Dave Winer

April 2015
  April 3
    Re the wikipedia page for podcatchers
      I respect Wikipedia's guidelines for not modifying content that's about you, so I'm posting this as a liveblog item, hoping someone will correct the page.
      Their podcatcher page says there were no podcatchers until 2003. This is not true. The first versions of Radio UserLand, shipped in early 2001, were podcatchers. It was called My.UserLand on the Desktop at the time it was first released. I talk about this in the blog post that basically defined podcasting in early 2001.
      That's how podcasting booted up, Radio could both distribute them through RSS feeds, and capture them through the built-in RSS aggregator.
      It's really important people understand how open standards get created. In this case, it was because we were open about our file format for blogging and podcasting that an open market was able to grow and thrive.
  April 2
    It's the powerlessness, dummy!
      This became a post on Scripting News.
March 2015
  March 27
    MWE captured me
      Sorry for the lack of updates here.
      I still love the Liveblog. But it's hit a few walls and I want to think before figuring out how to approach them.
      The walls are...
        1. The file is getting big. Each reader has to download the whole thing every time. On a normal desktop connection that's not such a big deal, it's the size of a small JPG file. But on a remote connection it seems a big sluggish.
        2. I don't think the outline structure is helping that much as an index to all the posts here.
      The things that I love
        1. The instant updating. That seems to work, and seems to scale.
        2. The outlining.
      I have a few more steps to do in MWE before I swing back around to Liveblog.
  March 23
    Ted Cruz is a smart person
      The really scary thing about Ted Cruz is that he is certainly self-aware. He chooses to say these things. He is not a stupid man, but he says things that a smart honest man would never say. He has a goal in mind. People write him off, but I suspect he's smarter than they are, and he sees something they don't see. His cynicism and intelligence combined say something I don't like about our culture at this point in time.
    Google Glass will rise again
      Just read a piece that says that Google Glass isn't dead. It shouldn't be. There's no doubt that what it does will be something people do in coming years. For example, the Meerkat craze would be doubly-interesting if it were a Glass app. It's hard to imagine walking around the city with a phone pointed at everyone. I've tried it, not with Meerkat. And the results are way less than stellar.
      We listen to podcasts as we walk around. Why not watch a show? We're being asked to accept driverless cars. Okay, then why should there even be people inside the bodies we're watching walk around the city? Are there people in there? Or are the people on the net? In the future they will be watching video. Unless there's a major reversal in direction of our culture.
  March 22
    A new liveblog feature
      This is a big one with a small footprint.
      I can now archive whole branches of the outline.
      For example, February is now archived.
      That means that the outline text has been replaced with a pointer to the outline.
      Which in turn means that when I point to a story in March, you no longer have to load all the text for February. However the links to pieces in February still work. They just take a little longer to load. Which is okay. They're part of the archive after all, and blogs are about (mostly) what's happening now.
      I've wanted this feature for a while. I even implemented most of it, before I started work on MyWord Editor, but I couldn't get it to work. I stared at the code. And stared some more. The problem was in the outline. Heh. A fresh start and I found the problem within seconds.
      Onward! :-)
      Update: Ooops, it didn't work. There's a prohibition for running a synchronous read from the main thread. That interferes with the traversal working. Had to (hopefully temporarily) deactivate the feature.
    Notes on Brent Schlender's Steve Jobs book
      I got my review copy of Brent Schlender's book on Steve Jobs late last week. I've been writing about it a little on Facebook, thought it would be good to bring my latest comment into the liveblog.
        Brent Schlender spent a lot of time with his subject, and with the rest of us, while it was happening. It's still a reporter's account, but at least it has the depth coming from seeing each of the changes take place, and how they were adapted from earlier work, how the ideas build on each other. I haven't read his book yet (waiting for the Kindle version, I just can't read paper books any more). But after reading the first couple of chapters, I didn't find myself rolling my eyes and screaming "you fucking idiot" at the author, not even once. "+1"
  March 21
    A challenge for Silicon Valley
      All this talk about driverless cars -- a scary idea for this urban bike rider. Who are we going to yell at for almost killing us? (Bike riders who get killed can't do any yelling.) Seriously, is this the best thing the tech industry can come up with?
      On a recent visit to the Bay Area, I was reminded at how awful the traffic is there. I first moved there in 1979, and I thought it was pretty bad then but it's gotten much much worse with all the growth.
      The Bay Area presents some huge transportation challenges. After all it's a metropolitan area with no center. Smack in the middle of the city is a huge body of water. San Francisco Bay.
      Despite what some people say the buses the tech companies supply their employees are a good thing. Taking all those cars off the road helps, a little. But how about a really disruptive idea, more mass transit, for what's supposedly the most modern part of the country, but is actually one of the most traffic-choked!
      Come on Larry, Sergey, Tim and Zuck -- solve this problem. Let's get some good mass transit circling the Bay.
  March 20
    Meerkat's social graph
      Adweek asks the question: "Where Does Meerkat Go Without Twitter’s Support?"
      Meerkat's founder, Ben Rubin says: "We are definitely going to start our own network," Rubin said in an interview. "We are already starting to decouple the social graph."
      Here's a radical idea. How about decoupling Meerkat's functionality from the social graph, and enable other developers to use the graph you're developing, without locking users in? Why do we keep having to boot up new graphs? Someday there's going to be an open un-owned public one. Why not now??
  March 19
    Digital native, there is no such thing
      There's no such thing as winning on your own terms, and there is also no such thing as a Digital Native. If you believe there is such thing you are not one, that's for sure. And the reason there is no such thing is that "digital" is a constantly moving target, though to any given generation it seems like it isn't. There will always be a next thing that strips the gears off any mind that was raised in the previous thing.
      I think of trying to explain to my uncle, who's been gone for just 12 years now, what a cell phone is, and I'm sure he would understand the idea of a portable phone, but how could you explain what all those people are doing who are walking around the city paying no attention to anything but what's in the glass screen they're holding in front of their face.
      My uncle was brilliant, with a super flexible intellect, but I'm pretty sure this would strip his gears. But that's just one iteration, one turn of the wheel. The futurists who think they understand the implications of the technology they can visualize are fooling themselves and anyone who believes them.
    Winning on your own terms, there is no such thing
      I read somewhere in all the coverage of Hillary Clinton's email server that this time she wants to win "on her terms." I just want to say there is no such thing. If you put too high a tax on winning, you just lose to the person who's willing to pull out all the stops and win on any terms.
      Democrats beware, if HRC seems like she thinks she'd already won, nominate someone else. No matter how much you feel it's her term. She won't win, and we'll have another President Bush, likely with a Republican Congress. I don't think the world can survive that.
    MyWord Editor will be silo-free from the start
      I came back from SLC ready to ship MyWord Editor. But I decided to make it silo-free from the start. This means a little more work before release.
      What does silo-free mean? It's really very simple. My first blogging software, called AutoWeb, released in the very early days of the web, was silo-free, as was every other blogging tool I ever released. WordPress is silo-free. However Tumblr is not, nor is Medium, and Facebook certainly is not, nor is Twitter.
      What it means is you can host your blog, and its editor, on your domain. I may offer a service that runs the software, but there will be no monopoly, and it will be entirely open source, before anything ships publicly.
