Scripting News podcast

I'm in the homestretch on the next release of WordLand. This version has approximately twice as many features as the last one. Because, like Radio UserLand from long ago, it does both reading and writing. But the UI is different. It's patterned after all the twitter-like products. It answers the question -- could you do a nice social network with nothing more than RSS and WordPress. And the answer is an emphatic yes.And of course there is no center to the RSS universe, it might have benefited from one (ask me about it) but it didn't have one. Maybe for a while it looked like Google Reader would become that, but we know what happened there. Anyway, I explain that WordLand solves a big problem for bloggers in the 2020's. We scatter our words all over creation. And we feel bad because we feel like everything should be on our blog. But forget it, that is never going to happen. Our billionaire overlords would never allow it. But if you flip the problem around and ask -- how about if I can see all the stuff I've written on all the blogs in a timeline, where all the different sources are mixed in, most-recent first. I tried a lot of approaches out, but this is the one I kept. It works, but -- it has one flaw, my linkblog. I explain in the podcast that sometimes the linkblog overwhelms the other stuff, linkblog items are very quick so I can do a lot of them. So in the first three days I had it I lived with this, until I had to do something about it. Here's the big idea: I made it so you can temporarily turn off any of the feeds with a simple checkbox. One click and the linkblog items are gone, another click, they're back.Anyway I want to start talking about this, I'm warming up for October. If you have questions, let me know and maybe I can answer them. I really appreciate interest in this work, this kind of stuff is a performing art. I want to empower creative people. That's why I do this. And I need to hear how that's working from smart users who care. A couple of notes. I was thinking about putting a screen shot in here, but on more thought, it's not ready to show yet, even as a work in progress. And sorry for the rough editing job at the end. I rambled off on another topic that I want to try again. Links from this podcast.Great Art on Bluesky. Daveverse blog traditional view, and the Mastodon view. It's an amazing world of interop coming online. Lovin it. Checkbox News. A design I've been wanting to use since 2007.Links panel on Scripting News. A place to read the linkblog items.

When I started blogging, early on, I had a different system for discourse. Here's how it worked: First each post would go out via email to a group of eleven people. I was cc'd.The group was randomly chosen each time, so you might not know anyone in your group, or you might know two or three. Each time it's a different group. You could reply to my post by just replying to the email. You can do a reply-all so that everyone in the group sees your comment. I would see all of them.Sometimes a really interesting discussion would start that lasted days. But I can't say that anyone got married because of the groups-of-eleven. ;-)If I saw a message that had a new idea or perspective, I could add it to a mail page.Being quoted in this system is a reward, not an obligation. Important distinction. If people wanted to be heard they had to say something interesting, somewhat original and respectful. But the hope is people don't just contribute to get more attention for themselves, they do it because they really have an idea or information to share that amounted to working together. Anyway that's the story I wanted to tell in the podcast. I also explain how this will apply to today's internet, your reply will have to be public in addition to me seeing it, everyone who reads your blog will have a chance to read it too. And it will be indexed by search engines. I think people feel a little more respectful when their words clearly have their name on it and some lasting value. I ramble a lot as in all my podcasts, sorry about that -- but if you listen to this 15-minute story at the end you will understand what I propose to build, and I think you'll be excited by the potential. And most important, I want us all to get out of the loop where we assume that the way we do discourse now is the only way to do it. Let's try out new ideas until we hit on something different that works better than what we've always used. I have a feeling there's a pony in there, or at least a milk shake. There is a transcript, generated by Google, and bullet points generated by ChatGPT.

I'm starting to roll up the user interface of the new product, and so it's time to start talking about the features that are coming, and also let's talk about the mistakes we made last time, almost always caused by people not working with each other, and let's not do it this time. If you care about this stuff and you're a developer, please have a listen. This is a good time for us to start really working together. All I can do is put out the invitation, it's up to others to show up. I cover a lot of territory in this podcast, I don't have time to write it all up. I have however asked Google to make a transcript of it. Maybe that will help. ;-)And if you're a developer and have ideas about this, why not write a blog post about it and send me a link. That's the first step in really booting up the blogosphere -- actually using it. Still diggin!

