on the system for normal people. But we have no spam, right? Our system has no spam like other systems and it’s like – go ahead.

Cory Doctorow Well, that’s like saying, we built the system that works incredibly well but fails very badly, right? Like our car goes 0 to 60 in three seconds, but has no breaks. I mean –

Leo Laporte But it does go fast!

Cory Doctorow It’s not like god handed them two stone tablets that said, thou shalt make a spam filter without a circuit breaker. Someone sat down and said, yeah, spam filter with a circuit breaker would cost more, would me more difficult to administer, let’s leave that out.

Leo Laporte I understand there’s a problem, though, when you have nearly have a billion users, I don’t know how you anything effectively, including censorship.

Cory Doctorow Well, maybe they don’t do it effectively.

Leo Laporte Right. And so –

Cory Doctorow To go back to what you’re saying about Facebook and how they lost our trust, because there’s something else that Facebook did, which is that they had a plebiscite of their users, right? They said to their users, you provide all the value here. What do you think Facebook’s privacy policy should be? What are you opting into when opt into Facebook? And they let their users vote. And the users voted overwhelmingly for a much more private system than the one that they’ve just created. So I think that if you want to talk about losing trust, to me that’s the real trust loser.

Robert Scoble Yeah. All these issues, I don’t think have much to do with privacy. Because I’m seeing us give up our privacy in a whole range of context outside. So I think it’s a trust issue and that’s why I wrote Zuckerberg, I said, you are deleting sites that’s a trust issue, I don’t feel good about leaving my content on Facebook, I don’t believe you are going to treat it properly in the future. You might delete my identity or my business or my content, my pictures and you have done that before, so you have already told me that you are not trustworthy and that’s what I want to hear, the privacy stuff is – points to trust, does – can we trust this company with our data?

Leo Laporte So that’s the question and I guess what I am saying to people is just, these are all data points that are going to help inform your decision about whether you want to be on Facebook or not, but one thing is very clear if, I think this comes down to the conversation about an open web and it’s much better to have your presence on the web be something you control.

Robert Scoble Yeah.

Leo Laporte Look, let’s face it, people don’t go to Facebook to search for people, they search on Google and then get their Facebook page, yes or no?

Robert Scoble I disagree –

Leo Laporte You think people go to Facebook and search.

Robert Scoble [ph] Brian Chen (21:14) just tweeted that any journalist who quits Facebook is sacrificing access to a valuable resource for finding leads (21:20).

Leo Laporte That’s BS, that’s BS. That’s wrong.

Robert Scoble I disagree, I have a lot of people in my Facebook who are CEOs or CTOs or executives who put their phone number in Facebook and email addresses in Facebook and even if they don’t, they answer their direct messages. It’s hard to get a hold of some of these people and so, I understand where [ph] Brian’s (21:40) coming from there. I do use it on my iPhone to find phone numbers of my friends.

Leo Laporte Well I would say then to people if you – and by the way this happens on Twitter too, there is Kevin Marks, the only way I can reach Kevin Marks is by DM’ing him on Twitter. That’s wrong, it’s just wrong, if you have to use to Facebook to reach somebody then better not reach them. If you have to use Twitter to reach somebody then just, I just, what I am saying you need an open web.

Cory Doctorow I just don’t believe that the CEO of a company can’t be reached. Well I just don’t believe the CEO of a company can’t be reached without Facebook. I don’t use Facebook. I have never really used Facebook. I have never had any trouble reaching people that I wanted to interview as a member of the press.

Robert Scoble It’s just makes the friction of finding their phone number a lot lower, that’s all.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, but are you saying that if you call up the PR office of any major corporation and say hi, I am writing a story for the Guardian and I want a comment from you, from your CTO about this they won’t get back to you very quickly, I mean if they’re careless (22:36) they are sacrificing access.

Robert Scoble Absolutely, they probably will but there’s a little friction [Indiscernible] (22:36). When I am on my iPhone and calling people, when Facebook bought FriendFeed in fact I had the two guys who owned FriendFeed on my…

Leo Laporte I know we couldn’t get them on.

Robert Scoble And I just clicked on their phone number and I had the first interview because I just clicked on their phone number and got their phone and said hey, can we talk in a public forum about this and I was walking around the [ph] Alamo (23:02) when this all happened by the way.

Cory Doctorow But did they talk on the public forum with you right then or did you then set up an appointment?

Robert Scoble No I recorded the call, I said can we –

Cory Doctorow Oh you recorded the call? That’s cool.

Leo Laporte That was back when Paul and Bret were much more open, I mean you can’t get them now, you couldn’t get that kind of access now probably.

Robert Scoble Because they have to check [ph] whether you can’t get them (23:21).

Leo Laporte They have to go through Facebook.

Robert Scoble They just say I can’t talk on the record…

Leo Laporte Right.

Robert Scoble …until you get the PR people to approve me to talk to you.

Leo Laporte That was – they had just joined the company, [ph] they were still in elopement (23:30) and we never did get them because we didn’t those methods, but I would submit that if you want to, I mean I don’t know if that’s a reason to stay on Facebook, maybe it is, I mean I am not saying that it’s not hideously useful, that’s – I am saying that, I am saying what – at what price?

Robert Scoble On the other hand [Indiscernible] (23:42) I interviewed a lot of people who are not in the tech world and they just love it for being able to contact their friends and family. My wife when I interviewed her about this she said I really don’t care about the privacy as long as my – as long as something doesn’t leak out it has yet, but she said I love being able to talk to my elementary school friends from Tehran that she grew up with, she said that they are all in Facebook. She said that there are several of them and that’s the only place she could find them. She went to Google and Yahoo! and tried to search for them and couldn’t find them, but she found them instantly on Facebook.

Leo Laporte Abby’s in college this fall and all the incoming freshman have created a Facebook group where they are meeting each other before they go. I am not saying it’s not useful. In fact very often the most horrendous things are useful. I am just saying…

Core Doctorow That’s interesting.

Leo Laporte What’s the price?

Cory Doctorow It’s interesting the degree to which this reverses the traditional dynamic for people like us who are using Facebook presumably for like to have a public profile as opposed to people who are just using it to find their friends. So traditionally like if you had a service or magazine or media that you use to kind of communicate with the rest of the world the more important you were the more they would rely on you, so in other words if you know, if you just talk to People magazine and People magazine, people buy People magazine to see what you have to say every month, you have more leverage over People magazine the more people you have who care about you. It’s the opposite with Facebook, with Facebook the more people there are who care about you the less you could afford to leave Facebook, because of that [ph] wall guard (25:16) nature, because it’s much harder for them to follow you somewhere else.

It’s a little like what happens to the DRM and publishing where the more as a publisher, if all of your music is sold through one DRM platform, all your video, all your audio books, all your books are sold through one DRM platform leaving that DRM platform becomes much more expensive for you because you have to count on your listeners, or your readers, or your viewers following you to a new platform and that means that they have to abandon the old platform, they can’t take the media of yours that they have [ph] bought/brought (25:47) with them.

Leo Laporte Right. Mark did send you an email saying that this week Facebook, they have been listening, they have been planning, they have been thinking and they are going to do, they are going to make a shift, right Robert this week.

Robert Scoble Yeah. He said basically that he wanted to wait until they had actually software fixes for some of the problems that they have been seeing people talk about and they just didn’t want to talk and not have anything to show, which is a legitimate way to come at it. I think he did himself a bunch of brand damage by not coming out earlier but, they will survive and if they make some good choices from here and win our trust back and stop doing some of the stuff that they have been doing to shift stuff that we thought was private into the public sphere without our permission, then I think they will regain trust.

Leo Laporte I don’t think that’s why they will survive; they will survive because there is no good alternative. I think MySpace fell apart far less because Facebook existed and if there existed a good alternative to Facebook, now that we are private and trustworthy people would go there and that would be it, Facebook would be over.

Robert Scoble There are other systems like Pip.io, Wall Street Journal I think –

Leo Laporte Pip.io is not an alternative to Facebook, I like Pio.io.

Robert Scoble Because nobody’s on it.

Leo Laporte Well, yeah it’s kind of circular though, isn’t it, I know there is a network effect but Facebook started at zero, things can start at zero, something does, are you saying Facebook’s here forever no matter what?

Cory Doctorow I don’t – never is a long time.

Leo Laporte Five years.

Robert Scoble I can’t see the scenario where it falls apart in the next five years, I just don’t.

Cory Doctorow So Scoble it’s sounds like you are saying that the reason that they are giving out your personal information like they changed their privacy policy to give up personal information that they previously said they wouldn’t is because they had a technical error and they don’t want to say anything about it until they fix the technical error.

Robert Scoble No, I think there’s a couple different problems that they are working on and let’s separate them out into the pieces. One is they keep changing their privacy policies so often that you can’t I mean keep track of what the policies were or what change, even my wife said that I got a message, she got a message two months ago that the policies had changed and then [ph] at half eight (28:11) they changed it again and that caused a lot of people just to be confused like why are they changing this so much? There is too much change about something that’s so emotional about for people.

So that’s one, that’s one slice. The other slice is actually what they did which at the f8 conference which is they took stuff that used to be, that used to be able to keep private. For instance, your social graph and some of your profile information like what music you listen to and what movies you like listening to – or going to and that kind of stuff. And they took that and made that public as well. And then they also added a new feature or a new set of features, a new API and a new privacy construct where applications now could share that information with each other. For instance I got the new Pandora that night and wow, all my friends were there on Pandora with all of their music and so I could see, oh Leo Laporte listens to Black Eyed Peas or [ph] Danah Boyd (29:19) listens to this thing and my boss was listening to Kenny G and I made fun of him in a [ph] bog bust (29:25) and that was unexpected. So those three separate buckets of things are all going at one time and so that caused the firestorm and the media frenzy around us.

Cory Doctorow So I guess the thing that I am skeptical of is that they couldn’t have said something about the privacy policy change because they caught them off guard, I mean I don’t understand how something that you do can catch you off guard, right. No one surprised them by changing their privacy policy.

Leo Laporte Now the reaction, the reaction is what surprised them, not the –

Cory Doctorow No, yeah but presumably like they knew what they were doing when they did it because [ph] they had the (29:59)…

Leo Laporte Obviously.

Cory Doctorow …[ph] slum site (29:59) last year in which the users said don’t do this and then they did it and then their users were upset to say, oh we had no idea and we can’t say anything for a while until we figure this all out, just sounds to me to be like a kind of lame excuse and in terms of the privacy…

Leo Laporte Sorry about that music there…

Cory Doctorow Sure. In terms of the privacy policy…

Leo Laporte I tried stopping (30:15) Pandora.