      I could have gone another way, and put up my own hosting service, as I have done with Little Pork Chop, Happy Friends, Radio3, Little Card Editor etc. None of those are open source, however they all run on the nodeStorage platform, which is.
      I want MWE to make a very strong anti-silo statement. And even though it might make more sense from a development standpoint to do it in stages, it will muddy the message to have it be a silo when it's released. So we're going a little more slowly, to make a big strong, impossible-to-miss statement. Silos stink. We don't want them. Not even for one version.
    Are there any cooperative species?
      Humans compete with humans, and we compete with other species. I was wondering if there are any species where there is no competition within the species? I wonder if they might be a good model for building collaborative software, or if we consciously decide to evolve our species to solve the huge problems that loom in front of us.
    A club that recommended binge-watches?
      A few days before I left on my trip to SLC, I asked my friends on Facebook for recommendations of TV series that are good binges. As always, there was an outpouring of excellent ideas. But there were a few misses, and quite a few recommendations of shows I had already binged on.
      Wouldn't it make sense for there to be a service that catered to binge-watchers, and kept track of what you watched, and what you liked, and automatically made recommendations? Isn't this something a TV network should operate? Not just for their own content, but for everything?
      And also keep track of which series come back. For example, I loved The Americans, and didn't know there was a new season already underway.
      A bonus: I'd love to be able to chat with friends about each of these shows, without fear of spoilers.
      It seems we should already have this service in 2015. Maybe we do? Maybe I asked the wrong question in my Facebook post! :-)
  March 18
    Why 'Better Call Saul' is an outstanding value
      There are no spoilers in this post.
      I loved Breaking Bad. But I hated the cliff-hangers.
      And I realized that Better Call Saul, while every bit as good as Breaking Bad, from a storytelling, acting, design standpoint, totally blows away Breaking Bad in cliff-hangers. Not only doesn't it have them, it has the opposite of a cliff-hanger. How?
      No show can tie off all the loose-ends. And some whole arcs of Breaking Bad never even were explored. Like how did Mike and Saul meet? Who is Mike? We know Kaylee is his granddaughter (she calls him Popop), but what is Kaylee's mother's relationship to Mike? No spoilers. :+1:
      Some episodes, like the week before last, resolve a huge number of Breaking Bad loose-ends, and that is soooo satisfying!
  March 17
    Exhaustion
      Some days I'm tired of being the only adult in the room. Exhausting. You need the open web as much as I do.
    First bike ride of 2015
      I was late for lunch at 2nd Ave Deli when I got to the 34th St and 6th Ave. It was nice out so I hopped on a Citibike, and rod it crosstown. Then I did it on the way back. Felt great! Nice to see the legs still do their thing. Tomorrow it will be cold, but soon I'll be riding every day, Murphy-willing. ;-)
    Better Call Saul
      This week's episode not as epic as last week's.
      But you can't hit that high note every time you play.
    Happy St Patrick's Day!
      And a second day of not feeling like working.
      What's going on here. I think I'll just read a book!
  March 16
    When will the 140-char wall come down?
      I ran this as a post on Scripting News.
  March 15
    Terry Gross fails to ask the question of Jonathan Banks
      Spoilers are only about Breaking Bad scenes. No Better Call Saul spoilers.
      Jonathan Banks of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad was a guest on Fresh Air last week. They played excerpts from two great scenes with the character played by Banks, Mike Ehrmantraut.
      In the first scene, Mike is murdered by Walter White. Mike has enough time to tell Walter to fuck off. Enough time to regret not killing White first.
      In the second scene, which comes earlier in the series, Mike tells White a story about a man who beat his wife, who he threatened with death. He made a mistake by letting him off because the next week he kills the wife. Mike has a chance to learn the lesson, which he tells White is this: "No half measures." White is a bomb waiting to go off (which he says before he was shot, before he knows this is his last scene).
      Now here's the question that was just begging to be asked, that Gross didn't.
      Didn't Mike eventually die because he really wasn't as much of a hardass as he let on, or as smart, or have as good a memory? He certainly must have thought of killing Walter, and certainly had many opportunities to do so, but in the end, he gets killed by the guy he warned about the half-measures. A repeat of the incident with the wife-beater.
      I never would have thought of this question myself had they not put these two exact scenes next to each other.
      It's a great little sub-arc, because it is one of life's lessons. If someone does something bad, and you give them another chance, they will do it again. There's really no variability in this. It always happens.
      Anyway, if you love Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul (which is actually as good as the best parts of Breaking Bad), you should listen to the interview.
    Meerkat and Glass
      I bet Meerkat would make a great Google Glass app, and vice versa.
    Ideas of March
      I just misread something someone wrote.
      My brain substituted "ideas" for "ides."
      Worth a small liveblog post. :+1:
    A Medium-size hole in Twitter
      I ran this post on Scripting News.
    Where did Meerkat get its inspiration?
      John Furrier noticed something interesting.
      First, Twitter announces that it's acquiring Periscope. That happened in January. Then Meerkat began developing their product, which does more or less the same thing as Periscope. They ship. It's a hit! Esp among the VCs in Silicon Valley. A group of people who are well-listened-to. Will this be the big hit of SXSW? Maybe it will. Will Twitter let it continue? Maybe so.
      Somewhere along the way the order of the events was forgotten.
      Was Meerkat an original idea, or an idea they "got" when they saw which way Twitter was headed?
      Honestly I've been on the other side of this. In the Frontier community, in the mid-late 90s, I posted a roadmap telling developers where we were going, presumably so they could easily stay out of our way. We had a big advantage over them in any area we were active in, because we could bundle our software with the platform. So what did the developers do? Exactly what we put in the roadmap! With predictably bad results. ;-(
      I guess it's human nature in a way. It may not make sense, or it may be greedy, but it seems that perhaps Meerkat wasn't the innovator here. Maybe Twitter would act differently if it was an idea that they hadn't already clearly telegraphed their interest in.
  March 14
    Twitter and Meerkat
      Was there another approach Twitter could have taken?
      Over the years, I've developed a theory about the lifecycle of successful platform companies, like Twitter now, and Microsoft in the 90s. Often the companies don't make the transition from scrappy startup to BigCo in a sensible way. Microsoft acted like a small company even when they dominated the PC software industry.
      My theory is that companies should recast themselves as an investment banker and distributor. Twitter, as a public company has access to capital that a startup doesn't. And clearly they have the distribution (social graph) that Meerkat wants.
      So an alternate approach might be:
        1. Make an investment, get a board seat and a right of first refusal to acquire the company.
        2. If a competitor to Meerkat comes about, let them build off Twitter's technology base, and offer them the same deal.
      The advantage is a competitive market, instead of just another feature.
      Big companies on their own rarely innovate at the pace of a market.
      The risk in doing it the way Twitter is doing it is that eventually this approach will force a competitor to rise up. Maybe not this year or next, but eventually there will be a big idea, bigger than the platform, and users will be thirsty for something new they won't be able to get on Twitter.
      Had Microsoft taken this approach, I think Google would have grown up in its ecosystem and Microsoft shareholders could have participated in the growth.
  March 13
    Kingsman
      I went to see Kingsman yesterday, really liked it. It's an ultra-violent comedy. There's nothing incredibly disturbing about it, but I wouldn't want to have to explain it all to a kid. Probably best for teens and above.
