2015 was the year we decided if we're going to watch a shitload of TV it might as well be good.

If Facebook is going to be the #1 blogging platform, wouldn't it be nice if they added a few features to the main product. People aren't using Notes so much. They seem so formal.

• Links.
• Basic styling.
• Titles.
• An RSS feed.
• For extra credit -- Markdown support.

Then they could not be holding back the blogosphere because people could actually use Facebook as a blogging platform. As it stands right now the stuff people post to Facebook is fairly useless outside of Facebook. 

If they'd pay a bit more attention to the world outside their boundaries, they might be better-received when they try to extend their reach into new markets. I think it's felt all around as the attitude of Facebook, it's a very silo place. 

If the time isn't right for an idea, if you say it, people won't hear it. 

Keep repeating until the day people are able to hear the idea.

That will be the day the idea was invented.

I wrote this as a comment on Mike Caulfield's post about Twitter and Facebook.

Mike, I think the key thing that Twitter and Facebook do well that RSS did not do well is subscription. Suppose I want to subscribe to the RSS feed for this site. Count the number of steps to do this.(I just did it, it took 6 steps.)

In Twitter if I want to follow someone, I just click on the Follow icon and it’s done. (It’s gotten a bit more complex over the years, but not much.)

We identified that problem before there were other RSS aggregators and came up with a proposal for everyone to follow to make it easy, but they all invented their own buttons. I’m sure you remember the crazy mess of icons on websites, for a period, until people gave up on it.

Also if you look at how the vendors supported RSS, they were creating their own namespaces with data in them that could have been represented just as easily using the common elements. Apple was the worst with their iTunes namespace. So writing an aggregator kept getting more complicated. Then there was the proliferation of RSS versions. And the flaming on the mail lists (if this goes on much longer, the flaming will show up here too).

Google Reader came much later, and it did it’s own number on RSS by first dominating, sucking in all the other readers to their runtime and then shutting down. They couldn’t have done more damage if they tried

Want to create the next level of the web?

Here's how it could work.

A new object called a message.

It's stored however you like, but it's transmitted and received in JSON.

It has a number of values. The text of the message. The date it was created. When it was last modified. An optional title, enclosure. The username of the person who created it. A list of usernames of people who liked it. A list of subs, each of which has all the same properties. 

I use Twitter identity. Highly recommended. Their servers stay up and are fast. Millions of people already have accounts. If for some reason they were to try to control the network, we'd substitute an equivalent. Who knows, we could end up owning Twitter. 

Here's what the JSON of such a message might look like. In fact it's the JSON representation of this message. The one I'm writing and you're reading.

Now, if our two networks peer, I can send a link to one of these into your network and you can display it in your context exactly as if it were created there. And because we're dealing in pointers whenever it changes over here, the display over there changes.

Want to build a network that interops with mine? You now know how to.

Today I learned that your ears can get stuffy just like your nose. Except it doesn't affect your breathing, it makes for funny pseudo-audible sloshing sounds.

Every year around this time I choose someone to honor as my Blogger of the Year. There's no award ceremony, no prize, no testimonial other than a blog post here on Scripting News. Such as the one you're reading right now.

The first year, 2001, I nominated several bloggers, and the readers chose the winner via a web poll -- Joel Spolsky, who was at that time blogging prolifically about writing software. 

He was doing what I had come to understand what blogging was about:

• He wrote as an individual, edited only by himself.
• He shared his experience and expertise. 

There isn't a single personality trait all the BOTY's share other than their desire to share what they know and see. As I've said in the past, if you need a volunteer and there's a blogger in the room, you won't have to wait long. They can be conservative or liberal. Rich or poor. They can be unemployed, self-employed, or work for a great newspaper. Any race, any gender, any kind of person writing publicly, as long as it involves sharing their own knowledge and perspective. 

