Elon Musk bought the biggest airport on the social web. A major world hub like Atlanta, London or Dubai. Bluesky is a regional airport in a cool place, maybe Austin. Mastodon is a small network of airports, like the ones served by Ryanair in Europe. Threads is potentially...

The Wikipedia page for Living Videotext begins with one of our slogans. It was a joke, and meant to keep us humble, so we listen to users. It was one of many such slogans. LVT made some important contributions to the networks we use today. Wikipedia should talk about that first, show some respect, for crying out loud. Otherwise, except for that snipe up front, the account is actually pretty accurate.

BTW, it's nice to see the DNC including influencers this year. I hear them say this is the first time, but I beg to disagree. A few dozen bloggers were at the DNC in 2004, and were treated well, in many ways. I think the word influencer and blogger have fairly similar meanings. Blogger is a broader term, because it's possible to have a very small readership for a blog, thus not be influencing very much, but still have a lot of value. And you always can influence your mom and little sister, right? 😄

Respect the reader. This isn't exactly a new rule for journalism, but it's worth mentioning anyway. If you wouldn't want to read the piece yourself, don't let them put your name on it. Example. A story promises to tell you about 47 seconds that saved Kamala Harris's career. ...

I'm working on a project which may or may not ship publicly, but it presents an interesting design challenge anyway. The idea is I want to write lots of little bits, less than 1000 words each, they have titles, use styling, links, include images, etc. But it could also be a...

I was kvelling the other day about rss.app and how they have feeds for Threads accounts. They do. But there are two caveats.

1. It costs $9.99 per month for 15 feeds. Could be a bit expensive for some people's budgets.
2. The second concern is more serious. It doesn't handle titleless items properly. It repeats the contents of the tweet in the title and description of the feeds it generates. An example. This is not right, and it's not the way Mastodon and Bluesky do it. There's nothing wrong with items that have no titles. When an item has no title you do the common sense thing -- omit the title. I'm happy to help with this. I wrote the RSS 2.0 spec, and am something of an authority on this. It's important to get this right.

BTW, Olliver Willis is right, the Dems don't need the journos.

I was surprised that Donald Trump was so famous because I didn't watch reality TV. I come from NY and he was a pretty small thing in NY, even though I guess the rest of the world thinks he's big in NY.

• I come from Queens, actually, so I know the Trump character pretty well too. Self-important narcissists who inside feel worthless, lashing out at everything they come in contact with. Not the ordinary Scotch/German in Queens, but not that rare either.

The same thing is probably happening now with Elon Musk, because attention of people like me has wandered away from Twitter, but the audience is huge, and probably every bit as movable as it was for Trump in 2016, and Musk owns it? Seems so.

People who think this is over are fooled, imho.

Read this piece in today's Guardian for another perspective.

Another possible rule for journalism. Employ new kind of op-ed writer. Appointed to a two-year weekly column, where they expose flaws in stories that have appeared in the publication, either news or editorial. They should have expertise in areas your publication covers. They...

Journalism is very important part of how our country works yet there is no accountability, no checks and balances, no requirement of transparency. There isn’t even a mechanism to disagree with them. most of the time they have the only voice. We don’t even know what they’re trying to do, what their goals are.

I would almost add a rule that journalists should have respect for critics, we'll save that for the rules of 2030 if there is any journalism left.

John Goodman explains what to do if you get ahead by $2.5 million.

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.

Thank you for reading the NY Times so I don't have to.

Watch out when reporters say something said on their air or in their pub is "misleading." What they really mean is someone just lied in their space. Heard it just now on NPR after a Republican was using "talking points" that were "misleading." Of course lies are misleading, b...

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. 😄

And here's the timeline for Kamalahq, via FeedLand.

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?

I'm looking for an RSS feed for Kamalahq.

Feature requests for Threads.

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.

Podcast: 11 minutes. I see happy talk all over the place that Twitter is done, Musk is killing it, blah blah blah. It's bullshit. In the next few months Twitter is going to morph into the political system that Barack Obama could have and should have built. It turns out crea...

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.