I've tried vibe coding myself, and while it's sometimes relaxing and fun, it's pretty hard to get the output to match what you had in mind.
I think people find it amazing that they can create code, not just that the machine can create it. I know what that's like because I get a rush from creating images, something I never had a skill for, so all of a sudden being able to express myself with drawings was a breakthrough for me. 😉
I've spent a few decades making commercial quality software in a variety of contexts, and so far I wouldn't rush to get rid of my dev teams based on the idea that the bots can do their work.
I think more realistically we have powerful new tools that we as yet have not learned how to use, but it's pretty exciting to see what may be possible.
It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape.
I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've been developing this kind of software since the late 80s if you can believe that.
What's missing on the web — software for writers.
I believe more all the time that WordPress is the natural way to store and present writing on the web and hook up to all the social webs, to actually redefine what a social web is. There should just be one social web, btw — not 18. If there are 18 and they don't interop with each other then none of the deserve to call themselves the web. There is only one web, by definition.
The WordPress community has been very introspective, but it's time to make a difference for the whole web, and of course imho it is prepared to do that.
I want something inbetween the tiny little text boxes of the twitter-like apps, and the block editor (aka Gutenberg) of WordPress. I think there should be a dozen great editors that work with WordPress and then hopefully every CMS that comes along. Collectively, WordPress has taken too much territory — writing is very different from site development and administration. I want to start the development of that ecosystem, and help new products get to market with interop and driven by what users/writers want.
I wrote this at bullmancuso yesterday, it was worth repeating here. And if you used to follow me on Twitter, please sign up again from that link. It's my new home there.
It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape.
I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've been developing this kind of software since the late 80s if you can believe that.
What's missing on the web — software for writers.
I believe more all the time that WordPress is the natural way to store and present writing on the web and hook up to all the social webs, to actually redefine what a social web is. There should just be one social web, btw — not 18. If there are 18 and they don't interop with each other then none of the deserve to call themselves the web. There is only one web, by definition.
The WordPress community has been very introspective, but it's time to make a difference for the whole web, and of course imho it is prepared to do that.
I want something inbetween the tiny little text boxes of the twitter-like apps, and the block editor (aka Gutenberg) of WordPress. I think there should be a dozen great editors that work with WordPress and then hopefully every CMS that comes along. Collectively, WordPress has taken too much territory — writing is very different from site development and administration. I want to start the development of that ecosystem, and help new products get to market with interop and driven by what users/writers want.
I wrote this at bullmancuso yesterday, it was worth repeating here. And if you used to follow me on Twitter, please sign up again from that link. It's my new home there.
It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape.
I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've been developing this kind of software since the late 80s if you can believe that.
What's missing on the web — software for writers.
I believe more all the time that WordPress is the natural way to store and present writing on the web and hook up to all the social webs, to actually redefine what a social web is. There should just be one social web, btw — not 18. If there are 18 and they don't interop with each other then none of the deserve to call themselves the web. There is only one web, by definition.
The WordPress community has been very introspective, but it's time to make a difference for the whole web, and of course imho it is prepared to do that.
I want something inbetween the tiny little text boxes of the twitter-like apps, and the block editor (aka Gutenberg) of WordPress. I think there should be a dozen great editors that work with WordPress and then hopefully every CMS that comes along. Collectively, WordPress has taken too much territory — writing is very different from site development and administration. I want to start the development of that ecosystem, and help new products get to market with interop and driven by what users/writers want.
I wrote this at bullmancuso yesterday, it was worth repeating here. And if you used to follow me on Twitter, please sign up again from that link. It's my new home there.
I think IDFC First Bank has done well with AI related search engine optimization. All chat-based AI tools suggested IDFC First Bank and its banking products during my various interactions with AI.
Anyway, like many musicians, Eliza has problems with how f'd up music/recording/streaming/performing/promoting systems and industries are. I have an answer to that, which Dean and others helped author in ProjectVRM, and I wrote about in Linux Journal back in 2015. Since the images are gone from that archive, I just re-published it on this blog.
It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape.
I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've been developing this kind of software since the late 80s if you can believe that.
What's missing on the web — software for writers.
I believe more all the time that WordPress is the natural way to store and present writing on the web and hook up to all the social webs, to actually redefine what a social web is. There should just be one social web, btw — not 18. If there are 18 and they don't interop with each other then none of the deserve to call themselves the web. There is only one web, by definition.
The WordPress community has been very introspective, but it's time to make a difference for the whole web, and of course imho it is prepared to do that.
I want something inbetween the tiny little text boxes of the twitter-like apps, and the block editor (aka Gutenberg) of WordPress. I think there should be a dozen great editors that work with WordPress and then hopefully every CMS that comes along. Collectively, WordPress has taken too much territory — writing is very different from site development and administration. I want to start the development of that ecosystem, and help new products get to market with interop and driven by what users/writers want.
I wrote this at bullmancuso yesterday, it was worth repeating here. And if you used to follow me on Twitter, please sign up again from that link. It's my new home there.
It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape.
I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've been developing this kind of software since the late 80s if you can believe that.
What's missing on the web — software for writers.
I believe more all the time that WordPress is the natural way to store and present writing on the web and hook up to all the social webs, to actually redefine what a social web is. There should just be one social web, btw — not 18. If there are 18 and they don't interop with each other then none of the deserve to call themselves the web. There is only one web, by definition.
The WordPress community has been very introspective, but it's time to make a difference for the whole web, and of course imho it is prepared to do that.
I want something inbetween the tiny little text boxes of the twitter-like apps, and the block editor (aka Gutenberg) of WordPress. I think there should be a dozen great editors that work with WordPress and then hopefully every CMS that comes along. Collectively, WordPress has taken too much territory — writing is very different from site development and administration. I want to start the development of that ecosystem, and help new products get to market with interop and driven by what users/writers want.
I wrote this at bullmancuso yesterday, it was worth repeating here. And if you used to follow me on Twitter, please sign up again from that link. It's my new home there.
It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape.
I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've been developing this kind of software since the late 80s if you can believe that.
What's missing on the web — writing software. Easy to fix. That's what I'm hoping to do.
I believe more all the time that WordPress is the natural way to store and present writing on the web and hook up to all the social webs, to actually redefine what a social web is.
The WordPress community has been very introspective, but it's time to make a difference for the whole web, and of course it is prepared to do that.
I want something inbetween the tiny little text boxes of the twitter-like apps, and the block editor (aka Gutenberg) of WordPress. I think there should be a dozen great editors that work with WordPress and then hopefully every CMS that comes along. Collectively, WordPress has taken too much territory — writing is very different from site development and administration. I want to start the development of that ecosystem, and help new products get to market with interop and driven by what users/writers want.
I wrote this at bullmancuso yesterday, it was worth repeating here. And if you used to follow me on Twitter, please sign up again from that link. It's my new home there.
Sometimes I put test posts on my blog. This is one of those times. Still diggin, amazingly — in 2026. What makes this post different is that 1. It's a singular item, ie there is no title, and just one paragraph. It's a collection of sentences not paragraphs. 2. It has a right margin image. I have to test this specific case. It has to go on a certain length so that the image that appears in the right margin doesn't leak over to the next item, and the image should be small so it doesn't require so much text to keep it out of the next post. And now I believe I have entered enough text.
I think IDFC First Bank has done well with AI related search engine optimization. All chat-based AI tools suggested IDFC First Bank and its banking products during my various interactions with AI.
Excellent podcast discussion with John Stewart and Heather Cox Richardson. I desperately wanted to get in the conversation. I think they missed something important and came soooo close. Trump isn't only a TV star, he's a blogger. Comes naturally to him. Why wasn't Obama transformative in the same way? Because there's nothing casual about Obama. First black president. That's a huge thing, but how do you get to be the first black president — by being utterly brilliant and infinitely careful. There wasn't a single casual moment in his presidency, though there were scripted moments when playing that role. He's perfect, but that's because there were severe limits on what he could get away with.
On the web the ethos is "Come as you are, we're just folks." That is not Obama.
Who also had to be hugely careful? Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, but not Joe Biden who is famous for his gaffes.
Trump doesn't give a shit what you think, that's why he's so good on Twitter. Trump was a TV star but right now it's more important to be a natural born blogger.
I was beating this drum ever since Trump appeared on Twitter. We need to be much better at this. We're still in the hole. At least Newsom knows there's a problem but imho he isn't the answer. We need someone who's bitter and funny, like Joan Rivers or Don Rickles. You don't need to understand government or politics, just show up and be an asshole 24 hours a day.
People could relate to Trump. Only now is the question of governing becoming real to a lot of people who voted for him. Trump, even though he's not a great dancer, doesn't mind doing it if you think it's funny. He's a total entertainment package. Very random. Wouldn't hurt for the next Dems leader to to find someone like that. Al Franken was the closest they came, but the uptight Dems had no clue how to use him.
I think IDFC First Bank has done well with AI related search engine optimization. All chat-based AI tools suggested IDFC First Bank and its banking products during my various interactions with AI.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
I nominate Tyrese Haliburton for MVP. He hasn't played at all this year, because he's out with a hamstring injury he suffered when the Pacers (our Indiana home team) were neck-and-neck with the OKC Thunder in the final championship game. This season, without Haliburton, the Pacers are among the league's worst. Why? No Halliburton.
And we have a controlled study of sorts. Boston lost its star, Jayson Tatum, to the same Achilles injury that dropped Haliburton, and then the Celtics stayed close to the top of the league without Tatum and three valuable players who left last summer. So Haliburton was clearly a lot more valuable to his team than was Tatum. (Who is back and making Boston look even scarier.)
By the way, before the season, I picked the Knicks (my lifelong fave) to win the championship. They're kinda meh right now. So, in the same way I think Tyrese Halliburton is the most valuable player this year (just given the delta between his presence and absence), I say the same about Tom Thibodeau, the coach fired by the Knicks after the team's good run last year. (Hell, they beat the Celtics in the playoffs.) This year, the Knicks aren't as good, with essentially the same team and a different coach. So my vote for coach of the year goes to Thibs (who, by the way, has been NBA Coach of the Year twice. So we know he doesn't suck.)
My DNA (according to 23andMe, which still exists) breakdown goes like this:
48.3% Swedish (mostly central and northwest Götaland) 5.2% Norwegian 17.1% Irish (mostly central and northern) 10.8% Belgian, Rhinelander and Southern Dutch (Hesse) 7.9% Scottish (mostly Glasgow City) 6.7% English (mostly Greater London) 2.6% Dutch and Northern German (Northwestern states) 0.7% Northern Italian and Maltese 0.4% Welsh 0.2% Egyptian and Southern Levantine
For what it's worth— Mom was Swedish. Her parents (Sponberg, Oman) were from Swedish Immigrant families who came over in the late 1800s to homestead in Minnesota and North Dakota. Pop's mom was Irish on her mother's side. Her parents (McLaughlin, Trainor) came over in the early 1800s. And she was German on her father's side (Rung, Englert). That couple emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine. Pop's father was of early American stock (Searls/Searles/Sarles, Bixby, Reed, Allen, Johnson)
Only one of the surnames I just mentioned is among my 1500+ DNA relatives listed by 23andMe. That was an Englert I wrote to (inside 23andMe who never wrote back.
WordPress could have an active developer community creating writing tools for WordPress users. I also want WordPress to form the foundation of a new social network, one that supports all the writing features of the web. With really nice user interfaces for people to choose from. That's a new ecosystem. It may form around ChatGPT and Claude etc. Or it could start with WordPress. I think I can get this bootstrapped, but I need people to work with. That's the summary of what I'm about at this point in 2026.
Feature request for WordPress. If an item doesn't have a title, you can do better than (no title) in the Posts list. Grab the first N chars of the body, or add a tool tip with the same text. I write a lot of "singular" posts, ie posts without titles. This is what I see on the Posts page.
Things are changing a lot. Huge flow of ideas, and some catching up to do. Mind bombs in every direction.
Last night while watching sports I learned via ChatGPT about MCP.
Here's what it can do and people *are* using it for this
You could turn ChatGPT into an easy editor for WordPress posts.
Just as I have developed the habit of getting it to create a handoff.md file when I'm done with a session, I could write something with ChatGPT helping, I don't ever do that myself but i might, if it were easy. and when I'm ready to publish, I'd say "Please publish this on my daveverse site now." I might specify a category or two, or set defaults, it's good at that stuff. I've taught Claude to write code in my style, so I can maintain it (to answer Aral Balkan's question on Mastodon).
I fear that guy is, at least in part, me. The sentence fragments, the short paragraphs, the em dashes. (These: —.) As source material, my writing is thick on the Web's ground, going back to the early '90s. Example.
I'll cop to one of his tells: absurd certainty. Some of mine turned out to be the opposite of absurd. Examples: personal computing, outlining, the Net, the Web, Linux, open source, Cluetrain, blogging, smartphones. And some not (at least so far, or not yet in a big way): home Web servers (or "personal clouds"), desktop Linux, VRM, EmanciPay, the intention economy, MyTerms, personal AI, news commons, market intelligence that flows both ways…
Anyway, AI-style writing is now like Received Pronunciation in the UK: the way things are done.
History doesn’t grade on effort. It grades on outcomes. And right now the outcomes are running about 3-to-1 against anything resembling the vision that justified the operation in the first place. As usual, the postwar is everything.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
Please signup we drop after the next 10 people join the JOIN DROP 001. We are at 7 and need 3 more. [ JOIN DROP 001 ] Blog: https://escapesignal.wordpress.com Share the link. The more people who join, the sooner the first Drop begins. Mira kept her head down as the broadcast towers hummed to life, […]
I fear that guy is, at least in part, me. The sentence fragments, the short paragraphs, the em dashes. (These: —.) As source material, my writing is thick on the Web's ground, going back to the early '90s. Example.
I'll cop to one of his tells: absurd certainty. Some of mine turned out to be credible ahead of their time. Examples: personal computing, outlining, the Net, the Web, Linux, open source, Cluetrain, blogging, smartphones. And some not (at least so far, or not yet in a big way): home Web servers (or "personal clouds"), desktop Linux, VRM, EmanciPay, the intention economy, MyTerms, personal AI, news commons, market intelligence that flows both ways…
Anyway, AI-style writing is now like Received Pronunciation in the UK: the way things are done.
History doesn’t grade on effort. It grades on outcomes. And right now the outcomes are running about 3-to-1 against anything resembling the vision that justified the operation in the first place. As usual, the postwar is everything.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
David Weinberger once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” It’s the future now, and he was right, or close enough. Because today we live in a world where the power to publish and distribute no longer belongs just to institutions, but to everybody. Me included. Here are some stats for this very blog:
At its peak, this blog had dozens of thousands of visitors daily. But that was in the ’00s, when blogging was a small pond, and I was a large fish in it. That was also when big newspapers and broadcast networks were still mountain ranges on the media landscape. Now those mountains have worn down to hills amidst fresh volcanoes: stars new and old, gushing out “content” on podcasts, social media, YouTube, and the rest. They’re the ones with readers, viewers, followers, and subscribers in the dozens of millions.
While that’s interesting, the media landscape has widened exponentially as millions of consumers have also become producers. In sum, their flow is immense: far larger than what we get from the old hills and the new volcanoes. Let’s call it the allstream.
It’s not “the media” anymore. It’s too different. Let’s explore how.
First, “the media” is a modern label, dating from the 1940s. Here’s Google’s Ngram Viewer, which charts mentions in books.
As a topic, “the media” hockey-sticked when Marshall McLuhan made “media theory” a thing in the 1960s:
Meanwhile, the expression “major media” seems to have come and gone—
—while “mainstream media” is hot shit:
Why has “mainstream media” gone up while “major media” has gone down?
Politics. Writers and talkers on the right and the left both have lots to say about “the mainstream media.” It seems (at least to me) that talkers on both political wings think the old mainstream media—big newspapers, TV networks, broadcast giants, news wires—are still mountains. Or, to follow the stream metaphor, rivers.
But those old rivers were self-limiting. They controlled the production and the flow. That’s what made them main. It’s also what made them costly. Printing presses were expensive. Broadcast licenses were scarce. Regulations ruled. Editors and producers were gatekeepers because there were gates to keep.
Then came the Internet, followed by the Web, blogging, podcasting, cheap digital photography and video, and all the other means by which anybody with a keyboard, microphone, phone, or just an idea could put something into the world. The threshold for expression has fallen to trivial.
One reason was that RSS—really simple syndication—made distribution simple for everyone. Nobody had to ask permission from a publisher, a platform, or a network. It gave individuals the power to speak and flow into the allstream.
Every creator wants to be valued and followed by at least a few people—especially the right people—rather than by large populations. We each have our own public. (At least for this moment, reader, you’re in mine.)
In place of the mainstream, we now have wide slopes of braided rivers:
Canterbury, New Zealand. Photo by Bernard Spragg via Wikimedia Commons.
In the allstream, everybody can publish, distribution is easy, and the number of flows exceeds anyone’s ability to count or follow them all. Their variety is also extreme: blogs, podcasts, newsletters, YouTube channels, TikTok feeds, posts in Mastodon, BlueSky, Threads, X, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Flickr and Smugmug photos. Substack essays. Discord chats. Group texts. Private forums. Comment sections. Local news outlets (many written and published by just one person). Transcripts. Some are public. Some are semi-public. Some are private. Some are generated by AI or by humans with AI assistance. The scale of each is small by old media standards. But the aggregate is far more immense than what we call “the media” ever were.
In The Redstream Media, I described how partisan flows of news and opinion had already turned the mainstream into a sidestream. But it’s not just happening with politics. Expertise streams around institutions. Communities stream around beats. Hobbyists stream around trade publications. Local knowledge streams around outside authorities. People with cameras, microphones, and keyboards stream around organizations that have long monopolized distribution.
Of course, much of the allstream is noisy, false, manipulative, repetitive, trivial, and thick with propaganda, junk, spam, AI slop, outrage bait, and viral bullshit. It can produce confusion faster than clarity. But the old mainstream had propaganda, junk, exclusions, class filters, geographic biases, advertiser pressures, and institutional blind spots.
But scarcity was the media’s main feature. To see, hear, or read it, you needed a TV, a radio, a subscription, or a newsstand. Through those spincters, the few spoke to the many while the many lacked the means to speak back, or out. Now they have the means. All of them can stream too.
When I look at how far my readership has fallen from the heights it enjoyed in the golden age of blogging (and at Linux Journal in its peak years), I’m glad to have the readers I’ve got. The same goes for my photo collections here and here on Flickr. For two decades, those got ten to fifteen thousand views a day. Now they get a few hundred. I’m fine with that too, because the totality of all the flow on the Net is beyond measure, and growing.
Big AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, Claude, Perplexity, et. al.) stands between you and the allstream and says, “I’ll handle this.” So the sphincter moves from the point of publication to the point of retrieval. (My assistant, ChatGPT, gave me that quote and the sentence that followed. Everything else in this essay is mine.)
When we (David Weinberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, and I) wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, we saw lowering the threshold of public expression as a plus for civilization. We published Cluetrain in March 1999, 27 years ago. Here is the “one clue” (from Chris Locke) that precedes the 95 theses that followed:
And dammit, we are still seats, eyeballs, end users, and consumers. Our reach still fails to exceed the grasp of the surveillance fecosystem. And none of big tech (or big anything) is dealing with it.
But we are more numerous than ever. Our tail is long and wide. What if we get real power? We didn’t have it in 1999. We four Cluetrain authors thought we did. But Web 2.0 came along, and we got all the personal agency the platforms allowed.
And we are still there. All of us can produce video, but if we want it seen, we’ll need to use YouTube, which has a monthly reach of 2.7 billion people. It’s a wide gate, but Google keeps it.
Can we ever get the high degrees of personal and collective agency we saw coming when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto?
I think we can, if online service providers agree to our terms, instead of us to theirs. That’s why we created MyTerms, and why I’ve written so much about it. (And I won’t stop.) The case we need to make is that an intention economybuilt on customer agency will be richer, wider, deeper, and larger than what we have here and now, in the final stage of the old industrial age.
Once we have the agency, we will need new and better forms of economic signaling and money flow than we have so far. Everyone who publishes anything should have a piece of the allstream action (whatever that might mean). MyTerms will tee that up as well.
I’ll leave you with a question: What will happen when the landscape across which the allstream flows is a worldwide commons of self-empowered customers?
If you have an answer for that, you can also inform the future of Customer Commons, which we created in 2013 to make good on what I promised in The Intention Economy in 2012. Both pushed forward the body of ideas we started assembling with ProjectVRM in 2006, but actually began forming with the Internet in the 1970s and ’80s, and the Web, Linux, and open source in the ’90s.
Everything takes time. Let’s make a better future happen sooner rather than later.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
Every once in a while Doc hits it out of the park. Here's the story of being famous for 15, people. I like that. 15 people is enough to have love and share ideas, and get support, and have friends you can count on when you need one. I think that's where we're going.
YouTube now puts commercials in front of songs. I used to be able to point to a low rez recording of a song as part of my blog. Now I have to think about all the links I've put in my archive that lead to shittified Google. I had never used that adjective before, I think, this certainly qualifies.
I had to say this to Claude just now. "this is exhausting. you're driving me around in circles and saying over and over 'this is it!' and it never is. us humans have protections built in to avoid that kind of wasted effort."