To be my BOTY, I don't even have to agree with you on much of anything. In 2012, I chose Philip Greenspun, a brilliant technologist, whose political opinions are abhorrent to me. But he's a wonderful advocate, and he listens if you tell him he's wrong. He stimulates thought, and underneath his Neanderthal politics lies a brilliant mind, so there's hope! 

Last year I chose the people who blog on Facebook. No single person comes to the front. But I wanted to say that while Facebook is a silo, and that's generally a blog-killing thing, there are people who use Facebook for blogging, and some of it is excellent and inspiring. I wanted to honor them. 

In 2007 I chose my friend NakedJen. She was going through a tough year, as so many of us were and are now. Life is not a straight line. She wrote about it openly, without fear, as she would say, fiercely. To everyone whose life collapsed in 2015, there are no guarantees, but there's a good chance next year will be better, and even better for all the pain you went through this year. Growth and pain go together, perhaps unfortunately. 

Sunrise doesn't last all morning

A cloudburst doesn't last all day

Seems my love is up and has left you with no warning

It's not always going to be this grey 

You can go through the list of all past BOTY choices. I find these pieces are good markers in time. They show not just where my friends the bloggers are going, but where we have come from, and perhaps provide a clue for where we're going.

BOTY 2015

Enough pre-ramble! 

On with this year's choice. 

The early years of blogging, for me, from 1994 to say 2005, are kind of a haze. Things moved quickly. Every year more bloggers came on line. Every year new tools, new communication frameworks. We were building an ecosystem without a center. The design of the blogosphere mirrored the design of the web. There is no home page for the web, and there was no home page for the blogosphere either.

There were lots of home pages. Because mine was the bootstrap blog, I got the people who would go on to start their own blogs, and people who would start companies around blogging tech. Eventually there was lots of segmentation, there was a political blogosphere, then by geography, culture, technology, you name it. In each of these worlds there was generally one blogger who served as an anchor. His or her blogroll was the place you needed to be. A link from this person would send huge flow. 

Even though we were creating the new layer of networking software, there was no network that connected all the blogospheres. So you would hear people say that Andrew Sullivan was the inventor of blogging. To people in his world it seemed that way. But there were lots of other blogfathers. 

So, in 2005 I was at a blogging conference in Nashville, sitting in a restaurant, with other bloggers coming and going. I did a podcast with two of them, Brendan Greeley who I knew from Berkman, and Hossein Derakhshan, the Iranian blogfather, also known as Hoder. It's so cool to have a voice record of that meeting. (An aside, listening to the podcast now, I wish I could poke the 2005 version of myself and say Dave, let the other guys talk more!)

Hoder was arrested in Tehran in 2007. He spent the next seven years in jail. No Internet, no web, no blogosphere, no Facebook, no Twitter. It didn't look like he was coming back, but he was released in late 2014, and earlier this year, we read a stirring post from Hoder on Medium. It was like reading the diary of Rip Van Winkle, awoken from a long sleep and shocked to find out how much the world had changed. How much of the change was for the worse. 

Please read the piece on Medium. A similar piece by Hoder ran yesterday in the Guardian. 

We watched this happen in slow motion. We know in detail why and how we ceded control of the flow of discourse to tech companies. And how they used that flow to enrich themselves, and in doing so killed the crazy cacophony of the web, the fertile environment for the exchange of ideas. They congratulate themselves for grabbing the money we left on the table. We saw it happen slowly, but Hoder saw it all at once. That's why his perspective is so valuable. 

Even though it's only for one post, he is the clear choice for this year's Blogger of the Year.

Let's hope that at the end of 2016 we can write about the modest rebirth of the blogosphere, without all that ownership. Such vision is not unprecedented. 

Serial podcast v2.0 is not as captivating as last year's version. I think we get what happened. In episode 3. 

A long time ago, when I lived in Menlo Park, I was driving and listening to NPR, an interview show. 

A woman was talking on all kinds of topics, I kept wondering who is this. So smart, and thoughtful and well-spoken. 

