Today's song: Take Me to the River. #

Ben Smith explains why it's bad that Apple is now a media company. He's right, it is. The more tech owns media, the less truth we'll hear about tech. But I'm waiting for Ben to aim at the incumbent media companies, who we the public, never hear the bad news about, other than the bad news they want us to hear. I remember when this became totally clear to me. A friend who was a tenured reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News had a scoop. He/she was an insider to one of the biggest media buyouts in history (at the time). I wanted to know when he/she was going to write about it. Never. That opened my eyes to something I should have been able to see much earlier. We never hear about things the media industry doesn't want us to hear. They manipulate and control us. Yet they feel transparent to us, the mere conveyors of information, or so they would have you believe. We need triangulation here. A source of news that is totally disconnected from the media industry.#

BTW, a disclaimer. Like a lot of other people in tech, I hated Gawker, even though I admire Nick Denton, its founder, a brilliant man with guts. We became closer when he was getting hammered by the Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan as proxies for Silicon Valley, and he eventually lost Gawker. But I still think Gawker crossed the line of propriety, often, in unnecessary and destructive ways. Occasionally their reporters made up events. And they missed stories that were right in front of them, stories that would have revealed corruption in tech. But. The idea that any billionaire has the ability to shut down any publication at any time -- that's unacceptable. So net-net, I'm in favor of telling the Gawker story. And Apple, btw is the perfect example of a tech company that should never have a say in what stories get told. #

Now that I understand what agile development means, I realize that the story of how podcasting came into being is beyond agile. The user had a vision, but didn't know how to explain it. It sounded to me like there was something there, so I started prototyping ideas I thought might be what he was saying until it clicked. #

My hope for podcasting was everyone who wanted to do a radio show could, without having to submit to corporate judgement. Almost 20 years later, it has, and still does. The web has none of the limits of broadcast. Simple idea. That it worked, that’s kind of a miracle. If you’re doing a podcast now, just know someone believed in you a long time ago.#

Stacey Abrams speaking at Georgia's Electoral College. Inspiring. #