Dave Winer posts in early January 2016

My current bookmarks page of sites that I visit or feeds that I consume includes a link to DW's feed near the top of the list. I access his feed multiple times per day to see what new insights he has posted. I'm mainly interested in his thoughts and projects regarding web publishing.

I agree and disagree with his tech posts. I don't care about the other topics. I don't access his Facebook or Twitter pages, except in extremely rare occasions. I read the RSS feed from his blog.

Here is how I read Dave Winer's writings: feed page.

I use my custom "feed" command that is included within my Junco code that powers this site. The feed command also exists in the Parula code that powers my message board at ToledoTalk.com.

Here's how it works. The feed= is surrounded by two curly braces at each end. The line must begin at the start of a new line in order for it to work.

Scripting News - 2025-04-02T14:24:31Z

- 2025-04-02T14:05:06Z
Cory Booker asked the right question. "Where does the Constitution live? On paper or in our hearts?" Every living American was raised under the Bill of Rights. That's different from other countries which have long traditions of autocracies. Fascism on a mass scale will have a harder time taking root in this country. Joe Rogan said what Trump is doing is wrong. He knows he has the right to say that. Setting a fine example. It will be hard to suppress that.

- 2025-04-02T14:24:31Z
Gambling and sports don’t mix for me. I want a version of games without the gambling. I don’t know how parents can let their kids watch games with all the gambling ads.

- 2025-04-01T14:23:43Z
The chickens of sanewashing come home to roost.

- 2025-04-01T11:12:48Z
How did the music industry get through hip-hop sampling in the 80s without blowing itself up? I was paying attention to copyright issues in software at the time, we used copy protection, but we knew it didn't work. It was just how things were done.

- 2025-04-01T10:41:29Z
The beautiful art that came with the season finale of Severance could have been drawn by ChatGPT, it's that good, in the way that machine art is good. There's a point of view reflected in its creations, looking into a soul that in no way exists. We're learning about it, but it's a moving target, evolving before our eyes, in huge steps.

- 2025-04-01T10:39:00Z
My server has been coughing up hairballs tonight. It coughed up a link to this piece from two years ago, when Twitter pulled the plug on their API. It knocked everything I had built on the Twitter API off the air. Every thing. Just like that. That's what tonight was like here. It was just some of my apps, suddenly, not working. Whew.

- 2025-04-01T10:16:09Z
WordLand and Scripting News and a bunch of other sites/apps were off the air starting about 1AM Eastern, but mostly things seem to be working now, shortly after 6AM. It was a big scramble, I had to provision a new server on Digital Ocean.

More weird ChatGPT fun - 2025-04-01T10:47:58Z

The prompt: Here's a drawing and a profile picture. I'd like you to insert the person in the profile into the drawing, and adapt it as you see fit, but the face of the person in the profile should be in the same style as the ones around it.

I gave it a snapshot of the art from the season finale of Severance, and my profile picture from Facebook.

- 2025-03-31T22:00:33Z
I changed the domain for Radio Free America and the Bluesky channel. It's not a Canadian site. Maybe at some time we can have a version of the news flow from Canada. We may need it!

- 2025-03-31T13:38:02Z
Bluesky is today brimming with irreverance.

- 2025-03-31T13:57:25Z
When Apple bought NeXT, it wasn't long before we understood that it was the other way around.

- 2025-03-31T13:33:52Z
Great artists, before they die, should share their secrets, so the next generation can be even greater.

- 2025-03-31T12:37:23Z
There's now a home page for Radio Free America. Once we have more feeds, the home page will be a timeline of news that can be acessed outside of Bluesky. Please subscribe now, and help spread the word. Via the dynamic OPML file that's publicly available there can be many such pages on the open web.

More ChatGPT fun - 2025-03-31T13:01:42Z

Yesterday I uploaded an image of a pizza pie, in a New York pizzeria, with a couple dressed in evening clothes with a NYC cop and off-duty sanitation worker lurking in the background.

Paolo Valdemarin writes from London, "Have you tried adding more images to a prompt? From my experiments it can easily keep 'in mind' five different images and mix them. You can get a bunch of people sitting in the same room, with a very detailed version of the room." He sent two examples which are somewhat embarrassing, but you'll probably enjoy them. :-)

First, he uploaded my profile picture from Facebook. And asked ChatGPT to add me to the picture and then to "sit him next to the couple, with both of them kissing him on the cheek, and as you can see ChatGPT complied!