Turned out it was Hillary Clinton. Up till that point I had thought of her pretty negatively. 

Had the same experience with Dan Quayle btw, no joke. He's really smart of course, we just remember him in embarrassing situations.

On the original Mac there was an Alarm Clock desk accessory. There's a screen shot of it in the right margin of this post. 

In the upper right corner there's an icon of a mailbox flag. When it's down, the contents of the window is revealed. Flip it up to reduce the window to just the top line, showing the current time.

The flip is animated. Meaning the icon appears to flip up and down in steps, the same way the jQuery slideUp and slideDown calls make a div appear to roll down and up.

I want to use this animation in a web app I'm doing. I think it should be a standard design element, the same way wedges are for expand and collapse. This just reveals the contents of an object that can be summarized in one line. For example the message you're reading right now.

It could be implemented as a set of four characters:

1. The flag is vertical.
2. The flag is 1/3 vertical.
3. 1/3 horizontal.
4. The flag is horizontal.

Update

As you may know, you can now read my posts on Medium thanks to their relatively new API, and support for it in IFTTT. 

Yesterday I got a message from Mike Jones on Twitter: "FWIW now everything publishes to Medium I've returned to reading everything you publish. Just like pre-death-of-Google-reader."

Two observations:

1. Medium can play the role of an RSS reader, at least how I, and my readers use it. They might want to develop that feature by directly supporting RSS, and allowing updates to posts to flow through to their version of a story. If, for example, I were to make a change to this story after Medium picked it up, those changes would not appear on Medium.
2. Google really hurt the blogosphere with the dominance of Reader and then its shutdown. It's good to pay attention to that now. When you start relying on a dominant product, everything is good, because it hasn't gone away yet. You don't feel the pain until it goes away. 

Here's the river I did for the Guardian. 

http://guardian.newsriver.org/ 

My personal opinion, this is what should be on the home page at theguardian.com. Plain, simple, no nonsense. Where you go to get caught up on the day's events.

I've been tweaking up the look of the blog panel on the Scripting News home page. 

Previously it had been displaying my Twitter icon in the left margin, and author info and Twitter handle. Since this site has only one author, it seemed a waste of space to repeat my name and Twitter handle for each post. 

Because there was more room, I made the title larger, and increased the maximum characters displayed to 60. It looks so much better! 

I wonder if you can tell that there's a new kind of CMS running behind Scripting News now? It can handle multiple authors per blog, and uses Twitter identity for membership. 

I've been working elsewhere for the last couple of weeks, so I could gain a new perspective on this project as a user, in addition to being a developer. I wondered if I would still like it as much as I did when I was working on the code all the time. I do! As you can see from the output, I've had a fairly prolific period in the second half of December. Just writing about an hour a day. The tool is pretty good. And now I have a better perspective on it as a user.

Thinking about next steps...

Burt Herman predicts that next year publishers will trust all their distribution to Google and Facebook.

I don't see how it makes sense for any of them. They have an open platform now and they would willfully get into a closed one? That's just crazy talk. Yet there it is on the Nieman site, without rebuttal.

This post on Curbed says CitiBike is "beleaguered."

What? This is the first I've heard that there's trouble.

If it's in trouble we need to fix it. I don't want to hear it's being shut down or the territory is shrinking. 

To the CitiBike managers, if there are problems, don't hide them. Let's get them out in the open and work on it. NYC needs a growing bike program. 

So what became of that social network where you could only communicate via emoji?

Elon Musk says we must put a million people on Mars if the human species has a chance to survive. 

This is a bad idea. Because if you think you have an escape hatch, what's the incentive to make it work here on the only planet that humans inhabit, or can inhabit, that we know of. Mars is a hail mary play. I think it's nice to have that as a dream, but it's not a viable plan.

Who would get to go? Donald Trump and his followers? What about Muslims? Get a panel of science fiction authors to tell you about all the problems with choosing a million people to be the survivors while the rest of us perish on the planet we destroyed.

