I keep wondering when Twitter is going to hire some bloggers to keep the people entertained. 

Sports celebs are fine, but this isn't really their medium.

The muck that they've made out of news, it's like frankfurter meat. 

Steven Max Patterson says that despite what others say Twitter's model is sustainable. I'd like to add this.

If you remember dreaming about what the Internet would be able to do 10 years ago, did you imagine a notification system that worked between people spread out everywhere across the world, instantaneously? Reliable. With an API. That's what I was looking for. And guess what, it's 2016 and Twitter has it working. And 300 million people use it,  it scales.

But they've limited the potential applications of this resource, only to allow it to run through software that they design so they can create a not so profitable ad business on it. 

But it seemed to me then and now that it could be much more than that.

I look at Twitter as a 1. User. 2. Developer. 3. Shareholder. 

1. As a user I miss that Living In The Future feeling I used to get with Twitter.
2. As a developer, I think they're within easy grasp of it, by just sharing the ability to create for this platform with developers who don't work for Twitter.
3. As a shareholder, I understand there's risk in this. It means Facebook can run software against Twitter's cloud. And so can developers who grow huge, remembering Instagram as an example. But, Twitter can also become a banker and distributor for these projects. That's what mature platform vendors always do. They don't try to force all the creativity through their own developer organization. 

It's like that scene in The Godfather where the families sit down with Don Corleone and insist that he share his senators and judges, for a fee of course. This is where we have that talk with Twitter. It's time to share the platform and we'll help you grow it. And we should become friends so you don't feel good about crushing us and we trust you so we'll continue to invest in the platform. This can be done, if you're human about it. 

For specifics see a post I wrote in August last year, Twitter NT. 

Okay I've said why Trump is doing so well, now why Hillary Clinton is our best choice. Everyone talks about how great Sanders is and how HRC is okay, but actually she's just the right person to follow Obama imho. 

The world is scared of us, but not in a good way. They're not scared because they're all bad guys and we're the good guys, they're scared because we're acting crazy, have been for quite a while, and it's getting worse. 

Sure the President should inspire us, but more important imho the President should be a good representative for us internationally. As crazy as Congress is, if we elect HRC, the rest of the world can relax a little, because the lunacy quotient has steadied a bit. We still have all the crazyness in Congress, but after the election the Republicans are going through, they might just calm down a little if we avoid Trump or Cruz as President. Either of them would change the Republican Party so much as to make it unrecognizable. And probably not in a good way if you're hoping for a return to sanity, as I am.

So it's not like I'd love to have Bernie but I'm settling for Hillary. I view this as a baseball manager trying to decide who should bat next. Should we send in someone who might walk or get a hit, but probably isn't going to strike out, but won't hit a home run either? Or should I put in someone who will swing for the fences knowing there's a very high probability they'll strike out. 

In 2008 we needed the latter. We needed a miracle, and we got one. But 2016 is not 2008. 

At this moment, we need a solid hitter, someone who the rest of the world is comfortable with, and who a deeply injured Republican Party can work with. The US has been a bronco the last decade or two, starting wars, leading to huge instability around the world and taken unnecessary risks with the world economy. Real recklessness. 

Time to sober up, everyone. Or else.

No I don't think it would be lunacy to elect Sanders, but I do think it would be lunacy to elect Trump. I believe HRC is as honest as any politician, including Sanders who imho is selling some real snake oil. And her honesty isn't the issue exactly. The issue is what kind of world do we want and what do we want our role in it to be.

Ever noticed how our choice of President tries to fix the bug in the previous President?

We elected Carter who promised he'd never lie, after we had just been hugely betrayed by Nixon. Carter is an honest man, exceptionally so, in hindsight. But not a great President.

We elected Reagan to fix the bug with Carter. Reagan promised to make us feel good about ourselves after Carter talked about our "national malaise." No President since has tried that one. Not a good idea. 

Then Bush was milquetoast to Reagan's charisma. We had had enough of charm. Time for a guy whose mind while basically sound (imho) was at war with the English language. 

Clinton was charisma because we were bored with Bush and because we didn't really want Perot.

And on and on.

Obama? We desperately needed hope after Bush II destroyed the economy. I laugh when the Repubs talk about the "disaster that is Obama." I guess they expect us to have short memories. And we do, collectively, have very short memories.

Now here's why certain people like Trump. 