- 2025-03-30T20:25:05Z
A new Bluesky news feed, Radio Free America. It will also be on a web page as a river of news, and of course in dynamic OPML so it can be reproduced in lots of places. It will be hard to shut down, if it catches on. The idea: deliver news stories, blog posts and podcasts from sources with ideas and facts an informed person would want. We hope we are helping the United States respond to threats to our freedom, well-being, the rule of law, and our country's friendships around the world. As the depth of what's happening is understood across the country, I believe we may need more flexible sources of news. We use mature tech that's widely deployed, well-understood. And it is completely and utterly one hundred percent billionaire-proof. We start out today with two feeds, FactPost which is the official rapid response page of the Democratic Party, and my linkblog feed, so I can easily test the system. The part that hooks up to Bluesky is relatively new, so we'll need to look at problems. As they say -- still diggin!

- 2025-03-30T14:38:44Z
The US is being run like a TV show, with predictable results.

- 2025-03-29T14:48:22Z
This is very important. If you're on Bluesky, follow this account. "This is the official rapid response page of the Democratic Party." I've been begging the Dems to do this since 2009, a permanent heartbeat for the Dems on social media. Staffed by the team that ran the Harris campaign social media center during the campaign. They were snarky, fun, irreverent, and never apologized for representing the people, and they did it well. This is a moment. I no longer have to beg for this. It exists. So the first step has already been taken, thank goodness!!! Now it's up to us to spread the news that there is a place to find the heartbeat of the Dems. I'm going to study it, RT it, and keep the flame lit the best I can.

- 2025-03-28T14:58:53Z
When your AI bot gave you code that worked do you go back and thank it and say it worked? I do. I don't feel complete until I do.

- 2025-03-28T14:54:11Z
When you put a hack into a piece of software you have to say out loud "It's a hack." That makes it okay.

We had it all on the web, and we will again - 2025-03-28T14:25:46Z

When we flatten out the differences between the different social networks, we'll start with their RSS feeds, if it works, ultimately there will be no need for different social networks. And again, if it works, we'll bring back the features of the open web that Twitter left out.

This is a much better approach to federation, delivers the benefits long before hashing out the diffs betw ATP and ActivityPub will take. And we really have the choice that Bluesky says they will deliver, and yes, it will also be billionaire-proof.

What is art? - 2025-03-28T12:47:53Z

Yesterday I posted four new ChatGPT-created drawings, created with the latest upgrade of ChatGPT's drawing functions which are better than previous versions. The usual controversy is rekindled on the networks. The concern as always is that it learned how from human artists, puts artists out of business, and human artists create art, machines can't, and since this is created by software, it isn't art.

This gives me a chance to write a piece I've been wanting to write for a while. The meaning of art imho comes from what it says to and about the person observing it, what it does to them, how it changes them, what they experience. For most people, most of the time, they don't have any idea who created the art beyond their name, nationality and when they lived. If you see enough of their work, you learn about the work, not the person. What you learn from art is always going to be about yourself.

My father once told me, in all seriousness, the cliche about an abstract work of art -- it isn't art, my father said. I said to him, Dad that you feel so strongly about it means to you it most definitely is art. I believe if he were more truthful about his response, he would say what's behind the feeling, he's experiencing dishonesty, stolen valor, the artist is a profiteer, the person who made it a con artist not a real artist. Pretty similar to what people say in 2025 about art-making machines.

More art examples - 2025-03-28T13:58:26Z

I gave ChatGPT a picture of a man and woman, reading the screen of a computer, then asked for various renditions.

If you step through the pictures after giving each a bit of your time, by the time you get here, if you were asked if it's art, I hope you'd say Who cares. If it helps you see something new about anything (probably yourself) whether or not it's art is not the most interesting thing.

