A 5-minute podcast speculating on new social behavior with Apple watches on Manhattan streets. Will people stop staring into their phone and stare into a watch instead? Now their eyes will be pointing down, instead of out, unless they're going to hold their wrists up at eye level? Or perhaps people will stare into the watch and the phone at the same time. If you put your watch on your left wrist and hold your phone in your right hand, it might just work. Either way, the success or failure of Apple's watch will be seen in the streets of Manhattan in a few weeks. Listen to this hilarity-cast for the scoop.

There are no joke posts here, and there won't be.

I'd love to see other blogs and news sites make that statement.

See also: This is not an April Fool joke.

On March 23, I posted a short-term roadmap for MyWord Editor, including this:

The editor is a plain pre-HTML5 <textarea>. There are lots of great projects underway to do beautiful full-featured text editing in JavaScript. I did a survey of them last week, and have reached out privately to some of the authors of these tools. I want to get great text editing in MWE. But first I wanted to get the open source release out there.

The editor is now released, people have successfully gotten their own servers running, and yesterday I released the first version of templating. I'd say the train is rolling.

What's the best text editor?

Now I'd like to swing back to the question of text editing.

There are lots of editors to choose from. They all presumably have advantages and disadvantages. I'd like to host a discussion here. What would be the best editor to use?

Discussion

The two I looked at most closely were medium.js and Dante.

The genre of editor that makes the most sense is one that's trying to mirror the Medium feature set. That's what both these editors aim to do.

But there are other drop-in editors written in JavaScript. I wanted to cast a net as wide as possible to see what would come back.

This is a decision lots of other people have had to make.

For example, what does Ghost use? I assume WordPress wrote their own? Did they? Tumblr?

They all had to make the same decision.

We're coming up on that awful day on the web when anything you read might be a joke. The jokes are never funny, usually they say something bad about someone the author doesn't like. Haha just a joke.

It's pretty horrible for a reader. All this week, every article with a seemingly sensational headline, will have to be checked to see if it might be a joke. Here's the first one I was bit by today.

BGR: Meerkat is dying – and it’s taking U.S. tech journalism with it.

Is it real? I think it is. There don't seem to be any obvious lies in the piece. But the conclusion is way over the top. Nothing is dying, that's pure hype. And if US tech journalism is dying, it's been happening for a long time, Meerkat could hardly be the cause.

I don't think it's funny, I don't think news orgs should play this game. It's as if a bank decided one day, as a joke, to take all the money from your account and give it to someone else. Haha it's a joke.

Imagine going to GMail on April 1, and finding someone else's email there instead of yours.

The press only has one product, facts. They twist things, every day, to make the news seem more interesting or important than it is, but one day of the year, this Wednesday, they outright lie. Not in every piece, so you have to always be on the alert. It's as if an airline deliberately crashed a random plane into a mountain as a joke. The goal of a news organization is to inform. On April 1, they crash instead.

If you're a news organization, on March 30, preparing your annual joke, how about do everyone a favor, skip it this year.

Facebook thinks the purpose of the Internet is to be The Matrix. A sort of lifeboat or ark for people whose lives must consume no more than a watt or two of electricity and some protein slurry.

I propose that the purpose of the Internet is to create a place for people of intellect to work together to create a greater consciousness for the species, so we can make the changes we need in order to survive, with some purpose beyond mere existence.

So I think the purpose of the Internet is to save our species from self-destruction.

It's the only tool we have whose purpose is not yet fully decided.

And survival is the only problem we have that we must solve.

In this piece Seth Godin says that your negative internal voice is a permanent fixture. Nothing you can do can get it to leave you alone. But there is an answer. Surround that voice with lots of love, it's the perfect antidote.

I learned how to do this myself a number of years ago.

I would drop something, and in the instant after, as it's falling, my dark inner voice would judge me. "Idiot!" it would say. Before I learned to challenge the voice, something I never dared do as a child, it would take over. The idea would fester and bloom and become other kinds of negativity.

Instead, as soon as I regain my composure, I call up another voice, my inner adult loving voice. "I love David very much," the voice would say, firmly, almost fiercely, "and he is not an idiot, he's a very smart, good, nice person, and I want you to stop saying that about him."