To them Obama is a disaster simply because of the color of his skin. They like to say they're not racists, but deep inside there's a feeling something is wrong here. We need to get America "back on track." Which means a Strong White Male in charge. And Trump plays the role of a strong confident White Male to a T. 

That's my theory for why Trump is doing well.

Nik Cubrilovic sent me a link to the page on Mozilla's project management system where they decided to put a big red X through the icon for sites that are using HTTP, the standard protocol of the web, instead of their preferred HTTPS. 

Interestingly, it's both an argument for and against government control of utilities like web browsers.

1. It's an argument against control because Mozilla is acting like a government. They have decided that if you want to continue to publish to users, you must comply with the new regulation established by Mozilla. If not, we'll mark you as unsafe, and make sure everyone knows you're not to be trusted. And this is just the current iteration. When that fails to alter user behavior, or cause sites to convert, what next? Will they stop displaying them altogether? As Google does when they encounter a site that it thinks has malware embedded? 
2. At the same time, Mozilla is most definitely not a government. They are a private company. And they have not disclosed the impact of shutting down access to a huge part of the web. I likened it to book burning but on an unprecedented scale. As a user of the web, both as a publisher and a reader, I want protection from this kind of power grab. The web does not belong to Mozilla. What if it works? Most of my own sites will disappear, and lots of sites that I care about.

I wonder if they've even tried to quantify the outages they'll cause. So many sites are simply residing on a hard disk somewhere, served by an ancient version of some unknown and not maintained server software, chugging along as someone keeps paying the electric bill, and replaces a broken hardware component when needed. The people who created the site might not have understood HTTPS or how to deploy it, and many are long gone. Some of course are dead. We are certainly not all sitting around doing nothing waiting for a handful of programmers on a mail list to make us perform a ridiculous act of security theater for our blog posts written in 2002. 

Most of these sites do not need HTTPS. It isn't an issue for my ancient blog posts. Or yours.

In the thread there are some very reasonable alternatives offered, that help Mozilla achieve their goal, without burning all those sites. For example, if the browser sees a form that contains a password or a credit card number being transmitted over a non-encrypted connection it could warn you with a big dialog box, saying hey dummy, your ISP or their ISP can read that stuff. Are you sure you want to send it? That would actually communicate clearly to the user what the issue is without the confusion at the point where security matters. 

It was also pointed out that some users are going to think the browser is broken. Smart users! They are right. The browser is broken. It has totally the wrong idea of its role. 

Imagine Honda or Ford tried to do something like this. It noticed you were stopping at a McDonald's. Your Civic stops and a big red X shows up in your dashboard. When you ask why it says "McDonald's is not good for you Davey. Go somewhere healthy like Panera or Whole Foods." You might say who the fuck is Honda to tell me where to get my comfort food? And you would be right. Only in tech would they be so arrogant as to think they know better, when (get this) -- they don't.

If we had government oversight, they might require the equivalent of an Environmental Impact Statement. How many sites will disappear as a result of what you're doing? Maybe require them to disclose that so their users have a chance to switch to a browser that is less opinionated.

The web isn't their property. They are just providing a tool. They have too much power if this goes through. I suspect once they start putting red X's on sites that people care about, and their support people start handling calls saying the browser is broken, they might put this back on the list, as an urgent bug, and find a nicer way to help users stay safe, one that doesn't require sacrificing large pieces of the web. 

Joi Ito tells the story of how the MIT Media Lab's slogan, Demo Or Die, derived from the traditional academic motto, Publish or Perish, evolved first to Deploy or Die, and then just to Deploy. 

