No more lies in news, that's the first new rule of journalism. We've had to live with a journalism that tries to give lies equal stature to actual news, but the two just don't mix. What happens if your news is half lies, the users don't believe anything you carry. This was predicted, in 2016 when it was clear that Putin's Russia was heavily influencing American journalism. They had developed their techniques in Ukraine in previous years, and the Ukraine press and government came to the same conclusion we're now arriving at -- stop at the first lie, turn the microphone off. That's the main rule, main change that has to take place now, in advance of the November election. They may not do it, but at least now we all understand that what they're doing is stupid, wrong, even corrupt. No matter what they don't get to keep their rep if they are laundering lies.
Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.
- Generator
- oldSchool v0.8.16
- Rights
- © copyright 1994-2026 Dave Winer.
- Public lists
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IndieWeb
- Fetched
And even better -- here's the RSS feed for my Threads account. This is a huge gateway for interop. I wonder how often the feed updates.
And here's the RSS feed. 😄
The way I see it, if the journos are going to lie to us, why shouldn’t we listen to lies that make us feel good?
A few minutes later, the feed is in my blogroll. 😄
When was the last time the owner of the NYT did a press conference?
One advantage of using GitHub for questions tied into a blog is that you get a great archive of all the questions you asked and how people answered or contributed, going back to 2016.
BTW, I've started using Mastodon in place of GitHub for comments on posts like the one below. GitHub has a better model for text with comments, supports full Markdown the way it was meant to work. I have an instance of Masto that I can use that supports Markdown but they do an unacceptable rendering of links. Example post. I want a simple, widely accepted easy place to comment, on the social web, not Discourse or GitHub, that isn't controlled by one vendor (so ActivityPub for now is probably the best approach) and supports plain old Markdown without any weird embellishments. I don't work in the Mastodon world, I'm already committed to the projects I'm doing. But we could really use something nice, designed to plug into blogs. This is a good use-case, and it's pretty close.
I wrote rules for standards-makers and it caught on, and has been used by a few open source projects. I hope that the new rules for journalism, which is just getting started, will be similarly influential. If existing journalism is going to start working again, they're going to have to have some rules. Comments welcome on Mastodon.
Musk is just getting started
Mass Deportation Now
This was promised at the Republican convention in July. August 15, 2004: My audio blog post from NYC, from my Podcast0 feed. Had just listened to an Adam Curry podcast and one from the Gillmor Gang. Played a bit of music, described how a podcatcher would work, pretty close to the way they work today. Shortly after the feature would be in Radio UserLand. It was the only episode I did in August 2004. The next one is on September 1 and there are a total of nine shows in September, including the first Trade Secrets which is a podcast Adam and I did together. Here's the archive for this blog in August 2004.
Let's stay organized after the election.
In today's installment of the Adventures of Wordle Kitty, the world's cutest and most adorable kitten was sentenced to life at Attica.
Pundits are idiots, part 2,297,748
The stupidest thing about all the pundits remarking on Kamala's rise in the polls is they are completely missing the story.
Here's the headline.
- "Thank god the Trump nightmare is almost over."
If you want an illustration, it's the flip side of this New Yorker cover.
Oh sweet Jesus. Please God, no. Anything but that. Come on.I am addicted to buying domains. Latest example. Ideally it would be a news site with all the latest videos from the Land of Kamala aka the United States of America.
So what are we doing on Threads and why does Facebook (aka Meta) want to get the best minds of Twitter using their software. I am not a lawyer and I haven't read the user agreement, but that said, I bet it has something to do with building out their AI model so they can compete with OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.
The best journalism is coming from the candidate.
I asked ChatGPT to put the Statue of Liberty on a $100 bill.
If you don't buy the new rules for journalism because the liars will tell lies about you, the journalist -- well, you get that either way, no matter what you do, so I don't see the problem. And if you want people to trust you, you've got to tell the truth. Your reputation gets destroyed by their lies if you pass them through. Might not seem fair, but if you can't be trusted you don't really have a job, do you. Maybe as a PR person, but not as a journalist. Doctors can tell you to stop smoking to save your life and the tobacco companies will accuse them of lying or whatever and some people (such as myself, earlier in life) will continue to smoke. You still have to do what's right if you want people to trust you.
Harris makes me proud
I ordered a Pixel Pro 9 today for delivery in September. Look forward to seeing what makes it so AI.
I started a this.how page for the new rules for journalism. Common-sense rules for reporters that they violate regularly, so now it's time to write them down.
There's a second new rule. Journalists do not make demands.
Just got a message from Slack that should serve as a warning to people who use other free services, expecting their archive to be maintained over time. It was too good to be true before. Now you need to ask vendors if that's true on their system.