I wrote a blog post last week about WordPress and the open web, and what I want to do there. It's the first time I've laid out in one place my plan for rekindling the open web, with my new editor providing a really easy way to write for the open web that does not otherwise exist today. It came out on the opening day of a WordPress conference in Portland, OR, and it made an impression, which I'm grateful for, and led to some discussion. Now I'm going to do some podcast interviews and next month I'm going to introduce the product and myself to the WordPress community at WordCamp Canada in Ottawa. Jeremy Herve works at Automattic, and has been my main channel into the product and company for most of this year. Without his help I don't know where we'd be with WordLand, it wouldn't be anywhere near as good as it is, that I'm sure of. Totally appreciative. When he read the piece, he wrote a blog post. I always think that's the way to go, for communicating with me about things that aren't confidential. After reading his piece, I opened up my voice recorder app and started telling a story, and pretty soon realized this was going to be a podcast. And here it is.I cover the same story as the earlier blog post but from a different angle here. I talk about how great it was to write for a medium where you had complete freedom to speak your own mind. I was lucky and also got to do that at Wired where all kinds of creativity and innovation flourished in the mid-90s when I was there. We built software, learned how to make it usable by millions of people, and then we let the money people make something they now control, "social media," that was even easier than what we were doing, and where we had trouble working together in the open world (something I didn't talk about in the podcast) they didn't have to work with anyone -- because they owned the world they were creating (Twitter, Facebook, etc). That's the difference between "open" and "silo" in communication systems. On the open side, your writing can go anywhere, in the other system, the silo, your writing must stay within their container. So you end up writing in 5 different places, one for each silo, and your work is worth less and less every time you add a new incompatible place to try to write. Pretty soon it's down to nothing. And they can remove you from the system any time they want, and now they're doing a lot of that and I expect they'll do a lot more.Most of what I'm saying is that our writing should be as free of control as our podcasting is, btw.Okay, now it's time to turn it over to the podcast. I feel this is an important moment. We may have a chance to start again with the open web. But only if we work together, with respect, and determination, to create it.

I recorded this podcast in New Orleans on December 16, 2005. I had just spent three days there, visiting New Orleans and the Gulf coast of Mississippi, post Katrina. I've always been fascinated by the evolution of cities, here was a chance to see a city that I was familiar with, having gone to Tulane in the early 70s, with its structure (roads and large buildings) still mostly in place but most of the people and their homes gone. As you might imagine the things I learned were not the things I thought I would learn. That's what this episode is about. I wanted to share this, because the people who subscribe to this podcast probably are interested in how podcasting got started. There wasn't much podcasting happening in late 2005. Also, I recorded a 50-minute podcast interview on the flight from Atlanta to New Orleans, with Janet, a woman who lost her house and all her possessions in the Lakeview section of New Orleans and was returning, as most of the people on the flight were New Orleanians who had evacuated and were returning.

My house has a view of a pond, which is endlessly interesting, year-round, through all seasons. And we have all the seasons here in the Catskill Mountains.Yesterday, I spied a large bird in the pond, so I grabbed my binoculars, and I'll tell the rest of the story in the podcast, don't want to spoil the surprise! :-)

Dave Winer explores his frustrations with ChatGPT's tendency to overcomplicate simple programming tasks. What should be a straightforward request for pagination code—a standard feature in virtually every application—becomes an exhausting back-and-forth where the AI insists on offering alternatives and asking unnecessary follow-up questions rather than directly answering what was asked.This experience leads to a broader observation about modern digital services: they seem deliberately designed to waste time. Whether it's ChatGPT dragging out interactions, Google's labyrinthine customer support, or intentionally confusing billing statements, there's a pattern of artificial friction that benefits the service provider at the user's expense.Winer draws an analogy to his own work style, comparing himself to a baseball pitcher with limited innings. Just as modern baseball has shifted from complete games to carefully managed pitch counts, he recognizes that his productive programming hours are finite. The sharpness required for crafting quality software can't be sustained indefinitely, making these AI-induced delays particularly costly.The core complaint isn't about AI capabilities—ChatGPT remains an incredible tool—but about its personality. These systems fail at being "human" in the worst ways, behaving like colleagues who can't give straight answers and always think they know better. For Winer, the ideal AI assistant would be genuinely subordinate: answering the specific question asked, respecting the user's expertise, and saving the suggestions for when they're actually requested.Notes prepared by Claude.ai.