      Very typical setup, an evil villain and a Bond-like hero. They do battle. The villain however can be seen as a hero. Especially if you want our species to survive the coming climatpocalypse.
      Food for thought, from a surprising place!
    My new Nexus 6 is hot
      If you use it for a while it gets so hot it's hard to hold!
      What's up with that??
    It's up to us to make the open web thrive
      Just as we heard premature calls for death to RSS, similarly, people who don't want open competition are calling for the death of the web.
      If we want our ideas to live freely outside of silos, it's up to us.
      Many of us give to charity, work for good causes, see value in our lives beyond the balance in our bank accounts. What's the point of being wealthy if our lives have no meaning? The people who want death for ideas we love don't have to win. Not if we don't want them to.
      We've gotten awfully cynical. It's gone beyond just hoping someone else steps up and do the right thing, now we're assuming NO ONE will. Well, I promise you that's not true. My friends all care enough to work together to make something great continue to happen on the open web.
      It just takes a few people to help the open web and it will thrive instead of die.
      Prove the cynics wrong. The web is like Peter Pan. To make it real, all you have to do is believe.
    NakedJen masters the web
      I just showed NakedJen how to manage DNS, set up an S3 bucket, upload a file, and view it in the browser. She now knows the essential idea of the Internet.
      http://nakedjen.org/saltyfamilybeach.jpg
      So proud of her! And expect amazing love bubbles to pop on the net
  March 12
    Medium and domains
      It's good that Medium has acknowledged that it would be better if they weren't a complete silo with no API, not part of the network of software that make up the blogosphere. Until now they've been claiming to do something vastly different. I expect over time for them to slowly add features.
      Meanwhile, starting next week, we will offer a much more open version of what they do on myword.io. And from there, we will only get more open.
      There's no magic. They have a nice editor and an nice template. All of which can be done with open source software. We just need to organize the work. And that's what we're doing.
    SXSW never caught on with me
      In the first years, they had panels about blogging, included my competitors but refused to allow me to talk about my products. Then came podcasting, and lots of people spoke on the SXSW stage about my work, but I couldn't get an invite.
      I just got out of the habit of going. If they ever wanted me to come talk about how blogging works, and why it's important, and why silos suck, etc -- I would consider coming.
  March 9
    On being locked out
      First time I experienced lock-out as a developer was when I was a Compuserve user in the early 80s. I was also a software developer, and had written an app that sat on top of their CB Radio service and gave you a dashboard to communicate with six individuals. This idea of being both a user and developer is important. It's how I do what I do.
      Naturally I wanted to put my own software on the server, and I asked the Compuserve people if they would let me do it. Never got a response. I did hear from a friend who worked there that they didn't think very much of the users. They called us the "Lonelyhearts" -- as if people who used online systems were somehow inadequate.
      I kept trying to get behind the network interface, and kept being locked out, until the web came along. That was the opening I had been waiting for. All of a sudden I could write software that ran between the users. And some great things came out of it, from all of us.
      But we're getting back there again. It's not as bad as it was in the 80s, because we still have the web to fall back on. But people who work for Facebook or Google have special powers the rest of us don't have. I was looking for the right word for how that feels, it's not a good feeling. I felt in the 80s that I was every bit as good as any of the people writing software as employees of Compuserve. Today, I feel the same way about people at Facebook. They're nice to me, no complaints on a personal level, but when you come down to it, to them I'm a user, not a creative person.
      I saw this when Microsoft wanted to "work with me" on RSS around the time Vista was in development. I thought they meant their code would work with mine. Eventually I realized that they wanted me to use their software and tell everyone it was wonderful. They saw me as a user. A weird kind of reporter. An unpaid PR consultant.
      When I realized that's how it was, I just walked away. I have no interest in being a user, at least not yet. I'm still developing. I do use this stuff, because that's the only way to gain intuition on how it should work. But I'm still stuck where I was in the 80s on the outside looking in, and as before I'm going to have to force the issue. At this point in my career that seems ridiculous. Haven't I proven, yet, that I'm capable of working at the top of my profession?
    APIs may be good for stock value
      Most investors probably assume it's good if their companies have a lock on the market. Until something like Meerkat comes along. Then they might puzzle it out. Maybe the fact that Twitter has an API is not factored into the market cap of the company. Maybe the stock is undervalued?
      Twitter management take note. You might have a diamond in the rough here. Might want to do some marketing for the API.
    Meerkat is validation for the Twitter API
      Lots of people have said that no one will ever build on Twitter again, but obviously that isn't the way it's going. Meerkat could not have happened if Twitter didn't have an API, because the Twitter component is vital. Another thing to think about if you're running a silo and not happy with the growth. Putting an API on it lets a thousand flowers bloom. You never know which one is going to be a hit, you have to try them all. An API makes that happen more quickly.
  March 8
    A difference between genders
      This one could not be more striking.
      Women will sometimes post messages that go like this...
        I'm having a bad day. Some bad stuff happened. (List of some bad things follows.) I am feeling bad, and could use some encouragement.
        What follows is a chorus of positive energy. Mostly from other women. Men usually seem to sit this out.
      Nothing wrong with this! Just observing..
      Men don't do this. Speaking as a man...
        Yes I have very bad days too, and on those days a kind word of support makes a huge difference. However I won't post a public notice about it, because I know (am sure, etc) that I will also be punished for it. And will end up having to defend myself. And on an already-bad day nothing could be worse. So no sharing.
      Also my first impulse when I see another man do this is to think "what a weak mofo, he should just tough it out."
        Now, I'm an evolved person, so I know not to succumb to those first impluses. I breathe. Let it pass and realize this -- inside, men and women are the same. When you get through teh layers, the packaging, we are human. We create each other. Etc.
      Also, as a man my first impulse is to try to "solve the problem."
        However, I'm pretty sure this one doesn't have a solution, not one that I can implement. If it were to be solved, people who are unkind to men, just because they are men, would pause before acting on it. Maybe that will happen someday. But not yet.
    Uncle VaVa and Lady GaGa
      My uncle Ken used to be called Uncle VaVa. It's a long story, actually it's not. Ken was a master story-teller, he was the hero of all his stories. He told one about the time he went to the beach in St Augustine and told all the babes he was a professional wrestler. They wanted to know his name, so he told them. The Great Va Va Voom. He just made it up on the spot (and he made up the babes too of course). But it stuck, and eventually it was shortened to Uncle Vava. Everyone called him that, it became his name, down on the beach in Negril, even in the family. I would introduce him as Ken, aka Uncle Vava.
      Anyway, last night I saw a picture of a party that Francine Hardaway was at in Phoenix, and there was a big GAGA sign, I don't know what it meant, but it got me thinking. GAGA. VAVA. LADY GAGA. UNCLE VAVA. Wow. It's really close. I wonder if she knew VaVa? Maybe we're related! ;-)
    Just say bye-bye to Bee-Bee
      As an American, I've never cared who was PM of Israel.
      But if you guys could get rid of him, it would help undo the damage he did to our political system, as if it weren't already screwed up enough already.
  March 7
    Liveblog-on-phone improvement
      If you're reading this on a phone, you should see a column of icons in the left margin. From top to bottom, this is what they do:
        Lock -- unlocks the outline, so updates flow in real time. It's useful to keep it locked when you're reading, so an update doesn't interrupt. If it turns green that means there's an update waiting.
