So far we've only created reading portals. What I want for myself and for you, is a writing portal. Think about it.#

I didn't like the code ChatGPT was writing for me, so I tried it in Claude, and the code is much closer to my style. I may try that again. I've heard it's better at supporting code than other chatbots. #

Counting down to 30. #

When news excuses lies and when all the viewers know they're doing it, we're beyond the point of no return. #

Trade Secrets Radio: What is podcasting? This is the exact moment, 9/24/2004, that podcasting got its name and its definition. It's pretty short. We knew what we were doing. We loved what RSS did for news. Now we were doing the same for radio. Not just talking about it, but finally -- doing it. It worked, pretty freaking well. There's a podcast episode to go with it, coming out shortly. #

I have been looking for this picture of John Palfrey, and just found it via digging through the archive for September 2004.#

It has been pointed out that this blog will be 30 years old on October 7, not October 10, as I had previously reported. The clock at the bottom of story pages is correct. It currently reads: 29 years, 11 months, 25 days, 19 hours, 1 minute, 34 seconds.#

I asked Google Trends about textcasting. No data. #

I'm still waiting for the podcast client that can subscribe to OPML lists, so I can subscribe to shows from my desktop, even automate it. If one of them did, we could start curated lists of feeds put together by smart people and influencers. The first podcast client that did this would open up the market, and stand out from the pack. I've been asking for this from the inception of podcasting twenty years ago. I had it in my first podcatcher. It would be great if one of the popular clients of today adopted the idea. Happy to help.#

I had a dream last night with many of my dead relatives present. We were at some kind of social event. My grandfather had a new wife or girlfriend, but he didn't recognize me, though he pretended to. My mother was far off in the distance taking pictures. I wonder what that means. Some of them were dead and gone. I had to remind myself of that. Meanwhile both my parents were alive and being themselves. (Heh.) My subconscious has a clear idea of who they are/were, only it doesn't register that some of them are gone. #

Here is the monthly archive for Scripting News in OPML, for September. I've been systematically creating this archive since May 2017. And also have been able to reconstruct the archive for most of Scripting News going back to 1994. I've been doing a lot of work with the contents of this archive in the last month. #

If I were benevolent dictator of Mastodon, I'd add Markdown support everywhere so we'd have links and simple styling. #

If I were benevolent dictator of BlueSky, I'd add Markdown support there too. Btw, can you really claim to be part of the social web when you don't support the web's most basic feature -- linking??#

If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I'd add Markdown support to Threads so writers could use the basic communication tool of the web. #

And finally, if I were the czar of ActivityPub, I'd add Markdown support to the spec because it ain't the web if you can't link in your writing. Maybe even invent some new kinds of links, after all it's been 35 years since the first web was invented. #

New episode from the Podcast0 feed about the open source release of Frontier, still the most powerful scripting environment ever. Someday the ideas in this product will be commonplace. And I would love to use a Linux port if anyone is so inclined. #

New episode from the Podcast0 feed about a new Yahoo RSS reader.#

BTW, I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm working on the reading interface for my blog. What you see when you go to scripting.com. I'm putting the same kind of attention into it that I did for the blogroll feed reader earlier this year. There are a few unreleased products that use the same approach. The way we read the web hasn't received enough attention, we've been so focused on the twitter-like interfaces, forgetting that reading on a full page is important too. We've settled for a pretty awful way of reading. I want to fix writing too, and have plans for this, but I thought I should do some work on reading as well. I wish I could show you all the new ideas, but I'm saving that for a big reveal at some point. #

This blog has been running for: 29 years, 11 months, 22 days, 20 hours, 43 minutes, 55 seconds. Still diggin! #

Thread: Much easier than struggling with ActivityPub, would be a set of functionally equivalent APIs and a common understanding of what a “post” is among various social web systems. This how we created solid interop in the blogging world, and it would work here too. #

If you want to help the open web, when you write something you’re proud of on a social web site like Bluesky or Mastodon, also post it to your blog. Not a huge deal but every little bit helps.#