Is software art? - 2025-03-28T13:33:40Z

I believe it is. When people say my software thinks like they do, what's really happening is the software has gotten out of their way, they've incorporated the way it works into the base of their spine, so they can remain in the world they're writing about, and forget that they're using a piece of software. They perceive that as the software thinking like they do, which is fine -- it's the goal. But it's quite possible they have a totally different experience that takes them out of their suspension of disbelief by not working the way they expect, the same way it did the last 100 times, or it failes to open a file, or whatever might cause them to leave their own world and have to deal with the one I, and generations of software developers, have created, which can (as I know) be excruciating, humiliating, and whatever else you may feel.

A new ChatGPT drawing tool - 2025-03-27T13:11:21Z

ChatGPT's drawing function has gotten a huge upgrade. I've been doing tests for the last 24 hours.

First I gave it a screen shot of WordLand and asked for a nice colorful poster for the product. Then I had it make a movie poster for Mutiny on the Bounty with different actors, and As Good as it Gets, and then a stunning rendering of an El Salvador news photo in the style of Edward Hopper. It refused to do an R Crumb rendering or Doonesbury, but it was OK with Hopper.

Join a parade today - 2025-03-26T15:48:36Z

This morning‘s early morning missive from WordLand..

Talking with friends about What To Do.

I actually have an idea.

We all try to lead a parade, with a big viral idea, if only everyone would follow me, it might just work. A lot of us have that feeling. My advice — it doesn’t work. Lose it. Instead, find a parade you can join, and add your energy, talent and experience to it.

We have a tremendous oversupply of would-be parade leaders, we need to build momentum, and it doesn’t really matter what it is or who leads it. As long as it’s something the press can cover. A movement that begets more motion. A huge march in DC. Demonstrations at Tesla dealers. Blogging in a group. Helping an existing group route around an outage. Making a great list of causes others can join. Reading a blog and finding the thing the blogger is looking for. And so on.

There’s great satisfaction in joining a righteous cause that’s working, my bother, my sister.

This goes back to something observed in standards work. The standard is set by the person who goes second, not the one who goes first. The person who chooses to interop instead of blazing a new incompatible trail. We should celebrate people who support others as much as we do the one who goes first. You need both, and the thirds and fourth adopters to create a movement.

At a time like now when there’s no room for error or individual ego, as Ben Franklin’s so wisely said during America’s revolution, we must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately.

PS: One way facebook can cripple a nascent movement, by the algorithm not showing you parades you might like too much. Remember Zuck is trying to ingratiate himself to trump. I find I’m seeing posts of vital interest to me over 24 hours after they were posted, when 165 people have already liked it. Suspicious behavior. We need to own our own social net.

PPS: This philosophy led me to build on WordPress as a foundation, instead of building my own, which I am fully capable of. It’s working much better this way, so far. Could the be a way toward our own social net? Possibly.

Doc's approach to WordLand - 2025-03-26T15:18:34Z

Watching Doc Searls use WordLand to post to his WordPress blog.

He's using it the way Manila worked for blogging in the late 90s early 00s. Every day is a new page, which contained as many items as you liked. When you add a blank line that starts a new post. It's Markdown kind of a approach to structuring text.

There's a point where you click the Flip Home Page button. You can do that once a day. Each day is a fresh start. Each day gets its own archive page. The software can automate some of that, but it's trivial to do it by hand. A nice daily ritual.

The RSS feed we generated looked for two Returns in the text, that started a new <item>.

Manila eventually adopted Blogger's approach, but I always liked this way because it said a blog post can be a very small thing. That was certainly the way I write. Some ideas don't require a lot of writing, so why should they take up so much space? I'm trying to make sure that as WordLand evolves, it treats little things and big things with equal respect.

Basically Doc is doing manually what Manila did for you, but it's not a lot of work, he just clicks the + icon to create a new post, when he wants a fresh start. He has to choose a site from a popup, and then he's ready to write. The advantage is he has them all arrayed for him to make a change where ever he likes. I have that when I write in Drummer.

He's not getting the benefit of the RSS treatment in Manila. Both WordPress and WordLand see that as one post, not N posts.

Below is a screen shot of Docs blog, and below it, in contrast is a page generated by Manila in 2001.

- 2025-03-25T10:33:28Z
What a world we live in.

- 2025-03-25T10:56:18Z
A thought for everyone struggling to see a good future in all the michegas. My advice -- please -- do your protesting, resisting, DEIing, organizing, learning, and look for silver linings (they are there) and most important keep doing things that feed your soul. Treat yourself with love even if the world isn't. So in that spirit for those of us who love cats -- a story.

