Good morning. I'm back in NY. Gorgeous fall weather. Starting to fill in my to-do list. #
Tom Steyer is funding a $10 million campaign to impeach Trump. #
Trump claims his administration has accomplished more in its first nine months than any previous presidency. How foolish, he hasn't passed any laws. But there's an argument to be made that it's true. Read about the dismantling of the EPA and the State Department, and realize how long it will take to bring them back. Some people feel it's for the best that the US not have any controls on pollution or have any foreign presence. For them these are accomplishments. Trump may not know or care about what they're doing, that doesn't mean it's not part of a plan, that the Kochs and Mercers aren't intelligently looting the government. Things are happening faster than people may realize. #How you know what the "Marine general" said is indefensible. And they're all violating their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.#
I finished binge-watching the Mr Mercedes TV series on the flight back from Denver yesterday, and man it was good. At the same level as Breaking Bad, only more bizarre. The acting was great. I thought the story from Stephen King they had to work with was so-so, that's why I expected the TV series to drift and get sappy, because that's what happened (imho) in the novel. But it didn't happen and I think I know why. The writer of the teleplay was Dennis Lehane who himself is a fine novelist, author of Mystic River and Shutter Island, two great movies. He also wrote for The Wire. #- In Mr Mercedes Lehane developed King's story into a 10-hour movie that would have been fine without the gore and violence, but it made it better, because it was delivered with humor and was outrageous and thrilling, on the same level as The Shining or Carrie. #
- Even the computer stuff mostly made sense (in the novel it didn't, King doesn't really understand computers imho). There was even some good Mac humor in the story! How about that. #
- Lehane found the thread in the King novel that worked, he changed a couple of things, and let the plot develop at a good pace, and the characters were fun, entertaining, cute, motivated, lovely and brave, and most important, believable. I loved it. Highly recommended if you like this kind of thing. #
- Update: The NYT review says there were three great writers working on the show. #
While I was vacationing in Taos, with a very slow Internet connection and a slowed-down mind, I wrote a Twitter thread saying I was happy about podcasting, proud of how far it had come, and how many people's lives it was enriching, and because it was open and had no limits it didn't have the problems of platforms that were created roughly at the same time, platforms that are corporate and silo'd, like Twitter and Facebook. #- I had just driven a full day from Denver to Taos and had listened to a bunch of podcasts, more than I had in one day since my cross-country drives in the mid-2000s. Back then there wasn't very much podcasting and since then it has boomed, several times. #
- My thread drew a comment from Jason Rowley, a writer at Crunchbase. "It’s almost like the RSS protocol finally found its killer app. Not in distributing text, but mp3s." I know he was being positive, but the comment was wrong from a couple of perspectives. #
- I promised an explanation, so here goes. #
- First, people focus on the connection between RSS and podcasting, but it's deep technology, most people, users and creators, aren't aware of the connection. That part of the bootstrap, writing the spec, implementing an authoring tool and adding the feature to my RSS reader, took a couple of days at most. The hard part was figuring out how to get people to do it! It wasn't a matter of "build it and they will come." It was a totally different story, like Tom Sawyer and the whitewashed fence. #
- Second, RSS was already well on its way when we started up podasting, and would have thrived even if it had not come about. In hindsight the killer app for RSS was the New York Times. Once we had them on board, in April 2002, with daily updates to their feeds, it built out to a news network that to this day is delivering far better results for news consumers than anything else, even Twitter or Facebook. True, most people don't get their news directly from RSS feeds. But the people who really care about news do. #
- RSS didn't need a killer app, it already had one. And RSS as a basis for podcasting, was essential to the bootstrap, but it was not the hard part. For that, we needed a bit of yeast to get the bread to rise. That came, as far as I'm concerned, from Chris Lydon, myself and then Adam Curry. At that point, we had enough examples for people to get the idea that they could do it too. #
- Jason's well-intentioned understanding of how podcasting came to be, and what role RSS plays in today's news ecosystem is the one many people have, but it is wrong. Every time I see it I try to correct it. It's important because people who want to follow in the footsteps of RSS and podcasting, and develop open technologies, should know that there's more to it than technology. Without compelling content, that gets other people to do it, you don't even have a good demo. #
- I did a podcast about this in 2015, if you want more of the background. #