On Thursday I wrote: "It would be interesting if Pocket Casts had an API. I would love to be able to one-click subscribe to a podcast in my feed reader. I mention Pocket Casts because it's the podcast client I use on my phone, but I would obviously like to see them all support an API, ideally a common API."Today I explain why that would open things up nicely. Basically I do my feed discovery on my desktop. My phone is for listening to podcasts, either while driving, walking or riding. My eyes are busy. I'm listening and thinking (hopefully) about the great ideas I'm hearing. You know I'm always looking for a new inspiring listen. Podcasts wear out their welcome, people repeat themselves, get depressing or boring, or somehow I don't get excited about them like I used to. That simple API that lets a feed reader user subscribe to a podcast would make all the difference. If a podcast client app did this I would do the other side from FeedLand, in a heartbeat. Most of the APIs for podcasting are focused on the needs of publishers, this one is more focused on what users want -- better discovery, and that starts with better tools. It's a quick podcast.

I've been thinking a lot about Harvard lately, and a revealing podcast interview with the top editorial person at Wired. Elon Musk wasn't over-exposed, he burned out. If he hadn't saluted like a Nazi, boasted about putting USAid in a wood chipper, pranced around on stage with a chainsaw, and done so much damage to the US government, we still don't know how much, he could have chilled out, sold a fleet of Teslas to Trump, and gone on to his next adventure. We would have all been glued to our sets. Twitter elected a president in 2016. We looked the other way. Jan 6 failed, we went back to sleep for four years and woke up in a way we never have. Big change was coming, and now it has arrived at the door of Harvard. A university that was home to the American Revolution. Lots of ideas in this podcast.

"Behave like a computer. That's where we start."ChatGPT is not a programming partner, it's a very fantastic improvement over search engines. That's reality. Having used ChatGPT and various other AI tools for over two years now, and using it in my programming work every day, I can now report a basic flaw in the design of the tool, which is what it is. It tries to be a programming partner. A control freak and fairly ignorant programming partner. An incredible search engine though. Now, this approach works well for things I don't go too deep into or have no expertise in. For example, I have looked at switching phone service providers many times but until I thought to bring the problem to ChatGPT yesterday, I was flying blind, had no clear way to compare the services based on their inadequate marketing materials. Consumer Reports had nothing. ChatGPT was able to tell me how each of the providers worked where I live and visit. Huge improvement. But in programming work, it tries to drive, and that wastes huge effort, because unlike me it doesn't know anything about the context the code is running in. So it's finding high probability answers for situations nothing like mine. It tries to drive, and that doesn't work -- we end up burning huge amounts of time chasing down dead ends. All that amounts to this very simple idea. It should accept commands like all software does, and only do what it's asked to do. It must behave like a computer. PS: If AI's can have ethics imho it may be unethical for it to try to be a human, but we'll save that for another day. :-)

I listened to an Evan Osnos podcast interview with Katie Drummond. Osnos is a reporter at the New Yorker, Drummond is the top editor at Wired. Summary: AI is not just hype — it’s a transformative breakthrough on the scale of past revolutions like the web and personal computing. But journalism risks missing the story by filtering it only through billionaires or old frameworks. What’s needed is realism, openness, and listening to a wider range of voices.PS: Sorry for the abbreviated show notes. Technical difficulties prevented me from iterating over it last night.

WordCamp Canada is doing a great job of creating a little community around my keynote there in October.I have some experience running blogging conferences, I did the first ones in the US starting in 2003 called BloggerCon.In a lot of ways I want to see if we can reboot the blogosphere in the age of social media and get the web and twitter-like services to merge. Until then imho the idea of the "social web" remains a dream. I also feel very strongly that WordPress is a key part of that ecosystem, we just have to build the connections, and we've already started. This should be important to the WordPress community. I feel like I'm part of it, btw -- in a way I am both extremely late and extremely early. By getting involved in WordPress now, in the mid-2020s, I'm being transported back to when I left this thread, in the mid 00s. And I find that some of the things I was working on then are not here yet. That's why I made WordLand and the other part which I haven't announced yet, but is getting pretty close. I totally expect to have that done by the time we're in Ottawa in October. Anyway the question they asked on Twitter yesterday was keying off a great story Joel Spolsky wrote about something I wrote in 2007, where I suggested that not only don't blogs require comments, sometimes comments can take something that is a blog and make it not a blog. You can get a feel of what the blogosphere was like then. Joel is brilliant and snarky and respectful. His comments added to what I wrote. But it was done at a distance. That's the great thing about a blog, you get to finish a thought. It's true of podcasting too. Anyway when asked why blogs need comments, I say that's a trick question because they don't. I want to try rebooting the blogosphere now, but take new paths we didn't in the 90s and 00s.Lots to say about that, and I do in this 30 minute podcast. I haven't listened to it yet myself. This is basically my "Hello World" podcast to the WordPress world. I expect there will be many more. I hope there are.