Cory Doctorow …being so complicated, I reviewed this book on Boing Boing back in 2007 called How to Cheat at Everything by Simon Lovell. It’s actually a book about how not to be cheated and one of the things he talks about is how proposition bets work like double or nothing if this happens, triple if that happens and so on and he basically is kind of boil it down it’s like anytime someone makes a proposition to you that’s really complicated. The reason that they made it that complicated is to make it hard for you to figure out what the odds are and at anytime someone presents you with a bunch of privacy options that are incredibly complicated, I think the reason that they do that is to make it hard for you to figure out what you are agreeing to.

Leo Laporte Some of this argument comes down to – trying to understand their intent and of course some of us impute their intent to be not so nice and some of us say like you, Robert say, well and they are trying and I don’t know do we need to know their intent to know whether we want to be part of Facebook, seems to me that what’s happened is sufficient whether their intent is good or you know what’s happened is sufficient for me to say, I don’t really want to be there because I can’t trust them to do the right thing whether intentionally or not and I am also really seriously concerned about this open graph, this open social graph thing they are doing because it really strikes me they are trying to co-opt the web. They would love…

Robert Scoble They absolutely are. The post I wrote that night after f8 wasn’t even focused so much on privacy because I don’t think we had time to even think about it then but I said, man these are ambitious moves and everybody at the press conference was using words like scary and ambitious and off camera they would make fun, they would say, man Zuckerberg has balls. He’s gone for it at all.

Leo Laporte Right.

Robert Scoble That they would Zucker all like that.

Leo Laporte It seemed to me a grab and again I don’t know what the intent was but I don’t think I need to know what the intent was. I don’t think it’s good for the Internet.

Robert Scoble The intent is clearly Facebook is headed toward an IPO and to get to an IPO and maximize the profit there they have to turn on a new kind of advertising that’s beyond banner advertising because I am not paying attention to any banner ads.

Leo Laporte Right.

Robert Scoble I couldn’t tell you the last time I’ve even paid attention to any ads on the side of Facebook or anywhere really. So where is the future money in advertising and I think Google showed us where it is. It’s in search, it’s in telling people or asking the system show me all the restaurants in the Half Moon Bay and then having an offer in there. Foursquare is showing us offers now. It’s really interesting and I think that’s where the money is and Zuckerberg knows that’s where the money is and needs to push his company in that direction which means get out of a private system because he’s not going to be able to make any money there.

Leo Laporte That’s where the fundamental problem is. People join Facebook with one promise that I was going to – I compose stuff here and it’s going to stay private and I control who gets to see it and all Facebook really would need to do is to make it that way, to make it an opt-out or opt-in situation where it’s private unless you say otherwise. That would solve a lot of people’s issues but it would not solve their ultimate corporate – I agree with you, Robert, their corporate goal and they’ve taken this chance and it’s a big chance. They know what they are doing. They’ve taken a very large…

Robert Scoble Sorry, when I plug my phone, my phone battery is down when I plug it in and makes that horrible noise.

Leo Laporte Love it. They have taken a very large chance and this is they know they are going to get flak. This is the flak and what they are hoping is that their almost 500 million users would insulate – the network effect would insulate them against their flak. They would be able to make this very big sea change in privacy and survive it on the other end maybe depleted but not bowed and continue on.

Robert Scoble It’s funny because I have gone the other way. I’ve actually used Facebook more in the past couple of weeks because of things like the Pandora.

Leo Laporte I can’t look at Facebook now. It just makes me queasy. I am sorry I don’t miss it, I don’t miss it. I have to say. Go ahead Cory.

Cory Doctorow I would be interested in knowing would the – how many users Facebook actually has because we all know what the user game looks like, right. 500 million people at some point had a Facebook account is not the same thing as there are 500 million people who are active Facebook users.

Leo Laporte Well they claim active.

Robert Scoble They are very specific when they quote numbers.

Leo Laporte They say active.

Robert Scoble They are very specific...

Cory Doctorow What does active mean?

Leo Laporte At least in the last month, I think, is what they are saying.

Robert Scoble Yeah, it’s people who have signed in, in the past month. They actually have many times more than 500 million who have signed into the system and left it or just left their account [ph] life alo (34:46).

Cory Doctorow Just signed in just mean that they have – that they’ve got a cookie or to sign and that hits on advertising cookie stuff versus…

Robert Scoble I don’t know because that’s an interesting question because of the likes and things that are spraying now out over the web but these numbers were before likes came out, so…

Cory Doctorow No way they’ve got 500 million.

Robert Scoble It’s just – those numbers whatever I hear it giant numbers. I am always reminded, I think it was Kevin Marks said a giant number, an imaginary number multiplied by a giant number is always a very big number.

Cory Doctorow I know I was in Tel Aviv after f8 and people there are very excited about Facebook. They were wearing the Facebook Like buttons at conferences and handing them out as stickers and stuff. There is a lot of people on Facebook whether it’s 400 million or 200 million or – there is a lot of people who are on Facebook that are on other things.

Leo Laporte It’s pretty obvious that there is a lot of people, I don’t know how many a lot is.

Robert Scoble Sure.

Leo Laporte It’s pretty obvious and that in itself scares me because I think more and more people, it’s just like AOL are seeing Facebook as the web, just as they used to see AOL as the Internet. Now they are seeing Facebook as the Internet and that's to me this is retrograde, this is a regression to an older walled garden model of the Internet that I don’t want to see.

Cory Doctorow It’s a weird walled garden that answers.com for instance which is the 10th largest website, put the Like buttons all on every answer and that’s not the old AOL walled garden where you had to pay to get into the walled garden, but it’s a new kind of walled garden. I think we are still wrapping our heads around. It’s not like AOL. It’s something new which is fascinating.

Leo Laporte Yeah, I want to move on a little bit. Any final thoughts before we go to the next topic which is Google I/O. Cory, bottom-lining for us. You are good.

Cory Doctorow I am good.

Leo Laporte I am good, he says. I am good.

Cory Doctorow It’s not funny because I am not a Facebook user. So, I wasn’t a Facebook user before and especially not a Facebook user now but it’s not – I kind of looked at this and I went, hey look someone invented a Skinner box to teach you how to undervalue your privacy, wow and ran away. So I am not – I don’t have a very nuanced view of it I am afraid, because I didn’t spend a lot of time there but I am very skeptical of the idea that you can’t do – work as a journalist without Facebook.

Leo Laporte I hope not.

Cory Doctorow I guess if you are like freaked out about getting scoops which I have never actually seen the point of, then maybe but I have been a print journalist and a web journalist now for more than half my life and I have never used Facebook for it.

Robert Scoble Yeah luckily for our industry Twitter has gotten – become predominant.

Leo Laporte I don’t trust them either by the way. I just want to make…

Robert Scoble Well, yeah, you know. They are very willing to stab you in the back when you are not looking.

Leo Laporte It’s funny I do trust [ph] Ev (37:39) more than I trust Mark and mostly it’s because, I mean it’s Twitter was never private in any respect. I mean I guess you could have a private Twitter account but nobody who uses Twitter really…

Robert Scoble Well DMs are private, right. If you took all of our DMs and put them in public sphere.

Leo Laporte I always treated Twitter as an absolutely public place and so what’s the risk, what’s the harm. You know what you are doing when you are on Twitter. That’s the issue for me is that Facebook made it the opposite promise initially.

Robert Scoble Yeah.

Leo Laporte We’ll talk more in just a bit. I am very excited about some of the announcements from Google. Robert, you were there at Google I/O this week and we’ll talk about that. You got your new EVO phone. You got a good deal because for $400 to go to that conference you get a Motorola Droid and then they surprise you with a keynote give everybody a EVO as well.

Robert Scoble Yeah, I didn’t – I didn’t – it actually was a Nexus One that they handed out. So they handed the attendees two phones and the press people only got one. I can’t use a T-Mobile phone, so I didn’t want to lose this one (38:33).

Leo Laporte Oh you didn’t Half Moon Bay, there is no T-Mobile.

Robert Scoble No T-Mobile in my house. So, I am sorry.

Leo Laporte I love my Nexus One. I have to say it’s a wonderful phone.

Robert Scoble Me too.

Leo Laporte Yeah.

Robert Scoble Me too.

Leo Laporte Have you put Froyo on it yet? The 2.0, Cory?

Cory Doctorow No, I am not doing any OS upgrades when I am on a book tour.

Leo Laporte I guess you are right.

Cory Doctorow I think that's like – that is just asking the fates to come along and just kick your ass. So, I’m one version of Ubuntu back, one version of Android back.

Leo Laporte You are going to love Lucid Links. I think they really hit the ball out of the park.

Cory Doctorow Yeah.

Leo Laporte 10.04 is just really slick.

Cory Doctorow I can never remember what the acronym is. I always note that it goes up by one letter, so it’s some…

Leo Laporte L-L.

Cory Doctorow It starts with an L and another word starts with L.

Leo Laporte Right.

Cory Doctorow I have been calling it like Leaping Lizards.

Leo Laporte I know, me too. I can’t remember either. I know it’s some animal. It’s some adjective. That's all.

Cory Doctorow Krazy Kangaroo and yeah.

Leo Laporte Hey, let me briefly talk about our friends at Citrix and the great product, GoToMeeting and then we’re going to get on with the show. We figure out a way to survive on advertising. It’s just forcing you to listen to it as we go through the show. Just listen. It’s okay, let it wash over you. And this might be a good time if you want to get a snack or whatever because I have a feeling we got a lot to talk about…

Cory Doctorow I am going to go to the bathroom.

Leo Laporte Go to the bathroom. There you go, exactly that's what this is all about. Go to the bathroom right now while I talk about GoToMeeting and GoToMeeting, see, GoToMeeting is so great because you can do things like not wear any pants the next time you are at a business meeting. You can because GoToMeeting makes it possible to meet over the phone, you are having a conference call but something to make it visual. Robert, you could use this for I think for some of your interviews. We use it now more and more on the shows as people can show stuff, I just love it whenever somebody wants to have a meeting I say let’s have a GoToMeeting instead and I want you to try it free for 30 days right now, go to gotomeeting.com/twit. You can meet with the people you want to work with whether they are across town or across the country even around the world bring them closer together, collaborate, demonstrate, train, present. It includes – the new iPad I am [ph] not/now (40:40) going to say this while Cory is not around, the new iPad app is so slick, I know he’s not an iPad fan but it is so slick, you could – I took it out the back yard with Wi-Fi, it’s got a microphone, the audio. Oh, here he comes I won’t mention it, don’t say the i word.

GoToMeeting.com brought to you by Citrix, try it today for 30 days absolutely free gotomeeting.com/twit we thank them for their support of this WEEK in TECH. I was just…..

Cory Doctorow I’m good for the next half hour.