It works, I'm happy to report. The dark voice is a coward. It only picks on little kids. Confronted with a powerful adult it sleeks off to hide until the next moment of weakness.

I had a teacher who showed us how to do this. There were exercises that included punishment for the dark voice. I would lock mine in a bathroom in the basement of the house I grew up in, and make him pour a bowl of spaghetti on his own head. In my imagination, as I locked the door I'd tell him to stay there and think about it a while.

A short podcast on the future of everything, The Matrix, Facebook, virtual reality, empathy, getting real for once in our species.

These days people do a lot more Favoriting that RTing.

Seems to me there should be some system built on Favoriting in Twitter.

A new tab where I see all the most favorited tweets from people I follow?

Backlash85: "How would you feel about an alternative to the current internet?"

I love this idea but I'm not sure what it means.

Maybe, like a new namespace?

Start over with a parallel .com and .net?

I really like the idea.

TCP/IP over IP.

Internet of Internets!

We didn't like the way this one turned out.

Start a new one!

New rules.

In software you can "drop it in and see what happens" and if it explodes into a billion pieces, you know you have to go back and re-think it. I keep having to remind myself that software is different. There's zero cost to an explosion, if you have a backup copy of everything of course.

Thanks to Dean Hachamovich for the pointer.

Silicon Valley proposes to drive our cars for us. I guess that's okay.

Silicon Valley theorizes about putting our minds in software containers and storing them in computer memory, to be woken up when there's something for us to do, or think about, or perhaps see.

But what would there be to see or do or think about in a world where everyone else is in a computer's memory. Have you seen many beautiful megabytes recently? Honey come look at the glorious pixel I just found. Of course you'll only be able to "see" it from the other side of the glass, looking out.

Maybe we'll be able to hear each others' thoughts?

There's a watch coming. But it will be a short-lived product, because soon we won't have wrists to put them on.

So in a world where we're woken up to see or think, or do something, but there's nothing to see or do, or think about, I guess there won't be any reason to wake up.

When it's all said and done, we might just end our species because we ran out of things to think about or do or see. Something to think about. Or do something about.

PS: I think this whole upload-your-brain thing is a trick. Once they get you up there, they'll just turn the computer off and that's that.

In a comment under my last piece, Drew Kime asks a question that needs asking.

"What is it about WordPress that you see as siloed?"

The answer might surprise you. Nothing. WordPress is silo-free.

1. It has an open API. A couple of them.

2. It's a good API. I know, because I designed the first one.

3. WordPress is open source.

4. Users can download their data.

5. It supports RSS.

"So, if WordPress is silo-free, there must be something about MyWord that makes it worth doing, or you wouldn't be doing it," I can imagine Mr Kime asking, as a follow-up.

Silo-free is not enough

This question also came up in Phil Windley's latest MyWord post, where he introduced the editor with: "I can see you yawning. You're thinking 'Another blogging tool? Spare me!'" He went on to explain how MWE is radically silo-free.

But there's another reason I'm doing the MyWord blogging platform, which I explained in a comment.

MyWord Editor is going to be competitive in ease-of-use and power with the other blogging systems. The reason to use it won't be the unique architecture, for most people. It'll be that it's the best blogging system. This is something I know about, and I'm not happy with the way blogging tools have evolved.

The pull-quote: "I'm not happy with the way blogging tools have evolved."

Imagine if you took Medium, added features so it was a complete blogging system, and made it radically silo-free, and then add more features that amount to some of the evolution blogging would have made during its frozen period, the last ten years or so, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what I want to do with MWE.

Blogging is frozen

There haven't been new features in blogging in a long time. Where's the excitement? It looks to me like there's been no effort made to factor the user interface, to simplify and group functionality so the first-time user isn't confronted with the full feature set, left on his or her own to figure out where to go to create a new post or edit an existing one. Blogging platforms can be both easier and more powerful, I know because I've made blogging platforms that were.

Basically I got tired of waiting for today's blogging world to catch up to 2002. I figured out what was needed to win, and then set about doing it.

