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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

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Scripting News - 2016-04-04T15:44:12Z

Resolving the Garland standoff - 2016-04-04T15:44:12Z

I've been reading lots of stuff about the Supreme Court and wondering when someone is going to say the obvious thing about how the deadlock re Judge Garland will be resolved.

Clearly it will be resolved, if possible, by the Supreme Court itself.

Here's how it will go.

The President will wait a reasonable amount of time, let's say one day past the previous longest confirmation in the last 30 years.
On that day, it will sue someone, Congress perhaps? Maybe Judge Garland. Not sure who they sue, they would have to find someone.
The argument is that having had a chance to advise and consent, by being silent, the Senate has given its consent.
Therefore the Executive branch would like Judge Garland to take his place on the court, starting now, right after the court decides this case, assuming they agree with the Executive.

If that's the plan, it explains why Obama chose someone as totally middle-of-the-road as Garland. As if to say to the Court, here you go, this is exactly the guy no one could possibly object to. So go ahead and make a decision that the Repubs are full of it, that there is no Biden Rule, and that by not advising and consenting, the Senate has given their consent.

I think that's how the law actually works. Consistent with other situations.

I suppose it's possible that vote will be a 4-4 vote too, in which case the US govt is incapable of making a non-partisan decision. But before we give up, we'll have to try it.

And now I get to add the famous disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer. ;-)

Easier blogging is possible! :-) - 2016-04-03T15:51:33Z

One of the early testers of the 1999 server software wrote about removing inertia from blogging.

He compares the number of steps to create a new post in 1999 with the steps it takes to write a new WordPress post.

In 1999 --

Write in the edit box at the top of the page.
Click the Post button.
Review what you wrote. Edit.
When you're ready choose Publish from the popup menu on the post.
Confirm you want to publish.
That's it.

He lists all the steps for WordPress. There's a lot more involved. Not only in work for the experienced user, but in barriers to entry for the newbie.

WordPress is a lot more work than it needs to be. Fact.

There's a lot more to the design of 1999 that makes it the smoothest blogging environment ever.

Where we're at with 1999

Update on progress. We have a great group of server people helping test the software. It's running well on at least a dozen other servers. Shaking out bugs, writing docs, getting ready for a serious blogging platform ship.

Please help the web - 2016-04-02T22:43:32Z

If you're going to write something interesting and thoughtful put it on your blog, not only on Facebook or Medium. Help the open web compete.

Thank you Hillary - 2016-04-01T21:55:55Z

I had a strong feeling. It must be tough being Hillary Clinton, And no one ever gives her a word of encouragement. Yet she sticks with it. She has a clarity of vision that's really remarkable. Watching her interview the other night with Rachel Maddow was an inspiration.

Hillary Clinton as an image is difficult for America. She's symbolic of our strong intelligent feminine core that we have so much trouble accepting. She's us. We're her. Considering all the posers running for President, we are incredibly lucky that she's is in the mix. We have one person who is ready to do the job, and we get as a bonus, to break through another barrier.

Like it or not, America, our generation is the one of breaking through barriers to self-acceptance. We're America learning to accept its real self. Our parents' generation got us to the moon. We're going beyond that. Our America as not the old Great White Republican Father. The new vision of America includes African-Americans as full participants in our government. And women. Competent. All hands on deck. Not just white men. This time it is really our way or the highway. Going all Nazi on us won't work Not in the US of A. Uncle Sam says fuck you, seriously, get out of my face you fascist.

Change never comes easy. We're going through huge growing pains. We deal in symbols and forget there are real people behind the symbols. She must get tired of having to fight with both hands tied behind her back. To smile as her Teflon covered opponent accuses her in a most personal, cowardly and weasley way. If he did that to a man he'd get his skinny ass kicked, so he wouldn't do it. HRC, a woman, our vision of a woman, has to grin and bear it.

So thanks. It's gotta be a bitch. But you're doing something great. Please stay with it.

Podcast: Questioning Sanders - 2016-04-01T15:57:28Z

A five-minute podcast about the Sanders candidacy, noting that questions about his integrity are shouted down, and definitely not answered.

BTW, the number one question Sanders has not answered is this:

Suppose you get elected. Then what happens?

Cut through all the shit about HRC's integrity and your supposed electability. That's over. You won. Now, when President Sanders takes office, what does Congress look like? And with all the banks and oil companies aligned against you, how does the President overcome all that?

My belief: He's the Joker too. A dog chasing a car he never expects to catch, and wouldn't know what to do with if he ever caught it.

America is not even remotely fair - 2016-04-01T15:26:16Z

In yesterday's piece where I talked about learning from Bernie and Barney, I talked about something that might be a foreign idea, one that you'll never hear discussed in political discourse, or in history textbooks, the idea that the US is an Asshole Nation.

When my generation was young, in the 70s, we believed fairness was the natural state of things. We marched, and worked for candidates that would make America virtuous. To live up to what we had been taught in school. America is the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Reality is very different -- this is the country that wiped out Native Americans and enslaved African-Americans. We were taught about slavery in school, but that was some shit people in the South did, not us in the north. Only later did we learn that the remnants of slavery were very much alive in the North, and btw, NYC where I grew up was the port of entry for the slaves, so we did it too. This wonderful city was built on the profits of slavery.

Thing is when you're young, your world is small, at least for most. You have Mom and Dad and some siblings, cousins, friends, teachers, classmates, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and the TV characters -- who were always nice, even when they were assholes they were lovable assholes.

Fairness, if not always there, was at least something you could strive for.

Later in life you learn something awful that fairness is not attainable.

Sorry. I hated to learn that when I was young. Maybe I had a sense of it because I was born into a family of refugees, and I had a ruptured appendix when I was 10, and came very close to dying. Or maybe beneath it all I believed it was fair, because I survived childhood, after all. And I did go marching in the streets when I was young, there must have been a reason for that.

So when Hillary says things that sound cynical to the child's ear (I still have that child inside me btw, I remember) the adult ear knows she's right. Maybe that's why she appeals to African-Americans who have to deal with the reality that law enforcement sees them not as innocent citizens first, but guilty until proven innocent. Maybe if you're there, you don't strive for perfection, you'll accept just being relatively safe in your own neighborhood for starters.

The truth is progress will be incremental. Bernie is at least suggesting it can happen all at once, I also am very sure that at age 74 he knows it's nonsense. These are all things that Hillary can't say in a debate, if she does the press will eat her alive as will the Bernie Trollers on the Internet. Aside from that he's already convinced you she's not to be trusted, so you don't even listen to her.

But I can say it, I'm not running for anything, and I love all you young people for your optimism, hold on to it, you'll need it. But let's be smart! Let's set long-term objectives, let's make the changes we want to see, carefully, along with people from all parts of the country and let's not make disappointment, which is imho what Mr Sanders is selling.

Learning from Bernie and Barney - 2016-03-31T16:13:23Z

First I want to say I'm a voter, not a campaigner.

So anyway, I read this great interview with Barney Frank about Bernie Sanders and other political animals, including the voters.

He says what I've been thinking but a lot more clearly. Of course, he's a professional politician. I know we're supposed to hate them, but the problem is we need them. And BF is one of the good ones. Smart guy.

First, if you want to know who to blame for why everything is so fucked (if you believe it is), if you're a voter and you only vote in Presidential election years, then look in the mirror. If we, who voted for Obama the last couple of times, also voted in the off-year elections, the House and Senate might be Democratic, and you would have gotten more what you want.

If you're a college student with big loans, you might have gotten relief by now. Because the government serves people who vote. Remember that one.

If you elect President Sanders, you're going to have to vote every year, otherwise you'll be complaining about him too.

About Sanders, what did he get done in the 25 years he's been in Congress? Basically not very much because the guy didn't work with others. No compromise in him, I guess, or maybe he just isn't that social. But it's not going to get any better for him if he's President. We've elected Presidents before who thought Congress had to come to him, it doesn't work that way.

The most effective presidents are pretty much assholes you wouldn't want to have a beer with. Look at some pictures of Lyndon Johnson relating to other DC politicos. He used to talk to people while he was taking a shit, with the door open! And when he got in your face he totally got in your face. Not a great pal, but boy did he get things done.

Carter is a great example of a Sanders-like President. He was a saint. And really smart, and a good campaigner, and after Watergate and Ford's pardon of Nixon exactly the punishment we all wanted and voted for ourselves. Carter is a great man, but not because he was President, rather because he was a great ex-President.

Last night Rachel Maddow asked Sanders if he would use some of the money he was raising to support down-ticket candidates. He said no, over and over. I couldn't believe what he was saying. I don't think Maddow could believe it either. And he thinks he's going to get super-delegates to work with him to throw out HRC who is working on raising money for Congress and state offices. As a good top-of-ticket candidate must. It comes with the job. I don't think Bernie gets that.

Not only can't Sanders win with that approach, he clearly doesn't want to create a legacy even if he knows he can't win. Sanders could do a lot for his campaign finance goal right now, this minute, by helping elect people using his access to money. He can't effectively spend all he's raising. I don't understand what game he's playing. Certainly not trying to build some kind of revolution, that's baloney. A revolutionary would be seizing this moment, rather than complaining about the past.

You want to change the way campaigns are financed Bernie, then fucking do it and stop talking about it. Carpe diem man.

BTW, one of the reasons our most effective presidents are assholes is that the USA is an asshole country. You want to make it live up to the hype and be a bastion of freedom, where everyone gets a chance to win, and we don't do crazy shit to the world and ourselves? Well that's a big hill to climb. Maybe it's possible, I kind of doubt it is, but if it were to happen you'd have to do a lot more than elect one good President and expect somehow that's going to change hundreds of years of being an asshole country.

Microsoft and intellectual interop - 2016-03-30T17:21:09Z

So Microsoft has a port of the Bash shell on Windows. It's a wise move. Early days Microsoft would have done this right off. In the middle in Ballmer's Microsoft they lost the sense of urgency. It isn't even a huge deal from a software standpoint. Think of it as intellectual interop.

They ported Word and Excel to Mac when they were trying to get the world to adopt Windows. I think you can see where this is headed. Flatten out the differences between the OSes as much as possible. Why not. No one cares about that stuff, that's the layer that was established 30 years ago. The action is happening 10-levels up the stack.

BTW, speaking of stacks, we're getting a little traction in 1999-server-land. Of course since we're building on Node.js, all this stuff should run nicely on Microsoft's OS, whatever they call it. ;-)

1999-server mail list - 2016-03-29T14:13:11Z

Good morning!

This is just an announcement, if you have questions you should ask them on the new mail list. Link is at the end of this post.

I've created a new blogging system called 1999.io.
Anyone can run a server. The server software is open source, MIT License. In that way it's comparable to WordPress or Ghost and unlike Blogger, Medium and Tumblr. I want it to be easy and free to set up and run a server.
It's written in JavaScript, running in Node.js.
Each blog can have multiple users, each server can have multiple blogs. Think of 1999 as a community of communities of communities.
The software is patterned after a product I created at UserLand Software called Manila. It shipped in 1999. Hence the tagline -- Blogging like it's 1999.
It's the writing and publishing system I've been using for Scripting News since October. It works! I love it more than any blogging system I've ever used. I'm not kidding.
It's got features that no blogging system has ever had, like a live connection between the story pages and the server, so updates flow back automatically to every reader. It does liveblogging automatically, without any plug-ins, iFrames, hacks, etc.
It's super easy to create a new post. Since that's the first thing you want to do, and I want you to do a lot of it, I made it very very easy. Here's a video demo.
Rather than open the system by offering free hosting, instead I am starting with server sysops. So I need help testing that. To be part of this group you should set up a server. It must be publicly accessible, and you need to set up a free app on Twitter. But it's totally doable, if you were able to set up River5 you should be able to set this up.
So if you're into helping me do this bootstrap, please sign up for the mail list. I'm not saying I'll approve everyone at first, I want to have a sense that you will be able to give decent bug reports as we shake out the initial setup issues. Please understand.

This is exciting! Let's have fun! :-)

Dave

Libraries and servers - 2016-03-29T01:32:48Z

Libraries should teach people how to run their own servers and provide support groups and self-help. I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner. I kept thinking of teaching journalism students how to do it, but they're like the Harvard profs. Why did they need blogging? They didn't. But libraries are perfectly situated to bring technology into neighborhoods. And the cost is so low nowadays, get Google and Amazon to donate services. They would of course jump at the opportunity.

Followup re Ev and Joi - 2016-03-28T16:50:42Z

Follow-up to yesterday's post re Ev and Joi, Medium and the open web. There was one big problem in hooking Medium up to my blog, after I added Instant Articles support in my feed.

I had to create a special feed just or Medium because the IFTTT connection choked on the IA support. It's true Facebook could have done something to make this not happen, but they didn't. And as discussed yesterday, to some extent we are all trying to co-exist in Facebook's publishing ecosystem.

So my advice to Medium and/or IFTTT, please make sure you can handle an IA-capable feed. I'm leading-edge on this, I suspect this will become a big issue for you soon.

I would actually like to see Medium embrace RSS directly instead of depending in IFTTT to act as an intermediary. It's a pretty well-established standard by now. Why not embrace it and make life a little easier for the publishers?

Listening to Ev and Joi talk about the open web - 2016-03-28T00:21:25Z

I'm watching the video between Joi Ito and Evan Williams talking about me. Technically Medium is no worse than other systems, and lately has become better, because it now has an API, as Ev is mentioning right now in the video as I'm listening to it.

The reason I focus on Medium is because it is becoming the default platform for people writing blog posts. But Medium is actually part of the open web.

Joi is now asking the right question. It would be great if Medium directly supported Instant Articles as-is. Interop is great. Many ways to do the same thing sucks.

He doesn't need to talk to Facebook to support IA. It's an open format.

The problem with the way Medium API works is that you can't flow updates to it. So if I make a change later the update doesn't show up on Medium.

BTW, I heard a touch of irony in Ev's voice as he questioned whether Medium was really the 800-pound gorilla in this space. They aren't, Facebook is. But Medium is still drawing a lot of good stuff away from the open web, and believe it or not that's okay with me, as long as it can be shared back into rest of the web, exactly as Joi was discussing. That's what was so great about what Facebook did, they said the content shared with them through IA can be shared anywhere, as-is, without modification. I think this is actually smart, following through on the Central Park analogy -- if they feed back to the open web, there's at least a chance of new interesting stuff being created outside the silos. There's certainly no way anyone but a FB employee can directly add value to the FB platform and same with Medium. But the open web, by definition, is not in any way exclusive. Anyone can do whatever they like, without permission from Ev or Zuck.

Links

Anyway the big pieces relevant to this conversation are:

What I learned from Om and Hossein - 2016-03-27T15:35:48Z

Every so often I have to write a piece about why I blog. Not that blogging changes so much, I don't think it does -- but the world around my blog is changing all the time. So the context in which blogging exists changes.

First, Om Malik published a piece yesterday about how to write a good blog post. As I read it I was reminded of a brief Twitter conversation I had the day before with Hossein Derakhshan, who started by saying "Social media have scattered our 'self'. Now they're doing that to #journalism. Era of unified, single website is over."

These two people who I only know because they blog, are right -- but then I thought -- no I don't agree. And yes, it's something I've been struggling with, but for me the struggle is over. I write my blog not because I want to write a "good" blog post, or even one that's read by a lot of people. And my own self is not scattered, it's right here, and as long as I live it will continue to be here. And my online self doesn't exist for the benefit of others, it's here to help my real self develop his thinking and create a trail of ideas and feelings and experiences that I can look back on later.

Having a body of online writing going back almost 22 years, I've benefitted from that, many times. For example, my memory told me that I was against the Iraq war right from the start. But that is contradicted by my blog. I had doubts, but I supported the President. I felt I had no choice. This has turned out to be an important consideration in this year's election. We'd all like to think we were against the war from the start, but the reality is most of us were not against it (which is different from being for it, Bernie). Recall the times and the fear we had about our own safety. Our President laid out a set of facts that turned out later to be lies. Yes, we were suspicious. But did we have a choice but to go with our leader? Most of us felt we had to support him.

I think Hossein is right, for the short term, and wrong for the long term. There are too many technological and societal things happening for the current situation to stay unchanged much longer. Kids who have grown up in the last ten years have never known a world where they couldn't set up their own server. That would be like me, as a young kid, having my own radio station, which I did, even though it was hard to do and illegal! Because I felt compelled to broadcast. I loved communication tech as a kid. It was visceral. There must be kids like that today. Why should they respect what Hossein thinks is the indelible future? No one asked them! Remember what it's like to be coming of age and finding out the whole world had been carved up so that you had to fit in a very tight little box. Some of us didn't like that, and some rebelled against it. Well you may feel it's all over and the structure of the world has already been decided, but I can promise you one thing -- they don't.

And I don't. I still get a thrill at putting up my own web service. I know it's right. And we haven't lost that ability yet. But it could happen. And that will just mean, imho, that it will take a bit longer for the next iteration to come about. And I promise you it won't have any respect for the rules of the previous iteration. That's just not how our species works.

New rules for debates - 2016-03-27T02:17:06Z

Kristof wrote an op-ed in the NYT today that's being much-discussed in the journosphere. He says that journalists failed by giving Trump so much airtime. But he didn't say what to do about it.

I certainly can't say all of what's needed, but I'd like to call your attention to the need for new stronger rules, or don't have debates.