Leo Laporte Good! No more tea. I was just saying you wrote that article “Why I won’t buy an iPad” this was in January and why you shouldn’t either. Have you changed your tune Cory Doctorow?

Cory Doctorow No, it was in April actually and – so, a lot of people they said well – you’ve got all these points about the ecosystem [ph] with (41:24) the iPad but wait til you hold the gadget, it’s an amazing gadget. And so I’ve held a couple, I have played with a couple. People keep bringing them there you go – people keep bringing them to the – to my signings and stuff and I pick it up and I go – yes, this is a moderately well assembled piece of south Chinese electronics, bully for you. In 18 months we’ll look back on this and we’ll go wow that looks really anachronistic like those old toilet-seat iMacs.

Leo Laporte You think so, really?

Cory Doctorow Of course it will, I mean this is Apple’s special genius really, is that they design a device that will be obsolete in 18 months and will be aesthetically obsolete in 18 months so that your – your iPad…

Leo Laporte Just like Detroit (42:01). It’s like [ph] fins (42:02).

Cory Doctorow Yeah, exactly, you take your iPod out of the box and you look at it and you go oh my God this is the most futuristic device I’ve ever owned. Remember the first ones that were kind of the size of like a [ph] dove bar (42:11) and then after like a year they come up with one that’s half the size with double the capacity and half the price and you look at this thing and first of all the industrial finish is designed to be kind of wear off pretty quickly so you know that…

Leo Laporte [ph] It’s going to look dull (42:26).

Cory Doctorow Yeah, it looks dull, it gets all scratchy – I just got this new like tiny little Leatherman tool, you can carry one of these in your pocket for like two years and they don’t scratch at all but somehow they can’t figure out how to make the back of your iPod out of that – you look at it cross side and it looks like you had –

Leo Laporte You’re saying this is intentional. This is industrial designed – designed obsolescence.

Cory Doctorow I think so, I mean [indiscernible] (42:46) and you dump it in the garbage can a year later or two years later.

Leo Laporte Same reason then probably that they don’t let you change batteries. That just encourages you after two years of charges –

Cory Doctorow To own it for longer, yeah. I mean – so I never had that aesthetic first on, right, where I picked it up and I was like oh wow this is the best design device ever. I picked it up and I was like it’s a skinny big phone. I have a Nexus One, it’s like if you took a Nexus One and made it a lot bigger you’d have one of these. And it’s – and there is no such thing as an iPad without its ecosystem. The iPad basically only exists to the extent that it’s embedded in all these software services and subscriptions and so on. And so you can think of it as just like a physical extrusion of this big set of policies and commercial arrangements and so on. And those policies and commercial arrangements are actually a lot uglier than the device. And so given that we are going to throw the device away in a year and buy another device and the only thing that’s going to endure are the policies and the underpinnings that’s the thing that I think we should be paying attention to. And I just don’t understand how anyone can defend it. I mean is there anyone who really thinks that like there’s a boiler room full of prudes big enough to evaluate everything that someone might want to deliver to your device and make good decisions about it like….

Leo Laporte Apparently Apple thinks so.

Cory Doctorow I mean we’ve got even bigger boiler rooms full of prudes that try to figure out what webpages you should be able to look at in schools and libraries and we all know how screwed up they are and if you don’t just ask your kids. So – human evaluation of stuff doesn’t scale very well and you know to the extent that it’s like that Apple wants to make sure that they’ve contained the experience, I don’t understand how that’s at odds with a check box that says I am a grown up let me choose something different. I mean that’s what my Android [indiscernible] (44:32).

Leo Laporte Steve Jobs’ response to that is well you have a choice, you don’t have to buy Apple products. We think that there’s a group of consumers who will prefer that kind of control environment.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, I totally agree, you shouldn’t – it shouldn’t be illegal to sell iPads. I think that you should just not buy an iPad because I think it’s a bad idea and one of the ways that people make decisions about whether or not to buy a device is people talk about it in public. I have never said we should have a law that prohibits making iPads, I’ve said you should think about how the iPad works and all the stuff that is not obvious when you take it out of the box, like all that ecosystem stuff that’s kind of hard to see and make your decision accordingly. I am in accord with Steve on this. I do have one small quibble with him which is that by adding just like a one atom thick layer of DRM to the iPad – it wasn’t good enough to stop someone from breaking the DRM, it was broken within 24 hours. They’ve basically gotten for themselves the legal right to stop you from breaking your iPad and installing other stuff on it. So, my friend Joe Johnson wrote a response to that editorial where he said I can’t hack my dishwasher either. I can’t make stuff with my dishwasher and someone tweeted later I can’t hack my toaster but no one ever designed a dishwasher where it was illegal to make dishes that fit in the dishwasher unless you had the manufacturer’s permission. And no one ever designed a dishwasher where it was illegal to put those dishes in the dishwasher. No one ever designed a toaster where only one company got to make the bread for it. Apple has done that and we are not talking about something as trivial as toasters or bread, we are talking about culture and information and communications tools which I think we should deal with – treat with a lot more gravitas than bread or dishes.

Leo Laporte Yeah, I think it’s a very good point. I happen to love my iPad but I also love other things that are bad for me like…

Robert Scoble Krispy Kreme.

Leo Laporte Krispy Kreme doughnuts, exactly.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, you are making bad decisions about something in the present where the consequences happen a long way off in the future.

Leo Laporte Long-term consequences, much harder to see and I have never been good at long-term consequences. However, I have to say after watching the speeches at Google I/O and playing with the Evo and taking a look – by the way the Evo is just a little bit bigger than the Nexus One and just even a little bit more size there makes it really good. You can read on it – I mean I just - it’s really – so, I am actually – in a way I think that it’s kind of interested to see we have these two groups now, kind of fighting it out – Apple and Google and you do have a choice and I think there will be Android Tablets that might have all the functionality of the iPad and then some.

Robert Scoble In fact I talked to Sergey Brin at Google I/O and he’s very passionate about tablets and obviously has an iPad and is studying it very closely. [indiscernible] (47:18)

Leo Laporte Just before I go – just before I go down that road Cory, do you have any problems with Google?

Cory Doctorow Yeah, you know it’s funny so, I started off like, I think a lot of us, I was very enthusiastic about Google when it was like two guys at Stanford and some computers built out of lego under a desk, right? And we were all like wow they are running Linux, they are doing something that is so much better than AltaVista and it’s great and then I got very enthusiastic for them when they started to do really well and then I started to feel kind of ambivalent about them when they – when they started to go down DRM and privacy violating routes and then I started to feel really kind of hostile to them when they started emitting this really self servicing BS about – we’ve gone into China, we’re [ph] censoring (47:54) results but that’s only because getting results that the [indiscernible] (47:58) didn’t want you to see would be a bad user experience which is like the most crazy thing I ever heard anyone say. And then I went back to kind of ambivalent about them and now I am feeling pretty enthusiastic about them. Between 100 gigabit Ethernet – or gigabit Ethernet through in towns. Gigabit municipal broadband totally like messing up the little cartelism of the phone companies and Android – with Android and with the G1 and just kind of generally pursuing an open and neutral net more or less and standing up to bullies like Viacom with Youtube. I feel like they’re being a force for good these days, I am pretty happy about it. The China thing was really interesting because I talked to a lot of really senior Googlers I knew about China and they said yeah, that story you’ve heard about Sergey Brin rolling out of bed one morning and going Oh my god my company is being used shall I help – arrest dissidents and harvest their organs for party members. I can’t do that anymore we are just not going to do that anymore.

Leo Laporte Wow that’s great.

Cory Doctorow And they all say it’s true. They all say – either he’s really good at duping his employees or it’s true which would be pretty cool.

Leo Laporte I have to say I am a big fan of the Android Operating System, I think they made some big announcements there. It’s interesting, isn’t it? That Vic Gundotra…

Robert Scoble Gundotra.

Leo Laporte Gundotra who made the – both – did very well I think on both keynotes despite some real technical issues, especially in the second keynote. Really took some pot shots at Apple in the second – on the Thursday keynote. It was very clear that a lot of what the Android 2.2 release was about was fighting back. And made a big deal about flash availability, I am not sure if that’s exactly something I’d go crazy over. I guess you can run flash now on your Nexus One although thanks to Apple you don’t see a lot of sites – mobile sites with flash on it anymore.

Robert Scoble Well, with Vic he uses every sword that somebody hands him. I though he was channeling great actually on stage.

Leo Laporte Really, he did a good job and it was exciting – I think the roadmap for Android looks very exciting. So…

Cory Doctorow Yeah you know, free software often goes down like on a slow code path, so Danny O’Brien coined, it’s what – it’s what happened with Mozilla where there was a lot of hype and then nothing happened for a long time, then all of a sudden, bam, there was this amazing world class browser…

Leo Laporte That’s right.

Cory Doctorow …that have just kind of seemed to have appeared from nowhere.

Leo Laporte I remember even saying what happened to the Mozilla project? Netscape open source did nothing, you know….

Cory Doctorow Yeah Jamie Zawinski went and opened a nightclub; it’s all over.

Leo Laporte Yeah.

Cory Doctorow So I have a theory kind of about all of the stuff about mobile content and about tablets and so on, is that anything where there is an enormous amount of hope and hype about what our device or technology means for the future of an industry, it’s very hard to do innovative, fast, smart development. So here’s what I mean by innovative, fast, smart development. When I was dating the woman, who is now my wife, Alice, I was on a Board of a company called Ludicorp, the Advisory Board, and they made a little flash game that was really fun. Alice lived in London, I lived in San Francisco and we had this long-distance relationship, and one day the Founder of Ludicorp came over to my place in San Francisco and said how’s it going with Alice? And I said you know, it’s going great and we share these photos of our days as we go through the day, but it’s a pain to do it, and he said, oh! we’ve got photo sharing coming in the game, we’ll accelerate that feature. And people really liked it. So they were revving the game a lot, like every 30 minutes, and eventually that feature grew to eclipse the game and they retitled the service Flickr.

Leo Laporte Yeah.

Cory Doctorow Right, that’s what iteration looks like. A user has an idea, you do a lot of stuff, something happens, and no one’s looking over your shoulder going – are your sure that’s a good idea, maybe we should have a meeting, let’s have some business development before that happens, meanwhile if you try to do anything let’s say, ebooks at a publishing house, as soon as you like whisper the word ebook anywhere in the building, everybody runs up and tries to make sure that whatever it is that you do, since it’s definitely going to be the future of the company because it’s ebooks, whatever it is you do isn’t going to undermine their little corner of the publishing empire.

And that means that you spend six months in meetings making sure you don’t offend anyone and you produce something that’s ultimately really inoffensive and when nobody likes it, you can’t produce something different the next day, because you’ve got to get everyone to buy in again. And as a result, all the mobile content offerings I’ve seen with, like, [ph] first time values of all (52:26) have just been crap and all the – all the tablet stuff has been really slow moving and not very interesting, nobody wants to take big risks in case the risks that they take cost them the business.

