Shownotes page for the first Trade Secrets podcast, on this day in 2004. I was in Seattle, Adam was coming from Belgium. Haven't written any notes about it yet. If others are interested in listening and commenting on these podcasts, this is when it was all coming together, let me know and perhaps we can start a thread on Mastodon.

I was recruited to speak at a Ria Novosti conference in Moscow in June 2011, but decided not to go. This was back when we thought naively that Russia was a democracy, and working with Russian journalists, when American journalists wouldn't, seemed like a fair deal. Something about it didn't smell right though, so I stayed home.

I used to think of Twitter as a coral reef, but its role as a world wide notification system is fading, and we haven't replaced it with anything. I wrote this in 2007 when the utility of Twitter was just becoming apparent.

Something has changed in the twitterverse, it's grown new centers, for me, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter is still here, but I use it a lot less than I used to. Each of them acts as if they are alone, except for ActivityPub but that's more complicated than it may seem. As often is the case, the tech industry is depending on confusion. This may be a strategic mistake. I could cite a few examples where this didn't work, when an open ecosystem whose benefits were by then obvious to users, completely erased the ecosystem that came before, often with remarkable speed. Each of them is playing for all of it, wanting to control their users, make it so they only post to one system. And some people do. I think it's better if we, as users, remain diversified.

You'll never see an article in the NYT saying how wrong polls have been in every presidential election because then they'd have to fire half their political reporters.

If you want a better idea of how it's going, look at where the ad dollars are going, and where the candidates are campaigning.

And make sure all your friends know that you're voting and who you're voting for. I think that makes a difference.

I'm voting straight Democratic party line.

I find that a lot of my posts here on my blog are just like the tweets I post on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter. I used to have an icon in my outliner that tweeted the text of the bar cursor headline. I could make it work once again, but it would be wasted if I couldn't send it to all four of the services I use regularly. Something has changed in the twitterverse, it's grown new centers. But each of them is acting as if they are alone. This is a mistake, for sure for the open web, but I think it may be a strategic mistake for each of them. I could cite lots of examples where this didn't work, when an open ecosystem whose benefits were by then obvious to users, completely erased the ecosystem that had existed before, and with remarkable speed. None of them are strong enough to try to dominate.

If ChatGPT had a simple, non-AI scrapbook, like the old Mac OS had, where you could just throw something over your shoulder so you can find it later with a text search, that would make it a lot more useful for retaining practices that work. It's a shame to work something out, come up with the answer that worked, and then to have to do it all over again 23 months later when you encounter the same problem.

BTW the Wikipedia page for the MetaWeblog positions it as a replacement for the Blogger API, but it's an extension of it. You could use MetaWeblog to publish to Blogger sites, but it also supported features that Blogger didn't have, that were in our blogging software, Manila.

Could we agree that ChatGPT can ingest everything that's in Wikipedia? I particularly want the images. I'd like to ask for a picture of Chuck Berry, and get something nice and be able to put him in a scene with the Wordle Kitty. That seems pretty harmless. And the news industry could hardly object, they didn't invent Chuck Berry, or own the copyright of the picture of him in Wikipedia.

I'm searching for some common ground between the twitter-like systems, a basis for interop, a common API even. We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places. And you could write the script that did that in an afternoon or two. We started out with simple systems and the best of intentions. There's no technical barrier. And we could do it in a few weeks at most if there was a will to do it

Hecklers at last night's rally in Greensboro, couldn't hear what they were angry about, but it had something to do with Gaza.

The US isn't doing the killing there, the issue is with Netanyahu who is part of the same political party as Trump. So you can be pretty sure the killing won't stop there at least until after our election. One way to be sure the killing continues is to elect Trump.

It's wonderful that we're laughing at Trump now.

What a joke to think that after all he took us through, there are 47% of the people in the country who want more of that!

OMG we must be crazy. What else are you going to do but laugh.

I keep seeing mention of "Podcast 2.0" in various places. That is unusually greedy, even for the tech industry. What next? Deprecating the way podcasting has worked for the last 20 years? How do we know the people doing this aren't shilling for Spotify, Google or Amazon? Please don't mess with something that works as well as podcasting. You want to do something better, great -- make your own name and get people to respect it. Stealing respect from podcasting tells me you have no honor or self-respect, and it should say the same to everyone else. Something else that tells you it's bad, they never bothered to send me an email. Welcome to the tech industry.

I just added a link to the RSS feed in each shownotes page. In the HTML at the bottom, as a white on orange icon. In the page source as a <link rel="alternate">.

