5-minute podcast.

There should have been a stage with 17 comedians on it, running parallel to the Republican debates. 

Seinfeld, Louis CK, Whoopi,Jamie Foxx, Steve Martin, Chris Rock, Larry David and Tina Fey, Dana Carvey, Chevy Chase, of course. 

Comedians not imitating the Repub candidates, but being candidates themselves. It's okay to invent a persona since that's what actors and comedians do. 

In the podcast I explain how this is basically what Trump is doing, giving his people really good television. It's amazing it took so long for us to get here. Just flip Reality TV over, and take it out of the realm of fantasy. On this island, the last survivor gets to live in the White House and fly around on Air Force One. Politics has changed forever, probably not just here in the US. 

Colbert was prophetic. Trump is doing the same thing, but he got off the for-play stage and jumped onto the for-real stage. Basically no difference. Remember when McCain said Obama was a celebrity? He was figuring it out. Only we don't want the one whose role is sub-titled The American Fuhrer. :-)

If things were working well in the web world, browsers would know how to implement a menubar for the user so the HTML code would only have to include the data that makes my menubar different from others.

Or a set of common user interaction dialogs that really work, so you can call them with parameters that include the language of your interaction but none of the layout.

There has been no factoring of user interface over a very long time. A pattern that was well-established in the 80s, and we still haven't caught up with the 1984 Macintosh in standardized UI. Throwing out standards like that, not good for business.

Seems like Mozilla was headed in that direction in the beginning but somehow didn't follow-through? It's all kind of a fog. 

Continuing the thread on the IA-feed-in-the-wild.

Adding the IA features made the Medium rendering of my posts unreadable, because parts of the <content:encoded> for the item are being displayed in the body of the message. Example. This is because IFTTT, acting as the bridge between my RSS feed and Medium, prefers <content:encoded> over <description>. 

My conclusion is that it would be best if Medium read the RSS directly, but they don't so I worked around the problem by creating a special feed without the Facebook features just for the IFTTT recipe. I chose that over turning off the connection with Medium. 

This is life in the content world of 2016. 

BTW, I'm not publishing the URL of that feed because I'd rather not have to support it long-term, instead viewing it as a bit of duct tape for an issue that I hope will eventually go away. 

The fix worked. When this post appeared on Medium it was rendered without the ugly bits. 

A 10-minute podcast reply to Mitt Romney.

In a nutshell, instead of coming up with things that the voters can do to stop Donald Trump, how about turning the jets on the current elected Republican leaders, and get them to stop acting so Trumpian. 

The idea is to start governing like thoughtful adults, and take the shortcuts out of your process. If you guys were serious about backing away from Trump, you all would admit you made a (serious) mistake in all the many ways you all try to invalidate the President that the people of the United States elected. Don't you see this is the problem! We elect someone, twice, and you all pretend he didn't get elected? Well who the fuck are you? As Trump says, you're the guy who lost. And your party acts like you won. 

So let's get going with the Scalia court replacement. Until you all are ready to play the proper role as established by the Constitution, then you aren't serious. 

Stop coming up with things for other people to do, and start doing what you yourselves can do.

Another -- have the Republican Party go on record saying that climate change is real, and we are going to stop obstructing efforts to change the American economy to take that into account. 

And another thing -- the NRA. They clearly aren't going to get you elected this year. Sure the 2nd Amendment is deeply etched in the brains of the voters. So we aren't going to change anything there. But the NRA isn't bounded by the 2nd Amendment. They make you guys do a lot of other nasty things. Send them packing. Let them scream. Just say loud and clear you're kicking out one of the biggest sources of obstruction. 

Let's start getting rid of the maggots and parasites.

One more thing -- call off all your voter suppression. It's another of the many awful and amazing things you guys do out in the open for all to see. You've tried to make some people's votes count and others not. That's not your place. That's like stealing. Something you should go to jail for. 

Romney was a perfect choice. A VC money-mover. Doesn't create anything, doesn't even do anything other than say shit to get people riled up. The problem is Mitt, it isn't working anymore. Now what are you going to do? 

PS: Here's a video of Romney's snotty RNC 2012 bit about climate change. 

To Facebook people, the choice of <content:encoded> for the IA content has disadvantages when the feed is used in other contexts.

For example, IFTTT prefers <content:encoded> over <description>.

When you refer to {{EntryContent}}, and both are present it will return <content:encoded>.

This broke the connection between Scripting News and Medium, which is built on IFTTT.

So there are four parties here -- Facebook, IFTTT, Medium, Dave.