Leo Laporte Well, if something like Android is open and freely available, doesn’t that encourage some interesting hardware stuff?

Cory Doctorow Yeah, totally and that’s what I think we’ve got – without – if you don’t have to worry about what happens when you ship apart from whether people like it or not, not whether some company will approve of it, then you’ve got a lot fewer steps to making a revision and another revision, and another revision; it lets you go really quickly. And so that’s what I hope will happen with Android is that people will be able to be more nimble with their technology offerings.

Robert Scoble Cory the place that I really was excited was the video codec VM8…

Leo Laporte Let’s talk about that, Yeah, yeah. I want to talk about WebM, VBA and Digital TV 2 in just a second because there was a lot from Google this week, a lot to digest. In fact so much that some of it was leaking out from Google in the blogs and so forth before they even made it to the keynote, and some of it never even made it to the keynote. So this was a big week for Google. We’ll also – we’ve got our Lightening RAM coming up and including a 23,000 member reply all email. It’s one more reason you don’t want to do a reply all. Before we do that though you may, Cory, if you wish find – there’s a place to go to the bathroom, anything you’d like to do right now, yes Robert go right ahead. As they use to say, the smoking lamp is on, smoke them if you’ve got ‘em, I’ve got…

Cory Doctorow You’re going to go look at the room service menu.

Leo Laporte Yeah, do that.

Robert Scoble [ph] Your check code (54:04) just asked what is this monitor? It’s an Apple 24-inch monitor…

Leo Laporte On its side.

Robert Scoble Ergotron arm, and you can turn it left or right.

Leo Laporte Yeah.

Robert Scoble And the Mac OS X software lets you go vertical or horizontal.

Leo Laporte So you have – on one computer you have a horizontal landscape and a portrait display…

Robert Scoble Yeah.

Leo Laporte So you put the web pages on the portrait display and the spread sheets on the…

Robert Scoble Yeah, this is just a 27-inch iMac with a 24-inch monitor on its side.

Leo Laporte That’s good. That’s nice. Nice setup.

Robert Scoble It’s really nice.

Leo Laporte Yeah.

Robert Scoble Yeah.

Leo Laporte How are you backing that up?

Robert Scoble All over the Internet.

Leo Laporte The reason I ask, Carbonite has a great solution for Macs. Now this is not for Macs, this is the business solution and Windows only right now, but it is backed by the same great Carbonite services, Carbonite Pro for small business. You’ve heard me talk about Carbonite over the years, the service that backs up your PC or Mac files remotely, automatically, encrypted, so that if you are in a disaster mode, forest, fire, flood, earthquake, tornado and you’ve lost your back-ups locally, you are not down for the count.

I’m going to put Carbonite on my daughter’s laptop before she goes to college this fall of course. But what about business? Carbonite found a lot of business users who are using the consumer-grade Carbonite, because there wasn’t anything similar for a small business, well now there is: Carbonite Pro.

Once you try Carbonite Pro for free for 30-days, just go to carbonitepro.com, you’ll be very impressed at central dashboard that let’s you back-up your entire enterprise, your users can restore themselves, you don’t have to – they don’t have to come begging you for their old files, you do get a status report on all the back-ups you’re able to restore as you choose yourself, prices start as low as $10 a month and I’ll give you an example, if you have eight computers, 5-gigabytes of back-up, 25 bucks a months, that’s all.

10 computers with 5-Gigs, $50 a month, that’s 10 to $50 a month for peace of mind for you and your employees, your files are safe, encrypted, offsite, at a sophisticated data centers, Carbonite is just great. I used them. I have used them for a long-time now and I encourage you to do the same, whether it’s Carbonite for your home, or Carbonite Pro for your business, try Carbonite Pro for you right now. Carbonitepro.com. I thank them so much for their support of the entire TWiT network and I do make it my model back-up, I’ve got to back-up to get it back.

Somebody in our audience has a EVO here. I can’t wait. I’m really excited about this. The only negative though, I’m little disappointed you can’t put 2.2 on it, because it’s got that Sprint’s – I mean, sorry the HTC Sense UI on top of it. So they have to upgrade that. Robert, do you like the Sense UI?

Robert Scoble Yeah.

Leo Laporte As opposed to just like the Nexus One, vanilla Droid?

Robert Scoble Yeah, it doesn’t bother me too much, it was pretty similar in most of the places it needed…

Leo Laporte And there’s some elegant stuff that looks nice. And Cory, what is that, it’s K9 that you recommend as an email tool on the Android operating system, is it? Oh wait, I’ve turned you down. Go ahead, K9?

Cory Doctorow Can you hear me?

Leo Laporte Yeah, I turned you down, I’m sorry.

Cory Doctorow Sorry. K9 is like an industrial strength fork of the mailer that comes with – that comes with Android, it’s pretty good POP client, I always use POP. I just wanted to say I’m with you on this back-up stuff. I’m not a – I don’t use Carbonite because I’m not a Windows user, but I’ve been a back-up – the back-up guy for all my life, always been telling other people to back-up and…

Leo Laporte Cory, I’ve seen what do you do to your laptops, I’m not surprised.

Cory Doctorow Oh yeah, sure.

Leo Laporte I’ll never forget…

Cory Doctorow You know as a guy who kills a laptop or two a year, although I tell you what, these ThinkPads are so rugged relative to the hardware I used to use. I used to use a lot of Mac laptops and the ThinkPads are super rugged and come with one year, one to three years of onsite next day worldwide hardware replacement which is great. No one is paying me from ThinkPad to do this, but for like a 100 bucks a year some one come to your hotel room anywhere in the world the next day with hardware to fix it, but even so I’m a total back-up guy, I have an onsite, I have an offsite, I have a travel back-up, I have a cloud back-up…

Leo Laporte You are a novelist, I mean somebody who writes fiction. I remember the Oakland fires of about, well it’s about 15 years ago, something like that and a novelist, who was it, was it Amy Tan – some well-known novelist lost not only her house in the fire but lost her manuscripts in the fire.

Cory Doctorow Oh my gosh.

Leo Laporte And I mean there’s nothing worse. Ralph Ellison after he lost his manuscript, he never wrote another novel.

Cory Doctorow Wow.

Leo Laporte And so you know, you don’t want to – if you write – you don’t want to, in fact if I were you, I’ll print it and mail it to somebody every chapter.

Cory Doctorow Well you know, I SCP it to my server in Toronto, all my working files, but I also use Git…

Leo Laporte Really?

Cory Doctorow …to back-up my writing as I go…

Leo Laporte For revisions. Wow!

Cory Doctorow For revisions. There is a friend of mine, Thomas Gideon, he’s got a great podcast called the Command Line, does – wrote me some Python scripts called Flashbake that every 15 minutes take all of my working files, checks to see if there’s been any updates, checks them into a local Git repository which is like a version control thing software guys use, software programmers use and then adds for context the last three songs I played, the last three headlines I’ve posted to Boing Boing, time zone, weather, how long it’s been since I rebooted, all kinds of cool stuff.

Leo Laporte So you have a record of your life kind of almost in that Git repository?

Cory Doctorow Yeah, yeah, it’s pretty cool and this is for me like to get back to Facebook which we shouldn’t go back to but it’s the difference between spyware and malware, it’s the difference between like a pedometer and like your boss counting how many steps you’ve taken a day to figure if you’re going to the bathroom too often. I love having the stuff for myself. And my plan is, since Git is so good at replicating itself, again my plan is to put a Git install on my server which is in a big cage in Toronto at 151 Front Street and then just have the two stay in sync.

Leo Laporte What a good idea. Yeah, because every Git repository is a duplicate, unlike SVN where there’s one repository, you have everything everywhere, right, on Git.

Cory Doctorow I think so. I think that’s correct.

Leo Laporte Yeah, I think that’s the idea behind it. Wow! that’s cool. Is that code available, because I would – I think that’s a great idea.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, it’s GPL, it’s on GitHub. It’s called flashbake, which is a term from my first novel, from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Leo Laporte Right. Cory Doctorow Flashbake. And it’s great, works like a charm.

Leo Laporte That is really cool.

Cory Doctorow But it’s extensible and open.

Leo Laporte So it’s basically – I can have it save everything I do, any changes, all the text…

Cory Doctorow It’s a great thing about in a text file.

Leo Laporte Yeah, text is – text is nice that way. Wow, that’s really cool. Oh, I was showing you the wrong thing, I have it set up wrong.

Robert Scoble I was wondering ask Cory something, something, something, something…

Leo Laporte I was going to Cory – ask Cory, you want to know what it says? Ask Cory about his recent unusual Skype interview. You did a naked Skype interview?

Cory Doctorow Accidentally. My friend Aleks Krotoski writing me up for the Guardian had a phoner with me at 6 a.m. when I was in San Francisco, I was rushing to get dressed because I had a 6:40 call to get to the first school for first period down the peninsula and I forgot Skype cam was on. So I answered the phone naked from the waist up and she said, “Oh my god, you’re naked!” And she’s a good friend of ours, it wasn’t like – it wasn’t terrible, right. I was just naked from the waist up. It was okay. So I dived under the table, I turned the camera off, and I walked around with a laptop for like 10 minutes getting dressed. And then I sat back down again and the camera was still on. I said, Aleks, has the camera been on the whole time? She said, "Oh, I didn’t want to embarrass you”.

So it was – it was definitely a low point. I’ve had two kind of major malapropisms on this tour that were very funny in hindsight. So that was the first one.

The second one is a guy came up to my signing – oh god, I didn’t even remember what city I was in. Maybe it was Austin. And he said, can you – I said, like, what would you like in you book? And he said Drama Hobbit. And I said a Drama Hobbit? And he said, yeah Drama Hobbit, Drama Hobbit. So I drew the most dramatic hobbit I could, and he said no, draw Muhammad.

Leo Laporte This is Muhammad the Hobbit.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, that’s right. So I drew a very dramatic hobbit and possibly gave offense to like a quarter of the world’s population at the same time.

Leo Laporte All the hobbits, all the little people now are upset with you Cory. There’s a fatwa. Cory Doctorow All the little hobbits, all the little hobbits.

Leo Laporte That’s a meme going on right now though, isn’t it? Draw Muhammad meme kind of going around?

Cory Doctorow Yeah, it’s unfortunately kind of inter-tangles issues of free speech with xenophobia, it’s kind of hard.