I should put a dollar in a jar every time ChatGPT saves my ass. I thought I had boxed myself into a corner regarding the hash value for a web page, then I asked a question I wasn't sure there was an answer to. "In JS in the browser, I have the name of an anchor element and I want the browser to vertically scroll to it," to which it said: "Here's an example." #

When markets have dominant products, evolution freezes. Google search, for example. I should have great search for my blog by now, powered by Google. It has been here for 26 years. They should have been doing R&D on how they can be part of a better reading environment on the web. But reading on the web has just gotten worse over the years. It's why we don't like clicking on links, usually what we find at the other end of the link is obnoxious. To get some peace and quiet we had to go to Twitter of all places, but now that's gotten ridiculous too. The only corner of the web where there's real exciting innovation is ChatGPT. And what's tragic about that is we've never made search work on the web, and search is valuable too, not just the digested version of what was said that ChatGPT produces. But I'd like some of my writing to survive the Great Ingestion. Writing matters, how humans express themselves matters. In other words we still have work to do in search, AI does not fill that need, at least not yet. #

Guy Kawasaki sent a summary of my career created by his new chatbot. Very flattering. :-) #

An idea for a news org. I want a for-pay site where I can ask a question about the news and get the most up-to-date answer. I'd like to link to that page from a blog post, and have it either be frozen, to document where we were on that day, or dynamic, so that it changes over time. I'm sure this product will be here soon, so obvious. #

Why do I care about what social web means? Because I plan to add functionality to this space. I'm tired of all the stupid limits these products have. Titles or no titles. 300 character limits. No links, etc etc and on and on. Where did they get the idea that taking features out of writing was something they could do. What a wrong turn we took there. And now that once we have a chance to erase the limits, maybe -- none of the companies running their products are doing it. I don't want the way they do it to be the only way, the products are deliberately incompatible. Social web is the best name for what I'm working on. So I need to reserve this space. They didn't ask for my opinion, the first I heard of it was a press release. When I ship my thing I want to point back at this and say look -- I did tell you this was going to be a problem. #

oursocialweb.org: You don't have to give it any money or come to any meetings. Just know that someone else believes in users and developers. And let's work together to make it great, as soon as we can, without waiting for the big companies.#

The question came up on Threads as to whether the ActivityPub support in Ghost will be a full two-way presence in the fedisphere, and apparently the answer is yes. They are working on a feed reader that also hooks into AP. That's how I would have done it. Really feeds and tweets should always have been peers. If you want to know the history, blame Google Reader for that disconnect. Also it highlights the need for a news-zine focused on the social web. When the PC first came out there was PC Mag and PC World and then PC Week. Same for the Mac. And there was InfoWorld that covered everything. Now we're basically using smoke signals between users. A few really interested users could bootstrap a blog to keep track of what's going on, and share what you learn publicly. That was the advice I gave Mike Arrington and he started TechCrunch and that acted as the glue that hooked together the early blogosphere, feeds and ultimately twitter and its offspring. We need it again. Users and developers party together has never been more needed as now.#

Interesting situation in Atlanta with the Mets. They have two more games to play with the Braves, but there's a hurricane headed toward Atlanta. It's going to start raining at 1PM and won't stop until Friday afternoon. It's the end of the season and both the Braves and Mets are in the same wildcard battle. Do the Mets stay in Atlanta to ride out the storm, or head back to NY? It's far more weird than I have time to explain right now.#

Now that ActivityPub is claiming to be the Social Web, I feel like Lloyd Bentsen at the debate with Dan Quayle. ActivityPub is not the web any more than Dan Quayle was Jack Kennedy. The web is simple. That was hard to do. Very little since then lives up to that standard of simplicity, definitely not ActivityPub. The web is the web is the web is the web etc. Pick another more humble name. If it ever does achieve the utility of the web does we can take another look.#

