Blogrolls, in the 90s, were the beginning of the social web. In the 20s, they can bring today’s social web into blogs.

I was trying to find Tony Kahn on the web for a friend doing a documentary on the origins of podcasting, and came up empty. I just stumbled across him on Facebook and that led to this autobiographical site where he tells his story of podcasting. Tony was the person who brought NPR into podcasting in 2004. A major contributor who isn't often credited. He was at WGBH at the time.

Best podcasts for Democratic voters?

There isn't a whole lot of love in this 39-year-old man. I worry for his kids, esp if either of them don't have kids.

Where is the AI-based meme maker for Kamala. I'd like to have her flying in the sky with a cape, like SuperPresidentLady, going from town to town, finding out what they need, and churning it out for them in an efficiently run government meme factory in the nation's capital. Like we were doing with the kittens earlier this summer.

OPML archive for July's posts on Scripting News.

Heather Cox Richardson: "When President Joe Biden announced just a week ago that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. He passed it to us."

The blogroll on scripting.com has more features today. Screen shot.

A note to anyone making a twitter-like system. If you supported outbound RSS, I could use your system as a note-taking tool. I know Bluesky does, and I should use it that way, but these days I'm more drawn to Threads, even though I know it's really Facebook under the covers.

Someone in charge at the NYT needs to take a step back and view events, and the NYT role in those events, from the point of view of an ordinary non-NYT-employed citizen, bewildered at the enormous risks journalists are taking with the system of government of the United States.

In the context of who we are as a country, what the Repubs do and say is to be very mild about it "weird." What word would you prefer the Democrats use? Imagine William Safire were here, the great linguist who was a Republican, of the 60s, 70s and 80s, write that column.

And to the Democrats, no matter what the NYT says, keep using the term. This is where you get to speak out about what they're doing over there, and how it's not journalism. One of the rare things you agree with Trump on.

Podcast: 3 minutes.

People who get their sense of self-esteem from having procreated are placing a heavy burden on their children. What if the child doesn't live up to their expectations? How will they treat the child then! Creating a new human is not an accomplishment. Treating that new life as a full person starting at birth, and through their whole life, that's an accomplishment. For a man to father a child just means they have a functioning reproductive system. It's not anything to be proud or to expect to be rewarded or respected for.

The Podcast0 project had taught me how to read the archive of my own blog. Until now I had not carefully read the story I tell on my blog more than a few days after it happened. Here's I'm learning to reconstruct the summer of 2004, maybe the most creative period of my life, at least that's viewable in such a public and preserved way. Am I the first to do this for any blog? If you know of an example of historic research done using the archive of a blog, please send me a note. I'd love to learn about what you learned! :-)

I said on Thursday that Biden's speech last Wednesday had the potential to be a Gettysburg speech, if it the United States turns back toward democracy and government of the people, by the people and for the people. Biden has the potential of being as great a president as Lincoln. Let that settle in for a moment. I get goosebumps when I think about it. If he hadn't taken that stand, he could have become known as the US equivalent of Kaiser Wilhelm.

I keep a solid line between my personal life and blogging, learned the hard way. When I started blogging in 1994, I didn't have such a solid line, and found that I couldn't have a personal life if I made it public. But now I want to reveal something. I am "childless" which i...

Like 193K others I tuned into White Dudes For Harris last night. Please, let that be the last time we do that. I felt like it might as well have been Slave Owners for Harris or Reformed Republicans for Harris. I don't have anything against people of my gender and approximate...

Like cholesterol, there's "good weird" and "bad weird." I think we all know which kind of weird the Repubs are.

Here's a perfect illustration how ChatGPT can improve customer relations. I bought an iPhone that I now don't need, and it's arriving today via FedEx. I wanted to know whether I should just refuse delivery, or accept it and then return it. Obviously it's easier for me to refuse. I asked ChatGPT and it gave me a detailed reply. Apple's chatbot saw it as a "technical" question and wasn't prepared to help. Sales support is one of those applications where cost is totally justified. A human helper would cost a lot more I imagine than a LLM chat system. I tried calling 1-800-CALL-APPLE and talked to a human who was very nice, but couldn't find anything in her manual about refusing delivery.