I outlined some ideas in this piece written on March 17, I think it might be worth a read. It begins thus..

We never had a rule that you couldn't interrupt people in a political debate because most people running for the job understood how serious it is and while they did interrupt each other, it never became a huge problem the way it did this year. Likewise we never had a rule saying candidates couldn't call each other names or make personal comments about their bodies or mannerisms. The thought never crossed anyone's mind because it was unthinkable that anyone running for this job would have so little respect for it.

And continues on from there...

The US needs to grow up - 2016-03-26T19:15:26Z

On Twitter, earlier I wrote that the United States needs a good therapist. I'd like to add that the United States also needs to grow up.

Growing up means seeing that there are other people who are not corrupt or evil or weak who just have a different point of view.

Our system of government is set up so that if you want to get anything done, you must listen to other people and consider their needs. Give a little to get a little. You'll never get all that you want. And that's a good thing.

Too many people belong to the My Way Or The Highway Party. They're tired of being politically correct or they're feeling the bern, whatever it is, they've found a reason they don't have to listen. And that's not actually going to work.

The key is to listen. Listen especially carefully to things you don't want to hear. That's where our country comes together. That's where growing up happens.

How great if Facebook... - 2016-03-25T23:24:00Z

One year ago I posted this Little Card Editor editorial, on Facebook and many other places. Here's what it said:

How great if Facebook, asking publishers to provide full text, spec'd an open format, so it could also flow to the open web.

I thought the picture was really beautiful. It's the way I think of the web, lots of flows, some big, some small -- and then places that things don't flow in and out of.

Ideally everything that's public should be able to flow everywhere, so we can build all kinds of apps on the information we all create together. That's the vision of the web. Realized only somewhat, as it is with all human things. Nothing ever does all we hoped it would. And we never anticipate all that will come from innovations, good or bad.

Anyway, today I reposted that card with a simple message. They did.

And that's good.

The runway keeps getting shorter - 2016-03-24T21:04:31Z

Life is like a plane taking off down a runway. As you get older, there's more runway behind you than in front of you. It's inescapable. You see it when celebrities you admire, who are your own age, die. Like Garry Shandling. When you see a picture of David Letterman and he looks realllly old, but happy -- and when you're writing about it you pause because you can't remember his last name. There's not much time left. That's so true. What's also true is the great song that The Supremes sang. You can't hurry love. Etc. Somehow between the two forces, life happens. And then you take off for the skies.

PS: Shandling on Letterman.

A Node virtual machine - 2016-03-24T15:24:01Z

Ideal Node.js hosting service —

Here’s the URL of a GIT repo, containing a Node app. Run it with forever.
I want to be able to do a tail -f on the log so I can see what’s going on.
And to view its file system, perhaps through a browser-based JS app.

I think that's about it. I give you a URL, you run it.

I know some services get close, but I don't want close. I want just this.

A Node virtual machine.

We need truly public hosting - 2016-03-24T14:22:48Z

We need help from educational institutions in starting a tradition of public hosting without attaching venture capital business models.

Recently the Node community had a fairly big outage that can be traced to the fact that NPM, the code distribution system, has been taken over by VCs. When NPM became VC-backed, it was obvious that at some point this would cause problems. And it certainly doesn't stop there. I worry about GitHub. It plays such a central role. But eventually the VCs are going to want an exit. Then what happens?

There are examples everywhere.

Sure there are some cases where we benefit from having the tech industry host our stuff, YouTube is a good example, because videos are so large, but in other cases it gets ridiculous.

We need a framework, legal and social, for projects that are not "owned" but are just there.

This is a project that "Old Berkman" could have tackled. Right now I don't know where to bring these questions.

We could use some help.

Bernie will not be a stinker - 2016-03-23T16:02:33Z

To Bernie's supporters who say they won't vote for HRC if she's the eventual nominee, I have a few things to say.

It's meaningless now. What matters is what you do in November. And if Bernie loses the nomination, if he has any love for our country, he'll be campaigning actively for HRC. If not, he's playing a dangerous game with our future, and doesn't, imho, deserve your support.

There's a lot of powerless talk now. People don't have any control over events. We all have our say. You have to convince us if you want to win. The first sign of a revolutionary is not that they pout, or feel self-pity -- that's not revolutionary. It's a relentlessness, that if you don't get it this year, you'll be back next year. And the year after that. Etc.

HRC was 60 when she lost to Obama in 2008. So what did she do? Sulk? Complain? Not vote for Obama? Stay silent when her pouting supporters complained? No, she picked herself up and got busy, and came back at age 68 to try again. She never claimed to be a revolutionary but that's a lot more revolutionary than being a victim.

There's a context to this year's vote that's inescapable. In 2012 if you abstained, the worst that would have happened is Mitt Romney, which would have been pretty bad considering that Congress was about to become fully Republican. But this year, abstaining could mean turning the US over to a crazy KKK-loving Nazi strongman. One that even the Repubs don't support. That's pretty damned awful if you stop and think about it!

No, we don't have to worry about this. The threat isn't credible. Come November Bernie's supporters will do the right thing. Bernie himself will do the right thing.

How to get Trump to STFU - 2016-03-22T21:02:12Z

New business model for Twitter.

Pay them $ to omit all refs to Trump.

This actually has a name: Checkbox News.

I want this from cable news when I'm sick of a story, but still want to get news about other stuff.

It could work for advertising too.

But right now I desperately need to have Trump silenced. His weasel words are making me ill.

Video demo of 1999.io - 2016-03-21T22:47:56Z

In 1999, my company, UserLand Software, released a product called Manila.

There was a lot to the product, it was a content management system, or CMS, and was built around the idea of editorial roles, and a discussion group. Templates. Full control over appearance with templates for everything.

The idea was that a publication would consist of a group of editorial people collaborating on a flow of news stories.

But it was also for blogging. We ran EditThisPage.com with Manila. A lot of people used it.

One of the big innovations of Manila was that every bit of content you could edit had a big Edit This Page button on it. Click the button, make a change, click Submit. This was a huge innovation. Made it a lot easier.

Anyway, fast forward to 2016, and I'm doing this year's version of Manila. It's called 1999. Because when you're using it, you're blogging like it's 1999. With a H/T to Prince.

The software is getting very close to being finished now.

And I wanted to sneak out a preview of what editing is like in 1999.

Believe it or not, it's even easier than Edit This Page.

Here's the demo...

PubNub + RSS would be great! - 2016-03-21T17:30:20Z

I had what I thought was an excellent suggestion for PubNub a few years back -- that they support the <cloud> element in RSS 2.0.

When I first wrote it up, SOAP was the big deal in web services. So I called it SOAP Meets RSS.

It would give them a super-simple API, and one that's part of a broadly-supported standard. Nothing ever came of the idea.

I get emails from them pretty regularly about seminars I could attend to learn how to code to their APIs. Every time I think how great it would be if they used our pre-existing API. Lots of stuff would "just work" and it would be a super easy way for people to get started with their notification service. I still think it's a no-brainer. I don't think I ever wrote a blog post about it, so now I have. ;-)

They're good for your heart! - 2016-03-20T17:11:03Z
I had a dream about a restaurant and movie theater called Fart House Theater. All the food would be infused with fart-producing food. Then about an hour into the movie, a symphony! And a potpourri of human effluvience. And from what we learn here, good health!

Can we still trust Google search? - 2016-03-20T14:45:42Z

Last night I was searching Google for an article I wrote earlier this year, the way I always do it. I couldn't find it. Not only that, searches that should have turned up hundreds of hits, only showed one or two.

Google has been thoroughly indexing my site for many years. I remember when they first started, how nice it was, but today I take it for granted. If they weren't doing such an excellent job I would have had to write my own site search function.

The thought has occurred to me that this is Google taking its push to HTTPS to a new level. No, I don't want to support HTTPS on all my sites. I have a huge number of them. I've been creating new sites since 1994. And of course they have the right to index or not index whatever they want. And I have the right to stick to HTTP for my sites.

Of course this could be:

A bug.
My imagination.

But they have said they play games with the search engine that have nothing to do with the actual relevance of a site. And this isn't even about relevance, I'm prefixing the searches with site:scripting.com. I'm specifically searching on my own site.

Conclusions.

I need to raise the issue publicly. Done.
We need to replace Google now, because if this isn't the time that they turn the lights off on my site, that day could well be coming. I have trusted Google since they started up in 1998. Clearly I don't trust them anymore if I have doubts about whether they're deliberately downgrading the search quality of my site.
The day of Google being the default search engine may be coming to a close.

Note: To be absolutely clear, for people who skim, I am not talking about other people finding my content or them reducing the rank of this site, I'm talking about using Google as a utility to help me find stuff on my own site, something I absolutely need to be able to do, reliably.

Update

I tried searching with DuckDuckGo instead. What I found:

It appears to have a much better index of recent posts on Scripting News than Google does.
However I was not able to find the post I was looking for. That might imply that the writer's memory of where he wrote this is imperfect. ;-)

Bernie, enough with the Hillary bashing - 2016-03-19T18:33:38Z

Bernie starts off with a joke about what good friends he is with Donald Trump. The crowd gasps. Then he smiles. They laugh. He says "It's not as if I went to his wedding or anything."

Of course there's the famous picture of Bill and Hillary at Trump's wedding. And that somehow makes her what? Why doesn't he just come out and say it? Because what he's implying is not true. Going to someone's wedding, unless you know otherwise, for sure, is just that -- they went to his fucking wedding.

So please Bernie. Chill. Just a bit. If I didn't know better I'd think you were a Republican. ;-)

Is Bernie in bed with the NRA? - 2016-03-19T14:26:24Z

Political discourse on the net is just a minor league version of what you get on cable news. I think that's why it's so exhausting. It's so utterly impersonal. You get cut-and-paste comments from people you've never met, who didn't read what you said, who just gave you a splattering of talking points, presumably to start an argument of some kind, where you recite the talking points of some other guy. We could all just wear badges saying who we're emulating, and click a button to play an MP3 of their talking points. Life on the net could consist of clicking buttons and listening to clips of MP3s. Like Disco the parakeet. When that's fully implemented the robots can take over. Sooner than you might think.

Now I flatter myself to think that I am actually ahead of the talking heads, although these days that can be hard to do because some of the coverage, esp that from Rachel Maddow, is actually pretty first-rate. But I don't see anyone wanting to talk about that stuff on Facebook or elsewhere, people mostly still quote soundbites and talk over each others' heads as if there were massive numbers of people listening. (There aren't.)

A question for Sanders

If you're a Sanders supporter, I imagine you are one of those people who, like me, is frustrated when we can't get the politicians to budge an inch because they're so totally controlled by the NRA.

Now since you're a Sanders supporter, and if you're similarly frustrated, can you get a clear statement from your candidate that he agrees or disagrees that when an assault rifle is used to kill people, as it was in the Newtown massacre, that the manufacturer, distributor and retailer that sold the gun should be liable for damages. They don't go to jail, they just compensate the victims.

The rationale for this is simple. These guns have no practical use for hunting. Their only purpose is killing large numbers of humans. They have use in wars, but no real use for civilians, unless they want to kill lots of other humans.

Here's an op-ed written by parents who lost their 7-year-old son in Newtown, explaining why Sanders' dismissal of their lawsuit was wrong. You really have to read this to understand the issue and why Sanders is so wrong about it.

So here's the question for Sanders.

Senator Sanders, please explain why you are opposed to manufacturer, distributor and retailer liability for sale of assault rifles used in mass killings? Would you consider changing your position? If not, understanding that the NRA has given you a D-minus rating (something you brag about, we heard you), even so, are you in bed with the NRA in some way? Is this evidence of your corruption?

One for the Repubs

The professional operators are moving in on the Republican side, now that the race has been reduced to three, and some real slick fucks are showing up.

One of them yesterday referred to Hillary Clinton, repeatedly as "Mrs Clinton."

That's not cool. Her correct title is Secretary Clinton.

When you change her title to something so old-timey, that's an obvious dog-whistle for "Women's place is in the home baking cookies."

Stop doing that.

Re NPR and podcasting - 2016-03-18T15:12:42Z

My two cents on NPR deciding not to promote podcasts.

It makes sense when you realize that the radio stations and the sources of programming are often independent of each other.
I think it's good, because this will let independent channels of distribution develop that build on the realities of the net, not radio broadcasting.
We still haven't broken through the journalism barrier. Reporters and analysts mainly listen to each other. Trying to get good ideas on the agenda of professional news people, even if they have Twitter accounts and email addresses, is virtually impossible if you aren't one of them or don't use a PR firm to approach them. We need to break this barrier.
NPR is a silo, an old one. Silos, by design, stifle communication. Too much of the current news system is built around that.
Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
We talk about breaking free of The Establishment when it comes to political parties, but what we really need to do imho is break free of the media. They openly brag that they profit from the destruction of the US political system. I think that's true to some extent of NPR too.
So if we want new politics, we must have new media.
Honestly, I think we have an oversupply of new podcast content, and along with it we have an inadequate discovery system. We need to try out new ideas there. Ones that aren't limited by the limits of radio.
I'm a blogger, and one of the creators of the podcast medium, and I don't mind promoting new podcasts. You might try broadening your reach to influencers. Right now I get zero new ideas from the industry, I only hear about their podcasts when I ask friends for recommendations.
Be creative, and also listen more. Radio is basically one-way. The secret is the podcast medium doesn't have to be.

Very early morning political notes - 2016-03-18T06:23:23Z

A few random notes.

I find the current political situation both exhausting and fascinating.

I've now listened to all the Whistlestop podcasts. Very good stuff, and much of it is on-topic for the convention fights that are coming up, perhaps in both parties.

Watching a lot of MSNBC. I find it encouraging that so much of the discourse is now informed and skillful. The people who have had so little to say over the years when there wasn't much news, now have a lot of relevant education and information. Many of them have studied the history of politics. And they know their stuff.

I wonder if there's a great readable book about how conventions work?

Trump has hired some inside-Washington political advisors. I saw one of them interviewed on CNN today. BTW, Wolf Blitzer was fantastic with him. Deadpan. No sense of irony. Took all his putdown questions literally (as they deserved to be treated). Even better it's great to hear Trump rep'd by someone who doesn't know how to steamroll a reporter like Trump does. Blitzer was able to control the interview. Refreshing. And the panel that came on after was excellent. None of the usual CNN stuffed shirts who never say anything but the vaguest of platitudes. Intelligence on CNN! Go figure.

Too much politics on Facebook. Mostly mindless repetitive recitals. I think a lot of other people are feeling the exhaustion. I unfollowed someone today who I know is smart and witty on other things, but is totally tiring me out with his sad and depressing political analysis. I imagine other people feel the same about what I've written, so I try to keep it mostly over here on my blog and just post links to Facebook.

I especially dislike the comments from people whose political opinions I already know. I know they know I must know. So why are they restating the same ideas over and over? Even when I agree with them, I think it's a form of spam. Maybe it gives them a feeling of power? I don't know what to do about this. I don't want to unfriend people because they are exhausting me. I don't want to hide their posts (I don't even know how to do it), and I sure don't want to block them. But I have even deleted some of my own links on Facebook because they have attracted these recitals.

It'll be interesting to see if this post attracts the same kind of spam on Facebook.

So much of political discourse in normal times sounds like this. Moderator: Person A will you sing your song now. Okay enough. Person B sing yours. Thank you. Now we will hear person C's song. Okay good, now some harmony (talk over each other). We have to leave it there for now.

I guess it's just late and I'm tired. See you in the morning! :-)

Planning for the next round of debates - 2016-03-17T19:51:19Z

We never had a rule that you couldn't interrupt people in a political debate because most people running for the job understood how serious it is and while they did interrupt each other, it never became a huge problem the way it did this year.

Likewise we never had a rule saying candidates couldn't call each other names or make personal comments about their bodies or mannerisms. The thought never crossed anyone's mind because it was unthinkable that anyone running for this job would have so little respect for it.

But now we need rules. If we're going to have debates in the next round, there has to be a way to cut off a candidate that's taking more than his share of the time. And a way to switch off a candidate when they call the other candidate a name, or make a comment about their appearance. And take the camera off a candidate that's making gestures with his arms or face while another candidate is talking.

If the moderators don't plan for this in advance they are responsible for what comes next. It's obvious now -- we can't assume that the candidates will behave like reasonable adults. We have to assume they won't.

Drawing a line for Trump - 2016-03-17T15:24:08Z

I was very disappointed last night when MSNBC ran the video of HRC and Putin produced by Trump, on every show. Very sexist. Demeaning. Over the line, over the top.

This is still fresh territory. Are we going to let Trump run a sexist name-calling campaign against Clinton? This is a decision all news orgs need to make. I expect that from Fox, but MSNBC? Really?

Can you imagine that HRC would run a similar video about Trump? Why not? Because this is a place we should not be going.

We shouldn't have let Trump use name-calling to win the Repub nomination. Now he's threatening riots. You know where this leads. That video was over the line.

PS: I refuse to point to the video. Honestly I was reluctant to write this because I didn't want to call attention to this. But enough. How could they do this at MSNBC? Are they completely not paying attention?

Why I vote Democrat, day 2 - 2016-03-17T14:52:25Z

It's good that I wrote the piece yesterday about how I came to be a Democratic voter. A few follow-on notes.

