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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2025-10-16T12:30:53Z

Good morning from Ottawa - 2025-10-16T12:30:53Z

Here's the link to the slides promised below.

I've been going back and forth on slides. I always do this. In the end I hate slides because I digress while going through them and skip ahead, end up wishing I hadn't used them. So I decided to compromise. I'll do the first three in some detail, and digress and go down tangents as I see fit.

The three main slides.

1. Accomplishments of WordPress.
2. Why podcasting retained its independence.
3. Demo of WordLand.

There were 20 or 30 more slides after that.

So what I'll do is this. Present the first two in some detail, then page through the rest quickly and come back and do the demo. Also publish a link to the deck on my blog so people can scroll through them at their leisure. And once the demo is done, I'll answer questions.

I have an idea that we can have a blogosphere that is as functional as podcasting. We just need users to get started, to get the idea off the ground. We don't have to accept the limits, we can have the full web if we want it.

The accomplishments of WordPress - 2025-10-15T12:07:30Z

One more slide from the presentation.

And with that I'm off to Ottawa, seeking fame and fortune. 😄

PS: One more slide for the road.

Times I've been ambushed at conferences - 2025-10-14T15:42:58Z

Well, I think I'm done. I've got the outline for the slides complete. I can't possibly talk about all the stuff that's in the slides. Once I leave tomorrow I think perhaps I'll post a link for the slides and maybe offer a place to comment. Maybe.

I get very nervous about these things and then remember when I've prepared as much as I have for this, the talk goes quickly and people generally are nice, though I've been ambushed a few memorable times. Let's see -- Austin, Cambridge, San Francisco and Nashville come to mind. ;-)

In Austin it was because I was privileged. I was being honored because it was the 25th year of my blog, and I was one of the keynoters. I told the promoter his people wouldn't like me, and then I forgot I said it when it happened. I was stuck, I didn't want to get into a public argument with anyone. (Had I wanted to rebut, I would have said everyone in this room is privileged, just look around at how well fed and educated everyone is. We all flew in here. We live in a rich country where we are the elite of the elite. Now STFU, in my dreams.)

There have been times when I welcomed an argument...

In San Francisco, I was invited to lead a panel from the music industry about how great Napster was. This was probably in 2000 or 2001 when Napster was at its peak. It was an ambush. All the panelists made me the issue, and then they voted to kick me off the stage. I stayed there and waited until they exhausted their rage, and then asked them a question about music and Napster. Acted like nothing had happened. I had earned my place there, I was a very early industry adopter of Napster. I loved what it did for us. Imagine until then you either had to buy an album to listen to music, build a collection, or wait until it was played on the radio. (What is radio? Kind of an early form of podcasting.) People were talking about music in supermarkets and airports. This could not be stopped, I was sure of it, and they were acting like babies. I stood up and prevailed.

In Nashville, I was invited to be a sort of keynoter for a conference that was patterned after BloggerCon. I did not organize it, but I led a session, which was attended by a famous right wing blogger who I had invited to the Harvard BloggerCon. He brought a bunch of his friends, and they each said no one was listening to them but we were listening to them. I eventually sat down and let them have a session dominated by a few people repeating themselves. It was boring.

Finally I was set up by the promoters of a CMS conference which Berkman hosted at Harvard. I was the master of ceremonies. No one told me that one of my most virulent trolls was there, and when he got up to rage at me I asked him to sit down, but Charlie Nesson who was the senior educator there, and kind of naive about internet trolls, said he should speak his mind. I should have walked out at that point. I knew what was coming. It really shook me.

In Nashville a columnist in a local paper who said I caused the riot, btw. I swear to god I always take my discussion leader role seriously. I gave them all a chance to talk and they all said the same thing, almost as if they had been told to say it.

The web crashes - 2025-10-13T15:35:14Z

Let's remember how the web could have worked.

The ideal is to write in our blog space, and publish everywhere.

That's what we have been trying to do since Twitter came along.

Write on your main blog, cross-post everywhere it belongs.

This could have worked, and it still can.

But it can't work until we get agreement on what text is. This will be much-discussed at WordCamp Canada this week, based on what WordPress is doing and what Evan Prodromou will speak about and of course what I am speaking about.

