Scripting News podcast

This started out as an open podcast to my friend Jeff Jarvis.

But it soon became a story about how in a few months we're going to be writing about how we gave up control of our last social network to the government. We could have made it decentralized, so users couldn't be shut down at the government's request, but we didn't make it an issue.

Instead, we were building the next network for a billionaire to own

We could have fixed it, but we didn't.

We need to get tougher. Watch the interviews Alex Wagner did on MSNBC did with marchers in Hungary (looking for a link to the video). They have the clear eyes Americans are just starting to get. We'll look back on this having been an easy problem to solve back when we could have fixed it.

Look forward and imagine the value of a truly decentralized social network. It's within reach. Rather than put Bluesky at the center, put them at the edge. That's where they say the want to be. We can make that happen now.

What we need is two-way RSS on Bluesky, ie imperfect decentralization now, so we can re-establish contact and flow if they go down or sell out.

I'd love to read an article or listen to a mainstream news podcast that explained how people are using ChatGPT-like apps, and why they think it's such a big deal, as opposed to debunking it for not being intelligent, or making stuff up, or stealing intellectual property. This has all been adequately reported.

It also is the most revolutionary use of computer technology ever, in terms of the augmentation of human intelligence. And yes, dear news person, this matters.

It's a tool for our minds, it makes up for our relatively slow processes, how long it takes us to learn new facts, and is able organize organize things to help us make better choices.

It really is amazing.

20 minutes

Another permanent rant -- about how universities can be reorganized to do more for us, and we need places where lots of people come face to face to learn and build things, but let's go back to school every ten years.

I went to Harvard in 2003 wanting to bring the minds of Harvard onto the open web, instead they brought my mind into the university, and we brought the open web into Harvard. And long after I got my last degree, with new maturity and experience I found much bigger ways the university could be used as a tool to grow and evolve, to create new stuff. But we didn't finish the job, Silicon Valley did. And we got a result similar to what we'll get if we let the Musk process go forward much further.

It's remarkable how some of the rich of Silicon Valley want to do to the world what they did to the web! If you extrapolate, we'll go from a world with great potential, to a lot of grunting and snorting and not much else. The new AI technology is not ready to run the world. The rich people should use their own wealth to build something great and then show the rest of us how to use it. That's the proper role for Silicon Valley, not to rule.

Lots of ideas buzzing around, but yet all this seems so freaking familiar.

22 minutes.

PS: Developing better Developers blog post.

This is my permanent political rant, podcast-style.

The Repubs figured it out via Trump in 2016, use Twitter to campaign every day of every year.

The Dems campaign intensely for a few months every four years.

The rest of the time it's as if the Dems don't even take the field.

They don't know what to say when they get interviewed, they mumble they don't make eye contact. It's creepy. There are a few who can do it. AOC gets a big shout out here. They should have a conference where she's on stage teaching and they're in the audience listening.

It's so simple, we need to market, to sell, to position the opposition and ourselves. Kamala Harris was doing it, it was great. When we lost the election all communication stops. That's when you need to ramp it up. We have no leadership, no coaching, no simple ideas to bring it home. That's the main reason we continue to lose and now we're not just losing elections, we're losing our world.

In this podcast I start with a story of how I was recruited to lead a rally on a bus from NYC to DC in 1971 as very small part of a march against the Vietnam war. That's where I learned that in a country where the people rule, we have to be part of the government. We can't wait for the Dems to lead us, they never will. Instead we have to lead them. That will work, when we do it.

All we need is campaign and money management, and people who do great advertising. We have to bring the war home, be a source of good information for our voters. Right now the Repubs are the only ones speaking, with predictable results.

21 minutes.

PS: I mention Natural Born Blogger in this podcast.

PPS: There's a transcript.

On Bluesky, I wrote a post to Oliver Willis, who writes at Daily Kos:

This podcast elaborates on that simple idea. We still have media, we don't have to wait for the leaders of the Democratic Party to tell Americans what the Repubs are doing in terms that mean something to them as people.

Saying we're losing rights, or government workers are losing their jobs, or immigrants are being deported -- these aren't as clear as a simple message that you depend on things they are terminating.

