The Brian Lehrer Show
• WNYC
As our centennial series continues, Dominic Preziosi, editor of Commonweal, talks about the 100-year history of the magazine and American Catholicism, in general.
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The Brian Lehrer Show
• WNYC
Andy Phillips, vice president of the Tax Institute at H&R Block in Kansas City, MO, offers advice and answers questions on this day before the deadline to file income tax returns.
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I don’t have any expectations for the FTC vs. Meta trial starting today. It seems wild and unlikely that Meta would ever have to spin out Instagram a decade after acquisition. Feels too late, too closely tied up in the Meta empire.
The Brian Lehrer Show
• WNYC
Even with a 90-day pause on President Donald Trump's reciprocal tariffs, Greg David, who covers fiscal and economic issues for THE CITY and directs the business and economics reporting program and the Ravitch Fiscal Reporting Program at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, argues that local economy—supported in part by Wall Street and tourism—will worsen, and how state and city budgets will respond to the economic turmoil.
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New Mac app for Micro.blog is out today with a couple improvements, including a little interface for editing the auto-generated accessibility text for uploaded photos. Here’s a screenshot:
There’s a pretty significant difference between good AI models and great ones. I sometimes think about how I could integrate local models directly into the Micro.blog apps, but I wouldn’t want it to be worse than using (for example) OpenAI. How many of my users really have a Mac with 24+ GB of RAM?
A long time ago, based on my experience at Berkman in the 00s, I proposed the idea of a Developing Better Developers function at a university, as a pilot, to create a teaching hospital atmosphere around creating new communication systems out the web and (key point) not compromising the openness of the web. It would be as sacred at academic freedom is in the university, or the First Amendment of the Constitution. It seemed to me that a university is the perfect place to create something like this. It just occurred to me that if we had such a setup, anywhere, at this time -- we would be working in earnest on an open alternative to twitter, one that is truly billionaire-proof right now, as opposed to "would be nice to have sometime in the future."
Dave Winer writes a longer blog post about inbound RSS. The idea is let’s have more systems able to both generate RSS feeds and read them in automatically. If you have that complete loop for posts, you don’t need much else to have a social platform.
Open Channels FM Podcast Network
• Bob Dunn
In this WP Agency Track episode, hosts Cami and Marcus interview Philip Levine, owner of South Florida Web Advisors, discussing his evolution from static sites to WordPress, emphasizing networking, automation, and work-life balance.
The Daily
• The New York Times
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents
• L. Jeffrey Zeldman
I asked Claude to write about the career of my father, the inventor Maurice Zeldman, as if I had written it myself. Here, with no edits from me, is what it came up with:
The post My father, Maurice Zeldman, and his ZGANNT software appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Apparently there will be big updates to the design in the next iOS and iPadOS, but I assume it will be mostly superficial. I’d like to see a rethink of text selection and editing. It’s still too finicky without a keyboard and mouse.
Better tracking with expanded UTM filtering
Testing a new, bolder FAQ section on the pricing page
Rob Fahrni blogs more thoughts on Dave Winer’s call for inbound RSS:
The problem is the platform folks tend to say “use our API.” Which makes sense, but most API’s are painful in some way because of authentication or some hoop you have to go through. If the platform natively supported inbound RSS it would greatly simplify the developer and user experience.
Micro.blog was designed around inbound RSS. We had that before we had blog hosting. It’s still a unique architecture that I haven’t seen any other platforms replicate.
Back in Austin, down at St. Edward’s for Staple! Amazing that the first show was 20 years ago. Got to meet Kazu Kibuishi and pick up the final Amulet book.
I keep beating the drum about Bluesky. Their story says they know they need to be replaceable. But until they deliver on replaceability, it's a 5-alarm fire because of what happened with Twitter. It should not have been possible to acquire Twitter's user base. In hindsight we know it could have been avoided. And it can be avoided by Bluesky, but my guess is the last thing they want is to be replaced. If they really meant it, we could make it happen in a few weeks, and then we could build some really incredible systems, starting in late May, early June. I really believe that. Next journalist that interviews them should ask about this. Thanks for listening.