Getting back on track is as simple as agreeing what text is on the web. For that we have two very good models: HTML and Markdown.

- 2025-10-12T18:20:15Z
I'm getting ready for a trip. And part of that is getting my laptop set up so I can post to Scripting News. If you're reading this, it worked.

It's funny because it's true - 2025-10-12T18:21:08Z

Working on my slides for WordCamp Canada next week.

I don't think I'll actually use the F-word in the slide.

But it makes me laugh when I see it.

- 2025-10-11T15:06:46Z
I'm narrating development work on my Daveverse site. If you're interested, that's where I've been while I'm shaking out core bugs in the new WordLand. These are the things I want to stay fixed and never have to screw with again. It does actually work that way in products that go through a shake-out process. Drummer and FeedLand both work pretty well. Sure there are bugs and things I wish worked differently, but I and a few other people use them as everyday tools. I'm trying to get WordLand with its timeline function to be that way. A bunch of new hookups via HTTP and Websockets.

- 2025-10-10T13:59:04Z
Today's song: Oh My Love, by John Lennon. I was trying to remember this song. It kept eluding me. It's not one of his most famous. It's what you experience when you fall in love. Clarity. Endless possibility. At home in your life. For the first time.

- 2025-10-10T14:10:04Z
I know so many people around my age that were never told this simple truth that I heard Steve Jobs say in a video the other day. Paraphrasing -- the people who made the rules you think you have to live by weren't smarter than you. Once you accept this as fact, then if you can find the leading edge you can make it work the way you want it to. You can be one of those people.

The social network of the web - 2025-10-10T14:16:01Z

I was just catching up on tweets and saw an announcement earlier this week that Matt Mullenweg is going to lead a town hall discussion at WordCamp Canada next Friday in Ottawa. A week from today. I find that exciting. I'll in the room for sure, and blogging it. Why not? ;-)

I am presenting the day before, where I'll do a demo of the new WordLand, explaining how it's now twice the product it was last time you all saw it. It is still centered on WordPress as the place where all the user's writing is published. And somehow through the magic of software, we manage to make it into a social network. And the cool thing about the whole stack of software we build on, all of it is replaceable and of the web, in every sense.

There are things that Bluesky and Mastodon can do that WordLand can't. But there are also many many things we can do with the structure that WordLand creates that the others can't touch. There's a simple reason for that, if implementing something, no matter how attractive, without limiting the web-ness of the system, we didn't do it. This is the social network of the web. That means all the pieces connect with each other in fantastic unforeseeable ways. And anyone can discover these connections. That was the joy of the early web, the thought "Hey I think I can do that" and when you try, it works! We're back there again, if the people come. The technical challenge is still there but now is smaller. Getting people to look and fall in love (hopefully) is the big challenge.

After WordLand 0.8 is ready, real soon now, who knows what's next? That's the glory a bootstrap. Every step tells you where to go next. That's how you know you're hitting a target.

I don't know if Matt will be there for my demo, I hope he is. He and Automattic and the community have created a fantastic platform. Finding WordPress has a super powerful API that I didn't know about is like finding a new web. Let me know if you see it too. ;-)

So thanks Matt for your great contribution. I hope to be able to thank you for that personally in Ottawa next week. Perfect timing.

Cross-posted from the WordCamp Canada site.

Cute paste for WordLand - 2025-10-09T13:39:02Z

Note this is for the 0.8 release of WordLand coming soooon. Not in the current released product.

A friend asked for this feature a few months back, before we had a Markdown mode in WordLand.

As I'm reviewing the product for first beta I realized I could now implement the feature he asked for.

How to..

1. Copy a URL to the clipboard.
2. Open WordLand, bring it to the front.
3. Go into Markdown mode by clicking the M icon. It turns green.
4. Select the text you want to be a link.
5. Paste the URL copied in step 1.

It creates the link for you, in Markdown syntax of course.

To see it in HTML, just flip the Markdown button off.

I call this feature Cute Paste. :-)

A video demo.

- 2025-10-08T20:01:15Z
WordPress news via FeedLand.

- 2025-10-08T16:58:42Z
The same energy that forced Biden off the ticket should get Schumer and Jeffries out of the top seats. Replace with people who can speak plainly about what's actually happening.

