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RSS of BitTorrent, Programmable Twitter client

Saturday, November 28, 2009 by Dave Winer.

My new blogging method is to post stuff where ever it might make sense to do so, and hoping to be able to bring it all back together through various mechanisms.  

In the last couple of days I've written three pieces I think Scripting News readers would want to see: 

1. Reviewing the RSS generated by BitTorrent sites. The goal to help improve the quality and uniformity of their metadata, perhaps to allow more distributed applications to be built around BitTorrent, and perhaps make the network more robust and useful, and potentially more lucrative for the content owners. But where I'm starting is with the obvious fixes, and there's lots to do. 

2. We need a programmable Twitter client. It took me a long time to figure this out, but I think it would be a huge accelerator. Turn over the tools of innovation to power users. It's always been this way, but somehow in the last couple of decades we've forgotten that programming tools belong to users too. Unix, DOS, Lotus, Emacs, dBASE, all pointed this way. Time to go back to our roots. 

3. Journos as Ski Patrol. I've been explaining the "reboot" in news by comparing it to skiing in the 50s and 60s, when the amateurs arrived, changing the sport forever. 

Tech note -- the first piece was written on a WordPress site, the second on a Tumblr site and the third on my Posterous. My authoring tools let me write for all these platforms, in exactly the same way. All are excellent products, but their capabilities are different.