In hindsight it probably would have been better to create an IA namespace, and instead of using <content:encoded>, you'd include an <IA:article> or something like that. Having never been used before, it could not be confused with anything that came before.

However, IFTTT could allow an expert mode, where I could somehow say "No, don't use the <content:encoded> stay with the <description> because it works better for Medium."

Or -- even better -- Medium could stop relying on IFTTT to process RSS for it, after all RSS is a well-respected standard (isn't it). You wouldn't outsource HTML to another app, or HTTP. It seems RSS, esp the new rich flavor of it started by FB is something Medium could support directly.

If it falls to me, I will either cut the connection to Medium and wait for something better from them, or produce another feed that will be used for apps that aren't processing IA feeds.

Also, it might not be a bad idea to establish a convention that says "This is an IA feed" in the feed itself. Not sure whose job that is.

After switching over my feed, I can see it had a negative effect on the Medium versions of these posts. An example. And a screen shot. 

The problem is this: my IFTTT recipe is taking the <content:encoded> sub-element of the <item> instead of the <description>.

And it seems there is no way to tell IFTTT not to do this. 

I imagine there will be similar problems in other RSS consumers.

We'll see, I guess! 

Here's an interesting twist.

The main feed for Scripting News is now also an Instant Articles-compatible feed.

Just like the one I did specially for Facebook.

The difference is that thousands of people already subscribe to this feed. So the installed base of people who could benefit from the mobile-faster IA content just grew by a fairly huge amount.

I know this is a new idea -- IA feeds as a basis for interop outside of Facebook, but it is that. And because all CMSes are being updated to support the format, it's a relatively simple matter to add the feature to already-existing feeds. 

WordPress, for example could do this, as could Tumblr or Blogger. Of course any of them would increase the size of IA-compatible content by a much larger factor than my own humble feed.

Think about it. 

Still diggin! :-)

Update

Doug Purdy on the philosophy at Facebook that led them to use RSS instead of inventing something new: 

We need to stop reinventing everything again and again. While I realize that most engineers don't like existing art for anything more than making fun or leveraging conceptually, we should be taking a far more pragmatic evolutionary engineering approach with most of the core communication infra and compete on product features/content.

 And my response:

Very well put Doug. I always try to re-use whenever possible. That's in fact how I came to support RSS in the first place. I had a syndication format called scriptingNews format, because that's what it syndicated. Netscape made their service read my format, and of course they did what you describe here, invented their own format. So I played a sneaky trick on them, I just adopted their format. Instant standard.

To people who read my stuff and work in news...

This piece by George Lakoff, a linguistics prof at UC-Berkeley, models the two parties as "strict father" and "nurturing mother." It's amazing over the years how well this model has stood up. 

Once I read this all the other analyses of why Trump is resonating sounds wrong. It's not about issues or being angry with Washington. That's head stuff. What matters is how they were raised, what kind of family. Are they looking for a strict guiding hand or a nurturing cuddle. 

The strict father is like catnip to Repub voters.

This is so important but Lakoff writes too long and too scholarly for it to get through to most people esp on the net. 

I'm trying to think who would do a good job with this, but you probably know much better.

I think this is important.

Dave

I know Marco Rubio is a lousy politician, but I felt a bit sorry for him in the interviews on Tuesday night. He has no chance of winning, his political career is at least temporarily wrecked, and he's got the burden of going up against a neo-Nazi white supremacist with a foul mouth who's winning. It's kind of a shitty deal. 

I empathize because I got kind of a similar deal with RSS . It happens all the time, out at dinner, at a party, a conference, someone says hey do you think RSS is dead? By implication it hurts me more than it hurts them if it is. And that's what I say to them. I don't make any money from RSS. It's never been a business for me. So if it's dead or not, has no effect on my well-being, any more than it affects yours. 

Like that.

Marco Rubio won't benefit if Donald Trump isn't President any more than you or I will. He'll get to write a book. And there won't be a nuclear war. There's that too. Rubio will benefit, but that's not really the point. It would be good for all of us if his efforts are successful, and even though his politics suck (as I said at the outset) we all do owe him at least a thank you for trying to prevent a calamity. He'd get a good book deal either way probably, so he doesn't really have to do this. 

We haven't completely forgotten manners, have we?

It's time to think the worst of Donald Trump.

He did refuse to disavow the support of the KKK. And I heard him refuse to do it again last night. He says there was a Facebook post and a tweet where he did. I haven't seen either of them. If you have seen one please send me a tweet with the link. Thanks.

The Occam's Razor conclusion is not that it's a gaffe, instead that it's real. Trump is himself a white supremacist. He sure talks and acts like one. 