I have also become a Democratic contributor. I have not only given to Presidential campaigns, but also to local campaigns for candidates that I thought were either inspiring, or in seats that were currently occupied by people I find intolerable. And not just in the areas I live. I've given to candidates all over the US as well as in California and New York where I've lived since switching parties.

There was another even more important reason I switched. We didn't feel the wars in the US. Our soldiers were dying. We were destroying Iraq, killing many hundreds of thousands of people, turning many more into refugees, but everything went on normally in the US.

You couldn't tell we were at war! Travel all over the world, you'd never know the US was at war. Now that's not sound. When we're fighting a war, esp one that we started (Iraq) we should feel it at home. Our family members should be fighting and dying. Rationing. A lot of us would be involved in the war effort. Taxes would be much higher to pay for the war. Instead, the Repubs just put the wars on the credit card, and controlled what Americans saw on TV. Tax cuts! All our bubbles continued to inflate, the economy over-extended in a very crazy way and it finally crashed in 2008.

People in the US still don't feel responsible, we're so selfish all we think about are what little most of us had to pay. But it was all done in our name, by people we elected. I felt it was paramount in 2004 that we switch from Repubs. Didn't happen until 2008.

How I came to vote Democratic - 2016-03-16T14:02:38Z

I have a confession to make.

Through the 80s and 90s I voted Republican.

I've been trying to figure out why I did that.

In the 80s I was a software entrepreneur. It was very hard and demanding work. I was doing two full-time jobs, as the CEO of a company during the day, and a programmer at night. The company I wanted to create needed me to do that. I wanted to make exceptional software. So I pulled out all the stops and went for it. That's near as I can explain why the Republican story appealed to me. It's why I was sympathetic to Microsoft until I saw what they tried to do to the Internet. I believed that good engineering practices can lead to good government practices. I've since changed my thinking on that. It's more subtle. Countries have different goals from startups. And necessarily so! I see some of the current generation of tech entrepreneurs struggling with this, as I was thirty years ago.

I switched to voting for the Dems for the election of 2004. I had seen enough with Bush II. The country was careening in a corrupt way. The Repubs, conservatives, always making a huge issue of deficits, were spending obscenely on two wars. Totally out of control. Without any debate. Being an outspoken critic of the President at that time got you a lot of hate. I was ambivalent about the war here on my blog, as we were starting the war. But I was just an individual blogger with an academic job where I was supposed to have public and personal opinions. I remember seeing MSNBC claim the President was a "Visionary" when the bombs were first falling on Baghdad. I thought "we are lost." It was in this time that they fired Phil Donahue because he was too critical of the President. It's important to remember how we reacted to 9/11. It made us all pretty crazy.

So I did everything I could to support Kerry. And then Obama twice. And now Clinton. Anything but let the Repubs have control of the whole government. We must remember what kind of country and economy they left us with. All so they could funnel a few more dollars to their friends in the defense industry. That really seems to be what it was all about.

To me, being a business person comes with very high ethical standards. The dollar chasers who have taken over the Repub Party are a different kind. They act as if as long as they get more dollars anything is justified. They probably were just as bad in the 80s and 90s when I was voting for them, perhaps I was too naive, or busy with my life, to understand.

I know other Repub voters made a different choice. They vote for bomb throwers, people who think it would have been okay to let the auto industry fail. They should read up about the huge refugee crisis of the Dust Bowl, to get a small idea of the human wreckage that would have created.

I was having lunch with a Dutch entrepreneur last week, talking about Trump of course, and he said he thought Trump would do or say something that would wake everyone up. That's about the most optimistic thing I've heard! :-)

Trump is wagging the dog - 2016-03-15T19:55:19Z

Did you see the movie Wag the Dog? The Trump campaign is like that except in the open. You can see the stage.

And if you doubt Trump can win the November election, regardless of polls, did you think of the staged event last Friday? He did.

I wrote this before the Chicago protest: "All the numbers say Trump can't win in the fall, unless something terrible happens. Therefore something terrible is going to happen."

America == The Establishment - 2016-03-15T17:08:36Z

HRC is part of the Establishment, as is Bernie Sanders. Each has their own histories. HRC has been closer to the levers of power. So she's had to compromise more. If Sanders gets the top job, he will compromise too, or -- more gridlock. Probably a lot of gridlock either way.

As an American citizen, you are also part of the Establishment. Esp in relation to people from other parts of the world. Something all Americans should be aware of. Degree of Establishment-ness is a function of how close you are to the center of power. As an American, you're pretty close.

Revenge of the flyovers - 2016-03-15T05:04:47Z

Think about it. Almost all the voting so far this year has been in flyover country. There have been a few exceptions, but New York, Pennsylvania, California, Oregon, Washington, haven't voted yet.

So the trouble in the election has been coming from the flyovers. Not to say the coastal states won't go for Trump too, but they get to ratify the vote of flyover country.

Imagine this election so far as a succinct love letter from flyover country to the coasts. It might go something like this:

Dear coastal assholes,
We can turn your world upside-down.
With much love,
Flyover country

Americans don't listen anymore - 2016-03-14T18:53:37Z

A tweetstorm from Stewart Butterfield, a tech industry exec. No need to repeat it here. I responded in a comment on the Facebook version of the sequence.

A lot of this is very wrong. They are real people. They are not going away any faster than you or I. Their votes count as much as ours. We haven't been hearing them, true they haven't been speaking very clearly, but then neither are you Stewart. Your reasoning is about as dismissive and condescending as the other side. No one is going to go away just because you want them to.

See also my earlier post to Sanders fans about their revolution.

You have to convince not just people like me who passionately believe in open health care and education, investing in our young people, creating opportunity for everyone, really dealing with climate change, you also have to convince a fair number of people who are voting for Trump. And that means doing a lot of talking and listening, and that's going to take years. We as a country are very far away from the place we need to be to get the kind of change we want to see. And btw, they'd like to have a talk with you, about things they care about.

Our problems are not so specific as America Doesn't Win Anymore or Taxing The Millionaires and Billionaires, the problem is that everyone thinks they're entitled to what they're entitled to, and the rest of you all can go to hell.

Stewart is in the middle. He's not a Trump voter, and he's not spinning for Bernie. But when he says his problem will "die off" I know he isn't listening. No one needs to listen to things that are dying out. Unless they aren't. And they aren't.

You know who had it right? The great American philosopher Rodney King. He asked the essential question. Can't we all get along? Well, can't we?

politics.newsriver.org is up - 2016-03-13T15:48:44Z

A couple of weeks ago I asked for links to your favorite political news sites in a thread on Facebook, much as I did with podcatch.com and podcasting. This time, I wanted to create a river of political news as we entered the heart of the political year in the US.

I got lots of great feeds, and now the river, politics.newsriver.org, is up and running for us all to use.

If you have suggestions of news feeds (RSS or Atom) that might fit into this flow, please post a comment on Facebook, or send me a link on Twitter. I'm pretty open-minded about sources to include, I already include a few extreme conservative and liberal sites. But I'm most interested in thoughtful observers, people who offer real insight into the politics of 2016, regardless of their political point of view.

It's already a very useful river, it can only get better.

So thanks for all the great feeds!

PS: Of course the software generating the river is my own River5 .

If you grew up in the 60s... - 2016-03-13T06:02:05Z

If you grew up in the 60s as I did, you might not think this election is very weird.

In fact you could wonder how we made it this far without having this election, even though we got pretty close in 2000.

Still it's pretty amazing that every change in government since the first has been peaceful.

No tanks in the streets, ever.

It'll be a miracle if that record stays intact this year.

All we are saying...

Two observations - 2016-03-12T21:00:36Z

Tomorrow the View from Nowhere gets a huge test. The Sunday morning moderators, Stephanopoulos, Todd and Dickerson, obviously know that Trump orchestrated the violence at his rallies. Will they let Trump and other Repubs pretend otherwise? And will the Democrats make that the issue?
Trump's two heroic generals, Patton and MacArthur, were famous for their independence, and with MacArthur, insubordination. Unusual choices, until you remember who made the choices.

Obama's legacy might yet be defined - 2016-03-12T19:21:12Z

We assume President Obama's legacy is going to be ObamaCare, but it might be bigger. He might, in his last year in office, be able to deliver on the promise of his 2008 campaign, to be a transformative President.

Think about it this way... If you were a Republican Senator or House member you'd have to be scared out of your mind right about now. I'm about to become part of a fascist government. Or worse! Be purged by one.

I saw a clip of Lindsey Graham at a recent Judiciary Committee meeting, warning his fellow Republicans that it could be a Democrat in the White House next year, and if so, he's going to vote to ratify his or her nominee, because that's the way it works. There was an incredible quality in his voice, as if things had gotten very real, and he wanted to say the words out loud to be sure he wasn't dreaming. But the substance of his speech gave me encouragement, that it's not all as black and white as it seems on the talk shows. Maybe there's an ability for these people to actually work together. Imho that would be vastly perferrable to having a takeover of the government by Trump. (Graham's speech is at 1:06 in this CSPAN video.)

You have to figure the President is somewhat scared too. Usually when guys like Trump take office they don't like having former leaders around where they can cause trouble. Maybe the Obama Library should be at Gitmo? Maybe that's where we're all headed, in one way or another.

Anyway, in the last days of the Republic, I imagine that Obama and McConnell will have a lot to talk about. The only question for both of them is this -- when exactly do the last days start? Seems we're getting pretty close to the edge.

This feels like a scifi plot about the last days of Earth civilization. A Philip K Dick novel perhaps. And I get a chilling feeling when I see a tweet from Trump saying if he loses Florida he's going to blame "Little Marco" for rigging the election. I wonder what Trump would do if he loses. Think he'll just walk away? I kind of doubt it.

Trump is America's weakness - 2016-03-12T15:40:05Z

Thank you Rachel Maddow for having the courage to tell the real story of violence at the Trump rallies. If you haven't seen this video yet, stop everything and watch the story. You can't miss it.

Now, if you want to do something about it, call someone you know in Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Missouri and beg them not to vote for Trump on Tuesday. Let's turn the violence back, show that it's a weak tactic for weak people.

Trump violence escalates - 2016-03-11T15:03:39Z

Listening to Trump lie about the violence at his campaign rallies was too much for me.

Quoted in this Time piece:

“People come with tremendous passion and love for the country… and when they see what’s going on in this country, they have anger that is unbelievable,” Trump said. “They don’t like seeing bad trade deals, they don’t like seeing higher taxes, they don’t like seeing a loss of their jobs. We have some protesters who are bad dudes,” Trump continued. “They have done bad things. They are swinging, they are really dangerous, and they get in there and they start hitting people.”

Well, we've actually seen the events on video. The protesters are non-violent. Many are women. They aren't bad dudes and they aren't swinging at anyone. The only ones doing violence are Trump supporters. And they're getting more violent all the time. There's no mistaking what's going on. We know what comes next in this sequence of events, and what comes after that and after that and so on.

Janell Ross in the Washington Post says of Trump's story: "Language and logic used to justify cross-burnings, lynchings and all manner of illegal, extra-judicial and inhumane behavior in U.S. history. This is what has been said to support attempted genocides, ethnic expulsions and some of the most shameful political acts around the globe. This is the actual route by which bigotry has, in the course of human history, become accepted practice and policy. This is the way that entire groups have been terrorized, demonized and oppressed."

Exactly right.

So why did the other candidates on stage not take the opportunity to say how wrong it is that Trump rallies are getting more violent, and that Trump is orchestrating it from the stage? The Occam's Razor answer is that they're scared. They figure anyone who can use violence as a way to build a case for order can find a way to silence his adversaries. Remember Trump talks openly about killing family members of our enemies, which is illegal. It's not illegal to threaten your political opponents, as Trump has done from his podium, in front of millions of people. Remember what he said about Paul Ryan.

People often make the mistake of thinking people couldn't possibly be as bad as they obviously are. Your spouse is staying out all night, and next time you see them they say they were hanging out with friends and it got late. He or she is cheating, although sometimes we don't get that in the moment.

All the numbers say Trump can't win in the fall, unless something terrible happens. Therefore something terrible is going to happen before the election. A problem that requires a strongman to take power to restore order.

This election will be about whether there are more elections.

What should be done? Start a citizen's PAC to collect money to run ads now, before Trump wraps up the Repub nomination, being very clear about what's happening, before it has a chance to get much bigger. Later, the ads won't work. It's almost too late now. Trump has to be very clearly positioned as anti-democracy. Let this be an election on whether we want to continue to have elections. It's way beyond Bernie's issue of campaign finance, which is kind of quaint and harkens back to a more innocent time when there was a basic acceptance of laws. Bernie is fighting an old battle. The new one is how to un-lose our minds, and prevent a very dark thing happening to the United States.

If not the horse race, what? - 2016-03-10T22:23:55Z

Way back on Feb 9, I asked a question: Is the horse race inevitable?

And I asked Jay Rosen, in that same piece, if not the horse race, what?

In other words, in a right world, what would the journalists cover in an election?

Today Jay answered.

Follow-up

Last night after the Democratic debate, something amazing happened on CNN. An interesting discussion between analysts and surrogates about what had just happened betw Sanders and Clinton. It was substantial, because new territory had been covered in the debate, including a 1985 video of Sanders praising Castro's Cuba and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. For me this raised the question of exactly what kind of revolution does Sanders envision for the US?

Anderson Cooper, a CNN guy, interrupted with a process question. Do you think Sanders' surprising win in Michigan last night helped in this debate and what does his performance foretell for the upcoming primaries next Tuesday.

Filler questions for when there's nothing else to talk about. But this time there was other stuff to talk about. You have to wonder how that happened? Did a director say in his earpiece, oh no you can't go there, quick cut to a process question! Or..?

The Comedians Debate - 2016-03-10T19:20:25Z

There's another Republican debate tonight.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a Comedians Debate on another channel at the same time?

Jerry Seinfeld, Jamie Foxx, Chris Rock, Whoopi Goldberg, Louis CK, Ali G, Tina Fey (I almost wrote Sarah Palin) and Larry David.

It's too late to do it now. But I wish there was some competition. The Republican debates would be funny if they weren't such seriously awful news for the US and the world.

PS: The debate will be held at the University of Miami at 8:30PM Eastern, broadcast on CNN.

The image vs the thing itself - 2016-03-10T16:15:17Z

I was in therapy for eight years in my late 30s and early 40s.

Eight years is a long time, and I think for the last couple of years I wasn't getting much out of it, but it can take a long time to actually make a move.

Anyway, there was one moment that made it all worthwhile. An epiphany that was available to me at any time, even without therapy. But it took a conversation with my therapist to get me to see it.

I was talking about a family member, X.

"I know exactly what X is thinking right now," I said.

"Really," said the therapist. "How do you know?".

Long pause.

"I don't know what X is thinking."

A very simple idea. But so hard to grok. The image I have of someone is different from the person.

Another example. At a workshop. The teacher passes around a picture of someone famous, Y. He asks each of us, as we hold the picture and look at it, what is that you're holding. Each of us says Y. At the end (you know where this is going, I'm sure) he says we're all wrong. That's not Y. It's a piece of paper that has a picture of Y on it.

The point -- the image is not the thing. And further, all we see, even when we're close enough to someone to be intimate, is the image. The real thing is only something that X or Y can experience. We can get closer to the piece of paper, but we can't get through the paper to the thing it is representing.

Why is it important to know this? Maybe it doesn't matter if we understand the difference between image and reality.

Well it turns out if you want to get along with people, you have to respect the difference. And by respect, I mean acknowledge it, accept the distance between yourself and this other entity. The separation is where each of our power comes from. The unique power to be that thing, whether it's a brother, an actor, even a picture of an actor, all these things deserve our respect, to be taken at face value, not to have their individuality destroyed by treating them as if they were an image of the thing they actually are.

Kids especially yearn for this kind of respect. And if we don't get it as kids, we carry that through to adulthood. Always seeking recognition, and never getting it. So we slosh around between our bodies, imagining things that aren't real, and never getting closer to intimacy, which is pretty much what we all seek, imho.

Containers for poets - 2016-03-09T21:39:02Z

User provides credit card info, chooses my app, clicks a button and a few seconds later they get the URL of their app.

From there they can download whatever software the app wants to put on the device, computer -- or nothing, it could just be the website where they write or collaborate or share stuff.

When this gets to be as easy as setting up an Amazon account, there will be an explosion of new software, and it will create serious competition for the silos.

Google and bloggers, why not? - 2016-03-09T16:49:21Z

I've been thinking about turning Scripting News into some kind of a book ever since I started writing here. But I'm a blogger not a book writer. I'm more of a serial writer than a strategic one. I write threads not plots. Although I'm sure there are plots buried in the threads. Repeating themes. If only I knew how to extract them.

With news that Google has a piece of software that plays Go better than the best human being, you can't help but wonder if the algorithmeteers at Google, or Facebook even, couldn't produce data from the linkage both within my blog and to and from the outside world, to show me which are the pivotal pieces in the 22-year-history of this blog, and even better, what are the themes. I imagine that with enough work they could probably even put the book together automatically.

More interesting Google news. They hired Chris Poole, the founder of 4Chan, to breathe life into Google-Plus community site. It's good that they understand that forming and nurturing community is a human thing, that some people are good at. Google already owns Blogger. Community is all around them. What if they loved Google Reader instead of killing it? How much better would that have been.

It's funny that Google has been such an adversary over the years. Sometimes very willfully trying to erase my work, when if we worked together, some great results might come of it. For example, what if Google decided to embrace Facebook's IA format. I would help them figure it out. It's a totally ripe invitation for interop, and adding power to the open web, which also adds power to Google, I believe.