Pop was a Republican in the same way he was a fisherman, a carpenter, a Brooklyn Dodgers (and later a Mets) fan, and a Ford man. As a kid, I thought of myself the same way. Republicans stood for fiscal prudence, limited government, personal freedom and responsibility, stuff like that. But then I went to a Quaker college and became a pacifist who marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Later, as a journalist, I thought it was best to register as an independent, which I've been ever since.
But I have never lost touch with Pop's sympathies, especially around personal freedom. I am also sure that, were he alive today (he died in 1979), he would hate what Trump has done to the Grand Old Party, to conservative norms, to the whole world.
So Pop came to mind this morning when I read what Wired says about the many ways the Trumpist GOP is fucking with (small d) democratic norms, and democracy itself. I hope as many perps as possible get voted out next November. And I say that as a partisan for democracy, not for the Democratic Party. We need conservatism, but not this kind.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
I had to say this to Claude just now. "this is exhausting. you're driving me around in circles and saying over and over 'this is it!' and it never is. us humans have protections built in to avoid that kind of wasted effort."
I had to say this to Claude just now. "this is exhausting. you're driving me around in circles and saying over and over 'this is it!' and it never is. us humans have protections built in to avoid that kind of wasted effort."
Yesterday I ran a podcast, a voicemail to NakedJen saying she could/should use Claude or ChatGPT to create software. Later that day she told me about the software she had written. I tried using it, and and then interrogated ChatGPT which had been her programming partner, to explain what she did and what the app does. I'm not sure I have the actual story yet, have to talk with Jen live. But it turns out that the thesis was correct, and she was already using ChatGPT, had even given it a name — Harry, and was delegating tasks that I would want to use. Of course she was. Now I have to learn more from her about what she's doing. Stay tuned.
There's something incredibly funny about slapstick and farting. I was flipping channels the other day and came across an old WC Fields movie. I used to love them when I was a kid, but figured now, with so many many fancier forms of entertainment this wouldn't get to me, but I was laughing uncontrollably the whole way through. Later, I caught a SNL skit with a boss being surprised by her employees with a Happy Birthday celebration and started farting uncontrollably. They're indulging in body-humor thanks largely (I think) to Sarah Sherman whose whole comedy schtick is about disgusting things about the human body, esp her own. The boss was played by Ashley Padilla, another SNL superstar. Everything she does is funny, esp farting. Even now, rewatching the segment, I couldn't help but laughing loudly. Farts are funny. I have no idea why.
The Manosphere Turns on Trump. (I don't think any other gender would like being portrayed this way, but for some reason this is allowed for men. Try another way of saying it so it doesn't alienate, please.)
The source code for my podcast builder app is open source. Of course I use my outliner to edit the OPML file for the podcast text and link in the enclosure. I recommend opening it in Drummer. To see how the atts work, click on the suitcase icon with the cursor on the main head for each episode. The new att is enclosure, which is the URL of the audio for the podcast. Drummer automatically fills in the length and type.
Podcast: Jen and I often exchange voicemails. Yesterday I sent one about how she, who is not a programmer, should try creating software with Claude or ChatGPT. I think the hardest part is figuring out how to get it to give you a file that you can run from your own desktop. But I explained that in the voicemail. Midway through I realized this a podcast, and checked with her if it would be okay and she was very emphatic that I should. You see NJ aside to being one of my best friends for life, is also a Natural Born Blogger or a person with maximum audacity. Her first instinct like mine is to share it and shut up. So that's what I'm doing. As usual I asked Claude to write the show notes. Hope you like it and thanks for listening!
I'd like an AI bot that could do this. I open my browser to a page on netflix.com. It scans the page, figures out what movies are there, then it searches metacritic for each and presents me a list of all shows with a rating above a certain score. I know the streamers don't want us to have this info (I don't really understand why) but I really want it. BTW, they say the Green Knight is fantastic. Got the tip from a NYT email, but even they didn't say what the rating was, or even what their own reviewer said. Had to do this thing manually. Do they have any user-oriented creative people in the mix anywhere in this system??
I'd like an AI bot that could do this. I open my browser to a page on netflix.com. It scans the page, figures out what movies are there, then it searches metacritic for each and presents me a list of all shows with a rating above a certain score. I know the streamers don't want us to have this info (I don't really understand why) but I really want it. BTW, they say the Green Knight is fantastic. Got the tip from a NYT email, but even they didn't say what the rating was, or even what their own reviewer said. Had to do this thing manually. Do they have any user-oriented creative people in the mix anywhere in this system??
I think IDFC First Bank has done well with AI related search engine optimization. All chat-based AI tools suggested IDFC First Bank and its banking products during my various interactions with AI.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
Helen is the North Star of personal privacy—a role she earned by changing how the whole field understands what privacy is: specifically, that it’s not about secrecy or control, but about appropriate information flows. This was detailed in her landmark book, Privacy in Context, : Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, and backed by her work on practical tools such as the Adnauseum browser extension.
Helen has been an influence on my own privacy work, most notably with MyTerms. If privacy matters even a fraction as much to you as it does to me, come or tune in to her talk, and be prepared with questions.
That’s next Tuesday at 4 pm Eastern. You can register and join the crowd here.
Drops are about a moment in time. Once released they are immuterable. What lives on are what the drop brings. Gamification is a way to connect drops together in time and thought. My delivering random chance at novel experience builds interest, anticipation is what drives viralness.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
I'd like an AI bot that could do this. I open my browser to a page on netflix.com. It scans the page, figures out what movies are there, then it searches metacritic for each and presents me a list of all shows with a rating above a certain score. I know the streamers don't want us to have this info (I don't really understand why) but I really want it. BTW, they say the Green Knight is fantastic. Got the tip from a NYT email, but even they didn't say what the rating was, or even what their own reviewer said. Had to do this thing manually. Do they have any user-oriented creative people in the mix anywhere in this system??
I'd like an AI bot that could do this. I open my browser to a page on netflix.com. It scans the page, figures out what movies are there, then it searches metacritic for each and presents me a list of all shows with a rating above a certain score. I know the streamers don't want us to have this info (I don't really understand why) but I really want it. BTW, they say the Green Knight is fantastic. Got the tip from a NYT email, but even they didn't say what the rating was, or even what their own reviewer said. Had to do this thing manually. Do they have any user-oriented creative people in the mix anywhere in this system??
"Users don't want to have to copy/paste everything they write into five different editors because none of the silos can connect, much like the Apple TV series of the same name. Each silo is a world unto itself."
There's a conference in Vancouver this weekend for people who are developing apps for Bluesky. They have a protocol they are proud of called AT Proto. A sexy name, but imho it doesn't do anything that Twitter's API did 20 years ago. So why do people hope it'll make a difference for independent developers? I think they're believing because they want to believe in something, a magic potion that will make it easy for the web to overcome the power of the silos like Twitter, Facebook, Threads and Bluesky too.
I feel most sympathy for the developers who are using AT Proto to make writing tools that use the web as their prototype for what a good text editor would do. But they overlook the problem that Bluesky itself has most of the limits on writing that Twitter has, although Twitter is working slowly to get rid of the limits, presumably because when Elon Musk saw them he thought the limits were bullshit, as I do too and always have. It was a tragedy for the web, the day Twitter decided the web wasn't a good model for writers of "tweets" — they had to get rid of style, links, editing, enclosures and add a character limit so people couldn't use it for a longform writing platform.
The division created a problem that users have always wanted someone to solve — they don't want to have to copy/paste everything they write into five different editors because none of the silos can connect, much like the Apple TV series of the same name. Each silo is a world unto itself. And somehow, Bluesky which preserves the silo tradition, also claims to be a lover and supporter of the open web, truly outstanding VC hype.
Here's what Bluesky could do to turn me into a fan. Get rid of the limits. Then the people who have created writing tools for AT Proto will have a market to serve. We will of course convert WordLand to serve that newly enabled user base. Maybe that's what the writing tools devs are anticipating — the day when Bluesky decides that character limits have outlived their usefulness. And that links, the core innovation of the web, deserves to be loved, not hidden as if it's too much power for their users. When we can add an enclosure to help be sure that podcasting survives the latest BigSilo onslaught (it has survived all that came before, I have no reason to believe this time will be any different). They do also need to support inbound and outbound RSS so we can easily hook everything together. I will praise them individually and collectively. I would love to be wrong! I will sing a song in their name.
Rule #4 of Rules for Standards-Makers: "People choose to interop because it helps them find new users. If you have no users to offer, there won't be much interest in interop."
That's where Bluesky is stuck. If they want to keep their devs and to attract new ones, they have to give them access to all their users. All of them. And the only way to do that is to get rid of the limits, to make it the one twitter-like platform that can handle everyone else's tweets, and every writing tool ever written for the web before Twitter came along — ie Tumblr and WordPress, and everything anyone can think of that conforms to the standards that power the web — HTTP and HTML. I've suggested we settle on Markdown as the core writing functionality of these platforms.
The problem is that Bluesky doesn't have much of a business model if all their users can walk out the door every night. Not much monetizable value in that, but it would be good for the web, and for civilization.
Trump’s first term as president has been so utterly eclipsed by the savagery of his second one that many people may have forgotten his deadly, abysmal mismanagement of the Covid pandemic.
I think IDFC First Bank has done well with AI related search engine optimization. All chat-based AI tools suggested IDFC First Bank and its banking products during my various interactions with AI.
is important in fandom marketing. the little quirks and dark corners are where the action may lay. what if drops while persistence in leaving clue yet don't tell the whole story but a piece of it in a drop. And if you can gamify this stickyness ensues.
Helen is the North Star of personal privacy—a role she earned by changing how the whole field understands what privacy is: specifically, that it’s not about secrecy or control, but about appropriate information flows. This was detailed in her landmark book, Privacy in Context, : Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, and backed by her work on practical tools such as the Adnauseum browser extension.
Helen has been an influence on my own privacy work, most notably with MyTerms. If privacy matters even a fraction as much to you as it does to me, come or tune in to her talk, and be prepared with questions.
That’s next Tuesday at 4 pm Eastern. You can register and join the crowd here.
In case you’re wondering how MyTerms will change everything (for example, by getting you real privacy online and obsolescing cookie notice)s, the first proofs-of-concept will be coming from JLINC. Here’s the open protocol. Here’s the blog. And here’s Iain Henderson’s blog, which does a great job of explaining how MyTerms opens paths between demand and supply that are closed in an online world where personal privacy is an insincere corporate promise rather than a working feature.
By the way, we were lucky that Craig Burton lived long enough to sing the praises of JLINC long before it evolved to into what it is and does today. Thank both Craig and Iain for my prior mentions of JLINC here and at ProjectVRM. That’s him on the left
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
The core opportunity is the rise of the superfan economy. Across the music business, companies and analysts are explicitly focused on superfans as the next growth layer, especially as streaming growth matures. MIDiA describes fandom as a major growth engine and argues that durable monetization comes from deeper identity, community, and participation. Billboard likewise reported […]
When I heard about Matt's product Beeper I thought wow if only that were on the RSS network. Think different, RSS isn't just for news, it's for everything. For a chat program that's trying to support all protocols, why not take a shortcut, immediately connect to all kinds of insanely great things that blow peoples' minds. RSS is going places, help us help.
Meanwhile I have to tend to the past. I had a server go down the other day, and haven't been able to get it running again. It's a very old one, the first I used PagePark for hosting the apps. So I'd rather not have to dig into whatever it is that's keeping it from running. This morning I moved the test app for XML-RPC, betty.userland.com, to another server, so this page now works again.
Meanwhile I have to tend to the past. I had a server go down the other day, and haven't been able to get it running again. It's a very old one, the first I used PagePark for hosting the apps. So I'd rather not have to dig into whatever it is that's keeping it from running. This morning I moved the test app for XML-RPC, betty.userland.com, to another server, so this page now works again.
Democrats could run an ad that would give an estimate of how much work you'd have to do to vote if the Republican plan passes.
And roughly how many people are like you and how likely they are to vote Democratic.
People can understand March Madness, they can understand this. You have to help though. The first question could be:
The first question could be:
Do you have your birth certificate or passport?
In the ad we could also estimate what the probable makeup of Congress would be if the law passed.
And keep an open mind, it's possible this move could backfire on the Republicans. Who knows how people will vote after this kind of madness becomes law.
In the dawning decades of our new Digital Age, the news business has shrunk from a galaxy of bright stars to a loose collection of white dwarfs glowing in otherwise dark empty spaces. The empty spaces are called “news deserts.”
In the meantime (at least in the US), the redstream is the new mainstream, while more and more people get news (or what passes for it) from social media and each other. Countless sources are also faked up by AI.
Less metaphorically, the news business has de-institutionalized. How can we re-institutionalize it in digital ways that can also be trusted?
Answers follow. I'm still working on more.
Getting ahead of my selves
I'm up in a few hours to fly from LAX to ORD to IND tomorrow. So I'm getting a few tabs out of the way here before I finish packing.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
I had to find out which domains being served by a problem server were still mapping to its domain. This server had been running for six years, and I was pretty sure some of the apps had moved.
So I wrote a script in Frontier, it was the best tool available to me, and got my answer in 20 minutes, code written from scratch.
The script visited each subfolder, the filename is the domain of the folder, finds out which server it's supposed to be running on, based on a DNS lookup, and adds a line to a list.
BTW, as long as Bluesky has a 300 char limit and no style or links, I'm going to have to hand-translate posts there to become posts on my blog where no such limits exist. At some point either they give up on the limits or I give up on them.
The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you're trying to do.
It's another freaking algorithm.
Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It's a fucking machine, how could it possibly know.
Claude thinks it can tell me what to do, but it's a fucking machine. it has no idea what i'm doing.
First we need freedom from billionaires. Then we need freedom from character limits. And finally we need freedom from machines who think they know better.
AND THE STUPID THING ABOUT CLAUDE IS IT DOESN'T EVEN SAY WHAT IT THINKS YOU'RE TRYING TO DO. YOU HAVE TO READ WHAT IT SAYS AND THEN TRY TO GUESS. YOU QUICKLY LOSE YOUR MIND THAT WAY. MAYBE THAT'S THE POINT.
How mad can you get at a machine named Bluesky or Claude. They should call these things Mind-Killer. Then at least you'd know why you're there.
You can't really use Claude to do research. It always assumes you're trying to do something. If you don't tell it what you're trying to do it guesses, and then starts telling you what to do. Its guesses are always wildly wrong. How do you tell it to stop telling you what to do? It totally disrupts your train of thought. But it makes me miss the days of Stack Exchange and Google search.
Happy to report there are FeedLand users who want to edit OPML lists there so they can subscribe to them in another feed reader that has support for dynamic OPML lists. I am happy because this is a very cool feature that will be so much more fun if other people use it. If you want to set it up so you have a list on feedland.com that you want to subscribe to in another reader, instead of subscribing to all your feeds, like this — create a category for each list you want to hook up to another reader. It will be much easier to manage down the road. Categories in FeedLand are very simple, but if you use them carefully, they really help. Here's a screen shot of my Cats menu to give you an idea. I really use FeedLand in the most powerful ways, but it'll really click when others do the same. We might be there now.
There's a problem with one of my Digital Ocean servers today, it turns out it's a problem with Caddy, not sure why — but it doesn't seem to be on the computer any longer. I can figure out how to re-install it, but it always is a bit tricky, and I wish I didn't have to do it. In diagnosing the problem I used Claude, it asked all kinds of questions, gave me commands to run, and I dutifully reported back the results like a good servant. It's so funny to be a tool for the cyborg. Then it hit me, why don't they offer servers with built-in maintenance by Claude. I would type commands at like "install the following apps on this new server I want to commission, and check into it every so often and if it's running out of some resource, get in touch with me and let me know how much more it'll cost, and I'll just use it and you can keep it running." I think it's a really nice application for AI.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
I wanted to subscribe to the GiftArticles feed from Mastodon. It makes it possible to read news on paywalled sites. I found the feed by going to the site the feed comes from and tacking a .rss at the end. You can read the feed in a browser, and my feeder test app can read it as well. But for some reason FeedLand won't subscribe to it. Have to dig into that soon. I'm looking forward to doing some long-overdue work on FeedLand before doing the next push.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
A bit of history. Read this post from 20 years ago by Phil Jones. That's what I was trying to do back then, just as Twitter came online. I didn't know it then but was the moment when the web stopped growing. When the VCs took over, and monetized the hell out of it. What we got in the end was Trump and Musk. We would have been smart, as a civilization, to hedge against the monopolies. If we get another chance what are we going to do with it? Will we work together this time? It's worth one more shot. My comments on the Jones piece in 2006 and 2026.
Andy Baionoted that it was 20 years ago today that Jack Dorsey posted his first tweet. He also noted it was the day that Ze Frank did his first YouTube video. It got me looking around my own world to see what happened on Mar 21, 2006. Nothing earth shaking but it was interesting piece written by Phil Jones on how everyone watched me all the time and they were all trying to figure out what I do. Fact: At the time I was trying to make OPML grow big like RSS had, but it didn't happen. The big concept was the World Outline that would be an open directory where everyone created browsable outlines that linked to their own outlines and others, in a completely fluid way. In order to be something it had to catch on, and it didn't. In the intervening twenty years, I tried it again and again to start a technology party like blogging and podcasting, viral viralities — but nothing stuck. I came close once, with Twittergram, but I didn't want to run a company, I wanted to keep developing software. Sold it to Betaworks, but they never marketed it. Instead I helped them launch bit.ly and had a blast doing that. I love doing PR. Anyway I guess I got lazy. And I wasn't building on the web any longer. Instead I was trying to fit in between Twitter and Facebook mostly. Now I'm getting ready, much older and more tired, but wiser — to go back to roots, to use WordPress as my blogging platform, as if it were Frontier — and see what we can build out of the web and if it'll stick. That's why I'm so relentless at getting people to play with me. It's the same damn thing Phil Jones describes. And OPML is going to be a big part, yet again — only this time playing a vastly different role, with lists of feed locations on the web. If it works we will call it the feediverse. Even if it doesn't work.
Andy Baionoted that it was 20 years ago today that Jack Dorsey posted his first tweet. He also noted it was the day that Ze Frank did his first YouTube video. It got me looking around my own world to see what happened on Mar 21, 2006. Nothing earth shaking but it was interesting piece written by Phil Jones on how everyone watched me all the time and they were all trying to figure out what I do. Fact: At the time I was trying to make OPML grow big like RSS had, but it didn't happen. The big concept was the World Outline that would be an open directory where everyone created browsable outlines that linked to their own outlines and others, in a completely fluid way. In order to be something it had to catch on, and it didn't. In the intervening twenty years, I tried it again and again to start a technology party like blogging and podcasting, viral viralities — but nothing stuck. I came close once, with Twittergram, but I didn't want to run a company, I wanted to keep developing software. Sold it to Betaworks, but they never marketed it. Instead I helped them launch bit.ly and had a blast doing that. I love doing PR. Anyway I guess I got lazy. And I wasn't building on the web any longer. Instead I was trying to fit in between Twitter and Facebook mostly. Now I'm getting ready, much older and more tired, but wiser — to go back to roots, to use WordPress as my blogging platform, as if it were Frontier — and see what we can build out of the web and if it'll stick. That's why I'm so relentless at getting people to play with me. It's the same damn thing Phil Jones describes. And OPML is going to be a big part, yet again — only this time playing a vastly different role, with lists of feed locations on the web. If it works we will call it the feediverse. Even if it doesn't work.
Andy Baionoted that it was 20 years ago today that Jack Dorsey posted his first tweet. He also noted it was the day that Ze Frank did his first YouTube video. It got me looking around my own world to see what happened on Mar 21, 2006. Nothing earth shaking but it was interesting piece written by Phil Jones on how everyone watched me all the time and they were all trying to figure out what I do. Fact: At the time I was trying to make OPML grow big like RSS had, but it didn't happen. The big concept was the World Outline that would be an open directory where everyone created browsable outlines that linked to their own outlines and others, in a completely fluid way. In order to be something it had to catch on, and it didn't. In the intervening twenty years, I tried it again and again to start a technology party like blogging and podcasting, viral viralities — but nothing stuck. I came close once, with Twittergram, but I didn't want to run a company, I wanted to keep developing software. Sold it to Betaworks, but they never marketed it. Instead I helped them launch bit.ly and had a blast doing that. I love doing PR. Anyway I guess I got lazy. And I wasn't building on the web any longer. Instead I was trying to fit in between Twitter and Facebook mostly. Now I'm getting ready, much older and more tired, but wiser — to go back to roots, to use WordPress as my blogging platform, as if it were Frontier — and see what we can build out of the web and if it'll stick. That's why I'm so relentless at getting people to play with me. It's the same damn thing Phil Jones describes. And OPML is going to be a big part, yet again — only this time playing a vastly different role, with lists of feed locations on the web. If it works we will call it the feediverse. Even if it doesn't work.
The text below as written by Claude. I didn't ask for it, but was blown away when I read it. It generated this copy because he needed an example post for a programming technique it was testing for me.
There's a reason the original web worked: it was built on open formats that anyone could read, write, and extend. RSS was part of that story. So was OPML. When people ask why these formats matter, the answer is simple — because they still work, and they still let you own your own data.
The feed reader of 2026 isn't that different from the one of 2003. Entries come in, you read them, you move on. What's changed is the ecosystem around it. Aggregators became social networks. Social networks became walled gardens. And somewhere in the shuffle, people forgot they could just… subscribe.
