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.

This blog has been running for: 29 years, 11 months, 22 days, 20 hours, 43 minutes, 55 seconds. Still diggin!

BTW, I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm working on the reading interface for my blog. What you see when you go to scripting.com. I'm putting the same kind of attention into it that I did for the blogroll earlier this year. And there are a few unreleased products that use the same approach. There are many new things in this work -- the way we read the web hasn't been worked on in a long time. We've settled for a pretty awful way of reading. I want to fix writing too, and have plans for this, but I thought I should do some work on reading as well. I wish I could show you all the new ideas, but I'm saving that for a big reveal at some point. I've changed the way I develop, again. For the better, I believe.

I've fallen behind on my Podcast0 feed. This is the episode for Sept 27, 2004. And there were two podcasts on the next day, the 28th, and I'm going to re-release those over the next couple of days. Today's episode is a review of an RSS reader that Yahoo came out with. I wasn't happy with it. The next one actually kind of historic, it's about the open source release of Frontier. It's still out there, and I really want it running on Linux if anyone is interested. More later.

I should put a dollar in a jar every time ChatGPT saves my ass. I thought I had boxed myself into a corner regarding the hash value for a web page, then I asked a question I wasn't sure there was an answer to. "In JS in the browser, I have the name of an anchor element and I want the browser to vertically scroll to it," to which it said: "Here's an example." I would definitely pay $1 for that. :-)

Molly White wrote a great piece on the problem we're all facing now that so many of us are trying to maintain a presence on a few different social web sites. She describes a situation I've been writing about since the mid-late 00s, with the inception of Twitter and Google Re...

Guy Kawasaki sent a summary of my career created by his new chatbot. Very flattering. :-)

I've had the same thought as Dan Froomkin, of course -- esp given how much voodoo is in weighting various things, the polls are junk. But, she could be winning much bigger than the polls say. And wouldn't that be nice. ❤️ But do you remember part of the 2016 postmortem was...

When markets have dominant products, evolution freezes. Google search, for example. I should have great search for my blog by now, powered by Google. It has been here for 26 years. They should have been doing R&D on how they can be part of a better reading environment on...

An idea for a news org. I want a for-pay site where I can ask a question about the news and get the most up-to-date answer. I'd like to link to that page from a blog post, and have it either be frozen, to document where we were on that day, or dynamic, so that it changes over time. I'm sure this product will be here soon, so obvious.

Why do I care about what social web means? Because I plan to add functionality to this space. I'm tired of all the stupid limits these products have. Titles or no titles. 300 character limits. No links, etc etc and on and on. Where did they get the idea that taking features out of writing was something they could do. What a wrong turn we took there. And now that once we have a chance to erase the limits, maybe -- none of the companies running their products are doing it. I don't want the way they do it to be the only way, the products are deliberately incompatible. Social web is the best name for what I'm working on. So I need to reserve this space. They didn't ask for my opinion, the first I heard of it was a press release. When I ship my thing I want to point back at this and say look -- I did tell you this was going to be a problem.

The question came up on Threads as to whether the ActivityPub support in Ghost will be a full two-way presence in the fedisphere, and apparently the answer is yes. They are working on a feed reader that also hooks into AP. That's how I would have done it. Really feeds and tw...

Another test post.

When I'm working on new stuff I often use Scripting News, my blog, as the test case for an experiment. This is one of those times. I will post this and then delete it and see what happens. You can safely ignore this message. We apologize for any inconvenience. 😄

oursocialweb.org: You don't have to give it any money or come to any meetings. Just know that someone else believes in users and developers. And let's work together to make it great, as soon as we can, without waiting for the big companies.

I started using the term "social web" on my blog a few months ago. I liked it because it was broad, and it inherited all the qualities of the web, most important that no one owned it, so that it could be a space for independent developers that worked for the benefit of users...

Interesting situation in Atlanta with the Mets. They have two more games to play with the Braves, but there's a hurricane headed toward Atlanta. It's going to start raining at 1PM and won't stop until Friday afternoon. It's the end of the season and both the Braves and Mets are in the same wildcard battle. Do the Mets stay in Atlanta to ride out the storm, or head back to NY? It's far more weird than I have time to explain right now.