Dave Winer

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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, 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.

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

  • Yesterday there was a meeting with people from Meta about their plans to support ActivityPub in Threads.

    A bunch of people I follow went there saying they’d report on what transpired.

    I’ve been looking for a report and have yet to find one.

    Any pointers appreciated. ;-)

  • It seems like HTTP requests these days, generally, don’t come with a referer header? Links and ideas on my blog.

  • I asked ChatGPT how I used OPML to share lists of feeds. The story it came back with is amazing. I asked for the list in OPML. I opened it in Drummer.

  • Back in the 1970s when SQL was new, it was touted as an English-like database language. Now with ChatGPT you really can do database queries in actual English and it understands. Whether the info is accurate or not (I suspect it is) is beside the point. It’s doing something with language that has not been possible before. Check out this query. “Make a table of 15 oscar-winning actors and actresses ranked by number of nominations, also include a column with the names of at most three of the movies they made that won best picture.” It worked.

  • I’ve used plain old HTTP on scripting.com since 1994.

  • Someday there will be a new twitter-like service with one feature that will blow the doors off this hugely dormant product area. Just support Markdown in your posts. That’s it.

  • A WordPress plugin that adds the source:markdown element to RSS feeds from the special projects group at Automattic. I’ve wanted to see RSS and Markdown get together. We put support for it in FeedLand, and now there’s a way to add it to any WordPress site. This will, long-term, add styling and links to RSS feeds, without opening the door to all the nasty stuff.

  • Manton, I just noticed that none of my August posts have gotten through, and just traced it to the fact that the URL of the file changed in a reorg I did right around that time. I can’t seem to find the place where you change the URL of an OPML file. Can you help? Thanks in advance.

  • A few weeks ago my news product passed the home page in daily reloads. As of yesterday it’s more than double flow. It makes sense. The news changes more frequently, includes everything that’s on the home page and much more. It of course was created and managed by FeedLand.

  • I’m doing a demo for a friend of how I post from Drummer to micro.blog.

  • It’s been a while since I looked at the everything timeline in FeedLand. In the interim, a bunch of people have subscribed to Bluesky feeds, and they are the most active, and also support rssCloud (!) so the list is skewed toward Bluesky posts from people who are on now.

  • I’ve been writing for my micro.blog site alongside my main blog, Scripting News, and my developer notebook. It’s always the third tab. I try to put something here every few days, as you can see in this screen shot. Anyway I was just looking at the outline and thought it would be interesting to share, for those of you who have software that can read OPML files. The bridge between Drummer and micro.blog was created by Manton when Drummer was first shipping. I want to be sure he sees that I appreciate the effort. :smile:

  • An open voicemail to Manton Reece, developer of micro.blog, about creating a common API for social media apps.

  • If Facebook really loved the open web they’d hook Facebook itself up to it. Support RSS feeds in and out. Let users have rich text and links. I’ve been asking them to do that for over ten years, and sometimes it gets somewhere, there are people inside the company who believe in the open web, but somewhere near the top the idea always dies.

  • I’ve seen people use the term social web where previously they’d say social media. I like this. Going in the right direction. Let’s try to bring everything back to the web. I bet most people who use the web these days only have a vague idea of what it is.

  • New way of displaying posts without titles in FeedLand. Also a better way to See more and less.

  • I’m echoing my blog posts on a WordPress site. I recently got my connection to WordPress going again. It all looks pretty good, and I get to edit my posts in my outliner.

  • On this day in 2003, Chris Lydon and I did the first podcast in his 20 year series, certainly the longest-running podcast on the web, and imho unapproached in excellence. I did a 10-minute podcast on what I remember of that moment, and how surprising it was to hear the idea I had been evangelizing come to life.

  • There’s hope for a bootstrap pairing of the open web and social nets to create a pretty good writing platform that doesn’t lock users into one platform or another.

  • All my freedom as a developer comes from the integrity of the web. More here.

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