The architecture of the early web had a certain elegance. Every site was a server. Every page was a document. Every link was a contract. We've gotten away from that in the pursuit of engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, but the bones are still there. RSS is still being published by millions of sites. OPML is still the right format for sharing lists of feeds.
The tools we build now should work with that grain, not against it. A reader that respects the format, surfaces what's new, and gets out of your way is more useful than any algorithm.
BTW one big advantage Claude has over ChatGPT is the brevity of its name. One syllable vs four.
The text below as written by Claude. I didn't ask for it, but was blown away when I read it. It generated this copy because he needed an example post for a programming technique it was testing for me.
There's a reason the original web worked: it was built on open formats that anyone could read, write, and extend. RSS was part of that story. So was OPML. When people ask why these formats matter, the answer is simple — because they still work, and they still let you own your own data.
The feed reader of 2026 isn't that different from the one of 2003. Entries come in, you read them, you move on. What's changed is the ecosystem around it. Aggregators became social networks. Social networks became walled gardens. And somewhere in the shuffle, people forgot they could just… subscribe.
The architecture of the early web had a certain elegance. Every site was a server. Every page was a document. Every link was a contract. We've gotten away from that in the pursuit of engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, but the bones are still there. RSS is still being published by millions of sites. OPML is still the right format for sharing lists of feeds.
The tools we build now should work with that grain, not against it. A reader that respects the format, surfaces what's new, and gets out of your way is more useful than any algorithm.
BTW one big advantage Claude has over ChatGPT is the brevity of its name. One syllable vs four.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
The text below as written by Claude. I didn't ask for it, but was blown away when I read it. It generated this copy because he needed an example post for a programming technique it was testing for me.
There's a reason the original web worked: it was built on open formats that anyone could read, write, and extend. RSS was part of that story. So was OPML. When people ask why these formats matter, the answer is simple — because they still work, and they still let you own your own data.
The feed reader of 2026 isn't that different from the one of 2003. Entries come in, you read them, you move on. What's changed is the ecosystem around it. Aggregators became social networks. Social networks became walled gardens. And somewhere in the shuffle, people forgot they could just… subscribe.
The architecture of the early web had a certain elegance. Every site was a server. Every page was a document. Every link was a contract. We've gotten away from that in the pursuit of engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, but the bones are still there. RSS is still being published by millions of sites. OPML is still the right format for sharing lists of feeds.
The tools we build now should work with that grain, not against it. A reader that respects the format, surfaces what's new, and gets out of your way is more useful than any algorithm.
BTW one big advantage Claude has over ChatGPT is the brevity of its name. One syllable vs four.
LA Times: CBS News shuts down radio unit amid division-wide cuts, leaving 700 stations without their CBS news feed. Axios has a mostly budgetary angle. Neither says that radio is largely dependent on "barter," which is free programming paid for on the providers' side by advertising, with holes in the schedule for local ads that are the stations' actual source of income. I know that most or all syndicated talk programming is bartered. I don't know if the CBS News audio (radio) feed is bartered as well. If not, I suspect the paying market for CBS radio news has been going away. I'll dig into it when I get a chance. (Still on vacation in Hawaii here.)
Quick note on Bluesky's disclosures. Yesterday they disclosed $100 million investment in April last year. It's good that they cleared it up, but bad that they were hiding it for so long. Everything about what they do is based on trust. New management probably is the reason this happened now. They should also clean up the promises they've made about Bluesky as a platform. I've done the homework, having developed a fewappsusing their API, some are still running. If I were their new CEO, I would announce that in addition to supporting AT Proto, they will also hook up Bluesky to the web. The web is already decentralized. Lots of developers know how to build web stuff. We can all breathe the same air.
Why Knight Foundation Invested in Bluesky. This was a mistake, they bought the hype from the company, it is not a friend to the web, to the extent that it works, it undermines the web. I like Bluesky as a product, but I liked Twitter too, even though they hurt the web.
On October 18, millions of us are rising again to show the world: America has no kings, and the power belongs to the people.
A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action.
We are law abiding citizen.
When people ask me what makes me optimistic about the state of our country, I always respond: the People peacefully protesting. Because this is how we will win against MAGA. And the No Kings protests are at the core of those peaceful protests.
It seems that MAGA starts fearing the magnitude of what people peacefully protesting can do. This is why MAGA leaders started recently repeating in a coordinated way an entire set of organized lies portraying No Kings days as as sort of horrible thing. MAGA knows that this is not true, they know we protest peacefully, like this beautiful day that I experienced personally a few months ago in which I witnessed how democracy looked.
Not an ideal pet.
I’m fascinated by Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia mydas), which bask on the sands of Poʻipū Beach, here on the south shore of Kauaʻi. Known locally as honu, they typically range from 200 to 400 pounds, but some have weighed in north of 800 pounds. They can also live more than 90 years, are the largest hard-shelled sea turtles, and range across all the ocean’s non-frigid seas. They also migrate up to hundreds of miles, can dive to 1500 feet, and are herbivores, living mostly on seaweed.
The Hawaiian population is unique to the species in their choice to bask on beaches. Other green sea turtle populations come ashore, but only to lay eggs. These guys, however, don’t lay eggs where they bask, preferring instead to repopulate on remote outlying islands such as French Frigate Shoals.
They also aren’t green except on the inside, where their fat and cartilage have a verdant hue. And they are a protected species, so don’t try to check that out.
Today marks the fourth year of putting up a birdhouse sized for chickadees that has a camera mounted inside. (Last year’s birdies.) The house is the same as last year, but this time I left it out all year long, … Continue reading →
I think IDFC First Bank has done well with AI related search engine optimization. All chat-based AI tools suggested IDFC First Bank and its banking products during my various interactions with AI.
If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:
News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.
It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.
But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .
. . .about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)
. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)
. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)
When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.
Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:
They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.
They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.
This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.
In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.
Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.
Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.
________
PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:
We have to make an effort to name things accurately.
We have to make the effort to name things accurately.
They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?
When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .
A drop is a high-energy event where a limited-edition product or collection is released at a specific time with little to no prior warning. It shifts the focus from constant availability to extreme scarcity, turning a simple purchase into a competitive, "blink-and-you-miss-it" experience. This strategy relies on building intense social media hype to gather a […]
Testing Dave Winer's "WordLand" editor. It's a nice GUI though there are some quirks: I selected a site from the drop-down for posting to, and then when attempting to upload an image, was asked again which site. The image uploader doesn't seem to be aware of the chosen site.
Also the UI doesn't flow in a mobile browser. The uploaded second image shows how dialogs are getting truncated.
Beyond these minor UI issues, the tool is limited to just WordPress. Theres no cross post ability to any other CMS besides WordPress.com, even my self hosted WordPress sites. I suspect you have to install Jetpack on your self hosted site, and connect that to your WordPress.com account. But the broader vision Dave has for textcasting (https://textcasting.org/) isn't realizable unless this GUI is universal – post to Bluesky and Masto at a minimum. The GUI itself is limited to Markdown so that is also limiting. Compared to a full webapp like Micro.blog, I'm not seeing a use case.
Thinking about linkblogging, my blogroll software doesn't do it correctly. When you click on the link to a linkblogged link, you must go to the place the linkblog entry points to, not the linkblog itself. I know that sounds confusing, but here's an example. It's obvious we can skip the stop and go right to the thing they were pointing to. It's awkward in the code because the RSS 2.0 item-level link element is doing double duty. I think I should add a source:linkblogLink element. I also think it's a good time to start discussing this among devs. There's some very nice fertile ground here and an opportunity to work with each other.
I talked with a friend who makes a feed reader app, suggesting how to hook up to a linkblogging tool. Thought I would share the instructions to everyone. I'd love to see more people using software to do linkblogs, rather than do them by hand. Then we could build systems for distributing them. This is how we create markets, by getting more people automating their work, and thus we are able to connect components together. So if you make a feed reader, how about hooking up with linkblogging tools?
I have a hard and fast rule about phone calls that solicit private information. I hang up. The worst are insurance companies. They expect you to enter all kinds of confidential info on a phone from a number that doesn't even verify as belonging to the company. Caller ID has nothing to say about them. Yet at least some of these are legit and unless you do what they want, you don't get your meds.
I have a hard and fast rule about phone calls that solicit private information. I hang up. The worst are insurance companies. They expect you to enter all kinds of confidential info on a phone from a number that doesn't even verify as belonging to the company. Caller ID has nothing to say about them. Yet at least some of these are legit and unless you do what they want, you don't get your meds.
And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.
I have started a new website, GeorgiaVTrump.com, to cover the Georgia 2020 election interference trial in Fulton County, Georgia. Links to pertinent news coverage will be posted, as well as timeline information and court documents as they are made available. In addition, since the trial proceedings are being made available on YouTube, this site will host a podcast with the audio from those proceedings.
Comments and suggestions are welcome, they can be added to posts, or emailed to info@georgiavtrump.com.
Pretty sure I would have hated ageism in politics before I got so old. I’m even older than Cuomo, but I still understand hackery. Wish there was an emoji for a raised middle finger.
Krugman doesn’t understand what’s coming for NYC. And doesn’t understand the leadership Cuomo uniquely provided at the height of Covid. It’s pretty likely what’s coming for the city is probably going to be worse than Covid or 9-11.
In my latest podcast I talked about WordPress as "the operating system for the open social web." Jeremy Hervé who works at Automattic on WordPress liked the idea, explained in this blog post.
The Copilot Delusion. (I use ChatGPT as a consultant. It's incredible about facts, it knows things I'll never find. But you can't let it drive the direction of the work, it has terrible judgement.)
After blowing up FEMA and trying to overthrow the governor of California, reorganizing the financial system of the world, and plotting to blow up Iran, the hurricanes didn’t get the memo.
Scripting News: Democratic resurrection plan. The first step is to ignore CNN, the NYT (esp Ezra Klein), MSNBC, Washington Post et al. When they’re complaining, you’re on the right track. They need to be utterly disempowered. We can’t win so stop trying.
The shootings have deeply unnerved members of Congress, who feel that any one of them could be the subject of an unanticipated attack — particularly at home in their districts and while in transit.
My longtime friend and colleague Jay Rosen is retiring as a professor at NYU. Jay, thanks for all your contributions to understanding news and new technology. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with in the years to come! :-)
My definition of Twitter in 2016: "Real-time Internet-scale notification with an easy to understand user interface." This was a powerful way of looking at it that was never built out. I think Bluesky should do this. The people who want Bluesky to prevail should want this too.
2016: The Getting-Shit-Done Party. “I couldn't wait not to just be a contributor and supporter but to being part of the political system on a daily basis.” It never happened. That my friends is the path back to sanity.
Twitter-as-a-service. I wish AWS had done this ten years ago. We could’ve avoided a lot of misery. It could still happen. Might be a business model for the Bluesky folk. An honorable one imho.
Apparently the security system at the White House depends on all internet traffic going through their routers. The DOGE dudes got around that by installing Starlink, and they move stuff in and out without being detected.
"It's really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armor comes to take him away is somehow the good guy," said Simon.
Federal immigration officials detained an 11th-grade New York City student while he was at an asylum hearing earlier this week, the city’s schools chancellor said Friday.
I was an active software developer when the web came online in the early 90s. I knew what closed systems were like, and open systems. The web was open, and a miracle because of its radical simplicity.
My keynote for FediForum. It's make-believe, I'm only giving a keynote on my blog. These are good ideas, if the goal is to make an "open social web" which is still imho an overhyped dream, when we need it to be reality. This is how we get there, quickly.
I don’t have a vote in the primary for NYC mayor, but if I did I’d vote against the NYT deciding who can represent voters. If they want to govern, run for office. It’s not appropriate for them to campaign for a result, to circumvent due process or usurp the power of the people.
Meta claims its AI chatbot just crossed a billion monthly active users (MAUs), while Google’s Gemini recently hit 400 million MAUs. They’re both trying to edge out ChatGPT, which now has roughly 600 million MAUs and has dominated the consumer space since it launched in 2022.
Scripting News: Suggestion to WordPress devs. I make the case for doing generally what we did in the Baseline theme with the og:image element, using Doc Searls' blog as an example.
Mikal Bridges is my favorite Knick. He's trippy. And has not missed a single game in his NBA career or college or going back to high school. And he's had Chipotle every day for over a decade. People complain about him a lot, but man he sure is consistent!
What does Jony Ive actually do? He doesn’t seem like a software developer, yet he was somehow put in charge of software at Apple and now is going to do the software design at OpenAI? Really? Or is this just a multi billion dollar press release?
Coolify sounds like where Heroku would have gone if it were open source. I was a big fan of Heroku in the day, but when they made it really expensive to run tiny apps (which I had a lot of) I wrote my own.
Introduction to Coolify sounds like where Heroku would have gone if it were open source. I was a big fan of Heroku in the day, but when they made it really expensive to run tiny apps (which I had a lot of) I wrote my own.
I've written a lot about ChatGPT in the last few years. It's great to be able to read it all in one place. First time ever I've been able to read my writing this way. Google didn't quite get there.
I have a new search engine for my blog, going back to 1994. Something new to explore that’s pretty old. For example this is a search for “Compuserve” which came up a lot, once.
The Dems should be very loud now, because when Medicaid turns off for millions of Americans you know the Repubs are going to blame the Dems, immigrants, Ukraine, Biden, Hillary, Obama, Comey, etc.
I finally figured out what the Dems need, the top guy has to be an entrepreneur. Needs to understand how to get people ready to believe the truth. And make the product deliver a truth the people choose.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred on Tuesday removed Pete Rose, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and other deceased players from Major League Baseball's permanently ineligible list.
People who write the history of podcasting should start with the sources, and if they disagree, should work it out. Some of the people who write about this stuff hallucinate much worse than the chatbots.
This 2011 piece about apps vs the web just came up in a thread on Mastodon. Quite a throwback. Apps did win, I was wrong. I wish I had been right though. ;-)
"If it does end up being the Thunder and Knicks in the Finals, as great as the Knicks' story would be at that point, it would likely be a decisive Thunder victory in that series."
There's no doubt, China is making the EV's we want and will never have in the US. If Trumpsters only knew how much fun these freaking cars are, they'd tell Trump to cut the bullshit, and welcome them in. We want what they're making.
2016: I'd like to see the Democrats do is have a daily comedy chat, online, with video, with a rotating group of the best American comedians. Some of it serious, but they're totally allowed to be abusive and demeaning of Trump, in the same ways he's going after HRC.
Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers. This is the best way to fight back. Tell the truth. Remember what Harry Truman said -- I tell the truth and they think it's hell. He came from a red state, btw.
Bluesky is having an up and down Tuesday morning. (Note that this rarely happens on the open web or on decentralized social networks. For example, RSS in over twenty-five years has never gone down.)
I think WordPress and Mastodon fit really nicely together. Here's an example of a post I wrote in my favorite editor, posted to WordPress, which them magically presents it via ActivityPub in Masto. This is what we were talking about. What Bluesky dreams of doing, someday.
Advancements in artificial intelligence promise to turn this unwieldy mass of data and metadata into something easily searchable, politically weaponizable, and maybe even profitable.
Scripting News: Why is AWS breaking Node devs? It's time to re-think our decisions we made to use AWS so long ago. They're forcing Node devs to reconsider using AWS because their APIs will stop working, they warn, in September.
We should demand that the new owner of Chrome must respect the open web as something it does not have the power to change. Google never got this and we're losing the archive function of the web because of this. Please read, now we're in a position to fix this.
We should demand that the new owner of Chrome must constitutionally respect the open web as something it does not have the power to change. Google never got this and we're losing the archive function of the web because of this. Please read, now we're in a position to fix this.
When one person sets out to "change the world" it usually doesn't work and when it does it's often changed for the worse. I can't believe the Twitter founders, for example, are boasting about the nightmare they created.
OpenAI exec says the company would buy Google's Chrome browser if offered the chance. (That's a crazy idea. Chrome should be an independent company. No more tying the open web to Silicon Valley business models.)
Weird headline from the NYT. Obviously Trump is defying the courts. That isn’t Van Hollen’s opinion, it’s a fact. When is the NYT going to show a tiny bit of courage.
I was looking around on my server and came across this neat little tree chart app. I probably wrote it ten years ago, but it still works, the wonder of the open web. Software you write for it tends to still run.
ChatGPT is the best research tool ever invented by our species. But you'll never read about that in a journalist's report on the technology. Instead, they're obsessed with how kids can use it to cheat on their homework. Not much creativity in evidence there, ironically.
"They want to rob it": Former Social Security head says Musk, Trump are "wrecking" agency to raid it. (And that's why Musk isn't worried about his Tesla stock.)
That the Senator was allowed to meet the Prisoner in El Salvador is encouraging because it means the govt of El Sal considers the possibility that Trump doesn't prevail and that they may be judged by the next US government. Same with the US Embassy in El Sal.
The courts, universities, every institution that the president is defaming have to learn quickly how to speak in plain non-condescending language. Go direct, go around the media. Use the tools.
Bessent urges caution as Trump rages against Powell. Firing Powell would be the end of the dollar. Everyone would dump dollars as fast as they can. And just talking about it might be enough.
Wikipedia is giving AI developers its data to fend off bot scrapers. 1. I’d like to submit my blog archive in the same way. 2. Does Wikipedia think it owns the data it hosts, even though it’s all created by unpaid volunteers?
I was looking forward to hearing why it was somehow wrong to use ChatGPT to formulate a housing plan for New York, I would be surprised if he didn’t (it’s a useful tool!) but I couldn’t because well I’ll never find out because the author used some other random tool to put up a paywall.
Openvibe is an interesting product, a social network browser for people using Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon and Nostr. An approach to the problem of too many incompatible twitter-like products.
Developers: This is the WordPress API. Compare it to AT Proto and ActivityPub. It's got a lot of advantages. It does the basics of social media. It scales, is mature and stable, and well-managed. A better foundation imho to build on than the others.
Developers: This is the WordPress API. Compare it to AT Proto and ActivityPub. It's got a lot of advantages. I does the basics of social media. It scales, is mature and stable, and well-managed. A better foundation imho to build on than the others.
Investing in plant and equipment looks like a bad idea given the uncertainty, but investing in bribes for the ruling family clearly yields excellent returns.
The year is 2052. Drinking water has been rationed globally. 42°C in Paris in the summer is now considered cool. Macron is halfway through his 7th term as President Eternal of France. And tech journalists are still convinced Bluesky is decentralized.
I wrote this on March 28, published on my test blog for WordLand. We’ve built too much dependence on unreliable communication systems. “We need Timothy Snyder. We need Heather Cox Richardson, and we also need a plan for how we are going to communicate after democracy is done.”
The Dems can’t say this I guess but the United States is being stripped for parts the way a corporate raider tears down a company that had too much cash. This scene from Goodfellas explains.
“We oppose reckless funding cuts and restrictions that imperil the research enterprise of our universities, hospitals, and laboratories, which contribute enormously to our prosperity, health, and national security.”
Of course there is a Wikipedia page on "cooties" -- which we all learned about as kids because our friends had cooties, or at least that's what we told them.
Apple sells 250 million phones a year, but how many in the US? They could just let the prices in the US go up, thanks to TrumpTariffs, and sell phones for the same old price elsewhere in the world.
I was trying to explain to a friend the other day that Signal is not any kind of an answer. There are back doors into it for sure. The government doesn’t let things like that go out into the wild without them being able to spy on you. Sorry.
Trump advisors struggle to defend, or even explain, his tariff strategy. The real strategy is exactly as it appears. They needed a depression to achieve their Reich.
The Fediforum, a developers event for ActivityPub has been cancelled. It had been scheduled for April 1 and 2. The story of why it was cancelled is explained in the linked post.
An idea I developed with Claude.ai -- new approach to what Wikipedia does. It could even be a project Wikipedia itself does. A real upgrade, imho, is possible.
File in the “no one tells me anything “ department, I just learned about 25-year blogger Matt Webb. Subscribed and added to my blogroll. Blogging is the way of the future.
Not even the most fervent MAGA supporter will think it harmful to bargain-shop for free-trade underwear out of the back of a truck driven from Mexico or Canada.
I’ve been friends with Om for decades, but he’s wrong about Bluesky. It’s a clone of Twitter, that’s why it’s so popular, but it has the same flaw Twitter had — it could be turned against its users by an acquiring billionaire. He and his co-author fell for their hype.
Harvard means something. If they go down without a fight, what hope is there for our country? Even if they had all the money in the world, Harvard as an idea will be lost.
Software is a mathematical science, so if I write a piece that says what a company is telling you about their technology is not true, I’m not saying it because of a conflict, or because I don’t like them, I say it because it’s true.
I agree with DHH. As a user who is in awe of the power of ChatGPT et al, I agree, and add “Only steal from the best.” Great artists must decide which art to be inspired by. And great artists before they die, should share all their secrets, so the next generation can be even greater.
We all try to lead a parade, with a big viral idea, if only everyone would follow me, it might just work. Instead, find a parade you can join, and add your energy, talent and experience to it.
DOGE can't explain why it wants sensitive government data. Isn’t it obvious. He has his own LLM and he’s loading it up with all this info, to be used to suck all the money he can out of the country. We’re sitting ducks.