Imagine no doctor would treat you for a serious illness until you got a court order saying it was due to rape, incest or the life of the mother. Judges with the power of life and death. In some states with the death penalty judges have the power to sentence people to death, but not for having a well-accepted medical procedure. But that's the situation women with a troubled pregnancy are in, if they live in the wrong state. From the patient's point of view, I have a slight inkling about what this is like because twice in my life I've needed health care to save me from imminent death. The health care system never hesitated to help. But what if they had said "we can't admit you until a judge rules that we can." In the new USA, abortion is like a pardon, something only the government can grant. Forget about juries of our peers. It raises so many questions. If a woman is about to miscarry are they even allowed to admit her to the hospital, or does she have to wait until she is actually dying? If you can check her in, what are the limits of the treatment they can provide? Aspirin? Blood? Oxygen? Surgery? And btw, medicine has advanced a lot since before Roe v Wade. Whatever practices they had for avoiding abortion can't apply now. This is the kind of thing no society should change the way we changed it as an edict handed down by judges who are subject to corruption. We are learning about a serious flaw in our system of government. #

It would be great if we could make voting a party, a celebration, something to look forward to, not something you have to make time for. That would probably do more to improve the lives of all Americans than any other single thing. It's like the SuperBowl, the NBA Finals, Coachella or the Oscars, only better -- because we are the stars.#

This is what it looks like when UPS loses a package. It's a case for the new Pixel 9 Pro. It shipped 17 days go. It was hell to just tell Google that the case was lost. I expected at that point they'd apologize and refund the money. That was a week ago. Just got an email saying want me to return the case when it arrives. It's never going to arrive. Luckily this is a cheap product, just $38. If it had happened with the $1300 phone, that would be a pretty big problem. It's amazing that a company the size and age of Google doesn't have a procedure for dealing with products that are lost (or more likely stolen) in transit. I've been through this with Amazon, they knew what to do, because UPS does lose packages, esp ones that look like they have phones in them. Anyway I have a fairly large credit with Google. I don't dare use it to purchase anything else, given how incompetent they are at dealing with fairly common customer problems. #

I wish my father had lived to use ChatGPT. He would have been so thrilled. My uncle would have lost his shit. #

Instead of just fact-checking the candidates, and presenting "both sides," how about recording the number of times the candidate threatens specific races, genders, lifestyles, origins, religions and of course individual people. Keep a page where you tally the groups he doesn't threaten with expulsion or worse. That would be very revealing, and in line with the true issue of this election. Time for you all to get in sync with the actual American history that's being made. #

It's around this time of year that I start thinking about my BOTY. I should give out a plaque or a statue or something. Someday! Anyway almost immediately I had my answer. The announcement will wait till December of course, sometimes early January. #

Social networks are condemned when they carry lies from race-hate, misogyny and worse, but the major news orgs do it all the time. It's ridiculous that there are two standards. #

To my programmer friends, how long would it have taken to answer this question using Google and StackExchange. There was a bug in this one line of code, a call to new Date () in JavaScript, that was behaving as if months were not 0-based, which they are known to be. The problem: I was specifying the day as 0 and month, correctly, but the day had to be 1 in order for it to work and without thinking I had specified it as 0. #

This is a test. For the next sixty seconds this station will conduct a test of a new server app that combines the functionality of several apps I used to run as separate servers. The goal is to be able to integrate the functionality of all the components. It's time to invest in blogging in a real way. The 2017 corner-turn was about getting back to the foundation I had before trying to co-exist with Twitter, Facebook, Medium. All three are now no longer high value targets for interop. So while I wasted a lot of time trying to peer with them, I did finally get off the horse and I had a decent setup while developed Drummer and FeedLand and in doing so learned how to do scalable server apps with SQL. I've wasted so much time trying to be compatible with apps that didn't want us. I have a feeling that none of the current targets really want us either. So let's get back to the Open Web, which gave us much hope before. I think we can do a lot with feeds and OPML. They're to open systems what GPL is to open source. You don't get to be half-committed to being open, you have to be all-in or you can't play. (Same idea as podcasting, which of course is just an instance of RSS.) You don't have to deal with a lot of confusion to find the interop. You just have to be willing to look in that direction. This started out as a test post and look what it has become. #