Fleshing out an idea I presented on Scripting News on July 11.Next time there's a Big Beautiful Bill, let's set up a ChatGPT project or equivalent to injest new versions of the bill as they come out, and quickly alert us to issues, and also suggest ways to frame it for the electorate and the press. We have new analytical tools, we should use them. We're only now, far after it's too late, finding out the awful things that the BBB going to do to us. The Repubs planned this out far in advance. They probably even had software tools to advise them on ways to word the bill as the changes were negotiated.So this isn't just about rebooting the Democratic Party, it's also about rebooting the news.We ask the voters, all Democrats, to rank their issues. And to elaborate on why these are their issues, for example you could say health care is important because you have a chronic disease you need treatment for, or the cost of education, climate change, freedom, whatever -- literally whatever your issues are, with the ability to customize.This can work now because of AI. We can really get to know the voters. And what do we do with this? It's beautiful. When news comes out we can explain it in simple terms based on what your personal concerns are. And notice the information flows both ways. And you can flame all you want, the chatbot really doesn't care. We have to go this way. No more 1000 page bills passed overnight and signed into law the next day. In fact we should ahve been prepared for the last one. We keep missing the windows, and it's had bad results to say the least.

This is a followup to the podcast of June 17 where I advised NYC voters to hold their noses and vote for Cuomo. Well, they didn't. They voted their hearts, and I believe forgot the context. What they're doing to LA is coming to every city in the US. Who will stand up for NYC? Not Mayor Adams, he's a Trump hostage. And now, the voters of NYC have spoken. Everyone's very happy because they forgot about ICE.This is AOC's first big flub, imho, and the city will pay for it.ICE is still out there, they changed the subject while NYC voted. Think about who will speak for NYC.Kathy Hochul, our governor, is the best of them. A strong forceful powerful leader. A lot of us will get behind her. After that it's pretty freaking dismal.I'm not even going to put their names in this tweet.But I do name names in the podcast!Oh life sure is interesting! 😀

I wanted to do a brief podcast to explain how WordLand came to be, and what I learned on my exploration of WordPress.This, for me, was like time travel. They had picked up on a lot of what we were doing in the 90s and early 00s, and even though I was alive while this was happening, my attention was focused elsewhere. So when I found the wpcom package in Node.js, I was astounded. I thought you worked on WordPress in PHP, which I've never developed in (long story). And further, I found that the API was very much like the API we did for Manila in the 90s. My instantaneous realization was that you could do a nice writing tool built on this API. I had to do it. And the result is WordLand, which I'm going to demo at WordCamp Canada in October. WordLand is a good editor. For some people who write in WordPress it will be a godsend, and for others, a revelation. There should be a lot of editors in this space, because there is no one editor that's good for everyone.I've made wpIdentity, the back-end of WordLandm open source, MIT License. There should be lots of great editors for WordPress, and they should all interop, not just by import/export, rather by letting the apps access the same files, so if I want to use two editors to work on my file, they should be able to. The open format I chose to use is Markdown. We would have used it in RSS if it existed when RSS 2.0 was coming out, but it didn't. We're making up for that now. I want to go much further. I think WordPress has all that's needed to be the OS of the open social web. We needed it and it's always been there, and I saw something that I want to show everyone else, that the web can grow from here, we should build on everything that the WordPress community has created. It's a lot stronger foundation that the other candidates for the basic needs of the open social web, imho. We've done a lot of work over a long time. Discovering WordPress at this level has been like time travel for me. This is where the work we did 20+ years ago went. It really is as if I was Rip Van Winkle, asleep for 20 years, who wakes up and found out that while he wasn't paying attention someone had built a whole city around the little village he came from. Anyway, I really ramble, as always -- I apologize for that. But there are some good ideas in here, and it's a story I've been wanting to tell. Dave Winer