Then there's a video of some white men at a Trump rally, one dressed as a veteran, physically abusing a young black woman. It's shocking. 

Someone said the Republican response to the Obama presidency has been a slow-motion lynching. I had the same thought but didn't dare say it. Now it's time to say it. Past time. Trump is what the Repubs, some of whom are decent people, were flirting with, as a way to win elections. 

Do we have any recourse against a candidate running this kind of campaign? No one has gotten killed yet, let's start thinking about that before it happens. Watching the Secret Service act at his command seems very wrong. They work for us, not him. They work for the protestors too. 

BTW, the discourse on the Democratic side hasn't caught up with reality yet. Even Marco Rubio, who has been fairly brave at stating what's obvious, still hasn't had the nerve to say what it is we're actually seeing. 

They were laughing a lot last night on MSNBC. I watched Fox for a while, they were trying to carry on as if this would settle down to something acceptable. But our understanding of these disgraceful and un-American acts, crimes actually, hasn't yet caught up to reality. We need to get ahead of it. We might want to pass some laws about what we're seeing. This might be something both Repubs and Dems agree to.

If you think Trump is inevitably going to be President, remember that he isn't yet President and won't be for a while. We still have some time to prevent the worst of what may be about to happen.

PS: Here's a link to Trump's supposed disavowal. It isn't of course that. I think he's a white supremacist. Racist, neo-Nazi. That's the presumptive Republican nominee for President. 

If you see this in your reader, you might want to click this link and leave it open. I'm going to type in notes as the night goes on. You'll see the updates without having to reload the page.

1. Trump's ambivalence about the KKK shows that dog whistles are not entirely over. The line has just moved into previously unthinkable territory.
2. On MSNBC they're not considering the most likely explanation for Trump's KKK confusion. He's actually a white supremacist.
3. How the Repubs gave us Donald Trump. A must-read.
4. When the results from Georgia were reported they had a big picture of Hillary Clinton next to Donald Trump. I thought who could have predicted this a year ago. Clinton yes, of course. But this combination.
5. Brian Williams is impossible to watch. Rachel Maddow must totally hate this having to be moderated by such an empty suit.
6. Hey I like this. It's like my own Twitter. Heh.
7. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. (Sung to the tune of Spam Spam Spam Spam.) 
8. Very interesting how WNYC reports election returns in tweet graphics.
9. BTW, the updates flow through to the IA version on Facebook. That's some good realtime. Pretty incredible for a huge company! :-)
10. Wouldn't it be smart for Twitter to upgrade the technology for cards? They're just using bitmaps. How about a subset of HTML. Wouldn't be expensive or dangerous.
11. Do you wonder how long it takes from me pressing Update to you seeing the change on your screen? Much less than 1 second. The net in 2016 is really fast. 
12. There are 50 people watching this page right now.
13. Little Marco isn't such a bad name. 
14. More love and kindness. It works. 
15. HRC should start talking about taking back Congress. Right now is the time to strike. The repubs are in total disarray. Might even get some Repub incumbents wanting to change parties.
16. Trump has created a White House ballroom/TV studio in his house in Florida. This is a new thing.
17. Obviously the last man standing is Cruz. Goodbye Little Marco.
18. Oh Christ it's that asshole again.
19. Goodnight everybody! :-)

I have turned off replies on scripting.com. 

I just wanted to give you all a heads up. I want to try other ways of getting public discourse connected to my blogging without hosting the comments on my site. I do like to ask questions on my blog from time to time, and not having a way to get input will be a problem. 

I have found that the norms of commenting on Twitter and Facebook have permeated everywhere, and I'm not interested in hosting other people's opinions, challenges or call-to-debates here in my own space. I don't usually respond to them elsewhere, but when they appear here, it's just a nuisance. I end up having to deal with too many personalities. 

That's not conducive to free thinking on my part, if I always have to anticipate how people will snark at it or what the various troll factions use to control discourse. I don't want that in my space. 

There will be another turn to this wheel at some point. ;-)

You know when Trump says that Rubio and Cruz have never hired anyone, or started a business, or created something, he's sort of right. 

His followers say they like him because he made so much money. So what if some other people who made a lot of money got together and said Hey this isn't our idea of who should be running the US govt, just so you know. 

I understand that at this point there's nothing short of him resigning that will keep him from being the Repub nominee. But at least we can balance his hype that he's somehow unique in that he's made money and supposedly cares about the US in some meaningful way.

Just a thought. 

Remember when I started podcatch.com? I asked my friends on Facebook what podcasts make them happy, then I created a list, fed it to River5 and did a special page for it. I've been feasting the podcasts ever since. Love it.

