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Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.
IndieWeb
I upgraded feedland.org to a new version of the system software, still being tested. In the process I started a fresh items table. This means for the next day or so your timeline may have a lot of items for a few feeds, as it catches up with every feed it keeps track of. Also, the server was down for a couple of hours while we did the upgrade. Still diggin! ;-)
AI is as good at writing software as it is in creating competent visual art. It's only amazing in terms of how much more a novice can do. It doesn't mean what they create is interesting in more than a gee-wiz way, and the novelty fades pretty quickly I've found.
Another thing I should have mentioned, about the title of the podcast, is that I think this is the last chance for the open web. It may already be too late. Look at what's happening politically in the US now and ask how tolerant the government is going to be for an open web. We always had to deal with the possibility that they would shut down free speech here. It has been tried, and didn't work in the 90s. But the guardrails that existed then possibly don't exist now. The same things that are forcing CBS for example to become a controlled press, will affect the web too, but you won't read about it in the NYT or hear about it on Maddow because they have very low regard for the amateur writing on the web. They only respect commercial writing.
BTW, one of the things I should have mentioned in yesterday's podcast is that the product isn't just WordLand, it's also FeedLand. The two are connected by a well-developed WebSocket interface, which I will provide code for, as well as docs for what goes over the wire. I think a lot of feed aficionados will find this really interesting (and also really simple).
Podcast: Last chance for the open web.
I want to start reading a bunch of WordPress community blogs.
If all the people who love RSS and make software for it, feed readers, editors, blogging software, put our heads together, we could make a great network for people to write on, that would be so exciting, it would pull a lot of interest from the silos. If momentum builds, they will eventually add RSS as an inbound and outbound format because they will want to be on this network.
We, as writers, shouldn't have to live with the compromises that come from having to make 5 versions of everything, and still you don't have a way to share a lot of the interesting stuff people write.
If we choose to work together, even just a few of us, we could make big change.
General note: When I say RSS, I recognize that there are other feed formats, but I don't want to confuse things. The software makes all that transparent, so let's make it transparent for the users too, ok?
A motto for WordLand. "All the tools you need right where you write."
A new kind of spam or phishing email. Appears to be a challenge by Twitter of one of my posts there as a copyright infringement, which it most definitely is not. You have to look closely at the URL it takes you to, which is on this domain. assents-x.com. Hmm at first looks legit, but look more closely.
I want my blog on the same network as my social media.
AI chatbots should drop the pretense of being human.
Today's song: Jambalaya on the Bayou.
Mea culpa: Unfortunately I misquoted Joni, she said "paved" not "took." I'm going to leave the mistake in the piece.
There are two quotes that make me laugh in the Think Different piece from last week. One of them is here: "They took paradise and.." At first, if you're roughly my age, you read "They took paradise and..." and recognize it as the beginning of a famous line from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi. The other is a subtle touch of sarcasm, that I usually try not to indulge in, but let pass through as I edited this piece. See if you can find it.
If you want to get an idea of how well WordPress has been bridged to ActivityPub, check this out. It's time for Mastodon to adopt these features across the board, so when writing in Masto you can use linking, style, titles, 10K character limit. Raise the bar. Let's bring more of the web into social media. Esp linking.
A podcast from post-Katrina New Orleans, Dec 2005.
One of life's lessons is if someone does something evil to you, and you decide to let it go, they are sure to do it again and again until you stop letting them do it.
Everything Trump is doing to steal the next election is proof of why Colorado was right to deny him a place on the 2024 ballot. The Supremes gave him four years to prepare, to learn from his mistakes, now he'll do it from the top seat. It seems certain to work.
I like what Vivaldi says about the web. It makes me want to do more to re-stock the web with interesting, inspiring human ideas. Maybe we could make our blogging software work better with their browser. All for the web, for humanity.
If I were running Bluesky I’d have a quiet project to make a lite Bluesky server that peers with the mother ship, highly factored, in a Node package, open source of course. Get the snake oil phase behind them, where they’re claiming to be decentralized, but aren’t.
It's the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina which wiped out New Orleans, a major American city, which I knew because I went to college there. I went there in December 2005 to get an idea of what a post-apocalyptic American city looks like. On the flight from Atlanta to New Orleans, a 50-minute podcast with Janet, a woman who lost her house and all her possessions in the Lakeview section of New Orleans. It's quite possible this and the one that followed were the only contemporary podcasts about Katrina, because in 2005 there wasn't all that much podcasting going on. You can see these episodes in the Morning Coffee Notes program listing.