I have no ambition to start a company. I like to make software. I'm happy to keep going as we have been going. I think JavaScript is a wonderful platform, with apps running in the browser, and in Node.js on the server. It's a more fluid technology world today than it was in 2002 the last time I shipped a blogging platform.

I would also happily team up with companies who think this is a great opportunity. That blogging has stagnated too long, and that there must be ways to reinvigorate the market. I don't like taking shots at WordPress, but honestly I think it's stuck. I'm happy to talk with entrepreneurs who have ideas on how to create money-making businesses from an exciting user-oriented, user-empowering, radically silo-free open source blogging platform! Blogging needs a kick in the butt. I propose to give it one. With love.

Anyway, to Drew, thanks for asking the question. I doubt if you were expecting this much of an answer, but the question needed asking, and I wanted to answer it.

PS: Here's an idea of what a MyWord post looks like.

Over on Facebook and on Twitter I posted a thought, that software could be "radically silo-free."

David Eyes asked what it means. I referred him to my blog, I said "scroll to the bottom and then read up." That's because this idea is so fresh that I hadn't yet written a post explaining. I thought I probably should.

First mention

First, I said I was going to hold up the release of MyWord Editor because I wanted it to be silo-free from the start. Then I spent a week doing that. While that was happening, I made a list of things that would make software silo-free, and I did all of them. I wanted to consciously, mindfully, create something that perfectly illustrated freedom from silos, or came as close as I possibly could to the ideal. In that post I defined the term.

"Silo-free" means you can host your blog, and its editor, on your domain. I may offer a service that runs the software, but there will be no monopoly, and it will be entirely open source, before anything ships publicly.

Second mention

In the post announcing the open source release of MyWorld Editor, I included a section listing the ways it was silo-free, fleshing out the idea from the earlier post. And from that list, comes my definition.

1. Has an open API. Easily cloned on both sides (that's what open means in this context).

2. It's a good API, it does more than the app needs. So you're not limited by the functionality of MyWord Editor. You can make something from this API that is very different, new, innovative, ground-breaking.

3. You get the source, under a liberal license. No secrets. You don't have to reinvent anything I've done.

4. Users can download all their data, with a simple command. No permission needed, no complex hoops to jump through. Choose a command, there's your data. Copy, paste, you've just moved.

5. Supports RSS 2.0. That means your ideas can plug into other systems, not just mine.

There may be other ways to be silo-free. Share your ideas.

Why it's "radical"

In that post I explained why the software was "radical".

These days blogging tools try to lock you into their business model, and lock other developers out. I have the freedom to do what I want, so I decided to take the exact opposite approach. I don't want to lock people in and make them dependent on me. Instead, I want to learn from thinkers and writers and developers. I want to engage with other minds. Making money, at this stage of my career, is not so interesting to me. I'd much rather make ideas, and new working relationships, and friends.

I guess you could say I believe there are other reasons to make software, other than making money. Some people like to drive racecars when they get rich. What I want is to drive my own Internet, and for you to drive yours too.

The best software frameworks are apps that do things users care about.

Back in the 80s it was dBASE and then FoxBase. 1-2-3 had a macro language, it was weak, but it was widely used because 1-2-3 was so popular with users.

Today it's WordPress.

And Slack is doing interesting things with their APIs.

Twitter too, but that got kind of muddied-up.

The best one of all of course is JavaScript, a very bizarre language in a totally underpowered environment that reaches into every nook and cranny of the modern world. It's an awful environment, you'd never design one that worked that way, but the draw of all those users makes up for its sins.

Flickr had a wonderful API, still does, but Stewart left the house before it could really blossom as a community thing. See Slack, above.

Chatting with Brent Schlender the other day, I commented that Steve Jobs' politics and mine are exactly opposite. Jobs was an elitist, all his products were as Doc said in 1997, works of art, to be appreciated for their aesthetics. I am a populist and a plumber. Interesting that this dimension of software is largely unexplored. I hope our species survives long enough to study it.

BTW, when ESR saw XML-RPC he said it was just like Unix. Nicest thing anyone could ever say. When I learned Unix in the mid-late 70s, and studied the source code, I aspired to someday write code like that. So well factored it reads like its own documentation.