Now I want to do the same thing for politics. There's so much news, it's such a big year for politics in the US, I want to have all the news and opinion, from all sides, in a river that flows all day every day with nothing but political news. 

So I've started a thread on Facebook, this time asking what are your favorite websites or feeds for politics? Once it's at critical mass, I'll open up the river. 

Let's have fun! :-)

Last week I released Instant Articles support for my blog, Scripting News. 

What this means is that every time I publish a new post or update an existing post, it's reflected in my IA feed. Think of my blog as an "emitter" of IA stories.

On the other side, Facebook is reading my feed every three minutes, pulling in new posts and updates. And my posts are then available as Instant Articles on mobile devices. Think of Facebook as the "consumer" of IA stories.

Here's a screen shot of what one of my pieces looks like when rendered as an IA.

Who and how

Here's a list of examples of services and products that I would love to see support IA.

1. Twitter is a news system and RSS is a perfect fit for news. When I publish to my IA feed, I'd like Twitter to read it every three minutes, and post new messages to my timeline and update existing ones, according to what's in the feed, exactly as Facebook does. Twitter, is in this context, a consumer of IA feeds.
2. Medium can and should imho play the same role. That means I could tell Medium where my IA feed is, and it would keep it in sync with stories on their site. Medium does now support inbound syndication, but when a post is updated, the version on Medium is not updated, at this time. IA provides a perfect mechanism to do this. I would love to see them support it.
3. But Medium is also an emitter, in addition to a consumer. It should be possible to hook Medium up to Facebook, so that stories people write there could be read in the Facebook app, full fidelity, as Instant Articles. 
4. WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger should clearly support IA as emitters, and I'm sure they will all be on stage demoing their support at F8 in April. Since WordPress and Tumblr also have readers, it seems they should also be consumers. 
5. Open source software such as River5 should support IA, as a consumer. 
6. An RSS reader such as Feedly could support IA, for a better mobile user experience, perhaps.

My feed

This is where my IA feed is.

http://scripting.com/fb/rss.xml

The View from Nowhere and Access Journalism have crippled press coverage of Trump. To see how this works, imagine you, an ordinary American voter, talking with Trump in person or on the phone. How long before you interrupt him, and say, look -- I'm tired of you talking over me, I want to be an equal participant in this conversation. And then when he keeps talking, how long before you hang up? 

Well, if you're a reporter, you can't hang up because: 

1. You don't exist (view from nowhere) and
2. If you did he wouldn't talk to you next time (access journalism).

So every conversation with Trump is exactly the same. He repeats himself over and over, you never get a word in, and he never talks about what you asked about. Time runs out and you thank him and move on to the commercial.

As voters we can hang up, because we aren't part of the View From Nowhere and we don't have access to lose. But so many people these days behave as if they are an insider, a member of the savvy elite. That's why an obvious virus like Trump is allowed to run wild in the body of American politics, so much so that we get a little relief knowing that the military may refuse his orders if he's elected President rather than commit the war crimes that Trump is advocating (e.g. killing the families of people we suspect to be terrorists).

BTW, John Oliver has the best takedown I've seen of Trump. It's direct and unforgiving, offers no apologies or explanations for Trump, and he disclaims both the VFN and any interest in having access. He reacts as many of us would, with outrage that a person could think this way of campaigning could work (it has, and that's even more outrageous).

PS: The View From Nowhere concept is Jay Rosen's contribution, a very useful one.

PPS: In December, Joe Scarborough at MSNBC hung up on Trump. Tremendous!

What if HRC is nominated and she made a deal with the Repubs (what would she want?) to choose a Repub running mate.

Not someone from the crazy branch of the Repub Party, sorry to all the also-rans on the Repub debate circuit.

Then the team would use all the resources of both parties to drive turnout, the Repubs would disable their voter suppression tools, and we could all sigh in relief knowing that Trump, the official Repub nominee would win maybe Utah, Wyoming and Alaska. It would be the biggest Electoral victory in 40 years, and the official end of Repub obstruction.

Am I dreaming?

Amazing. On Fox just now they had two analysts, one Repub and one Dem who agree that the Repub Party is splitting in two, right now. But the moderator won't let them finish sentences. Is it possible they're so accustomed to not having a real story that they don't know what to do when they actually have one?

I've been listening to John Dickerson's Whistlestop podcast. It's the best new thing. Each episode is 40 minutes, covering a moment in the history of Presidential politics. A convention, a campaign, a meltdown, a big win or loss. 

I was alive when many of these things happened but had no idea what was going on behind the scenes. Dickerson is a great story-teller, you can tell he loves this stuff, the stories are riveting. 