- 2025-10-08T17:17:11Z
I stop reading every piece that begins by wondering if the Dems or Repubs are "winning" the shutdown. Anything the Dems can do that has anything to do with governing is a win for all of us, including the Repubs, but esp the Dems. This is a new world, the old one is gone. Every day is a new reality.

- 2025-10-08T14:16:46Z
Fellow humans. If we're competing with AI, and to some extent it seems we are, consider that they have much better writing tools than we do. If we are to put up some kind of resistance to our cyber-domination, shouldn't we invest in better writing tools for bodied-intellects like us?

- 2025-10-08T13:44:52Z
I try not to run away from controversy when conventional wisdom is in the way of progress.

- 2025-10-08T13:29:33Z
The big deal with WordPress, as outlined in the Think Different piece is that the strong API makes WP into something quite different from what most people think it is. I think of it as an OS for writing on the web. Very analogous to what we use(d) PCs and Macs for before networks were everywhere. This came up in a thread on Bluesky about MicroPub which appears to be a redo of Metaweblog, with better identity system.

- 2025-10-08T13:43:15Z
The ActivityPub world, which MicroPub is part of (I guess), could benefit from reading Joel Spolsky's piece about Architecture Astronauts.

- 2025-10-07T16:41:25Z
Why we all should love RSS. It makes the web higher level without taking anything away.

- 2025-10-07T19:38:47Z
Thanks to Tanya Weiman for observing that this blog started 31 years ago. Probably the longest-running blog on the internets. Still making trouble. And as they say, still diggin. You can always tell how long it's been by looking at the bottom of any archive page, where it's constantly calculating, down to the second, how long this blog has been running.

- 2025-10-07T16:06:46Z
Try as hard as I can I still have distinct flows and more than one place where I edit. I think that's a consequence of working on WordLand. I have to use it for serious writing, otherwise how would I know if it works. Maybe I can find a way to merge flows, but not at the moment. I still have to do some copy/pasting.

The antidote to Bigco dominance - 2025-10-07T16:09:50Z

Fascinating blog post from Jason Shellen, tech entrepreneur, formerly with Blogger and Google. Here’s my perspective on part of the story he tells about RSS and Google Reader.

Netscape gave us RSS 0.91 and it was good enough to create a new powerful layer on the web. Then Netscape blew up and a bunch of repeated efforts to kill it from big companies. I’ll leave it to others to say why, but they tried over and over to extinguish the spark. Independent developers were stubborn, we kept using the original format, and in the end the independents prevailed.

Don’t ever think bigco’s are the answer. They almost always suck the life out of open systems. If you have something good going: work together. It’s the antidote to bigco dominance.

If you suck up to the bigco thinking they’ll let you in, maybe they will for a short while. But what you’ll be left with may not be worth the cost.

And just because you have a job at a bigco doesn’t make you hot shit. Maybe for a moment.

This theory has a name, it’s described in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and its lesson applies in tech and in the political disaster the US has become.

- 2025-10-06T21:06:32Z
I do all my shopping in ChatGPT. There must be a way to monetize that. For example, I want to buy a new backpack to carry my laptop and other mobile stuff. I should be able to set up anywhere there's wifi. I've got a modern MacBook Air, an iPad and two phones, one iOS and one Android. The main one is Android, I have to carry the iPhone because I use an Apple watch. I imagine there must be some improvements made in backpacks since I bought the last one, which was when I lived in Berkeley, in the late 00s.

- 2025-10-06T21:05:27Z
I've been evangelizing evangelism lately. Focus on goals and help others help us achieve them. It's a virtuous cycle, because once people figure out that they can get help by helping us, they will help us more. That is, when it works.

- 2025-10-06T14:15:25Z
Reason #29812 you know our current writing system is broken. When you want to post something that has more than the maximum characters they post an image instead of the text. I once wasted a few months making a writing tool for those kinds of posts, hoping that if it caught on we could have a shadow network that moved the actual text around the net between users.

- 2025-10-06T14:22:05Z
I did a video demo of pngWriter in Dec 2016.

- 2025-10-05T15:59:16Z
In 2014 I wrote a manifesto about web writing. A decade later later, I'm still trying to get writing on the web to work again. It was on a good track before the rude interruption.