Leo Laporte I know what you mean. And I also don’t want to – I don’t want to go there. It’s not for fear, but I don’t – it’s somebody’s beliefs I don’t want to kind of mingle that in with…

Cory Doctorow Well, I’m okay with ridiculing dumb beliefs but I just, I just – I think that there is difference between saying I think your beliefs are dumb and saying I think you are bad person and saying I’m going to intentionally give offense to a whole bunch of people, well, over something else. And I just – I think that it’s – it unfortunately it’s one of those things like if you want to do an experiment you always want to isolate out the thing you are trying to prove or test. And when you are doing like a social experiment, it’s really nice to make it fairly unambiguous so that it doesn’t look like a racist attack on a group of people on the basis of their ethnicity and instead looks like a defense of free speech. And unfortunately a kind of – it’s smack in the middle of those things.

Leo Laporte Right. And it’s on Facebook, just to confuse the whole thing. Here is the GitHub command line flashbake. Very cool. I’m going to try this.

Cory Doctorow Thomas’ podcast is called The Command Line.

Leo Laporte The command line. I’ve got to try that. That’s really, really neat.

So, Google TV, now Cory, you’re probably not interested in Google TV because this really does look like a commercial enterprise from Google. They are doing a deal. Sony, Logitech and the Dish Networks all will add this capability to hardware. Sony will put it in their TVs, Logitech is going to make a little box, Dish is going to put it in their satellite dish. I was underwhelmed by this. Robert, you were there. Did it seem more exciting to you than it did to me? It seemed like it was kind of pathetic.

Robert Scoble Well, you know, if you come from the geek world and you have a Media Center hooked up to your TV and you have an Apple TV…

Leo Laporte Yeah, we’ve been able to do this for a long time. Yeah.

Robert Scoble You have – but I did like how they took a search-centric approach to it. I want to play with it, I want to have one.

Leo Laporte Yeah, it struck me that it’s nothing particularly new and ironically the geeks already have this and the non-geeks; it’s way too complicated.

Robert Scoble I’m not sure that it’s all that complicated.

Leo Laporte Do you think your mom wants to enter in a search term, like so she wants to watch House as they did in the example?

Robert Scoble I think the world is changing when it comes to TV, and how we use TV is changing quite radically inside the home, even for normal people they are sitting on the couch with laptops or iPads or whatever, you know, iPhones or Android phones on the couch and we are talking on Twitter while we are watching a show – different shows. I mean tomorrow night is the big final for Lost and you should see my Twitter, it’s been lit up all day you know guesses about what's coming or even there is people writing code to remove any mention of Lost from their Twitter stream you know so that they won’t see a spoiler. It’s crazy.

Leo Laporte I never got the Lost thing; I never got that – that disease.

Robert Scoble Yeah, I got a little hooked into it; my wife is more hooked into it than I am. But how we are watching TV is changing quite a bit. I mean – and we are going to see a bunch of different approaches to how TV is changing. There is one coming out tomorrow at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that I’ve seen, I can’t talk about it, but they are coming at it from the social aspect. There is Boxee which is coming out of…

Leo Laporte I think the Boxee Box is very neat.

Robert Scoble Yea, I’m most interested in that, but this does – you know, Google has a brand name and has the ability to make deals with Sony, you know, if it comes – here is the…

Leo Laporte Well that was – I tell you, that was a nadir of this – of the event was when Eric Schmidt comes out on the stage with seven other CEOs, Charlie Ergen from the Dish Network, Howard Stringer from Sony; Logitech, I mean all the CEOs were sitting there, oh my god. And I can just imagine the developers going cross-eyed at that.

Robert Scoble Yea, some of them did. But did you see Stringer kissing up to Best Buy?

Leo Laporte Yes, that was funny. Yeah.

Robert Scoble But here is the thing. For a normal person they are going walk in a Best Buy, they want to buy a 50-inch TV, and there are so many choices that all look the same. I mean it’s really hard to tell the difference between any of the 50-inch HDTVs. I mean you have to look really closely to see any resolution differences anymore, because most of the time they’re made in the same factory with different brand names on them. And one of them has this Google brand name on it and the salesperson shows, oh you can search for YouTube videos on it too. Boom! That’s sold, as long as it’s not…

Leo Laporte Yeah, you might want it.

Robert Scoble As long as it’s not $100 more, if it’s the same price or $20, you are going to buy that and go, yeah I want the Google thing in there, throw it in.

Cory Doctorow You know what I’m waiting for is like it seems to me, especially when this HD thing all started in the early 90s when we started talking about or in the early 2000s when we were talking about the broadcast flag and whether we get a digital television transition, seems to me that the majority of high-def screens aren’t TVs, they are computer screens, and it’s pretty rare that you get like a giant screen and just put one big Window on it.

And so I’m waiting for computer for rather than them to have like computer-like UIs to have computer-like use patterns. I have this kind of utopian vision of a living room in which instead of TV being a thing that’s kind of isolating like – seems like one of the big pitches for a giant TV is, ‘hey dad buy a giant TV and send the rest of the family away while you watch sports’, you know, maybe with your friends; which sounds – seems kind of divisive. I’d love a giant TV that had like a video window showing something that required some audio, so like a television show somewhere in it. And then some games that didn’t require audio that have wireless headsets that kids were playing in the same room on the same big screen and then maybe some other stuff that someone else was watching. And while we can all pause each other’s screens and make something big or make something small, I kid of did this with my daughter now where in the morning she kind of wakes…

Robert Scoble Here is what your hatred of iPads is leading you stray. We’re already doing that with our iPads; we are playing SCRABBLE and playing Geometry Wars or…

Cory Doctorow But you are not all looking at one screen, you are looking at a bunch of different ones, right?

Robert Scoble I know. But nobody wants to look at one screen [indiscernible] (01:08:54) kids, I have a 16-year old, he wants to watch his own thing, I want…

Cory Doctorow Yeah, yeah, but you are missing the point. We are still designing our living rooms around having a giant 50-inch screen at one end. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m all about – you know, yes, we’ve been sharing screens on our little laptops for ever, that’s not an iPad thing, I mean we’ve – I’ve had LANs around my house with my loved ones for a long time that we could do lots of things with. My wife is a champion LAN gamer, she was internationally ranked Quake player. I know about doing stuff on a LAN; I’m talking about your big screen and whether or not you can have a shared experience with that. So, this is what I’m talking.

Robert Scoble If I’m watching Lost, I want it on the screen. I don’t want Craft taking any inch and pixel or any numbers of pixels away from that experience.

Leo Laporte That’s what I think. I think you sit with – if you…

Robert Scoble If somebody spent a lot of money to do HD, do HD experience for me. I watch YouTube…

Leo Laporte Well that’s what I’m saying is why is Google inserting this crap into the TV signal when really what we want to do is sit with a laptop on our Twitter if we want to do that and watch TV.

Robert Scoble Because I think the use case is changing. I mean look at what I can do now with a 5D Mark II camera. I can get 1080p video up onto YouTube and get it on to that screen.

Leo Laporte Right.

Robert Scoble The final show of House was filmed on the same camera I’m filming all my shows with.

Cory Doctorow So I have this thing I do in the morning with my two year old who – she has got the worst of both of our sleep patterns. I get up at 5 but I am very energetic. My wife gets up and she is very groggy. So my daughter gets up at 5 but she is really groggy. So she sits on her own for a while. And then she crawls over to my lap and she wants to watch video for a little while. So I’ll be on my laptop and I’ll put on a video in a little corner of the screen using VLC and just have the window manager keep it on the top. And she will look at what I am doing. I will look at what she is doing. We will pause each other’s work and talk about it for 15 or 20 minutes and we have our little video time in the morning. And it’s incredibly intimate to share a screen that way. It’s actually really, really nice to do that. It’s very friendly.

Leo Laporte That’s because you have a two year old, by the way, wait until Poesy is 15.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, she won’t sit on my lap then.

Leo Laporte She won’t be anywhere near you.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, well, we are like – we’re in that delayed fertility demographics, when she is 15, I’ll be like 100.

Leo Laporte Yeah, yeah, enjoy it, Cory.

Robert Scoble If anything, my 16 year old says, let me have a TV –

Leo Laporte Get the hell out of here.

Robert Scoble So I can play an Xbox game.

Leo Laporte Yeah, yeah.

Robert Scoble And enjoy it in its full glory.

Leo Laporte And can you go out and get us a pizza. See you dad, bye-bye.

Robert Scoble Yeah.

Leo Laporte That’s really –

Cory Doctorow Well, you’re really selling this parenthood.

Leo Laporte No, I love it. Don’t get me wrong. I love it. But it suddenly changes, let me tell you, Cory. Let’s see, I don’t – I want to save the lightning round for one more commercial before we do that. What else did Google announce? They announced Android – did I get everything, Google TV, oh, VP8, let’s talk about WebM.

Robert Scoble Yeah, they announced that and they also announced a datacenter thing, which is pretty boring but actually has some pretty interesting implications for –

Leo Laporte Well, there were rumors that they were going to do an S3 clone that they were going to have a Google storage clone and they did –

Robert Scoble And they did something like that.

Leo Laporte They did it for developers though.

Robert Scoble Yeah. And that’s what it’s for. They also announced something with VMware where you could move basically servers, virtual servers from your private cloud to your public cloud to wherever. And that’s pretty interesting as an idea.

Leo Laporte Yeah, Amazon’s EC2, they are doing some really interesting virtual server technologies and all sorts of cool stuff.

Robert Scoble Yeah, Rackspace were using VMware for private cloud, so.

Leo Laporte I tell you why this is interesting. It sounds like enterprise, but what ultimately is I think intriguing about it is it reduces friction for an innovator who wants to create a new website, a new service, a new web app because the storage in the cloud makes it very easy. EC2 really or Google Code even makes it very easy for somebody for very little money to create the next Facebook or the next Twitter.

Robert Scoble While we were waiting in line we were starting up servers from our iPads because we have an iPad client for our Rackspace cloud.

Leo Laporte I think that’s really intriguing. I think that’s very pro-innovation in the long run and can make a huge difference. Steve Gibson who does our security show, told a great story a couple of weeks ago about when he was a teenager and he made, what he called, the portable dog killer, which was a sonic weapon. There was a dog that would terrorize people as they walk by. So he created a tight beam, 15 kilohertz sonic beam. And every time the dog came at the fence he’d shoot the dog with the sonic beam and it trained the dog not to do that anymore. Then he made the mistake of aiming it at the school principal. But his point was that this –

Cory Doctorow Was it like a bowel loosener?

Leo Laporte Yeah, kind of.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, all right.

Leo Laporte The point is that he could – he was a maker that he instead of sitting and consuming, he created. And Maker Faire is going on right now in San Mateo. There is going to be another Maker Faire in July I am hoping actually will go to Detroit for that, one in New York in the fall. And Steve’s point was we got to get kids making stuff. We got to get kids doing instead of consuming. I think we all agree that that’s what’s going on. I am sure you’re doing that kind of thing with Poesy. She is only 2 but she’s got to have finger paints and things like that.