- 2025-03-25T10:57:17Z
You know how they have walkability scores for different places? I live in a place now with a score of zero, you can't do anything without a car. I moved from a place with a score of 99. I'd like to have social networks get a score like that, for how much they feed energy into the open web, vs how much they take out. Something that attracts you from the open web, uses it to build its network, but doesn't reciprocate, gets a low score. Like Twitter or Facebook, they'd have a lot of nerve saying they were of the web, and thankfully they don't. But Bluesky? They would like you to believe they are of the web, that they are feeding the web, when they are not. They would get Twitter's score, divided by two for the dishonesty. Substack? They don't make the claim so they're bad for the web but not the worst. Mastodon? They're trying. But they could make a concerted effort to check the boxes on textcasting, and implement support across their entire network. Give writers a chance to really work on the platform. Give Bluesky some competition which they desperately need (by my estimation, probably not theirs).

- 2025-03-25T11:13:58Z
This may seem controversial, but the Repubs do have a point re DEI. We really do have a problem honoring the achievements of white men. I know because I get the bullshit when people have tried to honor me for my achievements. When I was offered a keynote spot a the ISOJ conference in 2019, to honor my (then) 25 years of blogging, I told the show runner, Rosental Alves, that his audience wouldn't like me. He is gentle generous person, so I believe he was genuinely puzzled. I decided to go, because a future of journalism conference that thinks the advent of blogs was something for journalists and journalism students to acknowledge was something I wanted to see. But in the Q&A period, it all came out. Bluntly and rudely. My contributions mean nothing because I am a white man and in their minds I couldn't have failed. Do they really believe that? Swimming upstream isn't easy for anyone. The experience at that conference was pretty good proof of that. Behind my back in Silicon Valley, while I was writing about the failures along with the victories, when professional journalists and magazine publishers almost unconditionally worshipped the tech gods, I assume because they respect money more than anything, I wrote about the great victories of tech, but a lot of them didn't come from billionaires and VCs. I don't study the creativity of bankers, I care about tools for creative people. I tried to write the truth, didn't always succeed and sometimes I had to retract. But I did pretty much what journalism preaches. Stayed true to what I believe. The "white men bad" thing was an excuse for people to say I was weak or stupid, or whatever they think. So we get the backlash now. Some of the energy that MAGA gets is honest frustration of people who are victims of DEI, despite the hype from "the woke" which is a term I despise, what's wrong with being awake, what's the alternative, being asleep? dead? -- these righteous assholes, on both sides of this thing, really do treat people as objects, and that hurts, and that kind of pain is hard to forget.

- 2025-03-24T22:26:22Z
I was just thinking about themes for WordPress, and thought to look up Manila themes, and found we have a whole website that's still running (thanks Jake!) where you can see the catalog of themes we had for Manila and Radio (thanks Bryan Bell!). I want something like this for WordPress themes that work beautifully with WordLand-authored blogs.

- 2025-03-24T14:15:34Z
The ruling class in America is more out in the open now. Pretty much the same people who brought us the Lehman Brothers too-big-to-fail meltdown in 2008 and the Brooks Brothers Riot in Y2K. Not sure if oligarch is the right word. Peter O'Toole starred in The Ruling Class, a favorite when I was younger. The last song in the movie is pretty freaking great.

- 2025-03-24T13:41:33Z
I want natural language text macros in ChatGPT. I would devise a macro that turned random text I wrote online into a properly formatted blog post. for example when i write fast i almost never stop to capitalize things that should be capitalized. or i might abbreviate the name of a product so i expect it to fill it in, as a professional copy editor would. I hope we're heading there. And if they have this, put it behind a simple api so i can wire it into my favorite writing tool. We could even work on a set of standards, a higher level Markdown if you will, that goes deeper than formatting. That would be something for an experienced copy editor to do imho.

- 2025-03-24T13:41:03Z
We're getting into WordPress in a new way, the need for a featured image came from users. I didn't know they had this feature in WordPress. If you asked me if it did, I would have said yes, I'm sure it does, but where and what is it called? i could've gotten that too via chatgpt, but i would have had to think of it. that's where having sharp users makes a world of difference. When people thank me for my generosity, they don't get it. I want something out of it, your experience and your mind. It's one of my main raw materials.