The last two episodes I listened to were about Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan at two RNCs, in 1980 and 1976 (the order I listened to them). 

I just watched a video of Reagan's closing 1976 convention speech. A lot has changed in 48 years. And he was a pretty fantastic speaker. And we know how things turned out, as he says in the speech that we will. 

Dan York at the Internet Society commented on my first IA piece after I got it working, and he's the first imho to concisely say why it's so interesting. 

I have expected that Facebook would be focused on keeping everyone inside their shiny walled garden and thought I understood that Instant Articles involved putting your content on FB’s servers, which I now understand it does, but via caching of an RSS feed. Which is very cool!

That's exactly right. The feed is how stuff enters their content system. But the feed itself is outside, leaving it available for other services to use. It's great when this happens, rather than doing it via a WG that tend to go on for years, and create stuff that's super-complicated, why not design something that works for you, put it out there with no restrictions and let whatever's going to happen happen. That's certainly how I've done my past projects. I like to create functionality much more than I like to go back and forth on mail lists. 

Now to answer your question, I don’t know very much about AMP.

The reason I was able to get on board with IA is that one of the directors at Facebook, Doug Purdy, wanted to work with me. So we met almost two years ago, here in NYC. Then I was briefed on what they were doing, and kept in the loop as it came together. In the beginning all I had was a promise that it would be RSS . I’ve seen many companies over the years say nice things about being open, but somehow forget as the project goes forward.

But they came through. When I got to start work on it early last week, it turned out they had stuck to the promise. It was a simple addition to my RSS-generating code to have it also generate an IA feed. It took three sessions over three days to do the work, and to ship.

So that’s pretty good use of existing technology as I see it. ;-)

About AMP, no one ever sent me an intro to what they were doing. They emphasized the big companies they were working with. To be fair, so did Facebook. From my point of view it’s largely because Doug really wanted this openness that it happened. I find that many of the big open innovations over the years have one person inside a big company who sees it as worth the extra effort to do something open. 

Basically I find that developers want to create open stuff, it's part of the ethos of programming. So sometimes it actually happens. ;-)

PS: On Twitter, Tom Murphy called this a "bridge into a walled garden." Beautiful.

PPS: On Facebook, Purdy lists the people who worked on the open protocol at FB.

I believe this is the first public and live Instant Articles feed. 

http://scripting.com/fb/rss.xml 

As you can see it's also RSS 2.0, something I'm quite proud of. 

When I was developing my Instant Articles feed, I desperately needed a working example to follow. It would have helped to have something that worked to study and copy. Now that my feed has been working reliably with Facebook's OS, I wanted to share it. 

Interop is what matters. This is a good place to start.

PS: Is it really open? Well, you can write an application that uses that feed. (Please do.) So yes, it's open.

I was telling Joi the other day that I have advice for the NY Times that I thought he would appreciate since he is a board member there. 

He said I should write a blog post, of course (he's an NBB). 

So here it is.

Anatomy of a story

First, let's look at the anatomy of a news story. 

1. A headline.
2. A lede.
3. Quotes from experts, people involved in the story, witnesses. Also known as sources. 
4. Some numbers perhaps from pollsters or researchers.
5. A closing paragraph (optional, the Times often omits them, which makes a lot of sense).

Now for ten points, tell me which of these items has changed the most in the last few decades. It's #3 of course. 

Sources go direct

The big revolution brought to us by the Internet is that sources can now speak publicly, easily and for free, using Twitter and blogs mostly. I once predicted that every member of the US House of Representatives would be a blogger. That seemed bold at the time, but today? It's much bigger than that. The President of the United States just wrote a guest post on the SCOTUS blog. Think about all the change that represents.

For me, this ability to go direct, was the reason I started blogging. In 1994 I had a Mac product. Couldn't get the news out because reporters, even though they all used Macs, believed the Mac was dead. They reported their belief, not facts. 

A lot of people used Macs, and there was lots of new software. There was no way to get news of new products out to users, because it contradicted the belief that there were no new products. So I started communicating directly, using the web, and it worked. We got enough users for our software to allow it to evolve into blogging, podcasting, RSS. 

Markets could develop without the support of journalism. That's a big new thing and should have been a wakeup call for the news industry, if they weren't mostly ignoring blogs or trivializing them. 

So now when a reporter needs quotes, he or she may turn to Twitter, or a blog, or search, to find the sources they need. The phone, the previous technology used for gaining quotes, is not used as much these days.