Today, I'm mainly concerned with getting some outside-the-silos flow going with people I like to read. If we get (back) there, I will consider it a victory.

My friend Jay Rosen asks for comments on Facebook's request that content providers give them access to the full text of their stories. A NYT report earlier this week said that Buzzfeed, the NY Times and National Geographic were among the first publications that had agreed to do this.

I've commented on this many times over the years. The news industry could have seen it coming, prepared, already had a distribution system in place to close off the opportunity for tech. They didn't. That's still what they have to do. And it doesn't seem like it's too late, yet.

My advice

1. Do the deal with Facebook. They have access to 1.4 billion people, that's huge. There's never been a news distribution system even remotely like it. How can you not try to use this system? It's as if you were a world-class skier and the Olympics asked you to compete. You of course would thank them for the honor, and go.

2. At the same time, be part of an independent news system, one that's not captured by any company, that does what Facebook hopes to do. It's too soon to throw in the towel. The technology already exists to do this, easily. (Even the lowly Knicks show up to compete every night, in theory at least, and sometimes they embarrass the current world champs.)

3. There's good reason to think the independent system will be much better than the Facebook-captured one, because it can offer things that no captive system can, independence and some measure of objectivity. Don't miss that Facebook has become a newsworthy entity. Expect this to develop over the years, as their audience grows to cover every person on the planet. No one can fully trust them. And you should trust the people, your readers, to know that. Offer something interesting and independent. It may never reach the size of Facebook, but it can be a sustainable, and growing service.

4. Partner with Twitter. Encourage them to support full content as Facebook is doing. That means relaxing the 140-char limit.

5. Run your own river on what used to be your home page. The smart ones will point not just to stories on your site, but everywhere there's news. Include all the sources your people read. You can't compete with Facebook and Twitter with a system that only contains your stories. Stop thinking so linearly. People return to places that send them away.

6. Expand. Have a goal to have twice as many sources reporting on your site every year. Accept that the roles for your current editorial people will change as they grow to lead teams, to teach large number of sources how to go direct to readers, with integrity. (Jay: Teach this new role in J-school.)

7. You have to become more like Facebook, but please only the good high-integrity parts. No snickering. There are a lot of good people who work at Facebook, people who really care. Some of them used to work for you. Listen and learn from them. News is changing. Be the change.

Last week I said we'd wait to open up MyWord Editor for use by everyone until it was fully silo-free. Today the wait is over. We're ready to begin a journey, that hopefully will add new life to the open blogging world.

A shot in the arm for the open web. A way for JavaScript developers to collaborate on a new fun project. A way to escape from the silos that threaten to turn us into commercial robots, consumers and promoters, when we aspire to be thinkers and doers.

https://github.com/scripting/myWordEditor

It's radical software

These days blogging tools try to lock you into their business model, and lock other developers out. I have the freedom to do what I want, so I decided to take the exact opposite approach. I don't want to lock people in and make them dependent on me. Instead, I want to learn from thinkers and writers and developers. I want to engage with other minds. Making money, at this stage of my career, is not so interesting to me. I'd much rather make ideas, and new working relationships, and friends.

Here's the plan

1. I know MyWord Editor is not as good as it could be, as good as it will be, once we get the ball rolling. The editor is a plain pre-HTML5 <textarea>. There are lots of great projects underway to do beautiful full-featured text editing in JavaScript. I did a survey of them last week, and have reached out privately to some of the authors of these tools. I want to get great text editing in MWE. But first I wanted to get the open source release out there.

2. It's pretty easy to get your own MWE instance up and running. I've included instructions on how to set it up in the readme. There's a mail list where people can help.

3. I am operating a server myself, but please think of it as a demo. I do not want to be in the hosting business. Anything you post there could disappear at any time. The best way to use MWE as a blogging tool is to set up your own server, or pool your resources with other people to set up a server. Especially with free services like Heroku, it's very inexpensive to operate a server, and fun, enabling, and you're helping the web when you do it. Remember silos are bad, even ones operated by people you like!

