20-minute podcast. Some things are true even if you can't prove them. This is the bug in news that, if you account for it, news becomes a lot more useful to us. Utility in news is a foreign idea to journalism, but it should not be. I talk about the four-color theorem in the podcast. Also Michael Avenatti. Here's the picture of Lavrov, Trump and Kislyak, with the poll about who is the alpha. And oil prices have risen substantially since Trump withdrew from Iran deal. A lapdog is "a dog that lies comfortably on a person's lap." #

Nixon was never proven guilty of anything, but we still know he did some terrible criminal things. That's Occam's News in action. #

"You can't be forever blessed."#

One thing I am doing over time, is mapping sites to sub-domains of scripting.com. For example, the XML-RPC and BloggerCon sites both do this. I'm concentrating my meager efforts to preserve my work, and they really are inadequate, on scripting.com. I should probably use a permanent redirect, but I am chicken, permanent redirects really are permanent these days. 💥#

Lesson learned on radio.weblogs.com. We should have mapped to one of my servers, where I did a permanent redirect to radio-weblogs.com, which points to the archive on Automattic. If you are left with the task of preserving a community of static sites, as I was, don't just point a CNAME at the site, have it pass through a redirect. That gives you the flexibility to, after a certain amount of time, make the mapping permanent. I didn't understand this when we originally did the mapping when I sold weblogs.com.#

Yesterday's piece about how the Internet is going in the wrong direction started as a set of notes for an interview I was doing with German public radio about the Angry Founders of the Internet post. They got a kick out of it. It was meant to be funny, like Angry Birds. But what came out was one of the best summaries of what the Internet is, what makes it important, and what needs to be preserved. In a way, a 2018 followup to JPB's declaration. Main point: companies must not take on the role of governments. When they do, disaster results. A thoughtful company would realize this. All the companies say they are thoughtful. Perhaps they should think a bit more and take a step back. Apple must stop trying to hijack web links. Google must live with the flaws in HTTP. Facebook must care about preserving what's good about the web (links, styles, titles, podcasts). And Medium must take steps to preserve their user's writing outside a paywall. All of them would do better, long-term, if they didn't consume what's great about the web, rather invested in making it even better at doing what it does so miraculously well.#