I believe it is. When people say my software thinks like they do, what's really happening is the software has gotten out of their way, they've incorporated the way it works into the base of their spine, so they can remain in the world they're writing about, and forget that they're using a piece of software. They perceive that as the software thinking like they do, which is fine -- it's the goal. But it's quite possible they have a totally different experience that takes them out of their suspension of disbelief by not working the way they expect, the same way it did the last 100 times, or it failes to open a file, or whatever might cause them to leave their own world and have to deal with the one I, and generations of software developers, have created, which can (as I know) be excruciating, humiliating, and whatever else you may feel.

Yesterday I posted four new ChatGPT-created drawings, created with the latest upgrade of ChatGPT's drawing functions which are better than previous versions. The usual controversy is rekindled on the networks. The concern as always is that it learned how from human artists, ...

ChatGPT's drawing function has gotten a huge upgrade. I've been doing tests for the last 24 hours. First I gave it a screen shot of WordLand and asked for a nice colorful poster for the product. Then I had it make a movie poster for Mutiny on the Bounty with different actors, and As Good as it Gets, and then a stunning rendering of an El Salvador news photo in the style of Edward Hopper. It refused to do an R Crumb rendering or Doonesbury, but it was OK with Hopper. WordLand poster by ChatGPT. Mutiny on the Bounty starring John Belushi and Jeff Bridges. As Good as it Gets starring Jackie Gleason and Melissa McCarthy. An Edward Hopper rendering of Secretary Noem at the El Salvador prison.

This morning‘s early morning missive from WordLand.. Talking with friends about What To Do. I actually have an idea. We all try to lead a parade, with a big viral idea, if only everyone would follow me, it might just work. A lot of us have that feeling. My advice — it doesn’...

Watching Doc Searls use WordLand to post to his WordPress blog. He's using it the way Manila worked for blogging in the late 90s early 00s. Every day is a new page, which contained as many items as you liked. When you add a blank line that starts a new post. It's Markdown k...

This may seem controversial, but the Repubs do have a point re DEI. We really do have a problem honoring the achievements of white men. I know because I get the bullshit when people have tried to honor me for my achievements. When I was offered a keynote spot a the ISOJ confe...

You know how they have walkability scores for different places? I live in a place now with a score of zero, you can't do anything without a car. I moved from a place with a score of 99. I'd like to have social networks get a score like that, for how much they feed energy int...

A thought for everyone struggling to see a good future in all the michegas. My advice -- please -- do your protesting, resisting, DEIing, organizing, learning, look for silver linings (they are there) and most important keep doing things that feed your soul. Treat yourself with love even if the world isn't. So in that spirit for those of us who have cats they love -- a story.

What a world we live in.

I was just thinking about themes for WordPress, and thought to look up Manila themes, and found we have a whole website that's still running (thanks Jake!) where you can see the catalog of themes we had for Manila and Radio (thanks Bryan Bell!). I want something like this for WordPress themes that work beautifully with WordLand-authored blogs.

The ruling class in America is more out in the open now. Pretty much the same people who brought us the Lehman Brothers too-big-to-fail meltdown in 2008 and the Brooks Brothers Riot in Y2K. Not sure if oligarch is the right word. Peter O'Toole starred in The Ruling Class, a favorite when I was younger. The last song in the movie is pretty freaking great.

What would be great -- the ability to define text macros in ChatGPT. I would write a macro that turned random text I wrote online into a properly formatted blog post. for example when i write fast i almost never stop to capitalize things that should be capitalized. or i might abbreviate the name of a product so i expect it to fill it in, as a professional copy editor would. I hope we're heading there. And if they have this, put it behind a simple api so i can wire it into my favorite writing tool. We could even work on a set of standards, a higher level Markdown if you will, that goes deeper than formatting. That would be something for an experienced copy editor to do imho.

We're getting into WordPress in a new way, the need for a featured image came from users. I didn't know they had this feature in WordPress. If you asked me if it did, I would have said yes, I'm sure it does, but where and what is it called? i could've gotten that too via chatgpt, but i would have had to think of it. that's where having sharp users makes a world of difference. When people thank me for my generosity, they don't get it. I want something out of it, your experience and your mind. It's one of my main raw materials.