Before we were so rudely interrupted - 2025-10-05T18:04:57Z

I've used this phrase a few times recently: "Before we were so rudely interrupted."

Or, "the big interruption."

I'm referring to 2006, when web writing was downgraded, to be 140 characters with no styling, no links, without the ability to edit.

That's when writing on the web started going in the toilet.

So when I say it again I may link to this post, because out here on the web, linking is always allowed.

Nightly email subs work again - 2025-10-05T15:15:42Z

Please try again if you've been waiting.

Report problems here.

It had been broken since Sept 14.

Still diggin! ;-)

- 2025-10-05T01:06:19Z
I test drove three different EVs today at an event at SUNY Ulster today. VW ID.Buzz, Rivian R1T, Kia EV9. I was surprised the one I liked best was the VW. It handled well, the others were sloppy, drive like the big cars they are. The Rivian had the best computer system, looked even nicer at first look than the Tesla. The Kia EV9 had a standard Kia computer system, far behind that of Rivian or Tesla. VW's computer was halfway between, it appeared they thought overall about the controls, but I was so impressed by the ride, and size, and the whole concept of it, and I always liked vans. I'm seriously thinking about swapping my Tesla for the VW. There are other disadvantages, I'm going to start reading up on it, until today I never gave it any thought, didn't think it would be a car for me. But I realllly liked it.

- 2025-10-05T01:24:18Z
Bluesky post: "The idea is to build a social network entirely out of replaceable parts. No silos, no centralization. Just the web."

- 2025-10-03T13:32:51Z
In yesterday's piece I suggested people start by creating a free site on wordpress.com to be their home on the open social web.

- 2025-10-03T13:39:43Z
People are surprised that I'm trying to build the for-real social web as opposed to the aspirational social web. It does require a lot of chutzpah. I feel that. Sometimes I put off doing things because while the coding is simple and straightforward, the immensity of it overwhelms me a bit. I don't remember feeling that way the first time around, possibly because we were doing it all step by step over approx ten years. Now it's all compressed into weeks. I know how to do it, and I've got or built the pieces I needed. But it just doesn't somehow feel right that the idea is actually becoming a thing. "This can't be happening." But we live in that kind of time. Who knows what monsters lie within. We may find out. Heh. Maybe that's where the goosebumps come from.

- 2025-10-03T14:43:23Z
With the advent of AI code development tools, maybe we should embark on a project to merge all programming languages into one syntax. To undo all the chaos and make humans more competitive with machines. The fact that there are so many development bubbles is a huge waste of resources. Makes us all net-net more stupid.

- 2025-10-04T00:49:34Z
Some day they will have AI actors delivering the nightly news and no one will notice.

Should tech run the world? - 2025-10-03T14:59:20Z

With all respect to the tech industry -- why is the traffic in the Bay Area so awful. Why haven't they done anything about it.

Wouldn't that be a good test before running the whole world? As programmer myself, I wouldn't trust the algorithm without a lot of QA. Seriously. Think about it

It's the strangest configuration for a metropolitan area, the center of the city is in the middle of the bay. (Same as Seattle, btw.)

The best answer the tech industry came up with was Uber, as far as I know.

I lived in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Berkeley, Los Gatos and Woodside over 31 years and I did nothing to fix the problem either. My answer was to move to NYC where the transit system is pretty great. Then I moved to the mountains and got a Tesla.

BTW, the idea that the stars of Silicon Valley should run the world is not new. I first heard about it from Apple top level managers in the 1980s. They were not techno-fascists, but they did hugely underestimate what it takes to run the world, or even a small country in Africa.

Let the web be the web - 2025-10-03T13:57:28Z

Yesterday I wrote about preserving freedom by using replaceable parts to form a social web out of the web itself. Outside the silos. I'm getting comments on it. Nice to see other people thinking likewise. That's what we need to get a bootstrap going. People.

In other words the social web is the web. It's made of people. Somehow we forgot that, and gave up so much.