1. Imho, there's too much emphasis in tech on inanimate things dying, but this is worse, they're talking about people dying! And it's not true, never was, that you either demo'd or died. And it takes all the fun out of it if the stakes are seen as that high, without throwing a little humor into it. Demo or die is not, in any way that I can see, funny.
2. At my first company, Living Videotext, started in the 80s, when there were all kinds of new styles of management, we invented Management By Shipping. That was the value of the company. Getting product into the hands of users so they could kick ass with it. 
3. I also practiced Management By Walking Around. As the CEO, being accessible to everyone in the company was also a major value. I wanted to understand how my company worked, and believed that the people doing the work were in the best position to show me. 
4. It makes sense that Joi would bring Deploy! to academia. He came from the blogosphere, he's one of our champions, where the focus was always on the people who use the stuff. Ideas are great, but until they are deployed they aren't helping anyone. 
5. Academia is very much about publishing and demos, and not so much about deploying. 
6. In the blogosphere the focus was so much on the users (a good thing) that the software that made it possible sort of fades into the background (as all software should).
7. A popular slogan at my second company, UserLand, and on my own blog was Let's Have Fun! Although it may not seem so at first it has a dark side. There was a line in a movie with John Travolta and Christian Slater about high powered nuclear missiles. Slater has this great line at the beginning of the movie where he's showing Travolta a new weapon and says "it's a real crowd pleaser." That means of course it kills a lot of people. Let's Have Fun! was like that. Along the lines of the Chinese curse -- May you live in interesting times. Our culture was that we enjoyed our work, even when it felt like a death march. ;-)
8. One more software slogan, when someone reports a bug, a bad one, think to yourself  "It's even worse than it appears." That'll give you something to laugh about while you're investigating. 

I'm thinking of forking Chrome to create a browser that can only be used to read scripting.com.

All other sites, sorry, I can't vouch for your safety. So instead of displaying your contents, my browser will just display a big red X.

It will be the best browser.

PS: To show what a nerd I am, I just realized this would be super easy with the Electron browser that has Node.js baked in and is basically Chrome in a desktop app. It would probably be a very nice browser! :-)

Now I think I finally get why Google wants HTTPS everywhere.

1. A lot of pages have Google code embedded in them.
2. This code sends data back to Google.
3. Suppose Comcast wanted to track users in addition to Google, or in place of Google.
4. Now as the text of my page passes through their router, they simply modify the Google code, and leave the rest of the page alone. 
5. They wouldn't want to alert anyone to what they're doing, so they'd keep it as innocuous as possible. They probably would leave the Google code in, at least at first, so as to not arouse suspicion.
6. They can do this because a lot of the sites that include Google code don't use HTTPS.
7. This assumes Comcast can't crack the HTTPS. I have no info either way on that.

Disclaimer: I never wanted to have to understand this stuff. 

More: They probably couldn't care less about pages that have no code in them.

Also: Of course it's not just Comcast. All the mobile providers. In Europe, Asia, everywhere. And it's Facebook too. They have a browser coming too. 

Posted on Twitter this morning:

Tech journalists: Have you questioned the wisdom of Google/EFF/Mozilla push to shrink the web to only sites that support HTTPS?

I don't understand why Google et al are doing this, and I think we should all be involved in this decision, esp journalists. I expect the tech press to be leading here. But so far no one has been willing to look. I've been more or less alone in questioning the idea.

To think that people who set up blogging servers can jump through this hoop, no one can be so naive to think that won't hurt the open web. For what benefit? Please don't recite the standard talking points, I've heard them all before many times.

There's no doubt it will serve to crush the independent web, to the extent that it still exists.  It will only serve to drive bloggers into the silos. Perhaps that's the real motive for Google et al. 

Google did this before, with RSS, the loop is closed on that. So to assume their motives are good, or that they're competent to make these choices for us, is not true. They are a company. A very large one, and they behave like one. 

Update at 1PM

A former exec at one of Google's competitors explained what is possibly their real motive. Google doesn't want its competitors to write bots that scrape their search engine. 

So why not just encrypt all access to google.com? I asked. 

Because bits of Google code are embedded in other people's pages. Google Analytics, YouTube, maps. I immediately understood. The way HTTPS works, if any component of a page is not secure then all other accesses are not. 

I guess that means that google.com still has to be ready to handle unsecure requests, because some pages include references to it. 

My guess is that Facebook wouldn't shut down Parse if there had been a lot of uptake with devs. 

I never considered using it in my own work.

Here's a list of the toolkits I use in my JavaScript work.

I am very conservative in what I will build on, for the very reason that corporate platforms like Parse are subject to the needs of the companies that own them. 

I read Walt Mossberg's recent piece about how Twitter is too hard because of all the "secret handshakes." 

There's no doubt it's hard to come into a story late and catch up on all that's happened along the way. That's how software development processes work. Version 1 is easy to get onboard because if it weren't there would be no version 2. Then the feature lists reflect the wants of the users (this is good!), and that's how the secret handshakes creep in. 