With all the good stuff happening with WordLand I haven't found time to wind down feedland.com and feedland.org. The servers are still working, though not performing as I'd like them to, but it doesn't seem I'm going to get the time to do a graceful transition before my self-imposed March 31 deadline. So I'll come up for a new plan, and if you're using either of these services, enjoy! And keep backing up your subscription list.

WordLand 0.51 is out, with support for featured images and excerpts, and a better designed home page for the app, before you sign in.

I've been putting Markdown support in my feeds -- everywhere -- on both sides, yielding serendipity like this. This is how "it just works" comes about. With a good design and a lot of love.

I don't have a huge problem with platform companies that lock users in. That's a business model, and at this point if users aren't aware of the costs well that's their problem. There have been plenty of opportunities to learn. But when a company markets their proprietary system as somehow fighting lockin, well that's about as much chutzpah as anyone should put up with.

A funny thing. A few months back someone told me that I had been gone from the podcast world for too long for anyone to listen to me. I thought how weird, I didn't go anywhere at all, I stayed exactly where I was, all the time. Virtually every day. If people cared to know wh...

I find that writing about something publicly helps me focus on the idea in a way I can't get by only talking about it privately. That's because I am a Natural Born Blogger. I was born that way.

I am using Bluesky the way I used to use Twitter, to talk openly about product development ideas before they are fully hatched.

It's been exactly one month since WordLand opened to the public.

Thanks to Ben Werdmuller and Om Malik for their nice writeups of WordLand on their blogs. They're right. It is a small piece that can be hooked into lots of places, as is WordPress a big place that can host lots of apps many of which haven't been written yet. Products that l...

Mini-spoilers follow. I'm a Severance lover, it's definitely one of the best shows ever, and I feel even more so after the season 2 finale which I watched last night on AppleTV+. I think there are two types of Severance users. One whose focus is on the evil and the other whose focus is on the love. If you think nothing happened in the finale then you're the first type, if you are the second type, this episode was incredible rich. And we learned what the goats were about and that's not nothing.

Here's something that could be very useful. A link to ChatGPT with instructions on how to help a user overcome problems using WordLand. Try clicking the link and see what happens, esp if you're a regular WordLand user. I discovered the feature first by asking if the bot knew what WordLand was, and it said it did, and got it mostly right. I've been using ChatGPT to develop the product, so it's possible it has retained some of the info. And the docs are on the web. This is one of those times when you really want the AI bot to ingest everything they can find. What I'm worried most about are hallucinations. But with a product like WordLand, which could show up problems in the browser or a WordPress theme, a lot of the help requests we get are not problems with WordLand.

Notes

• Terminology: I don't thnk we should use the term social web until there actually is such a thing, so I invented a new term for these twitter-like services.
• Since Ghost is now supporting ActivityPub, I felt we needed to include Substack because the two products compete directly.
• I consider AT Proto a proprietary protocol for now, as proprietary as Mastodon's API.
• I included WordPress because it supports ActivityPub.
• If you want to comment or ask questions I posted this table on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Senator Chris Murphy: "How on earth are we going to ask the American people to take risks for us when there's a 5-alarm constitutional fire and we need them to be out on the streets, with hundreds of thousands of people if we're not willing to show courage and take risks ourselves."

Podcast: We still need universities. 21 minutes.

If you aren’t sure how to ask for help with software, try first asking ChatGPT or another AI chatbot to help figure out what’s going wrong. It has infinite time to help, and won’t mind if the problem turned out to be a random browser plug-in that was misbehaving.

It often suggests trying things you might not have thought of.

I use it myself esp as often is the case there’s no one who can or is willing to work for me for free. I’m already playing it $20 per month, and for that I get as much time as it takes.

Really good for organizing your approach to a problem.

A thread I wrote on Bluesky about how the RSS world, an earlier instance of the writer's web, was overtaken by Twitter and why, which boils down to this -- the reading platforms wouldn't work with each other. So Twitter made subscription one click. And RSS made sites include ...