Cory Doctorow Oh, yeah, and it’s really amazing, the extent to which having stuff that she can make something with really makes a big difference –

Leo Laporte Absolutely.

Cory Doctorow And how differently she plays with those open-ended toys.

Leo Laporte And that’s why I think things like cloud storage and Google Code and EC2 are really powerful because they give people a chance. Inexpensively, a 16 year old can create the next Twitter for nothing, virtually nothing.

Robert Scoble Well – or a 16 year old could create something that makes all of their friends delighted, which is just as cool in some ways.

Leo Laporte Yeah, right, absolutely.

Robert Scoble We were sitting in line with the guy, the kid who started Chatroulette and he has 20 million unique visitors a month, he showed me as Google Analytics and it was created using these kinds of technologies –

Leo Laporte Very amazing.

Robert Scoble At very low cost.

Leo Laporte Now he is here, right? He is no longer in Russia.

Robert Scoble He’s says he is moving here but he is bouncing back and forth.

Leo Laporte VP8/WebM, this is just to give you the backgrounder on this. Google really was pushing HTML5 open web standards, the idea of getting rid of proprietary stuff like Flash, promoting a standard for video for web apps and so forth. And the problem is that there is no specified codec for HTML5. There are some frontrunners, H.264, but the problem is that’s encumbered with patents. It’s owned by somebody. Ogg Theora which is open although there may be some question about it, but it’s not very good, it’s VP3.

And then Google bought this company, On2 that has a codec VP8 which is superior. There is some debate about how much superior, whether it’s as good as H.264. It sounds like it’s not quite as good as H.264 but good enough and they decided to open it. And companies like Mozilla who have been holding off on endorsing any particular codec say, yes, this is what we’ve been looking for. It’s good for us because we stream a lot of video. And right now we’re streaming over proprietary technologies like Flash and H.264. I’d love to see VP8 or WebM as Google is going to call it, take off. Any thoughts on that, is it any – good, bad, ugly?

Robert Scoble I think this is a play for 3 years from now. They are clearly hoping that there’s some new innovation in codec technology that developers around the world will now have a say in because it’s open source and because there is a little bit of protection from the cost of these codecs and –

Leo Laporte It’s the same kind of thing, opening up the video in the same way that these inexpensive servers opens up development. There is –

Cory Doctorow I think what everyone’s worried about is the drug dealer model, right, where you can use it for free for a couple of years until it’s totally embedded in your business and then it suddenly costs a lot of money.

Leo Laporte That’s H.264 right now.

Cory Doctorow. Yeah. Maybe the cartel that controls it or the company that controls it today has claimed with all sincerity that they have no intention of doing it. But you’re kind of betting that no one over the life of the patent ever ends up in control of it with dollar signs in their eyes or no one ever ends up in control of it and decides, you know, the kind of material you make is unsuitable for our codec. We don’t like porn or we don’t like subversive material or we don’t like material that is hosted on services that infringe on copyright.

So unless you’re willing to do what Viacom thinks YouTube should be doing, which is paying a lawyer to review every clip before it goes live, like 30 hours of video a minute so exhausting the total supply of lawyer hours remaining between now and the heat death of the universe. So unless you’re doing that, you can’t use this codec for – if the codec is controlled by someone, they can condition your access to it in any way, right, any way.

Leo Laporte So do you believe that Google – is there a way Google can give away WebM in such a way that you would feel comfortable with it?

Cory Doctorow Well, I guess, it just may – it depends on whether they make like permanent and revocable representations about what the terms are of use for it, yeah. I mean there is such a thing as permanent and revocable –

Leo Laporte Good. So that’s we should be looking for.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean this may be a better question for Denise in this WEEK in LAW.

Leo Laporte Right, right.

Cory Doctorow But it sounds to me like that’s the kind of thing where you have to have really good binding long-term promises made. I don’t know when the patents in the On2 codec expire. I saw a demo of it in ‘99. Presuming it didn’t get any more patents filed I kind of sort of think around 2025 maybe at the latest. So you kind of want promises that go out for another 15 years.

Leo Laporte Let’s see, what else? I think that’s it for Google I/O. I think that’s it for Facebook. We’ve thrown a little Apple in there. Let’s take a break and come back. We’re going to do a little lightning round, a bunch of stories, some good stories too. I see that Toyota and Tesla are going to revive the Fremont NUMMI plant and start making electric cars there, which would be fantastic news I think. That’s the local auto plant that was shut down just recently. And the 23,000 reply-all emails.

We’ll talk about that in just a second. But I want to mention our friends at audible.com. Yes, Cory, audible.com – you want to take a break now?

Cory Doctorow I have actually good to say about Audible.

Leo Laporte What is that?

Cory Doctorow So with Makers they agreed to drop the DRM from my audiobook. We still had some questions about it. We didn’t end up going with it. But they agreed to drop DRM from my audiobook. I thought that was really good of them. The problem was of course that Apple said, if you don’t put DRM in it, we won’t carry it, so – and Apple is the major distributor.

Leo Laporte So this is – the real question is who is enforcing this DRM stuff. Is it the publishers? And we had this conversation before where you said you tried to get Audible to do without DRM. And they said, no, we’re just not going to do that.

Cory Doctorow So they changed their mind.

Leo Laporte So that’s good news, yeah.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, I think that’s great. But Apple refused to carry it on the iTunes Store. They said DRM or nothing.

Leo Laporte It’s very frustrating because –

Cory Doctorow So much for Steve Jobs’ much vaunted hatred of DRM.

Leo Laporte Yeah, no kidding. I don’t know what that means exactly. Well, here is the news.

Cory Doctorow For the record, if Apple would allow me to, I’d put all my audiobooks in the iTunes Store; they said DRM or nothing.

Leo Laporte It’s very frustrating.

Cory Doctorow So much for Steve Jobs’ much vaunted hatred of DRM, huh?

Leo Laporte Yeah, no kidding. I don’t know what that means, exactly. Well, here’s the news.

Cory Doctorow For the record, if Apple would allow me to, I’d put all my audiobooks in the iTunes Store like a shot, with no crazy EULA and no DRM, I’d be on them like white on rice.

Leo Laporte Wouldn’t that be great? Steve? Steve?

Hey, I did record an audiobook for one of your short stories. What happened with that?

Cory Doctorow So that’s – that’ll be coming up probably this autumn. It’s a short story collection called With A Little Help. And it’s made with a little help from a lot of my friends. So there’s an audiobook that will be free and you can buy it on CD, so it’ll be free downloads. There’s a printed book; you can either buy it with one of four different covers from Lulu, or you can get it as a free download.

Or there’s a very limited edition hardcover, where each book has custom end papers that are original paper ephemera from writer friends of mine. So Jay Leike sent me his cancer diagnosis and Joe Halderman sent me his watercolors. Kathe Koja sent me her grade two report card. And those are original pieces of paper that will be stuck in as the end papers.

And then the top, top end was that you could commission a story from it for $10,000. But Mark Shuttleworth already bought that, and I wrote that story already.

Leo Laporte He did? Oh, that’s great! Oh, that’s wonderful!

Cory Doctorow Yeah. Yeah, so that will be out in the Autumn. And all the financials are published monthly as an appendix to the book. And if you send me a typo for the book, I’ll correct it in the next copy printed and give you a footnote, so maybe you buy another copy to see one with your name in it.

Leo Laporte Ah, that’s very smart. Cory, as usual, pushing…

Cory Doctorow I’ve monetized typos.

Leo Laporte [Laughter] Now that’s creative. With A Little Help; we’ll look forward to that. And the audiobook, I’m on it, I know Neil Gaiman read it – a story on it.

Cory Doctorow Yeah. And Mary Robinette Kowal, and Wil Wheaton; a lot of great readers.

Leo Laporte And just to foster the open source of it, I did the recording sessions on TWiT Live, live, so they were – and it actually was really fun, because people corrected me when my accent changes, they said, no, no.

Cory Doctorow Oh, that’s great! I had no idea. That’s…

Leo Laporte It was fun, it was really fun. I really enjoyed doing it and they – I think they enjoyed the story. And I’m sorry it took so long, but I’m glad you got it in time. And I look forward to that.

Cory Doctorow You did an awesome job. It’s a great reading.

Leo Laporte Oh, it was fun, it was really fun. However, let me talk a little bit about commercial audiobooks from our friends at Audible.com. Audible is, as many of you know, kind of a lifesaver for me. I first started using Audible when I was commuting to San Francisco. I did that for ten years, two hours sometimes each way. And I would have – I’m sure I would have just gone bazooties, if not kind of had some sort of road rage incident if it weren’t for these audiobooks. I started first listening to cassettes. But when Audible came around, man, it changed my life.

And now, Audible’s got 75,000 titles. They’ve got a huge collection of science fiction, they’re doing a lot of sci-fi that was never turned into audiobooks. They have a Audible Frontiers collection, where they’ve built their own studios and they’re recording a lot of this great stuff that has never been recorded before, which is wonderful.

Audiobooks, performances, radio shows, comedy performances, tons of wonderful stuff at Audible.com. And I know Cory liked Audible books too, he has a whole bunch of them.

So let me see if I can make a good recommendation for – I see there’s one. This – for nostalgic reasons, I might get this, The Astronomer: A Novel of Suspense. It’s on the front page. Narrated by Napoleon Solo, the man from Uncle, Robert Vaughn. I just like his voice, I don’t know, I might just get it for his voice. You’re agreeing? Yeah.

Anyway, here’s the point. You get two free books, two credits, that’s almost any book in the house. All you have to do is go to audible.com/twit2 and sign up for the Platinum account, two books a month, that’s what I’ve got, I love it. On the 22nd of every month, just happened yesterday, I get two new credits, and then I have so much fun going through the audiobooks and looking for two new books to listen to.

Right now I’m listening to – I really love The Time Traveler’s Wife. I have to highly recommend that. The movie was beautiful, but the movie’s two hours. This is a really excellent, long book.

Have you ever read The Time Traveler’s Wife?

Cory Doctorow Yeah, it’s a great book. Do you know if they’ve got Kathe Koja? K-O-J-A?

Leo Laporte I will look.

Cory Doctorow I know she’s got a bunch of audiobooks. She is one of my favorite young adult writers. And if you’re looking for a book…

Leo Laporte They do. Kissing the Bee, Buddha Boy…

Cory Doctorow Kissing the Bee is great, and Buddha Boy. They’re both – and they’re both really good readings. I’ve reviewed both audiobooks. I’d really recommend them both, anyone who’s got kids. They’re good, kind of meaty, subtle books that never clobber you over the head about kids who are a little bit different and about how they end up fitting in.