For single-user software this isn't such a problem. I was always a very casual spreadsheet user, and used a tiny fraction of the feature set. It didn't matter to me if they kept adding features as long as I didn't have to use them. 

The evolution of programming languages has the same problem. I had more or less figured out the features of JavaScript, until they came out with a new version of the language late last year, and then there were lots of features I didn't grok. Not a problem until I have to read someone else's code that uses the new features. So you tend to get dragged along whether you want to or not. (The new features are very worthwhile additions, btw.)

I don't know if anyone has yet to figure out a solution for this. But it's yet another reason that tech is cyclic. Some bright creative developer might figure at this point, with Twitter becoming congested for experienced users and there being too much culture to absorb for newbies, that it might be a good time for a fresh start. Just re-read the recent Tech is Cyclic piece for a story of how that replacement works. 

PS: A rebuttal to Mossberg's thesis. I find that Facebook has lots of secret handshakes too. I tend not to feel them in Twitter because I started near the beginning, in 2006. I was a much later arrival on Facebook, so the culture had already been through a number of iterations when I got there. I see little vestiges of its history here and there that more experienced users might not see. 

Trump is in every way a classic blogosphere troll. 

Just shows how big and mainstream all this has become. 

And how disappointing!

Note: I posted this as a comment on Medium under Matt Carroll's post that included a link to Evan Williams saying that the open platforms are over. This is my rebuttal.

Tech is cyclic. First there was an open platform, then silo-makers were able to build something higher level by foreclosing on the openness. Then they stagnate because big companies get stuck in the Way Things Always Have Been, and the users get skilled, a new generation comes along and they see how to make progress outside the silo and enough people use the new open system so it gains traction. It’s always more exciting than the stale corporate silos, so for a while they blossom, until the cycle repeats.

The winners of one cycle always think they see how to get to the next level without being open and they always end up very rich but off in a cul de sac far away from where the new stuff is happening.

I saw this happen, in my career, the first time with the winners of the minicomputer era, who didn’t understand why people loved the underpowered PCs that could do a tiny fraction of what their big iron could do. (We loved the PC because it was ours to do with as we pleased.)

Then Bill Gates boasted he wouldn’t get stuck when the next thing came along he’d embrace it and he did, but it still rolled over him, as it had to, because he had too much invested in preserving his victory in the previous cycle. That story is fully documented in the early archive of this blog. 

And so it goes. No one ever seems to escape the loop, though there is a way out of it, they are all super impressed with their success and believe it has to do with some innate superiority they have. But so were the founders of DEC and Microsoft and Google and even Facebook now. They were all super smart, and they all got stuck when they won. The only way out of it is to shed the results of victory and get back down in the trenches. That's what Steve Jobs did when Apple rebooted  in 1997.

That’s why Ev is right and wrong. He was able to improve on RSS with Twitter because it controlled the subscription process. It was a much-needed improvement so Twitter caught fire. But it’s now ten years later. Enough time has passed, there’s a new generation around, and the cloud technology today is vastly better than it was ten years ago. Hold on, because the ride is about to get interesting. And Ev’s analysis just couldn’t be more wrong for today. It was right a few years ago, but we’re at a different point in the cycle now.

My recent piece, Anywhere But Medium, has gotten a fair amount of play. Nothing on TechMeme, but I didn't expect them to cover it, they generally promote VC-backed tech companies, and the message in the ABM piece was very much counter to the current thinking in VC. I hope eventually that will change, and their investments will accept the open web, and their companies will create products that feed back into the web, products that can be built on to create new products without forcing every new venture to start over from scratch. I think it'll be a much more powerful and healthy ecosystem then. This ecosystem is eventually going to run out of room to grow. I suspect that's going to happen pretty soon.

Anyway, there is probably enough agreement "out there" to create a critical mass for a newly invigorated blogosphere to boot up along the lines of the one that started this whole thing in the late 90s to early 2000s. What we need is a little new technology, and support from one or two vendors.

It's interesting to see Mike Caulfield try to get under the covers of WordPress to be able to directly edit the code behind the rendering. My good friend Daniel Bachhuber says there are reasons it's not possible. There are privacy concerns, people use short codes in WordPress and might not want them revealed publicly. I'll have to learn more about this.

But there is another approach, to have WordPress accept as input, the URL of a JSON file containing the source code for a post, and then do its rendering exactly as if that post had been written using WordPress's editor. That would give us exactly what we need to have the best of all worlds. Widespread syndication and control over our own writing and archive. All at a very low cost in terms of storage and CPU. 