Show notes for a short podcast I recorded on this day in 2004, a response to Adam's podcast which I had just listened to. These were the good days, a new medium in its early stages of booting up, after years of trying to get it to go. In the next few weeks, it'll really start going. You can subscribe to the podcast feed here.

I was trying to explain to Miguel de Icaza, a longtime developer friend, how Dropbox was within inches of making the web a million times more useful, ten years ago, and then backed away from it. I don't think I've ever told the story here on my blog, so here goes. In 2014, ...

Just watched a Harris rally in Charlotte NC. She's using what Trump said in the debate in her new campaign speech. Brilliant. Getting him on the record in that context is a gift. 60 million viewers. Up till then he only took interviews where he could bully his way past the interviewer.

Braintrust query: I got an email from OpenAI saying I could access the new models, but I don't see the new models in the popup menu.

And btw I also am wasting my ideas, one in a hundred has any influence, and even then it's minscule, the ideas drift away unimplemented. I keep writing, hoping I see a way to get into the global conversation, again. I remember what it's like. But I'm not done. We still have a big problem to solve in our political and communication system. Online software is where it's at.

Another fantastic thinker and writer who is mostly scattering his ideas into the wind -- Dan Conover, who when he comes out with a piece, I stop everything and sit down and carefully read it and savor it, because not only is there sure to be new info and new ideas, but the writing is sooo good. He's a former local reporter in South Carolina. I met him on a road tour I did a bunch of years ago. Where does he post this stuff? Facebook. I want it to be part of the concentrated web writers union. Maybe think of it as my karass, my version of The Atlantic, perhaps. Or my version of the op-ed page of the NY Times. I think there is definitely enough good stuff out there, unorganized, to easily rival them for originality, depth of thought, experience and great writing. Dan is on my list of such superheroes.

I've been enjoying the recent blog posts by my longtime friend Jeff Jarvis. A couple of months ago, I was practically begging him to do this. He was pouring so much unfocused energy into making journalism play an appropriate role in our democracy. When Jeff started posting t...

Someday an election will be like Game of Thrones or Succession. A campaign would be a season. There would be character development, arcs, twists, revelations, unforseen events. Near the end of the season you have the election, with the following episodes the plotting, intrigue, and undermining of democracy, and at the end of the season the inauguration of a new president. Each year you have more of this, until four years later you go through the election all over again. People would really study the candidates, and would have reasons they like one character over another. And maybe the patriarch doesn't die, and decides to run again. This is where we're heading, we might already be there.

It would have been cool if Harris had said "He's going to have you for dinner" instead of "He's going to eat you for lunch," which is what she said Putin would do to Trump.

Makes you wonder if that was a slip of the tongue or if it was a little Easter Egg she dropped for our later amusement.

What Harris is doing is marketing. It takes a lot of impressions to get people to believe she can be president. If she wants to win, she has to do a lot of interviews and rallies and say quotable things, and be tweeting all the time, not just in the campaign snark accounts (...

Idea for TV series. Law and Order style crime drama where all the crimes are against humanity.

Even if his supporters don't see it, Trump is a pathetic broken has-been. When he's gone we'll dance in good riddance.

Trump was at his most pathetic lying bullshit asshole self. He looked and sounded terrible. I wouldn't have traded places with Harris for anything in the world, she did fantastic. The pressure on her was enormous. I don't think Trump said one thing that was true. And Harris made the point that the division is coming from that guy over there, and if we don't want it all we have to do is turn the freaking page. For once the power is with the people. The Repubs in the Senate wouldn't vote to convict, the Supreme Court just gave him immunity, but the American people, in a few weeks, can tell them all the fuck off.

The most encouraging thing about last night's debate was that the moderators were journalists. When Trump repeated his most egregious lie about murdering babies being legal in certain states, moderator Muir confidently, almost derisively, said that there is no such thing. And when Trump said he didn't admit he lost the election, and then when challenged said in a snotty way he was being sarcastic, Muir plainly that wasn't true either. It was like the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. ABC News was the last place you'd expect real journalism to surface, maybe the NYT et al will follow their lead.

Harris must become the president of Twitter before becoming president of the United States.

BRIC countries == Brazil, Russia, India and China.

12 minute podcast.

I made kittens the theme for the presidential campaign, it was my attempt to bring levity to it for readers of my blog. Then came "childless cat ladies" and now cats being eaten in Ohio. Either I was prescient, or the Trumps are copying me! Anyway, here's the Wordle Kitty $5 postage stamp, next in the series. She just broke out of prison to rescue the Ohio cats from JD Lance. My collaborator of course is ChatGPT.