I don't know why I waited so long to find the day that I first used the term podcast to describe what we were doing with audio and RSS. That was one of the reasons I kept a blog (still is) -- to have a chronological record of how ideas develop. #
Doc Searls an old radio guy wrote about podcasting in the same month of September 2004. He followed this with another piece in October, explaining that podcasting is not radio. October was an incredible month, lots of adoption, new aggregators, tools, an audio version of weblogs.com, and signs of the grief that was about to happen, starting to happen. #
- I got the response from Lexis/Nexis re the mapping of radio.weblogs.com, doc.weblogs.com and scoble.weblogs.com. Here's what they said.#
#- "During a recent security audit related to the GDPR, we removed the DNS entries for doc.weblogs.com, radio.weblogs.com , and scoble.weblogs.com . We had concerns about cross-domain issues such as cookie sharing, along with general concerns about having subdomains that were not under our control. At this point, the only suggestion we can make is for you to update the links on scripting.com to point to the newer domain names that are under your control."#
- Of course it's not just links from scripting.com that are broken. Radio UserLand was a large early blogging community. Links into the archive of these weblogs are also broken.#
- The sites are still on the web, but at this address:#
- That isn't going to change in the immediate future. #
- Also thanks to Automattic for hosting the archive of the Radio UserLand sites.#
- We will have to do something special for doc.weblogs.com.#
- And you can access Scoble's Radio blog at scoble.scripting.com. That's a completely new name, there are no links to it anywhere on the net (except here of course).#
- Earlier today I wrote about making the web more long-lived. This is how the web's history disappears. A cut here another one there, sooner or later, it'll all be gone. #
- Evidence #
- Facebook is taking the place of blogs, but doesn't permit linking, styles. Posts can't have titles or include podcasts. As a result these essential features are falling into disuse. We're returning to AOL. Linking, especially is essential. #
- Click a link in a web browser, it should open a web page, not try to open an app which you may not have installed. This is what Apple does with podcasts and now news.#
- Google is forcing websites to change to support HTTPS. Sounds innocuous until you realize how many millions of historic domains won't make the switch. It's as if a library decided to burn all books written before 2000, say. The web has been used as an archival medium, it isn't up to a company to decide to change that, after the fact. #
- Medium, a blogging site, is gradually closing itself off to the world. People used it for years as the place-of-record. I objected when I saw them do this, because it was easy to foresee Medium pivoting, and they will pivot again. The final pivot will be when they go off the air entirely, as commercial blogging systems often do. #
- Instead#
- We should preserve the past on the web, and learn to make sites even more future-safe. The web is where human knowlege accumulates. #
- It's time for tech people to have values, as journalism, medicine and law do. Deliberately taking features out of the web, claiming pieces of the web as corporate property, forcing the history offline, all are terrible abuses of what make the Internet great. An ethical technologist would refuse to do this work.#
- When we teach people to create technology, they should learn to respect and enhance the things that make the Internet great, not help modern day robber barons appropriate them. #
- The Internet is a place for the people, like parks, libraries, museums, historic places. It's okay if corporations want to exploit the net, like DisneyLand or cruise lines, but not at the expense of the natural features of the net. #