Dave Winer

  • Okay just one more, then I have to sign off for the night. Back in the 80s I wrote a bulletin-board system that was based on ThinkTank, the outliner I did for VisiCorp, and then started Living Videotext with. It was the ThinkTank codebase, with a dialup interface, and a layer of UI (you couldn’t do an expand/collapse interface over a 300 baud modem line and an Apple II with 48K of usable app memory). It meant that threads were easy to write, because I had an outliner right there. I think it would be nice to have an outliner interface on a system like micro.blog which is, in many ways, like the BBS communities of the early 80s. Since we’re starting to use OPML again (something that makes me happy!) maybe we could work out some interfaces here. I have an open source outliner, and lots of good example code. An idea for future development perhaps.

  • Okay one more post. I usually don’t start watching baseball until the basketball season is over. I’m very modal with my sports. But for some reason last night I tuned into the Mets game, in the last half of the 8th inning. When the inning started the Mets were up by two, by the end they were down by five! A complete meltdown. Errors, stupid mistakes, bad pitching, a total mess. The Mets were supposed to be good this year, but ever since they started spending money like the freaking Yankees, I’ve been somehwat conflicted, because I don’t mind that much if the Mets lose, but I can’t abide them becoming the YANKEES. Please. Anyway, I’m going to stay away from the Mets until July or whenever the Knicks are eliminated, and hope we can recover from my having tuned in early. Yes I am mystical about sports. It makes up for how analytic I have to be about software.

  • I have the smoothest way imaginable to post to micro.blog, thanks to an innovation Manton did, while I was paying attention to fighting early fires in the release of Drummer a couple of years ago. Here’s a screen shot. I wish it was this easy for me to write for all the other platforms.

  • With ActivityPub you know who’s following you and in RSS you don’t. This may sound like a negative until you think about it from the user’s standpoint: no spam, spyware, etc. Which is probably why Google didn’t like RSS btw.

  • It's not just Meta

    Manton responds to my post about his post about Facebook (some people call them Meta). I can never remember how to enter a comment over there, so I’ll post this on my micro.blog.

    The thing is, it’s very difficult for any tech company to break out of the tech industry pattern, because people move between companies all the time. The board members, the ones from the industry come from tech companies, and many serve on boards of other tech companies.

    I spent ten years in the system, and was for a while trying to start one of these companies. Eventually I sold out to one, and was on the board, and got a look inside. Later, as the web was starting up, first I tried to raise VC, but found the terms onerous, I also saw first-hand what they did to founders. It’s designed to produce one kind of output. One that piles up value and then sells it to the public. There have been later twists, but ultimately once you have the huge cash flow a company like Facebook has, and your shareholders have expectations of great returns, you basically have no choice. You have to run your company by the rules.

    However! It is possible to get truly open ideas out there, and the ideas can survive. So let’s do more of that, and don’t depend on S

  • Next steps in social blogrolls

    The dust is settling on the rollout of the new blogroll on scripting.com.

    I’m starting to work on next steps, learning how to host blogrolls for other people.

    I have one set up for Manton, and I’m interested in doing the same for people with interesting blogrolls on micro.blog.

    If you’d like to see your list rendered on blogroll.social, post a comment here with a link to your micro.blog site. I can take it from there.

    I think this would be fun and memorable, and would help us all learn how this stuff works.

    Thanks in advance!

    Dave

  • Welcome to the modern age of blogrolls

    My blog once again has a blogroll.

    I wanted to post about it here on micro.blog because it has basic compatibility with the stuff Manton rolled out a couple of days ago.

    Once I’m confident the new stuff works on scripting.com, I’m going to get Manton’s site working in my world, so we can see what that looks like.

    We’re back in the zone. A new mind bomb every day! :-)

  • Rebooting the blogroll bootstrap

    This is a cross-post of something I just wrote on my main blog. I wanted it to be in the flow here too.

    Manton is doing great work.

    His micro.blog system is pioneering a new form of blogrolls.

    We’ve been working together behind the scenes to make sure his stuff interops with mine.

    That’s imho the best part.

    PS: Blogrolls is where the social web started.

    PPS: I have to write a short “what is a blogroll” doc, re OPML and RSS. There’s not a lot to it. So it needs to be written down. Will do.

