Scripting News podcast

If I could grab you by the shoulders I would urge you to pay attention. Here's a way to push news around the net that's as fast as you can imagine it being, and even simpler than RSS. It's all about WebSockets, rssCloud and WordPress. Would you spend a few minutes thinking about that? Then here's a podcast for you.Here's the blog post I wrote this morning with all the links you need to explore the sockets tech in FeedLand.

When I started blogging, early on, I had a different system for discourse. Here's how it worked: First each post would go out via email to a group of eleven people. I was cc'd.The group was randomly chosen each time, so you might not know anyone in your group, or you might know two or three. Each time it's a different group. You could reply to my post by just replying to the email. You can do a reply-all so that everyone in the group sees your comment. I would see all of them.Sometimes a really interesting discussion would start that lasted days. But I can't say that anyone got married because of the groups-of-eleven. ;-)If I saw a message that had a new idea or perspective, I could add it to a mail page.Being quoted in this system is a reward, not an obligation. Important distinction. If people wanted to be heard they had to say something interesting, somewhat original and respectful. But the hope is people don't just contribute to get more attention for themselves, they do it because they really have an idea or information to share that amounted to working together. Anyway that's the story I wanted to tell in the podcast. I also explain how this will apply to today's internet, your reply will have to be public in addition to me seeing it, everyone who reads your blog will have a chance to read it too. And it will be indexed by search engines. I think people feel a little more respectful when their words clearly have their name on it and some lasting value. I ramble a lot as in all my podcasts, sorry about that -- but if you listen to this 15-minute story at the end you will understand what I propose to build, and I think you'll be excited by the potential. And most important, I want us all to get out of the loop where we assume that the way we do discourse now is the only way to do it. Let's try out new ideas until we hit on something different that works better than what we've always used. I have a feeling there's a pony in there, or at least a milk shake. There is a transcript, generated by Google, and bullet points generated by ChatGPT.

I wrote a blog post last week about WordPress and the open web, and what I want to do there. It's the first time I've laid out in one place my plan for rekindling the open web, with my new editor providing a really easy way to write for the open web that does not otherwise exist today. It came out on the opening day of a WordPress conference in Portland, OR, and it made an impression, which I'm grateful for, and led to some discussion. Now I'm going to do some podcast interviews and next month I'm going to introduce the product and myself to the WordPress community at WordCamp Canada in Ottawa. Jeremy Herve works at Automattic, and has been my main channel into the product and company for most of this year. Without his help I don't know where we'd be with WordLand, it wouldn't be anywhere near as good as it is, that I'm sure of. Totally appreciative. When he read the piece, he wrote a blog post. I always think that's the way to go, for communicating with me about things that aren't confidential. After reading his piece, I opened up my voice recorder app and started telling a story, and pretty soon realized this was going to be a podcast. And here it is.I cover the same story as the earlier blog post but from a different angle here. I talk about how great it was to write for a medium where you had complete freedom to speak your own mind. I was lucky and also got to do that at Wired where all kinds of creativity and innovation flourished in the mid-90s when I was there. We built software, learned how to make it usable by millions of people, and then we let the money people make something they now control, "social media," that was even easier than what we were doing, and where we had trouble working together in the open world (something I didn't talk about in the podcast) they didn't have to work with anyone -- because they owned the world they were creating (Twitter, Facebook, etc). That's the difference between "open" and "silo" in communication systems. On the open side, your writing can go anywhere, in the other system, the silo, your writing must stay within their container. So you end up writing in 5 different places, one for each silo, and your work is worth less and less every time you add a new incompatible place to try to write. Pretty soon it's down to nothing. And they can remove you from the system any time they want, and now they're doing a lot of that and I expect they'll do a lot more.Most of what I'm saying is that our writing should be as free of control as our podcasting is, btw.Okay, now it's time to turn it over to the podcast. I feel this is an important moment. We may have a chance to start again with the open web. But only if we work together, with respect, and determination, to create it.

