It's the perfect way to transition into greater-than-140 char posts.

IA pages are readable, full-featured web docs, without all the malware that's in news story pages.

I just implemented IA for my blog, it was easy to support, and the file is just sitting there waiting for other platforms to pull from.

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

I think this would be a killer move. 

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

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

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

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

Who and how

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

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

My feed

This is where my IA feed is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turns out I know one of the reporters portrayed in Spotlight.

Matt Carroll at MIT. I met him on my visit to the Media Lab.

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

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

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

Am I dreaming?

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

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

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

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

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

BTW, there's nothing wrong with Repub leaders in DC working against voters. They are citizens too, and have the Constitutional right to work in accordance with what they think is best for the country. We hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://scripting.com/fb/rss.xml 

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here it is.

Anatomy of a story

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

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

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

Sources go direct

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

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

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

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

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

The missed opportunity that amazingly still is open

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'd all love to hear the plan!

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

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

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

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

Adding #feeltheburn to your tweets is not enough.  

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

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

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

Why wasn't it in the timeline?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a test. 

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

This is only a test.

How Facebook Instant Articles helps the open web.

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

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

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

In the town hall last night one of the questioners asked Bernie Sanders if he can promise not to be "beholden to anyone" when he takes office. He gave the $27 spiel and then said no (obviously).

But there are other kinds of deals that don't involve donations. Like deals with unions. I've never heard Bernie say he was against unions backing candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if he had some of them already on board. DId they commit just out of the goodness of their hearts? Or do they expect something in return?

Are unions part of the Establishment?

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

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

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

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

Discussion on Facebook.

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

This guy is a professional reporter.

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

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

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

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

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

Observation from studying the Facebook Instant Articles docs -- they're turning Facebook into a mobile RSS client. Google Reader II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update

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

Update on the Update

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

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

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

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

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

Lots of emails, back and forth

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

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

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

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

Where to go?

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

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

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

Update

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

Seeing the picture of the 3-year-old boy looking up at the President gave me a much better idea of the meaning of our electing the first African-American president in 2008. 

Voting for a president can be a meaningful act, despite the conventional wisdom that our votes mean nothing. And I think how much meaning a similar picture might be, eight years from now, of a little girl looking up and seeing the same kind of future that young Clark Reynolds saw. 

I recorded a seven-minute podcast, because written words aren't enough for this idea. 

What a great picture of a 3-year-old boy looking up at the President of the United States and seeing what will soon be part of our past, our history. 

It's a beautiful picture, the same way the pictures of the first men on the moon are beautiful. We reached a very important place, but who knows when we'll be here again. 

And while I feel huge pride for my country for this accomplishment, let's not forget our fellow citizens who are African-American. For them, this has much greater meaning.  

I was chatting with a friend today about the best emails I've ever received. 

Like the reply from Bill Gates to a 1994 DaveNet piece. That was a good email, because it proved that the then-nascent art of blogging could be two-way. Gates was at the pinnacle of power in the tech industry at the time, as the web moved into the desktop. He was at the start of one of the biggest pivots in history, and this exchange was totally on-topic with that. (And some of the questions he asked have since been answered, for example, yes the web meant the end of Encarta.) 

Then I thought of an email I got from Bob Atkinson, also of Microsoft, in the winter of 1998. I had just written a piece about how to do networking protocols using the web. It had occurred to me in what I call a mind bomb, a flash of insight, that XML-over-HTTP could replace the deeply complicated and history-laden networking protocols of the Mac and PC, which were totally incompatible with each other. Using the web for program-to-program communication would turn out to be a breakthrough in simplicity and today whole industries are based on the idea.

Anyway, I don't have a copy of Bob's email but it went something like this.

"We want to do this too. Would you like to work with us?"

The next week I was in Redmond in a big room with a bunch of Microsoft people, designing what would turn out to be XML-RPC. 

I watched Bernie Sanders on MSNBC last night, I don't know why, I guess because it was a town hall involving HRC too, but I didn't stay around to hear her talk I was so fed up with Sanders and his yelling and lying, and the way he disses HRC and more important the way he disses me, a voter who is trying to hear a complete answer to a straight question. And trying to understand what it is people see in him.

One of the first questions they asked is if he is a single-issue candidate as HRC says he is. He answered a different question, explaining what a jerk HRC is for saying he's a single-issue candidate, and how he's running a clean race. Heh. And then he talks at length about his single issue. So yes, he is a single-issue candidate, and when you call him on it he gets nasty.

It's a consistent pattern. 1. Bernie, is this true? 2. They're members of the Establishment so of course you'd expect them to say that. 3. But Bernie is it true? 4. They're members of the Establishment. 

Then one of the citizens of the town hall asks him what he's going to do about the tough lives black and Hispanic people have, esp men who are incarcerated at much higher rates than whites, with the caveat that we've heard all about how you're going to address the problem by getting them better jobs, and could you say something other than that, because not all of the problems are economic, some of them involve prejudice. So Bernie proceeds to explain how he's going to get them better jobs and that should solve the problem. He says it a bunch of different ways, filling up a lot of time, but he's repeating the same idea over and over, if you actually listen to the words he's saying.

I watched for another fifteen minutes as he did it over and over. Clearly they've thought it through and decided that he must not talk about anything other than this because he's a single-issue candidate and doesn't know enough about anything else to speak coherently about it.

Last week I wrote about an EZ-Pass for online news sites. Now I have hit my monthly max for two pubs: the Washington Post and Boston Globe. So until March I won't be able to read or link to any of their stories.

Shame. I just clicked on a link to a Washington Post story that said that one of the Koch brothers said Bernie Sanders is right about one thing. What that thing was will remain a mystery for me, sadly.

PS: I probably should go ahead and turn off the Wash Post river too. Not much point having it if I can't click on the links. Sad day. 

PPS: The Guardian does not have a limit on the number of articles I can read. It's also a very good source of news, and I have a river for it as well. 

PPPS: I cheated, I opened the story in another browser. Heh. It's a really good piece, an op-ed written by Charles Koch himself. I think Sanders should debate Koch. That would be really interesting. Koch mentions that it seems to him that Sanders is running against Koch. Very true. It's good that he's willing to de-cloak, even if it's in a place where very few voters will likely see it, or even know who he is and what role he plays in the political process in the US.

I've become a hot tea drinker.

I haven't read the docs for Facebook's Instant Articles yet, but now that I know that I'll be able to post them from my CMS, in a little over a month, I want to understand what the capabilities are.

1. Is there basic style? Bold, italic?
2. Linking?
3. Can I update an article after it's posted? 
4. I would love to see an example RSS feed used as input.