Has anyone attempted to make a higher level language on top of SQL? It's taken me a few iterations over years to finally (I hope) figure out how to design a table to take advantage of the features that evolved into making SQL efficient for the applications people really deploy. If this were machine language, it would be time to start thinking about the HLL that it inspires. Actually long past time imho. #

My Pixel 9 Pro keeps giving me tips on using it when I bring it up, as I'm trying to read an important message, or change something at a red light. I'm always distracted when I use the phone, and by adding more distractions to sell me on something, that's not their right. I paid $1300 for this new phone. And also I can't figure out how to get the phone to ring when I get a call. I keep missing important calls. #

Note to self: When the phone doesn't ring, go to Settings - Sound & vibration - Do Not Disturb. It was on for some reason. I'm sure I didn't set this. I'm pretty sure I've been here before. Here's the ChatGPT log and screen shot.#

I keep discovering uses for ChatGPT. I think it would be very useful to learn a language, for example. I know how to say this in English, could you explain to me, in English, how to say it in French. I bet it's very good at that. I am using it to learn to write SQL code that takes advantage of all the arcane features they've added over the years to handle cases that come up in real database work. It's anything but a new language, and efficiency is everything -- so I think they pretty much have all the cases covered. I remember how frustrating it was to learn Algol when all I knew before that was Fortran and Basic. It would have been great to have ChatGPT to coach me on it. #

Sarah Huckabee Sanders forced us to think of her as a mom. I don't think that works out very well in her favor, probably best not to go there. #

Interesting thread on a simple upgrade for any podcasting client that would create a network of tools people could use for subscribing and listening. I've tried to get people who make podcast clients to listen. Yes I am a user, but I also designed the technology, and did the first implementations, so I know what's possible.#

Podcast: Let's use feeds to hook together pieces of the twittersphere. #

I theorized why Jack Dorsey is disappointed with Bluesky on Bluesky. I did the same on Threads and heard people say ugly personal things about Dorsey. This really pissed me off, because he's a human being who made a large contribution to the technology we use, and I think his heart has been in the right place. Nobody is purely good or bad. If my theory is right about why Dorsey is disappointed, it's a valid point, Bluesky was started with its prime mission as creating a distributed system. The more they dig in on nice-to-have features that have nothing to do with being distributed, the more they go down the same path as Twitter did. Jack was openly talking about turning Twitter into a developer platform as early as 2007. Had they realized the system he talked about, basically global object storage with real financial backing, we'd be much further along with the web as an operating system. We're paradoxically so close to that now, but so far, for a reason I don't understand. We should start having a public discussion about this. It can't hurt to talk about what-if's instead of barrelling down the same ridiculous cul de sac as we did in the 00's. I've been writing about this since 1994, the loop we refuse to break out of. Well let's start talking about how we break out, because it's not going to "just happen" organically. #

When will ChatGPT be able to do a transcript of an audio file?#

I look forward to the day when I can ask a question on my blog and get an answer, on the blog, from a trusted member of my karass. #

I look forward to the day when I can link to a topic I've written about on my blog without having to depend on Google. I don't think they know I have a blog or have any respect for it. #

I've been re-watching The Bear and am now totally thinking of my job as a chef. I started out that way 40+ years ago, and somewhere along the line I stopped thinking that way. If you can, watch S02 E07 to see what I mean. It's about service, the connection between the staff and the people who come to eat, and the medium is the food. It's the same idea. There's so much cynicism around tech, and I hate that. We've rarely seen it as a human thing both by the people who make the meals and the people who love great food. The world thinks of it as billionaires and influencers and lying fascist politicians. But it should be much more than that. #

Has it ever been suggested that journalists take an oath, similar to the one the President takes to: "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Could be voluntary. Sports reporters might take a different oath. #

Shownotes page for the first Trade Secrets podcast, on this day in 2004. I was in Seattle, Adam was coming from Belgium. Haven't written any notes about it yet. If others are interested in listening and commenting on these podcasts, this is when it was all coming together, let me know and perhaps we can start a thread on Mastodon. #

I used to think of Twitter as a coral reef, but its role as a world wide notification system is fading, and we haven't replaced it with anything. I wrote this in 2007 when the utility of Twitter was just becoming apparent.#