I was thinking I might have coined "let the web be the web" as an obvious ripoff of The West Wing slogan for the new President Bartlet. But a search reveals that it was used, but all in very good ways, so that's cool. However a Google Trends search shows up nothing. I'm going to look at this in a year or two and see if that has changed. 😀

It's such a sexy idea, I had to get ChatGPT to generate it.

- 2025-10-02T15:46:41Z
New motto: Let the web be the web.

- 2025-10-02T13:24:10Z
Latest news from WordPress. Always looking for more sources. 😀

- 2025-10-02T14:52:32Z
I have a problem in the development version of WordLand. Sometimes when I bring it to the front, there's an error deep in jQuery, an event has fired and the handler is pointing to a string or number, not a function. It dies, with no stack crawl, because it was responding to a focus event or blur or something like that. Something got overwritten. I have no idea where or how it happened, but once found it will be obvious. I've been trying to figure it out with Claude and ChatGPT and I can see it's going to take a few hours of concentration and learning to figure it out. But then I realized hey -- I bet I could use the Chrome debugger to find this problem. It has Gemini built in. It has access to the running code. I don't have to act as an intermediary, gathering data, pasting stuff into the AI bot. Now I'm looking forward to doing this.

- 2025-10-02T14:58:33Z
Someday soon you're going to read a post here, have something quick you want to say, click on a little icon, the editor opens, you write, post, and it's on your blog. I get a pointer. I can read it, and if I want, I can attach it to my post. The writing stays in your space, so you have an archive of all your writing. We let the web be the web.

- 2025-10-02T13:12:38Z
One of the things we can do to preserve freedom, is to resume using the open internet to communicate instead of the silos of Zuck and Musk et al. When you use the web instead of a silo you are helping build community outside, where free speech is the default. The more of us who communicate outside, the more people will be attracted. Your participation helps draw people out, where independent developers can create new tools for you without waiting for permission of big companies who own the network you're using. It's like voting. The more people do it, the stronger we all are. I've spent the last 31 years insisting on that freedom for myself as a writer and developer and sharing it with others. As people flocked to Twitter and Facebook, etc, you thought I was gone, finished, a loser. I know they think that about me. But honestly, I also knew the open internet would come back, because I knew its value, and I knew eventually the silos would reveal their real cost. They may appear free, but there's a price to pay. I hope you'll consider using the tools. If you want to get started, create a free site on wordpress.com. Just create it. That will be your home on the open social web. And btw, you don't have to agree with my politics to be part of it. That's kind of the whole point. ;-)

I have a very large head. - 2025-10-02T14:45:02Z

Normal hats don't fit. Not even close.

So I buy my caps from BigHatStore.com.

In prep for my trip to Ottawa later this month for WordCamp Canada, my first trip out of the country in a long time, I wanted to get a new hat.

They don't have a big selection of NBA hats, so there's no Knicks hat that fits my head.

And they didn't have any Mets hats for some reason.

I thought -- I'll get a Wisconsin hat! I went to grad school in Madison and loved it there. You know Fuck em Bucky! But they didn't have any Wisconsin hats either.

I was dejected, but noticed they did have Harvard hats.

So I got one.

Which reminds me of a joke a famous VC told when we were walking around on the Stanford campus in 2004.

It goes like this...

How can you tell someone went to Harvard?

Pause.

I give up.

They tell you!

Haha.

Or they wear a Harvard baseball cap.

I plan to tell that joke a few times, while wearing the cap. :-)

Don't focus on the Democratic Party - 2025-10-02T14:36:55Z

I don’t like the Democratic leaders in Congress, but that doesn’t matter. People say what they’re doing won’t work. I agree. But the elected Democrats swore an oath, to uphold the Constitution. With that constraint there isn’t much they can do other than try to force the Repubs to do the same, and that isn't likely to work. It hasn't so far, but it's all they can do without breaking the Constitution themselves. Think about it. All these minds, and we haven't come up with anything.

What brought this home was a comment by a Democratic congressperson saying on CNN last night no matter what they do Trump won’t obey if he doesn’t want to. It’s true. They could get Repubs in Congress to fund Obamacare, but Trump could ignore it. That’s reality. What do the pundits think they should do?

Here's the unvarnished truth. Whatever the answer is it can't come from the Democratic Party.