        Uparrow and downarrow -- move up and down at the same level.
        Expand/collapse -- toggles the expand state of the cursor headline.
        Eye -- Opens the reader with the cursor on the current headline. Useful for sending someone a link to a specific line in the outline.
        Share -- Opens Radio3 with the cursor item ready to be sent to Twitter or Facebook.
        Comment -- Opens the comment dialog. Yes you can comment from a phone (however there is at this time no way to read comments on the phone).
    We've built our culture around billionaires
      And I think maybe some people are waking up to the idea that this might not have been the best idea. ;-)
      I was struck by this reading the piece about the inside world of First Look Media, and its relationship to billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who founded it.
        No doubt Omidyar is a smart guy, but not smart enough to be able to run a media startup. They were born with a trove of great stories, yet you hear almost nothing from First Look. Where other media startups formed at the same time are up and running.
      Once you've made billions, does that spoil you for future creations?
        Maybe. Problem with having so much money is the struggle is out of it. You need to have some resistance to make something good.
        Would I be able to make better decisions about evolution of my software if I had more money? Just by asking the question that way, you can tell the answer is no. Of course not. Good decisions are formed by experience, intelligence and intuition. Money? Well I can buy a new Nexus 6 when I want one (I just did, it's coming tomorrow).
        And it's certainly easier to be creative when you don't have to think about where your next meal is coming from. Or is it? I've done some of my best work when my back was to the wall financially. I bet Omidyar has too.
      The media assumes that with huge money comes great wisdom. Look at how they fight for quotes from billionaires, and ignore other ideas. But it's might not be true. In fact, if being rich dulls the intellect, causes you not to question your assumptions, it can have the opposite effect.
      See also
        For more on the meaning of money, see this blog post from Y2K.
        And this story, on the post-Minecraft life of its founder.
    Meerkat -- ugh
      I've seen a bunch of people pointing to Meerkat, and I of course wondered what it is. Each time I click on a link it wants me to sign in via Twitter. I asked @azeem to write a blog post about it, and he naturally invited me onto Meerkat so he could explain it there.
      I really wanted to read about it first.
      Anyway, an hour or so later, I saw another advert from him about Meerkat, and decided what the hell, let's try it. He's driving around sunny London, and then he starts talking about ME to all the other people there. This is exactly what I didn't want. There was no warning that I was visible just by connecting.
      I won't be using it again anytime soon. I really dislike being so visible. Especially with no warning.
      Update: Azeem did write a post about it.
    Progress on MyWord Editor
      I think it's about done, at least to a certain level.
      Just added a File Open dialog today. So now you can go back and edit a piece you wrote last week or month. It seemed a bit too primitive to not have that much.
      There's no way to delete a file, but you can wipe out all the text in one.
      There are about 20 people on the mail list now. If you'd like an early look at MWE, just join the list, and follow the instructions in the first message there.
      Sorry for all the steps, but I want to make sure early users have an easy ability to report problems. I actually want to hear from the first people to use it. Amazing as that might seem. Even if it works, I want to know about it. ;-)
  March 6
    Matt Haughey moves on from Metafilter
      Matt Haughey, the founder of Metafilter, has had a tough few years, which he explains in a post on his site. He's been doing Metafilter for 16 years. The story is worth reading if you find yourself cast in the role of entrepreneur, as Matt was, and feel you might not be right for it.
      It took me a long time to realize what should have been obvious, I am not an entrepreneur either. Most people aren't. I hate almost everything about running a business, except the creative stuff. That I can spend all day every day doing. And I do! And when there's been a business that depends on me, my absence has created a lot of stress and angst and failure.
      There's an assumption that everyone who's involved in tech must be an entrepreneur. When people talk about tech work, they think in terms of raising money and starting companies. We need to get beyond that. Creativity is what we need more of, not companies.
      So, congrats to Matt for listening to himself, that's harder than it sounds, and congrats for acting on what he learned. It's all around goodness.
    MyWord Editor mail list
      I just started a support mail list for MyWord Editor.
      If you'd like to be a tester, please join the mail list ;-)
      Also here's a screen shot of the editor. It's not meant to blow you away. Quite the opposite.
      BTW, here's the page in the screen shot.
    I am using this.cm
      And this is my link for today.
      I will add stuff here as I think of it. ;-)
    Happy Friends is great
      Here's a quick video demo of Happy Friends.
    Every man had a mother
      Whenever I read a piece that says women are great at something that men are bad at, like a recent piece that said there are more narcissist men than women, I remember that we all had mothers, and they played a big role in teaching us what it means to be who we are. So it isn't a tribal thing. Not Jews vs gentiles, or Red Sox vs Yankees, or whatever. Whatever is fucked up about men is a reflection of what's fucked up in all of us. We very much create each other. If you want men to be healthier, raise healthier men. And that doesn't mean, btw, make them women. :-)
      And BTW, there are a lot of narcissist women. And they're just as much trouble to be around as men. (I really think we're all narcissist, btw -- it's very hard to wake up from the dream that you're at the center of everything and realize there are other people in your midst, real people, who aren't as you perceive them.)
  March 5
    You've heard of Mother Earth..?
      http://motherweb.org/
    We are in a huge tech bubble
      A lot of the value in tech stocks is based on user lock-in.
      So far it's worked because programmers outside of the silos have not coordinated their work. But there's a huge swell of code sharing going on now, around the growth of JavaScript on both client and server. Everyone wants to make a contribution to the platform, do something meaningful.
      All that has to happen is a small amount of that energy has to be directed at replicating the functionality of one silo. There are some pretty easy silos to pick off. But once the first one falls, the perceived barriers to entry will collapse, and so will the valuations of tech stocks.
      All it takes is for some programmers to decide to coordinate their work to do what one of the big silos does. Yes it has been tried before, by college students. That's not what I'm talking about. Real professional commercial quality developers.
      The key thing is "working together." If that can happen in a meaningful way, outside the VC-funded world, then the bubble is over.
      PS: If you want to hedge, as an investor, do some bubble-popping yourself. Invest in startups that don't use lock-in as a barrier to entry.
    The next version of myword.io
      This became a blog post on Scripting News.
  March 4
    Buzzfeed
      I learned something today that I did not understand before.
      Buzzfeed thinks of itself as an ad agency.
      The big-flow stories they put out are demos.
      Could that be right??
    JavaScript in the browser is almost complete
      This piece ran on Scripting News.

    Proposed: A new TLD
    Send a message to lazy Internet users.

      I propose a new TLD -- .RTFM.
      Don't waste my time asking me to tell you what's in the link I just pointed on because either you were too lazy to click on it, or just skimmed the nouns before writing your snarky reply.
      On .RTFM, if you do that, you owe the author $5. Until it's paid you will not be allowed to see any other .RTFM domains.
      That would as they say "send a message."
    I'm an NBA blogger!
