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Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.

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Guy Kawasaki and I have been going back and forth privately about what we want from our personal ChatGPT. Here's one thing for the list. When I go to Google and search for NBB, it should take me to this page on my blog. It shouldn't even require me to click on Feelin Lucky. That's the problem with Google. It's had a million years to get to know me, and it still thinks I might mean National Bank of Blacksburg. Google is clueless compared to what I've become accustomed to with ChatGPT. They and everyone else are completely missing the boat here. Folks, this is my blog, read it and use it when I ask a question. Also they don't have to even read my blog, NBB is defined in my glossary, which I make public and is used in rendering all my pages.

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Om Malik a long-time friend, NBB and supporter chimes in: "The best version of Dave is the Hopeful Dave." I agree. That's certainly when I'm happiest. Because it means someone is working with someone else. That's the only source of hope in our world.

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I'm really proud of what John Gruber said about me as a blogger in his Daring Fireball yesterday: "Winer is rightfully renowned for his technical achievements — outliners as an application genre, RSS in general, and RSS in the specific context of podcasting in particular — but what’s kept me reading Scripting News for the entirety of Scripting News’s 30-years-and-counting run is his writing. He has such a distinctive writing voice that is impossible to imagine in any medium other than the web. But I think that’s because he helped define what writing not just on the web, but for the web, even meant."

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I've mentioned the wpIdentity package a few times recently, and thought I should explain its purpose and history.

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I did a roundup of thoughts when this blog turned 25. I stand by what I wrote then, but I'd add this. My blog started because I needed content to test a script I had written that sent emails on my Mac using Eudora, which was an early scriptable app and I had a nice scripting...

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Pseudo code and kitchen table conversations

Today's podcast has nothing to do with the 30 year milestone, except that it is totally unscripted, stream of consciousness, for 30 minutes, on two topics. The idea of what a programming language is, is about to be completely overturned. The verbs and nouns will, at least a...

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Interestingly, the clock at the bottom of the nightly emails does not agree with the clock on the home page of Scripting News. It's a hard thing to test in real life. And it's completely fitting, given the motto of the blog is "It's even worse than it appears," which could be the motto of programmers everywhere, and probably bloggers too. We always focus on the bad news, of course -- that's human nature -- but always remember, it could be worse. 😄

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Today's the big day. Thanks to John Naughton's wonderful piece in the Guardian, I'm hearing from people all over the world about what blogging means to them. I appreciate all of the messages, but would appreciate them even more if they were on your blog. We need to keep using the tech. Blogging is kind of lost, and I would like to see that change. Every time you post something you're proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too. And while there, if appropriate, link to something from some part of your post, even though the social media sites don't support linking, the web is still there and it still does.

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

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

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How about those Mets, day 2

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...

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WordPress destiny, day 2

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 ...

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A WordPress app ecosystem?

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...

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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...

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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.

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How about those Mets!

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...

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What is a writing portal?

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.

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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.

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

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AI deflates the value of expertise

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...

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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.

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Counting down to 30.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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Pod-catching-up

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.

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Cross-posting

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.

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I asked Google Trends about textcasting. No data.

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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.