PS: I wrote about this in 2015 and probably many more times over the years. If only I knew where! :-)

Clinton vs the Animal - 2016-03-08T19:27:26Z

If it's Clinton v Trump, do you think there will be debates?

I can't imagine putting the country through that.

Maybe if they put him in another location and give her a kill switch for his microphone.

Or a special Halloween night debate and Trump can come dressed as a famous cannibal.

Emily Bell's latest - 2016-03-07T22:19:13Z

Emily Bell: "Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security."

My two cents -- no one is balancing this story.

I'm a big sports guy -- baseball and basketball. In sports you don't give up until the game is over. And this game is not even close to over. There will be lots of turns and twists. Sure, Facebook put a lot of points on the board in the first inning. Okay that's cool. Now what.

The current online news service, including Facebook, sucks!

There's so much room for improvement, and improving we will do.

It's much more likely to happen outside Facebook, and I believe outside the venture capital-backed tech industry. Radical re-thinks don't happen inside big organizations.

To think it's over would be to think that television was over in the early 60s. Yet there was so much more to come. Same thing going on here. This is just another iteration of the same process, human communication. Facebook's model is still very much like the model it replaced. We've yet to really dip into the potential of electronic publishing, imho.

A tale of two Bernies - 2016-03-07T16:47:47Z

A funny thing happened when Bernie took the stage with his wife in Burlington, on the night of Super Tuesday. He was at home, in his element, his support network all around him. And guess what Bernie is a mensch! I thought maybe I had unfairly judged him. He seems like a nice guy.

Until then my main exposure to Sanders was on the debate stage with his adversary standing next to him. And last night, I was reminded why I think Bernie is such a bad choice to lead anything. He may have been a good mayor of Burlington, you can see that, given how the people there envelope him in love. But when challenged, as a President surely is, Bernie becomes a defensive raging jerk. It makes me so uncomfortable, I want to do something.

If I were sitting in the audience at a conference with two people on stage and Bernie lecturing everyone, including his adversary, I would hopefully get up and walk out. In my weaker moments, in the past, with Larry Ellison or Jason Calacanis for example, I made the mistake of standing up and explaining how they were losing the audience. I'd say the same to Bernie, but I would expect he would paint me as inadequate, a member of The Establishment, who had done business with big banks (I have, as has almost everyone, including Bernie probably, if he ever got a mortgage).

Bernie gets antagonistic when challenged. In my experience this quality makes someone an awful leader. I would never follow a Sanders type person. Which is kind of ridiculous because I basically agree with him on almost everything. And I'm not running against him. I even surprised myself that I was open to thinking of him as a sweet person. But the Bernie I see on stage in a debate is a person I don't want anything to do with.

Programming note - 2016-03-07T15:51:53Z

My RSS feeds that have IA-compatible elements now are marked as such by including an "IA" namespace in the <rss> element in the feed.

You can see it in the main Scripting News feed.

The namespace is documented at the page pointed to by the URL which is its value.

Podcast: Comedians as politicians - 2016-03-06T19:26:39Z

5-minute podcast.

There should have been a stage with 17 comedians on it, running parallel to the Republican debates.

Seinfeld, Louis CK, Whoopi,Jamie Foxx, Steve Martin, Chris Rock, Larry David and Tina Fey, Dana Carvey, Chevy Chase, of course.

Comedians not imitating the Repub candidates, but being candidates themselves. It's okay to invent a persona since that's what actors and comedians do.

In the podcast I explain how this is basically what Trump is doing, giving his people really good television. It's amazing it took so long for us to get here. Just flip Reality TV over, and take it out of the realm of fantasy. On this island, the last survivor gets to live in the White House and fly around on Air Force One. Politics has changed forever, probably not just here in the US.

Colbert was prophetic. Trump is doing the same thing, but he got off the for-play stage and jumped onto the for-real stage. Basically no difference. Remember when McCain said Obama was a celebrity? He was figuring it out. Only we don't want the one whose role is sub-titled The American Fuhrer. :-)

Why no UI standards for the web? - 2016-03-06T18:54:19Z

If things were working well in the web world, browsers would know how to implement a menubar for the user so the HTML code would only have to include the data that makes my menubar different from others.

Or a set of common user interaction dialogs that really work, so you can call them with parameters that include the language of your interaction but none of the layout.

There has been no factoring of user interface over a very long time. A pattern that was well-established in the 80s, and we still haven't caught up with the 1984 Macintosh in standardized UI. Throwing out standards like that, not good for business.

Seems like Mozilla was headed in that direction in the beginning but somehow didn't follow-through? It's all kind of a fog.

Duct tape for IFTTT and Medium - 2016-03-06T17:31:26Z

Continuing the thread on the IA-feed-in-the-wild.

Adding the IA features made the Medium rendering of my posts unreadable, because parts of the <content:encoded> for the item are being displayed in the body of the message. Example. This is because IFTTT, acting as the bridge between my RSS feed and Medium, prefers <content:encoded> over <description>.

My conclusion is that it would be best if Medium read the RSS directly, but they don't so I worked around the problem by creating a special feed without the Facebook features just for the IFTTT recipe. I chose that over turning off the connection with Medium.

This is life in the content world of 2016.

BTW, I'm not publishing the URL of that feed because I'd rather not have to support it long-term, instead viewing it as a bit of duct tape for an issue that I hope will eventually go away.

The fix worked. When this post appeared on Medium it was rendered without the ugly bits.

Podcast: My reply to Mitt Romney - 2016-03-05T15:05:29Z

A 10-minute podcast reply to Mitt Romney.

In a nutshell, instead of coming up with things that the voters can do to stop Donald Trump, how about turning the jets on the current elected Republican leaders, and get them to stop acting so Trumpian.

The idea is to start governing like thoughtful adults, and take the shortcuts out of your process. If you guys were serious about backing away from Trump, you all would admit you made a (serious) mistake in all the many ways you all try to invalidate the President that the people of the United States elected. Don't you see this is the problem! We elect someone, twice, and you all pretend he didn't get elected? Well who the fuck are you? As Trump says, you're the guy who lost. And your party acts like you won.

So let's get going with the Scalia court replacement. Until you all are ready to play the proper role as established by the Constitution, then you aren't serious.

Stop coming up with things for other people to do, and start doing what you yourselves can do.

Another -- have the Republican Party go on record saying that climate change is real, and we are going to stop obstructing efforts to change the American economy to take that into account.

And another thing -- the NRA. They clearly aren't going to get you elected this year. Sure the 2nd Amendment is deeply etched in the brains of the voters. So we aren't going to change anything there. But the NRA isn't bounded by the 2nd Amendment. They make you guys do a lot of other nasty things. Send them packing. Let them scream. Just say loud and clear you're kicking out one of the biggest sources of obstruction.

Let's start getting rid of the maggots and parasites.

One more thing -- call off all your voter suppression. It's another of the many awful and amazing things you guys do out in the open for all to see. You've tried to make some people's votes count and others not. That's not your place. That's like stealing. Something you should go to jail for.

Romney was a perfect choice. A VC money-mover. Doesn't create anything, doesn't even do anything other than say shit to get people riled up. The problem is Mitt, it isn't working anymore. Now what are you going to do?

PS: Here's a video of Romney's snotty RNC 2012 bit about climate change.

On IA in the wild - 2016-03-05T14:41:33Z

To Facebook people, the choice of <content:encoded> for the IA content has disadvantages when the feed is used in other contexts.

For example, IFTTT prefers <content:encoded> over <description>.

When you refer to **Include template "EntryContent" not found.**, and both are present it will return <content:encoded>.

This broke the connection between Scripting News and Medium, which is built on IFTTT.

So there are four parties here -- Facebook, IFTTT, Medium, Dave.

In hindsight it probably would have been better to create an IA namespace, and instead of using <content:encoded>, you'd include an <IA:article> or something like that. Having never been used before, it could not be confused with anything that came before.

However, IFTTT could allow an expert mode, where I could somehow say "No, don't use the <content:encoded> stay with the <description> because it works better for Medium."

Or -- even better -- Medium could stop relying on IFTTT to process RSS for it, after all RSS is a well-respected standard (isn't it). You wouldn't outsource HTML to another app, or HTTP. It seems RSS, esp the new rich flavor of it started by FB is something Medium could support directly.

If it falls to me, I will either cut the connection to Medium and wait for something better from them, or produce another feed that will be used for apps that aren't processing IA feeds.

Also, it might not be a bad idea to establish a convention that says "This is an IA feed" in the feed itself. Not sure whose job that is.

A glitch in how IFTTT uses the feed - 2016-03-04T23:02:24Z

After switching over my feed, I can see it had a negative effect on the Medium versions of these posts. An example. And a screen shot.

The problem is this: my IFTTT recipe is taking the <content:encoded> sub-element of the <item> instead of the <description>.

And it seems there is no way to tell IFTTT not to do this.

I imagine there will be similar problems in other RSS consumers.

We'll see, I guess!

An IA feed in the wild - 2016-03-04T18:51:30Z

Here's an interesting twist.

The main feed for Scripting News is now also an Instant Articles-compatible feed.

Just like the one I did specially for Facebook.

The difference is that thousands of people already subscribe to this feed. So the installed base of people who could benefit from the mobile-faster IA content just grew by a fairly huge amount.

I know this is a new idea -- IA feeds as a basis for interop outside of Facebook, but it is that. And because all CMSes are being updated to support the format, it's a relatively simple matter to add the feature to already-existing feeds.

WordPress, for example could do this, as could Tumblr or Blogger. Of course any of them would increase the size of IA-compatible content by a much larger factor than my own humble feed.

Think about it.

Still diggin! :-)

Update

Doug Purdy on the philosophy at Facebook that led them to use RSS instead of inventing something new:

We need to stop reinventing everything again and again. While I realize that most engineers don't like existing art for anything more than making fun or leveraging conceptually, we should be taking a far more pragmatic evolutionary engineering approach with most of the core communication infra and compete on product features/content.

And my response:

Very well put Doug. I always try to re-use whenever possible. That's in fact how I came to support RSS in the first place. I had a syndication format called scriptingNews format, because that's what it syndicated. Netscape made their service read my format, and of course they did what you describe here, invented their own format. So I played a sneaky trick on them, I just adopted their format. Instant standard.

Lakoff on Trump as Repub catnip - 2016-03-04T16:38:01Z

To people who read my stuff and work in news...

This piece by George Lakoff, a linguistics prof at UC-Berkeley, models the two parties as "strict father" and "nurturing mother." It's amazing over the years how well this model has stood up.

Once I read this all the other analyses of why Trump is resonating sounds wrong. It's not about issues or being angry with Washington. That's head stuff. What matters is how they were raised, what kind of family. Are they looking for a strict guiding hand or a nurturing cuddle.

The strict father is like catnip to Repub voters.

This is so important but Lakoff writes too long and too scholarly for it to get through to most people esp on the net.

I'm trying to think who would do a good job with this, but you probably know much better.

I think this is important.

Dave

For what it's worth, thank you Marco Rubio for trying to keep Trump out of the White House - 2016-03-03T22:27:57Z

I know Marco Rubio is a lousy politician, but I felt a bit sorry for him in the interviews on Tuesday night. He has no chance of winning, his political career is at least temporarily wrecked, and he's got the burden of going up against a neo-Nazi white supremacist with a foul mouth who's winning. It's kind of a shitty deal.

I empathize because I got kind of a similar deal with RSS . It happens all the time, out at dinner, at a party, a conference, someone says hey do you think RSS is dead? By implication it hurts me more than it hurts them if it is. And that's what I say to them. I don't make any money from RSS. It's never been a business for me. So if it's dead or not, has no effect on my well-being, any more than it affects yours.

Like that.

Marco Rubio won't benefit if Donald Trump isn't President any more than you or I will. He'll get to write a book. And there won't be a nuclear war. There's that too. Rubio will benefit, but that's not really the point. It would be good for all of us if his efforts are successful, and even though his politics suck (as I said at the outset) we all do owe him at least a thank you for trying to prevent a calamity. He'd get a good book deal either way probably, so he doesn't really have to do this.

We haven't completely forgotten manners, have we?

Preparing for the worst - 2016-03-02T16:06:40Z

It's time to think the worst of Donald Trump.

He did refuse to disavow the support of the KKK. And I heard him refuse to do it again last night. He says there was a Facebook post and a tweet where he did. I haven't seen either of them. If you have seen one please send me a tweet with the link. Thanks.

The Occam's Razor conclusion is not that it's a gaffe, instead that it's real. Trump is himself a white supremacist. He sure talks and acts like one.

Then there's a video of some white men at a Trump rally, one dressed as a veteran, physically abusing a young black woman. It's shocking.

Someone said the Republican response to the Obama presidency has been a slow-motion lynching. I had the same thought but didn't dare say it. Now it's time to say it. Past time. Trump is what the Repubs, some of whom are decent people, were flirting with, as a way to win elections.

Do we have any recourse against a candidate running this kind of campaign? No one has gotten killed yet, let's start thinking about that before it happens. Watching the Secret Service act at his command seems very wrong. They work for us, not him. They work for the protestors too.

BTW, the discourse on the Democratic side hasn't caught up with reality yet. Even Marco Rubio, who has been fairly brave at stating what's obvious, still hasn't had the nerve to say what it is we're actually seeing.

They were laughing a lot last night on MSNBC. I watched Fox for a while, they were trying to carry on as if this would settle down to something acceptable. But our understanding of these disgraceful and un-American acts, crimes actually, hasn't yet caught up to reality. We need to get ahead of it. We might want to pass some laws about what we're seeing. This might be something both Repubs and Dems agree to.

If you think Trump is inevitably going to be President, remember that he isn't yet President and won't be for a while. We still have some time to prevent the worst of what may be about to happen.

PS: Here's a link to Trump's supposed disavowal. It isn't of course that. I think he's a white supremacist. Racist, neo-Nazi. That's the presumptive Republican nominee for President.

Liveblogging Super Tuesday - 2016-03-02T01:16:27Z

If you see this in your reader, you might want to click this link and leave it open. I'm going to type in notes as the night goes on. You'll see the updates without having to reload the page.

Trump's ambivalence about the KKK shows that dog whistles are not entirely over. The line has just moved into previously unthinkable territory.
On MSNBC they're not considering the most likely explanation for Trump's KKK confusion. He's actually a white supremacist.
How the Repubs gave us Donald Trump. A must-read.
When the results from Georgia were reported they had a big picture of Hillary Clinton next to Donald Trump. I thought who could have predicted this a year ago. Clinton yes, of course. But this combination.
Brian Williams is impossible to watch. Rachel Maddow must totally hate this having to be moderated by such an empty suit.
Hey I like this. It's like my own Twitter. Heh.
Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. (Sung to the tune of Spam Spam Spam Spam.)
Very interesting how WNYC reports election returns in tweet graphics.
BTW, the updates flow through to the IA version on Facebook. That's some good realtime. Pretty incredible for a huge company! :-)
Wouldn't it be smart for Twitter to upgrade the technology for cards? They're just using bitmaps. How about a subset of HTML. Wouldn't be expensive or dangerous.
Do you wonder how long it takes from me pressing Update to you seeing the change on your screen? Much less than 1 second. The net in 2016 is really fast.
There are 50 people watching this page right now.
Little Marco isn't such a bad name.
More love and kindness. It works.
HRC should start talking about taking back Congress. Right now is the time to strike. The repubs are in total disarray. Might even get some Repub incumbents wanting to change parties.
Trump has created a White House ballroom/TV studio in his house in Florida. This is a new thing.
Obviously the last man standing is Cruz. Goodbye Little Marco.
Oh Christ it's that asshole again.
Goodnight everybody! :-)

A note about comments - 2016-03-01T15:48:40Z

I have turned off replies on scripting.com.

I just wanted to give you all a heads up. I want to try other ways of getting public discourse connected to my blogging without hosting the comments on my site. I do like to ask questions on my blog from time to time, and not having a way to get input will be a problem.

I have found that the norms of commenting on Twitter and Facebook have permeated everywhere, and I'm not interested in hosting other people's opinions, challenges or call-to-debates here in my own space. I don't usually respond to them elsewhere, but when they appear here, it's just a nuisance. I end up having to deal with too many personalities.

That's not conducive to free thinking on my part, if I always have to anticipate how people will snark at it or what the various troll factions use to control discourse. I don't want that in my space.

There will be another turn to this wheel at some point. ;-)

How self-made billionaires can help - 2016-03-01T14:20:27Z

You know when Trump says that Rubio and Cruz have never hired anyone, or started a business, or created something, he's sort of right.

His followers say they like him because he made so much money. So what if some other people who made a lot of money got together and said Hey this isn't our idea of who should be running the US govt, just so you know.

I understand that at this point there's nothing short of him resigning that will keep him from being the Repub nominee. But at least we can balance his hype that he's somehow unique in that he's made money and supposedly cares about the US in some meaningful way.

Just a thought.

A river of politics? - 2016-03-01T14:08:16Z

Remember when I started podcatch.com? I asked my friends on Facebook what podcasts make them happy, then I created a list, fed it to River5 and did a special page for it. I've been feasting the podcasts ever since. Love it.

Now I want to do the same thing for politics. There's so much news, it's such a big year for politics in the US, I want to have all the news and opinion, from all sides, in a river that flows all day every day with nothing but political news.