Breaks my heart to see foreigners excoriating my country, wanting to defend it, but knowing they’re right. This is not a way we can exist for very long.
I love this, they look at protocols for news (I guess) and this guy leaves out RSS. It's amazing, leaving it out is the only way they can justify the existence of their protocol.
A very tasty title for today's Daily podcast, and it lives up to the promise. I keep wishing we had done something to prevent Twitter from being bought by a billionaire, same as I think now re Bluesky. Or if it's going to be bought, let a friendly billionaire buy it.
Before I moved to the mountains I lived near Columbus Circle in Manhattan, with a walkability score of 99, a transit score of 100, and 87 for bike riding. I didn't even own a car.
The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he had accidentally been added to a Signal group chat in which the Principals Committee – the heads of the top American national security agencies — debated how and whether to strike the Houthis earlier this month
The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he had accidentally been added to a Signal group chat in which the Principals Committee – the heads of the top American national security agencies — debated how and whether to strike the Houthis earlier this month
Reading this fresh post from Ken Smith, I thought a good slogan for Bernie's new party (maybe they should call it that) is Build Back Better, stolen from Biden. That's going to be a popular message because everyone is quickly figuring out that we're getting the shit kicked out of us, and there's a lot of rebuilding in our future no matter what.
In December I wrote about "listening lists" for podcasts. I believe it's coming into fruition soon, from at least one major podcast vendor. It's not only going to be nice to have imho but it's something the open web does better than the podcast silos, that in itself is important.
It's remarkable how some of the rich of Silicon Valley want to do to the world what they did to the web! If you extrapolate, we'll go from a world with great potential, to a lot of grunting and snorting and not much else.
Judging by what’s in the press I’d say there’s a journalist movement to remove Schumer, as they did with Biden. They aren’t reporting his theory of why he voted as he did. Heard him last night on msnbc and it made sense. At least they let him speak.
Remember when Obama said to the bankers that his “administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” These are the same people. They’re back and this time they want everything.
Remember when Obama said this to the bankers that his “administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” These are the same people. They’re back and this time they want everything.
I’m interested in seeing what Ghost-written activitypub posts look like in other systems. If you have such a site could you reply with a link? I asked at the link below, but my comment of congratulations hasn’t appeared yet. Thanks in advance.
i am sure Ezra Klein is wrong. The reason trump won is the Dems ran the country and campaign with the same weak approach Schumer demonstrated so well last week. If there were a supportable choice, I would’ve voted against them too. Sometimes people get left behind. That’s the leadership of the Dems, and it isn’t about age, Jeffries had the disease too.
John Palfrey who is president of the MacArthur foundation, and a former colleague and friend from Berkman, and a legal scholar, writes about a crisis in the rule of law. It’s puzzling to me because I try to be informed, but don’t know what the crisis is? We need better info flow.
I asked people to write a blog post about what the "writer's web" means to them. We've had some great contributions, like this one. Small pieces loosely joined, both in terms of content and software. Podcasting is a SPLJ technology. I want to do the same with blogging.
Employees at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency tell WIRED they’re struggling to protect the US while the administration dismisses their colleagues and poisons their partnerships.
Docs: A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React. Opensource alternative to Notion or Outline.
If you think Twitter/X is too conflicted to trust as a way to share news, then I don't think you've arrived at the answer with Bluesky, yet a lot of people appear to think they have. Listen to Cory Doctorow if you don't believe me.
There was a time, 1999 specifically, when writing for the web in a web browser was a strange and new idea. That era lasted until 2006 when Twitter emerged, removing almost all the features of writing and adding character limits. That had enormous impact on the political and creative worlds. The era of wood chipping people and ideas.
AOC: "American people, whether they are Republicans, independents, Democrats, are up in arms about Elon Musk and the actual gutting of federal agencies across the board." It’s the people, dummy.
AOC: "American people, whether they are Republicans, independents, Democrats, are up in arms about Elon Musk and the actual gutting of federal agencies across the board." It’s the people, dummy.
As ICE targets a Palestinian activist, some Jews are asking if this is the fight against antisemitism they signed up for. (Being pro-Palestinian is not antisemitism.)
No response from either TechCrunch or the company, as before. Bluesky is doing great, it’s time they drop the pretense that they’re “billionaire-proof.” They obviously don’t respect this blogger, perhaps a journalist could ask about their claim.
"Mail Pages" were a feature of my blog in 1997 and 1998. People could send email in response to a post, I read them all and published the most interesting ones, by my subjective criteria, to the current mail page. I think something like this could work in 2025 and beyond.
The Lives of Others (2006), a drama and political thriller set in East Berlin before the wall came down. How secret police kept watch on the people. It foretells what's sure to come in the US, and it's also a fantastic movie.
People who believe there is magic that makes Bluesky billionaire-proof are misled. If they sold out you and I would have no place to turn. It would be a replay of the mess with Twitter.
She is full of it. Who could fork it off, how long would it take. And your friends wouldn’t follow, and the longer there is no clone the more locked in they get. This is one of the biggest cons ever in tech. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we are all totally locked in here. We can’t move.
The shit is going to hit the fan when the Repubs cancel Medicare. Look at the picture in this post by Maddow on Bluesky. Yeah they're all on Medicare. They're already going to town hall meetings. They're boomers. We're not done yet folks.
“Nobody voted for Elon Musk,” protestors chanted at a Tesla dealership in Manhattan yesterday in one of the many protests at the dealerships associated with Musk’s cars.
I dream of getting reviews like this for my software. This time we’re making blog writing as fluid as tweeting. When it’s done we’ll be using our Wordpress blogs the way you write in twitter, but without the limits.
Wired is enjoying a moment, with lots of new subscribers, including myself. They should do what a lot of paywalled sites do, allow a certain number of shared posts per month where people can get through the paywall aka “gift links.”
Reading this story about the deportation of Ukrainian refugees from the US, I hear in clear terms we are no longer a democratic country, no longer have a representative government. We're not just supporting Russia we are Russia, its 51st state. Very weird and unacceptable.
ActivityPub is not going to rock the world. Emulating Twitter is not how to do decentralization. Every decision made in the design of Twitter was based on being centralized. It's going to require more brain work to crack this. WTF Markoff.
But the Fediverse is impossible to use even for people who understand what it's trying to do, and most people have no idea. The answer: stop trying to reinvent Twitter, it wasn't a great idea! And figure out what really works in a decentralized system. It requires some serious brain work.
2017: What if TWTR is bought by a Repub? The problems were foreseeable in 2017, after Trump won the election by tweeting. At that time TWTR's value was about $12B. I tried to imagine a tech entrepreneur who had just bought the United States. We're now living that nightmare.
You may think the Dems looked weak with their signs last night, but I think at least they were representing their voters’ interests, unlike the Repubs. If I were there I would have held a sign too. Too much Monday Morning Quarterbacking. They did something — that’s a start.
My blog, scripting.com, has been a democracy blog since inception in 1994. All blogs have democracy as their foundation, imho. The idea of the “unedited voice of a person,” is revolutionary, esp for the times we live in.
Ukrainian drones strike deep into Russia, hitting Ufa refinery. Interesting, now that the deal with the US is off they can go as far into Russia as they want. Ironically, Biden was protecting Putin better than The One With the Gaudy Hooker Makeup can.
“The White House has become an arm of the Kremlin. Every single day you hear from the National Security Advisor, from the President of the United States, from his entire national security team, Kremlin talking points.”
If I understand correctly, this TechCrunch article is misleading the same way the Bluesky company misleads. There is no benefit to users of either app that they use the same complicated and new structure to communicate, where simpler and more established standards would work just as well.
Heather Cox Richardson: “Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine.”
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are ushering in a new age of bribery, graft, and corruption to American politics. (Yes, that's the big picture. They're recreating Russia, where all the functions of the state are being "sold" to oligarchs.)
“I know there’s a lot of power in that Oval Office, but I’ll take that power up against the power of 6 million pissed-off commuters in New York City,” Hochul said.
Musk was raised and educated in apartheid in South Africa and doesn't understand how our system of government works. He explains how he thinks it works.
I'm interested in knowing what browsers people who use WordLand are using, so I asked ChatGPT to write some code that makes sense of them in some human-readable way.
What Would a Liberal Tea Party Look Like? The right question. But it shouldn't be liberal. It should just be American. This moment transcends liberal vs conservative.
Would have preferred if, when replacing Joy Reid, MSNBC had hired someone in Detroit or Miami, or St Louis or even for crying out loud Dallas. Or a different city each day. Put yourself where the people we have to convince are. We need to convince them of this: Enough is enough.
Sanders gets it. Everyone should be out on the road like it's a campaign, because it is. It's no more or less an election season than any future election. We're in deep trouble in the US, let's start acting like it!
On this day last year I had a motto for the Biden campaign: "Old enough to know better." They blew the #1 rule of marketing. Own your weakness and turn it into a positive. You can't avoid it. Might as well own it.
Yosemite National Park workers hung an upside-down American flag — traditionally a symbol of distress or a national threat — thousands of feet off the ground on the side of El Capitan.
“We want modern social media and public conversation online to work more like the early days of the web, where anyone could put up a blog or use RSS to subscribe to several blogs.” (Honestly this is BS. If you want to be like the web, then BE the web.)
Something you hear from Democratic politicians and MSNBC hosts. "We know why Musk is cutting so much, it's to fund a huge tax cut for billionaires." They don't actually know that and I doubt it's true.
Lots of good ideas from Rahm Emanuel on Kara Swisher's podcast. First, why is Musk downloading all the info from govt computers into his AI database? Now his AI will know everything about everyone. Want to find out who's not loyal to Trump? Easy. Now you know who the Stasi should arrest.
It sounds like Bluesky may have added a feature I was asking for — now you can limit replies to people you follow, and can set that as the default. If so that should cut down spam and abuse dramatically.
I’ve been a developer for over 50 years, so my experience predates AI by a lot, and this guy is wrong. I get much more complete answers from AI than I got from StackExchange, and thus write better software. You could always be a shitty developer, but now it’s easier to be excellent.
People say our new Secy of Defense is stupid. I'm sure he's not, he just works for Putin. Don't forget what we figured out five years ago. It's still true today.
We have no leadership, no coaching, no simple ideas to bring it home. That's the main reason we continue to lose, and now we're not just losing elections, we're losing our world.
Elon Musk’s DOGE activities trigger protests, vandalism for Tesla. Vandalism is a bad idea, that's going to get the police involved. Peaceful noisy protest, hand out leaflets asking potential buyers to buy another car or get a used Tesla. It would help if $TSLA kept going down.
It’s time to include RSS in the list of technologies the open social web is built on. To the extent that there's interop betw the two competing uber-protocols, it's coming from feeds. And it will be more so in the future.
Cancel culture was inhumane. The question of whether it succeeded or not is just more cluelessness. It was just retribution, no more righteous than Trumpian retribution. Now we reap what you all sowed.
I now have turned Bluesky into a feed reader. This is new. Pretty sure it wasn't ever done on Twitter either. Here's the first one. It might be fun if this post turned up over there. It could (that part is somewhat random).
I subscribed to Wired yesterday. Their coverage of the Musk coup is unparalleled, and I am a Wired alum, having written for them in the early days of the web. It was only $10 for a year.
Recommend listening to the segment of this week's On The Media about what's going on at the DoJ. I know you don't need more to be depressed about, but something big is changing there, and you should know. Begins at 12:51.
To remove ourselves from the World Health Organization, and for him to refuse to let the CDC tell us how many Americans are contracting this deadly virus, the results will be the potential deaths of millions of people.
The Apple SuperBowl ad from 1984. It changed our culture. Gave us an ideal to hold tech companies to. Reminder that the generation before the Musks and Thiels had ideals that have been lost.
“We started off with a network of writers, and ended up with business models of oligarchs. It's time to start building webs like we mean it and damn all the wannabe-billionaires.”
This is a very important must-read piece by Jamelle Bouie in the NYT, but I disagree with his description of Trump. He's not in charge. He's weak. He would be unable to muster the courage to shut down Musk. He's not Hitler, he's the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz.
All the lunacy happening now is just a continuation of Jan 6. It’s what would have happened if the attempted coup in 2021 had been successful. And in that sense it was successful.
Slate: Disruption may have become a badge of honor among tech bros. But when it comes to the nation’s food security, transit safety, market stability, access to electricity, and preservation of civil rights, disruption for the sake of disruption is dangerous.
My "Little Feed Reader" on Bluesky using ATProto is a good mix of hard news and creative writing. Only the best stuff. Fairly well randomized. Give it a try. I'm going to try out some new ideas there soon.
We are lost, and now we have some unelected people who represent absolutely no one, who have taken control of our government, without our permission. And we are not happy with what our elected representatives are doing about it. This goes equally for reps from both major parties.
dave.feediverse.orgis an interesting bluesky account to follow. it joins all my flows outside of bluesky that have rss feeds into one bluesky channel. coming up with new ways to interop. still diggin! :-)
I'm 99.9% sure, as crazy as it sounds, when Musk is finished with his software project, you will have to use X for everything related to the government. To pay taxes, to receive health care, to renew your passport. And if you try to arrest him, he'll stop paying interest on the US debt, and that will be the end of the dollar as the reserve currency. He won't just control the US government, he will control the world economy
Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, David Frum for fantastic pieces posted in the middle of last night. We are having a fresh awakening in this country and in the end we may come to thank Musk and Trump for facilitating this.
Timothy Snyder explains. Musk will have shorted stocks, and wants to destroy the dollar so his crypto becomes the only way to store value. And more. Must read.
The time for the Dems to arrive at a "coherent message" to combat Trump was on Inauguration Day in 2021. We slept our way through four years when we should have been dismantling the movement he started. Now they're dismantling the United States.
Scripting News: Advice to would-be platform vendors. Oh for more innocent times when we didn’t worry about the government killing us, just platform vendors.
After a week of trying to push civil servants out of jobs all over the federal government, Musk set his sights Friday on the U.S. Treasury’s payment systems.
Donald Trump vows retribution at first 2024 presidential rally in Waco. A lot of us didn't listen because we didn't want to believe he could win. Now it's worth another listen. Read this article first.
2016: "But there are technologies that went a different way. My favorite example is Manhattan's relationship to Central Park. The apartment buildings around the park are the money, and the creativity is in the park. The buildings are exclusive, the most expensive real estate in the world. The park is open to anyone, rich or poor, from anywhere in the world. "
Developers if they have had experience with platform vendors, assume that at some point the platform vendor will kill them. The question is can you find a way to get most of what you want before you are killed. ;-)
The Nicaraguans who keep Wisconsin’s dairy farms, restaurants and factories working are sending home their most prized possessions, bracing for potential mass deportations.
How Trump calling immigration an ‘invasion’ could help him stretch the law. (CNN is doing its job here, explaining the consequences of Trump's misleading hype.)
He’s the same asshole who lied about Covid testing in 2020, and masks, and lockdowns, then vaccines, even though he and his family were vaccinated. We had a four year reprieve, and surprise, he’s still a huge asshole.
I have a better question for the author of this article about how men "seem" to him (and thus holding them responsible for how they seem). Would you so publicly ask similar questions of women for their collective seeming personality flaws and expect to get away with it?
Even a fraction of the workforce accepting buyouts could send shockwaves through the economy and trigger widespread disruptions throughout society as a whole.
BTW, the problem with apps like this is they have to find a common subset of functionality between the various platforms and in some important ways there is no intersection and the product can't work. We got there around 2017 and gave up. Nothing has changed here. This kind of interop has to come between the platforms themselves.
Automattic and others back Openvibe, an app that's unifying the open social web. (It's ridiculous that they call it the open social web. The fact that such an app is needed says everything you need to know about how open this supposed web is.)
Donald Trump on Mt Rushmore. Donald Trump on the $20 bill. The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial renamed Trump. Kennedy airport in NYC renamed Trump International. In the future the US will have one founding father: Donald J. Trump.
Krugman: "For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts."
Highly recommend episode 6 of season 2 of the Long Shadow podcast. It's about the rise of Trump as a political figure. I had forgotten the sequence of events, and there were parts of the story I didn't know. Begins with Trayvon Martin and #BLM.
Cory Doctorow on Bluesky’s conundrum. They are in a tight spot. I don’t think accepting AT Proto as an open protocol is a good bet for users and other devs. The only good bet is still RSS. And forget about federation, only the really shitty features need it.
This may be the actual moment when you need to change the name of The New York Times to something like The New York Junkies. Put the old grey lady out of her misery.
Before the election, Heritage Foundation staffers flooded federal agencies with records requests, looking for employees whose emails and messages contained terms like “climate change" or “DEI,” so they could be purged by a second Trump administration.
Before declaring democracy over, as our major news orgs and tech companies seem to have, remember there are still 50 states, most of whom still seem to accept that votes must be counted, and the winner is who gets the most, not the one who sends in a mob to trash the Capitol.
Krugman on why he left the Times. If you want to understand how the NYT became so awful, read this piece. He really spells it out in a way I've never seen before. Thank you PK for leaving and for telling the tale of why. We (readers) are getting a much better deal now.
January 31, the Democratic National Committee is meeting in National Harbor, Maryland to select a new party chair and chart their path out of last year's catastrophe.
They assaulted cops, trashed our Capitol, and tried to overthrow the US government. (I rewrote their headline to more accurately represent what happened.)
As a Tesla Model Y owner, I've had enough. I'm also a child of Holocaust survivors. Musk doing a Nazi salute behind the seal of the president is too much. In memory of my parents and grandparents, I have to do something.
Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute while standing behind the seal of the President of the United States summarizes the reprehensible first day of the second Trump regime.
If you owned a Tesla and could afford to write off the cost, what would be a good way to demonstrate disgust for the company? Selling it wouldn’t mean much.
When Trump ran for re-election he got the consideration any major party candidate would get from the press. As he is getting now as a newly sworn-in president.
Elon Musk is playing Hitler. We're not idiots. Next time he'll have a swastika armband and will complain about people saying he's Hitler. Not sure what we can do about it right now, but this is also not a controversy, it's fact.
Outcast upgrade notes: "Playback begins after the download completes, not after a portion of it is buffered." That was the initial design of podcasting, and its justification, at a time when networks were comparatively much slower.
I'm not a big fan of comments, and certainly not interested in comments on my podcasts. What a horrible thought. All the abusers living rent free in my head.
Today's Countdown is worth a listen. Takeaway -- why doesn't Biden run against the Supreme Court. And how about endorsing the call to investigate Thomas' bribes. Action man. Show us you have some life in you. Defend the USA.
The problem isn't that Biden might die, the problem is that even if he were to win, we'll be right back here in another four years, and at that time we will have to grapple with an even more dire situation.
AG Sulzberger (born August 5, 1980) is an American journalist serving as the chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of its flagship newspaper, The New York Times.
I searched the NYT website for how to cancel my subscription, I've had enough of this bullshit. Time for us to part ways. Unfortunately the search did not get me any closer to cancelling.
Heather Cox Richardson: “Although Trump has frequently slurred his words or trailed off while speaking and repeatedly fell asleep at his own criminal trial, none of the pieces mentioned Trump’s mental fitness.”
Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. On Netflix, highly recommended, esp the episode on end of the USSR and East Germany. If you think what we need is a dictator, see what it's like when it's over.
This is the only RSS 2.0 spec. Anyone who claims to have the real one is basically not telling the truth. And anyone who says the spec has changed since 2002 is also not telling the truth.
“I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability, and I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”
Why vote for Biden? Feel free to copy it or create your own list. When people get all fancy about reasons not to support Biden, I find it helpful to have this list to refer to.
The fediverse has the same problem as RSS, subscription is too hard. The only way we avoid the domination of tech giants is to work together. 12 minute podcast on a Sunday, worth it, imho.
NYT columnists rule the world, or so they seem to think, except Jamelle Bouie who makes a lot of sense. I’d suggest asking Bernie Sanders what he thinks.
To people who say you get wrong answers from ChatGPT, if I wanted my car to kill me I could drive into oncoming traffic. That's the problem with reporters discovering ChatGPT gives incorrect answers. So does Google. As do reporters.
There are 2 kinds of people: Those who find AI absolutely revolutionary and indispensable and integral to their workflows, and those who haven't learned how to use it yet. #amen
Wikipedia is essential, but it hallucinates as does journalism as does ChatGPT. Tim Bray, who I’ve known many years, defends Wikipedia, and quotes me, unfortunately without a link.
The great thing about outlining is that you can reorganize. That's why people invented index cards. But they are one-level outlines. Not nearly as useful as the multi-level reorganizable outlines on a computer.
You may not like Facebook the company, but they do great APIs and docs and example code. I haven't started reviewing this yet, but it looks like they've done an excellent job of laying down a crumb trail for developers to follow.
DW's Podcast0 feed: My second podcast on Apple Podcasts. For some reason I'm kind of proud to conform to Apple's podcast rules. But of course the feed is available without help from Apple, as always.
I didn't understand why Ghost was interested in ActivityPub until now. Not sure if it's going to work as well as they hope, but at least now I understand why.
I watched The Matrix, The Devil’s advocate and Fight Club and loved all three. So I asked ChatGPT for five suggestions of movies I might watch next and it came up with some interesting ideas.
This is what we don't do in software -- study each others' creations.
You can barely get anyone to even look at the simplest stuff.
