1 day, 3 hours, 4 minutes, 49 seconds until this blog is 30.

I am reminded of 2015, when the Mets were so charmed -- they could be down 9-0 in the 8th inning and you would tune into the game to see how they'd win it. It's not the usual thing for the Mets, who pull defeat from the jaws of victory far more often than the other way. And...

Glad I wrote the piece I wrote yesterday. I could have written it any time in the last year as I was investigating and developing on the WordPress API and back end, but now seemed to be a good time, with all the attention its getting, and Matt's interviews, I and others are ...

A few years before WordPress came out, I did a product called Radio UserLand which was a combination blogging tool and feed reader. Two main screens, a streamlined UI. You could get in quickly, write and publish a post in a minute, and see it show up in the reader a moment l...

I think a lot of confusion about AI products comes from the name. It's not clear what intelligence in humans is or how it works. We just believe it exists. So then the question is, can machines do the same thing? The truth is no one knows. It could be that human intelligence...

An idea for Gabe at Techmeme. Here's a screen shot of a story on Techmeme. I don't have time to click on each of the links, but a machine can. I would love to get a AI-generated summary of all the links, the range or reactions, or a consensus if one has emerged.

Around the kitchen table in my childhood home, the default question was "What did the Mets do?" We are a Mets family. Before I was born we were a Brooklyn Dodgers family, always National League, but the Dodgers left shortly after I was born and the Mets came along when I was...

So far we've only created reading portals. What I want for myself and for you, is a writing portal.

• A reading portal brings a lot of writers together so you can read them all in one place.
• A writing portal is the same idea but in reverse. I write in my portal, and it flows where ever I want it to.

The problem is the reading portals aren't open to allow this to work.

They all want you to write in their tiny little text boxes.

A ChatGPT news network would be pretty interesting. You could register as an independent blogger, and push your writing up to their cloud in real time. And then readers could ask what experts on whatever think about what just happened and it would know what your expertise is, and it could build the report also in realtime, in response to a very detailed question you could ask. And you could tell it whether or not you want lies, or if they should omit the lies. Personally I would opt out of the lies, but some people like lies in their news, kind of like menthol in cigarettes. And forget about paying the news orgs. They don't give you a way to opt out of the lies.

So far we've only created reading portals. What I want for myself and for you, is a writing portal. Think about it.

I didn't read the WSJ story about the deflation of expertise, quoting Vinod Khosla, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who I know from my time in California. He says AI leads to a deflation of expertise. I agree with him, AI absolutely deflates the value of expertise. It ag...

I didn't like the code ChatGPT was writing for me, so I tried it in Claude, and the code is much closer to my style. I may try that again. I've heard it's better at supporting code than other chatbots.

Counting down to 30.

IT WOULD BE AMAZING IF IN THE LAST WEEKS OF THE CAMPAIGN JOURNAILSTS DECIDED THEY CARE ABOUT OUR COUNTRY AND THE REST OF THE WORLD AND START REPORTING THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS ELECTION AND HOPE FOR THE BEST IF TRUMP IS ELECTED. OTHERWISE THE ONLY HONORABLE CHOICE IS TO QUIT.

I have been looking for this picture of John Palfrey, and just found it via digging through the archive for September 2004.

It has been pointed out that this blog will be 30 years old on October 7, not October 10, as I had previously reported. The clock at the bottom of story pages is correct. It currently reads: 29 years, 11 months, 25 days, 19 hours, 1 minute, 34 seconds.

Trade Secrets Radio: What is podcasting? This is the exact moment, 9/24/2004, that podcasting got its name and its definition. It's pretty short. We knew what we were doing. We loved what RSS did for news. Now we were doing the same for radio. Not just talking about it, but finally -- doing it. It worked, pretty freaking well. There's a podcast episode to go with it, coming out shortly.

I have a lot of podcast catching up to do today.

• A Trade Secrets podcast from Sept 28, 2004.
• An Morning Coffee Notes episode from the same day, about Bloglines, an early feed reader, the commons and fair compensation for centralized commons.

Cross-posting is here now. I am not surprised Croissant is getting such a positive reception.

That is where the fediverse will be defined imho, in the intersection between the competing social web services.

You'll know it's working when they feel they have to match each others' features because with cross-posting their difference in character limits, titles, styling, links etc will be much more visible.

Activitypub is too much. Cross-posting is exactly right and here now.

I asked Google Trends about textcasting. No data.

I had a dream last night with many of my dead relatives present. We were at some kind of social event. My grandfather had a new wife or girlfriend, but he didn't recognize me, though he pretended to. My mother was far off in the distance taking pictures. I wonder what that means. Some of them were dead and gone. I had to remind myself of that. Meanwhile both my parents were alive and being themselves. (Heh.) My subconscious has a clear idea of who they are/were, only it doesn't register that some of them are gone.

I'm still waiting for the podcast client that can subscribe to OPML lists, so I can subscribe to shows from my desktop, and even automate it. If one of them did, we could start curated lists of feeds put together by smart people and influencers. The first podcast client that did this would open up the market, and stand out from the pack. I've been asking for this from the inception of podcasting twenty years ago. I had it in my first podcatcher. It would be great if one of the popular clients of today adopted the idea. Happy to help.

Here is the monthly archive for Scripting News in OPML, for September. I've been systematically creating this archive since May 2017. And also have been able to reconstruct the archive for most of Scripting News going back to 1994. I've been doing a lot of work with the contents of this archive in the last month.

And finally, if I were the czar of ActivityPub, I'd add Markdown support to the spec because it ain't the web if you can't link in your writing. Maybe even invent some new kinds of links, after all it's been 35 years since the first web was invented.

If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I'd add Markdown support to Threads so writers could use the basic communication tool of the web.

If I were benevolent dictator of BlueSky, I'd add Markdown support there too. Btw, can you really claim to be part of the social web when you don't support the web's most basic feature -- linking??

If I were benevolent dictator of Mastodon, I'd add Markdown support everywhere so we'd have links and simple styling.

New episode from the Podcast0 feed about the open source release of Frontier, still the most powerful scripting environment ever. Someday the ideas in this product will be commonplace. And I would love to use a Linux port if anyone is so inclined.

If you want to help the open web, when you write something you’re proud of on a social web site like Bluesky or Mastodon, also post it to your blog. Not a huge deal but every little bit helps.

Thread: Much easier than struggling with ActivityPub, would be a set of functionally equivalent APIs and a common understanding of what a “post” is among various social web systems. This how we created solid interop in the blogging world, and it would work here too.