Is there anyone here within earshot who is involved in doing the web stuff for the Harris campaign?

I don't when technology moves backwards.

I'm always trying to push it the other way.

It's like being a ball player wanting to win a game.

Or a musician wanting to record a hit.

A VC wanting a 10x return.

A diplomat achieving growth and peace.

Before Twitter broke the API, it used to be a quick way for me to channel items from my blog to almost all the people who follow me on the social web. Now it isn't even one of the services I use that I can post to automatically (those are Bluesky, Masto, WordPress). None of them are anything like the aggregator of people that Twitter was, and I can't even reach it from my writing tool. I really want to solve this problem, but I absolutely can't do this on my own. No time, patience, and it's not my job to do all that coding. As observed the other day, my time should be spent on writing tools for the web and directly related products. This is the kind of project that should be handled as an open source thing.

Braintrust query: Every day a web page opens in Chrome from a plugin that asks me to buy a subscription. I don't know what the software is, I gather that it's related to a debugger I use for Node.js apps. I would like to block it from doing this, but I don't see an easy way to tell Chrome to not display pages from this site. Any suggestions?

I signed up for White Dudes for Harris, but I did it reluctantly. Would have enthusiastically joined a Men for Harris group. Tech for Harris. New York for Harris. How about Americans for Harris. Voters for Harris.

Patrick LaForge who just left the NYT after 27 years: "RSS news readers let me track breaking news and competition back in my blogging days and I still used them as a corrective to see beyond what social media algorithms were showing me. You see the stories long before home page play or tweets. Gave me an edge. To print-focused journalists who knew little about computers in a certain era it seemed like magic."

John Batelle had an interesting observation about this yesterday, that SearchGPT is a clever way to get news orgs to think about ChatGPT in a different, less threatening way. They want to be in a search engine index (that's called SEO) where they want to be paid to be part of a chatbot. There really isn't a line there, in fact. That's what SearchGPT makes obvious. I for one, want all my stuff in their index so I can find out wtf I've been writing about here for almost 30 freaking years! 😄

Referrer logs and webmentions may be about to become obsolete with the advent of SearchGPT, and presumably Google's AI and search facilities are also about to merge. Here's the deal. When I write a blog post and want to know if anyone has mentioned it, I will simply be able to ask ChatGPT, "Have any sites mentioned, with or without links, the story I wrote yesterday entitled "Unix-like things" and if so please provide a title, synopsis and link, if available, so I can read the full text." I'm sure that will be appropriately shortened, or perhaps turned into something like the referre lists of today. This is the kind of thing the network can do for us automatically.

On this day in 2004, I did podcast interviews with Don Means of Meetup and Patty Wetterling of Minnesota at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. For both, I did the interview with Natasha Celine of the Pacific Views blog. The next podcast won't be until August 15. I think Adam Curry and Steve Gillmor are on this one, and if so for sure we'll be talking about the podcasting bootstrap which at this point appears to be underway. Not sure if anyone as ever gone down this path in the last 20 years because, when I do the searches to find links to sites and people, I don't see any mention of this stuff in the current day, although now there will be (here on my blog). Here's the feed of ancient podcast podcast review. You can find the reverse chronologic list of the whole series on morningcoffeenotes.com.

Somewhere in this timeframe Adam Curry began Daily Source Code which is still running to this day, almost 20 years later.

On this day in 2004 I was in Boston to blog the Democratic National Convention, esp with my newfangled audio blog post thing.

Somehow it's up to the Harris campaign to get the Trumps to have a normal American presidential campaign, not a prelude to a second attempted coup, which is what the Trumps are doing. I can see the op-ed they run in September saying that it's Harris's fault that the Trumps a...

I lost my iPhone a few days ago. I think all the data is safe. First time I ever lost a phone. I ordered a new iPhone 15 Pro with 256GB, it will arrive on Monday hopefully.

In the meantime I've needed to use my Android phone to record voice memos. It's just what I wanted.

It has a website, so you don't have to export your recording to get it where you need it to be, and it automatically does a transcript. There's an editor on the website, which again is exactly where I want it.

BTW, I think the files are smaller?

Here's a screen shot.