- 2025-10-01T13:35:45Z
A very small picture of the blogger's room at Dean For America in January 2004. A big chunk of political history happened in this room. I was there, in the runup to the Iowa caucus and on the night of the famous Dean Scream. Here's a picture of my digital camera in 2004. It wasn't cheap and as we know it was futuristic. That was possibly one of the first digital selfies.

- 2025-10-01T13:29:32Z
I started this site to hold some of the essays John Palfrey posts on Facebook, where they are out of reach of the tools of the open web. John is a longtime friend, for over 20 years, and we did some great stuff together in the early days of the blogosphere. I will happily turn the site over to JP any time he wants, and provide personal support if there are problems. I want him in my online web family, and Facebook simply does not make that possible. It's a silo, as we know and that means it's basically a world unto itself. If we want to solve the problems of the world, we have to step out into the open space where what we write is not so local or controlled.

- 2025-10-01T13:52:50Z
All the September posts in an OPML file.

Frum's dilemma - 2025-10-01T21:11:01Z

Listening to today's David Frum podcast, from a journalist who says he reps the facts-only brand of journalism. He says his guest invented podcasting in 2014, about 14 years after we started it.

He then says that anyone in tech in the late 1990s made hundreds of millions of dollars. I didn't make very much money on those terms in the 90s, but I did a lot of the creating in that period.

Both of which tell you more about who he pays attention to than anything resembling the truth.

Maybe the first thing journalism can do is let up on the arrogance, they represent their own point of view and nothing more. Humility.

Regardless I find that Frum is worth listening too, because he asks questions that are worth thinking about.

In today's podcast he asks if the Dems ever get control of government, should they use the new norms to punish the Repubs who so damaged our system. He says it's a tough question, I say he's made it unnecessarily complicated.

The same people are also breaking laws that are on the books. Let the reconstituted DoJ do their jobs. And if there's one thing I'd insist on, they get an AG who doesn't dream a lot about how everyone means well, and they kick off the prosecutions immediately on taking office. And if the courts have been corrupted, then you have to deal with Frum's Dilemma, but not until then.

And of course I'm not one of the people he can hear, but if you're one of the people he does listen to could you send this his way. Thanks! :-)

We like Twitter. So blogging must be dead. - 2025-10-01T15:12:33Z

I was having a conversation with Dan Knauss from the WordCamp Canada team. He said that people in the WordPress world don't think of it as a blogging community. I can see why they resist that, blogging has gotten a lot of bad PR in the last 19 years. The same bad PR that RSS got, and I felt that was so wrong, as wrong as what people said about blogging.

We like Twitter. So blogging must be dead. I understand -- I get it. But that's marketing, and only necessary because Twitter wouldn't let blogging be part of what they did. I'd be happy to talk about that during my keynote if people want to hear why I think that.

Anyway until 2017 I tried to fit in between the silos. 2017 is when I realized it was hopeless. I couldn't write for the web and for the silos at the same time, I had to choose, so I went with the web. Instant happiness.

Okay so you don't emphasize blogging in the WordPress community. This imho is a mistake.

Even if it was a community built around a style of sneakers or audio equipment I would say it's a mistake not to build a custom blogosphere just for the community. In the past we would have used Twitter for this, but I don't think anyone in their right mind wants to try to do that now. Esp a community, like WordPress, that has open web built into its bones.

I don't have a lot of time to write this morning, so let me leave you with this story. It took years to boot up blogging as a community. I thought everyone would want to do it as soon as they saw what it was, but there needed to be a critical mass before there could be a critical mass. Logically impossible, right, but somehow it happened anyway. But slowly, in fits and starts.

But podcasting, in contrast, happened much more quickly. The reason? We already had blogging to build on. We had a way to communicate without the press in the middle. That's the power of blogging. We build our own news system. Do things the journalists don't understand or are counter to conventional wisdom.

So imho it's only coincidence that WordPress happens to be a great blogging tool. It can be that and all the other things it is. It's going to be something else too, if I have my way -- it's going to define the basic software that powers the social web. Not peripheral, but central. That and RSS. Incredibly powerful combination, and I think ready to be a strong alternative to the silos. In order for that to work, we have to reboot the blogosphere, so we will do that. :-)

Cross-posted from WordCamp Canada.

#rss