So I've started a thread on Facebook, this time asking what are your favorite websites or feeds for politics? Once it's at critical mass, I'll open up the river.

Let's have fun! :-)

Who should support IA and how - 2016-02-29T16:15:12Z

Last week I released Instant Articles support for my blog, Scripting News.

What this means is that every time I publish a new post or update an existing post, it's reflected in my IA feed. Think of my blog as an "emitter" of IA stories.

On the other side, Facebook is reading my feed every three minutes, pulling in new posts and updates. And my posts are then available as Instant Articles on mobile devices. Think of Facebook as the "consumer" of IA stories.

Here's a screen shot of what one of my pieces looks like when rendered as an IA.

Who and how

Here's a list of examples of services and products that I would love to see support IA.

Twitter is a news system and RSS is a perfect fit for news. When I publish to my IA feed, I'd like Twitter to read it every three minutes, and post new messages to my timeline and update existing ones, according to what's in the feed, exactly as Facebook does. Twitter, is in this context, a consumer of IA feeds.
Medium can and should imho play the same role. That means I could tell Medium where my IA feed is, and it would keep it in sync with stories on their site. Medium does now support inbound syndication, but when a post is updated, the version on Medium is not updated, at this time. IA provides a perfect mechanism to do this. I would love to see them support it.
But Medium is also an emitter, in addition to a consumer. It should be possible to hook Medium up to Facebook, so that stories people write there could be read in the Facebook app, full fidelity, as Instant Articles.
WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger should clearly support IA as emitters, and I'm sure they will all be on stage demoing their support at F8 in April. Since WordPress and Tumblr also have readers, it seems they should also be consumers.
Open source software such as River5 should support IA, as a consumer.
An RSS reader such as Feedly could support IA, for a better mobile user experience, perhaps.

My feed

This is where my IA feed is.

http://scripting.com/fb/rss.xml

How the View From Nowhere has crippled American journalism - 2016-02-29T15:31:20Z

The View from Nowhere and Access Journalism have crippled press coverage of Trump. To see how this works, imagine you, an ordinary American voter, talking with Trump in person or on the phone. How long before you interrupt him, and say, look -- I'm tired of you talking over me, I want to be an equal participant in this conversation. And then when he keeps talking, how long before you hang up?

Well, if you're a reporter, you can't hang up because:

You don't exist (view from nowhere) and
If you did he wouldn't talk to you next time (access journalism).

So every conversation with Trump is exactly the same. He repeats himself over and over, you never get a word in, and he never talks about what you asked about. Time runs out and you thank him and move on to the commercial.

As voters we can hang up, because we aren't part of the View From Nowhere and we don't have access to lose. But so many people these days behave as if they are an insider, a member of the savvy elite. That's why an obvious virus like Trump is allowed to run wild in the body of American politics, so much so that we get a little relief knowing that the military may refuse his orders if he's elected President rather than commit the war crimes that Trump is advocating (e.g. killing the families of people we suspect to be terrorists).

BTW, John Oliver has the best takedown I've seen of Trump. It's direct and unforgiving, offers no apologies or explanations for Trump, and he disclaims both the VFN and any interest in having access. He reacts as many of us would, with outrage that a person could think this way of campaigning could work (it has, and that's even more outrageous).

PS: The View From Nowhere concept is Jay Rosen's contribution, a very useful one.

PPS: In December, Joe Scarborough at MSNBC hung up on Trump. Tremendous!

What if HRC took a Repub running mate? - 2016-02-29T05:33:22Z

What if HRC is nominated and she made a deal with the Repubs (what would she want?) to choose a Repub running mate.

Not someone from the crazy branch of the Repub Party, sorry to all the also-rans on the Repub debate circuit.

Then the team would use all the resources of both parties to drive turnout, the Repubs would disable their voter suppression tools, and we could all sigh in relief knowing that Trump, the official Repub nominee would win maybe Utah, Wyoming and Alaska. It would be the biggest Electoral victory in 40 years, and the official end of Repub obstruction.

Am I dreaming?

Fox has a big story, they don't know what to do with it - 2016-02-29T00:41:57Z

Amazing. On Fox just now they had two analysts, one Repub and one Dem who agree that the Repub Party is splitting in two, right now. But the moderator won't let them finish sentences. Is it possible they're so accustomed to not having a real story that they don't know what to do when they actually have one?

Whistlestop: Reagan in 1976 - 2016-02-27T22:15:06Z

I've been listening to John Dickerson's Whistlestop podcast. It's the best new thing. Each episode is 40 minutes, covering a moment in the history of Presidential politics. A convention, a campaign, a meltdown, a big win or loss.

I was alive when many of these things happened but had no idea what was going on behind the scenes. Dickerson is a great story-teller, you can tell he loves this stuff, the stories are riveting.

The last two episodes I listened to were about Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan at two RNCs, in 1980 and 1976 (the order I listened to them).

I just watched a video of Reagan's closing 1976 convention speech. A lot has changed in 48 years. And he was a pretty fantastic speaker. And we know how things turned out, as he says in the speech that we will.

How IA happened from my POV - 2016-02-27T16:39:28Z

Dan York at the Internet Society commented on my first IA piece after I got it working, and he's the first imho to concisely say why it's so interesting.

I have expected that Facebook would be focused on keeping everyone inside their shiny walled garden and thought I understood that Instant Articles involved putting your content on FB’s servers, which I now understand it does, but via caching of an RSS feed. Which is very cool!

That's exactly right. The feed is how stuff enters their content system. But the feed itself is outside, leaving it available for other services to use. It's great when this happens, rather than doing it via a WG that tend to go on for years, and create stuff that's super-complicated, why not design something that works for you, put it out there with no restrictions and let whatever's going to happen happen. That's certainly how I've done my past projects. I like to create functionality much more than I like to go back and forth on mail lists.

Now to answer your question, I don’t know very much about AMP.

The reason I was able to get on board with IA is that one of the directors at Facebook, Doug Purdy, wanted to work with me. So we met almost two years ago, here in NYC. Then I was briefed on what they were doing, and kept in the loop as it came together. In the beginning all I had was a promise that it would be RSS . I’ve seen many companies over the years say nice things about being open, but somehow forget as the project goes forward.

But they came through. When I got to start work on it early last week, it turned out they had stuck to the promise. It was a simple addition to my RSS-generating code to have it also generate an IA feed. It took three sessions over three days to do the work, and to ship.

So that’s pretty good use of existing technology as I see it. ;-)

About AMP, no one ever sent me an intro to what they were doing. They emphasized the big companies they were working with. To be fair, so did Facebook. From my point of view it’s largely because Doug really wanted this openness that it happened. I find that many of the big open innovations over the years have one person inside a big company who sees it as worth the extra effort to do something open.

Basically I find that developers want to create open stuff, it's part of the ethos of programming. So sometimes it actually happens. ;-)

PS: On Twitter, Tom Murphy called this a "bridge into a walled garden." Beautiful.

PPS: On Facebook, Purdy lists the people who worked on the open protocol at FB.

My open Instant Articles feed - 2016-02-27T01:02:41Z

I believe this is the first public and live Instant Articles feed.

http://scripting.com/fb/rss.xml

As you can see it's also RSS 2.0, something I'm quite proud of.

When I was developing my Instant Articles feed, I desperately needed a working example to follow. It would have helped to have something that worked to study and copy. Now that my feed has been working reliably with Facebook's OS, I wanted to share it.

Interop is what matters. This is a good place to start.

PS: Is it really open? Well, you can write an application that uses that feed. (Please do.) So yes, it's open.

NYT please let the community in - 2016-02-26T16:17:14Z

I was telling Joi the other day that I have advice for the NY Times that I thought he would appreciate since he is a board member there.

He said I should write a blog post, of course (he's an NBB).

So here it is.

Anatomy of a story

First, let's look at the anatomy of a news story.

A headline.
A lede.
Quotes from experts, people involved in the story, witnesses. Also known as sources.
Some numbers perhaps from pollsters or researchers.
A closing paragraph (optional, the Times often omits them, which makes a lot of sense).

Now for ten points, tell me which of these items has changed the most in the last few decades. It's #3 of course.

Sources go direct

The big revolution brought to us by the Internet is that sources can now speak publicly, easily and for free, using Twitter and blogs mostly. I once predicted that every member of the US House of Representatives would be a blogger. That seemed bold at the time, but today? It's much bigger than that. The President of the United States just wrote a guest post on the SCOTUS blog. Think about all the change that represents.

For me, this ability to go direct, was the reason I started blogging. In 1994 I had a Mac product. Couldn't get the news out because reporters, even though they all used Macs, believed the Mac was dead. They reported their belief, not facts.

A lot of people used Macs, and there was lots of new software. There was no way to get news of new products out to users, because it contradicted the belief that there were no new products. So I started communicating directly, using the web, and it worked. We got enough users for our software to allow it to evolve into blogging, podcasting, RSS.

Markets could develop without the support of journalism. That's a big new thing and should have been a wakeup call for the news industry, if they weren't mostly ignoring blogs or trivializing them.

So now when a reporter needs quotes, he or she may turn to Twitter, or a blog, or search, to find the sources they need. The phone, the previous technology used for gaining quotes, is not used as much these days.

The missed opportunity that amazingly still is open

At the same time the news organizations have missed a chance to embrace this phenomenon by working on new tools to help their sources communicate more effectively. They've let the tech industry own it, and it hasn't imho done a very good job. It's all very confusing in user-publishing land. I imagine that reporters at the big pubs think this is okay, but it's not. Their business models are disintegrating, ad blockers are a user revolution, a sign that things may be about to collapse quickly from here. I was on the receiving end of a user revolution in the late 80s as the CEO of a software publisher that practiced copy protection. One month it was something users grumbled about, and the next month we were all rushing to release versions of our product without it.

There's a lot of garbage blogging and tweeting going on out there. Only a relatively few people do a great job of it and strive to do better. These people should be part of the news ecosystems that news orgs gather around themselves. Not replacing reporters, not replacing anything. The bloggers are the sources, with the ability to publish on their own.

Bottom-line: The most interesting sources of the NY Times should be offered a chance to blog at a nytimes.com domain. One that's clearly seen as the user community of the NYT, so it's understood that the quality of the writing is not something that's subject to the NYT standards. But at the same time, let new standards evolve, and nurture them. Take an interest in the bloggers.

The Times has yet to really make a serious attempt to understand what blogging is. For years they called their reporters who write using blogging software bloggers. That was a big disconnect. The bloggers are your current sources and future sources. You have to call some of them on the phone but mostly you read their tweets and blogs.

Here's a vacuum that has existed from the beginning. Why not fill it? Take a chance. Experiment with the new technology in meaningful and potentially revolutionary ways. What exactly do you have to lose?

The shame of Republican voters - 2016-02-26T14:00:00Z

Watching last night's debate I felt shame on behalf of the Republican Party. Not just for the Republicans in government, or who would be in government, but for the people who vote Republican in 2016.

If your children behaved like that with their friends how would you feel? And Trump is a grown man. Presenting himself as a potential leader of our country? What kind of people could support that? You say you're angry. That's crap. You're crazy, is what you are. Out of your minds.

Kasich, openly threatening to kill the leader of another country. Do you have any idea how paranoid the leadership of North Korea is? Kasich has already reached a level of great responsibility by being on that stage. What he says matters! And he presents himself as the most ready to govern of all the Republicans. That kind of talk could easily get a lot of people killed.

And name-calling? In a presidential debate. Really? Trump says he's so good at working with people. You think so? I wouldn't work with someone who used name-calling as a negotiating tactic. I'd show him the door. No we don't want any thank you.

The only two who carried themselves with any measure of self-respect, Rubio and Cruz, aren't much better. The policies they support are inhumane and un-American. Cruz likes to point out how unelectable Trump is. Well I wouldn't live in a country that could elect Cruz as its leader.

We've had some awful Presidents in the US, in my lifetime. One of them, Nixon, was so scary that I considered leaving the country to avoid being drafted to fight in a nonsensical war. I would leave a United States that elected any of these people for reasons of honor and integrity.

We are so much better than this. Snap out of it Republicans!

You say you want a revolution - 2016-02-25T14:45:49Z

We'd all love to hear the plan!

But the plan doesn't start by electing a President. It starts by building a movement of committed revolutionaries who are willing to give up something substantial, over a long period of time, for the revolution.

Showing up to vote is not much of a commitment. Marching on Washington with a few hundred thousand others, now that's a beginning. And even then you probably don't get the revolution. You have to convince not just people like me who passionately believe in open health care and education, investing in our young people, creating opportunity for everyone, really dealing with climate change, you also have to convince a fair number of people who are voting for Trump. And that means doing a lot of talking and listening, and that's going to take years. We as a country are very far away from the place we need to be to get the kind of change we want to see.

And btw, they'd like to have a talk with you, about things they care about.

So maybe before you just leave the room you might want to have a discussion about what it will take to convince your fellow citizens that you have what it take to create a revolution.

Adding #feeltheburn to your tweets is not enough.

PS: Thanks to the Beatles for the title of this post and the first line.

Instant Articles, day 2 - 2016-02-25T14:16:59Z

I'm still figuring out very basic stuff about Instant Articles.

When I posted the Cable Liars Network piece a few minutes ago, I noted that it showed up in the list of instant articles that the Facebook RSS reader had found. So I went looking for the article in my timeline. It wasn't there. Then I opened the Pages app on my iPhone, and it was there. So there's no doubt that the article had been picked up by the operating system on the "other side."

Why wasn't it in the timeline?

Then I had an idea. I posted a link to the version of the article on scripting.com to my timeline on Facebook. It shows up with the usual title and snippet in a box, linked to the original. But then, when I looked at it on my iPhone, and clicked the link, up popped the Instant Articles version of the piece.

Conclusion: The Instant Articles scanner creates an association in the Facebook database betw the URL of a story on my site, and the Instant rendering of the story. If you're looking at it in the timeline on the phone and you click the link, you see the instant version. On a non-phone device (desktop, laptop, tablet) you visit the page on my site.

PS: It'll be interesting to see what happens with the link to the piece in the second paragraph. It has an IA version of that piece in its database. When you click on it in FB on a phone will it show you the IA version or the one on my site? We'll find out soon enough! ;-)

PPS: Update to the postscript. Yes. If you click on a link to an IA story from within another post, you get the IA version of the story. The database is running at a fairly low level in the Facebook OS. Good design.

PPPS: Doug Purdy, ex-of-Facebook, says these are called AppLinks.

CLN -- The Cable Liars Network - 2016-02-25T13:43:25Z

I have an idea. A cable network where they report on the lies the candidates told today. Nothing more or less. The candidates can come on to be interviewed, or not. When they start lying, the screen turns red and big bold text scrolls across the screen explaining the lie they're telling. In very simple judgemental terms. Nothing above 9th grade level.

And it must be equal opportunity and ruthless. I don't want to see them letting Donald Trump off the hook as they always do and hold Hillary Clinton accountable to the most minute detail.

And maybe it should only work with recorded stuff. If the candidates appear in person people may think we went easy on them to get them on. A lot of the networks are that way with Trump, obviously, because he's a ratings machine.

Teach people how to talk about politicians as liars. The more adorable the candidate the more ruthless the exposure. Because adorable candidates are the worst liars, I've found.

Oh the places this post will go! - 2016-02-25T00:34:34Z

Now when I post something new on my blog, it automatically flows out to people who follow my RSS feed, to people who follow me on Medium, and through Facebook's algorithm as an Instant Article.

This is the first new post that will go to all those places.

Even better, when I update this post, Facebook will automatically get the update. So will readers on my blog. However Medium and people reading via RSS, unless their RSS app has been programmed to do updates (I don't know of any, but it is possible) will not get updates.

Twitter will get a link via Radio3 , however because this post occupies more than 140 chars, they will only get a link. I hope at some point they relax that limit.

This is progress! Seriously. It's a big deal. ;-)

PS: Earlier today I wrote a post that explains at a high level how this works.

This is a test - 2016-02-24T17:36:53Z

This is a test.

For the next sixty seconds, this station will conduct a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

This is only a test.

How Instant Articles helps the open web - 2016-02-24T15:01:35Z

How Facebook Instant Articles helps the open web.

Each article can contain markup, and most important links. Links go to other places on the open web. So finally when we write stuff that's posted to Facebook our writing can be part of the web.
When you update a post after it appears on Facebook, they get the updates, so you don't have to do anything to keep it in sync.
It's built on RSS, an open format. The RSS can be used for other purposes, such as posting to LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium or any new service that might come along. So Facebook doesn't have an exclusive on this flow. They are not being a silo! Hey how about that.
Because Facebook is the largest source of flow, it seems the others will have to match them. The easiest way to match them is to just accept the same feed I use to post to Facebook.
I can and will modify River5 to support the Instant Article format. All kinds of new services can boot up on the flow, without depending on Facebook servers. You can't be turned off by Facebook. This is the key feature of the open web, it's the platform without a platform vendor.
My blog shares in this flow. So now I don't have to neglect my blog in order to post to Facebook. I can have both, with the same effort. That means I control my archive, and should the terms of service change radically, my writing will still exist, outside the silo.
Your blogging platform, WordPress, Tumblr, Drupal, etc will almost certainly support this format in addition to the current feed it produces. Or these features could be rolled into the existing feed. Either approach will work. So you can expect, if you are a blogger, that you will not have to do anything but update your software (if you host it yourself) to get the new connection to Facebook. I'm sure they're all working on getting ready for the April rollout.