- 2025-03-24T13:26:56Z
With all the good stuff happening with WordLand I haven't found time to wind down feedland.com and feedland.org. The servers are still working, though not performing as I'd like them to, but it doesn't seem I'm going to get the time to do a graceful transition before my self-imposed March 31 deadline. So I'll come up with a new plan, and if you're using either of these services, enjoy! and keep backing up your subscription list.

- 2025-03-23T13:50:42Z
WordLand 0.51 is out, with support for featured images and excerpts, and a better designed home page for the app, before you sign in.

- 2025-03-23T13:47:44Z
I've been putting Markdown support in my feeds -- everywhere -- on both sides, yielding serendipity like this. This is how "it just works" comes about. With a good design and a lot of love.

Paving cowpaths - 2025-03-22T14:03:33Z

A funny thing. A few months back someone told me that I had been gone from the podcast world for too long for anyone to listen to me. I thought how weird, I didn't go anywhere at all, I stayed exactly where I was, all the time. Virtually every day. If people cared to know what I think they could have found out pretty quickly because I am of course an NBB. I talk about what I think all the time. (And besides, why do you care where you get ideas from, I don't.)

Anyway, the idea was about a feature for podcasting that would open up doors for influencers and ad hoc networks of podcasts, instead of a few dozen weak (imho) attempts to build synergy, I trust that invisible hand Darwinian ecosystem builds better networks, because they are real, not contrived.

Give the people the tools and see what happens.

Users and developers party together.

That's the opposite of the "move fast and break things" approach to technology, instead it's "paving the cowpaths," the process that has always fascinated me and been the method to my madness. Make the tools, give them to the people and sit back and hope something happens. When it doesn't try to show the way. And try out lots of these kinds of ideas.

This method really works, and it isn't destructive, it's totally constructive. (Actually it does destroy what was there before, but in a merciful way, they get a chance to jump on the train, even if they rarely do, but NPR got on early with podcasting, and the NYT with RSS.)

PS: I did not invent "paving cowpaths" -- it's been around for a long time, like mythical man-month and the like. It's pretty much the same thing as bootstrapping, which I also advocate.

- 2025-03-21T20:28:07Z
It's been exactly one month since WordLand opened to the public.

- 2025-03-21T15:46:04Z
Thanks to Ben Werdmuller and Om Malik for their nice writeups of WordLand on their blogs. They're right. It is a small piece that can be hooked into lots of places, as is WordPress a big place that can host lots of apps many of which haven't been written yet. Products that look outward that can be hooked up in a million ways to everything, and leave the door open for those who follow. Such products are rare in our world. People always try to own their users by locking out competitors. I found a perfect spot for me to put some software, and I am having fun watching people use it, and coming up with new features that build on what we have. I think the writing tools market for WordPress will be huge, and I firmly believe that will turn into what I call the writer's web, which you could also think of as just the web. Ben thinks of it as the "indie web," and that's fine. It's all just the web. Anyway, I should have put something here a long time ago, but I didn't look inside WordPress until a couple of years ago and I really liked what I found.

- 2025-03-21T14:26:56Z
Mini-spoilers follow. I'm a Severance lover, it's definitely one of the best shows ever, and I feel even more so after the season 2 finale which I watched last night on AppleTV+. I think there are two types of Severance users. One whose focus is on the evil and the other whose focus is on the love. If you think nothing happened in the finale then you're the first type, if you are the second type, this episode was incredible rich. And we learned what the goats were about and that's not nothing.

- 2025-03-21T12:41:10Z
Here's something that could be useful. A ChatGPT with instructions on how to help a user with WordLand. Try clicking the link and see what happens, esp if you're a regular WordLand user. I discovered the feature first by asking if the bot knew what WordLand was, and it said it did, and got it mostly right. I've been using ChatGPT to develop the product, so it's possible it has retained some of the info. And the docs are on the web. This is one of those times when you really want the AI bot to ingest everything it can find. Worried about hallucinations. But with a product like WordLand, which could show up problems in the browser or a WordPress theme, a lot of the help requests are not problems with WordLand itself. Here's a thread where you can report on your experience. Remember the guidelines. Thanks!

