I started a new this.how doc on how podcasting got its name, so I could include new information. It links back to the piece I wrote in 2014. I have done this before, when a blog post I wrote became something I wanted to add to over time. Two examples -- Rules for standards-makers and Trolls.

And the show notes for the podcast from Sept 2, 2004, and now we are fully caught up.

WordPress and GitHub fit into similar niches, but one is for writers and the other for developers.

The problem with Mastodon is its protocol is underspecified, therefore interop is really hard, and ultimately the standard, if any emerges, will be decided by the big tech companies and will be ridiculously complex. I think Bluesky has a better chance of being a solid stand...

Random thought. In hindsight Medium chose the wrong business model. They could have done what Automattic has done with WordPress. It's a private company so I don't know how much it's growing or how profitable it is, but from outside it's growing, and generates lots of cash. Basically, charge writers for the service. I think they would have done well. And open source the Medium editor, and offer it to Google to bundle with Chrome, and upgrade the whole web while you're at it. With billions of windfall from the success of Twitter, why argue over nickels and dimes. Ev had the ability to change the course of the industry, and make the same kind of money Google and Microsoft make. And yes, I did urge him to do this at the time, publicly (didn't have access to him privately, if you can believe that).

Here's the show notes page for the podcast from Sept 1, 2004.

September 2004 was the month when podcasting became a real community thing. Twenty years ago. I did eight podcasts that month. The mail list, which Adam started, was going strong. This is the month where podcasting got its name, thanks to some brilliant creativity from Dannie Gregoire. Until then we were calling them "audio blog posts" or some variant thereof. You can see it in this Google Trends graph. I started a special feed to echo my programs from 2004, I even got it registered in Apple's podcast database. There will be two podcasts in the feed today because I missed the one from yesterday. Still diggin!

The networks should put Trump on time delay and when he says you can legally murder babies in some states, that should be treated as if he said fuck or shit. Put up a screen that explains why he was cut off, then go to commercial, esp during the debate on Sep 10.

Dear NY Times, before we get rid of the penny, let’s open up your op-ed page to include criticism of the NYT. You can handle a little pushback, you need it desperately.

And for some companies, the founder of a company they acquire might make the best CEO when the founder of the original company isn't available. Again Apple is a great example. Steve Jobs ultimately replaced Gil Amelio, after Apple bought NeXT.

Wordle Kitty is watching TV along with 80 other convicted house pets serving life sentences at Attica high security prison. They’re watching a mushy political psycho drama starring Wordle Kitty herself, the cutest most adorable kitten known to mankind. The NYT headline reads “Cushy kitty crushes mushy melodrama in prison laugh riot.”

Graham uses Steve Jobs as an example. He knew what was and wasn't an Apple product. A hired CEO would have to have that explained to him. Sculley, who Graham cites, is a perfectly nice person in my experience, had no idea how to deal with Windows. Very different from a consumer product like fizzy water. Who but Steve Jobs would have thought that an iPod was a proper product for a company that made PCs. I think he himself wanted it, and that's what made something an Apple product. It's probably why post-Jobs Apple is pretty much stuck selling only the products Jobs created for them. He told Cook to innovate on his own vision and timetable, probably knowing full-well that nobody would be able to do it. 😄

Another rule for whoever runs a tech company, they must themselves be a fanatical user of the company's product. They must love it the way a founder loves it. They must think the users are the smartest people in the world because they love the best product in the world. As a founder, I could not visualize the day I left the company for the last time. In hindsight I felt that was the one factor most responsible for the success of the company.

Paul Graham wrote a very useful piece about "Founder Mode." As a founder myself, I think I can tell you why founders have a central role to play as the company grows. They're the only ones who know how the company was built, and what works and what doesn't and how to keep it ...

August is archived. Let's start September.

Why does JD Vance have so many opinions about women?

It's worth reflecting that the press took its best shot at Kamala Harris, and it was a big puff of smoke, she just cruised right through it.

Thread: Blogs and the social web will merge.

A feature I've wanted to add to the textcasting server app is a plug-in architecture so you can add a new platform driver without having to reconfigure or even reboot the server. There's a new folder at plugins/platforms. Each subfolder contains a driver for one platform. I...

Feature I really need: A way to search all of my conversations with ChatGPT. It's the one feature I'm most missing, and the most surprising. I'm sure there's a huge amount of utility locked up in that.

What if Trump had been killed in the assassination attempt. What would have happened next? Biden was still the Democratic candidate.

I was thinking about Wisconsin news orgs and remembered we called the two Madison papers the Crap Times and the Wisconsin State Urinal. I don't know why that's so funny. Everyone does it. We used to call our own company Living Videosex, and the company that bought us out was Cementech or Sementech. Still makes me laugh. And there are company names that are funny without changing them like Microsoft. Sorry.

It has come to my attention that "It's even worse than it appears" might not be the right overlay for Kamala Harris, whose picture is the current banner art for Scripting News. Of course she's still even better than she appears. I really mean that, and if you read this blog r...

Humor and putdowns in politics are great if you know how to do it and if the time is right. Trump was the only comedian on stage at the debates. And his act was fresh. The people who loved him loved that the other people hated him. It really was simple. Like a sports team or...

I use my blog in the earliest part of the day to warm up and procrastinate.

I can't read most of the stories I want to read. I have the money and am willing to spend it. But there is no system. On the other hand the distribution of video entertainment is somewhat functional, I spend an ungodly amount of mostly wasted money to get access to that. I...

In elections we get to say who we are, ie who comes closest to who we are. It's all made of imagery. Bernie Sanders is someone you either love or don't. He reminds me of people in my own family, who I would never want to be president of anything. But this ad, the best ever imho, says wait a minute, please reconsider. A campaign is a series of messages from candidate to electorate: "Is this who we are?" The great ads tap our optimism, imho. The Sanders ad says we're nice happy people who have jobs and help each other.

In the next scene, Wordle Kitty, lithe and slender, and fiercely cute, is doing an AMA on Reddit. One of the questions asks if Wordle Kitty knows anyone in the US Government. "I don't know anyone in the US Government," she said, "but I do know their kittens!" she concluded. This scene is shown on the front page of the NY Times along with the headline "Wordle Kitty is leading an insurrection in DC, other kittens are colluding!"

An idea for the Harris campaign. Let me buy some swag and have it sent to 10 of my best friends, esp ones who live in swing states. Plus you get the names and contact info for people at least one of your supporters thought would be a potential Harris voter. I'd send something less presumptuous like When We Fight We Win stickers. Another related idea, let me buy a whole set of promotional materials, kind of like the gift baskets they sell at Zabar's.

Today Automattic announced that they're converting Tumblr, which they acquired in 2019, to run on WordPress as its foundation. This could get a simple colorful user-friendly interface for WordPress, something it's needed for a long time. WordPress does everything in its UI, Tumblr has its UI better organized for writers and more casual users. If they can move in this direction, it seems that WordPress could be large part of the emerging social web.