4. I have tons of features I want to add. I have a huge set of debugged concepts from previous blogging systems I've done, dating back over 20 years. I'd like to add them all to MyWord. But first people have to use it. It's no fun to add features to a product no one uses it.

5. Remember, if the past is a guide, the tech press will not write about this. So if you want people to know, you'll have to tell them. Please spread the word. Let's make something great happen, all of us, working together, to build the web we want.

6. If you believe you can fly, you can!

Silo-free

Here are all the ways MyWord Editor is silo-free:

1. There's an open API that connects the in-browser app to the server. So you can replace the app. Or the server. Or both.

2. Because there's an open API, you can build anything you want at either end. You're not limited by my vision of what's possible. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

3. The app is provided in source, MIT license. So there are no secrets. And you can use my source as the starting point for your own editor.

4. The server is provided in source, MIT license. No secrets, etc.

5. The app has a command that downloads all your content in JSON, so you can move your data from one server to another, at any time. If any instance removes this command, alarms should ring out all over the land. It's your content, ladies and gentlemen, not theirs.

6. Of course every MyWord user has a great full-featured RSS 2.0 feed. We love RSS and it feeds us and we feed it, it's doing great, and anyone who disses it is a mean rotten silo-lover.

Thank you Twitter

Twitter is doing a good deed, by allowing us to use their service for identity. They have an excellent API, and their servers are reliable. And I think they're fair about what they allow and don't allow.

We're not in any way trying to usurp their business. And if there's more good stuff out there on the web, that's more stuff for people to point to from their Twitter feeds. I use Twitter, so do a lot of other people.

I spent some time over the last couple of weeks surveying the amazing collection of Medium-like editors written in JavaScript. All open source, some very good. It's just amazing to see the collective energy and ambition of the JavaScript community. I've been programming a long time, on a lot of platforms, and have never seen anything like this.

I thought about integrating one of these toolkits with MyWord Editor, currently in development. I put together testbeds for the most promising ones, ZenPen and its derivatives, Dante and medium.js. They're all on the right track, each has advantages, but imho what they all were missing was a way to enable a motivated user to run a Medium-like blogging service with their editor as the centerpiece. A next-gen blogging system, built with JavaScript, with elegance and beauty at the center. Key point: this is achievable, within easy striking distance, in the spring of 2015.

I decided that rather than pick one beautiful simple editor, I'd sprint to the finish line with the standard pre-HTML5 <textarea> editor, release the whole thing as open source, and let the community decide what to do. There appear to be some front-runners, projects that are active and ambitious, going somewhere. I want to make it easy for people to work with me, rather than be in the position to choose a "winner" at this time, based on incomplete info.

With all the incredible open energy in the JavaScript world, I don't doubt we can move the leading edge forward, if we have the will to work together. I'm putting out my best invitation. I have a great back-end, perfectly suited to host a blogging environment (I have some experience with this), and a rudimentary editor. Let's see where we can go from here.

I expect to ship my editor next week.

I came back from my trip early this week, ready to ship MyWord Editor. But I decided to make it silo-free from the start. So I had a little more work to do before release.

"Silo-free" means you can host your blog, and its editor, on your domain. I may offer a service that runs the software, but there will be no monopoly, and it will be entirely open source, before anything ships publicly.

I could have gone another way, and put up my own hosting service, as I have done with my software snacks, Little Pork Chop, Happy Friends, Radio3, Little Card Editor etc. None of those are open source, however they all run on the nodeStorage platform, which is.

I want MyWord Editor to make a very strong anti-silo statement. And even though it might make more sense from a development standpoint to do it in stages, it would muddy the message to have it be a silo when it's released. So we're going a little more slowly, to make a big strong, impossible-to-miss statement. Silos are not user-friendly. We don't want them. Not even for one version.

We'll start testing the software over the weekend, and hope to have a first public release early next week.

PS: Here's an example of a document published by MWE.

Yesterday I ran a piece where I said Twitter's 140-char limit is probably in its final days. It's gotten a lot of attention.

Next question: When will the change be announced? Imho, it's not hard to read those tea-leaves either.

Facebook is having a developer conference next Wednesday and Thursday. It's likely that they will talk about their plans for news distribution at this conference.

