I posted the above piece around the social web, I like the way it looks on Threads the best.

An eye-opening segment on Brian Lehrer's show today. The first half is an interview with Hakeem Jeffries, you can skip that part, pretty standard stuff. It gets interesting at 17:50 when they take calls from listeners. A lot of different points of view from people of all age...

Now that Elon Musk is giving so generously, dollars and flow, to the fascists, he's encouraging more of us to use Zuckerberg's twitter-like system, aka Threads. But Zuck isn't making it go down easy. There's a piece in Bloomberg (paywall) that says Trump is badass but isn't supporting either candidate. What could possibly go wrong?

Matt says some interesting new stuff is coming from Automattic now that WordPress 6.6 is out. Something for writers? Perhaps something that moves WordPress into a space adjacent to twitter-like systems? They just added support for Threads to WordPress, so now you can crosspost from a blog to a thread. Haven't tried it yet. They also have a new identity system built around Gravatar, announced in early June. It'll be interesting to see what they come out with. I wonder if there is a developer ecosystem building on this, and if they have an evangelism program. I have my own vision of how these things should work.

If the world doesn't know you did something you might as well not have done it. This is what Doug Engelbart learned, and what we learned in his aftermath. He is known for inventing the mouse, because that's the one thing he invented everyone knows about. He also developed software that pioneered using a computer to organize your ideas. For the most part people don't know about that because (I guess) most people don't organize their work?

I'm avoiding the actual RNC, the speakers are just actors. Trump looks like the Queens kid he is. People from Queens don't feel like we really belong, except with other Queens people. We expect to be thought of as the kid from Queens. I know this so well. So the "boss" slumps around not sure what to do or say. He's not gregarious. Not in charge of anything.

Nancy Wicklund Gonzalez: "I’ve had to switch to watching the BBC. American news is unwatchable. Between the lionization of a sociopath and the denigration of a decent man, I just can’t even."

Today's song: It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).

The Repubs can win by throwing the election into the House. They can probably get it by the courts in enough places, just a couple of swing states, and they win even if they lose by normal vote-counting methods. The whole bit about Biden's age is meant to distract us from the fact it probably doesn't matter how old the Democratic candidate is.

A podcast about listening to the podcasts from 2004.

This is a short episode about what I learned, and what's coming up.

Humbling experience.

Highly recommend this Netflix series -- esp the last three episodes. I found it enlightening, even though I lived through most of this history, I never saw it all put together in a series of events over decades. I came out of it with a much clearer perspective of where we are in the Cold War. It never was over. "The end of history" was too good to be true. Also glad I read so much about slavery a few years ago. If you put both these together, you get the USA, and the deep and lasting wounds we keep re-opening.

Today's adventure: "The great and cute Wordle Kitty was surprisingly chosen to be the running mate of the most popular presidential candidate in the history of the United States, who happens to also be very very old so that’s why they nominated the cute little cat to be the vice president because she is so young and so incredibly cute."

And btw, don't panic. You can't accomplish anything that way.

The problem with JD Vance is that he's empty inside, he'll be whatever he needs to be to get more power, and he's young. He's as empty as Trump, and much younger, so we can't hope to outwait him. Now we have a real problem, because Trump has a successor. I imagine Trump's so...

Shownotes for the Podcast0 from July 16, 2004.

NYT -- put one of your readers on the op-ed page, so we can talk to your readers about you. It would be the bravest and smartest thing you ever did.

Al Sharpton should write the defining op-ed in the NYT, not George Clooney, who is very pretty, and a great choice to cast in movies like Up In The Air or Michael Clayton, but we don't know anything about his political judgement. He hasn't done anything to tell us who he is ...

We. Need. To. Organize. Democrats should roll out new initiatives with the same skill as Apple rolls out new products. Not the same as Steve Jobs, that's asking too much. But with focus and showmanship, and a livestream, and fanbois and Al Sharpton in place of John Gruber. F...

We should hire an intern at some J-school to keep track of all of my tweets, write them down, then translate each into a rule for what a news organization should do instead of not do. Flip the sense of the rule in other words.

Then we feed those rules to an AI.

Then we flow in the news stories of the day from various sites through the same AI for translation. Yes I know they'd complain vociferously, but which ones you use don't matter because the AI algorithm will translate whatever they are to Dave Winer tense.

Then of course publish them to another site called The News That Helps Us All Stay Sane.

In today's Kitty Komix episode: "The very cute but also very courageous Wordle Kitty is learning how to be a surgeon. They brought a mysterious leader into the operating room and asked the Kitty to please operate on the leader and save his life so Wordle Kitty got out the textbook and read up on brain surgery, even though the patient only had a nick on his ear, which was admittedly very bloody, she operated on the patient’s brain and unfortunately the patient died. So we are looking at the scene where the dead body of the patient is on the operating table and Wordle Kitty is smoking a cigarette, relaxing and reflecting on what she learned. She’s still very cute of course."

TWiT studio in Petaluma is shutting down. A lot of great stuff came out of this place. Please take a video of the studio before it closes down for good. I've learned this over and over, having shut down a few offices where great stuff was created and forgetting to do this.

On this blog 20 years ago: "Our mission when covering the DNC is to figure out what goes on at a DNC. On the other hand, some portion of the 15,000 reporters at the DNC will be trying to figure out what we, the bloggers, are doing at the DNC. I suspect most of them will conclude that we don't belong there, in the same way most of the early articles about weblogs concluded we are not going to kill professional journalism." This turned out to be true.

Shownotes for today's Podcast0 episode.

The shownotes for today's Podcast0 episode. The shownotes pages now have a player. Still have a little more work to do on it. I like this because it's a lightweight project, which is something I need while the world is boiling over.

This blog 20 years ago today.

BTW, I'm intermittently locked out of my Threads account. They say it has to do with automated stuff they don't explain. I don't have any apps that do anything with Instagram or Threads. I tried changing the password. Anyway, I was just starting to like the network, it has i...

The show notes for today's Podcast0 episode.

This blog 20 years ago today.