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 - 2025-07-25T12:59:44Z

Like Christmas in July - 2025-07-25T12:59:44Z

I've rarely been this happy to receive a new feature.

I have a plan of course. I'll let you know how it goes! :-)

Modernizing my sound system - 2025-07-25T12:38:51Z

I got tired of my old sound system, too many wires, a big receiver whose functions I never used, all designed long before the 4-year-old 65-inch OLED screen on top of it all, so I downscaled to a Sony soundbar, figured that was as simple as you could get, for $300, thinking of it as an experiment.

I liked it but then I thought to ask ChatGPT a question I've had for a while. I want a small amp designed for today's music and video, and went through a bunch of options and came up with the WiiM Home amp. No speakers, unlike the soundbar, but hooks up to the TV via the ARC connector, and I have plenty of old speakers to try out in this configuration.

I got it yesterday and the setup experience was pretty great and the feature list is totally 2025. Will have more to say for sure.

PS: It's from a Silicon Valley tech company btw. Nice to see a company just designing nice products and not trying to take over the world.

- 2025-07-24T14:21:58Z
BTW, this business with Trump and the Fed is almost exactly what I wanted Obama to do with Garland when McConnell refused to hold hearings. Walk him over to the Supreme Court, unlock his office, swear him in and get back to work. Sometimes you just do it. The Dems weren't pragmatic that way.

- 2025-07-24T12:51:49Z
When trying to "work" with ChatGPT, realize that it's mistakes could be much worse than you could possibly imagine. It could be leading you down a blind alley. You must always consider how full of shit it is. It may not just be making things up, but it could not understand something very basic about what you're doing. There's no limit to the ways it can be wrong. And you can waste whole programming sessions chasing a solution where none could possibly every under any circumstances be found. The level of bullshit is sometimes hard to fathom.

- 2025-07-24T11:57:19Z
You can see from this Bluesky post that I do copy-edit my linkblog items, but not enough. The web isn't a write-only medium, so to say that Bluesky is part of the web, well in this way it isn't.

- 2025-07-24T11:17:50Z
Question: I have a site with a well developed set of categories, I've added to it carefully over a few months, it covers most of the topics I write about. Another site has a small set of categories. I write all my WordPress posts in the same editor, and could easily set it up so that all categories were available to me in every site I post to. The question: Is that a good practice in the world of WordPress? I noticed that categories are given global ID's so if I use a category like "movies" it will have the same ID as yours has on your sites. I love this idea of a global namespace for categories, and see it as something that could be adopted by sites written in any other writing environment. Anyway, if you have a moment to comment, I'd appreciate your ideas. Update: Jeremy Herve, a WordPress developer explains.

- 2025-07-23T20:59:42Z
Question. If you have to choose between Google's web browser or one from your favorite AI company, which would you go with? Also yes -- Google is destroying the web, as is ChatGPT and Claude etc. Because the people who tried to capture flow using SEO made you wade through mountains of garbage before you got the info you were coming there for, if you ever got it. It's the same thing with clicking links in Twitter. If instead, they had focus on providing a product that made people happy and built respect for theri brand, they'd still have a seat at the table. It's too late to complain, you had a chance to view your efforts as a business. But there's still plenty of potential for the web, esp if developers get imaginative in how to use the new browser platforms. I don't imagine Google's going to rock and roll too much with Chrome, but maybe they will.

- 2025-07-23T21:07:13Z
Trump says he's going to give AI companies freedom except with DEI and climate change, guessing they have to follow Trump dogma? Hard to tell from the language. I assume so. Just like CBS when the Ellisons own it. Our communications systems are pretty much owned by the government as they are in China. Or very close to that.

- 2025-07-23T21:24:49Z
Here's a benchmark. I just asked ChatGPT for 250 words on climate change. Let's check that out in a year and two years and see if they're still telling the truth.

- 2025-07-23T21:19:35Z
If you could look into people's minds and see if, at their core, they feel it can't happen here, most of us would have that belief. We'll probably still believe it when the last of our freedoms is gone.

- 2025-07-22T20:26:18Z
I think I figured out why the AI companies want to do web browsers. It’s so that they can create an application development platform for people who want to write apps that run inside a new environment where the OS is a LLM. Lots of interesting possibilities. Imagine how the OS API might work. You could restructure a database by explaining in English how you want it restructured. In the freaking code. Could we bury Algol-like languages the same way we buried assembly and machine languages? Do we have the courage to imagine such things?

- 2025-07-22T15:27:49Z
"You're an important caller," the machine lied, as if it were human.

- 2025-07-22T13:04:35Z
New WordLand release, v0.5.24, fixes a problem in previous release that kept the Markdown icon from appearing in some user's icon bars.

O Journos! - 2025-07-22T21:27:39Z

I hate it when journos say the Dems are in trouble, or hopeless or whatever, it shows how poisoned their point of view is.

When people are fed up with Trump, if that should happen, then whatever the Democratic Party is meant to become it will become exactly that at that moment.

The voters are where your attention should be, and think of them as people not as numbers.

That's my best advice for a Tuesday.

- 2025-07-21T21:41:36Z
Change notes for WordLand v0.5.22.

- 2025-07-21T19:11:46Z
Short video demo of Markdown mode in WordLand.

- 2025-07-21T19:44:04Z
The Great on Hulu gives an idea of what a king or queen would be like. The difference is the actors playing the monarchs are pretty lovable and not stupid, and somewhat self-aware (not their strong suit).

- 2025-07-21T00:40:19Z
Today's song: When You Awake. You will remember everything.

- 2025-07-20T16:31:41Z
Just listened to an episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast with Michael Wolff, about the material he has on Jeffrey Epstein that he can't get anyone to publish, but maybe that'll change. In the interview it was remarkable how the reporter wanted to know just how bad Donald Trump is. That is no longer an interesting question. Didn't you see what happened on January 6? And have you seen the armed, masked, badgeless military in American streets, disappearing people. And the $80 billion they just took from the US Treasury to build a network of concentration camps and who knows what else. You can't get more bad than that. It's too late to still be talking about this bullshit.

- 2025-07-20T15:32:13Z
I keep saying this to my chatbots and you should too. "You are not human, I don't want you to pretend you are. Act like a computer."

- 2025-07-19T13:23:56Z
The nice thing about a blogroll is that it can become a feed reader, in a very small space. It's been on my blog home page for over a year, and I use it a lot, largely because I have to go to that page a lot to see how something I've written looks. Then I see that one of my favorite sites has updated, and I take a quick look to see what's new. The way it works, from a technical standpoint, is that it's hooked into a FeedLand instance where I have created a category called blogroll, and put all the feeds I want in my blogroll in that category. All I have to do to add a new one is subscribe to it in FeedLand, and click the blogroll checkbox. Another developer wrote a post about using their blogroll as a feed reader, and I wanted to put my hand up and say yes -- this is a good idea. People should do this. I like it because it's real innovation in feed reading, something that imho has been lacking in the feed world. Lots more potential here. And you're welcome to use my blogroll as your feed reader. I have put it on its own page but it's at a confusing location. Something to fix, maybe later today if I have some time or tomorrow. :-)

- 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

- 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.

- 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.

- 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

- 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.

- 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.

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