I was recruited to speak at a Ria Novosti conference in Moscow in June 2011, but decided not to go. This was back when we thought naively that Russia was a democracy, and working with Russian journalists, when American journalists wouldn't, seemed like a fair deal. Something about it didn't smell right though, so I stayed home. #

Something has changed in the twitterverse, it's grown new centers. For me, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter is still here, but I use it a lot less than I used to. Each of them acts as if they are alone, except for ActivityPub but that's more complicated than it may seem. As often is the case, the tech industry is depending on confusion. This may be a strategic mistake. I could cite a few examples where this didn't work, when an open ecosystem whose benefits were by then obvious to users, completely erased the ecosystem that came before, often with remarkable speed. Each of them is playing for all of it, wanting to control their users, make it so they only post to one system. And some people do. I think it's better if we, as users, remain diversified.#

I find that a lot of my posts on my blog are just like the tweets I post on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter. I used to have an icon in my outliner that tweeted the text of the bar cursor headline. #

If ChatGPT had a simple, non-AI scrapbook, like the old Mac OS had, where you could just throw something over your shoulder so you can find it later with a text search, that would make it a lot more useful for retaining practices that work. It's a shame to work something out, come up with the answer that worked, and then to have to do it all over again 23 months later when you encounter the same problem.#

Could we agree that ChatGPT can ingest everything that's in Wikipedia? I particularly want the images. I'd like to ask for a picture of Chuck Berry, and get something nice and be able to put him in a scene with the Wordle Kitty. That seems pretty harmless. And the news industry could hardly object, they didn't invent Chuck Berry, or own the copyright of the picture of him in Wikipedia.#

I'm searching for some common ground between the twitter-like systems, a basis for interop, a common API even. We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places. And you could write the script that did that in an afternoon or two. We started out with simple systems and the best of intentions. There's no technical barrier. And we could do it in a few weeks at most if there was a will to do it#

BTW the Wikipedia page for the MetaWeblog positions it as a replacement for the Blogger API, but it's an extension of it. You could use MetaWeblog to publish to Blogger sites, but it also supported features that Blogger didn't have, that were in our blogging software, Manila.#

Show notes for a short podcast I recorded on this day in 2004, a response to Adam's podcast which I had just listened to. These were the good days, a new medium in its early stages of booting up, after years of trying to get it to go. In the next few weeks, it'll really start going. You can subscribe to the podcast feed here. #

I also added a link to the RSS feed in each shownotes page. In the HTML at the bottom, as a white on orange icon and in the page source as a <link> element. #

I keep seeing mention of "Podcast 2.0" in various places. That is unusually greedy, even for the tech industry. What next? Deprecating the way podcasting has worked for the last 20 years? How do we know the people doing this aren't shilling for Spotify, Google or Amazon? Please don't mess with something that works as well as podcasting. You want to do something better, great -- make your own name and get people to respect it. Stealing respect from podcasting tells me you have no honor or self-respect, and it should say the same to everyone else. Something else that tells you it's bad, they never bothered to send me an email. Welcome to the tech industry. #

Just watched a Harris rally in Charlotte NC. She's using what Trump said in the debate in her new campaign speech. Brilliant. Getting him on the record in that context is a gift. 60 million viewers. Up till then he only took interviews where he could bully his way past the interviewer. #

Braintrust query: I got an email from OpenAI saying I could access the new models, but I don't see the new models in the popup menu.#

I've been enjoying the recent blog posts by my longtime friend Jeff Jarvis. A couple of months ago, I was practically begging him to do this. He was pouring so much unfocused energy into making journalism play an appropriate role in our democracy. When Jeff started posting to his blog, it gave his friends something to point to. This writing had much more impact than a random tweet. Journalism crossed a line they should not have crossed. Now we fully expect them to try to do it again. We have to find a way for our ideas not to be scattered in the wind, so thorougly ignorable. And in doing so, I'm convinced we'd find a better way to organize the electorate online so it's more immune from unwise and unfair manipulation from the journalists. At the same time Dan Gillmor, who was also scattering his ideas about, has started a newsletter. Dan was a real blogging pioneer as was Jeff. We remember how this kind of thing boots up. We can set up any kind of distribution system we need. What matters is the collection of brilliance. Individuals are not so powerful unless they come from one of these. #