The missed opportunity that amazingly still is open

At the same time the news organizations have missed a chance to embrace this phenomenon by working on new tools to help their sources communicate more effectively. They've let the tech industry own it, and it hasn't imho done a very good job. It's all very confusing in user-publishing land. I imagine that reporters at the big pubs think this is okay, but it's not. Their business models are disintegrating, ad blockers are a user revolution, a sign that things may be about to collapse quickly from here. I was on the receiving end of a user revolution in the late 80s as the CEO of a software publisher that practiced copy protection. One month it was something users grumbled about, and the next month we were all rushing to release versions of our product without it.

There's a lot of garbage blogging and tweeting going on out there. Only a relatively few people do a great job of it and strive to do better. These people should be part of the news ecosystems that news orgs gather around themselves. Not replacing reporters, not replacing anything. The bloggers are the sources, with the ability to publish on their own.

Bottom-line: The most interesting sources of the NY Times should be offered a chance to blog at a nytimes.com domain. One that's clearly seen as the user community of the NYT, so it's understood that the quality of the writing is not something that's subject to the NYT standards. But at the same time, let new standards evolve, and nurture them. Take an interest in the bloggers. 

The Times has yet to really make a serious attempt to understand what blogging is. For years they called their reporters who write using blogging software bloggers. That was a big disconnect. The bloggers are your current sources and future sources. You have to call some of them on the phone but mostly you read their tweets and blogs. 

Here's a vacuum that has existed from the beginning. Why not fill it? Take a chance. Experiment with the new technology in meaningful and potentially revolutionary ways. What exactly do you have to lose?

Watching last night's debate I felt shame on behalf of the Republican Party. Not just for the Republicans in government, or who would be in government, but for the people who vote Republican in 2016. 

If your children behaved like that with their friends how would you feel? And Trump is a grown man. Presenting himself as a potential leader of our country? What kind of people could support that? You say you're angry. That's crap. You're crazy, is what you are. Out of your minds. 

Kasich, openly threatening to kill the leader of another country. Do you have any idea how paranoid the leadership of North Korea is? Kasich has already reached a level of great responsibility by being on that stage. What he says matters! And he presents himself as the most ready to govern of all the Republicans. That kind of talk could easily get a lot of people killed.

And name-calling? In a presidential debate. Really? Trump says he's so good at working with people. You think so? I wouldn't work with someone who used name-calling as a negotiating tactic. I'd show him the door. No we don't want any thank  you.

The only two who carried themselves with any measure of self-respect, Rubio and Cruz, aren't much better. The policies they support are inhumane and un-American. Cruz likes to point out how unelectable Trump is. Well I wouldn't live in a country that could elect Cruz as its leader.

We've had some awful Presidents in the US, in my lifetime. One of them, Nixon, was so scary that I considered leaving the country to avoid being drafted to fight in a nonsensical war. I would leave a United States that elected any of these people for reasons of honor and integrity. 

We are so much better than this. Snap out of it Republicans!

We'd all love to hear the plan!

But the plan doesn't start by electing a President. It starts by building a movement of committed revolutionaries who are willing to give up something substantial, over a long period of time, for the revolution.

Showing up to vote is not much of a commitment. Marching on Washington with a few hundred thousand others, now that's a beginning. And even then you probably don't get the revolution. You have to convince not just people like me who passionately believe in open health care and education, investing in our young people, creating opportunity for everyone, really dealing with climate change, you also have to convince a fair number of people who are voting for Trump. And that means doing a lot of talking and listening, and that's going to take years. We as a country are very far away from the place we need to be to get the kind of change we want to see.

And btw, they'd like to have a talk with you, about things they care about.  

So maybe before you just leave the room you might want to have a discussion about what it will take to convince your fellow citizens that you have what it take to create a revolution. 

Adding #feeltheburn to your tweets is not enough.  

PS: Thanks to the Beatles for the title of this post and the first line. 

I'm still figuring out very basic stuff about Instant Articles.

When I posted the Cable Liars Network piece a few minutes ago, I noted that it showed up in the list of instant articles that the Facebook RSS reader had found. So I went looking for the article in my timeline. It wasn't there. Then I opened the Pages app on my iPhone, and it was there. So there's no doubt that the article had been picked up by the operating system on the "other side."

Why wasn't it in the timeline?

Then I had an idea. I posted a link to the version of the article on scripting.com to my timeline on Facebook. It shows up with the usual title and snippet in a box, linked to the original. But then, when I looked at it on my iPhone, and clicked the link, up popped the Instant Articles version of the piece.