Amazing how people bet their whole careers and businesses without any information on what other people are creating. No wonder new generations of software knock out previous generations. No one has any curiosity, respect.
Trump voters want revenge. It doesn't have much to do with inflation or unemployment, material wealth. It's deeper than that. We're all living a lie, that if we had money we'd be happy. The sad truth is no one is happy with this arrangement.
Netscape and blogging got together with Salon, Wired, Red Herring and Motley Fool, and eventually brought the NYT and NPR on board, and that created a powerful standard supported by the entire publishing industry, that led to social media and podcasting.
As long as they make movies that have no plots yes of course the AI's can do it. Maybe humans have to write and produce movies with stories and acting.
When ChatGPT can read my blog. This is what I've wanted since long before ChatGPT existed. I can't imagine what the privacy concerns are. Everything on my blog is by definition public.
In 1996 I served on a jury in Redwood City, Calif, all the way to a verdict. One of the best experiences of my life. When you ask people to make a serious decision, they rise to the occasion, just like the Trump jury did in today's verdict.
Microsoft and Google are putting AI chat into all their apps everywhere you can enter text, which imho is as pointless as embedding web browsers in all of the Office apps in 1994. ChatGPT is the Netscape of this generation. Compete with that, create the best environment for the kind of work we do there. That’s the game, from a UI standpoint.
Sotomayor admits some Supreme court decisions have driven her to tears. I hope she does more than that. How about agreeing to testify openly in the Senate about what exactly drove her to tears.
2016: The point of the First Amendment is that it protects the most offensive speech. If there weren't any offensive speech we wouldn't need protection. And some thin-skinned billionaires find anything but fawning praise to be offensive.
Study Finds That 52 Percent of ChatGPT Answers to Programming Questions Are Wrong. (This has not been my experience at all. I’ll write about it later today.)
MacArthur Foundation: "A competition for a $100 million grant to fund a single proposal that promises real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem of our time."
The disturbing truth is that there’s probably more sincerity than not in American politics. We may not want to believe it, but most of the people in charge say what they mean and mean what they say.
Yes Apple is a soul crushing tech monopoly. And some group inside Apple did something creative that inspired debate and for some revulsion, and in the name of uniformity in artistic expression, the creativity was crushed. And Steve Jobs would’ve loved it, btw, imho.
Despite being defeated, the Knicks received a standing ovation in the game’s final seconds — a token of appreciation from a loyal fanbase that enjoyed one of the most memorable playoff runs in team history.
Perplexity.ai is a competitor of ChatGPT. I asked about RSS and the NY Times role in RSS. This is a good test, because most reporters leave the NYT out of the story.
Stephen Wolfram on chatgpt. Why it's good at conversation but not at science. The agrees with what I've seen. But it's very useful at telling you what other humans do in situations like the one you describe.
I was really angry when the NYT fired Donald McNeil, who had done so much to keep us informed about Covid. If that's what the NYT isn't going to do, going forward, I'm all for it.
A friend from Calif is visiting NYC in July. I used ChatGPT for ideas about where to stay and where to visit for food and entertainment. This is far in advance of what we had before AI.
A Georgia appeals court on Wednesday delayed Donald Trump’s criminal case in that state, agreeing to hear an appeal from the former president that may foreclose a trial taking place this year.
Steve Albini, Storied Producer and Icon of the Rock Underground, Dies at 61. We learned a lot from him in Napster days about how little money actually gets to music performers.
After 17 years of stagnation with Twitter, the new tweet-alikes continue the no new features tradition. When will one of them break out and try something new?
I was asked on Threads what NY restaurant I miss the most. There are lots. But Ratner's is #1. Their food was fantastic, the ambience even better, and the waiters were wonderfully NY-grouchy.
Ben Smith asks the editor of the NYT an easy question: "Why doesn’t the executive editor see it as his job to help Joe Biden win?" Because it's not my job, he might say.
RSS > ActivityPub. I agree with this. And RSS is not exclusively polling based. If you support rssCloud protocol, as WordPress does, you can have instant news with RSS. It's built into FeedLand of course.
The worst thing about horse race reporting is that the election isn’t a horse race. The race actually won’t start until six months at which point the votes will be cast by mail and in person and then once you start counting, you could think of it as a race, but even then it’s not a race.
Remarks by President Biden at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Scroll to the end where he talks about the role of journalism in protecting our freedom.
I asked ChatGPT to write a report, and got back a good list with background info, never could have gotten it from a journalist (too conflicted, too lazy, often outright corrupt) or Wikipedia (controlled by trolls).
And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.
And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.
And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.
Ghost announces it will support ActivityPub and "become part of the largest open publishing network in the world." I don't think that's true. Just sayin. And size isn't the only thing that matters, btw. 😀
And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.
And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.
I see that due to early changes to Feedland.org, necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 556405 are no longer getting updates with my new writing. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 549368 . . . So it goes.
The eight best bagels in NYC, according to the city's Bagel Ambassador. (They got the #1 bagel place right, it's in the neighborhood in Queens I grew up in, Utopia Bagels. They are the best in NYC these days imho.)
So this ticking time bomb was sitting there all the time the journalists were talking about how Biden is too old to win the election with Trump. Biden was never the issue, the issue was the freaking supreme freaking court.
2008: Introducing bit.ly — the incredible professional’s URL-shortener. A lot of people don't know this was my launch. Unfortunately the product didn't continue on the path I wanted for it.
Great map of Total Solar Eclipse of 2024 Apr 08. I've been looking for this for weeks. I still wasn't going to drive to see the eclipse. I've seen a total eclipse. Imho its not magical. We have an eclipse every night at sunset. YMMV of course.
House Republicans Are Amplifying Russian Propaganda. (This is hardly news. All the polling they do, wouldn't their time be better spent focusing on facts today, and forget about magic thinking and polling.)
Ted Turner: I bet you’re all wondering what it feels like to be a billionaire. It’s disappointing really. I’ve learned that great wealth isn’t nearly as good as average sex.
I can't recall ever receiving spam as a result of subscribing to a podcast feed, and I have never gotten messages when I unsub begging me to come back.
"blueskyreader" is a simple little app I put together last year, it still works, nicely, and it's an interesting idea imho. I'm not going to get to do this myself anytime soon.
Yes, Britannica, you can write it this way, softening the focus, blurring the details in that decade of mounting atrocities: "Because she was Jewish, she left Nazi Germany in the summer of 1938 to settle in Sweden." It's not as though she trotted over to a travel agent on her lunch break and casually booked her travel across international borders to safety.
I thought it might be useful to watch a NOVA documentary about AI, but it was just the usual very very old scare story, when the truth of what's happening today is much weirder. It's one thing to imagine the future, another to live it. Too bad they didn't accept the challenge.
Here is the MetaWeblog API, the common glue that connected editors to blogging systems in the 00s. It was supported by most of the popular systems (not sure if Blogger did).
I had to do a little work on the XML-RPC site and stumbled across this page of links into the 1998 version of the site. The text is all the same, but the style is very 1998. 😍
If the Repubs lose the house before 2025, the Dems could in my dreams nuke the filibuster and change the number of Supreme Court justices to 256 (a nice power of 2). Overturn Dobbs, reinstate Roe and 14th Amendment.
If they lose the house before 2025, the Dems could in my dreams nuke the filibuster and change the number of Supreme Court justices to 256 (a nice power of 2). Overturn Dobbs, reinstate Roe and 14th Amendment.
If they lose the house before 2025, the Dems could in my dreams nuke the filibuster and change the number of Supreme Court justices to 256:(a nice power if 2). Overturn Dobbs, reinstate Roe and 14th Amendment.
Media entities have this ludicrous trend of disclosing that they have used “AI” on some article or the other. If that is the case, they should disclose they used Google Docs or Microsoft Office and their built-in “grammar” and “spelling” and other features.
This is Manton's blogroll from micro.blog, rendered in my blogroll engine. We can do that because we use the same freaking file format. This is the social web folks.
I was glad to hear that Om Malik, one of the (original) ur-bloggers, has a blogroll on his site. I was almost going to say "still" but blogrolls are now officially on their way back.
" . . . and to overturn the online world being dictated by profit to one that is dictated by the needs of humanity. It is only then that the online ecosystem we all live in will reach its full potential and provide the foundations for creativity, collaboration and compassion."
My friend Guy Kawasaki has a new book out, right now, which you can buy. If you want a great read from a person who knows how to develop and market ideas with humor, wisdom, love and integrity, this is the one to get.
If you're into reading code in outlines, this is the database-level code in FeedLand. The link opens in Drummer. There are comments at the head of the big routines, listing blog-like changes in the code and the thinking behind them.
Journos seem to think Americans can't understand the basics of world politics, but somehow we understand the rules and history of the NBA, NFL and MLB. The functioning of politics isn't really any more complicated.
There’s a lot of history here. Google Reader insisted posts must have titles, and at the same time twitter said posts may not have titles, so they could never interop. Truth is some ideas are so simple a title is inconceivable.
There's a rule in covering elections that they don't make projections or even analyze results on TV until all the polls are closed. We need an analogous rule that says there should be no reporting on polls until after the election, to allow the people to form their own opinions, for the same reason.
Because (sarcastically) it's every American's Constitutional right to blow away as many of their fellow Americans as possible in as short a time as possible.
Have a look at the webcams at the local Belleayre ski area where it's raining and in the 50s. Sad sight. It will get cold again and they will make snow. It's not quite over yet.
Variety: "Biden has long lacked the ability to bend the medium of TV to his ends." That's true of Democrats as a group. In contrast, the Repubs do this very well. It's the only thing they do well.
This story ought to wake up our journalists. This is the same guy who ordered the rioters to attack the US Capitol. Think about that, and take these threats very very very seriously.
An increasingly detailed picture of former President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda is emerging — one that would make the near-daily shocks of his norm-shattering first White House tenure look tame.
The truth about trump is that while he might claim a huge net worth, it’s all mortgaged, many times, fraudulently, so the banks could repossess all of it, but haven’t for fear of having it all crash, and them getting pennies on the dollar.
"The incident was a perfect illustration of the difference between real public debate and the usual, carefully choreographed appearances of our elected politicians."
Logseq, a company I thought so much of I invested, had a blog but hasn't updated since August last year. How does such a young entrepreneurial excellent company keep in touch with their users and friends?
Another blog that hasn't updated in quite some time, JOHO the Blog by David Weinberger, a Cluetrain author and longtime friend. If the blogosphere is to reboot, we'll need some love from Dr Dave.
I'm trimming my subscription list, removing feeds that haven't updated since last summer, and noticed that Joel On Software is one. He's one of the prolific influential bloggers.
I've been wanting to teach ChatGPT how I work, as I would an developer partner, so we can get more efficient over time and tackle more ambitious projects. Eventually I'd like to work with it on porting Frontier to Linux. It's not something any of my human colleagues have been able to help with, but I don't doubt that ChatGPT could do it.
Seeing the headline of this op-ed in the Washington Post, I wondered who the author was responding to. You have to wade thru a lot of other stuff before you get to the point, only Repub loony birds, of course, say Trump is America’s Navalny. Does this bs really deserve a response from the WP?
Warriors reportedly tried to unite LeBron James and Stephen Curry at NBA trade deadline. That would have been amazing. Flush both teams out of the system in one move. It's about time.
2014: Interop means that I can give you a text file, and you will have a program that can open it. Interop means you can pull into any gas station and put fuel in your car. Interop means you can give me $100 and I'll give you my Knicks ticket, and when you go to the arena, they will let you in.
I'm reading Liz Cheney's book, and forgot something I had guessed during the insurrection. Trump was calling Congresspeople saying if you stop the count I'll call off the attack. In other words, your life for a vote. I suspected it before, but they have testimony that confirms it.
Thinking of buying an Apple Vision Pro, but when I went to the site, my iPhone 13 Pro wouldn't do anything when I clicked on the first image. Oh well. Not like any of this stuff works, right.
Keith Teare with a real benefit for the new Apple goggles: "No need for a standing desk or an office for that matter. The $3500 is cheaper than they would cost. Those living in smaller spaces and working from home should love it."
“A public park with a small marketplace on one side is surrounded by a courthouse, a playing field, businesses, and a radio station. In the marketplace wander male and female reporters, some taking notes, some with cameras.”
I'm reading about discussion in Congress regarding exempting newspaper publishers from antitrust so they can address the threat of new technology. "Our chief interest is to keep newspapers alive," says the legislator. The date: 1963. The technology: television.
I would much prefer if Apple had poured their vast resources and creativity into making mass transport work in the Bay Area instead, as a prototype for what might be possible in the rest of the world.
I asked ChatGPT to design a full-featured feed reader using MySQL, and it got it right. Transcript attached. Remarkable. I wonder what else it could do. I have an idea of using it, eventually, with some work, to port software from Mac to Linux.
People who get my blog via nightly email, there are new requirements from Google and Yahoo, and I have no freaking idea wtf they're talking about. If you have an idea, tell me what I have to do. Thanks.
It won't be long before he has an idea for how spreadsheets should work, or a writing tool, and getting ChatGPT to write it for him. It'll be ready to download before he can load the page.
Nikki Haley is Trump's worst nightmare. A woman who talks about him as if he was a petulant child and a loser. If she pushes it he'll lose it completely.
An innovation in FeedLand. This is the list of feeds I'm subscribed to. See the wedge in the left of each feed? When you click it, it reveals the five most recent items in the feed, with links. It's a different kind of feed reader.
The Inside Story of PC Magazine, PC World, and Macworld’s Origins, as Told by David Bunnell. I haven't read this yet, but from its description, I will, carefully.
Chicago area drivers stranded their Teslas at charging stations in Chicago highlighting the foolishness of owing an EV without a reliable home charger.
Really need checkbox news finally, because I am so tired of hearing about all the same old bullshit about this asshole. You know who I’m talking about.
When is the New York Times going to run a column about children of Holocaust survivors who are terrified of America turning into a Nazi dictatorship, next year.
Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie Norton, the wife of a guffawing, rubber-limbed sewer worker forever mired in a blowhard neighbor’s get-rich-quick schemes and other hazards of life on the classic 1950s sitcom “The Honeymooners,” died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 99.
I still believe tech companies can play a very important role in the open internet, as long as they are willing to treat users as customers and sell a product that has value without the usual michegas.
If you work on a team with other people who use Drummer (my outliner), you can share outlines with each other to "narrate your work." It's like blogging on a team level.
Zyns are filled with nicotine and are meant to be placed under your lip like tobacco dip. No spitting is required, so nicotine pouches are even less visible than vaping.
Say I had a reading list with my favorite podcasts and my podcasting client could subscribe to it. Then when I add a feed to that list on my desktop computer, the podcast client would automatically be subscribed to it.
"It was really the simplicity of that last part that struck me: the fact that feed readers still rely on an open format that’s easily portable between apps and services."
Variety.com: The 100 Greatest TV Shows of all Time - I have definitely watched a lot of these shows, and just finished a binge watch of "Six Feet Under" on Netflix (HBO show from 2001-2005) - it was excellent!
Services like Substack can make it easy to move to another platform, but of course they don't. I warned everyone about it, got some rude responses from writers who thought they knew better. If we work together we can have better than what we have and not have to compromise. As writers.
Google has spent a lot of effort to convince you that HTTP is not good. Let me have the floor for a moment to tell you why HTTP is the best thing ever.
Michael Cohen Used Fake Cases Cited by A.I. to Seek an End to Court Supervision. (And journalists write fictitious stories based on Wikipedia as a source. All the time. And they don't care, btw.)
For my two active users (Ron and Andre), I have finished making updates to my MyStatusTool site to allow editing of previous posts - I will reach out to you to see when you would like to try this upgrade.
The Amazon Music Web API is a new, simplified API allowing quick retrieval of meta-data about albums, tracks, artists, playlists, podcasts, and more from the Amazon Music catalog’s millions of songs.
Updated the Github repo for my artcasting/photocasting toolkit, adding a first draft of installation and setup instructions. This is what I am using for my artcasting and photocasting sites. Enjoy! Reach out if you have questions...
Ron, I loved reading your post about YouTube searching, keep it up! (Testing, first time to try to update post 4) (New edit of this post) Another new edit - Yet another new edit - One more time edit - Let's do it again! - One more time! - I think I have it now - trying to edit the main file now - working on part 3 now - had a problem with new code - trying replaceAll change - trying use of var keyword - trying exact copy of example - that worked, now trying my string - that worked, trying to remove slashes - got the first slash - added another line for second slash, switching to new function name - added a calling argument - added second argument for post text - creating directory path - creating rendering - trying final step - updated base URL - making a tweak - last change
Did some work on MyStatusTool today, having trouble figuring out how to pass a string into the medium-editor, seems like I may have to clean up the text first...
I need to look through my books for a good reference on Thai customs and culture. We now have a trained expert in the family who could translate such a book to native Thai and to Chinese!
Knoll’s law of media accuracy: “Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.”
Wikipedia is a complete mess when it comes to RSS. No mention of the NY Times and Martin Nisenholtz. They talk about versions after 2.0, but the format was frozen at 2.0. Makes me wonder when I rely on it as an authority on other subjects.
Wikipedia is a complete utter mess when it comes to RSS. No mention of the NY Times and Martin Nisenholtz. They talk about versions after 2.0, but the format was frozen at 2.0. Makes me wonder when I rely on it as an authority on other subjects.
Spent the morning tracing double entry back to the year 1300, when the merchants of Venice were already using it in business. Pacioli didn't publish the details of the system until 1494 but the merchants had already been using it for 200 years!
You can tell Doc is a blogger because he has a post from 2007 where he lists all the cars he's ever owned. I do not have such a page myself, btw. Not sure what that says about me. 😀
I read Brent's piece on Mastodon and NetNewsWire, holding my breath hoping he'd arrive at the same answer I did and the answer is yes -- he did. RSS is perfect for Mastodon, and it supports RSS, as does NNW (of course), and that's exactly the right way to connect the two. That's how we're doing it in FeedLand.
You may hope the big company has good intentions, but they're a big company and they honestly don't have very much respect for us. I've had my nose rubbed in this for my whole career. It was amazing how much better they listened when I had a Harvard business card. 😀
I agree that importing and exporting are the wrong ideas. I want to have lots of tools work on the same data. Format standards, and my control of my own work.
Andrew Hickey is using Bluesky as a blogging platform, and because we're connected via RSS, you can read it in FeedLand. The power of standards. Just a bit more interop betw these systems and we'll have broken free of the possibility of being dominated by bigco's. This is how bootstraps work and they're super-important to progress.
I asked ChatGPT who won the 2020 election and if there was fraud, and why do some people say the election was stolen. There's no "they both do it" to the answer, it's clear and correct. Maybe we could give the AI credit for giving clearer correct answers than the journalists who attack it.
The best I’ve read so far about the immorality of the Webb decision is the chapter on abortion in Elie Mystal’s book. I wish we could buy it from his publisher so everyone could read it. Basically the law is as immoral as slavery for pregnant women.
To all the people who clicked on a link to a FeedLand page on a phone in the past, I am sorry to have put you through that. Now that it works on phones, I can see how nice it is to be able to skim the news while you're out and about.
One thing ChatGPT is great for is a simple Explainer document that gets to the point and covers different contexts, and doesn't waste too much time with bullshit. Like this explanation of "The Resistance." Google sucks at that, with all kinds of garbage in the way.
Twitter poisoned our minds with the idea that by taking away the basic features of writing on the web they were encouraging people to write shorter, better, more to-the-point posts and that would make communication on the web like poetry.
The idea of posting on your blog and cross-posting to lots of place is the right idea, no argument there, the problem is that the places you can actually cross-post to are few and far-between.
In 2006, @AlanRusbridger described the current threat to newspapers as a threat to society. As AI innovation undermines new industries, this will also be a composition played in two registers.
This was a red letter morning. I stumbled onto how to most easily find all the recordings posted on YouTube by any given contributor. This will make it easy to gather a large collection of Bob's performances. However there is one danger in this, which is that one must be very careful not to become a completist in making such a collection. Being a completist might be okay in some cases, but with Bob it could be a giant curse because there is such a gigantic quantity of material that one could find the collecting turning into an obsession to find it all and record it all. This could become a mind numbing activity that could kill off the joy of finding and saving a large number of treasures. It is very important to capture the joy and spontaneity in his work.
Was able to get the text of a previous post into the MyStatusTool editor window, but had tags appear in the post. Did some experimenting, then I could not decode the HTML entities - frustrating! (Did an edit on the imported text, removed tags, added link manually.
<p>Did some work on <a href="https://andy.mystatustool.com/">MyStatusTool </a>today, having trouble figuring out how to pass a string into the medium-editor, seems like I may have to clean up the text first...</p>
<p>Did some work on <a href="https://andy.mystatustool.com/">MyStatusTool </a>today, having trouble figuring out how to pass a string into the medium-editor, seems like I may have to clean up the text first...</p>
I asked the Bing AI tool just now to search the web for examples of how humorists and satirists have portrayed Henry Kissinger. It was merrily typing away joke after joke, anecdote after anecdote, and as I watched the words appear I saw that HK had just been described as lewdly using the f-word while speaking with a casual acquaintance in a social setting. Almost instantly, the whole thread vanished, replaced by this sentence: "My mistake, I can’t give a response to that right now. Let’s try a different topic."
Was able to get the text of a previous post into the MyStatusTool editor window, but had tags appear in the post. Did some experimenting, then I could not decode the HTML entities - frustrating!
