onfocus

I'm still alive! And if I had time to blog, I might post stuff like this:

• Eddie is doing great. Two months old, super chubby. Loves eating and sleeping. Hates gas.
• Last month Machinist had a nice summary of How Comcast blocks your Internet traffic—another reason network neutrality should be set in legal stone.
• How about those Google coalitions of the willing? What happened to open standards? And when will we get open cell networks, already? Walt Mossburg nailed the reasons why we need this in Free My Phone. Google's entry into the cell world isn't disruptive at all.
• But hey, I dig Gmail's IMAP. I'm using it everywhere now—especially on my iPhone. And the Google can block spam like nobody's business.
• I was quoted in a Baseline article about Yahoo!: YaWho? (In the section Accentuate the Positive.) Basically I said that I liked Yahoo's REST-based Web APIs, and I was disappointed Google shut down their Web APIs. I do, and I am.
• I love this picture of an Alaskan lake with aurora.
• sk and I have been reading lots of parenting advice on Ask Metafilter. The following questions have been particularly helpful:
  • Ways to keep being the rock for my family?
  • Good advice for a new dad.
  • How to play with a newborn?
  • How do I stay sane while home all day with a newborn?
• And yeah, my work at MeFi is going well. Did a fun Twitter thing a while back to go along with the Flickr thing. Lots of behind-the-scenes stuff going on now.
• I want to be Neil Postman when I grow up. I'm loving his book Disappearance of Childhood. It's a crash course in media history, how media affects our concept of childhood, and how literary and visual cultures differ. And to go along with that, I'm reading The Victorian Internet about the history of electronic communication. The book opens talking about France's network of optical telegraphs in the early 1800's—fun!
• Next up on my to-read list is Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, Books on Fire, and The Plague.

Until next month (probably), have fun without me.

The O'Reilly Radar picked up on an internal conversation I was involved with about Google's decision to stop supporting their Search API. There's more at the Radar: Google Deprecates Their SOAP Search API.

I can't help but think of the lawyerly phrase arbitrary and capricious to describe the decision because no one from Google has explained the move in a public forum. I'm sure there were some black hat SEO types using the Search API for nefarious purposes—and I'm guessing the decision to shut it down stems in part from that. (Not to mention that SOAP has fallen out of favor.) But that's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Why such a limited alternative? (The API has been "replaced" by the Ajax API, a very limited cousin of the Search API.) And why not move to a REST API if that's where the developer preference winds have blown? In one of my emails I mentioned that this decision reminds me of Microsoft's decision to scrap their MVP program (which was later reinstated). Why alienate future potential power users?

Also, the new Hackzine blog picked up a tip I stumbled on for grabbing an API Key while the grabbing is good: Get a Google SOAP API Key.

Update: Slashdot weighs in. For them it's all about the failure of SOAP, not a misstep by Google.

Hey, this site is the fourth result on Google when you search for Paul. I'm situated behind Paul Graham, Paul McCartney, and DePaul Univeristy. I know because I heard from the fifth Paul on the list—Paul Stamatiou—who found me via Google. (I'd link to them, but I don't want to add to their Paulrank values.) I'm expecting an email from Paul Harvey (10th on the list) any day now.