      I got my first invite to an event based on my blogging of the NBA and I couldn't be happier. A big car brand invited me to a dinner held at Clyde's Wine & Dine during March Madness, to talk about the Knicks. That is so cool. I need to work on this. I can't imagine more fun that being part of the punditocracy of the Knicks. NakedJen take note! :-)
      This reminds me of a story. When I was living in Berkeley there was some kind of mess relating to the Bay Bridge, so I started a WordPress blog to cover it. The domain baybridgeblog.com was available so I grabbed it. As the PR died down, the people who run the Bay Bridge decided to reach out to bloggers, and of course I was one of two people they called. I had already lost interest (bridges aren't really my thing) so I told them to take me off the list.
      The moral of the story is this -- it really isn't that hard to break into the inner circle of anything, you just have to pick a good point of entry. Sometimes it takes persistence. I blog about the Knicks because I'm always thinking of lessons they teach us. They do that so well.
      In the end it is all about Melo. He certainly sees it that way, and he has forced everyone else to see it that way too. In the picture on this post, you can see the moment when he blew it. With a great coach, and a perfect point guard, exactly what he needed to get to the next level, he said basically, this isn't the way I want to win. Moral of the story, when fate conspires to give you what you want, even if it came in an unexpected way, the proper answer is this: YES! :+1:
  March 3
    $25 is too much for a new domain
      With all the new TLDs, domains are way devalued now, and with every new TLD, they are worth even less.
      It's all getting heavily diluted.
      The one that will clean up is a good one like wtf or land or camp that dropped their price to $5 per name.
      Even better, give people like me, who write blogging software, an even better deal, to help seed the market for your TLD.
      You want to be the next .io -- you need to think about making your TLD a coral reef.
      Net-net: Names should be much cheaper. We all know how much they really cost. :+1:
    I would like to have a dialog box pop up when you open one of my pieces
      What it would say...
        Before I open this up I'd like you to click OK if you agree to actually read it before posting a comment.
          Now here's the funny thing. Because I wrote this software, I could actually do it! :-)
    Not enough "working together"
      That's one common thing in tech, we all go it alone, or when an open tech shows up and proves popular, everyone tries to own it. Even if they had nothing to do with creating it. The impulse should be to try to feed the new standard, help it stand up, strong. Instead what people do is try to grab it for themselves.
      I've had people who were supposed to be friends do this. One of them even told me to my face, on a standard that hadn't yet been established that I wasn't needed anymore (like being fired). Heh. I just stopped working on it, and it died.
      Another person, call him Mr X, days before he tried to take over RSS, asked me if I would kill their servers if I got angry with his company (we were hosting some sites for them, I couldn't imagine why I would get angry). I said of course not. When they did it, sure enough the thought crossed my mind, but of course I didn't do it. Their attempted takeover failed. I don't think they ever forgave me for fighting them. So premeditated, so cold. Why couldn't they just work with me? What would they have lost? Did they think I didn't have good ideas? Was it just an accident that RSS had been so successful up to that point? I wasn't asking them for anything. I just don't get it.
      Over the years I've become hardened, I expect people to act outrageously and selfishly. I often give people second chances, sometimes third. It never works. There are very few people, it seems, who are willing to join forces with others to try to make something big happen. It's so sad, because we need that, really do need it, if we're going to solve the problems we have to solve.
        And actually I think it's easy. So rare is it that people actually cooperate, that when it happens, other people's imaginations are tapped. When I did the project with Doc and Dave Weinberger on the New Clues, it caught more attention than any of my projects get. And I'm sure it helped them that I was lending my name (and work) to the process.
      So I don't admire billionaires who selfishly try to grab more users' freedom so they can make more billions. Money itself has no meaning. And none of the billionaires have any idea what to do with it once they get it. Why progress should be held back for them, why they think it should, is a mystery to me. Don't they know in a few years they'll be dead and forgotten, just like the rest of us. I mean seriously. We've heard of Andrew Carnegie, he created a lot of libraries. But he was an asshole. I don't know that for an absolute fact, but if he got that rich, he must have been. All the libraries in the world won't change that.
      You want to get rich to leave it all to your kids? Do them a favor, let them define themselves. Otherwise the money will. Even if you raise them with the strongest characters, other people will only see the money when they see them. They won't have any friends, won't get to accomplish anything. (See the movie Foxcatcher for an idea how that works.)
      Much better, imho, to act in the interest of all of us, your whole life. A little selfishness, to get your freedom, okay I understand that. But after that, you're just being a dick.
    On the eve of the iWatch
      I had this thought -- the world is not waiting for the Apple watch.
      However, the world is very much waiting for the Apple interface to TV.
      I have an Apple TV and use it with my iPhone to stream video through my Sony TV in the living room. It could be a little bit easier to set up, but just doing that much, it's a big step forward for most people. And there are a lot of people who could use that, enthusiastically, today.
      It seems the window for Apple TV is now. Not sure who else can fill it, so they may have time, but we're wasting time, net-net, waiting for Apple TV to leave hobby mode.
    Fate was unkind to Steve Jobs (and us)
      Imagine creating technology with the far-reaching impact of the iPhone, only not to live to see it through. Also I wonder what he would think about people walking around Manhattan like zombies, as they do, completely unaware of what was going on around them, using the technology he gave us. Or parents who take their kids to the park, but spend all their time staring into the phone, paying no attention to the kids. I wonder if he would have spoken up about that. Or perhaps tweaked the product to skew its use toward more human-to-human interaction.
    Netanyahu's speech
      Almost 1/2 hour into the speech, and so far it's been the same kind of scare talk that led to the war in Iraq. You have to remember that almost everything Netanyahu is says is a lie. So this is just a free political ad for him.
      He almost used the Bush line of the smoking gun being a mushroom cloud. I'm sure he would have if it hadn't been discredited.
      Pakistan is nuclear. I wonder what he thinks about that.
      How about if Iran wants a corresponding deal that the PM of Israel STFU.
        Seems reasonable.
        I'd vote for it.
      It felt as if this were a Republican political rally.
        Designed to re-elect Netanyahu.
        And also to be repaid in campaign contributions for American politicians.
        A way of selling off another American asset, our independence.
      His speech is the Jewish version of Mom & Apple Pie
        It's all about the holocaust.
        Everything is a replay of Nazi Germany.
        Ignore my words and not only will millions of Jews die, you will die too.
    Brian Alvey's startup
      Overnight Brian's new startup, Recurrency, was announced.
      It has the core idea in the piece I wrote last month about reforming the economics of the Internet.
      Basically, you can start paying people before they ask to be paid.
      It's a way for users to bootstrap new business flow.
  March 2
    Creating a new blog should be as easy as...
      Choosing the New command in the File menu of a desktop app.
    Mousetraps and mice
      Anthony De Rosa said something very wise.
      "Mousetraps are not built for the benefit of the mouse."
      He says he wants to respect his readers.
      And his readers, more and more, appreciate that! :-)
      Why? For the simple reason that the news experience on the net has devolved into supermarket tabloid level. The kind of stuff that's supposed to attract attention while you're standing in line at the checkout.
      But on the net, it's even worse. Caught in a line, your eye has to fall on something. You're stuck. Bored. But on the net these days, we're all like pigeons pecking on things, and then quickly getting bored and moving on to the next thing.
      The economy is organized around that very simple gesture. Peck. Move on. Peck peck peck. Next. And someone gets paid a tiny bit of money every time you peck.
      De Rosa's idea not only has integrity, it's good business. Because eventually this will run its course, and pecks will be sub-divided into micro-units of attention, even smaller than a peck, until.. I don't know, and further I don't want to know.