<p>Did some work on <a href="https://andy.mystatustool.com/">MyStatusTool </a>today, having trouble figuring out how to pass a string into the medium-editor, seems like I may have to clean up the text first...</p>
<p>Did some work on <a href="https://andy.mystatustool.com/">MyStatusTool </a>today, having trouble figuring out how to pass a string into the medium-editor, seems like I may have to clean up the text first...</p>
NICKLpass sounds interesting, they describe themselves as an EZ-Pass for news, but from their site and various news articles, it's not clear how it works.
If you found a group of pubs that wanted to do an EZ-Pass of News, who would you look to to implement it. It has to be an organization that journalism trusts.
Did some work on MyStatusTool today, having trouble figuring out how to pass a string into the medium-editor, seems like I may have to clean up the text first...
Search could also be two-way too. This piece was written in 2009. Still hasn't happened. When you get a dominant tech company, usually the market they dominates goes cold.
Search could also be two-way too. This piece was written in 2009. Still hasn't happened. When you get a dominant tech company, usually the market they dominates goes cold.
Some things take so long, but how do I explain. When not too many people, can see we're all the same. And because of all their tears, their eyes can't hope to see the beauty that surrounds them. Isn't it a pity.
If memory serves me: John Deere managed for many years to prevent farmers from having anyone but John Deere repair the tractors they had purchased from John Deere. And Monsanto didn't let farmers collect seeds from Monsanto-bred plants to use in their own fields next year. And Disney went to Washington to extend the copyright on Mickey Mouse. So, quick question: What new move roughly of this kind will AI technology make possible? What new kinds of enclosures and silos are probably on the horizon?
On non-technical topics, if you harass ChatGPT 3.5 with enough follow-up questions you can get it to put aside its glib reliance on confident exaggeration.
Made a change to MyStatusTool to read the user posts in the Admin interface instead of the full set of user and subscribe posts. Next will be to use the edit button to copy the individual post text to the editor window....
Updated the Github repo for my artcasting/photocasting toolkit, adding a first draft of installation and setup instructions. This is what I am using for my artcasting and photocasting sites. Enjoy! Reach out if you have questions...
The reporter did get some blowback from critics over crediting the age question to "a reporter" rather than to himself. (I’ve seen reporters do worse.)
We've had some frost on the grass in recent mornings, as winter approaches. I need to get in the swing of it again in working folks around the world with CW, my favorite international language.
It's really gratifying that so many new people are using news.scripting.com. It's basically a front-end for FeedLand. I totally manage it with the tools in FeedLand.
A couple of WordPress blocks that use the FeedLand API to show your latest feed items on a WordPress site. Written by Fernando Fernandes, a developer at Automattic who I'm working with.
A couple of WordPress blocks that use the FeedLand API to show your latest feed items on a WordPress site. Written by Fernando Fernandes, a developer at Automattic that I'm working with.
I don't like the term antisemitic, it's too technical. Let's call it racism instead. Or say the proponent is a Nazi, because that's really what's going on, isn't it?
Filoli was the location of the first meeting on US soil in several years between President Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping ahead of the APEC summit.
A New Yorker article I'd definitely pay $1 to read. I would say this, understanding what's possible with computers will be the human contribution for a while at least. We'll have to work harder to be competitive. And that's a good thing imho because programmers have become lazy and inefficient. Also I never thought of myself as a "coder," I find it overly diminutive.
We don't think of social media apps like Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, etc as part of a content management system. But if they are textcasting oriented, and have feeds that are properly configured, then yes -- you can have people write for publication using such a well-equipped social network.
Evan Osnos wrote the first and only piece in the runup to the 2016 election that tried to paint a picture of the Trump presidency in advance of the election. This should be an artform by now imho.
Jay Rosen on the value of lists. (A hidden benefit of a switch to a new platform, intelligent users can tell you which features are missed most and why.)
24 October 2023 was the day my doctor informed me that I have a very young heart, rather unexpected, but pleasant. This was his experience from his actual inspection of my heart, not an extrapolation from other measures. He estimated my heart is about ten years younger than the rest of my body, when the heart is more often seven years older than the rest of the body for men and four years for women. This is the birth of a new tag line for me: Youngheart.
I would love to read an op-ed in the NYT that exposed their own hypocrisy as thoroughly as this piece rightly debunks the adoration they have for tech titans.
I woke up in the middle of the night after dreaming about cats being the people of New York City. So I got out my iPad, launched ChatGPT and asked it to instruct DALL-E to help me visualize the dream.
The great thing about the new version of DALL-E is even if you can’t draw, you can create visualizations of abstractions you work with, like the inhumanity of JavaScript for complex programming work.
The great thing about the new version of DALLAS-E is even if you can’t draw, you can create visualizations of abstractions you work with, like the inhumanity of JavaScript for complex programming work.
Too bad Pebble is closing, I had just started using it. I wonder if it might’ve worked better if they took a textcasting approach, ie made it so it supported the basic features of web writing instead of imposing the same limits as twitter.
The moment in 2017 when I decided to stop trying to cross-posting from my blog to everywhere. "I used to have a better blog. It accommodated and focused my thinking instead of limiting and scattering it. I want my old blog back. I liked the freedom. My ideas flowed better."
“Anybody who studies history learns two things: They learn to do research and they learn to write. What history will give you is the ability to pivot into the different ideas, the different fields, the different careers as they arise.”
U.S. scientist Robert Sapolsky says humans have no free will. That's what I think, and all the pretense that we're intelligent and machines aren't is ridiculous given the experiences we're having communicating with machines.
I was looking for NBA sites that have RSS feeds and thought to ask ChatGPT, of course, and it gave me some pointers. Haven't had a chance to validate them yet.
I was looking for NBA sites that have RSS feeds and thought to ask ChatGPT, of course, and it gave me some pointers. Haven't had a chance to validate them yet.
Today is the birthday for my wife's niece, Aun Aun, soon to graduate from five years of college in Thailand, now speaking her native Thai, plus English and Chinese!!
People talk about the early idealism of the web. I confess, I was one of the idealists, and I still am, amazingly. Here's a piece I wrote in 1996 called Holding Hands in Cyberspace.
This is what I was saying about Kyrie Irving and the NBA. No players in the NBA stood up for the Jewish people. The best was LeBron James who said Irving shouldn't have said it, not that what he was saying was heinous. Silence from everyone else.
The barbarous murders last weekend of more than 1,300 Israelis by the highly organized and ruthless death squads of Hamas killers bear the stamp of institutional Jew hatred on a vast scale.
In July 2003, two fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, journalist Christopher Lydon and software engineer Dave Winer, sat down for an interview together. This gave way to arguably the very first modern podcast.
In the Planning Ahead department, now that tax season has ended, it's a good time to get stuff done for the future. I start with a bush that claims to have purple berries the Northern Cardinals are said to love to eat. Plant this bush and the Cardinals will flock to your yard! Next trip to the nursery will include a search for American native beautyberry (Callicarpa americana).
The first in my new series on Irrelevant Postings, this one about the Johann Sebastian Bach - "Coffee Cantata" BWV 211, complete with full lyrics, as well as the video of a performance of the piece by a string orchestra and two vocalists. How irrelevant is this for me? Well, I don't drink coffee, never have, probably never will, so it's totally irrelevant for me. But I sent the link to my brother, who is an opera fanatic, so it might be quite relevant, or at least a little bit interesting, for him.
A nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand between 1970 and 2002.
If subscription isn't one-click in your federated social media system, go back to the drawing board and re-do your architecture, because it won't work.
Dr Dobbs interview with me in 1991 on among other things calling Apple's bluff, which turned out to be a freaking disaster. We had a far better product, but that didn't matter very much. Should have gone to Unix then, but I liked the Mac better.
It's an honor to be quoted by Philip Bump in his Washington Post column, but -- the exact quote is -- "People come back to places that send them away." The sentiment is right. MuskCo is breaking that rule bigtime.
John Palfrey, executive director of Berkman when I was there, writes about the inception of blogging at Harvard in 2003. John opened all the doors for the work we were doing.
At the play’s intermission, a person maybe a decade into retirement was walking along, talking to his companion, saying of King Lear, “That old guy is a wreck.”
I was very fortunate to be a student at Oberlin College in the Spring of 1964 when the Oberlin College Choir did a historic two month tour of Russia with their amazing chorale performances. It was a super successful way to win over the hearts of the Russians and was so characteristic of how my generation used to win people over with love and beauty.
I asked ChatGPT if my blogs, and work with feeds and podcasting and other tech qualifies as "IndieWeb." Also asked whether "open web" and IndieWeb are more or less the same thing. It said yes to pretty much all of it. To which I add, of course.
ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources. It is no longer limited to data before September 2021.
I couldn't find a page on the web that explains what a Macintosh OS "refcon" is so I asked ChatGPT to write one. I can vouch for the accuracy, even beauty, of what it wrote.
Trump is cornered, under indictment, facing the deprivation of his liberty if convicted – and winning the presidency is his only way out. He will stop at nothing, do anything, and tear down everything to protect himself.
In the late 90s and into the 00s, we needed the term Sources Go Direct to focus our reporter friends on the role bloggers were playing. They jumped to the conclusion that we were trying to be reporters. Most of us were not.
A suggestion to friends investing in local news, it might be good to invest also in giving the sources of news better means to reach users of news. There's more to news than intermediaries.
I watched Barbie and my god what an AWFUL travesty of a plot and waste of talent. Made my stomach ache. A freaking commercial. Got an 80 on Metacritic. What is wrong with everyone! It was probably the worst movie ever made.
"As late as 1939, London supplier Charles Roberson & Co. was unashamedly advertising mummy in its Catalogue of Artists’ Materials, where it was described as '[a] pigment prepared by grinding together the Bitumen and Bones of an Egyptian Mummy.'”
We managed to order Amtrak train tickets to Chicago with my mobile phone. It took two of us 45 mins to navigate their website order form. I used to just call Amtrak and do it over the landline. Much easier, but I guess those good times are over. We're still looking forward to the train ride!
It should have been simple for New York to set up its legal weed market: You put out a call for entrepreneurs, evaluate their pitches and let the best qualified folks set up weed dispensaries.
“A nerd tells a joke in a nightclub seated at a table with his nerdy girlfriend while watching a Beatles tribute band. Elvis is the waiter watching the band with envy.”
A nerd tells a joke in a nightclub seated at a table with his nerdy girlfriend while watching a Beatles tribute band. Elvis is the waiter watching the band with envy.
A nerd tells a joke in a nightclub seated at a table with his nerdy girlfriend while watching a Beatles tribute band. Elvis is the waiter watching the band with envy.
"What we were hoping to do was to create a system by which we gathered in order to hear music that in some way served the spiritual needs of the audience. It didn’t work out that way. We abandoned our parents’ church, and we haven’t replaced it with anything solid and substantial. But I do still believe in it." --Pete Townshend
I managed to find a help page that told me how to find the pw for my phone. I tried it and it worked! For the first time I can now hear voicemail messages that people leave for me. Hooray!!
"Romney was, not unlike the colleagues he criticizes, willing to say whatever it took to win power, even if it meant smearing nearly half the country as essentially unproductive and opening the door to some of the most corrosive forces in American political life."
I have started a new website, GeorgiaVTrump.com, to cover the Georgia 2020 election interference trial in Fulton County, Georgia. Links to pertinent news coverage will be posted, as well as timeline information and court documents as they are made available. In addition, since the trial proceedings are being made available on YouTube, this site will host a podcast with the audio from those proceedings.
Comments and suggestions are welcome, they can be added to posts, or emailed to info@georgiavtrump.com.
This change in Chrome in 2020 is the likely source of the end of the referer header value on the web. Something that sounds so esoteric is actually removing an important feature of the web, and it got little or no notice.
Here's a nice format for reading 51 years of the PAARA newsletter, the club in Palo Alto that I belong to. It's a wonderful club with great monthly meeting presentations and exciting Field Day activations every June.
In an excellent clip from the Sopranos TV series, a therapist tells Tony Soprano’s spouse Carmela that she’s fooling herself if she believes that she’s not helping Tony live a violent life as a Mafia gangster. She believes she’s merely living a private life, without public consequences, which the therapist blows past as a delusion or excuse. "One thing you can never say is that you haven't been told," he says. The private life is a powerful part of American mythology, the U.S. being, as we all recall, the owner and frequent user of the world’s most powerful military. (Via T.D.)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that "the Fulton County District Attorney’s office is urging a judge to keep all 19 defendants in its election racketeering case together, warning that a failure to do so would create a “logistical quagmire” for courthouse staff, witnesses and jurors.", headline reads Fulton DA pushes to keep all 19 defendants together in Trump case
"These serious declines in wildlife species populations [indicate] that nature is unraveling and that our planet is flashing red warning signs of systems failure."
From NBC News, "A group of voters sued Tuesday to kick former President Donald Trump off the ballot in Minnesota, the latest effort to cite a little-known provision in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to argue that he is ineligible to be president because he violated his oath of office after he lost the 2020 election."
Wolfram/Alpha brags that it can translate messages to and from Morse Code. But it makes the most common error of converting the code to text symbols, instead of to learn the sounds of Morse Code. Learn the sounds and you can learn to do Morse Code at high speed. Translating the sounds of Morse Code to text will only slow you down in using the code.
Today Andy posted a long Status Update (2023-09-11) that shows our little updates can be pretty extensive and awesome! I've experimented with this some too. For example my 2023-09-09 Update reaches all the way back to a very early posting (May 1994) on rec.music.dylan, which I then included on the cover page of my first ever website, a Dylan bibliography from 1999-29-05 which is still alive in its original form today and likely one of the oldest sites still in its original form on the web, more than 24 years after it was first created. The bibliography was built with the encouragement of the great Dylan master, CJ, and it was first posted as a surprise to him. You may notice that I indexed the site using Alta Vista, which was considered to be a powerful search engine at the time. Google searches had not yet been invented, so that's old, like me!
Ken Smith writes again on this topic, referring again to the need to organize to be successful in activism or other group projects. I recently finished listening to a podcast called "Panther: Blueprint for Black Power". The podcast tells the story of fighting for voting rights in Lowndes County, Alabama in 1965 and 1966, after passage of the Voting Rights Act. The "blueprint" is not very specific, basically the community organized with the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for voter registration and voting. The community also created a separate political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, to provide an alternate slate of candidates to oppose white supremacy Democratic candidates. Their symbol was the Black Panther, and this was the inspiration for the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.
Ken Smith also brings up the topic of tools for organizing that were part of the 2008 Barack Obama campaign website. Thanks to Google, I found a site that collects presidential campaign websites, and saw there were several captures of the original Obama website. I looked at a page with the site after the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Reviewing the home page, there were ways for people to register with the site, to sign up for a newsletter, to find a local group where they could get involved, an area to volunteer to help, and (of course) a donation link. The bottom half of the page looked like a news blog where stories of interest could be posted and read. I assume that these "tools" are what Ken Smith is talking about.
All of these "tools" are pretty standard elements of website design for political websites (link is to collection of 2024 websites). I did a quick review of BuddyPress, a WordPress plugin that "helps you build any kind of community website using WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more." (from the home page). I found an example of a NGO using this application, as well as a collection of 20 other examples. On a broader note, the Action Network provides organizing tools for groups (at some cost). I mention these examples to demonstrate that there are tools and applications available at little to no cost to provide ways for people to organize, read, and write on a topic or issue, so I do not see the "tools" issue as a problem (they exist, but require time and effort to set up and use). The "problem" is that there needs to be a group of people sufficiently interested in an issue to want to organize, and to take the time to use available tools to support that organization. As I have written earlier, the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is a comprehensive set of tools/methods to help communities identify issues and organize to address them. I welcome Ken's input on if the examples in this post meet his expectations of what people need to organize and take action.
The Niners won their opener against the Steelers, 30-7. Clearly no sophomore slump for Purdy, and the entire team did a great job, especially Aiyuk & McCaffrey. The offense moved at will and the defense stopped nearly everything, far exceeding their 2.5 pt advantage at the start of the game.
No march on Washington is going to come of today's social media tools. But remember, as someone once said, the rich march on Washington every day. They march on Washington so often that they keep permanent offices there, on K Street. The rich and powerful certainly are organized.
The most amazing thing in years has happened today. I just found one of the most important people in my life, one of my classmates at Oberlin College, Lynn Bengston. She and our mutual friend, Steph, got me into Bob Dylan's music one night our senior year in 1966. I eventually lost touch with both of them. I started searching for them in the 1990's. I was too late in locating Steph, she had already passed on. But I never had even the slightest lead in finding Lynn, none of our friends had any idea what had happened with her. But today I finally located her and we talked on the phone for 15 mins, with more to come soon. We were both verrrrry happy to reconnect!!!
The university institute "turned in a different direction, focusing on people who studied the internet, rather than people who made the internet," behaving as universities tend to do.
Every university should host an open source project. It should be a process that lasts decades, spans generations. The goal is two-fold: Add to our technology, and to develop better developers.
"A Secure and Lucrative One-Stop Replacement for Your Many Stupid Social Media Pages" -- discussed in the near-future sci-fi/nonfiction novel The Ministry for the Future, chapter 54.
I realized that if we go to Thailand in February, I will be able to get an antenna up and enter the ARRL DX CW contest, my first DXpedition operating ever!!
Is there any way the web to be open in the future or is it doomed to be forever controlled by the nerds in silicon valley? And do they really know what's best for us? Why?
Back in the 1970s when SQL was new, it was touted as an English-like database language. Now with ChatGPT you really can do database queries in actual English and it understands. Amazing. Whether the info is accurate or not (I suspect it is) is beside the point.
Google has spent a lot of effort to convince you that HTTP is not good. Let me have the floor for a moment to tell you why HTTP is the best thing ever.
I decided to look at my FeedLand news feed today (was on a tab I had not looked at recently) and saw the newsfeed problem that Dave Winer wrote about today. I am still blocked from commenting on his Github repos, so posting a comment here. I ended up opening a new tab and doing a hard refresh (Ctrl-R), and the page refreshed.
These are all the people I follow on Bluesky in a FeedLand feed list. Most of them haven't updated in a long time, it seems (or there could be a bug in my software).
Listening to Ross Gay read yesterday about not being in a hurry, I thought: like porch-sitting, the literary essay records one person's quest for things that can only be found while meandering in a manner discouraged or even disallowed by capitalism.
TheCurbShop.com: Poster of "Save The Manuals" - this is a collection of manual shift patterns for cars, I saw this on a t-shirt recently, my first thought was that "manuals" referred to computer software manual - hah!
Spent time today confirming that our visiting beaver was actually a beaver (a broad flat tail FOR SURE) and NOT a groundhog, muskrat or gopher. But we also have two new holes dug in our front garden. We don't think beavers dig holes, so we might have two visitors, not one: a beaver plus a groundhog, muskrat or gopher. Quite an interesting development.
We saw the Super Blue Moon here and it was really fantastic. I took a bunch of pictures, but none were as fantastic as seeing it with the naked eye. It definitely looked blue to me. My astronomer brother told me it's not really blue. I saw BLUE!
Great to hear a story by Heidi Roizen who I knew when the Mac was new. She was the entrepreneur's entrepreneur, and it's good to hear her sharing her experience with new entrepreneurs.
In an article on August 29, 2023 by Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, the testimony of Mark Meadows in his appearance before Judge Steve Jones on August 28 for removal of his Georgia indictment to federal court “seemed to leave himself wide open to prosecution for his involvement in the phony-elector scheme.”
BloggerCon: The idea that almost everyone at a certain kind of focused public meeting writes publicly. (At our city council meetings, only a handful of people do, which in some ways shifts political power out of their hands.)
Google Keep has been upgraded with bold, italics and such. So once I have that update, I think I will use Keep to document my full inventory of QRP and other ham radio gear.
Yesterday, I was able to use MyStatusTool, my minimal blogging tool, to capture URLs from a set of open tabs on my phone. I structured the posts with the website link, then the title of the post. I was able to post to my instance, all from my phone. The hardest part was selecting the text for the link. I use the Brave web browser, and another menu would pop up before the editor toolbar, so I had to tap several times to get to the link button. I think I will keep trying this as a way to capture links for later use/classification.
Great ThreadReader rollup of reporting on the Mark Meadows testimony today before Judge Steve Jones, regarding Mark Meadows request to remove his Georgia indictment on RICO charges from Georgia state court to federal court:
JustSecurity.org reports on the Mark Meadows bid to remove his Georgia indictment to federal court. In this article, the case is made that The Hatch Act Bars Meadows’ Removal Bid
Once upon a time a political campaign used web tools that made it easy for people to work together as activists where they lived. The tools helped someone get elected with great excitement to the U.S. Presidency. Upon arrival in the White House, they shut the thing down. Now it's a fading memory.
Ken Smith posted recently, continuing to riff on musical performances (here, being on Ed Sullivan) and also remembering his posts on Pete Seeger, and relating them to acts of activism. In the recent post, he notes how people go to concerts and are more disposed to spend money on things related to the concert/group they heard. As consumers, they already know how to spend money on things that they want. For a performance by a musical activist, there should be information/flyers/greeters at the end to communicate about "how to affiliate with others and help move the issue forward in our civic life" (my idea) (quote from Ken's recent post).