Conclusion: The Instant Articles scanner creates an association in the Facebook database betw the URL of a story on my site, and the Instant rendering of the story. If you're looking at it in the timeline on the phone and you click the link, you see the instant version. On a non-phone device (desktop, laptop, tablet) you visit the page  on my site. 

PS: It'll be interesting to see what happens with the link to the piece in the second paragraph. It has an IA version of that piece in its database. When you click on it in FB on a phone will it show you the IA version or the one on my site? We'll find out soon enough! ;-)

PPS: Update to the postscript. Yes. If you click on a link to an IA story from within another post, you get the IA version of the story. The database is running at a fairly low level in the Facebook OS. Good design. 

PPPS: Doug Purdy, ex-of-Facebook, says these are called AppLinks.

I have an idea. A cable network where they report on the lies the candidates told today. Nothing more or less. The candidates can come on to be interviewed, or not. When they start lying, the screen turns red and big bold text scrolls across the screen explaining the lie they're telling. In very simple judgemental terms. Nothing above 9th grade level.

And it must be equal opportunity and ruthless. I don't want to see them letting Donald Trump off the hook as they always do and hold Hillary Clinton accountable to the most minute detail.

And maybe it should only work with recorded stuff. If the candidates appear in person people may think we went easy on them to get them on. A lot of the networks are that way with Trump, obviously, because he's a ratings machine.

Teach people how to talk about politicians as liars. The more adorable the candidate the more ruthless the exposure. Because adorable candidates are the worst liars, I've found.

Now when I post something new on my blog, it automatically flows out to people who follow my RSS feed, to people who follow me on Medium, and through Facebook's algorithm as an Instant Article.  

This is the first new post that will go to all those places.

Even better, when I update this post, Facebook will automatically get the update. So will readers on my blog. However Medium and people reading via RSS, unless their RSS app has been programmed to do updates (I don't know of any, but it is possible) will not get updates. 

Twitter will get a link via Radio3 , however because this post occupies more than 140 chars, they will only get a link. I hope at some point they relax that limit. 

This is progress! Seriously. It's a big deal. ;-)

PS: Earlier today I wrote a post that explains at a high level how this works. 

This is a test. 

For the next sixty seconds, this station will conduct a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. 

This is only a test.

How Facebook Instant Articles helps the open web.

1. Each article can contain markup, and most important links. Links go to other places on the open web. So finally when we write stuff that's posted to Facebook our writing can be part of the web. 
2. When you update a post after it appears on Facebook, they get the updates, so you don't have to do anything to keep it in sync.
3. It's built on RSS, an open format. The RSS can be used for other purposes, such as posting to LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium or any new service that might come along. So Facebook doesn't have an exclusive on this flow. They are not being a silo! Hey how about that.
4. Because Facebook is the largest source of flow, it seems the others will have to match them. The easiest way to match them is to just accept the same feed I use to post to Facebook. 
5. I can and will modify River5 to support the Instant Article format. All kinds of new services can boot up on the flow, without depending on Facebook servers. You can't be turned off by Facebook. This is the key feature of the open web, it's the platform without a platform vendor.
6. My blog shares in this flow. So now I don't have to neglect my blog in order to post to Facebook. I can have both, with the same effort. That means I control my archive, and should the terms of service change radically, my writing will still exist, outside the silo. 
7. Your blogging platform, WordPress, Tumblr, Drupal, etc will almost certainly support this format in addition to the current feed it produces. Or these features could be rolled into the existing feed. Either approach will work. So you can expect, if you are a blogger, that you will not have to do anything but update your software (if you host it yourself) to get the new connection to Facebook. I'm sure they're all working on getting ready for the April rollout. 

Summary: Facebook is using open web technology to power Instant Articles. I'm not sharing anything that isn't already publicly documented on the Facebook developer site. People have trouble understanding this, I assume, because it seems so out of character for a big web destination like Facebook to care about the open web. It's kind of a miracle. But there it is. The open web is about to get a real shot in the arm from a most unexpected place. 

Note: I have been in the loop on this for almost two years. But until I was able to produce a feed that correctly flows through their system, it was all speculation. But it's no longer speculative. I've tried it, it works as advertised. 

I just made a pass over my Facebook timeline judging things as sad, wow, happy, angry. I didn't Like one thing. I want to see how I'd feel. Answer: weird. No icon for that.

It was funny to hear Bernie Sanders complain yesterday that HRC is stealing his lines.   

I went to two DNCs, in 2004 and 2008. The funny thing is most of the speakers there were stealing his lines too. 

The point: Sanders' pitch has been the standard Democratic Party line for a decade or more.

Discussion on Facebook.

Facebook keeps winning at the expense of the open web, but that's now about to change. Here's a case study that illustrates. 