I wrote about this in an earlier piece.

Here's an example of the JSON for this post. I'm already storing it publicly with my in-development blogging tool, 1999.io. Since it hasn't yet been deployed outside my own server there's still time to change the format, with relatively little breakage.

Just want to put this idea out there for people who are thinking about this stuff. APIs are not necessary. Just a new syndication format. We could even use an existing format, but since we're mostly working in JavaScript these days, I think JSON is also a fine way to go. ;-)

I think it might make sense for Twitter not to show ads to people who they want to stay engaged. Similarly I think people who post lots of links, curators you might say, should be immune to paywalls. I always think it's stupid for the Chicago Tribune to block me, when there's a good chance I'll post a link to the article I came to read. I'm certainly not going to pay to read the Tribune, I don't live in Chicago, or follow any of their teams regularly (unless the Mets are sweeping the Cubs in the NLCS). The Boston Globe too. I actually pay to access the NYT through their paywall. I bet I make money for them because I post so many links to their stories. Not that I'm trying to do that, I don't care if I do or don't. But it's kind of silly to make me pay for that. But for my local hometown paper, I do.  

I thought tonight's Democratic debate was excellent.

Sanders gave an enthusiastic pitch for his cause, but there was the hole in his argument, it depends on a miracle. But he was fairly honest about that. It was up to the people to have a revolution, not something he could do himself. I doubt it the Sanders supporters are willing to sacrifice anything to get what they want, but even if they were, you'd have to convince a lot of Republican voters to elect revolutionary Democrats in time for Sanders to accomplish the revolution he wants to have. There are so signs his supporters understand this.

I don't think Hillary is a poet, and she even alluded to that, several times quoting the Mario Cuomo line that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. When the young Sanders supporter asked why people call her a liar, she came close to nailing it -- when you do and say things that piss powerful people off, one of the things they do is smear you personally so people won't listen to you. But some great poetry snuck in there anyway, at the end when she explained her admiration for President Lincoln, who not only kept the country from splitting apart but also built the transcontinental railroad. So she says you can have vision while fighting the inevitable battles. There's no doubt she's ready to be President tomorrow.

Hopefully this will be Martin O'Malley's last debate.  

I want Bernie Sanders to STFU when Hillary Clinton is speaking.

She can't do what Ronald Reagan did when he shouted famously "I am paying for this microphone!" Because even the slightest assertiveness on her part is met with complaints that she's pushy or a bitch. Comments that would never apply to a male candidate.

It's time to snuff out this garbage. Yes, I want HRC to win. Yes, I dislike Sanders at a visceral level. I think he's lying and people who support him are naive. So I feel a bit more frustrated when Sanders cuts her off while she's speaking. But even if I weren't against Sanders, I'd still think it's time to stuff a sock in it Bernie when the other candidate is speaking, even if she is a woman.

I ordered an item from Amazon on January 8, scheduled to be delivered on January 9. I got an email the next day saying there was a hangup and it would be delivered a week late. Two weeks later I looked at the Orders page on Amazon and saw it was still stalled at the last step. "Looks like it's lost" I concluded.

So I went looking for a Contact Us link anywhere on amazon.com. I spent 15 minutes going all over the place, for a $12 item, btw. No luck. So I posted a question on Twitter, and nine hours later, after claiming the link was obvious, an ex-Amazon PM gave me the link. I filled out the form. And within minutes got a reply back from an Amazon rep, apologizing and saying the package obviously is lost and they were refunding my money. Then they asked me to evaluate the service. This is what I wrote.

I had to ask on Twitter if anyone could find a way to raise an issue with Amazon, and only after many hours did anyone find a link on your site. I spend thousands with Amazon every year, check your records. If I have an issue to raise with you, it's something like this. I am offended that you make it so difficult to even send an email to Amazon. There should be a Contact Us link on every page. And I have to ask why did I even have to contact you for this? The package was stalled at the endpoint for weeks. Why didn't your computers pick this up and fix the problem on your own, without making me go through the misery of having to find a way to contact you. Something is wrong with your service. You make it so easy to buy, but when there's a problem it's virtually impossible to find a way to communicate with you.

