Most of today's posts are thoughts that came from a weekend at a future-of-news conference in Phoenix. #

More Newsgeist -- the subject of the massive bit-burning that the turn to HTTPS will cause did come up at one of the last sessions. I was getting the usual talking points from several participants from different organizations, the ones I get when this is discussed on Twitter. Since we had Chatham House Rule I can't say who they are. It was fun to get the pushback I always get when I write about it, in real time, face to face. It's all bullshit, masking the ridiculous power grab by Google and Mozilla. If HTTPS is so necessary, then selling it on its own merits should work fine, without destroying the history of the web. I'm kind of okay with Google using it as a "signal" to determine search rank, although it's a lie and makes me think very negatively of Google. But using their dominance of browserland to force this, there's no justification for that, and there should be a huge anti-trust outcry over it. If I have anything to say about it, there will. My blog may not have huge traffic, but I'll use whatever I have to expose this. They call me names, but it all amounts to one thing -- they don't want to be called out. I love the web, think it's very important, and only fascists want to destroy history. Google, you really are way out on a limb here.#

Poll: Will there come a time that Google Chrome will refuse to show pages with links in them? They're insecure, they might say.#

Lots of gender discussions. Earnest, well-intentioned, supportive, even at times loving. But most of it too dangerous for me, as a man, to write about in public. I will say this one thing. I heard the term "mansplaining" used several times, by people of both genders. I don't like it. I don't think you should either. Man is becoming a pejorative just as Jew was when I was growing up. I thought to be a Jew was dirty. I didn't want to be one, even though my family ran for their lives in the Holocaust, because we were Jewish. I both hated the term and myself. If the unfair effort to indict men, as a gender, continues, you're going to have a lot more angry self-hating men. If you think that's good you're crazy. You want to see how bad the term is. Imagine if the man in mansplaining were replaced with "jew." It's a hateful term, and if you use it, you're spreading hate. And you gotta know that's going to come back on you. No way around it. Find another way to get a person, of any gender, to listen. Without resorting to awful humiliating gender-slamming tricks. #

Even more Newsgeist -- Journalism should put extra effort to create high-density/quality news flows for people who really want to know what's going on. Out of that will grow new products, services, and news paradigms. It's the equiv of the way we developed first, in the 80s, for power users, and that helped us develop concentrated simplified versions for people who valued ease of use over power. That's how new ideas get developed. #

Trump-voter-on-Trump-voter violence is the least objectionable form.#

Newsgeist was good. It would be interesting to have the same conference without the journalists. Also they could use some more independent software devs. They look to Facebook and Google for everything. Independent devs are much more likely to give them what they want. #

Newsgeist was good but I totally felt like I didn't belong. None of the things I care about are on their radar. It was shocking how much it's business-as-usual. Shouldn't there be some self-examination of how they screwed up the 2016 election and implementing some defenses against making the same mistakes again? Right now the bugs remain not only unfixed, they aren't even reported or logged. #

In hindsight, I should have proposed a session about how Facebook and Google are actively destroying the open web. Maybe we can get some of the reporters to look at that? Right now they mostly still want Facebook to give them money. That sickens me because Facebook is not what I think of as a good news system. #