And they hired crazy people to determine whether you survive the next pandemic, and btw there's one brewing, you can see how fast by how high the prices of chicken are.

I've thought we should have a Qanon of our own, that tells the truth about what's actually happening, not in the vague bullshit terms the Pelosi's et al explain them. Their time is past, they lost the whole fucking government. If we let them continue to speak for us, a lot of us are going to be dead.

It really is that serious.

It's time to use the media we have to organize and refine the truth down to simple terms everyone can understand.

I hope you listen.

There is a transcript.

I posted this to both Bluesky and Mastodon just now.

I see people betting on the idea of federation in Bluesky.

At the same time, we should bet on simplifying Mastodon at scale.

Approach the problem from both directions.

We may need and not have federation in Bluesky at some point.

It couldn't hurt to have a better lifeboat.

This podcast goes into more depth of this idea.

There is a transcript.

I had my first confrontation about what's stirring in the WordPress world.

I've tried to record this podcast a few times before, but today it became clear that I could get embroiled in the emotions flowing around WordPress now. There's a strong community there, and the angst is familiar, I've had it myself, because the people and companies we depend on rarely live up to our expectations of them.

Since most of the people who lead my industry are either my age or younger, I never idolized them. I certainly respect people like Bill Gates and others who made great fortunes and had great power for a long time. But I usually only care about that when it's in my way.

Right now I see a huge need for a tools for writers that builds on WordPress. The opportunity has been there for the full 20+ year history of the product. Because of who I am and what I did in blogging systems before WordPress, I have a perspective on what's missing, and I see the potential for a large market for writing and other creative tools that simplify the process.

There's too big an opportunity to let the economics of the platform on a large scale get in the way of moving forward. I'm going for it.

In this podcast I offer some of my experience being deeply entrenched in platforms that were going in directions I couldn't go in with them. It's painful to give up. I empathize. But I'm in a different place. I'm a 50+ year developer, about to turn 70, and feeling my age. This may be my last big project.

I think WordPress will be around and evolving for many years to come. I want to make a contribution, and I don't have time to wait for all this to be resolved. There is no other platform that can do what WordPress can do now. So this is where I've made my bet.

So I'm going ahead, and I'm going to try to stay away from the problems, and just try to make some good software and make some users happy. 😀

A place for comments and questions about this podcast.

There is a transcript.

It's been a while since I released a podcast so here goes..

As a programming partner, ChatGPT is encyclopedic but is not good at strategy. It will drive you down blind alleys. It's also really irritating that it rewrites your code to conform to its standards. And it has a terrible memory. Forgets things you told it specifically not to forget. It does not keep promises. People who say the bubble is fully inflated on this stuff are not paying attention. We're still dealing with very basic technical problems.

"What we needed was an encyclopedic, conversational simulated programming partner, that has infinite knowledge of everything. But unfortunately not the best judgment."

There's a transcript.

I keep having to answer the question of what I think about Podcasting 2.0, I thought I should say it clearly, in a podcast of course. 😀

A lightly edited quote from this cast: "Podcasting is in trouble and needs our help and it needs good ideas that accentuate the power of having no boundaries between different voices. You can listen to my podcast and you can listen to one that comes from somebody else, from a big company if you want to. There are no gatekeepers. There's nobody who controls what you can listen to here. And that's important. That's powerful. That makes it a place for creativity, and for art, and for really unpopular ideas, because it's open."

It's insidious to form an organization whose name says you own the future of something that is open. Even the W3C wasn't that brazen, even Apple said they wanted developers to innovate on their platform. But claiming to be the 2.0 of something as hugely consequential as podcasting is not supportable and I can't overlook it.

I've proposed an innovation in podcasting, for the benefit of everyone, and I could have done it even if I didn't even know what a freaking podcast is (but I do).

I'm tired of people trying to own things that are unownable.

There's a transcript.

"I hope this doesn't give Trump any ideas" is what I thought when I heard that the president of South Korea had out of the blue declared martial law. You probably thought it too.

I decided it was time to tell the story of how we elected Trump even though we had a 4-year demo, including COVID and an attempted overthrow of the US government.

We knew who he was, and we said give us more of that.