Another question. Why won't we destroy Mars too? Isn't the more difficult problem figuring out how to live and grow in a way that does not consume our home? What if we destroy Mars too? Where do we go then?

PS: I am in favor of space exploration If you see a contradiction between that and the ideas expressed above I suggest: 1. You read it again. 2. Think some more. 

Winning team leaders in the NBA are pit bulls, German shepherds, Jack Russells. 

Melo is a Lab. Labs are sweet dogs, they always want to play, have fun. Labs are pets, not leaders. Melo should be a #2 on a team that has a super focused goal-oriented single-minded lead dog to be the alpha. Then Melo can be Melo. 

He was mis-cast on the Knicks. Even Jeremy Lin is a tougher competitive leader than Melo.

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich is calling for an end to gerrymandering in Ohio, where he is governor. I was really surprised when I read this, but he's got a really good point, that gerrymandering is hurting the Republican Party as much as it is hurting the Democratic Party, if not more.

In Ohio they set things up so that the Republicans have a 12-4 majority of House seats, even though they're just half the population. The same thing has happened in states that were controlled by Republican legislatures after the last census, in 2010. This has meant that the Republican Party, even though it's not the majority party in the US, has a lock on control of one of the houses of Congress. 

Now the problem is that the way things are set up, all of the Republican seats are still vulnerable to challenges from more and more extreme candidates. That's where the lunacy in the Republican Party is coming from. It's why a small minority of the population has extraordinary power in Washington.

The Senate was already tilted to the Republicans because they tend to control less populous states that each have the same representation in the Senate as the most populous ones. So a state like Wyoming, that has a population of a small county in New York State has just as much voice in the Senate as the whole of New York.

I'm sure this isn't making Kasich a lot of friends among incumbents in Ohio House seats, because they have to look even more extreme than they already are, which is saying a lot, to head off the challenges that are coming in 2016. 

But until we bite this bullet, government in the US is going to be lunatic.

No matter what, it's a brilliant tactic, at least, by Kasich to throw out a lifeline to more sanity-oriented Republicans, saying "I'm not crazy" like Trump nor crazy like Christie or Cruz, or just a nasty fuck like Rubio or a spineless oligarch like Jeb Bush.

I live in Manhattan, and I'm a big fan of Central Park.

The visionaries who conceived of New York City set aside the land of Central Park long before the city had moved that far north. 

They had a sense that the city would grow.

But they didn't take any chances with that...

They also created the Erie Canal which caused the port to grow, which caused banking and insurance to grow here, then accounting and data processing. 

That philosophy continued with the subway system, they built mass transit lines into the middle of farmland, figuring the city would follow. It did.

The reason I mention this is that Central Park is a lot like the open web. 

I'm sure there were cynics at the time of its creation like the tech industry today, who thought there was no value in setting aside a portion of the land of the future city for recreation and inspiration, but history has proven them wrong. The real estate on the edge of the park is the most valuable in the city. Over time it has grown more so, as everyone, rich and poor benefit from the open egalitarian, you might even say idealistic space of the park.

We need a similar approach to the web. Otherwise it's just going to end up with a bunch of tall buildings and no reason for anyone with a mind to be there. 

YouTube is playing John Lennon songs to me tonight.

This was a very intense high growth period for me, when these songs first came out. I realize how there was a lot of grieving involved trying to make sense of what had happened. It's hard to explain how big the Beatles were in my early life. And then to have them break up just as I was becoming a young man, it actually shattered my world in a real way. That's how important the Beatles where. (I was born in 1955 if you want to do the math.)

I still think to this day that John didn't appreciate Paul's talent well enough. George blossomed in the new arrangement. And how Ringo was so steady and everyone's friend. This is how it seemed to the 15-year-old Dave.

It's funny how you just begin to figure this stuff out so many years after it happened. 