Kathe made her name as a really prominent horror writer, and then gave it up to write these young adult novels that are just genius.

Leo Laporte Well, you’ve done two young adult novels now.

Cory Doctorow That’s right.

Leo Laporte It must be satisfying. It must be very satisfying. I have to say, one of my best audio – Audible experiences is getting a few great audiobooks like Bud Not Buddy and – oh, I can’t remember. A few – we got three or four and we drove out to Montana and listened to them. And talk about a togetherness experience, it was really wonderful to really listen to them together and talk about them. That is a great use. And a juvenile is – by somebody who’s really good, is great; because adults will enjoy it as much as the kids do. So it’s really something to talk about. Okay.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, I think there’s a popular misconception that young adult books are for young adults as opposed to books that can be enjoyed by young adults and adults together.

Leo Laporte Yeah.

Cory Doctorow If you like Alice in Wonderland or The Hobbit, you like young adult books.

Leo Laporte Exactly. Kathe Koja, these are two good recommendations. K-A-T-H-E K-O-J-A. Kissing the Bee and Buddha Boy. Make those your first two books, especially if you’ve got kids around. Maybe like 12, 11, 10, thereabouts?

Cory Doctorow I’d say like, 13 and up.

Leo Laporte 13 and up, okay. 13 and up. Audible.com/twit2. Two free books for you. They’ll play on any – almost any device. They’re still working on the Android, although I understand that’s in beta now. I’ve talked to a couple of people that have the beta edition, so that’s coming soon. Audible.com/twit2, we thank them for their support of TWiT.

So your new one is FTW? What’s the story of that, Cory?

Cory Doctorow So – For The Win, it’s a book about gold farming, which for those of you in your audience who aren’t gamers, gold farming is when someone in a video game does a repetitive task to amass virtual wealth, like making shirts out of sheep to get gold, or killing low-level monsters to get gold. And then sells that gold to other players who are either too impatient or too short on time to do those repetitive tasks themselves. And…

Leo Laporte And this is not science fiction, this exists.

Cory Doctorow No, that’s real. There’s like 400,000 people who earn a living doing it today. Most of them are in poor countries, and most of the people who buy the gold are in rich countries. And For The Win is a kid’s book about what happens when the gold farmers form a union and use videogames to outsmart their bosses and unionize and start the first independent – large independent trade unions in China and other countries where it’s illegal to unionize.

Leo Laporte That’s so great.

Cory Doctorow And so it was a really fun book to write. I borrowed a little gimmick from a great writer named Ken McCloud, I called the union the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, which is a joke – for those of you that know your labor history, it’s a little funny pun.

And it’s a book that’s got like, it’s got lots of great adventure and action because they’re fighting these pitched battles in videogames and they’re fighting pitched battles in the streets of Mumbai and in China. But it’s also a book about economics and about social justice, labor issues, behavioral economics.

It was a lot of fun to research and to write. And the reviews have been great. And the tour has been great, everywhere I’ve been it’s been packed houses.

Leo Laporte That’s so neat.

Cory Doctorow I’m going to be in New York next week for your New York readers. If Google ‘For The Win tour’, you’ll find our – or just go to craphound.com/ftw, you’ll find the tour schedule.

Leo Laporte That’s awesome. So instead of wobblies, they’re what, webbies?

Cory Doctorow Webblies. Webblies; the IWWWW.

Leo Laporte The Webblies.

Cory Doctorow The Webblies. The gamers united will never be defeated.

Leo Laprote Yeah. They need a song. We have a song.

Cory Doctorow That’s right.

Leo Laporte Quick round of stories. My friend, Jason Calacanis, kind of got in a little bit of a trouble the other day. He has an emailing mailing list with more than 23,000 on it. Apparently misconfigured the reply all, sent emails back to everybody on the list, and – so all of a sudden, people are getting messages back offering jobs. Somebody figured it out, said, well I might as well include a shameless promotion since this is like a big party now.

Cory Doctorow To unsubscribe, just die.

Leo Laporte Yeah. Because otherwise, you’re stuck. Jason discovered it in the wee hours of the morning and disabled the list, but there were 34 reply alls that went out to more than 23,000 people.

Robert Scoble The best thing I’ve ever done in terms of productivity is learn how to use Gmail’s filters.

Leo Laporte Yeah, no kidding. Gmail’s gotten better and better now. They’re getting – they’ve got folders now, and they got – I’ll tell you.

Robert Scoble I’ve written about 800 filters so far in the last three months, and it just has made a dramatic production improvement on my email.

Leo Laporte Wow.

Cory Doctorow I live and die by mail filters. My two favorites; one colors the message differently if it’s from someone who’s in my address book, which is just such a no-brainer it should be automatic. And I have it set so that I – every time I reply to you, it adds you to my address book. So I can tell email from people I’ve corresponded with from correspondence from people I haven’t.

And then the other one is that if it’s someone that I haven’t ever corresponded with, but I’m the only person on the to: line, it colors it differently.

Leo Laporte Right.

Cory Doctorow So it can distinguish mail, like bulk mail from individual mail. And those two things, sorting it by color, has been really, really good at making sure I don’t miss the spam. Or the non-spam, rather, the ham.

Leo Laporte It’s very Eudora of you. You do that with K9 or what do you do that with?

Cory Doctorow No I don’t do anything fancy with K9, I only K9 sort of walking between a place where I’m using my laptop and another place where I’m using my laptop. I use Thunderbird.

Leo Laporte Thunderbird, okay, cool.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, I got like three or four million archived emails at this point and sticking them up on Gmail or something even if I wasn’t worried about the privacy stuff, sticking them all on Gmail is like months of uploading.

Leo Laporte Yeah, you surprised me when you said you use POP mail. Is that why you don’t use IMAP? Same reason; you don’t want to keep the stuff under somebody’s server.

Cory Doctorow Well I used to use – I used to have the best IMAP config, I had a local IMAP running on my own computer, this was back when I was using a Mac and I was using it under OS X. So I had an IMAP server running on my own computer and then I had lots of different mail clients on the computer depending on what I wanted to do. So some were really good at searching and some were really good at filtering and some were really good at composing, and so because I can keep them all in sync with the same local IMAP server, it was really easy to just use them all.

And then there was an update to OS X and it didn’t – WFTPD, or WU-IMAP whatever the Washington University IMAP didn’t work anymore and I just gave up and I never went back to it. And I was thinking the other day, I’m up to, like a 500 gig hard drive in this ThinkPad, I’ve probably got enough room to make three or four copies of my mail spool, I should really do that. Because it was the most – it was the best fun I have ever had with my mail. It was super ninja email stuff.

Leo Laporte Yeah, then you use Procmail and stuff and really kind of filter it like crazy.

Cory Doctorow Oh yeah, I just saw an amazing presentation by the women who’s the chief scientist at bit.ly about her spam filters which are so good that she no longer checks her mail. Her mail sends her a text when there’s something good in it.

Leo Laporte Oh man, is that online somewhere?

Cory Doctorow Talk about Nerdvana…

Leo Laporte Is that online somewhere? I want that.

Cory Doctorow She’s putting it all on GitHub. She’s putting all her scripts on GitHub.

Leo Laporte All right.

Cory Doctorow Hilary – I’ve forgotten her surname – I want to say Mason.

Leo Laporte Hilary at bit.ly; I’m writing it down, I’m going to find the link. Buy.com has made its biggest sale yet, it sold itself $250 million to Rakuten, a Japanese company that runs the biggest ecommerce site in Japan. I was thinking of that because my IMAP company FastMail just got sold to Opera. So Opera is in the IMAP business, I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Here’s a story…

Cory Doctorow Norwegians are cool.

Leo Laporte They’re cool, I like Norwegians.

Cory Doctorow Yeah. They got awsome sweaters.

Leo Laporte They have to. Let’s see what else; HP expands recall of notebook computer batteries due to fire hazard, we always enjoy those stories. Bill Gates: More Profit Than Prophet. This is with an f and not a ph. This is a great article on The Atlantic analyzing Bill Gates’ predictions from the last – 15 years ago he wrote The Road Ahead. Apparently not exactly the road ahead. He wrote about email, for instance, 15 years ago. Electronic mail and shared screens will eliminate the need for many meetings, well that’s GoToMeeting, right. When face to face meetings do take place they’ll be more efficient because participants will have already exchanged background information via email; that’s true. He said we’ll be able to carry a wallet PC in our pocket or purse that will display messages and schedules and let your reader send electronic mail and faxes, monitor weather and stock reports; sounds like an iPad, maybe a smartphone.

Cory Doctorow Or a phone.

Leo Laporte Yeah. His prediction: the wireless network of the future will be faster, but unless there’s a major breakthrough, wireless networks will have far greater bandwidth, mobile devices will be able to send and receive – the wireless networks of the future will be faster, but the wired networks will still have better bandwidth, I get it okay. Mobile devices will be able to send – of course that’s, not hard. Mobile devices will be able to send or receive messages, but it will be expensive and unusual to use them to receive an individual video stream. I hope not; wrong. Let’s see what else real quickly. Thirty years of Pac-Man did you see the Google front page search had a Java script Pac-Man on it.

Robert Scoble Wait, Bill Gates predicted 30 years of Pac-Man?

Leo Laporte No. 15 years ago he said Google will have…

Robert Scoble [ph] If only he’d gone with (1:34:05) 30 years of Pac-Man. So it’s interesting because as a science fiction writer I’m always struck by the number of people who think that I’m trying to predict the future. And I think that science fiction writers have never been very good at that, but what you can often tell by reading someone’s predictions about the future is what they’re worried about in the present, what their hopes and fears are about technology in the present.

And Mary Shelley wasn’t worried that animated corpses would stalk you. Mary Shelley was worried that technology was getting out of control and that Frankenstein’s monster would be kind of a metaphor for all of us. Asimov had a lot of faith in big institutions like the New Deal and so on and so he wrote about the Foundation, right, he wrote about a 2000 year future history projection where a group of wise people round a table could predict the next 2000 years of human history and make sure that it didn’t go off the rails. So a very New Deal way of thinking about the future. So you can often learn a lot about the present and about the past from looking at futuristic predictions; you can rarely learn much about the future from that.

Leo Laporte You know where I think science fiction authors do influence the future, though, because a lot of future scientists read science fiction and then end up working on stuff that science fiction predicted.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, that’s very true, yeah. Of course, you’ve got that the metaverse being echoed in Second Life, you’ve got Arthur C. Clark predicting orbits that then people built in but that’s slightly different from predicting that this is kind of an inevitability. Let’s talk about Pac-Man.

