And here, for the record, is the archive for November. A relatively lite month, only 87K worth of text. The norm is about 120K.

Welcome to the last month of Scripting News in the year 2024. Each year goes by faster and faster. And as we move forward in time, there's less room in front of us on the runway of life, and more behind us. At some point in the next decade my plane will probably take off. I feel a sense of urgency about getting it done. Still a fair amount on my todo list, but I'm making progress. As someone once said many times: Still diggin!

I wasn't clear enough yesterday. We're losing the word "podcast" very quickly. It's come to mean video interviews on YouTube mostly. Our only hope is upgrading the open platform in a way that stimulates the imagination of creators, and there's no time to waste. If you make a podcast client, it's time to start collaborating with competitors and people who create RSS-based podcasts to take advantage of the open platforms with no silo walls, otherwise having a podcast will mean getting distribution deals from Google, Apple, Spotify and Amazon. And they, as we know, are nuzzling up to the government leaders, who will want to impose severe limits. This isn't a casual request, it's urgent.

I've been working on a reboot of Bingeworthy over the last few days.

Today's song: I guess the lord must be in New York City.

Heres's where I'll post ideas to help podcasting stay open.

Think about primarying Democratic candidates not from the right or left, but from courage, intellect, and power in communication. People who say what they think and know if the press excoriates you, you can survive it, and the users will love you for it.

I want to add an important feature to podcasting that can only work with RSS, it can’t work with Spotify, Google, Audible etc. The idea is subscribing to subscription lists, which the influencers are likely to really love because they can create networks of podcasts. And when they want to edit the list, if this is done right, the users will automatically be updated. The RSS-based podcast industry just hasn’t been moving and if we don’t add features, improve the tech with new features for creators and users, then we deserve what we get. More on the technology to come in subsequent blog posts. But this is the core idea, just to get started.

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate the holiday. What am I thankful for? Peloton for one. And living in the most beautiful part of the United States, except for all the other most beautiful parts. I know we're going to find our way out of this mess. My hope is we all sta...

Analogously, Trump is Kennedy and Biden/Harris is Nixon. And the social web is 2024, what TV was in 1960. Trump has mastered the new medium. To a large extent, he created the new medium, and the resulting network formed around him. So when Carville says he wants to figure o...

Every generation or two you hear about a few tech wiener boys who think after getting founders stock at a Silicon Valley company and getting his picture in Business Week or TechCrunch that he should run Africa or make up some country and for a minute tries doing it and no one pays much attention and a generation or two later it happens again, and the conclusion is that being a tech wiener boy doesn’t really prepare you to do anything but make a bunch of money once, be bored, and really nothing else. First time I witnessed this phenomenon was with a few product marketing wünderbrats at Apple in the early 80s, smart people (not kidding) but not nearly as smart as they thought they were. A big part was the serendipity of being in a Hobee’s or Buck's when Steve Jobs or a Kleiner partner was having breakfast after a big IPO.

Podcast: We elected Archie Bunker. 17 minutes.

Carville gets close to the answer. The Dems shut down their online operation on Election Day, go off the air for 3.5 years, then reboot. The Repubs never sign off. Trump is Archie Bunker. People vote for him, even if they don't agree, over the stranger they don't know. Voters kept saying this, but somehow this didn't register. Never nominate a candidate again who isn't very well known to and tolerated by the electorate. Forget about gotchas. The old Dems revolve around fear of being got. It's no longer a problem, a flaw proves you're genuine, authentic. Dems need a complete overhaul top to bottom. Their next leader should have a top podcast, because that's how you will govern from now on. Expect to be surprised how Trump does this starting Jan 20.

I just wrote a for-real post on my WordLand site.

In January 2017, I scooped everyone, by years, on the idea that a billionaire could buy Twitter and thus purchase the presidency. That value wasn't priced into the stock price of TWTR. No one listened. Here's the next installment. The US government acquires Twitter. Elon Musk is of course named Secretary of Twitter. The "constitution" reconceived for online twitter-like systems, says every other online system has to go through twitter.com to reach users. It will act as their gateway to the net. There will be resistance, but by that time there will be no actually independent twitter-like systems, they will all be owned by venture capital funds, or individual billionaires, and of course they will conform because they are also owned to a large degree by Musk. We will have been cartelized, which is one step beyond enshitified.

It's important that Bluesky increase its character limit to 500 because they are not alone. Today there are so many twitter-like systems that are useful, people want to cross-post. If I'm writing something I plan to cross-post, and I pass the 300-char limit, but I'm not finished, what to do. These days generally I view 500 as the actual limit, which means when my cross-poster tries to publish to Bluesky it fails. We should be trying to coalesce on an idea of what a text document is in the mid-late 20s. I've put my proposal out.

The usual block-inducing mindless bullshit is most definitely showing up on Bluesky. I wonder if people understand the economic box that's pushing them into. It's so important that if it's going to be the next Twitter, we as a world, invest in lifeboats to get off the ship quickly and easily if Hulk Hogan ends up being the czar of Bluesky. Weirder things are possible my friends.

According to Blogtree, 259 blogs considered Scripting News their parent blog, ie they were inspired to start blogging by this blog.

One of the best things about ChatGPT is that you can ask it to put together exactly the report you want, that the news orgs aren't writing, or you can't find, or get to through paywalla. In this query, I learned about how Republicans deal with intersex people and bathrooms, they apparently don't. Not surprising, to tell the truth.

Rule #2. You have permission. If you want someone else to do something, and they haven't done it, or you don't want to wait, you have permission to do it yourself. You can invoke this rule when someone says "who do they think they are." You had permission, according to rule #2.

If there was going to be a User's Charter for Bluesky, item one would be: You can give me the benefit of the doubt. Let's not argue, esp not about details. We assume the other person is smart. That's one way we get stuff done.

If such a network existed, we would be nominating our own Cabinet members, the shadow Cabinet. Let the journalists compare the qualifications of our candidates vs the incumbent party's. Create news. That's what the Dems absolutely suck at. They very quietly pass legislation that the other party (which votes against) takes credit for. One party is on the air, the other is not. We need to change that. We make news. And we listen to each other, not just the stuffed shirts who run the party now.

Imagine if the Democratic Party ran a Bluesky clone where being able to post means you're a dues-paying member of the party. We can vote on referendums, support or not support Democratic initiatives. Site would never shut down, and would support campaigns when they're running. It would cost money to belong to the site. This would keep trolling under control, and would fund projects the community would sponsor, and also pay for operating the service. No advertising, no billionaires sponsoring. They can be members like everyone else.

Given that the conversation has rightly turned to billionaire-proofness of Bluesky, if they allow devs to build on Bluesky with RSS in and out, that's enough to alleviate the concern about it being billionaire-proof.

They already support outbound RSS. Now just let us get into the system with just RSS. Yes, I know it's a "third party opportunity" but something like this, to have the required value, has to be a fully supported and maintained feature of the platform.

Let's do this right, and we can spread this into Masto-Land and Threads-Land and then we can thank Elon Musk for helping us not just bridge these systems, but make them all part of the same freaking system.

We can do this.

I just realized that there's another kind of enshitification that we're experiencing now because the twitter-verse has split into so many forks. Bluesky is hot now, but this isn't over yet. Developers are deliberately locking their users in by creating new APIs that are not ...

I just realized that there's another kind of enshitification that we're experiencing now because the twitter-verse has split into so many forks. Bluesky is hot now, but this isn't over yet. Developers are deliberately locking their users in by creating new APIs that are not ...

I started a feature list on the About WordLand page.