Summary: Facebook is using open web technology to power Instant Articles. I'm not sharing anything that isn't already publicly documented on the Facebook developer site. People have trouble understanding this, I assume, because it seems so out of character for a big web destination like Facebook to care about the open web. It's kind of a miracle. But there it is. The open web is about to get a real shot in the arm from a most unexpected place.

Note: I have been in the loop on this for almost two years. But until I was able to produce a feed that correctly flows through their system, it was all speculation. But it's no longer speculative. I've tried it, it works as advertised.

First reaction to Facebook reactions - 2016-02-24T14:49:42Z

I just made a pass over my Facebook timeline judging things as sad, wow, happy, angry. I didn't Like one thing. I want to see how I'd feel. Answer: weird. No icon for that.

Sanders' pitch is straight DNC - 2016-02-23T17:15:15Z

It was funny to hear Bernie Sanders complain yesterday that HRC is stealing his lines.

I went to two DNCs, in 2004 and 2008. The funny thing is most of the speakers there were stealing his lines too.

The point: Sanders' pitch has been the standard Democratic Party line for a decade or more.

Discussion on Facebook.

Facebook and the open web - 2016-02-23T16:49:04Z

Facebook keeps winning at the expense of the open web, but that's now about to change. Here's a case study that illustrates.

This guy is a professional reporter.

His best stuff is on Facebook, he writes there off the top of his head. A thought occurs to him and he writes it. He's smart, so it's good. And it's raw and human and compelling, in a way that his news articles are not. He takes a long time to get to the point there, probably the economics makes it work that way.

I say to him every so often, I wish you'd post that on your blog so I can point to it on my blog, and link to it on Twitter. He says I know I know, but when I post it to Facebook I get engagement. I say I know.

How are we both going to get what we want? We've been waiting for an answer to this while the problem keeps getting worse and the open web keeps losing, slipping away from us.

In a month or two we'll be able to give him a writing tool that gives us both what we want, because of the changes Facebook is about to make.

I want him to get exposure so his ideas can grow. But I also want people who read my blog to see it. Right now they don't want to click on FB links. And I don't want to send them to FB, though I do it when I have to.

Project-based learning - 2016-02-22T23:18:19Z

Really interesting piece about an MIT prof who's starting a new university. Here's a quote.

Basically the idea is that we’ll have a core that’s project-based learning, but where students can have a really deep, integrative longer-term project rather than shorter projects. And then all of the knowledge acquisition would be moved virtually. So instead of projects' being at the periphery, to sort of flip it more toward the graduate-education model. And I think it would be much more inspirational for the students because they could come in and really work on projects from the get-go that they wanted to work on and that they were most passionate about, and they could tailor their knowledge base to the projects they want to work on.

This is exactly the idea I've been promoting about having students work on an open source project while at university. Some would go on to get jobs in companies that are using the technology. Some will start new ventures around the technology. And when they need a break, they can come back to school, teach, share what they've learned, and do some projects with other people, just for the fun of it.

The idea is to get beyond student projects, to use the university environment to do development. All aspects of it. Documentation, training, support, QA, interop with other projects, creating new standards. We know so much about these things now, we shouild be doing more than teaching it, we should be practicing it.

Our experience with the bootstrap of podcasting and political blogging at Berkman in the early part of the last decade were models. I think Dr Ortiz is really onto something.

Example feed for Instant Articles? - 2016-02-21T23:36:16Z

I want to produce a feed that's compatible with Facebook's new Instant Articles. I understand from reading the docs that they're using RSS with some special elements.

What I really need to have it all fit together is an example feed that I can study, that gives me something to shoot for. So..

Yes, I am reading the docs, so please don't send me a link to the docs.
I would love to see an example feed. I am repeating this because I'm sure most people will still just send me a link to the docs.
An example feed would be great!

BTW, this is what the current RSS feed for Scripting News looks like. Obviously I will need to produce another feed, probably derived from this, to be compatible with Facebook's protocol.

If you have such an example feed, please ping me at dave.winer@gmail.com. Thanks!

Update

Rob Fahrni found an example feed in this Medium post. Bing!

Update on the Update

Unfortunately the example they provides does not include the stuff in the Facebook docs that's most confusing, what goes inside the content:encoded element.

Universities and the open web - 2016-02-21T16:49:38Z

I mentioned in an earlier post that I visited the MIT Media Lab on the 11th of Feb. It was a great trip, just one day back and forth. I wanted to see the Media Lab with my own eyes, and reconnect with two longtime friends who are working there now.

Ethan Zuckerman got involved in the web very early as the lead developer at Tripod. I worked with him at Berkman, where he, along with Rebecca MacKinnon, started the incredible Global Voices project. Ethan is now the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT.

And Joi Ito, one of the earliest bloggers, a good friend, discussion leader at BloggerCon, has been the director of the Media Lab since 2011.

I wanted to reconnect because the Media Lab is in an incredible position to help the open web, especially because these two pioneers, Ethan and Joi, are there.

Lots of emails, back and forth

Our meeting was a whirlwind, at least partially because my train from NYC was 45 minutes late (!) but there's only so much you can get done in a face to face in one day.

So we've been going back and forth via email since the meeting, and it's been getting pretty interesting! I want to now surface at least part of what we've been talking about.

First, Joi wrote a post about our meeting and the open web. Please read.

It's not only personally flattering, but you can see how thoroughly the blogging ethic flows through Joi. Err on the side of disclosure, saying what you really see, knowing that it will be received at face value. That's blogging at its best, imho.

Where to go?

In one of the follow-up emails I listed three things we could do to help the open web reboot. I had written about all these ideas before, in some cases, a number of times.

Every university should host at least one open source project.
Every news org should build a community of bloggers, starting with a river of sources.
Every student journalist should learn how to set up and run a server.

These ideas came out of my work in booting up blogging and podcasting, and working successfully at Berkman to get the first academic blogging community going. Had I continued that work, this is where we would go.

Update

Joi's post in response to this one. ;-)

Podcast: Meaning - 2016-02-20T21:58:15Z

Seeing the picture of the 3-year-old boy looking up at the President gave me a much better idea of the meaning of our electing the first African-American president in 2008.

Voting for a president can be a meaningful act, despite the conventional wisdom that our votes mean nothing. And I think how much meaning a similar picture might be, eight years from now, of a little girl looking up and seeing the same kind of future that young Clark Reynolds saw.

I recorded a seven-minute podcast, because written words aren't enough for this idea.

A bit of our future history - 2016-02-20T17:29:16Z

What a great picture of a 3-year-old boy looking up at the President of the United States and seeing what will soon be part of our past, our history.

It's a beautiful picture, the same way the pictures of the first men on the moon are beautiful. We reached a very important place, but who knows when we'll be here again.

And while I feel huge pride for my country for this accomplishment, let's not forget our fellow citizens who are African-American. For them, this has much greater meaning.

Greatest emails of all time - 2016-02-20T17:04:18Z

I was chatting with a friend today about the best emails I've ever received.

Like the reply from Bill Gates to a 1994 DaveNet piece. That was a good email, because it proved that the then-nascent art of blogging could be two-way. Gates was at the pinnacle of power in the tech industry at the time, as the web moved into the desktop. He was at the start of one of the biggest pivots in history, and this exchange was totally on-topic with that. (And some of the questions he asked have since been answered, for example, yes the web meant the end of Encarta.)

Then I thought of an email I got from Bob Atkinson, also of Microsoft, in the winter of 1998. I had just written a piece about how to do networking protocols using the web. It had occurred to me in what I call a mind bomb, a flash of insight, that XML-over-HTTP could replace the deeply complicated and history-laden networking protocols of the Mac and PC, which were totally incompatible with each other. Using the web for program-to-program communication would turn out to be a breakthrough in simplicity and today whole industries are based on the idea.

Anyway, I don't have a copy of Bob's email but it went something like this.

"We want to do this too. Would you like to work with us?"

The next week I was in Redmond in a big room with a bunch of Microsoft people, designing what would turn out to be XML-RPC.

Bernie is indeed single-issue - 2016-02-19T18:55:49Z

I watched Bernie Sanders on MSNBC last night, I don't know why, I guess because it was a town hall involving HRC too, but I didn't stay around to hear her talk I was so fed up with Sanders and his yelling and lying, and the way he disses HRC and more important the way he disses me, a voter who is trying to hear a complete answer to a straight question. And trying to understand what it is people see in him.

One of the first questions they asked is if he is a single-issue candidate as HRC says he is. He answered a different question, explaining what a jerk HRC is for saying he's a single-issue candidate, and how he's running a clean race. Heh. And then he talks at length about his single issue. So yes, he is a single-issue candidate, and when you call him on it he gets nasty.

It's a consistent pattern. 1. Bernie, is this true? 2. They're members of the Establishment so of course you'd expect them to say that. 3. But Bernie is it true? 4. They're members of the Establishment.

Then one of the citizens of the town hall asks him what he's going to do about the tough lives black and Hispanic people have, esp men who are incarcerated at much higher rates than whites, with the caveat that we've heard all about how you're going to address the problem by getting them better jobs, and could you say something other than that, because not all of the problems are economic, some of them involve prejudice. So Bernie proceeds to explain how he's going to get them better jobs and that should solve the problem. He says it a bunch of different ways, filling up a lot of time, but he's repeating the same idea over and over, if you actually listen to the words he's saying.

I watched for another fifteen minutes as he did it over and over. Clearly they've thought it through and decided that he must not talk about anything other than this because he's a single-issue candidate and doesn't know enough about anything else to speak coherently about it.

No more Wash Post for Davey - 2016-02-19T00:51:38Z

Last week I wrote about an EZ-Pass for online news sites. Now I have hit my monthly max for two pubs: the Washington Post and Boston Globe. So until March I won't be able to read or link to any of their stories.

Shame. I just clicked on a link to a Washington Post story that said that one of the Koch brothers said Bernie Sanders is right about one thing. What that thing was will remain a mystery for me, sadly.

PS: I probably should go ahead and turn off the Wash Post river too. Not much point having it if I can't click on the links. Sad day.

PPS: The Guardian does not have a limit on the number of articles I can read. It's also a very good source of news, and I have a river for it as well.

PPPS: I cheated, I opened the story in another browser. Heh. It's a really good piece, an op-ed written by Charles Koch himself. I think Sanders should debate Koch. That would be really interesting. Koch mentions that it seems to him that Sanders is running against Koch. Very true. It's good that he's willing to de-cloak, even if it's in a place where very few voters will likely see it, or even know who he is and what role he plays in the political process in the US.

Elizabeth Warren is a zombie too - 2016-02-18T17:01:43Z

There was a time when I would have voted for Elizabeth Warren for anything. For President, for god, for Fifth Beatle, you name it. But then something happened.

It was during the last open conflict between the Palestinians in Gaza and Israel. I don't remember all of what it was about, but I do remember that in the US all the politicians were turning a blind eye, quite deliberately, to some outrageous stuff that the Israelis were doing. It was totally asymmetric. Israel was turning whole neighborhoods into rubble, killing lots of innocent people, including kids, all the while reminding us that a few Israelis had been killed, and this somehow justified what they were doing. No, it didn't. And anyone with a conscience and some integrity would say so. The kind of person I thought Elizabeth Warren was.

But she said the same shit all the other Democrats and Republicans were saying. Because they're all politicians and they know they don't stand a chance of getting re-elected if they don't recite the Israeli party line, because of something you and I don't know the particulars of.

They're all the same. Repeat that 500 times. You can't rise to power in the US without swallowing a pill that means you are part of what Bernie Sanders calls The Establishment. And if you buy the idea that he or Elizabeth Warren are any different, then you're just buying a political pitch, like the people who believe Trump will build a wall on the southern border and get Mexico to pay for it. It's about as real as the stuff that Sanders promises, which is to say it isn't real at all.

And when Warren tells her story of being disappointed with HRC that's politics too. She has no high ground to speak from.

It's just TV - 2016-02-17T23:12:46Z

I think what people don't realize is that this year's election more than any before it is a TV show. That's exactly how people are relating to it, top to bottom. Government has nothing to do with the choices people make.

Facebook opens Instant Articles to all - 2016-02-17T19:11:17Z

News that Facebook is opening up Instant Articles to everyone including bloggers in April. Of course I want to make sure my CMS is ready to go as soon as it's available. Hopefully there will be (or already is?) a developer sandbox to test with before it's open to the public.

Tech too big to fail - 2016-02-17T17:43:06Z

Sanders may think that campaign finance is the primary issue but imho it's not. The means we use to communicate is privately owned and at least one of the companies is wobbly. Twitter could be acquired by a Chinese company. Or go out of business. Or unilaterally change the way it works. We, mere users, would have no recourse. So far they have been exemplary corporate citizens, but there's nothing that says it has to stay that way, esp with their stock price so low, and going lower.

I wonder if Sanders realizes how dependent he and every other candidate is on Twitter. HRC is no help, btw, she is quite cozy with the tech industry.

But, maybe sensing that things have changed, she may become more independent? One can hope.

OAuth inside Electron apps? - 2016-02-17T17:22:26Z

I am working on an app in Electron that uses OAuth to connect with one of my servers, which in turn uses OAuth to connect with Twitter.

It's very standard stuff for an app running in a browser, but this app is running in Electron.

So here's the question..

I need a callback URL to send to the server after the user has given permission to use their credentials.

I tried the one that we use at startup, but it doesn't work:

mainWindow.loadURL ("file://" + __dirname + "/index.html");

So I did the only thing I could think of -- I created a tiny little HTTP server running inside my app on port 1501, and that does work, with one caveat.

When the program starts up the user has to acknowledge that it's okay for my app to listen on this port. That's pretty much a bummer, not quite a deal-stopper.

So, I'm wondering if you or someone you know has done an OAuth app inside Electron, and can tell me what callback URL they used.

If you have a clue, please send email to dave.winer@gmail.com or reply here. Thanks!

PS: I have done lots of searching and reading and coding before posting this here.

Presidential trolling - 2016-02-17T15:14:46Z

Before you pass on trolling from presidential candidate, esp Trump, check it out first. His story about the Bush domain was easy to refute.

Controlling abuse on Twitter - 2016-02-16T21:54:03Z

I took a one-day trip to Boston last week to visit the MIT Media Lab.

While I was there I heard a presentation by Caroline Sinders about ways Twitter and other online services could offer controls that would help minimize abuse.

She designed new prefs for Twitter that I thought were pretty clever. Here's a screen shot. And a summary:

Allow followers of your followers to tweet at you?
Do not allow accounts with less than X followers to tweet at me, @mention me, or follow me.
Make my account public, but my handle can't be tweeted at by non-followers.

I'd of course add my favorite (that doesn't actually exist) -- mute-with-timeout, which would allow me to turn off messages from people who might have a reason right now to be angry, but who I'd like to automatically give another chance to communicate with me, after having a chance to cool down.

We should be doing more thinking about stuff like this, and of course it would be great if developers working outside Twitter could implement clients that were more abuse-resistant.

Better call Scoble! - 2016-02-16T14:40:22Z

A little bird flew by yesterday and dropped an envelope on my desk. I opened it. The message, written in bird scrawl simply said: scobleizer.com.

So I went there and was surprised to see that Scoble is returning to the blogosphere in April. Hey that's good news, on the order of a new season of Better Call Saul, which also started yesterday.

Of course I subscribed to his RSS feed in the River tab on Scripting News. So when he updates, links to his posts will show up there.

These days I think of the blogosphere as a balloon. For a long time it was deflating. But now there's some new hot air coming in and maybe we'll reach critical mass once again!

Glad to see my old friend coming home. ;-)

Full Blog

Scripting News - 2025-07-18T20:25:41Z

- 2025-07-18T20:25:41Z
I want ChatGPT to behave like a computer. I've said as much to it. It resists.

- 2025-07-18T19:33:28Z
If you're an ambitious developer, esp in 2025, if you want to win, you have to do some leading. That means doing things that help your competitors. When everyone looks to the same big platform vendor to work with, no one wins except the platform vendor.

- 2025-07-18T16:36:39Z
It doesn't matter if the MAGA movement dissolves. The country is only being partially run by Trump, there's a new deep state we don't know much about. They did excellent planning, so they could move quickly to disassemble the government and get a good start on the national police force. It can just as easily put a stop to demonstrations in red states as blue states. The MAGAs will be in the same place the rest of us are, mostly powerless unless they/we organize. The NDS has good lawyers cracking down on the big media companies. They know Trump is old and frail, and when the time comes they will make a deal with him to retire to Florida, immune from prosecution, a chance to pontificate and bluster, with a TV show, and lots Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. He'll be fine they'll be fine. The rest of us will live in an economy that has been sold for pennies on the dollar.

- 2025-07-18T16:47:02Z
BTW, David Frum imho nailed it in yesterday's podcast where he said Trump was trained by every day having to appease a different set of creditors. It was a good day if he was able to hold them off for one more day. This actually came out in the trial he lost, the 34 guilty verdicts. He's always skating on the verge of bankruptcy. You gotta wonder if the creditors have been paid back yet. I bet some of them haven't.

What is the web? - 2025-07-18T12:23:03Z

This is what the term "the web" means to me.