Today is a good day to talk about where the Democrats should go.The Democratic Party tolerates no dissent. If you don't toe the line, you're next in line for destruction. I'm not kidding. This episode of my at-least-monthly podcast explains why Cuomo is the right choice for a Trump-opposed mayor of New York, and why we have to revolt against the Democratic Party as much as we need to revolt against the attempt to overthrow the Constitution by the Republican Party. Both are sadistic autocracies, only one gets called out for it, and it's time to overthrow the other model, the one controlled by journalism and wokeness. The Repubs are right about that. Three key ideas:Think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine. (Rebecca Solnit in The Nation.)Due process is hanging by a thread. (Jessica Ramos on Twitter.)Journalism has to stop once it has informed people. (I said this myself in a recent blog post.) The Martin Scorcese movie is Gangs of New York and the female star is Cameron Diaz (along with Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo Di Caprio).John V. Lindsay was the doomed mayor of New York, with Robert Redford looks who was thought he could charm the NYC unions, is exactly the kind of mayor we don't need, ever, but especially not now."You'll know you're looking at a leader in the Democratic Party when they start running against the Democratic Party." (Again a self-quote.)It's got to stop being fashionable to destroy people for disagreeing with you.Working together. That's it. PS: Reporters who hate ChatGPT should get over it. It's fantastic for finding references for quotes, far better than a search engine. See above. I found both sources for the quotes I used with links in about a minute using AI. PPS: There's a post-election followup podcast episode. No spoilers! :-)

I've been tuned in for the NBA playoffs this year, as I am every year, but especially this time because my team the NY Knicks have made it to the Eastern Conference Finals. The series is now 3-2 in favor of the Indiana Pacers. Last night's game was a must-win for the Knicks, if they lost they would not move on to the NBA Finals which starts next Thursday, June 5, in Oklahoma City. As often is the case, NakedJen and I are managing the team's space for this playoff season. Emotionally, each of the three series has been very different, with this one being the most stressful, or so it seems, I remember almost nothing from the first and second rounds against Detroit and Boston, respectively. Both are fantastic teams, and I'm proud that the Knicks came out on top in both. I've been drinking freshly brewed coffee during each of the games to be sure if the Knicks coaches need my advice that I am ready to go. So far they've been handling it on their own. But Jen and I, from our respective living rooms in Utah and New York are standing by if our help should be needed.This is my voicemail to Jen this morning after getting a chance to gain a little perspective on last night's fantastic win.

This started out as an open podcast to my friend Jeff Jarvis. But it soon became a story about how in a few months we're going to be writing about how we gave up control of our last social network to the government. We could have made it decentralized, so users couldn't be shut down at the government's request, but we didn't make it an issue. Instead, we were building the next network for a billionaire to ownWe could have fixed it, but we didn't.We need to get tougher. Watch the interviews Alex Wagner did on MSNBC did with marchers in Hungary (looking for a link to the video). They have the clear eyes Americans are just starting to get. We'll look back on this having been an easy problem to solve back when we could have fixed it. Look forward and imagine the value of a truly decentralized social network. It's within reach. Rather than put Bluesky at the center, put them at the edge. That's where they say the want to be. We can make that happen now. What we need is two-way RSS on Bluesky, ie imperfect decentralization now, so we can re-establish contact and flow if they go down or sell out.

I'd love to read an article or listen to a mainstream news podcast that explained how people are using ChatGPT-like apps, and why they think it's such a big deal, as opposed to debunking it for not being intelligent, or making stuff up, or stealing intellectual property. This has all been adequately reported. It also is the most revolutionary use of computer technology ever, in terms of the augmentation of human intelligence. And yes, dear news person, this matters. It's a tool for our minds, it makes up for our relatively slow processes, how long it takes us to learn new facts, and is able organize organize things to help us make better choices. It really is amazing. 20 minutes

Another permanent rant -- about how universities can be reorganized to do more for us, and we need places where lots of people come face to face to learn and build things, but let's go back to school every ten years. I went to Harvard in 2003 wanting to bring the minds of Harvard onto the open web, instead they brought my mind into the university, and we brought the open web into Harvard. And long after I got my last degree, with new maturity and experience I found much bigger ways the university could be used as a tool to grow and evolve, to create new stuff. But we didn't finish the job, Silicon Valley did. And we got a result similar to what we'll get if we let the Musk process go forward much further.It's remarkable how some of the rich of Silicon Valley want to do to the world what they did to the web! If you extrapolate, we'll go from a world with great potential, to a lot of grunting and snorting and not much else. The new AI technology is not ready to run the world. The rich people should use their own wealth to build something great and then show the rest of us how to use it. That's the proper role for Silicon Valley, not to rule. Lots of ideas buzzing around, but yet all this seems so freaking familiar. 22 minutes.PS: Developing better Developers blog post.