I'll add here, this is probably a legal issue. To sell to the public yet have it be so difficult to report problems raises a serious question about the honesty of the company. Perhaps something for the FTC to look at. 

PS: For future reference, here's a link to the Contact Us page. 

PPS: It's situations like this that make me seriously doubt whether the tech industry should be allowed to make self-driving cars. Can you imagine how you will ask for help when your car drives you to a dark place, at night, and just stops there, like my package did. You look around for a Contact Us link in the car, and find there is none. Now what.

So where is all this silo stuff headed?

Imho there's a right way and a wrong way.

The wrong way is they're each going to divide things up the way Netflix and Amazon divide things up. Or each of the TV networks. Or the airlines or banks.

It'll be easy to link within each of the worlds. The way when you say @davewiner on Twitter it takes you to my Twitter profile and when you refer to me the same way on Facebook, you get my Facebook profile.

Ideally, I should be able to post the JSON file address for this post on Medium, and then all changes would automatically percolate through to readers who get to the story via Medium. And ideally, Facebook and Google would also understand that format, and we're back where we were before all the silos formed.

Any of them could do this, easily, if they weren't trying to exclude the other tech giants from their world. Because that's ultimately how they expect to reward their shareholders. 

Or they could simply be part of the web instead of trying to divide it up between them.

This is not an idle concern. This is what businesses do. And if you think tech is different, trust me, it's not. The people who run tech think exactly like the people who run oil, or airlines, or banks. Time passes, tech was never actually run by the renegades of Steve's famous commercial. that was just good advertising. The geniuses in tech are really good at chutzpah and hubris as much as creativity. 

Anyway, it's all up to you -- if you want to have all this stuff work together, I believe you can have it, you just have to focus on it, and think and act in your own interest. 

Try to imagine what Steve Jobs would say to Donald Trump if he were still alive. To me it's an interesting question because he's the only person I've known whose chutzpah-quotient was as high as Trump's. The only other person I can think of who comes close is Michael Bloomberg. 

Before the storm that just went through NYC, when we knew it was on the way, I boasted that I would ride a CitiBike in the snow. It feels like a CitiBike could do it. They're built like battleships. Low to the ground, heavy, thick tires. 

A bunch of people heard me say that, and asked if I had ridden the CitiBike in the snow yet. As of yesterday, no. 

And as of today, still no.

In the storm, I just couldn't do it. Too dangerous. It was hard to even walk, the drifts were so big, and the visibility so bad. I did come across one guy riding in the park during the storm, but just the one.

This morning, I walked for two hours in the park, and I seriously thought about getting a bike and riding it home, but I didn't do it for two reasons:

1. The CitiBike station I wanted to use was completely plowed over. I might have gotten a bike at another station, but then again.
2. Too many people were out, walking in the places bikes go. There were a few people out riding, but they were endangering not only themselves, which is acceptable, but endangering everyone else. That wasn't OK with me. 

I think perhaps tomorrow, a weekday, it will make sense. But by then I expect the streets will be more or less completely clear, so it won't be a snow-riding experience, if that's the case.

It sounded good, but like a lot of things that sound good on the drawing board, the reality of it seemed completely different. 

When we talk about the "open web" that can sound idealistic, until you realize the open web includes the New York Times.

Which, btw, has been on the open web for 20 years, as of today.

That's something to celebrate!

A simple idea about the open web, for all who think it's "idealistic" to do stuff to keep it going. 

All the publications that used to be called magazines and newspapers when they were printed objects, do you know where those publications live? 

They don't live on Facebook, yet. Or on Twitter, or Apple or Amazon, or even Medium. 

They live on the open web, of course.

You can be sure of one thing, all those companies plan to suck the good stuff off the open web, into their silos, where they can monetize the shit out of it. Now there's no guarantee that they will succeed. In fact, they can't all win. But here's something that will happen. They will suck some or all of the life out of the open web. It's already happening.

The probability that you will thrive inside a silo is pretty small. I've been there, as a software developer. It never works because of something called the Stack Fallacy. The platform guys always oversimplify what happens on their platform. It's human nature. And because of that their ecosystems are unhealthy. Nothing really interesting grows there. For that you need the wilds of -- the open web -- of course. 

Why don't we hedge our bets. Not assume that we all will enjoy being locked in the trunk of the tech industry while they party up front. The air supply in the trunk is, famously, not very reliable. ;-)

I have to say the Bernie Sanders America ad is wonderful. Makes me choke up. Man I love America. Bernie is a nice man. And this is pretty much exactly the ad Hillary should run, and I said so. 