Leo Laporte Pac-Man; 30 years old and on the Google front page. Isn’t it great? This is actually really as much a demonstration of what HTML5 can do. It’s the first time I can remember a Google Doodle actually being animated like this.

Cory Doctorow I think that's right.

Leo Laporte And Google’s kept it alive by the way if you go to goggle.com/pacman, it’s still there.

Cory Doctorow So I think the next Doodle is going to be one of those under-construction animated gifs.

Leo Laporte And for what – to do what?

Cory Doctorow Just, as a 30 years of under-construction icons on the web.

Leo Laporte That's a good idea actually. Somebody told me if you insert the coin twice, you can get Ms Pac-Man. Oh yeah, there she is, yeah. I like that. Let’s see, Twitter expects…

Cory Doctorow It’s funny before you go on, the first gold farmer I ever knew, I used to hang out in an arcade in the Sheppard Center in North York in Toronto, and there was like – we would cut class to go in, but there were older kids. We were about 14-year, there were kids who were about 18, 19 who just dropped out entirely to hang out at the arcade and there was one guy who was kind of a – like a part-time hashish dealer, full-time gauntlet hustler. And so he would play gauntlet all day long and you’d get in, you’d cut after lunch you get in around one or two in the afternoon…

Leo Laporte He’d have you set up.

Cory Doctorow …he would have build up the most epic Valkyrie, and he’d sell it to you for a dollar. And he was like the world’s worst paid stoner gold farmer of the late 80s.

Leo Laporte Wow! That’s – you’re right, a proto-gold farmer.

Cory Doctorow That’s right.

Leo Laporte Twitter expects hundreds of advertisers this year. That’s exciting. Twitter plans to have hundreds of advertisers using its new ad system in the fourth quarter as the company ramps up to become a self-sustaining profitable business. Do – you use Twitter, Cory. I see you on Twitter.

Cory Doctorow I do yeah. I find it – I had no idea what it was for, like Ev sent me an invite when he first started it, and I had one person on my follow list, and it was configured to use my phone. And basically every time I turned my phone on, it would tell me a whole bunch of things about what this guy I barely knew was eating for breakfast. And I just – I was like, ‘wow, this is the dumbest service ever, Ev, what’s wrong with you!’ And then I was at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference and we were using Twitter to follow it and comment on it, and all of a sudden it was like scales fell from my eyes, so I started really using it a lot and now I use it all the time.

Now it’s kind of an all-day, everyday thing. It’s actually – one of the crazy weird things about Twitter from this book tour is it’s like getting the reviews in real time, so I get off stage, finish doing a two-hour, three-hour signing and on my way to dinner I’ll look at my tweets on the phone and it will be like this kind of – all the stuff that people liked and didn’t like about what just happened, which is a really interesting thing. Normally what you get is the next morning you get a few emails, but this was really real time.

Leo Laporte Yeah, I think you’ve probably experienced that as well, Robert. I mean this thing now when we speak, immediately how you did; it’s kind of scary. I look at the reviews for the shows; they happen as the show is going on.

Robert Scoble Well while you guys were talking about books, I was reading all the tweets going on about this show.

Leo Laporte Yeah, there you go. And I’m using Buzz more and more. I really love Buzz. I know, Robert, you’ve kind of given Buzz some love lately. I’m hoping Buzz kind of – which is the Google Twitter. We didn’t hear much about Buzz at the Google I/O.

Robert Scoble No, but they showed off the API for it.

Leo Laporte But they did announce an API. Yeah, they finally have an API and it is possible now to write third-party applications. Seesmic immediately did on Seesmic Web.

Robert Scoble And I am on an NDA beta program and there’s a bunch of features coming.

Leo Laporte Good. I’m excited, I love Buzz, I really do. Yahoo! has decided that they want to be, I don’t know what, a content company. They’ve just purchased for $100 million one of these demand media type companies; Associated Content. You know what demand media is; that’s where somebody looks and sees what people are searching for, hires somebody really cheap to write some really crappy content around that because they know it’s going to drive a lot of traffic; sells ads on it; profit. And Associated Content claims to have something like 30,000 bloggers they pay something like $5 an article for. And now I guess Yahoo!’s in that business.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, it’s funny because another word for demand media is magazine, right. Before the web came along and blogs and so on, the way that – you would be crazy to like spend a lot of money publishing a magazine unless you thought there were people out there who wanted to read it. So the magazine formula goes ‘find something that you think other people care about, find someone who can write about it, have them write about it.’ And for me the amazing thing about blogging now which I’ve been doing for 10 years has been it goes like – takes something that you’re really interested in, write about it because it costs nothing to publish it, and then see if there’s anyone else out there who likes the same stuff as you. And boy, that’s way more satisfying. Maybe it’s more indulgent, but I find it so much more satisfying.

Leo Laporte I agree. I agree. You don’t like the tail to wag the dog. We do – we kind of do the same thing here. We think about would anybody be interested in this show, but ultimately we do the shows we’re interested in.

Cory Doctorow What's it cost you to do a show that you don’t like, right? I mean people go like look at all those blogs that were abandoned, doesn’t that show the Blogger is pointless? It’s like, you know how much it used to cost to find out you didn’t want to publish a magazine? You know, thousands, millions, people lost their houses. Now you can find out you don’t want to publish a magazine in an hour, for free.

Leo Laporte Tom Merritt’s coming over here June 1, he’s going to start with the news show. But Tom and were talking and I think what we – it was his idea and I’d really like to do this, maybe it was Ken Sheppardson’s; another new hire. A show a day. We’re going to launch a show a day in August. Every day a new show. And then we were also…

Cory Doctorow This Week in Dog Hair!

Leo Laporte Yeah. It doesn’t matter, a show a day. And then… Cory Doctorow Twitter!

Leo Laporte And then we’ll use Kickstarter to say, okay here’s five shows…

Cory Doctorow That’s pretty cool.

Leo Laporte The first show to reach $5,000 we’ll launch, and we’ll use that money to launch the show. How about that?

Cory Doctorow Good idea.

Leo Laporte Yeah. Just same idea, so I shouldn’t really knock demand media, except that I do knock anybody who’s cynical enough to put out crappy content just because you’ll find it.

Robert Scoble Yeah, and you know it’s funny, because like on the other side of that you get all the spam for ‘write articles for money!’, which is actually a really old scam. If you get like old copies of like Popular Mechanics from the 50s…

Leo Laporte Right, right.

Cory Doctorow The ‘write articles for money’ scam has been around for, you know, I think that you know there’s a cuneiform on a stone tablet somewhere that says ‘etch tablets for money!’

Leo Laporte How much money do you make etching tablets for money?

Cory Doctorow Well, I think you get at least one goat a month.

Leo Laporte Robert Scoble, what are you up to these days? What's new for you? I know you’re cranking out great video…

Robert Scoble I’m about to go and go to New York for the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and…

Leo Laporte That’s on right now. I know Sarah Lane is out there. We’re also hiring Sarah Lane; she’s going to start June 1 as well.

Robert Scoble Very cool.

Leo Laporte Yeah. And – so what do you expect at Disrupt, anything disruptive?

Robert Scoble Well, I’ve seen a few of the companies – well I can’t talk about them, I’ll get them kicked off the stage.

Leo Laporte All right. We’ll find – we will find out next week.

Robert Scoble But there’s some pretty interesting companies; one will make Windows dramatically better, which is really cool, and one is going to bring social to TV, which is also pretty interesting.

Leo Laporte Sounds good.

Robert Scoble Whether it’s going to win or not, we don’t know; that’s what’s fun about startups.

Leo Laporte [ph] The clouds and a thousand flowers bloom. (1:42:48) Absolutely. Robert Scoble is the scobleizer; scobleizer.com. His blog post today got responses from Facebook’s Vice President of Global Positioning.

Cory Doctorow Global Positioning – that guy is awesome with a SatNav!

Leo Laporte What is his title? Global…

Robert Scoble They know where I am, I’m carrying two GPS just in case they can’t find the first one…

Cory Doctorow The man with two GPS never knows where he is.

Leo Laporte That’s true, it’s like two watches.

Cory Doctorow That’s right.

Leo Laporte Elliot Schrage, and also an email from Mark Zuckerberg, so I know you’re the guy if people want to get a hold of you. scobleizer.com and we look forward to videos from Disrupt and of course it’s all there at – and are you still doing Warehouse 52? What is the…

Robert Scoble building43.

Leo Laporte building43.com.

Robert Scoble The center of the Internet.

Leo Laporte Cory Doctorow is at craphound.com. Find out about his new book at craphound.com/ftw and…

Cory Doctorow And at Boing Boing.

Leo Laporte I forgot Boing Boing. Let’s leave that out. boingboing.net which is the original – the blog, and a must read every single day. If you’re not reading Boing Boing, you’re missing some great stuff, really, really great stuff.

Cory Doctorow Hey, that’s what it looks like with the ad blocker turned off. Just kidding!

Leo Laporte Cory! Cory, you’re not supposed to say that…

Robert Scoble At least he is not trying to goose up his own revenues.

Leo Laporte No kidding, I love it. We won’t tell Mark you said that.

Cory Doctorow Oh, I’m just kidding.

Leo Laporte Jeez. John Battelle’s going to kill you!

Cory Doctorow Yeah so, and I’m going to be in New York next week for Book Expo America, and I’m doing live events, two stores in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn. And then I’m going to be in Toronto on June 4th, for the big Canadian launch of For The Win at the Merril Collection.

Leo Laporte That’s exciting; Toronto your hometown.

Cory Doctorow It is; I’m going to see the family.

Leo Laporte Back home. That’s where his server – your home is where the server is.

Cory Doctorow That’s right.

Leo Laporte Thank you all for joining us. Don’t forget we do shows about all of these subjects. In fact we’re doing more and more live coverage. If you were watching Wednesday and Thursday morning, we did live coverage of the Google I/O keynotes, with commentary by Kevin Marks, our own Larry Flanagan and Tom Merritt and we will – those videos are on our TWiT specials feed at twit.tv. Mark Frauenfelder will be on Net @ Night at night this week on Tuesday to talk with you, is he going to talk about Boing Boing? Oh he’s got a new…

Cory Doctorow I think he’s probably talking about his new book.

Leo Laporte He’s got a new book, that’s right.

Cory Doctorow Yeah, he has got an awesome book about making stuff by hand and the quiet dignity that accrues there too.

Leo Laporte I love it. Yeah, we just got the book. So that will be fun and we have a show called this WEEK in GOOGLE on Wednesday’s. There’s lots of good material, make sure you check it all out at twit.tv. Subscribe to this show at twit.tv or on iTunes, the Zune store anywhere. Finer podcasts are carried both in audio and video now, and we are also on YouTube at youtube.com/twit.

Thank you all so much for being here, we will see you next week. Another TWiT is in the can.