Dan Rather speaks 

Larry King is interviewing him right now.

Rather seems to wear his heart on his sleeve... talked about the new gig with Mark Cuban... said he wants to do something on the internet but isn't sure what.

Could be a podcast 

The Larry King Show would work as an audio podcast, almost as well as Meet the Press. The only time you'd want a visual is when he has a has-been actor as a guest -- something he seems to do a lot. But even then some "album art" of Liz Taylor or Andy Griffith would be enough to make your judgement about how they are holding up.

Freedom from the press 

From Democracy Now, an audio interview with Ron Suskind about his talk-of-the-net book revealing, among other things, that the U.S. deliberately bombed Al Jazeera's office in Kabul in 2001. The interview is the last long story in the news show. A juicy bit: CIA personnel call Dick Cheney "Edgar," as in Edgar Bergen. I have to read this book.

What's the "one percent doctrine," taken for the book's title? According to Suskind, Cheney believed that threats with even a 1% likelihood must be treated as certainties.

The Colbert Report's Suskind interview 

Wow! 

Little guy expects to reach level 60 in WOW tonight. I have the camera ready, but maybe the microphone would be more fun. These precious childhood moments, they just bring a tear to my eye.

Flash meeting blows away Web-X and Live Meeting for my money  

I wasn't acquainted with it but when I checked out an archived k-web status meeting today, I ended up getting distracted from the meat of the meeting and fascinated with the medium. It's a project of the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, not commercially available but you can apply to use it on their server.

Not everybody edits 

I wonder if anyone has thought about making an offline viewer for OPML files. Better still -- because there are people who won't take the trouble to install anything -- how about a tool that would allow you to package an OPML file into an executable format you could send as an e-mail attachment.

There are times when you want to share an outline but you don't want to put it online. Example: notes on competitive research. You can do the CTRL-P thing from the OPML Editor and send the HTML file as an attachment. I've done that at work, and it works, but the outline is fully expanded, which isn't nearly as cool or useful.

Later: AJAX folks are doing stuff that looks related -- is it?

Julien Couvreur was working on a take-it-with-you wiki in January using Flash.

In his detailed narrating-your-work post, Julien reminded me that "...the AJAX trend is not simply about rich UI and eye candy, but more generally about providing a more responsive experience by optimizing the bottleneck resource (the network): you cache the data that doesn't change (some HTML, Javascript or CSS), and transfer only the information that is dynamic." When people diss AJAX and equate it with slidy Web 2.0 superficiality they forget about this aspect.

Still later: What would it take to get a browser to recognize and render an OPML file? I'm out of my depth here. Could it be done with a plugin or would something more fundamental have to change down deep in the browser?

I'm not going anywhere 

People are going to die from heat here today.