- 2025-03-20T15:15:08Z
Podcast: We still need universities. 21 minutes.

- 2025-03-20T15:27:21Z
Senator Chris Murphy: "How on earth are we going to ask the American people to take risks for us when there's a 5-alarm constitutional fire and we need them to be out on the streets, with hundreds of thousands of people, if we're not willing to show courage and take risks ourselves."

- 2025-03-20T13:09:38Z
I like Jeff Nichols' piece, but I don't agree that the writer's web is blogging. I think it's bigger. Blogging is part of the writer's web. Today's writing network is much more powerful, the software tools are stronger, and new UI standards have evolved. Things like Digital Ocean, Markdown, Font-Awesome and Node.js didn't exist last time we took a serious look at writing on the web. The web with all its features is still here. WordPress has created a strong foundation to build on, at least as good as the social media platforms, but better because it's of the web, with no limits. We've got the beginning of a new platform, one where developers compete to create great writing and reading environments, and we don't need federation because the web takes care of that.

- 2025-03-20T13:34:18Z
A thread I wrote on Bluesky about how the RSS world, an earlier instance of the writer's web, was overtaken by Twitter and why, which boils down to this -- the reading platforms wouldn't work with each other. So Twitter made subscription one click. And RSS made sites include 25 buttons to give people one-click subscription in every popular feed reader. Twitter only needed one button. And it worked every time. Now, 18 years later, the twitter-like systems world, Mastodon, Threads, Substack, Ghost, Bluesky, etc mostly can't get together on a simple way to peer. They keep talking about it and while they do, we're losing everything that's important to us. In the open tech world we have the same problem as the Democratic Party and the same problem RSS had. We refuse to see how the world has changed, and our slow and steady approach leads nowhere fast. We can't all be masters of our own silo'd domain. We need a web for words that's simple and can be learned in an afternoon, but doesn't lose the essential features writers need. I don't know what we need to win, but I do know what we need to get started.

How the "socialsphere" shapes up - 2025-03-20T21:27:32Z

Notes

• Terminology: I don't thnk we should use the term social web until there actually is such a thing, so I invented a new term for these twitter-like services.
• Since Ghost is now supporting ActivityPub, I felt we needed to include Substack because the two products compete directly.
• I consider AT Proto a proprietary protocol for now, as proprietary as Mastodon's API.
• I included WordPress because it supports ActivityPub.
• If you want to comment or ask questions I posted this table on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Using ChatGPT for tech support - 2025-03-20T15:12:34Z

If you aren’t sure how to ask for help with software, try first asking ChatGPT or another AI chatbot to help figure out what’s going wrong. It has infinite time to help, and won’t mind if the problem turned out to be a random browser plug-in that was misbehaving.

It often suggests trying things you might not have thought of.

I use it myself esp as often is the case there’s no one who can or is willing to work for me for free. I’m already playing it $20 per month, and for that I get as much time as it takes.

Really good for organizing your approach to a problem.

- 2025-03-19T14:54:52Z
Obama once said to the bankers who had just crashed the economy, much like Trump/Musk are trying to do now -- that his administration is the "only thing between you and the pitchforks.” These are the same people. They’re back from 2009 and this time they want everything. They don't care what's left, they're machines. All they know how to do is to consume. Squeeze a cent of value from every dollar. This clip from Goodfellas explains. I saw a quote from one of the Dogeheads saying that all universities should be shut down. Hey you can say whatever you like, but they want to actually do it.

- 2025-03-19T16:44:49Z
A piece that Paul Krugman should write. How what Musk is doing to the US is worse than the 2009 near-collapse of the world economy. People who think he's going to bring down just the US, should recall how close we all came to falling into the abyss. But this time there will be no one to save us.

I'd like to excerpt from and comment about three DW posts that he made over the past couple days.

• Jan 4, 2016 - Leave nothing but footprints
• Jan 4, 2016 - Why tech insiders must be on Facebook
• Jan 5, 2016 - Re Twitter easing the 140-char limit

Dave claims that he likes the open web, and he often rails against silos, such as Twitter and Facebook. A couple years ago when I discoveredI heard the #indieweb use the word silo to describe social media sites