David Carr ran an article in the NY Times last October that previewed the pitch we'll likely hear. They want publishers to post full content to Facebook. In return they are willing to share ad revenue with the publishers.

The reason this is so important? In a mobile environment, clicking on a link to read a story is a very big price. We all know that mobile is where Facebook's growth is coming from. News reading on mobile can become much more fluid. That's what Facebook wants to do.

So, with Facebook getting full content from at least some publishers, and the announcements likely coming next week, does Twitter really want to explain the magic of 140, and ancient limits of SMS, or would they rather have an equivalent proposition for publishers? Smartphones aren't just the future, they're here, now. It seems like this is the moment to say 140 was nice, it got us to where we are, but now because of mobile, we have to get more text from publishers, if only to remain competitive with Facebook in the one area Twitter still has an advantage (for now) -- news, especially mobile news.

Still reading tea-leaves. I have no direct info, but if Twitter doesn't make the change now, they will be too late. My bet: It'll happen before Facebook's announcements next week.

Some people call "vendor sports" what I call it tea-leaf reading. I've been doing it for decades. I like to watch, and guess, based on incomplete information, what the various forces in the tech industry are doing.

A lot of times you can discern what big companies are doing, the same way astrophysicists discern the existence of black holes, by the effects they have on smaller more visible entities.

In this case, I think perhaps Twitter is getting ready to bust through the 140-character limit. Why? Because Medium appears to have given up on merging with them. How can I tell that? Well, because they went straight after Twitter, by introducing a timeline, and short Tweet-like messages, without the 140-character limit. This was Medium blinking. I was really surprised they did this. Up to that point I thought Medium was a juggernaut. That they were cleaning up. Apparently not. Apparently they needed to tap into greater growth potential. And if anyone is likely not to be overly respectful of Twitter's internal engine, it's the founder. He knows how the sausage factory really works, where the bodies are buried, etc. The stuff that we don't know.

I always thought Medium's manifest destiny was to be acquired by or to acquire Twitter (in the same way NeXT acquired Apple in 1997). The founder returns, bringing with him a feature that users are likely to adore. I said it this way: "There's a Medium-size hole in Twitter." I thought that was funny. Funny because it was so true.

I imagine, via tea-leaf-reading, that Dick told Ev, "Sorry dude, we decided to make vs buy, you want too much money, so we decided to build our own Medium clone inside Twitter." Much the way they said that Bit.ly wanted too much for their URL-shortener five years ago.

One way or the other. imho, the 140-char wall is not long for the world.

PS: I thought it would be interesting to tweet a link to this piece in Medium. I had to do it by hand of course, would be nice to hook it up to Radio3 via API.

PPS: When will the 140-char wall come down? See this follow-up post.

As users, we're all familiar with the idea of lock-in.

A service starts. They offer something attractive. We use it. And later find out that we can't move without leaving behind everything we created there.

That's lock-in.

Lock-out applies to developers.

A service starts, offers something attractive to users. But it has no API. It can't share its data with any other application. It can't receive data either. If a user wants to create something, they have to use their editor. And if they like the editor, they can't use it to create something that lives elsewhere. The creation and serving are bound together in a closed system. No other software can enter.

A system with APIs is part of a network of software. One without APIs stands alone. If you get an idea for a feature that would make a world of difference, you can't implement it unless they offer you a job, and once inside, let you do it. And don't cancel the project before it's done. And it isn't taken over by someone else in a organization shift. There's a reason big companies don't create new stuff, they are subject to rules that individual creators aren't. They aren't free to try new ideas out.

I guess all industries have lock-out. The moneyed people own everything, and in order to create, you have to fit in. And most really creative people don't.

Then you have systems that are not locked-out, like Twitter and Facebook, but are subject to revision at any moment. This is imho better than not having APIs at all. At least the world can get a glimpse at the idea before it's shut down. In a fully locked-out system, new ideas are stillborn.

The good news is the costs on the net today are so low that there really is no technologic or economic reason for lock-out. And so many developers want to make open source contributions. It's really just a matter of organizing the work to create open alternatives to the locked-up systems created by the tech industry. We need user-oriented frameworks for free systems. This is the one area where open rebellion is not only legal, it's encouraged. At least if you listen to and believe the proponents of free markets. We're going to find out.