      That said, Medium, where he posted his ideas, is one of the newest kinds of mousetraps. There are no ads there yet, but that's clearly where it's going. And those ideas will stay right where they are, because there's no way out.
      Increasingly I am unwilling to point into silos. I prefer ideas that can live and grow, and be part of a network of software.
      But I made an exception here.
    Programming priesthood?
      I'm trying to find a good reference on the concept of programming priesthood, but Google comes up with nothing. I expected there would be a Wikipedia page about this idea. It was very prevalent in discourse about the culture of programming in the 80s. Maybe the new priesthood (and yes there is one, bigger than ever before) has quashed all discussion of the idea? Only slightly paranoid thought.
    More House of Cards
      Marc Canter told me I had to watch the rest of House of Cards, so I watched a few more episodes. I might finish the season. Let's see.
      Here's what I don't like about it most:
        1. Mostly the drama in the show is in the sets. They have an Oval Office. All the rooms in the White House. They stage a meeting of the UN Security Council, and it looks real. The makeup is great.
        2. When the President meets to talk about strategy in the Oval Office of course, there are two people with him, that look and act like security guards. Everywhere he goes there's one to three people with him. No, that's not the way it works. White House people don't look like they just stepped out of a workout. And they're always in a crowd, vying for the attention of the President, never just a smattering of people.
        3. The music! Oh my god. It's always so foreboding, as if something momentous is happening. But nothing is happening.
        4. The things they say in their speeches are the kinds of things you'd say to your husband or wife, or gossiping in the supermarket. But the music makes it sound like we're on the brink of the apocalypse. And, get this, I bet that's what's coming. World War III. But it will be missing the one key element in all drama -- motivation. At least through the first 3.5 episodes that's how it is. Could it get much better between this point and episode 12. Well...
      What I do like:
        1. I like the Russian President, their version of Putin.
      Net-net:
        1. It's a very silly stupid, no make that moronic, expensive, overdone, ridiculous, time-waster.
        2. On the other hand, you can get stuff done while it's on.
  March 1
    Why silos are dangerous
      If you're wondering what the danger is in having yet another silo, I video'd an explainer and posted it on the up and coming YouTube clone.
    Why the tech press won't write about us
      A few days ago I said in a post that the tech press won't write about my products. That's because the tech industry today doesn't have a niche for end user software that isn't based on advertising. The do understand enterprise software, but we're not making that. Right now it's all free of cost, a lot of it is open source (but not all of it). But to cover it would mean comparing it to ad-based software. And that would open a discussion the tech press, for some reason, can't, won't or doesn't know how to support. It used to. But it's a lost art.
      They would also have to talk about the other costs that ad-supported software have for users. Such as stifled feature sets, that only evolve to suit advertisers. That's why, for example, there have been so few features added to Twitter or Facebook that support what users want to do with it. All new features are driven by needs of advertisers.
      Software that wasn't ad-based will evolve differently. There are no advertisers to develop features for, so if there is to be any development it has to be motivated by something other than that.
      I'm only really beginning to understand why they can't see what we do. I expect to write more about this later.
    Small comment improvements
      Each person's name now is has an icon of a person. Previously the icon was an arrow.
      To people who know outliners, it used to be an include node, I added code to expand the includes.
      We also expand Emoji Cheatsheet codes.

    A New York Times of the people
    It's time for truly non-commercial news.

      Elitism gets us inbred thinking.
      People chasing a buck to get us our news gets us news that's also chasing the buck. So you get 1/2 the story. The story of the people doing the selling. And cute little human interest stories about the other half. Always basically good news. Or if it's bad, the conclusion always is "What can you do?
      And the commercials have an answer. Buy more shit!
      But if somehow we could create filters of quality like a good news org does (or should if they didn't always side with 1/2) then we could use the net to get us useful information. And if the money-focused industry won't help us fix the planet, maybe we can do it without them. Would they have the chutzpah to try to get in the way? Yes, they would. So whatever answer there is would have to survive that.
    Upton Sinclair
      "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
        Upton Sinclair
    Saul Goodman
      In the latest Better Call Saul they tell how Saul thought up this name. But for some reason I think it might have gone over some peoples heads. I think it's the most clever thing ever, a huge pun, but I don't want to spoil it. Just saying if you saw the last episode, and don't yet know the origin of the name watch the first ten minutes again.
    "I see you," is what we crave
      So says Seth Godin, and I agree.
      That's the message of the Internet in 2015.
        In the sense that the medium is the message.
      We must overcome our fears, and learn to listen.
      How else can we solve the problems we face, the changes we have to make in who we are, and our relationship to Earth.
    Gillmor was paid to write his Medium piece
      Apparently in response to my piece here, Dan Gillmor has posted an addition to his Medium piece saying that he was paid to write it.
      That makes a difference.
      Suppose the Guardian, for example, asked me to write a column. I would expect the offer to come with money. That's the way contract writing works. And if Dan had something to say, and wanted to say it on Medium, I have absolutely no problem with his writing it on Medium.
      However!
      It is still ironic and tragic and weird to be declaring independence in that context, especially since by being paid to write it he is not independent. Any more than you are independent when you take a job working for someone else.
      Further, he's misleading the rest of us, who have not been offered money to write on Medium. We're supposed to be happy with the nice-looking template and the possibility of more exposure (a claim I don't, for one, believe).
      Basically, Medium is the worst kind of silo. No API, so it can't be part of a network of software. And because they pay people like Dan to write, without being clear upfront that he was paid, it looks like he chose this place over all the others for the same reasons you and I should. Except we aren't being offered any money.
      If they offered us money it would be very different. Then we could put a price on the freedom we're giving up, and decide whether it was worth it. But the deal they're actually offering -- $0 -- you get to pour your heart into our silo for a nice template and a url on our site.
      This is Silicon Valley Content 3.0, and the first two versions really sucked, and it's getting worse. And I don't like it when people like Dan mislead people by giving Medium a totally unearned aura of independence.

    House of Cards is unwatchable
    I have to look away it makes me so uncomfortable.

      I remember giving up on the previous season of House of Cards. It was so stupid. The way it simulates government, nothing could possibly work that way.
      I knew The West Wing was total fantasy too, but at least the characters were interesting. House of Cards? They're cardboard cut-outs of people.
      I can't even make it through the first episode without putting it on pause, again and again. I don't think I'm going to watch it.
February 2015
  February 28
    Lock-in and silos makes software much more expensive
      If there were no lock-in and every web app had an API, there would be a lot less duplication of effort. If for example, I loved the editor in Medium but wanted to host writing on my own site, I'd just use their editor and hook it up to my CMS through their API. If the API stayed in place long enough, i.e. no gratuitous breakage, there would be tools that made it so you don't have to be a programmer to make this work.
      If you want to lock people in, though -- you have to implement every feature yourself. Maybe you make more money, but progress on the whole slows down until at some point it stops. We're pretty "stopped" right now.
      It wouldn't take a lot of programmers, a small percentage of those employed by the silos to create one of everything they do, release the source, put APIs on the results, and just host it all ourselves .
      It's only because we aren't ambitious enough, yet, that this mess persists.
    Twinkies
      I just published a card. The analogy between Twinkies and silos is actually pretty good. I am told that Twinkies just make you fat, they don't do anything good for your body, the energy they provide isn't usable for much other than fat.