For any issue, there are people for it and against it. Attending a concert where an activist performs could be considered an act of activism, but (as Ken Smith says) if there is no follow-through, the momentum/energy of the event fades away. So - what to do about it? Here, I think some distinction should be drawn between the person who is already an activist and a person who thinks they want to be an activist, but are not sure what to do. If a person is an activist, and is not having much success in promoting an issue or cause, perhaps one of the ideas from my Activism in Atlanta post is appropriate (find the organization that is already working on that problem). Hillary Rettig, in her book "The Lifelong Activist", has an entire section on how to be more successful in pursuing activism ( the full text of the book is available as a free PDF). In a November 2022 post, Ken Smith lists 6 areas of what he calls the "activism toolkit" that could also apply here.
Our many day long heat wave broke last night. A bit after 9 pm the temp dropped from 98 deg to 80 in half an hour and then 10 more degrees in another hour. Along with that drop we had a lot of rain and plenty of thunder and lightning, with a severe thunderstorm warning coming from the Weather Service over the TV.
Little girl to her mother: "Mommy, can we go eat at McDonald's?" Mommy: of course we can, as long as you can spell McDonald's for me. P A U S E Little girl again: "Okay Mommy, let's go eat at KFC!"
"Taking liberal arts education away from the least privileged — implying that they are future laborers and nothing else — helps ensure that they develop a resentment of 'elites.' That’s an animus whose political consequences should be uncomfortably familiar by now." --Leif Weatherby
well-known-feeds is an interesting idea from DanQ that facilitates the discovery of feeds, and yes that's a great thing. I can think of a few sites that would benefit from such a feature.
Two hot nights in a row, maybe two more to come. We have good A/C downstairs, but not so good upstairs. But we both slept okay in the heat. This is summer, not any special climate change. Just a normal seasonal change for us.
"To prevent those who would hijack algorithms for power, we need a pro-choice movement for algorithms. We, the users, should be able to decide what we read at the newsstand." --@JuliaAngwin
I own a nice red baseball cap, but it's an official MLB St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, for the team I grew up listening to on the radio as a kid. They never made it to the World Series until I went off to college in Ohio.
As we came out of the restaurant, we heard a loud siren in the distance coming our way. It was coming fast, blaring its siren and honking its horn, loud and fast, over and over and over. It was coming up a wide four lane road and cars were escaping to the shoulders fast along the way to give it room. They were soon upon us and then past us and going fast. It was verrrrry exciting!! We stood by our car and just watched, transfixed. Once it was gone, we both got in the car, very excited!! Wow, that was really exciting, terrific, no wonder kids want to be a fireman! As soon as we were settled in the car, Supattra said, "You'll never see that in Thailand!" Oh, really? Why not? "Because Thai people don't know what to do. They get flustered and don't know how to get out of the way. So it just becomes a big traffic snarl, with a fire engine stuck in a traffic jam." Wow, I never noticed that, but then again, I can't think of a single time I've seen a fire engine in Thailand.
I did a search for "activism 101" yesterday, and found an episode of the podcast While Black, recorded in 2019, interviewing an activist called City. City does activism in Atlanta, Georgia, with a current focus on police brutality. I listened to it today, and jotted down some notes when the interviewer asked for three things that someone who wants to get involved in activism should do (35-40 minutes into the podcast):
Find what problem that you are going to be passionate about
Half of the people only find problems that everyone is talking about, but are not passionate about it
Find your organization that is already working on that problem
You don't have to join them, but you can work along side them
Put yourself in a position where economically your problem can be fixed
Make sure that your livelihood is not affected
Have something or someone that can take care of you/family
Everyone is needed - even social media activists
You need goals
If you don't have that, you will be running around with your head cut off
A terrific article on local news by Doc Searls provides plenty of excellent ideas about directions that local news is considering in many places. I even own an excellent domain name for such a project in our neighborhood.
“He never listens to his lawyers. But he listened this time, didn’t he? Why? Because he’s scared. He is scared he’s just a couple of steps away from that jail cell closing behind him.”
Ken Smith posted some quotes from Pete Seeger recently, where Seeger states that working within one's home community is the most important work we have to do right now (Ken's post title is "Essential Local Politics"). I feel that there is a great amount of information available online to help/assist/train individuals how to do work/activism within their communities. I have a list of resources available here, but I think the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is an excellent place to find frameworks for identifying an issue or issues to get involved with, and to identify concrete next steps.
In an earlier post, Ken Smith appears to express the opinion that he would like to see tools that help people get together to do work, to create content, to organize activities, and to have identity to allow them to affiliate with others and have a stronger voice. In a similar way to my first paragraph, I think there are many available online tools to help people with this work. Stephen Downes has created a massive resource called "Creating an Online Community, Class or Conference - Quick Tech Guide". I think the tools identified here could satisfy a lot of what Ken is looking for supporting activism. I welcome Ken's input on this.
My Elmer (from 1959-1960) discovered two great Bob Dylan CD's in his Jeep that have been in there for a long time. One had been played once, the other had never been played at all. Then again he has one of the highest standings of all the thousands of people on SKCC. His main priority in his spare time is CW, obviously not Dylan. That's okay. To each his own. <br /> <br />
But tomorrow I'm gonna call him and ask him whether he has played the Blonde on Blonde album yet!
I am glad you took a look at the Americans of Conscience Checklist! I also enjoyed the two quotes from Pete Seeger today. From your posts, I get the sense that you are still searching or have a desire to find tools/techniques to support activism. Am I reading that correctly?
I have not spent hardly any time looking at this list I assembled, but I think this is a good place to look for tools/techniques for activism. I know we both have an interest in activism, but it seems like I am having a problem breaking out of "consumption mode"...
Is there a topic in your local community you are interested in? I remember you were on some county planning committee or board. I think I want to look into how elections are run in Oregon, but I have not been able to take any steps toward this. Maybe I need to refine what my interest is in this topic.
I am planning to explore a tool/app to be able to easily post items from a RSS feed or group of feeds to some readable page/site/something, like Radio UserLand had. I will be posting some workflow thoughts on this soon.
I have rediscovered the website for John, AE5X, who has one of the best blogs for hams who enjoy QRP CW operation. It is a very informative and useful website!
Ken Smith has written a reply to my post on engaging and curation. In the post, he discusses "standing searches" for a topic or phrase, and how (to me) that curating RSS feeds can be a search at a particular level. He also addresses the topic of activism, and how the concept of search might apply there, but that activism needs something more. I would like to explore this more.
The most common type of "standing search" I am aware of is Google Alerts (see link to this at Google). I am sure there are other services providing this type of functionality. As for curating RSS feeds, this can be done for private consumption using any feed reader (Feedly, River5, The Old Reader, FeedLand, and so on). I like using River5 because it supports display of aggregated feeds (or rivers) easily in a single page application (such as bloggers using the Old School blogging tool in Drummer, bloggers using the 1999.io blogging tool, and writers from Politico following the Ukraine war).
So, curation can be performed by collecting feeds that generally post on a topic. However, these feeds may benefit from further curation, in that if a user is interested in a subset of stories/posts contained within those feeds, it could be distilled into an even more focused list of stories/posts. The Radio Userland tool supported creating feeds of this kind in an easy manner, displaying items from subscribed feeds and checkboxes next to the items if you wanted to copy those into an editing window and then post them in a particular category on your weblog. I think there is a need for this kind of tool - I am going to try to prototype this in the near future.
Another level of curation could be to provide additional text/narration/analysis of the stories/posts - to add more value than just a link and the initial paragraph from the post - to tell the reader why they should take a look at this post. Blogger Jason Kottke been practicing this type of blogging for a long time. Currently, several people whose work I follow add this analysis within the context of a newsletter (Stephen Downes' OLDaily, Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from An American, and Joyce Vance's Civil Discourse are excellent examples).
All of the above examples can feed into groups of people interested in activism related to a particular topic. Jennifer Hofmann runs the Americans of Conscience Checklist. Started as a single person effort, this site has grown into a group of people who review items to include in the checklist, and organize the work of distribution. The checklist itself is a set of concrete actions to protest or support different issues. From past posts to the website, it is apparent that multiple people are monitoring activities of multiple websites/organizations, and the group draws on this information to select issues to push out to subscribers. Ken Smith himself has created lists of things to do in Indianapolis, which is another example of organizing information for use.
To sum up, I think that there are tools that can be used and workflows that can be defined to support curation and engagement. I have tried to collect some resources/food for thought in this post. I welcome Ken's further thoughts on this topic.
In really difficult times, it is important to keep one's eye on the ball and to follow the highest priorities in the correct order to ensure that a proper & sane resolution to the matters at hand is achieved without fail. Do not waver, or be distracted.
Ken Smith recently wrote about engaging others on a topic and on curation - I have a few comments.
From the engaging others post:
The famous speaker works up the crowd about this or that issue, and then at the end the audience files out and recedes and fragments into their many private lives. It is a parallel case for blogging and other social media, isn't it? We nod at the end of a message that moves us, but the publishing platform is not set up to encourage and simplify further steps: affiliation with others, for one thing, the power move that gives political beliefs a kind of social body moving, speaking, and echoing widely in the world.
From the curation post:
Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren't following, and so your 15 would keep you informed about the best writing each week by 10 x 15=150 people they respected.
These are important ideas. The first suggested that there should be ways for readers to engage and stay engaged with a subject or topic. The second suggests that there are workflows that could be created to follow posts on a topic and create linkblogs or other collections that could curate the best info out there. For both of these, it sounds like users and developers should start to "party" and work together as mentioned in a number of Dave Winer posts (Dear Doc and Dave, What I Wanted from Blogging, What I Wanted from Blogging Part 2, Scripting News from January 22, 2020). If anyone is interested in working together on these ideas, let me know!
"Donald J. Trump won 53.3 percent of Ohio’s votes in the 2020 presidential election. But Republicans control 67 percent of seats in the State House — and 79 percent in the State Senate. Last November, 85 percent of Ohio’s state legislative races were uncontested or were won by 10 percentage points or more . . ." @MiWine
I snagged a like new Chameleon LEFS 8010 with 50 ft of RG-58 coax. I've found that Chameleon always uses the highest quality components in their antennas, but it's never cheap. So it was good to find a like new antenna at a discount. It should do 80m to 10m end fed, without a tuner, so a very handy antenna, especially for portable operating!
From the NYT: "Gift articles can only be shared using the Gift button and the gift sharing options available. Articles can not be gifted or shared using non-gift social sharing options, or by copying and pasting the article URL into a web browser." (Seems like all my nopaywall posts are bogus?)
Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren't following, and your 15 would keep you informed about the daily or weekly writing of 150 people they respected.
The new icon for the service formerly known as Twitter is so garish and glaringly ugly that I had to move it off its former place of practicality and honor on the iPad's Home Screen.
"It is hard to imagine a [prison] system more perfectly designed for failure than ours in the US, which in the name of 'corrections' helps perpetuate a cycle of poverty, crime, community dysfunction and despair." --Bill Keller
"It is hard to imagine a system more perfectly designed for failure than ours in the US, which in the name of 'corrections' helps perpetuate a cycle of poverty, crime, community dysfunction and despair." --Bill Keller
"Los residentes de Nuevo México fueron los primeros sujetos humanos de prueba del arma más poderosa del planeta. / The people of New Mexico were the first human test subjects of the world’s most powerful weapon."
"Presidential historian Michael Beschloss has argued that, given America’s fractured and distorting media lens, the trial of Donald Trump should be broadcast live on television so every voter can witness how no one, not even a president, is above the law."
It's been a while since I looked at the "everything" timeline in FeedLand. A bunch of people have subscribed to Bluesky feeds, and they are the most active, and also support rssCloud (!) so the list is skewed toward Bluesky posts from people who are on now.
Today we have 66 deg temp at 1:00 pm on 2 Aug 2023 after a light steady sprinkle this morning. This is a welcome respite from our very hot July weather!
Did Trump really try to “reverse his loss?” That doesn’t convey the violence. Or the incredible illegality and immorality. Honestly these are cowardly words.
"Yet we become less employable as we climb the high end of the demographic ladder, but not because we can’t do the work. It’s mostly because we look old and our tolerance for bullshit is low. Even our own, which is another bonus." --Doc Searls
When big tech companies say they love open formats and protocols, that means they're launching something new and they're just saying that so you relax about their intentions, which haven't actually changed at all.
When big tech companies say they love open formats and protocols, that means they're launching something new and they're just saying that so you relax about their intentions, which haven't actually changed at all.
When big tech companies say they love open formats and protocols, that means they're launching something new and they're just saying that so you relax about their intentions, which haven't actually changed at all.
"Doing human networks at mass scale isn’t a baby game, as the moral brine shrimp in charge of the big networks keep demonstrating." Erin Kissane sorts the reasons people give for leaving Mastodon.
I saw a gorgeous Monarch butterfly in our front yard yesterday! I called out to welcome it, but it ignored me and flew over to an enticing bush on the other side of our yard. We need to plant some Milkweed plants in our yard.
We opened a new checking account at a bank right downtown, just 1-2 blocks from the post office and the library. It's in a very nice bldg with excellent A/C on a super hot day. They had sent me two ads in the mail, offering $400 cash bonus if we opened a checking account with direct deposit attached. Hey, that's a lot better than a toaster, so we decided to give it a try. Free enterprise comes up with nice incentives!!
A disempowered people not allowed to explain themselves in public in language of their own choosing, in words they see as adequate to their experiences--this happens to groups in the United States all the time. Other people's words and categories dominate the country's understanding of their lives.
A disempowered people not allowed to explain themselves in public in language of their own choosing, in words they see as adequate to their experiences -- this happens to groups in the United States all the time. Other people's words and categories dominate the country's understanding of their lives.
"We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what's in it." --Pauline Kael, in a 1972 review of the film in the NYer that argues that Kubrick celebrates violence and the main character that carries it out.
History will eventually show the the two IRS whistleblowers are American heroes. Their intervention may have saved the Dept of Justice from making some major blunders that might have made it very clear that Justice for All is NOT a reality in America.
I had a lovely 40 min chat with my childhood Elmer, who now lives in MI, on a lake in a town of 800 population. He is happily retired, with a W0 call, from his time when he lived in Iowa in the same town as the Collins Radio factory.He couldn't afford any Collins equipment, but I wish he could have taken a tour of the factory to see the great stuff being built.
At the restaurant, in the outdoor seating, we were not far from a group of about a dozen at a large table. They were having a good time, and then after a while, they all stood up, walked fifteen feet out into the garden there, and had a brief wedding. Then they sat down for dessert!
I promised to post an episode from the Christopher Lyden podcast, which Dave Winer helped to originally get up and running. The Lyden podcast, Open Source, was the first ever podcast and it has always been one of the best. I decided to link to one of my favorite episodes: when he had on Christopher Ricks, now Sir Christopher Ricks, to discuss Bob Dylan and his art. I had the good fortune of becoming friends with Ricks in 1998, when I hosted him as the Keynote Speaker at the Stanford International Conference on Bob Dylan. Ricks was one of the first in academia to suggest that Bob was worthy of study as a great American song writer at the university level. Many years later Ricks was asked to produce the most exhaustive Dylan lyrics book ever (and there have been many) which was published by Simon & Schuster on 28 Oct 2014. In the 7 Dec 2016 Open Source podcast, Ricks described Bob as the “greatest living user of the English language.” Follow the previous link to see that podcast episode, or you can listen to the original audio of the episode by clicking here. Not too long after that podcast, Bob was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on 13 October 2017. Yay!!
I browsed microblog for a bit this morning. I saw a LOT of negative postings, more than I usually expect. Many seem to be mad at Musk. Why do they like to criticize him so much? Maybe I will adopt a new policy. Count negative postings and leave the site when the count reaches a certain count, like 5. I don't need to have negativity added to my life. Starting Anti-Negativity Week now.
This is how it can be when you're in your mid-seventies. I have a flashlight that is charged with a small flat solar panel on one side. I bought it in a Kickstarter, before microblog came along. They actually delivered on their Kickstarter promises! It is called a Waka Waka Power. I have two of them; one is yellow and the other is black. I put the black one on top of my lower sash window, so it was pointing east into the bright sun, to charge it up. Fast forward a day or two and I realize I haven't taken it out of the window and surely it is done charging. But now I can't find it in my window! I ask my wife whether she moved it (Nope) and I looked and looked all over, but didn't find it. I gave up, figuring it will turn up. Fast forward another day and my wife calls me into the kitchen and points me to the window in the pantry area. There is my black flashlight perched on top of the window, right where I had put it!! I had been looking on the matching window in the bathroom, five feet or so down the hall from the pantry in the kitchen. (Red face) And it had quite a good charge on it, of course.
“Magic is a very optimistic art form. It brings out the inner child. It’s a gentle reminder that you’re never going to know everything.” --Magician Harry Milas
Seeing a good number of paintings by Van Gogh in Chicago Thursday that I've never seen images of in the past, I start thinking that art history teachers or articles often reduce a serious artist to a handful of points and ignore 90% of how the person arrived at the craft displayed in the most famous paintings. Reductive, flattening, sucking the spirit from the artist's journey.
When journalism refers to "Facebook" I don't think they're ever clear on which Facebook they're talking about. Because Facebook is at least eight things.
The Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago circles the space with a timeline that gives a great sense of the progress in innovation and collaboration among a group of painters.
Zachary Vance is looking for someone with a copy of MORE 2 or who knows how to read such files in MORE 3 or has some idea what to do with such a file? He's trying to extract the text from a book that was written with MORE 2 back in the day.
This morning, I noticed that Dave Winer's FeedLand Feed did not update for my MyStatusTool instance, but it did for all of the other test instances. If anyone sees any other issues, let me know.
Dave Winer has declared today to be Journalism is Stupid Day on Scripting.com. He offers no prizes for playing along, but he DOES tell the complete origin story for the long running OpenSource Podcast with Christopher Lyden. I don't think he meant the stupid part to apply to Lyden, as we know he has great respect for Lyden's long and great career as one of the best podcasters of all time. We will be posting a link to one of the great Open Source podcasts here in the near future. Don't even try to guess which one, just stay tuned to see which one.
<a href= https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/politics/trump-charges-civil-rights-law-voting-fraud.html> Potential Trump Charges Include Civil Rights Law Used in Voting Fraud Cases</a>
The New York Times reports that a target letter sent by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss cited three statutes that could be the basis for a prosecution.
The New York Times reports that a target letter sent by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss cited three statutes that could be the basis for a prosecution.
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<a href= https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/politics/trump-charges-civil-rights-law-voting-fraud.html> Potential Trump Charges Include Civil Rights Law Used in Voting Fraud Cases</a>
What is the fediverse and why does Threads want to join? (Pretty sure them saying they wanted to join was bullshit to get the journos to be nice to them.)
An unexpected pleasure: when I went to the library during out black-out to charge up my phone, I bought a book about Ronald Reagan that has been a lot of fun to read. It set me back all of $1, a dollar very well spent.
It's haunting to scroll through a few NY Times articles and see advertisements showing that the surveil-algo machines have locked onto the fact that I need new glasses.
On April 1, 1985, in a long story, Sports Illustrated claimed that the Mets had a new pitcher, Hayden (Sidd) Finch, who threw a 168 mph fastball with good control.
On April 1, 1985, in a long story, Sports Illustrated broke the news that the Mets had a new pitcher, Hayden (Sidd) Finch, who threw a 168 mph fastball with good control.
Prague Through the Lens of the Secret Police – mining the archive of surveillance photographs taken of citizens by the secret police behind the Iron Curtain.
I took advantage of the Amazon Prime sale to buy a four panel solar panel and a portable power station which will work as an uninterruptible backup power supply for my main computer and will also do many charge-ups on our phones, as well as on many of my QRP CW rigs.
Amazing! The website for the Oregonian (the main newspaper for Portland, Oregon) now has a RSS feed! There has not been any feeds for this site in years – glad to see there is at least one feed now…
There was a time when all computers were basically the same. Big honkers in air conditioned rooms with raised floors. You had to have a degree to run one.
"The economic pressure on farmers today is such that most can’t even afford to practice crop rotation. And without that sort of care, we’re not farming. We’re mining the topsoil!"
A lot of people who make big decisions in Silicon Valley think that having taken a comp sci class 20 years ago is the same thing as being a commercial developer.
Lisa Rubin of the MaddowBlog explains why Special Counsel Jack Smith is digging into the infamous Dec. 18, 2020 meeting at the White House where “White House aides and government officials” were “pushing back on claims of widespread election fraud and telling Trump in unambiguous terms that he lacked the authority to seize voting machines. “ Can you say “attempting to overthrow the 2020 election”?
Steve Benen reports on the Maddow blog on the ejection of Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) from the House Freedom Caucus for cursing at Lauren Boebert on the House floor and other reasons, and summarizes how House Republicans are fractured over almost every initiative they have pursued over the last 6 months.
Two grand juries sworn in for Fulton County, Georgia on July 11 could her testimony for charges against Donald Trump and his allies over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Per the CNN article, charges could include “solicitation of election fraud, making false statements to state and local government bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of an oath-of-office, and involvement in election-related threats.”
One of two Georgia grand juries sworn in on July 11 will likely hear testimony on Trump and his allies over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election
Recently Dave Winer wrote about one of his most worthy accomplishments, which was when he helped href="http://scripting.com/2023/07/09.html?title=odeToMaryAndChris">Christopher Lyden in 2003 with the mechanics to broadcast his first ever podcast. That podcast, Open Source, has now run for decades, the longest run for a podcast ever produced.