I wrote a story on my liveblog on Monday about my personal experiences with lock-out.

Also see an offer I made to Medium when they started, in 2012. They could lead a new wave of silo-free writing for the web.

I've had it in the back of my head for a while that I should just go all the way with a simple browser-based blog post editor, that with a single click would produce a modern essay page, like the ones Medium puts out. After all, when I complain that people post their essays in a locked-up silo, what are the easy alternatives?

Tumblr is trying to get there, apparently, but there's still a lot more to Tumblr than there is to Medium. So it's not immediately obvious how to substitute one for the other. And immediate obviousness is required for the limited attention we have these days. Miniscule attention, actually.

Last Monday I decided to spend a few days taking myword.io to the next step. To add an editor that publishes stories to their own static pages. I have a very good back-end, written in Node.js, that's all set up to do this. I started with the MacWrite demo program, and it took five days to get all the way through it. I can now publish from the browser to a static web page, with simplicity and beauty.

Now, the editor is not as good as Medium's. Mine doesn't have comments, for example. But this will serve as a way for people to relatively easily participate in the open web, without locking into a silo. And if it proves popular, there can be more versions.

Not sure when I will open this up, but I wanted to put it out there that it is coming.

PS: As always this will likely not get covered by the tech press, so if you want people to know about it, you'll have to tell them.

As you may know, I've become a JavaScript-in-the-browser developer. My liveblog is an example of that. It's an app, just like the stuff we used to develop for Mac and Windows, but it runs in the browser.

The browser is a complete app environment except for one crucial piece: storage. It has a simple facility called localStorage, which almost fits the bill, comes close, but ultimately doesn't do what people want.

I have solved the problem in a generic and open source way. In a very popular server platform, Node.js. However it's not widely known that this problem has been solved.

Try this little app, as a demo: http://macwrite.org/.

You can sign in, write some text, save it, sign out.

And then sign in from a different machine, and voila, the text you entered is there.

From that little bit of functionality you can build anything.

I have a new app in development, very simple, and brain-dead obvious, and useful, that builds on this. Hopefully at that point the lights will start to come on, oh shit, we're ready to build the next layer of the Internet. It really is that big a deal. And you don't need VC backing to participate. One developer, one person, can build something useful in a week. I've just done that myself. The service will virtually run itself at almost no cost, for a lot of users. That's an interesting place to be.

Please read Ken Silverstein's piece, his story of First Look Media.

Watching them stay silent for so long, I suspected they lacked basic publishing ability. It made no sense to me. You can set up a blog on wordpress.com or Tumblr, with a custom domain, in at most a couple of hours. Anyone with basic tech knowledge could do this.

With all the talk about learning to code, and the digital native generation, it's kind of appalling that they can't do something as basic as create their own blog, to navigate around any blockage from their management.

Silverstein says, as others have, that there was no prohibition on publishing, they just didn't have a way to do it. To me, that's like saying in 1992 that you couldn't print a document on a laser printer because your boss wouldn't come and choose the New command from the File menu.

There's a basic failure of technological literacy here.

Or so it seems to this outside observer.

The tech could be easier

We're caught in the same trap tech was caught in when I started programming in the mid-70s. There was a priesthood that had no incentive to make things easier, and a built-in belief that things couldn't be easier. My generation had a different vision, we worked on ease-of-use.

WordPress, which is the choice most professional organizations make these days for publishing, never was that easy to begin with. They missed some obvious ideas that were available to be stolen from the previous generation of blogging software. And over the years, a priesthood has developed, and the software has become even more intimidating to the newbie non-technical user.

It's time to loop back the other way. Yes, some reporters should already be able to climb over the hurdles. They just aren't that high, and the current generation of journalists have had computers in their lives, all their lives.

But ease of use, and ease of getting started is something the tech industry should be working on. Yes, it might put you out of a job, but if you don't do it, someone else will. And further, you're supposed to do that -- in the name of progress, and in this case, since it's about publishing, freedom.