We are out of our minds.

Includes a transcript.

PS: Recorded on Tuesday, published on Thursday.

PPS: It turns out the president of South Korea was actually trying to give Trump an idea.

PPPS: The people of South Korea told the president to go to hell.

Sources Go Direct is the way everything works now. Ad dollars and gotchas are not how you get known. The only way that works is patience over long periods of time so the voters feel comfortable with the candidate. The story keeps repeating.

This is how the political system works now, but the Democrats haven't adjusted to the new reality. It's past time. We need to get going before the transition is complete.

Here's a transcript.

I've been saying this for twenty years -- the Dems shut down their campaign presence on the social web on Election Day, and they come back when they need our money (to give to the huge media companies for ads) and vote, and that's it. We play no role in governing.

Meanwhile the other party, starting when Trump discovered Twitter, was on the air 24-by-7-by-365 every freaking year whether or not there's a presidential election. Their voters are led, ours are left to drift around in the wind, asked to resist with no answer to the question How? We have no leadership.

Now we may be able to get the Harris campaign back on the air on the social web. We found the team that did it. Like the rest of us they lost their way on Election Day which was only two weeks ago, believe it or not. Anyway I wanted to share the good news. There are links on my blog for today.

PS: Here's a transcript.

We start with what didn't work about the election of 2024 as the question du jour, and the answer is basically everything. The Democratic Party is a funnel which tries to funnel what the elites think we need without triggering Jake Tapper or Maggie Haberman or the publisher of the NYT. As the Bidens discovered this is a hopeless cause, so no one liked Joe, and they didn't have a feel for Kamala, and they aren't wrong they're right.

The world changed and it's time for the old Democratic party to be replaced by a completely new version, as happened already with the Repubs. We're going to be much better at what we believe in, as they are much better at what they believe in. Our goals won't change, but we'll have candidates that rise from the people, instead of being filtered and handed down from above.

We're not connecting with people because they're not connecting with the people we give them. These people do know how to run the US government, but they aren't doing it the way we want them to. Change isn't happening fast enough to keep up with the demands of a changed country. I doubt if the Dems would disagree with that. Okay we see how to fix this. I explain in this long ramble, if you're patient enough to listen that long!

The piece that inspired this post.

The net-net is that WordPress is everything that remains of what's useful in the blogging world.

It carries the banner for the format writers need to be able to communicate meaningfully, which I call textcasting.

I wanted to develop a writing tool for WordPress because it needed to start developing in that direction. There should be hundreds of ways to write with WordPress, and it should be able to flow writing through all the social networks. That's the idea. It's doable, now, more so than ever before. And then once we have that working, we can see what's next.

But the writer's web has been reduced to a small fraction of its potential.

I think this may be a time when people will be looking for something new, but there doesn't need to be a cost. You don't have to pick up your whole thing and move somewhere else, we can build on what WP already is.

It's a 37 minute podcast, that also includes a long story about Napster, how revolutionary it was, and how the music industry failed to see the value in having all the music availalbe to everyone in one place. All the applications of music that didn't happen because of their approach.

We're lucky now that it's all in one place, and the software underlying that is open source, and the APIs are clonable. And the social web is just beginning to get it together, and btw Mastodon is sitting there ready for us to play with them. You just have to make the software, work with others and connect the dots.

In 2017 I wrote that Twitter, which had just elected the US president could be bought for $12 billion. (In the podcast I got the number wrong.)

Given that the US budget is over $6 trillion, and the assets of the government are worth much more, this was a bargain.

Not only did VCs not see this, but Elon Musk did. People kept saying he overpaid for it at $44 billion, but I have a hunch he may be able to make them eat their words.

Anyway, the leadership of the Democratic Party should play close attention to what he's doing, and don't dismiss the waste of money, or whatever you see that he's doing wrong. He hires clever people who see their way around corners that you probably don't. He has better tools that you, in many ways. His server capacity is world class. And obvious brainpower and creativity.

I was right in 2017 and right now in 2024. He could make the difference that puts Trump over the topo.

The quote I cited was by Ann Richards at the 1988 DNC. "He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple."