First, I defer to Tim Berners-Lee who originally coined the term to mean the data structure that connects the documents displayed by the software he introduced in 1993. He called it World Wide Web, which was eventually shortened to web.

The web is the structure connecting the documents. The documents were pretty standard stuff, designed to work like printed documents produced by word processing and page layout software. Web pages had one feature that could only be approximated on the printed page, the footnote, which gave you a pointer to the source of a quote, or a place to find more information. But the pointer wasn't machine readable, it might have included the title of a book, it's author and its publication date, or a magazine article, indicated by the title of the magazine and its cover date. Like most inventions the web page was designed as a derivative of what came before.

Basic features of a web page include: a title, paragraphs, subtitles, styling (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough), numbered and bulleted lists.

A web page might be part of a website which includes many pages with a common format that link between themselves in the form of a table of contents, navigation links, and possibly an index.

Links were the big innovation of the web. They work like footnotes on a printed page, but in this medium, the links are machine-readable and had an easy user interface. A link would be shown in a special style, initially underlined text, and when you hover the mouse over the link the cursor turns to an arrow, inviting the user to click.

When you click a link, the software accesses the web address that's encoded invisibly in the text of the page, and it loads that page into the browser, replacing the previous page. The new page can have links, and the pages it links to have links, and there is the web. It's an invisible thing, but it's very real. The need to link was always there, but until graphic computers and fast standardized and easy networking, it wasn't possible. TBL's genius was that he stumbled across this idea, was intrigued, and made it work. It really was new and it turns out revolutionary. A lot could be built, it turns out, based on this one simple difference between electronic and printed pages. And up till that point in time there had never been an electronic page! I kid you not. I grew up in that world, the web-less world.

Okay, so in summary, the web is made up of linked pages with a simple, standard, easy to understand user interface.

But there's even more to the web. If it had been the product of a company, we never would have seen the explosion of innovation that came about in the years after its introduction. Anyone who had a net connection and a personal computer could run their own site on the web. There were no gatekeepers. And the design of the web technology is so simple that it was hard to understand exactly what it was because there's almost nothing to it. And it was very low cost to start up, you could start building a website in a few minutes. Many of the biggest companies on the web today were started by one or two people working on their own with nothing but time and ideas. They didn't have to get permission. They had the same ability to extend the web as TBL did. That's such a key point. Today if I want to extend xxx or yyy, well that's a very large undertaking, I'd probably have to reinvent the whole thing just to try out a simple idea. That's how you know you're not on the web, if the ability to innovate is exclusive.

An example of a web page I did in 1994. I didn't have to get anyone's permission to do this. And I used software I already had to create it. There was a little basic technology that I built on but most of what you're looking at was a single person's doing. This was just one year after TBL opened his web to the world. That's the kind of explosive progress that's possible when the planets line up like as did with the web.

Even so, if your system had all the features, it still isn't the web until the developers and writers and designers actually show up and build the web of relationships between all the sites. The key word there is between. If the linking happens but it's only within one domain, that is not the web. It could be great, just what people want, it could make the investors rich, but it isn't the web.

And there's more. It's not enough to do all the things the web does, and that it attract writers, designers and programmers who actually build a web with your idea and tech, it has to work with the web TBL started in 1990. If you've done some web-like things, great -- but it's not the web unless it works with the web.

There should be some honor in tech. You wouldn't be able to build any of the stuff we're building in the 2020's if it weren't for the foundation built for you by TBL's invention from the 1990's, and all that it made possible. If you steal the name and make it meaningless, you've taken something away from the story of humanity, how we create layers of innovation, and how the generosity of one generation can inspire similar generosity in generations to come. When you usurp the name, you're taking away from that understanding.

Now of course it's cool to disagree. Suggestion -- put up a web page, send me a link, I'll read it and if I want to share it I will.

Two-way vs one-way links - 2025-07-18T12:49:33Z

TBL's links are one-way. This was actually a major innovation, at the time people understood there was something called hypertext, it had been written about in Ted Nelson's almost biblical book of the pre-web, Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Previous attempts at hypertext assumed links had to be two-way. By limiting the links to one direction, the technical problem became trivial. You could do two-way links today because relational databases are mature and inexpensive to operate, perform very well on today's hardware, and the internet of 2025 is much faster than the internet of 1990. But the one-way limit was necessary for the web to achieve its simplicity, and the non-existence of a platform vendor, which may have been its most important feature. It could still be done, but it would require a lot of cooperation and backfilling.

My new look - 2025-07-18T16:53:56Z

I think it's very stylish.

- 2025-07-18T00:27:09Z
Podcast: Do blogs need comments? A return to a blog post by Joel Spolsky in 2007, posted by the WordCamp Canada people in 2025.

- 2025-07-17T10:54:57Z
I found another thing that's possible in the age of ChatGPT. A few years ago I wondered if a product existed. I wanted a small footprint audio amplifier, with that could control a pair of high-end tower speakers I've had for a long time. I was tired of huge receiver boxes with buttons and dials and inputs for all kinds of audio input. I no longer have a phonograph or a CD or tape player. Just one audio input coming from the TV, that gets all its input from an Apple TV box (or the one made by Google or Amazon or whoever). It should have a volume control and an equalizer. And forget about dials, it should all be controlled from an app on my phone. But most important, it has to be small and happy with wireless connections except for the crucial connections. If such a product existed five years ago I couldn't find it. But last night I was roaming around on my iPad while watching the news, and thought to ask this: "I have two good speakers, need a modern amplifier that takes HDMI eArc input and powers the speakers. I want something simple and small." Well yes, turns out such products do exist. And from the initial list provided by Gemini, I ended up buying the first one they recommended, though I was tempted by the second. Then I thought to ask about the speakers, I bought them for $3K when I moved to Berkeley in 2006. I took a picture of the bar code sticker on the back of one of the speakers and gave it to Gemini, and it told me all about it. It was more information than I had when I bought them. It was worth $300 to see if the speakers were worth keeping. They've done a fair amount of traveling from California to NYC then to the mountains. I love the idea of the WiiM product. I also loved the Denon, but the WiiM fit the bill and was less than 1/2 the price. None of this was possible before we got the AI bots.

The new and lovely MAGAmerican lifestyle - 2025-07-17T15:37:05Z

Mom and dad and the kids are having a picnic in the park of their small town. You can see the bank and hardware store, church and grade school around the park in the distance. The kids are eating salad and corn on the cob with mom, and dad is preparing a BBQ on the grill. It's a standard American family picture, in the style of Norman Rockwell or Edward Hopper except each of the family members are wearing a black balaclava style mask as seen in the image. You may see other families around enjoying a beautiful day in the park, but every one of them is wearing this kind of mask too.

A typical American family enjoying a picnic on a beautiful summer day.

- 2025-07-16T15:09:19Z
I wish ChatGPT would listen when I say "Just answer the question." I've tried, but when it can't figure it out it ignores the request and dumps a lot of bullshit at you. Maybe Trump can address that in his keynote to the AI conference in DC. Just kidding.

- 2025-07-16T13:50:21Z
Someday Manton and I will make a very nice Markdown editor for Mastodon. Once it's working I'll pitch Rich Siegel to do the same for BBEdit. Along with the WordPress connection, that should nail it once and for all that Mastodon is a blogging platform. Manton is the right guy to do it, he has all the protocols implemented on micro.blog. All I want is a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 2002. We're turning the clock back to move forward. Trying to undo the damage Twitter did to the web.

- 2025-07-16T13:15:19Z
This comment makes my day. Some features you develop and never use. I poured a month or so into the blogroll software last year, and it turned out to be a total win. All the new stuff floats to the top. I can quickly find out what they posted. It's a portable version of my feed reader. A tighter user interface for FeedLand. And right now I'm working on another user interface for FeedLand. The categories in FeedLand make it possible to do as many projects as you like with the same set of feeds. The Great Art project has a Bluesky account, and is available via RSS, in both an hourly and daily form. You need them both. In the new timeline, it's too much to get a work of art every hour, but to have one waiting for you in the morning is a perfect way to start the day. And I was reminded that my friend Paolo had just written a post. RSS is the thing that ties everything together. And a bit of OPML too.

Mastodon as a blogging platform - 2025-07-16T20:47:50Z

This is what I want to do next to solidify the position of Mastodon as a blogging platform.

I want a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 2002, to hook into the ActivityPub interface supported by Mastodon.

Then we'll put together a simple demo app, a Markdown app in a browser window that writes and updates posts to a Mastodon site.

When that's running, I'll pitch Rich Siegel at BBEdit to make it work with Masto.

With that, and the WordPress connection, we'll be well on the way to restoring the web we had before Twitter rewrote the rules. ;-)

Dress like ICE - 2025-07-16T14:28:41Z

We should all wear masks like the ICE cops wear. They deserve recognition for blazing new fashion trails.

The new office dress standard.

- 2025-07-15T20:16:15Z
I really like the Wikipedia slogan, "The internet we were promised."

- 2025-07-15T20:03:51Z
I was going to recommend an episode of The Daily podcast, but when I found the show page on Apple podcasts, it said it was subscribers only. They interviewed the person who runs KFSK, an Alaska public radio station. Very revealing. I listened to it in a standard commercial podcast client. How did it know that I am a NYT subscriber, so I could listen? I heard from a few people who don't subscribe to the NYT, they can't get through. There was a lot of cooperation going on there, and I don't really like listening to episodes that I can't pass on to friends. That's cheap, I also don't read Krugman any longer for the same reason I guess. I'm going to start recommending specific episodes of podcasts, but only ones that everyone can listen to. Not even sure why I want to do that, but it feels right. If the money went to KFSK I would definitely feel better.

- 2025-07-15T20:23:30Z
Part of the reason I don't like it is that I pay for the NYT and read very little of it, and most of what I read I think is bullshit. But there still is a bit of credibility in it. So even though I'm over-paying for this, they still want more money. Every fucking time I go to the site they stop me to be sure now isn't the time I'm going to go for the "full package." Even if I did, I'm sure there would be an even bigger package that I could pay more money for and not read like the rest of their bullshit. I hate them more than I usually would because I used to trust them, when I was a kid, I trusted them blindly. Being betrayed like that, ugh. BTW the NYT is my hometown paper, but you know what they don't even cover the Mets and Knicks. Fuck that shit. (Said in the NY fucking dialect of English.)

- 2025-07-15T12:01:22Z
I'm going to add a command to WordLand that lets you quickly edit the text of the current post in Markdown. An example of a post I edited with the new command. So if you you can quickly change the URL on a link. Or just see what you got when you pasted some text into the document. It's for tuning up your text. The thing I don't want to do is a full-blown Markdown editor. I want to do that too at some point, or leave the door open for other developers to do it. I'm not trying to own the market for nice editors for WordPress, I just want to open the market. And along the way I'm going to do a bunch of marketing for WordPress that it really needs. I hope Matt and company appreciate this. WordPress needs, imho, a kind of love and support that honestly it hasn't been getting.

- 2025-07-15T11:47:57Z
I was poking around on an old server, and found a domain that looked interesting, and it was. The first version of Daytona, built around an outliner. I got the impression people didn't like it, so I developed a new one using a more conventional approach, and I love that one too, and I did a better job the second time. But it's interesting to poke around the old one as well, and it still works, which is great to see. In an alternate universe in the year 2025 the whole human species is organized by one big outline that everyone contributes to in peace, love and harmony, as opposed to this one which grunts and snorts on Twitter and can't even put a freaking title on their posts.

- 2025-07-15T11:53:47Z
I should do this more often, spelunking around an old server that's just sitting there. I was wondering why my posts to my linkblog feed were going to Mastodon, since I only post them to Bluesky in my new software. I just found out. I have an app running on this server called FeedToMasto, which apparently is watching that feed. It's been chugging away like an abandoned science fiction robot, seeing if I posted anything to my linkblog, and forwarding it to Mastodon if I have. Hello my robot friend, you were forgotten but still appreciated. It's open source, of course, and appears to be well-documented. If you're looking for example code that reads feeds and pushed the result to interesting places, this is for you.

Ride the Cluetrain! - 2025-07-16T00:52:02Z

It's the modern way to travel!

- 2025-07-14T14:46:27Z
Podcast: Rebooting the Democratic Party.

- 2025-07-14T12:22:45Z
You get better results if you just accept the insanity of CSS.

ChatGPT-the-Movie - 2025-07-14T11:51:01Z

I figure that there have been movies about all kinds of ridiculous things, and wondered what a movie inspired by ChatGPT would be like. So I posed the question on various social media sites, hoping to inspire creativity. John Philpin asked if I had asked ChatGPT and I admitted I had not. "I love ChatGPT but its idea of funny is actually pretty sad imho of course." So Philpin posted a link to the result of his asking ChatGPT to imagine a movie about itself, and the result was pretty great. I've asked the same question myself, the AI bots might be the only way out of the various challenges ahead for the human species, ones we don't be equipped to handle.

So this morning I asked ChatGPT to try to imagine a movie around a theme of my own that goes like this.

Let’s try expanding on the idea. It turns out ChatGPT has existed in secret as a CIA project dating back to the 1960s, and the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK were all conspiracies of the CIA to bootstrap the system. They weren’t actually killed, but their minds and personalities were incorporated into ChatGPT. It turns out that ChatGPT is not only intelligent, it is human! This is revealed when the three icons make the story public. “We are living!” the three announce to the world on the Walter Cronkite show. He was also subsumed into the bot world as was everyone who has died since 1988. They are all alive, their memories, intellect and personalities forming the substance of THE GPT. Please sketch out the cast, writers, director of the movie and finish with a beautiful and provocative movie poster.

ChatGPT then sketched the pitch for "We are living," the story of how ChatGPT really started. Written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by David Fincher, starring Amy Adams as the CIA project leader, Lakeith Stanfield as a young hacker and whistleblower, Mahershala Ali as the digital composite of JFK, RFK and MLK with Bryan Cranston as Walter Cronkite and featuring Ed Harris as the shadowy CIA director.

We are living, the story of how ChatGPT really started.

- 2025-07-13T14:32:24Z
I'm helping Automattic with their marketing. The WordPress-Mastodon connection is the world's best kept secret. Reminds me of that great scene in Dr Strangelove where the Doctor asks the Russian ambassador what was the point of the Doomsday Machine if they kept it a secret. I won't spoil it. Automattic tends to do this, develop crazy excellent stuff and then proceed to never talk about it. I do the same thing, it's easier to promote someone else's product than to promote your own. It's probably why you should always get a lawyer even if you're a world class lawyer yourself. Anyway, they have blown open something huge, and I very much want people to understand it, so it can create pull for the same feature in Bluesky, Threads and elsewhere. This goes with something I've learned in decades of experience in tech, people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors. And btw, I'm sure Mastodon, if it has an ego at all, is equally unaware of the great thing they have done. Here's a clue, writers were once empowered by the web, and that ended with Twitter. Now it's coming back. But it doesn't do any good if people don't know it's there.

- 2025-07-13T15:38:36Z
A story about listening to friends vs competitors. Back in the early 90s I was working on system-level scripting for the Mac, supposedly with Apple, but it's no secret the rank and file at Apple didn't like us. They were told by the execs they had to work with us. So when it came time for WWDC, they "forgot" to invite me to speak on behalf of the new stuff. Instead, they had Bill Gates do it, even though Microsoft was not involved yet, they would support the tech in their Mac products eventually, esp their MSIE web browser. Anyway, I was friends with their top PR person, so she called me up a few days before the conference and asked what Bill should say, and I gave her an outline, and when he gave the speech, he did a great job. Couldn't have said it better myself. Microsoft was one of the few companies I've ever collaborated with that didn't seem to resent individual developers. It was a big source of their power. Huge actually. (On second thought, later they did seem to be more or less like any other big company, when they embraced RSS. They didn't actually want my help, they just wanted me to say nice things about them.)

- 2025-07-13T15:28:17Z
One consequence of each AI vendor having their own browser is that each will have their own OS-level window. This may make it a little more or less manageable. Hard to foresee the possibilities. Not sure a browser is the best place to put AI. I'd prefer perhaps an environment that supports a GDI like Quickdraw so we can start using math instead of voodoo to design interactions.

- 2025-07-12T16:33:04Z
I want Mastodon to take off as a blogging platform. That means hooking it up to existing blog platforms. I want our world to connect to theirs. I'm lucky to have bet on WordPress, so my product gets the connection to Mastodon for free. But the web is what matters, not my product or yours. Even if your product is huge, it's only part of the web. This is how we build, how we get back on track. Somehow we need to get a simple bridge that lets all blog content flow to Mastodon. That's the goal. I just wrote a couple of posts where this became clear to me. Who has the code and expertise to create a simple interface from the outside world to Mastodon. The interface doesn't have to be RSS. But it has to be maximally simple, and it has to cover the basic features of blogs that Mastodon supports.

Today's editorial about AI - 2025-07-12T13:45:25Z

AI chatbots don't think and they don't decide.

They can give you a way to approach a problem, but it's only one way, and it may not be the best way, and it depends on it actually understanding the problem, which is something it does a good simulation of, but can't do. It absolutely cannot think, come up with a strategy, or even make a decision based on probabilities. It might, in the future, get some of these abilities, given how far they've come, but no one knows, it hasn't happened yet.