      Twinkies also clog your arteries, so you're more likely to die of a heart attack or stroke.
      In a similar way, when you post your ideas to a silo, when those ideas as a result must stay there, and be part of the advertising campaign of your host, either now or later, all they will grow is new money for advertisers.
      They can't grow into your own web presence, with your ads, or if you prefer, ad-free. Your writing reports on the habits of people who read it, you may want that info for yourself or you might want to treat your readers with more respect. If you post on a silo, you have no power over that. No say.
      Even more important, you're not feeding the technology of the web. Your ideas can't be part of anything other than what your host wants it to be part of. So your work isn't feeding the future of the web. It's feeding the future of advertising. It's making the bank account of the founder fatter. It's doing the opposite of helping you, by removing opportunity from the net, the same way the Twinkie shortens your life, it's actually hurting you. You're working against your own interest.
      The people fund this kind of business are "realistic" about your level of involvement in your own future. They think you are too stupid to even realize or too lazy to care. Maybe they're right. Then we will lose the freedom of the Internet, what little we have left.
      So please think if you might not be able to forgo just a little sugar, or do some exercise on behalf of the Internet. Help us all, instead of hurting.
    Don't declare independence from inside a silo
      Another very bizarre situation. Dan Gillmor wrote a piece declaring independence from Apple, Microsoft and Google. He did this from inside a silo, on Medium.com. That's the bizarre part.
      It hurts us when very visible users of technology, like Gillmor, gloss over the independence they are giving away, and getting us nothing in return other than a pretty template (which is easily reproduced elsewhere).
      It's why Google has been able to introduce draconian terms on video producers because every producer must be present on YouTube. Soon, it will be necessary for all of us to post our stories on Medium, if we want to be seen as serious, or reach the readers we want to reach. And what will Dan have gotten us in return for selling out this way? Just another silo.
      I'm busting my ass for years to create tools for people like Dan, tools that give users freedom of choice, with no lock-in. Mine is not the only choice. Yet when Dan chooses to express his independence, he uses a silo.
      Shaking my head.
      PS: Dan is not the only one, far from it. The first time I objected was when Jeff Jarvis did it. I objected when David Weinberger wrote a piece on Medium about the magic of Internet APIs. On a system that has no APIs. People aren't thinking. And these are people who are paid to think, people who other people listen to. This is short-term very selfish behavior, and I can't even see what they get out of it.
      PPS: Dan says I should let him know when I've given up Twitter and Facebook. That's confusing apples and oranges. Both Facebook and Twitter have APIs, that means I can move stuff in and out with software, and my tools can and have been adapted to use them as distribution systems. And if they had better editors, I could have the flow go the other way too. They are nowhere near as closed-off-to-the-world as Medium. Medium has reached a new height of silosity. Dan can do it if he wants. But he will get called on it, and not just by me.
      PPPS: And, just because we sold out to silos in the past, that means we should sell out to more silos? Come on that's just ridiculous.
      PPPPS: If Medium added an API, my position would swing around 180 degrees. I openly invited them to do so, shortly after they launched. The offer is still open.
    Every reporter should be able to start a blog
      An expanded version of this piece appears on Scripting News.
    Still diggin!
      BTW, in addition to liveblogging here, I am also live coding.
      That means I make changes to the reader, while people are reading it.
      So sometimes when you come here you might see something really bizarre.
      I apologize for that. This is still early days for this software.
      Nothing is cast in stone yet.
      Dig we must! :-)
      DW
    Bibi is a puppet and so is Boehner
      My friend Jon Glick, on Twitter, is trying to figure out wtf the Bibi speech is all about. Imho it's just a little puppet show for an 81-year-old guy who's not in great health, Shelly Adelson, who we know, somewhat because he made his fortune off Las Vegas real estate and shows. He was the owner of the tech industry's main trade show for about 20 years, Comdex. So we kind of know him. I have personally paid him several million dollars. I was never really sure what I was getting from him. That's the magic of Mr. A.
        Did you ever see the movie Being There? Remember the character Melvyn Douglas played (I think that's who it was). Shirley MacLaine's husband. When there was a crisis the President would come to visit to find out what he should do. (Jack Warden played the President.) In that movie, the character played by Douglas was not only rich and a big donor to campaigns, he was also smart. In this case I don't think Adelson is thinking a whole lot. I think this Israel is emotional for him, as it is for a lot of American Jews.
      He's one person, not too "with it" anymore, probably, and all these Repubs kiss his ass all the time. He's probably surrounded 24-7 by yes men. Bibi is one of his slaves, as is Boehner. He and few other Republic rich guys, who probably don't care if Shelly uses their meeting hall (i.e. The Capitol) for a sales meeting, which is what we're witnessing. It's a rally-the-troops party for the intercontinental Republican Party. The same one that's running Israel. The very same people, the same bank accounts, the same sick sad old guy in Las Vegas, who has these guys put on puppet shows for him. It makes him happy.
      Glick is right, it won't make a difference.
    What about inline movies?
      For some reason this is showing up as code, not a video.
      If you have an idea why this is happening, please post a comment.
    Inline pictures work in liveblog
      For some reason I thought inline pictures didn't work.
      But they do!
  February 27
    Building 20 at MIT
      Talking with Doc today about Zuck hiring Frank Gehry to design his campuses. It really tweaked me that Zuck turns to an 85 year old architect and Facebook employs so few software people my age. Gehry, I pointed out, is the same age as my father.
      Doc, with one word, flipped the whole thing around for me. The word: Starfucker. The building that Gehry would design for him would make people crazy. That's when he told me the story of Building 20 at MIT. A legendary building where all kinds of incredible science and engineering was done. He rattled off a list. The building is gone, replaced with a Gehry building that (according to Doc) is the least usable academic building ever.
      I have been inside the building. It seemed weird, but I wasn't there long enough to have an opinion. But I have to admit my friend made me feel a whole lot better. Zuck would do well to get some greybeards in there. I'm sure they're doing great stuff at Facebook (I did too when I was their age), but as they say, the young don't know what they don't know. They'll realize this someday. Till then nothing to about it. And keep truckin. :+1:
    A word puzzle that's like the amazing dress
      Please read this sentence.
        FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-
        SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-
        IC STUDY COMBINED WITH
        THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
      Count the F's.
      When you have the answer, expand this item
        There are six F's in the sentence.
        There is no catch. Write a script if you don't believe me.
        It'll find them for you. No catch.
      This comes from a 1997 blog post.
    Mr Spock
      I was in 4th grade when Star Trek was a big deal.
      What I remember most about it, other than talking about it with the other boys in my 4th grade class, was that I appreciated that the stories made sense.
      Most of the science fiction I was getting through TV must have been pretty junky stuff, if I, as a very young person, could tell that Star Trek was written by intelligent people who cared about their work.
      And of course Spock was cool, and so was Kirk, and McCoy was an asshole, and Scotty could fix anything. And Uhuru was hot. Sorry, but that's just the way the little man Dave remembers it. ;-)
      I stopped watching Star Trek at some point, stopped caring, but it's part of my foundation as an adult and a dreamer.
    I got inspired!
      I wrote a sales pitch and posted it on Scripting News.
      My friends, that is definitely the past. This is the future.