But! 

Please if there's a Republican president, no matter who it is, this is going to cause a lot of problems. So don't fucking vote for Bernie. Let him help the Democrats. It's great that he's out there talking about single-payer, but I want the new Supreme Court justices to be chosen by a Democrat not a Republican. 

OK?

PS: To Bernie, you can drop the www on your campaign banners. berniesanders.com is a perfectly good web address. 

Speaking of bigco's.

Yesterday I was out and about and wanted to listen to some music and a podcast on my iPhone. I had them all copied into the iPhone via iTunes, ready to play in the Apple music app. Except when I opened the Music app on the subway it froze on the screen where they want me to sign up to their farkakte music service. Which I will never sign up to ever under any circumstances.

It stayed frozen there until I got home and installed the new version of iOS, which seemed to stir things up enough so that it woke up from its crash, and let me play my own music after dismissing the dialog. Yes I tried everything. I rebooted it. Pressed every pixel to see if it was waiting for me to do something.

Fuck Apple. I paid almost $1000 for this brick. All I want to do is listen to some fucking music while I'm walking around. No, they want me locked in even more, and to get me locked in they're willing to install some crashy crapware on my fucking phone that prevents it from even playing music, something iPods could do fine, by the way, in 2001 or 2002. About 15 years ago. When Steve was still alive, btw.

This shit sucks Apple. At least keep the fucking software working well enough to play a song or a podcast, and until you get that right oh please I need to stop now I get so pissed at them.

Supporting the open web is a lot like supporting net neutrality, with the exception that the big tech companies don't think they have an interest in keeping the open web going.

It's like the fish industry not protecting the wildness of the ocean. Once they completely fish it out where will they get their new ideas from? 

The mistake the tech industry always makes and shows no signs of not making again, is the assumption they can hire and manage creativity within a corporate structure. There are severe limits to this, as anyone who has ever worked inside one will tell you.

I updated the comment guidelines for Scripting News. 

There's also a link to this document in the Stuff menu on every story page in the new version of the blog. It isn't hard to find. (I plan to make it even easier.)

I plan to ride a CitiBike in the snow should we actually get any.

I suppose I should label programmerish posts as such. 

This is a programmerish post. 

I have a new datatype in my vocabulary, something called a chatlog. It's a hybrid of the data for a chat application and a weblog. 

It's a chatlog in that the software you use to create and edit it feels like a chat app when you use it. I think that will become more apparent as Scripting News community features become more visible. 

But it also feels like a blog when you read it, so it's also a chatlog. 

Anyway, the programmerish thing is this. I store the chatlog in a single JSON file. Every bit of text appears in a single file. 

I was raised in a time when memory was measured in kilobytes, so I felt giddy when we had megabytes, but now our machines have gigabytes. And the wires that connect the devices are much faster. So loading a 1MB string over a LAN is something you don't have to worry about. But when do you start worrying?

Part of me thinks I should just enhance the app so it assembles the full structure only when it needs to, which turns out to be never. It'll make the code a little more complex for sure. But I know I will do it at some point. Even if I don't have to, I will do it. 

Eventually. 

Whether it needs it or not.

But not today.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program.

When you realize how infintesmal the probability that any sperm will get to fertilize an egg and make it all the way to being born, anyone who's breathing is as lucky as someone who won the lottery.

Last night I posted a tweet: "Next time you want to post an essay to Medium, do the open web a favor and post it elsewhere. Anywhere. Tumblr. WordPress.com." 

If I had more space I would have added Pastebin or Blogger. Really anywhere but Medium. 

I didn't have room to explain, but people asked, so here's where that tweet came from.

Over on Facebook, Steven Max Patterson wrote a long well-thought-out comment about Trump, jobs and how he's not wrong about the policies he's advocating. He also went out of his way to say he doesn't support Trump. 

It was so well written, it seemed a waste to bury it in a comment on Facebook, where almost no one would see it. You can't publish pointers to Facebook posts or comments, because you never know who might not be able to see it. I've never been able to fully figure out how this works. So I suggested he post the comment to a blog so I could give it greater circulation by pushing it through my network.

In the back of my mind I thought that he'll probably put it on Medium. But I didn't want to say anything up front. Who knows, he might put it somewhere else. 