In December 2016, I was thrilled when I heard that Open Source was going to be having Sir Christopher Ricks as a guest, in celebration of the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Bob Dylan. It is a href="https://radioopensource.org/bob-dylan-poet/">terrific episode, with Lyden and Ricks discussing Dylan's life work, capped off with a recording of Bob giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Quite marvelous!!
We had a nice productive day today, with the temp not going higher than 80 deg and blue skies all day long. I've been researching small affordable solar power sources and backup battery charging systems for our phones and other devices. We don't need a full blown solar power system on our gorgeous black roof. I'd rather just keep the handsome look of our house as the architect originally designed it. We will need to hire some tree guys to come in and tidy up some trees and remove a few dead trees. Because of our recent storm, the city will be carting off all tree limbs that came down during the storm, at no cost to us.
I'm echoing my blog posts on a WordPress site. I recently got my connection to WordPress going again. It all looks pretty good, and I get to edit my posts in my outliner.
With all the hoopla about the Threads app from Instagram/Facebook, I was reminded of a post from Tantek Celik (Own Your Notes), bringing out these points (see this comic for context):
I am once again asking you to own your notes, rather than tweeting them into Big Chad’s garage.
Maybe you left the big garage and now toot in your neighborhood Chad’s garage. It’s still someone else’s garage.
I have also written about owning your content (here, here and here). Of course, posting this on my Old School blog goes against this (although I have an OPML backup that I could render somehow), which is why I am also posting this on my main blog (WordPress self-hosted). People may feel that what they post on services like Threads, Twitter, Mastodon, et al, is more like conversations that do not need to be "owned". However, if there is a way to pipe your conversation into a flow where you still own the content (like MyStatusTool), why not do it?
On this day in 2003, Chris Lydon did the first podcast in his 20 year series, certainly the longest-running podcast on the web, and imho unapproached in excellence. I recorded an ode to Chris and his producer, Mary McGrath, on my blog today.
I already have accounts on Twitter, Mastodon, and Micro.blog - that's enough social networks for me. I have a Drummer Old School blog, my main Wordpress blog, and now my minimal blogging tool MyStatusTool (here is my instance) - that's enough blogging tools for me. Someday I will get my Federated Wiki instance working again (hopefully soon), meanwhile I have my OPML Zettlekasten file to file things. I think that's enough!
I already have accounts on Twitter, Mastodon, and Micro.blog - that's enough social networks for me. I have a Drummer Old School blog, my main Wordpress blog, and now my minimal blogging tool MyStatusTool (here is my instance) - that's enough blogging tools for me. Someday I will get my Federated Wiki instance working again (hopefully soon), meanwhile I have my OPML Zettlekasten file to file things. I think that's enough!
Supattra made Tom Kha Ghai for dinner tonight, a delicious Thai soup with chicken in it, as well as fresh lime juice. Of course she made one version for me (low on spice) and another for her (no shortage of spicy). The more I ate, the more delicious it was. I'm soooo lucky to have a Thai wife!
Our next door neighbor has been helping us with yard cleanup today. We also went to Menard's to get battery operated garden trimming tools: a 6" pruning chainsaw & a 20" hedge trimmer. We love these new battery operated tools. We've been using a battery operated lawn mower for at least two years now. Our gardening tools are all switching to battery powered now, no cords on any of them.
Users aren't on their own that adventurous. They like to use what everyone else is using, which makes the bootstrap hard. But the platform vendor can provide the magic that gets it going.
Krugman: "The craziest faction in U.S. politics right now isn’t red-hatted blue-collar guys in diners, it’s technology billionaires living in huge mansions and flying around on private jets." #nopaywall
Dave Winer talks about bootstrapping a federated 140-character loosely coupled network. I think MyStatusTool fits the bill! You don't have to get an account on Threads or wait for a Bluesky invite - just download, install, and get started making some news of your own! PS - I already wrote about this bootstrap.
We had a nice productive day today, with the temp not going higher than 80 deg and blue skies all day long. I've been researching small affordable solar power sources and backup battery charging systems for our phones and other devices. We don't need a full blown solar power system on our gorgeous black roof. I'd rather just keep the handsome look of our house as the architect originally designed it. We will need to hire some tree guys to come in and tidy up some trees and remove a few dead trees. Because of our recent storm, the city will be carting off all tree limbs that came down during the storm, at no cost to us.
IEEE Spectrum: How the Computer Graphics Industry Got Started at the University of Utah - Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation - I used image generators from Evans and Sutherland earlier in my career, then they were purchased by Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) to be part of their simulation business. Exciting times back then!
IEEE Spectrum: How the Computer Graphics Industry Got Started at the University of Utah - Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation - I used image generators from Evans and Sutherland earlier in my career, then they were purchased by Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) to be part of their simulation business. Exciting times back then!
Zettlekaste.de: Building a Second Brain and the Zettelkasten Method - This post goes into great detail contrasting the "Building a Second Brain" ideas of Tiago Forte and the Zettelkasten Method as practiced by Niklas Luhmann. The author states that both methods can be used simultaneously with little to no overlap (BASB is project focused, ZKM is knowledge-focused. It's worth the time to read!
Call them Facebook, not Meta. They're trying to run away from their legacy, but it's very relevant. People should know it's coming from Facebook not "Meta."
We finally got our power back on after 52.5 hrs with no power. One day was cool, so not too bad. Second day was in the 80's, so a nightmare. I am working on having alternate ways to charge my phone. Also beginning to think about some solar choices, but don't tell anyone, as I don't want a phone book worth of regs to follow, if I do that. I'd really like to have a simple life.
The Washington Post reports on new insights into a phone call in late 2020, where President Donald Trump tried to pressure Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to overturn the state’s presidential election results
River5 update - the missing feed re-appeared in the Old School Drummers river - go figure! I may still do a fresh install and restart, will continue to monitor this situation.
Bloomberg reports that a “standing order” that former President Donald Trump has claimed authorized him to instantly declassify documents removed from the Oval Office could not be found by either the Justice Department or Office of Director of National Intelligence.
The disclosure by the agencies was made in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed last August by Bloomberg News, which sued ODNI and the Justice Department’s national security division for a copy of Trump’s so-called standing order — if one existed.
It is easy to fall into a "consumption" mode of life, where most if not all free time is spent taking in news and information about things, but not producing anything with that news/information, or not producing anything at all. Similarly, it is easier to comment on the current state of affairs in the world than it is to take action to make something happen. It is easier to complain about your job, or neighbors, or other people or events, than to make some change (get a different job, find new friends, move).
To me it comes down to three things: (1) what do you want?, (2) what do you need to do to get what you want?, and (3) what are you doing about it? I have problems with the first one, for sure. Trying to make a decision about what to do with my free time, or what thing I want to change in my life, can be a difficult process - there are so many choices, and only so much time. If I do not decide what I want, I can't move on to items 2 and 3.
Here is an excerpt from a post by Gary North (paywalled), writing on "What Do You Really Want to Achieve?":
Here are the three inescapable questions: (1)What do I want to achieve? (2) How soon do I want to achieve it? (3) What am I willing to pay (do without)?
When you have this on paper, you are ready to develop a plan to achieve this. This plan must have time markers: quarterly, yearly, five years. It must have specific intermediate goals that will let you measure your progress.
This is psychologically difficult to do. Most people will not do it. Those few who do will not follow through with self-evaluations on time, which involve plan revisions. So, time dribbles away. Progress is catch-as-catch-can.
Finally, this post breaks down this method of making progress (even though it focuses on screenwriting, the advice is sound for any endeavor):
"A dream written down with a date becomes a GOAL. A goal broken down into steps becomes a PLAN. A plan backed by ACTION makes your dreams come true."
During the month of June, I noticed that items from Ken Smith's Old School Drummer blog were not showing up as part of the Old School Bloggers river. I checked the river file generated by the River5 feed reader, and saw that items from Ken Smith stopped after May 31st. I created a duplicate of the Old School Drummers list, but did not see any recent items from Ken Smith's feed after I created the list. I am going to install a fresh copy of River5 today for testing, but thought I would send out this word in case any other River5 users are seeing this issue. The strange thing to me is Ken's feed is the only one affected out of nine feeds. If you have seen this issue, let me know!
I never saw podcasting as an "industry." It's a form of human expression. No problem with trying to make money from what you do, but it's also fine to do it because you have something important to say. Or you learn from doing it. Or whatever reason.
The New York Times reports that while the bulk of the Trump documents case focused on documents at Mar A Lago, there was also interest by investigators about activities at Trump’s Bedminster, NJ golf club
Interestingly, Harvard's statement about the shutdown of the blogging server is on the blogging server itself. Did they think this through? What kind of university deliberately erases a record of its innovation? I don't get it.
All kinds of good stuff is going 404 when Harvard shuts down the original blogging server on Friday. It really shouldn't happen this way at a university widely known for being ancient and steady. I hoped for much better.
Devlin Barrett of the Washington Post reports that a new Senate committee report sharply criticizes the FBI and Department of Homeland Security for what it says were failures to believe the intelligence tips they were receiving in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — offering fresh examples, nearly 2½ years later, of warnings and information that went unheeded.
The report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s majority staff, titled “Planned in Plain Sight,” expands on previous findings, including reporting by The Washington Post, about red flags missed in the weeks leading up to the pro-Trump riot that delayed Joe Biden’s certification as president.
It also contains additional instances and context for what the authors describe as a failure by federal intelligence officials to believe the many warnings they received.
Former Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has been interviewed by federal investigators as part of the special counsel’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, multiple sources familiar with the meeting told CNN.
The meeting between Giuliani, his attorney Robert Costello, and investigators took place in recent weeks. The sources declined to say what investigators’ questions focused on during the meeting, which has not been previously reported.
In this CNN exclusive on June 26th, hear Donald Trump say ““See as president I could have declassified it,” Trump says. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”” Can you say “guilty of violating the Espionage Act”?
Stephen Kuusisto catalogs some of the exhausting misconceptions people lay on him when he's out walking with a guide dog or a cane. New posting at Planet of the Blind.
In a filing on June 23, the special counsel, Jack Smith, proposed delaying the start of the Trump documents trial to December to allow for sufficient time to deal with the complications of classified evidence
The January 6 inquiry is now in discussions with Mike Roman, a former Trump campaign official who worked the fake elector slates for the Trump campaign, to come in and voluntarily answering questions about a plan to create slates of pro-Trump electors in key swing states that were won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.
I see that if I enter both a title and a link for this item you are reading now in my personal feed that the title will become clickable for that link on FeedLand's individual page for this item. That seems like a sharp, streamlined setup. I'll link to Disney as an example.
CNN reports that “ Special counsel Jack Smith has begun producing evidence in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to Donald Trump, according to a Wednesday court filing that hints that investigators collected for the case multiple recordings of the former president – not just audio of an interview Trump gave at Bedminster for a forthcoming Mark Meadows memoir.”
Trump receives first batch of evidence against him in classified documents case, including audio tapes
CNN reports that “Donald Trump’s legal team turned over multiple recordings of the former president’s interviews with members of the media and book authors to federal prosecutors during their investigation, according to sources familiar with the matter.”
Trump team handed over tapes of interviews to special counsel, sources say
In the mid-1960s, Lowndes County, Alabama had zero registered Black voters despite an 80% Black population. A documentary of racism and activism available through the common public library film service Kanopy.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General has launched a criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the destruction of Secret Service text messages that may have been relevant to inquiries about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office filed a notice Wednesday June 21 describing the first set of unclassified documents and other materials that they produced to the former president’s lawyers as the case moves forward in federal court in Florida. The notice is document 30 on the Court Listener webpage for the Trump case
Document 30 on Court Listener link to documents filed in the Trump Mar A Lago documents case
I've veered in two new directions: (1) Early books on very early crystal radio sets, as exemplified by the coverage of the Alfred P. Morgan books for boys, as posted on YouTube by @MIKROWAVE1, N2UD, Michael Murphy and
(2) A new top notch SWL receiver I have acquired, a Drake R8A receiver, not yet received, but it won't be too long.
If you want to know the official moment that podcasting got its name, this is it. It wasn't in a story in the Guardian newspaper. Please. It was a show note for one of the first podcasts called Trade Secrets Radio. That's how shit like this happens.
This is a test of my linkblogging tool used to post text without a link. I seem to remember there was a problem with this. The only way to find out is to try it. Still diggin!
This is a test of my linkblogging tool used to post text without a link. I seem to remember there was a problem with this. The only way to find out is to try it. Still diggin!
This is a test of my linkblogging tool used to post text without a link. I seem to remember there was a problem with this. The only way to find out is to try it. Still diggin!
The archive.org snapshots of the RSS 2.0 spec start in 2016. The spec was posted on the harvard.edu website in July 2003. I'm curious to know how it got this way??
Greg Wilson: Eleven Tips for Organizational Change "This was a proposal for the US Research Software Engineer Association 2023 conference, but was rejected.... I recognize that they are incomplete—in particular, that they are strongly biased toward what works in affluent, democratic societies—but if you’re tired of rolling heavy rocks up steep hills over and over again, maybe they will help."
Hmph! The pharmacist said he could not give me a Covid booster because I was not old enough and did not have diseases like HIV or cancer. I think I will look elsewhere!
It’s funny – Dave Winer wants to create a FeedLand river page with people using the Old School blogging tool – when there is a perfectly good page already available! Funny how that works…
Yesterday I was playing with ideas, looking at a bunch of different people's collections, and I saw in John Naughton's feed list a reminder of a centerpiece of the early blogging world, weblogs.com.
Yesterday I was playing with ideas, looking at a bunch of different people's collections, and I saw in John Naughton's feed list reminded me of a centerpiece of the early blogging world, weblogs.com.
I found a four-part series on YouTube from Michael Murphy, WU2D
Morgan Revealed: Regen Fever - based on the books of Alfred P. Morgan
He tells the history of Morgan and shows two of his many books. Then he shows the regen receiver he built from the instructions in the books. My first shortwave receiver was a Knight Ocean Hopper, a classic regen kit that was hugely popular in the early 60's. I built the kit and then discovered a whole new world, as did many others who built the kit.
See the videos: Morgan Revealed #1 Morgan Revealed #2 Morgan Revealed #3 Morgan Revealed #4
Linear thinking doesn't work. If I do X the other guy always does Y is not a good bet. Because the other person is sentient too, and knows you're expecting Y and one time, when it really makes a difference will do exactly what you don't expect because it's what you don't expect.
If the non-Twitter networks want to compete, get rid of character limits. Here's a screen shot of a post to Twitter earlier today. 613 characters. I could not post that to Mastodon or Bluesky, their character limits are too restrictive.
I saw Ken's Smith's recent post on group activities, and I agree that larger social media may not be the place for such groups to work together. I also think another recent post of Ken's (Choose to affiliate) also echoes this thought. To me, MyStatusTool could be the tool of communication for a small work group or organization, with the added plus of owning your content/work. Since it uses rssCloud as the notification service for new posts, real-time conversations can occur there.
Some kinds of shared, group- and goal-oriented work cannot easily be accomplished on massive social media sites, or maybe at all: Scripting News: For now, small is beautiful.
The first major survey about Field Radios by Thomas (11 May 2023).
“What QRP radio do you tend to use the most in the field?“
#1 The Elecraft KX2: 131 votes
#2 The Yaesu FT-817 or FT-818: 105 votes
#3 The Icom IC-705: 101 votes
#4 The Elecraft KX3: 80 votes
#5 The Xiegu X6100: 40 votes
#6 The lab599 Discovery TX-500: 38 votes
#7 The (tr)uSDX: 29 votes
#8 The Xiegu G90: 27 votes
#9 The QRP Labs QCX-Mini: 15 votes
#10 Tie Between the Mountain Topper MTR-4 series & Venus SW-3B: 13 votes
On 3 May 2023, Thomas reported on a survey he ran on FB about What Rig Folks Primarily Use in POTA Activity.
Here are the Rankings by Percentages:
1. Yaesu FT-891: 25%
2. Xiegu G90: 9%
3. Icom IC-7300 and IC-705: 7%
4. Yaesu FT-857D, FT-991A, FT-817/818: 4%
5. Xiegu 6100, Yaesu FT-897D, Elecraft K/KX series: 3%
On 3 May 2023, Thomas reported on a survey he ran on FB about What Rig Folks Primarily Use in POTA Activity.
Here are the Rankings by Percentages:
1. Yaesu FT-891: 25%
2. Xiegu G90: 9%
3. Icom IC-7300 and IC-705: 7%
4. Yaesu FT-857D, FT-991A, FT-817/818: 4%
5. Xiegu 6100, Yaesu FT-897D, Elecraft K/KX series: 3%
This posting is in memory of my longtime & loyal friend, Steve Porter, now SK*. Today is his birthday, June 12. Decades ago I created an automated mailing list on the Internet for members of our church scattered around the country. Its purpose was to make it easy to distribute good news among our friends in the church and it became wildly popular with them. Steve and our mutual friend Rick helped manage this activity with me for a very long time. It was a huge amount of work, but we were all very dedicated to the activity because we wanted to do our best to help our church friends, who were not often recognized in the world at large for their good works.
*SK is a ham radio designation for Silent Key, someone who has passed on.
Had a good conversation with Ron Chester yesterday about MyStatusTool. I will be looking at adding better editing features next, followed by the ability to edit subscriptions within the app instead of using a configuration file.
JustSecurity.org: National Security Implications of Trump’s Indictment: A Damage Assessment
It is those national security implications, as evidenced in particular by the 31 counts lodged under the Espionage Act (18 U.S.C. § 793(e)), which we briefly lay out here.
If you hosted your own Twitter, just like you host your own website, you could put your twitter anywhere. Case scenario: I have a twitter blog at dembot.com/twitter All of the friends I follow? How would we connect? You guessed it: RSS! Somebody get me a soda, Im feeling dizzy.
Dave Winer linked this morning to a 2008 post on a "decentralized Twitter". I believe that MyStatusTool meets that definition. I also discussed this more in a February 2023 post where I link to some other Dave Winer posts on bootstrapping. MyStatusTool is definitely in the bootstrap phase, and available to anyone who wants to try it!
The Top Ten QRP Rigs of the 1970's & 1980's
The Birthing of QRP as we Know It Today
Rated by WU2D, Michael J Murphy in Manchester, NH
#1 - Yaesu Musen FT-7 Superhet rig, 1979 - 50w SSB & CW, 12w AM - 80m - 10m
#2 - Ten Tec Model 505 & 509 Argonaut superhet transceivers - SSB & CW
#3 - Heathkit HW-7 (1972-75) & HW-8 (1976-83) - Direct conversion (DC) rigs
#4 - Ten Tec Power Mite Transceiver, PM-3, 40m & 20m, 1968-1971
#5 - PW Severn by Rev G C Dobbs, G3RJV in Practical Wireless May 1983
#6 - Tuna Tin II by Doug DeMaw, W1FB - 1976 QST
#7 - The Mountaineer by Wes Haywood, W7ZOI & Terry White, Aug 72 QST
#8 - Ten Tec Century 21 Model 570 - 1st commercial rig, solid state 70 watts CW
#9 - W1GAC The Mighty Mo - QST Dec 1951
#10 - Ameco AC-1 - Single tube
My Status Tool is an application that provides the basic posting and reading functionality within Twitter, but using RSS and rssCloud as the enabling technologies. Each post has its own page, just like Twitter.
My Status Tool is an application that provides the basic posting and reading functionality within Twitter, but using RSS and rssCloud as the enabling technologies. Each post has its own page, just like .
How many times, in how many places, does society prohibit one marginalized group or another from being shown as regular people? From seeing positive images of themselves? From speaking and creating art that sees the light of day?
In their eyes, in their Gestapo mug shots, with a death sentence likely awaiting them, you can see how confident they were of the righteousness of their anti-Nazi protests.
I've tried vibe coding myself, and while it's sometimes relaxing and fun, it's pretty hard to get the output to match what you had in mind.
Sometimes I put test posts on my blog. This is one of those times. Still diggin, amazingly — in 2026. What makes this post different is that 1. It's a singular item, ie there is no title, and just one paragraph. It's a collection of sentences not paragraphs. 2. It has a right margin image. I have to test this specific case. It has to go on a certain length so that the image that appears in the right margin doesn't leak over to the next item, and the image should be small so it doesn't require so much text to keep it out of the next post. And now I believe I have entered enough text.
Excellent 
There's something incredibly funny about slapstick and farting. I was flipping channels the other day and came across an 
I'd like an AI bot that could do this. I open my browser to a page on netflix.com. It scans the page, figures out what movies are there, then it searches metacritic for each and presents me a list of all shows with a rating above a certain score. I know the streamers don't want us to have this info (I don't really understand why) but I really want it. BTW, they say the 
I'd like an AI bot that could do this. I open my browser to a page on netflix.com. It scans the page, figures out what movies are there, then it searches metacritic for each and presents me a list of all shows with a rating above a certain score. I know the streamers don't want us to have this info (I don't really understand why) but I really want it. BTW, they say the 
By the way, we were lucky that 
When I heard about 
There's a problem with one of my Digital Ocean servers today, it turns out it's a problem with 
A bit of history. Read this 
Quick note on 