About the funny URLs you might have seen in my linkblog flow on Facebook, Twitter or in the feed. 

I've had a domain for a while looking for something to do with it. 

The domain: pocalyp.se.

It's really sweet because it's designed to have prefixes like trump, tech or dave. It's place where I get to have some fun. Technically it's a URL shortener, but oddly the URLs often are longer. ;-)

I know it makes the links more fragile, I'm backing them up in static files so if I stop using this software, I can revert to a static server. It's not a bad backup, I've used it before. 

The great thing about it is that it's a way of categorizing and grouping links. I usually get tired of classifying posts, so something I'll actually use is a big deal. So far I'm using this one.

An example: http://beatles.pocalyp.se/0 points to a great John Lennon song.

The code is available on GitHub, MIT License. 

PS: There are easter eggs around here. ;-)

PPS: They're kind of like emoji for URLs.

The other day I was riding a CitiBike down 7th Ave near the park, and hit a red light, forcing me to come to a stop in a crosswalk, obstructing the path of a guy who obviously works for a bike rental company, because he was walking two bikes across the street, something that's harder to do than it sounds. 

He stood there in disbelief, hurling a series of profanities at me at the top of his lungs. Usually when people do this to you in NY they're riding by at speed, or you're riding by, so there's no chance for the retort I had been saving for such situations.

"You have it so tough," I said. "No one has a more difficult life than you."   

A NYPD traffic cop, within earshot, heard this and laughed audibly. The guy with the two bikes laughed too.  

Sometimes life works.

One issue Trump hasn't exploited yet is marriage equality.

I suspect that some of the anger among his supporters is that this change happened so quickly, and they had no say in it. They shouldn't of course, have a say. You don't decide equal protection issues by majority rule. But they probably don't see it that way. Abortion and guns have had decades to get established as conservative issues, but their shock at the almost instant change in rules re gay marriage probably is under some of their rage. 

It's amazing that this hasn't been mentioned in the Republic debates.

This idea became clear to me as I work my way through Season 2 of Transparent. Not going to spoil anything, so don't worry. I almost gave up on it in episode 4, I was so tired of the characters. But then it got good, real good. And if you know what Transparent is about, you understand how I made the connection to Trump. It's remarkable that they wrote this season long before Trump had a serious following.

Marriage equality is a big issue for them, but it hasn't been talked about yet. I can't imagine Trump will stay away from it much longer, so watch out.

If a developer says he or she is going to break users,  thank them for letting you know and then hit the Back button.

Only (some) software developers think breakage is okay. Imagine if you took your car to the dealer for an oil change and when you got in to drive it it didn't work. Version 2.0 says the mechanic when you complain. Now how to get get home?

Or if one day you went to the subway and the station wasn't there. "There aren't any subways," someone says to you. They were deprecated. Didn't you see the version change?

Or the doctor operates on you, a simple procedure on your arm, but in the process takes out your heart. You die. You shouldn't be surprised, hearts are no longer necessary. Sorry you died. Next patient!

The world does not work that way. That software developers think they can get away with this is an indication of some sense of power or indispensibleness that's completely unrealistic. We can get on without you or your software. So keep that in mind when you decide to break users. 

My goal for 2016: I want to make software that 100,000 people use and love. That's all I want. A nice community that uses my work for theirs. ;-)

I want to release new features in this software every few months. 

I don't really care what the software does, but given my past, it's likely to be about publishing. 

I don't really care that much about money, but it should make me some. I've always felt that's how you keep score. Some people have the wrong idea about me, that I want to give it all away. Not true. In my heart I am a commercial developer. Always have been. 

I want to teach what I know about making software. I've learned a lot knocking my head against the wall over and over. Some things come easy now that used to be impossible. Mostly I've mastered patience, knowing that if I iterate and ponder and iterate some more, the truth will eventually come to me. 