Well, he did put it on Medium and sent me a link, and I sent back a comment saying that I was worried he'd do that, and unfortunately while I love his post I am reluctant to point to it on Medium. I asked if he'd consider putting it somewhere else. He asked where else. Hence the tweet. 

Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web. if you're not sure you're going to be blogging regularly, the default place to put your writing is Medium, rather than starting a blog on Tumblr or WordPress.com, for example. I guess the thought is that it's wasteful to start a blog if you're not sure you're going to post that often. It's something of a paradox, because blogs are not large things on the storage devices of the hosting companies. If they're doing it right, a blog is smaller than the PNG image in the right margin of this post. They're tiny little things in a world filled with videos and podcasts and even humble images. Text is very very very small in comparison.

People also post to Medium to get more flow. But at what cost? Which pieces get flow? Ones that are critical of Medium? I doubt it. Or offend the politics of the founder? I don't know. I don't see a statement of principles, tech startups usually don't have them. They're here to dominate and make money off the dominance. I'm very familiar with the thinking, having been immersed in it for decades. 

Because I cross-post my stories to Medium through RSS, you will be able to read this there. I guess they won't recommend it. It probably won't appear on the front page of Medium. See there's the other problem with ceding a whole content type to a single company. Since you're counting on them not just to store your writing, but also build flow for it, the inclination is to praise them, to withhold criticism. To try to guess what they like, and parrot it. If Medium becomes much stronger, this will be what SEO becomes. We saw that happen before on Twitter, when they gave huge flow to people they liked, and not to people they don't. Now they're being more open about it. Why not? It didn't appear to cost them anything the last time around.

If Medium were more humble, or if they had competition, I would relax about it. But I remember how much RSS suffered for being dominated by Google. And Google was a huge company and could have afforded to run Google Reader forever at a loss. Medium is a startup, a well-funded one for sure, but they could easily pivot and leave all the stories poorly served, or not served at all. I'm sure their user license doesn't require them to store your writing perpetually, or even until next week.

I only want to point to things that I think have a chance at existing years from now. And things that are reasonably unconflicted, where I feel I understand where the author is coming from. Neither of those criteria are met by posts on Medium. I also want to preserve the ability of developers to innovate in this area. If Medium sews up this media type, if they own it for all practical purposes, as Google owned RSS (until they dropped it), then you can't move until they do. And companies with monopolies have no incentive to move forward, and therefore rarely do. Look at how slowly Twitter has improved their platform, and all the new features are for advertisers, not for writers. I suspect Medium will go down a similar path. 

We can avoid this, it's not too late. You have a choice. Post your writing to places other than Medium. And when you see something that's interesting and not on Medium, give it some extra love. Push it to your friends. Like it on Facebook, RT it on Twitter. Give people more reasons to promote diversity on the web, not just in who we read, but who controls what we read. 

We all point to tweets, me too, because it's too late for competition. And YouTube videos. SoundCloud MP3s. Do we really want to bury something as small and inexpensive as a web page? Is it necessary that a Silicon Valley tech company own every media type? Can we reserve competition in the middle of the web, so we get a chance for some of the power of an open platform for the most basic type of creativity -- writing? 

When you give in to the default, and just go ahead and post to Medium, you're stifling the open web. Not giving it a chance to work its magic, which depends on diversity, not monoculture. 

Anyway, the story had a happy ending. Patterson posted his story on WordPress.com. I circulated a link to it via my linkblog, so he got far more exposure than he would have gotten on Medium, and the open web got a little more of a future as a result. 

It's so cold that my iPhone battery, which was close to full, reported to the software that it was empty and caused the device to shut down. 

I had an interesting lunch yesterday with Leo Mirani of The Economist. He's in NYC this week to meet with people interested in news and tech to get their view on where it's all going. 

At one point in the interview he asked a challenging question. 

Does linking have a future?

We had been talking about the attempts of the tech industry to suck news into silos, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Medium, Google -- and if they were to succeed, or if the news industry could obviate the need for such platforms (seems unlikely at this late date), then how could the link have a future?

I was thinking about that as I put together the list of Toolkits that I build on. Look at all the links in that piece, and the links in the pages it links to. 

Conclusion: Linking is part of the language. If linking were to disappear, I would have to stop writing. I don't know how to write without linking.