Another fantastic thinker and writer who is mostly scattering his ideas -- Dan Conover, who when he comes out with a piece, I stop everything and sit down and carefully read it and savor it, because not only is there sure to be new info and new ideas, the writing is sooo good. He's a former local reporter in South Carolina. I met him on a road tour I did a bunch of years ago. Where does he post this stuff? Facebook. I want it to be part of the concentrated web writers union. Maybe think of it as my karass, my version of The Atlantic, perhaps. Or my version of the op-ed page of the NY Times. I think there is definitely enough good stuff out there, unorganized, to easily rival them for originality, depth of thought, experience and great writing. Dan is on my list of such superheroes. #

And btw I also am wasting my ideas too, one in a hundred has any influence, and even then it's minscule, the ideas drift away unimplemented or unused. I keep writing, hoping I see a way to get into the global conversation, again. I remember what it's like. But I'm not done. We still have a big problem to solve in our political and communication system. Online software is where it's at. #

Someday an election will be like Game of Thrones or Succession. A campaign would be a season. There would be character development, arcs, twists, revelations, unforseen events, cameos, acts of god. Near the end of the season you have the election, with the following episodes the plotting, intrigue, and undermining of democracy, and at the end of the season the inauguration of a new president. Each year you have more michegas, until four years later you go through the election all over again. People would really study the candidates, and would have reasons they like one character over another. And maybe the patriarch doesn't die, and decides to run again. This is where we're heading, we might already be there. #

The most encouraging thing about last night's debate was that the moderators were journalists. When Trump repeated his most egregious lie about murdering babies being legal in certain states, moderator Muir confidently, almost derisively, said that there is no such thing. And when Trump said he didn't admit he lost the election, and then when challenged said in a snotty way he was being sarcastic, Muir plainly that wasn't true either. It was like the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. ABC News was the last place you'd expect real journalism to surface, maybe the NYT et al will follow their lead. #

I wouldn't have traded places with Harris for anything in the world, she did fantastic. The pressure on her was enormous. I don't think Trump said one thing that was true. And Harris made the point that the division is coming from that guy over there, and if we don't want it all we have to do is turn the freaking page. For once the power is with the people. The Repubs in the Senate wouldn't vote to convict, the Supreme Court just gave him immunity, but the American people, in a few weeks, can tell them all to fuck off. #

Idea for TV series. Law and Order style crime drama where all the crimes are against humanity.#

Even if his supporters don't see it, Trump is a pathetic broken has-been. When he's gone we'll dance in good riddance. #

Today's song: Spanish Moon.#

Ed Kranepool was a Met when that really meant something. He started on the Mets in their inaugural year, 1962. They went from the worst team ever to World Champions in record time. They became the heroes of NYC in 1969. I was riding the subway back then to get from Flushing to the Bronx to go to school, and in the Bronx, when the Mets won, everyone was smiling. If you've ever been to NYC you know how unusual that is. And in the Bronx, which is of course where the always-hated Yankees were HQ'd. Ed Kranepool died Sunday. He was watching a Mets game when he had a heart attack. #

James Earl Jones: "I don't know if we ever learn from history."#

Famous heroic kitten breaks out of prison to rescue house pets in Ohio from being eaten by JD Vance.#

I made kittens the theme for the presidential campaign, it was my attempt to bring levity to it for readers of my blog. Then came "childless cat ladies" and now cats being eaten in Ohio. Either I was prescient, or the Trumps are copying me! Anyway, here's the Wordle Kitty $5 postage stamp, next in the series. She just broke out of prison to rescue the Ohio cats from JD Lance. My collaborator of course is ChatGPT.#

Could Kamala Harris look into the camera tomorrow night and say "To Fox News viewers, they've been feeding you a load crap. Just thought you should know. And I wouldn't trust the others so much either." #