I don't want to be a VC funded developer. I don't want a board of directors. I want to let the software and its users pull me, but mostly my own ideas and dreams. I see software as a performing art. Without users, nothing is happening. 

I buy headphones like some people buy shoes!

I read on Wirecutter about Jabra Move headphones. They were really inexpensive, Bluetooth, which has become a requirement for me these days, and Amazon had them, so of course I got a pair.

I love them! 

The sound is great of course. I say this because my hearing is that of a guy who went to too many loud Grateful Dead and Alice Cooper concerts in his youth. My eardrums will only hear a certain range and quality. I think other people hear better. It is what it is. These headphones have a nice clarity and good bass.

What I like most about them is their design. They have a quality feel. They're small. Light. Easy to wear. 

As I walk around the city I always look at other people's headsets. Mostly they're too big and the wires look awkward to me. Why would anyone use wired headphones when wireless ones are getting so good?

I liked them so much I got a pair for a friend for Christmas. 

I don't put everything in my blog in the RSS feed. 

That's because I use the blog to post short items as well as full essays. Still most RSS readers are not able to deal well with the short items. So I tend not to push them through to the feed. If you want the full effect, you need to actually visit the blog from time to time. 

Even though this is one of the short items, I sent it to the feed. ;-)

On Facebook, Michael Markman says: "Meanwhile, notice the Jedi mind trick of linking Medium to Facebook as though they are peers. How many users does each have? How much time do those users spend on each?"

To which I reply: "Yeah it worked for the first few years. Medium has been around since 2012 as has his ambition to take on Facebook. He makes the web his competition, knowing the web doesn't have a marketing budget or spokesperson quotable by the tech press, to rebut his claims. But it played out and he lost. Medium is getting all the spam now that you'd predict it would get. It's a place where people go for exposure. The ones who get it are the ones who figure out how to game the system. It's a never-ending battle. He lost it."

My first blogging tool, AutoWeb, in January 1995. 

Evan Williams says we're all going to publish on Facebook and Medium.

I have a few things to say about that.

1. That's like Hilton saying in the future everyone is going to live in hotels instead of their own homes. Sure it might be more convenient in some ways. You can meet people in the lobby, says Hilton. But it's nice to have your own place. Hotel restaurants usually suck. And sometimes you want to be on your own, without all those other people around. I think at one point they did think everyone would move into hotels. Didn't happen.
2. If Ev is right then everyone must use mass transit instead of driving their own cars. Heh.
3. If everyone will be publishing to Medium and Facebook then it'll be Facebook. Why would anyone choose Medium? They're infinitesimal compared to Facebook. Everyone uses Facebook. Seriously, most people, even avid Twitter users, have never heard of Medium. 
4. Eventually there will be features you can't get from the silos, because they are controlled by corporations who won't want users to have certain features. The web is great because of the freedom.
5. I like that I can add features to my own website. When I get an idea for Facebook, I'm stuck. I can suggest that they implement it, but they never do. I've been down this road so many times. Eventually monocultures stagnate. 
6. Finally, Ev, that's old hype. It didn't happen. People are still publishing to blogs. Twitter still has its 140-char limit. If you want to read something good, it's probably on a blog, still. Ev has been pushing this idea for years now. I would have hesitated before to say he's wrong, but not any more. He's wrong.

And by the way, why can't we publish to his silo and our own sites? We can, as this post illustrates.

The Washington Post keeps growing online, so I thought it would be interesting to see what it looks like as a river of news. 

1. So I wrote a little scraper in Frontier to turn their RSS feeds page into an OPML file, and fed the result to River4 . 
2. I put together a single-page viewer at washpost.newsriver.org and let it fill up with stories. 
3. I already found one piece I wouldn't have found before. A George Will op-ed about Donald Trump. I look forward to reading it. (Apparently he doesn't like Trump.)
4. I've added a WP tab to my collection of rivers page, in case you're using that resource.

And it's giving me some more ideas, which I guess was the point. ;-)