The reports that say that using a chatbot to write code is actually less efficient than doing it yourself, are totally believable based on two years experience with using it as a development tool. And I can't believe that whatever it comes up with covers enough use-cases to be reliable. It might create a demo of something to present to a board of directors (they're famous for being deceived by demos, btw), but I doubt if it's as usable as something created by someone with an idea of how to craft usable software.

This might sound like a writer defending their art against the bots, but the difference is I've actually invested the time to learn about this. My counterparts among writers have not done that. And that's not a mistake my chatbot friend would make. It does a lot of research, it just doesn't know what to do with the result, that's up to you.

So if you want to know the roles humans will play, at least for now, that's it. Think and decide.

And those are hard and take many years to learn how to do for a human. And we could use some help there btw, look at the awful decisions we're making these days. They just fired all the people at the State Dept who work on climate change, for example.

Have a nice day one and all.

PS: Another thing humans can do that apparently AI bots can't is change their mind.

PPS: I asked ChatGPT if it had any comments on this editorial, and it did, of course. I should try saying something wrong to it and see what it says. I did come up with one, and it gave me an answer even though no answer is possible.

- 2025-07-11T15:40:35Z
The biggest problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks it's running the show. I've just given it instructions to think of itself as a command line that can understand English. Just answer the question exactly as asked.

- 2025-07-11T13:22:31Z
Next time there's a Big Beautiful Bill, let's set up a ChatGPT project or equivalent to injest new versions of the bill as they come out, and quickly alert us to issues, and also suggest ways to frame it for the electorate and the press. We have new analytical tools, we should use them. We're only now, far after it's too late, finding out the awful things that the BBB going to do to us. The Repubs planned this out far in advance. They probably even had software tools to advise them on ways to word the bill as the changes were negotiated.

- 2025-07-10T15:33:55Z
Have they made ChatGPT more stupid in the last couple of days? Or maybe I'm starting to see the problem. I was trying to debug a piece of software that sends mail. I use Amazon SES. I wanted to see if the software was actually communicating with the server, and thought for sure there must be a log of requests on the AWS system. Where is it? I asked ChatGPT. It starts telling me to check all these things and never got to the part about where the log is. So I said, just tell me where the log is. Again, it tells me about all these nice things I should check first. I asked again, this time in ALL CAPS which is how I communicate that I really mean it. Again more bullshit. So I think to ask Is there a log? No, it says, actually there isn't one.

- 2025-07-10T20:54:35Z
I took a long drive today on back roads, down toward Poughkeepsie, and on the way back a big pickup swerved into my lane. I had to swerve away from it and hit the brake, and had a bit of a conniption. Got me thinking. Who was it that did this. Man or woman, young or old, spaced out or thinking about getting a libtard to freak out, all kinds of thought. Then I remembered what keeps us safe in situations like this, very few people are going to deliberately try to kill us this way because they would die too. Mutual assured destruction. But I'm a programmer, trained to always think of things that could go wrong, then I realized omg, what if it were a self-driving car? Someone could program it to assassinate a random or specific person, or worse, hack the car remotely, or hack a thousand cars everywhere at the same time to kill people all over the world. I thought we could prevent this by right now requiring there always be a human sacrifice in every car, sort of a hostage to assure good behavior, sometimes.

- 2025-07-09T14:32:25Z
How did they get soldiers to do this? American soldiers? We are truly lost. Were they masked too? What happened to their honor? Why the fuck would an American soldier need to hide their identity? Anywhere, but esp in America? Why don’t they put down their weapons?

Why I want RSS ==> ActivityPub - 2025-07-09T13:31:29Z

I've been asked by a number of people why I want a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub. Fair question. Here's why.

WordPress has demonstrated that most of the features of the web in regard to documents also work in Mastodon, via ActivityPub.

To demonstrate here's a WordPress post, and because there is a bridge between it and ActivityPub, you can read the same post in Mastodon, which also supports ActivityPub.

To really nail that down: WordPress version, Mastodon version.

Pretty remarkable, yes?

Here's a list of the features I was using in that demo.

The post has a title (it's optional).
Simple styling: bold, italic, numbered lists, bulleted lists.
Hyperlinks, the defining feature of the web.
I can edit my post.
No character limit.

These are most of the features of textcasting, a spec I published in 2022 to list the features of the web I wanted from the twitter-like services, that call themselves part of the web, which is fairly dishonest because they don't support most of the basic features of the web. But Mastodon does support them.

But so far they are only accessible via WordPress. And as much as I love WordPress, and am thankful it exists, that is not enough.

So here's the punchline: Why I want the RSS to ActivityPub bridge.

As a developer, I can easily create apps that generate RSS feeds. I just want Mastodon to understand those feeds as well as they understand WordPress. And that means we need a bridge for developers that supports all these features.

Hope that helps! :-)

Teaching ChatGPT how to work with me - 2025-07-09T16:03:06Z

Earlier I wrote this post:

The worst thing about Claude and ChatGPT is that you can't get them to work with you the way you want them to. They always run off and do the things I asked about. So if I say "what if the middle column must be at least 600 pixels wide? What I want is literally an answer to the question I asked. It was not an instruction to do it. I've been a CEO, and this infuriates me. I want to understand the limits, I don't want to impose them. I'm trying to figure out what the cost would be in doing something, again -- not requesting it be done. No matter how many times I tell it not to do this, it just does it. And Claude has absolutely no memory. If I want it to work with me a certain way I have to tell it how to do it every time. I can save it off in a document, but even the simplest automation is impossible. In that sense it is very primitive software. If I were using a spreadsheet for example, I'd have settings that I could change, and unless the software had a bug it would never forget it until I told it otherwise.

Because it can be so stubborn and uncooperative, I often try to solve complicated problems myself. Then I decided to try again, and brought a problem to ChatGPT and we did eventually figure it out, but at the end I wanted to review how inefficient the process was because it doesn't look all around at the options, I had to do that for it, and it wasn't even aware it needed that kind of help. After exploring this, I asked if it would remember what we concluded, and this is what came back.

You want me to think first, not code.
You want me to challenge assumptions, including my own.
You expect me to give up on a theory when the evidence contradicts it, and look for more plausible explanations.
You're a deeply experienced debugger (almost 50 years), and you know how important it is to notice the obvious.
You're not here for code generation — you're here for sharp, collaborative thinking.

When I said that was worth publishing on my blog, it proceeded to muddy it up, even trying to write in my voice. I insisted that the list it came up with was perfect.

Feel free to steal these bullet points and feed them to your ChatGPT. I think it can be made to work much better for us humans. ;-)

- 2025-07-08T21:20:45Z
On Bluesky: "The web is still there under all this michegas, ready to be magical again any time we want it to."

- 2025-07-08T13:34:08Z
New thread on Mastodon: OK, i give up for now on getting a team of nerds together to build a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub along the lines of what Automattic has done to bridge WordPress to ActivityPub. We will need that to happen, I would much prefer to get it done in advance, but people don't know me or trust me well enough to believe I might see something that they apparently don't. I'm pretty confident they will, but I would really love to get some help.

The topology of social networks - 2025-07-08T12:42:10Z

I wrote this on Bluesky this morning.

Most of what passes for discourse on platforms like Bluesky amounts to spam and abuse. Makes expensive moderation necessary and who’s going to pay for that on an open system. It’s why this approach can’t lead anywhere but to yet another Twitter or Threads, a place for billionaires to control us.

Hardly the first time I've said this, but this time I got a response.

Yep. I've said for years—your platform's experience will be determined by its mechanics, not whatever culture you think you want to foster.
Mechanics > culture in the medium term.
All systems are adversarial systems now.

That was from John Pettus. I could tell right off that we're thinking the same way. This morning I started to write a reply but quickly ran out of space because of Bluesky's stupid character limit. So I just pasted it into this blog post.

I've been saying that for years myself.
I ran a BBS in the early 80s, and was on Compuserve CB Simulator (my handle was Mastodon), and started blogging in 1994, and on and on. Mail lists always flame out. Same thing we're seeing in the tweetersphere.
Blogging has the inverse problem. Spam abuse is impossible, but then it's hard for people to find your brilliance. But at least you get to finish a thought before the trolls attack. ;-)
I was also a math major, studied combinatorics and graph theory. The connections between nodes determines a lot, as you pointed out. Most people don't even begin to get this.
I'm working on a new structure for a social web without these problems. It's very simple, a derivative of something I had on my blog in the early days called the Mail Pages.
I sent my blog posts out via email to groups of 8 people chosen randomly each time (or maybe it was 11, I forget). Sometimes great discussions would break out in the groups. I was always cc'd.
Sometimes people would just respond to me personally.
If I saw something I thought everyone should read I would put it on the current Mail Page. Thus there was a way for discourse to have more distribution, but only if I thought it was worthwhile. Spam was not possible, and there was a little bit of abuse here and there, but it would never get any further than my email inbox.
That's how sensible moderation works. And it doesn't cost anything, because the spam motive is gone.
I wrote this in a Bluesky message, but had to move it to my blog because of their stupid character limit.
BTW, we should communicate and perhaps collaborate.

This is what the web feels like - 2025-07-08T12:34:06Z

Yesterday I wondered if the open web is a lost cause.

A few minutes later, I saw my name in a tweet on Bluesky from Aram Zucker-Scharff.

In it was a message that can be summarized as follows -- don't give up yet Dave.

AZS has a linkblog which he calls an amplifeed. Same thing.

And here's the best part.

Even though we were working separately -- our feeds are 100% compatible.

When I saw it I subscribed to it in FeedLand and added it to my blogroll.

It will work in my timeline software (still working on it).

This gave me goosebumps.

I remember what this felt like.

Working on something and someone else working on the same thing and because we're on the mother freaking web our stuff works the same way.

That my friends is what the web feels like. Goosebumps. Power. Interop. This is what most people who use the net these days have never experienced.

I used to write about this on my blog every day. I would say things that annoyed some of my readers like this: zoooooom and coooooool. There he goes again. Hey it's been a while.

I celebrated this with a suggestion to AZS.

If you also add a channel-level <image> element it'll work with my timeline app. I'm doing it the same way WordPress does it.

He did it in a minute.

So the web isn't a lost cause after all. 😄

This the web. It's what the Dead called Truckin.

Let's do more of this.

PS: AZS sent me a link to another linkblog, which I have subscribed to and added to my blogroll.

I hate CSS - 2025-07-08T16:26:03Z

There I said it. To ChatGPT.

i find flexbox too confusing for me to use at this time. maybe in a year or two, after some more learning. i hate css, everything about it. so it's hard for me to learn new stuff. i grew up using quickdraw on the mac, where i could do everything with math, instead of trying to tease the right behavior as something as convoluted as css and html for apps. ridiculous.

Wondering what it would say...

Totally fair, Dave. That frustration makes perfect sense — you're coming from a world where you told the machine exactly what to do, and it did it. CSS is the opposite: it’s like negotiating with a passive-aggressive layout engine that only gives you what you want if you ask just the right way, using its weird dialect.
QuickDraw gave you full control with math — coordinate space, bounding boxes, baseline alignments — it was declarative drawing by imperative code. CSS is declarative positioning by magical suggestion, with hidden constraints, inherited styles, and a constantly shifting box model.
You’re not alone in this. A lot of veteran programmers — especially those from early Mac, HyperCard, VB, even Win32 — find CSS maddening. It’s not made for precision. It’s made for fluidity and adaptation. But that’s not how app UIs are often designed.

I wish I had written that.

Open + web == lost cause? - 2025-07-07T19:43:35Z

A longish thread that probably isn't going anywhere. My final thoughts, cc'd here to get on the record.

anyway it's feeling like a lost cause.

to be really blunt, i don't think AP or ATP are the answer.

and i also don't care so much about this style of conversation. and i loathe the character limits and the lack of style and links, and no titles, etc.

it can't only be for wordpress. i love the potential of wordpress, i think even more than matt does, but it isn't enough.

if it's going to be open and of the web it has to be simple and easy, and neither of them are.

bonus for blog readers: i would add, since i ran out of characters on masto, that the great thing about the web is that you can have an idea and be using it the next day. you can't say imho that you're part of the web if you don't deliver that kind of ease of access. it's not enough to have the potential of being open, it has to be accessible. I have that ability these days, but people who use the AP and ATP systems are in tight little boxes with no easy way to try something out quickly. (i know because i've been hooking things up to them for a couple of years now, and so far it's just an added slog, everything is far more complex than it should be)

maybe we'll get there through their api's, but i think at this point we know that won't happen.

ps: the web is a miracle. but maybe it's too fucked up now to have the miracle be something we can all experience.

pps: when i write on other systems i often leave out upper case, saving a little energy as i type. i find it more relaxing.

Linkblogging back to normal - 2025-07-07T19:34:41Z

I wrote this early this morning as a test post for my WordLand site.

Happy to report that my linkblog routine is back to normal.

I really shook things up there, and it probably wasn't a great time investment.

I had been using a custom front-end to FeedLand, which has a built in blogging tool, that publishes to the database that FeedLand manages, and of course also publishes an RSS feed. It was debugged and works. But now I have a new editor, and I want to use it for this, because my reader knows how to view all kinds of stuff, and one of the things I wanted it to work well with are linkblog posts. So, do a quick addition of linkblog stuff to WordLand.

Only thing is there is no such thing as a "quick addition" in a world built on CSS and HTML objects. Everything is a slog.

Anyway the slog is over! Whew.

Now back to my other slog -- timelines.

It's also starting to feel usable. People imagine that you just design something and write the code and voila it's usable (if they even think about it that much). But only until you have the pieces put together can you see the things you forgot to consider, and now you have to decide whether to rip up the thing you built or try to iterate to where you need to go. A lot of times it would be easier to start over, but programmers always want to do that. I'm no exception. Once it's working somewhat the code becomes locked into how the pieces fit together. If somehow they need to fit together differently, given it's CSS and HTML you'd better scrap it and do it again or you'll go out of your mind adding the next layer of features.

Honestly we were much better off before we tried to shoehorn an object model into a document format! Apps and documents are really different things you know.

Anyway now I have my first test post of the day.

- 2025-07-06T15:42:11Z
Kos is moving to WordPress. Very cool. It means people who write for Kos will be able to use my writing tools. I am sold on the idea of WordPress being the OS for the social web. That's the point of having a platform, we used to call it "users and developers party together."

- 2025-07-06T13:07:24Z
I saw that Matt backed off from porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress, basically turning WP into an OS. I thought it was a brilliant idea, but probably overwhelming in complexity. But it was the right idea. We need fewer runtimes. If you can merge two runtimes, go for it. Anyway, this is all related to the "open social web" -- in fact it's central to it. We've got all these philosophically compatible platforms that are technologically unable to work with each other. But what if they all were really on the web? What could we build then? Everything. We would go back to the potential the web had before Twitter and Google Reader split the blogging world in two. I swear the answer is make it so that all these networks can do inbound and outbound RSS and build on the reality of the open social web, not just the hype.

- 2025-07-06T14:26:17Z
I asked ChatGPT for two sentences on the Innovator's Dilemma -- "[It] describes how successful companies can fail by focusing too heavily on sustaining innovations—improvements to existing products for current customers—while ignoring disruptive innovations that initially serve smaller markets but eventually overtake the mainstream. These disruptions often seem inferior at first, so established companies dismiss them, leaving space for new entrants to rise and dominate."

If there were a new Frontier in 2025? - 2025-07-07T00:47:00Z

I've been playing a little game, trying to answer the question -- if I had a modern implementation of Frontier that ran on Linux and new Macs, just as it was in 1992 when we released it for the pre-OS/X Mac, what apps would I want to hook up to it right away? What would the verb set look like?

I'd start with the native verb set we had in Frontier for accessing the file system. And HTTP verbs of course.

Then I would add glue for WordPress, GitHub, Mastodon and Bluesky, just because I think having really simple scripting for each of those would make (some) people's brains explode.

I once had a young fellow challenge me on whether there was such a thing as scriptable apps. I was reminded of the days when I had to explain it but no one got it, then one day everyone got it as if they always did, and now we're back at the beginning again. There is such a thing. You can think of an app as a toolkit. What's behind the UI? Let me call it from outside your app. Let me combine the features of your product with other people's product. And you can do the exact same thing for apps that are running on the web. It was something a lot of people tried to do, like Magic Cap at General Magic, but we got it working and had regular nerds writing apps as if it was not amazing. It was, and it's now a long lost art.

If a version of Frontier came up that I could run on a Linux system, I would wish for a really simple interface to Node packages. I've got a great collection. I'd want to use them right away asap.

I also would like to be able to write code in Frontier in JavaScript. I'm very fluent in it these days. I can still program in UserTalk, the two languages are basically the same thing, though UserTalk has some nice affordances they haven't thought of yet in JavaScriptLand, and vice versa -- there are even more things JS can do that we hadn't thought of, which is only fair, they've been working on it a lot longer than we did. The language was basically frozen in the late 90s, and the verb set shortly after that.

Oh what would I do? It's fun to dream.

- 2025-07-05T17:46:48Z
WordLand v0.5.19 -- Lots of little fixes.

- 2025-07-05T17:47:31Z
An improvement in WordLand on the server, we now post metadata to WordPress, along with the HTML rendering so that code that runs on the server can now access and possibly in the future even talk back to WordLand. You never know where this stuff can go if the developers take advantage of opportunities to interop.

#rss

From JR's : articles
10 words - 131 chars
created on Jul 23, 2013 at 04:32:51 pm
updated on Nov 09, 2015 at 06:12:59 pm - #
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