This guy is a professional reporter.

His best stuff is on Facebook, he writes there off the top of his head. A thought occurs to him and he writes it. He's smart, so it's good. And it's raw and human and compelling, in a way that his news articles are not. He takes a long time to get to the point there, probably the economics makes it work that way.

I say to him every so often, I wish you'd post that on your blog so I can point to it on my blog, and link to it on Twitter. He says I know I know, but when I post it to Facebook I get engagement. I say I know.

How are we both going to get what we want? We've been waiting for an answer to this while the problem keeps getting worse and the open web keeps losing, slipping away from us.

In a month or two we'll be able to give him a writing tool that gives us both what we want, because of the changes Facebook is about to make. 

I want him to get exposure so his ideas can grow. But I also want people who read my blog to see it. Right now they don't want to click on FB links. And I don't want to send them to FB, though I do it when I have to.

Really interesting piece about an MIT prof who's starting a new university. Here's a quote.

Basically the idea is that we’ll have a core that’s project-based learning, but where students can have a really deep, integrative longer-term project rather than shorter projects. And then all of the knowledge acquisition would be moved virtually. So instead of projects' being at the periphery, to sort of flip it more toward the graduate-education model. And I think it would be much more inspirational for the students because they could come in and really work on projects from the get-go that they wanted to work on and that they were most passionate about, and they could tailor their knowledge base to the projects they want to work on.

This is exactly the idea I've been promoting about having students work on an open source project while at university. Some would go on to get jobs in companies that are using the technology. Some will start new ventures around the technology. And when they need a break, they can come back to school, teach, share what they've learned, and do some projects with other people, just for the fun of it. 

The idea is to get beyond student projects, to use the university environment to do development. All aspects of it. Documentation, training, support, QA, interop with other projects, creating new standards. We know so much about these things now, we shouild be doing more than teaching it, we should be practicing it. 

Our experience with the bootstrap of podcasting and political blogging at Berkman in the early part of the last decade were models. I think Dr Ortiz is really onto something.

I want to produce a feed that's compatible with Facebook's new Instant Articles. I understand from reading the docs that they're using RSS with some special elements. 

What I really need to have it all fit together is an example feed that I can study, that gives me something to shoot for. So..

1. Yes, I am reading the docs, so please don't send me a link to the docs.
2. I would love to see an example feed. I am repeating this because I'm sure most people will still just send me a link to the docs.
3. An example feed would be great!

BTW, this is what the current RSS feed for Scripting News looks like. Obviously I will need to produce another feed, probably derived from this, to be compatible with Facebook's protocol.  

If you have such an example feed, please ping me at dave.winer@gmail.com. Thanks! 

Update

Rob Fahrni found an example feed in this Medium post. Bing! 

Update on the Update

Unfortunately the example they provides does not include the stuff in the Facebook docs that's most confusing, what goes inside the content:encoded element.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I visited the MIT Media Lab on the 11th of Feb. It was a great trip, just one day back and forth. I wanted to see the Media Lab with my own eyes, and reconnect with two longtime friends who are working there now.

Ethan Zuckerman got involved in the web very early as the lead developer at Tripod. I worked with him at Berkman, where he, along with Rebecca MacKinnon, started the incredible Global Voices project. Ethan is now the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT. 

And Joi Ito, one of the earliest bloggers, a good friend, discussion leader at BloggerCon, has been the director of the Media Lab since 2011. 

I wanted to reconnect because the Media Lab is in an incredible position to help the open web, especially because these two pioneers, Ethan and Joi, are there. 

Lots of emails, back and forth

Our meeting was a whirlwind, at least partially because my train from NYC was 45 minutes late (!) but there's only so much you can get done in a face to face in one day. 

So we've been going back and forth via email since the meeting, and it's been getting pretty interesting! I want to now surface at least part of what we've been talking about.

First, Joi wrote a post about our meeting and the open web. Please read.

It's not only personally flattering, but you can see how thoroughly the blogging ethic flows through Joi. Err on the side of disclosure, saying what you really see, knowing that it will be received at face value. That's blogging at its best, imho. 

Where to go?

In one of the follow-up emails I listed three things we could do to help the open web reboot. I had written about all these ideas before, in some cases, a number of times. 

1. Every university should host at least one open source project.
2. Every news org should build a community of bloggers, starting with a river of sources. 
3. Every student journalist should learn how to set up and run a server.

These ideas came out of my work in booting up blogging and podcasting, and working successfully at Berkman to get the first academic blogging community going. Had I continued that work, this is where we would go.

Update

Joi's post in response to this one. ;-)