    PPPS: I’m having flashbacks to “Manila”. We’re using GitHub more or less the same way. We had a better scripting system. I also know that WordPress can be that too, and plan to use that in my software.

  • This is a cross-post of something I just wrote on my main blog. I wanted it to be in the flow here too.

  • PPPS: I’m having flashbacks to “Manila”. We’re using GitHub more or less the same way. We had a better scripting system. I also know that WordPress can be that too, and plan to use that in my software.

  • PPS: I have to write a short “what is a blogroll” doc, re OPML and RSS. There’s not a lot to it. So it needs to be written down. Will do.

  • PS: Blogrolls are where the social web started.

  • That’s imho the best part.

  • We’ve been working together behind the scenes to make sure his stuff interops with mine.

  • His micro.blog system is pioneering a new form of blogrolls.

  • Manton is doing great work.

  • The new version of news.scripting.com is up. It’s been a long time coming. It looks a lot like the previous version. But it’s faster. And if you poke around you’ll find some new stuff. There’s an About page, linked into the info icon at the top of the page. Basically the dust is settling on the big work we did last year, and now things are starting to feel more like products. I don’t doubt there will be problems, as they say, still diggin! 😄

  • Random thought – maybe the fastest way to get full ActivityPub support for WordPress is to offer a feature in any WP site to cross-post to a Mastodon gateway operated by Automattic. It’s possible I don’t understand the problem of course. But Mastodon is open source, so it’s not like depending on another vendor to do this for you. And then you avoid all the hassles with having to say what part of the protocol is ActivityPub and what part is Mastodon’s API.

  • What tool would you use to create and edit a blog roll?

    Suppose I asked you to create a machine-readable blogroll.

    For each blog you had to include a link to either:

    1. its HTML home page with the assumption that the home page had a element pointing to the feed, or

    2. a pointer to the feed, with the assumption that the top-level element points to the HTML home page.

    You could include other data for each site, but those are minimal.

    Think quickly – what tool would you use to create this data file/document?

    If this tool isn’t ideal, what would be?

    PS: Obviously you could do it with an outliner, I’m interested in hearing from people who don’t think in terms of outliners.

    PPS: I also asked this question on GitHub, with a place to comment.

  • Looking for bloggers, developers, reporters, columnists, who focus on new applications of AI. Please post a link here. If you have the URL for a feed, that would be best. Thanks!

  • When you’re making the rounds of various Twitter-inspired systems, which do you go to first, which do you find the most interesting stuff on?

  • Textcasting: Applying the philosophy of podcasting to text.

    textcasting.org

  • What's Manton's new killer feature?

    Manton has been teasing a new feature coming for micro.blog in the next few weeks.

    I wonder if there’s been any speculation on what it is?

    I have a theory, or a hope at least – that it’s a nicely lock-in-free way to publish a newsletter.

    That it will work in concert with all the other APIs that micro.blog supports.

    I know it would be a timely offering because people are thinking of leaving Substack these days because of their Nazi Problem.

    What do you think the killer feature is?? 😀

  • I asked ChatGPT to draw a “social network for writers.” I love what it came up with.

  • Writer-friendly services & textcasting

    It’s been a while since I posted here. I wanted to take a step back because I getting an idea that no one was listening. I made a lot of inquiries about ways we could collaborate, but they never went anywhere. However I have seen signs lately that there may be a little interest. So maybe I should put some of my ideas here as well as on my blog.

    What I have been advocating, for many years, but just recently gave a name to, is textcasting.

    This came from the experience we all had trying to cross-post to a variety of different places. For me the places I wanted to cross-post were Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Slack, Medium and obviously RSS and HTML. But they never came together, there were always such substantial differences between the different views they took of a post, that if I tried to write for the lowest common denominator, it just wouldn’t work. There was no middle ground. And if tried for a subset, well I couldn’t use links, could never give a piece a title, no styling, and on and on.

    Compared to graphic PCs, the web was always limited in the styling it could use, but the social media products took most of the rest of it out. And we accepted it. And even now we’re so confused, we’re missing out on the opportunity to create a small network of writer-friendly services. We could have always done that, but we were always waiting for something better to come along from the big companies. We’re still waiting.

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