FeedCity

At the beginning of the Trade Secrets podcast on Sept 22, 2004, is when I would say it got its name. Adam and I were the leaders of the community. It had been discussed briefly on the mail list. We all recognized that what we were doing needed a name. There was a consensus, i...

I started a new this.how doc on how podcasting got its name, so I could include new information. It links back to the piece I wrote in 2014. I have done this before, when a blog post I wrote became something I wanted to add to over time. Two examples -- Rules for standards-makers and Trolls.

Here’s the sausage fest I pulled out of:

https://frontmania.com/

They responded to my concerns:

We did receive a lot of talks, but almost no women because there are almost no women in this kind of jobs.

😳

“AI” is heralded (by those who claim it to replace workers as well as those that argue for it as a mere tool) as a thing to drop into your workflows to create whatever gains promised. It’s magic in the literal sense. You learn a few spells/prompts and your problems go poof. But that was already bullshit when we talked about introducing other digital tools into our workflows.

And we’ve been doing this for decades now, with every new technology we spend a lot of money to get a lot of bloody noses for way too little outcome. Because we keep not looking at actual, real problems in front of us – that the people affected by them probably can tell you at least a significant part of the solution to. No we want a magic tool to make the problem disappear. Which is a significantly different thing than solving it.

adactio.com/links/21390

Oh, this looks like an excellent event (in London and online):

Adventures in Episodic Type Design

With David Jonathan Ross

Thursday 17th October 2024

adactio.com/links/21389

Pulling out of a conference I was supposed to speak at because, now that the schedule is live, I see that 90% of the line-up is white dudes like me.

(They also don’t pay their speakers. These two things are not unrelated.)

Adventures in IndieWeb / ActivityPub (AP) bridging:While in general my posts are being successfully federated by https://fed.brid.gy/ #BridgyFed, most of my recent posts, and two more earlier this year, were delivered successfully to multiple #Mastodon instances AP inboxes (r...

And the show notes for the podcast from Sept 2, 2004, and now we are fully caught up.

Nice web utility from @mary.my.id that archives your Bluesky posts as HTML. Always a good idea to have multiple formats of everything.

Sometimes you just need a little color. Stairwell at Central Market.

There is a place for the WordPress block editor, or Medium, or Squarespace, or any number of very nice editors. But if you want to write natively for the web, those will never be quite right.

As I improve my own web text editor, I’m reflecting on what it felt like when the first WYSIWYG editors hit the market. PageMill launched and we said, “Amazing, this is what web editing should be.” But it turns out rich text just gets in the way. Markdown + limited HTML when needed is the way to go.

WordPress and GitHub fit into similar niches, but one is for writers and the other for developers.

The problem with Mastodon is its protocol is underspecified, therefore interop is really hard, and ultimately the standard, if any emerges, will be decided by the big tech companies and will be ridiculously complex. I think Bluesky has a better chance of being a solid stand...

Its proponents can be weird, it takes itself far too seriously, and its documentation is interminable. These are some ways that some people have described Christianity. This video is about React.js.

adactio.com/links/21387

I’ve been on a sabbatical from work for the past six weeks. At Clearleft, you’re eligible for a sabbatical after five years. For some reason I haven’t taken one until now, 19 years into my tenure at the agency. I am an idiot. My six-week sabbatical has been lovely, alterna...

Random thought. In hindsight Medium chose the wrong business model. They could have done what Automattic has done with WordPress. It's a private company so I don't know how much it's growing or how profitable it is, but from outside it's growing, and generates lots of cash. Basically, charge writers for the service. I think they would have done well. And open source the Medium editor, and offer it to Google to bundle with Chrome, and upgrade the whole web while you're at it. With billions of windfall from the success of Twitter, why argue over nickels and dimes. Ev had the ability to change the course of the industry, and make the same kind of money Google and Microsoft make. And yes, I did urge him to do this at the time, publicly (didn't have access to him privately, if you can believe that).

Here's the show notes page for the podcast from Sept 1, 2004.

September 2004 was the month when podcasting became a real community thing. Twenty years ago. I did eight podcasts that month. The mail list, which Adam started, was going strong. This is the month where podcasting got its name, thanks to some brilliant creativity from Dannie Gregoire. Until then we were calling them "audio blog posts" or some variant thereof. You can see it in this Google Trends graph. I started a special feed to echo my programs from 2004, I even got it registered in Apple's podcast database. There will be two podcasts in the feed today because I missed the one from yesterday. Still diggin!

So the human web, the people net, the your-net. Whatever it is called, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it is yours, if you want it. If you’re tired of the conglomerate-net, disgusted by the commercialised web, sick of being the product, allergic to The Algorithm, then you can have something else. Something of your own.

You want to upload your artwork? Write fanfic? World build? Document your developing Sistrum-playing skills? Discuss your experiences slice-of-life style? Experiment with poetry?

Do it.

Use wordpress if you want. Use Blogger. Hell, use Frontpage 98 if you want. Or learn some HTML And CSS and type it all up in notepad.exe. Or just HTML, don’t even bother with the CSS. Just make it yours.

adactio.com/links/21385