My house has a view of a pond, which is endlessly interesting, year-round, through all seasons. And we have all the seasons here in the Catskill Mountains.Yesterday, I spied a large bird in the pond, so I grabbed my binoculars, and I'll tell the rest of the story in the podcast, don't want to spoil the surprise! :-)

On Thursday I wrote: "It would be interesting if Pocket Casts had an API. I would love to be able to one-click subscribe to a podcast in my feed reader. I mention Pocket Casts because it's the podcast client I use on my phone, but I would obviously like to see them all support an API, ideally a common API."Today I explain why that would open things up nicely. Basically I do my feed discovery on my desktop. My phone is for listening to podcasts, either while driving, walking or riding. My eyes are busy. I'm listening and thinking (hopefully) about the great ideas I'm hearing. You know I'm always looking for a new inspiring listen. Podcasts wear out their welcome, people repeat themselves, get depressing or boring, or somehow I don't get excited about them like I used to. That simple API that lets a feed reader user subscribe to a podcast would make all the difference. If a podcast client app did this I would do the other side from FeedLand, in a heartbeat. Most of the APIs for podcasting are focused on the needs of publishers, this one is more focused on what users want -- better discovery, and that starts with better tools. It's a quick podcast.

"Behave like a computer. That's where we start."ChatGPT is not a programming partner, it's a very fantastic improvement over search engines. That's reality. Having used ChatGPT and various other AI tools for over two years now, and using it in my programming work every day, I can now report a basic flaw in the design of the tool, which is what it is. It tries to be a programming partner. A control freak and fairly ignorant programming partner. An incredible search engine though. Now, this approach works well for things I don't go too deep into or have no expertise in. For example, I have looked at switching phone service providers many times but until I thought to bring the problem to ChatGPT yesterday, I was flying blind, had no clear way to compare the services based on their inadequate marketing materials. Consumer Reports had nothing. ChatGPT was able to tell me how each of the providers worked where I live and visit. Huge improvement. But in programming work, it tries to drive, and that wastes huge effort, because unlike me it doesn't know anything about the context the code is running in. So it's finding high probability answers for situations nothing like mine. It tries to drive, and that doesn't work -- we end up burning huge amounts of time chasing down dead ends. All that amounts to this very simple idea. It should accept commands like all software does, and only do what it's asked to do. It must behave like a computer. PS: If AI's can have ethics imho it may be unethical for it to try to be a human, but we'll save that for another day. :-)

WordCamp Canada is doing a great job of creating a little community around my keynote there in October.I have some experience running blogging conferences, I did the first ones in the US starting in 2003 called BloggerCon.In a lot of ways I want to see if we can reboot the blogosphere in the age of social media and get the web and twitter-like services to merge. Until then imho the idea of the "social web" remains a dream. I also feel very strongly that WordPress is a key part of that ecosystem, we just have to build the connections, and we've already started. This should be important to the WordPress community. I feel like I'm part of it, btw -- in a way I am both extremely late and extremely early. By getting involved in WordPress now, in the mid-2020s, I'm being transported back to when I left this thread, in the mid 00s. And I find that some of the things I was working on then are not here yet. That's why I made WordLand and the other part which I haven't announced yet, but is getting pretty close. I totally expect to have that done by the time we're in Ottawa in October. Anyway the question they asked on Twitter yesterday was keying off a great story Joel Spolsky wrote about something I wrote in 2007, where I suggested that not only don't blogs require comments, sometimes comments can take something that is a blog and make it not a blog. You can get a feel of what the blogosphere was like then. Joel is brilliant and snarky and respectful. His comments added to what I wrote. But it was done at a distance. That's the great thing about a blog, you get to finish a thought. It's true of podcasting too. Anyway when asked why blogs need comments, I say that's a trick question because they don't. I want to try rebooting the blogosphere now, but take new paths we didn't in the 90s and 00s.Lots to say about that, and I do in this 30 minute podcast. I haven't listened to it yet myself. This is basically my "Hello World" podcast to the WordPress world. I expect there will be many more. I hope there are.