Quick podcast explaining what worked today that blew my mind.

I surprised myself by editing a post that appeared in WordPress and Mastodon at the same time, with no loss of fidelity.

We're pretty damned close to the ideal of textcasting. How about that!

Sorta snuck up on me.

Bing!

Today's podcast has nothing to do with the 30 year milestone, except that it is totally unscripted, stream of consciousness, for 30 minutes, on two topics.

1. The idea of what a programming language is, is about to be completely overturned. The verbs and nouns will, at least at first, be pretty much exactly like we do it now, but the way you specify how they work, how they interact both in the UI and on the backend, will be done more or less as you would document the user interface. The AI system is almost ready to work at that level. With a few more iterations by human designers it should all meet up in a place where the slogging type work I've been doing for 50+ years will be obsolete. We will all become anachronisms. All of us. Get ready for it. And btw I was the biggest skeptic of the idea of a higher level more human way of programming. Scoffed at the idea. Repeatedly. Never say you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

2. The second part is about kitchen-table conversations in families, the bored rantings of our ancestors, passed on lovingly from generation to generation. Should have realized that we did not turn a racial corner with the election of Obama, we all should have gotten prepared for the backlash from children of the slavers and fascists, who were raised alongside us as victims of slavery and fascism were raised to feel persecuted. We all revert to our comfortable roles. The question is can we rise above that and forget for a moment what our ancestors taught us as gospel and take an interest in going beyond that, or do we have to do another loop around the genocide and its consequences, which this time will be far worse than they were in the 1940s because of all the new war and computer tech and the damage done by the post-war growth.

I feel good about this podcast, because it has nothing to do with the milestone. I have an idea of what it feels like to have been blogging for 30 years, but no conclusions to offer that would mean anything to me or anyone else, except perhaps a psychologist.

I've been watching a lot of sports recently and the interviews with star athletes saying the same predictable bullshit after being asked how it felt to do whatever heroic thing they just did. All of TV and news is like that, none of it is news, all of it is predictable bullshit. That is probably why they have so much trouble reporting the truth about Trump and Musk. It doesn't fit into their job description, it's not in anyone's job to tell the truth. And that's the truth.

My fifth podcast release today, the others were all on the Podcast0 feed, which I explain is the flow of two feeds, Morning Coffee Notes and Trade Secrets.

Also the idea of subscription lists you subscribe to, the next level of power in feeds, which should be imho supported broadly by all apps that implement OPML subscription lists, which is a pretty strong standard in the world of feed readers, which of course includes podcast clients.

The users are so powerful when they realize they have the power. In the case of OPML lists, they are very very functionally powerful. That power always faces off with the famous programming priesthood and now is no different. I see the opportunity to get some more power for users, if a few developers are willing to go along.

Thanks for listening! 😀

52 minute podcast.

I want to talk about interop among the products that do more or less what Twitter does, including Twitter.

I think we're doing a replay of the way hypertext developed in the 80s, and then took off when TBL produced a much simpler product with one-way links instead of two. It made developing a website a matter of writing a text file and uploading it to a server. Almost no configuration.

Same kind of experience with Napster, in a minute you had access to all the music of the world. It was super easy to use, that was key to it being a breakthrough. Over and over, it's simplicity that has made new technology take off. That a developer without much training but a big idea can put something together in an afternoon or a weekend.

We need that kind of interface for the same kind of explosion to happen between the twitter-like products.

Also I am using a recorder app from Google that automatically produces a transcript, so here it is.

27-minute podcast.

Harris must become president of Twitter before becoming president of the United States.

After the debate, Harris should be interviewed anywhere they'll have her. Go ahead and be overexposed. Answer every question with one of your major positioning statements. Call in to radio talk shows, podcasts, whatever you can think of. Biden hardly ever promoted himself. Not being heard all the time was his biggest sin. Harris should get accustomed to being accessible when she's in office. Keep the kamalahq snark channel going. This will have been Trump's contribution to American politics, no fear of being heard.

BRIC countries == Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Brazil's population is 215 million, US is 333 million, so Brazil is 64% of US.

When we win the Twitter presidency we will have Jumped the Trump. 😇

12 minute podcast.