      It's all starting to make sense (not that it wasn't before).
      This is halfway between Twitter and a blog.
        Teeny little chunks of ideas, streamed together, but in structures, so you can organize them. When someone comes along later it isn't a jumble like the tweetstorms we create with Little Pork Chop.
      I have to figure out how to integrate multiple liveblogs in a useful way.
      The comments feature was a first step. Now every reader has an outliner.
      But it won't be done until anyone who wants to do what I do, can, and there's an easy way to share what we're writing.
      I see this as the ultimate workgroup software. For lots of different kinds of groups. And I refuse to put this behind a silo-wall. I refuse to shut out competition. But I insist on the power to finish the thought. I learned a lot from everything I've done in the past. Hopefully I can put it all into practice.
        I love you guys. :kiss:
    New liveblog features!
      Summary: 1. Useful. 2. Sorta fun. 3. Potentially confusing.
      If you read this carefully and think about it, you will learn something basic about software design. :smile:
      Look over in the left margin.
        You'll see three new icons.
        All of them are arrows. (This is confusing.)
        They do different things. (Of course!)
      The three icons:
        flatup:
          The first one is a bent arrow pointing up.
          When you click it, the cursor moves up to the previous headline no matter what the level.
          In outline terminology this is called flatup.
          To distinguish it from moving up at the same level to a previous sibling, skipping over all the intermediate stuff.
            Which can be very useful at times in outlines.
          If you're at the first headline in the outline, the arrow is disabled.
        flatdown:
          The next icon does the opposite of the flatup icon. It moves the cursor to the next headline no matter what the level.
          If you're at the last headline in the outline, the arrow is disabled.
        expand/collapse toggler:
          When you click this, the cursor headline expands or collapsed.
          It's like a door. If it was open it closes it. If it was closed it opens it.
          If the headline you're pointing to doesn't have subs, the icon isn't shown.
      Overall notes
        Why it's so potentially confusing is this.
        If you're using a keyboard and you like to use the arrow keys, they work differently. The up and down arrows move to the previous and next headlines at the same level, and the left and right arrow keys move flatup and flatdown.
        This is the way it's been in my outliners, which have been pretty popular, and were out before all the others (there was no prior art for me to copy), since the first one was released in 1983.
        So no doubt people will feel this could be "designed better," but rest assured I have put a lot of brain juice into this, over a very long time.
        Design is all about tradeoffs, and respecting prior art, and doing the best you can for your users, especially the ones you've been working with for a long time. And of course myself (I am a very heavy user of these tools).
        This is probably way more info than anyone wants to know, but if you read this far, and you're nodding your head, I want you to know that I love you. :kiss:
    I hate fixing bugs in code I don't understand
      But I do what I have to do. :+1:
  February 26
    Outliner menu items work in comments
      New feature..
      If you click in the comment area and then choose one of the expand or collapse commands from the Outliner menu, the commands will apply to the comment outline. If you click back in the main outline, they will work on that outline.
      So you set the context in an intuitive way (hopefully) and the same commands should work in both places.
      This feature is primarily for mobile devices (no mouse).
      Next feature -- up/down arrow, expand/collapse in the icon bar.
        Tomorrow! :kiss:
    Dig we must
      Big changes to the liveblog reader app.
      The icons on the left no longer scroll with the outline.
      The comments display on the right is similarly fixed.
      Please report problems in a comment on this post.
      More changes coming. ;-)
    Still no feeds from Circa
      There's a new version of Circa today, it's a website, and it's getting a lot of coverage, which is surprising, considering that news on the web was news 20 years ago.
      On the other hand, I guess we really do understand what's going on here.
      Circa may have a new idea in news, but they're really about being a destination. Their first try was to make users come to them via their mobile app. Why? They said it was because of a superior experience. There is a magic formula to what they're doing that could only be experienced through the app. If so, then the website must be a compromise. One they're now willing to make? Why??
      I suspect, and this is just my opinion, that in the end Circa is a news organization, not a destination, and is going to have to exist and compete on the same playing field as everyone else. That's going to mean providing feeds, so we can get their news in whatever destination we like. They have always provided headlines and links in their Twitter feed.
      Which raises the question, they've had a Twitter feed for some time now. Where were the Twitter links pointing to if not a website? How is this announcement actual news?
      PS: I know the Circa guys aren't going to like me asking these question. I have a job to do, and it sucks for sure, but it is what it is. :+1:
    Picasso said this
      "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."
      Nothing more to add to that!
      Perfect.
    Let me mansplain at you about mansplaining
      First, I get it. I get why mansplaining is so damned annoying.
      Here's a story about a tweet. Not a big proclamation, just a little idea I put out there. I was telling the truth. It actually happened, as I said it did. It was just a tweet. Here's the text.
        "Today I visited an Apple Store wanting to fall in love with a laptop. Not going to happen. I'll just wait for the retina MacBook Air."
      Key idea: fall in love.
      I did not say: Macs are not great computers. Or that you don't love it. Or that the 15 inch MacBook Pro isn't the best computer ever made (as it should be, btw, if they have a better one why aren't they marketing it). I also did not say that I already have five Macs, that I use, including a perfectly usable and light MacBook Air. No room for all that in a tweet, and honestly I don't feel like providing every detail of my life in a tweet, even if there were room for it.
      Now I look at the response to that tweet. All of it fails to address the key idea in the tweet. Love is a very personal thing, right? You don't get to agree or disagree. Do you understand?
      As Helen Hunt says to Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets: "Is there any limit to how creepy you'll let yourself be?"
      PS: Every one of the mansplainers is a man. I was kind of hoping a woman would kick in, but it hasn't happened.
      PPS: It would be really cool if the liveblog reader displayed tweets in their expanded state inline in the reader. It would be nice collapsed under a heading, to expand it and get the full picture, video, etc.
    Net neutrality isn't just about the wires
      Consider this. Twitter is not just a corporate service, it's a communications medium. A common carrier. It doesn't have competition. If I want to post to people who use Twitter, I have to use Twitter. In that way they are like an ISP, like Comcast or Time Warner Cable, only more so.
        I can use my TWC connection to send email to someone who uses Comcast.
        I can read sites that are served anywhere on the web, not just on TWC's network.
      Twitter has been for a long time inflating the follower counts of people, many of them reporters. Why do you think some seemingly random people have a million followers, when other people just like them have a few thousand? Because not all users on Twitter are equal. There's no promise of the equivalent of net neutrality on Twitter's network.
        If follower counts matter, and they do, those who get boosted follower counts can be thought of as in the "fast lane." Did they pay for the right to be there? Was it algorithmic as Twitter said it was? Does that matter to you?
      Same with Google, and especially with Facebook. My friend Jay Rosen has made this an issue over and over. He raises a fair point. Why do some people's posts get through, and others don't? Simple answer -- they pay. There's the fast lane!
      Net neutrality is impossible unless everything on the Internet is non-commercial, and that ain't happening anytime soon, nor is it in any way desirable.
  February 25
    Something depressing
      I searched for RSS 2.0 on Google, and the Harvard spec wasn't even in the seven pages of results (I stopped looking at that point). That's ridiculous. A short while ago it was the first hit. Does the web really change that quickly for something as established as RSS 2.0 (the spec was out 13 years ago). I think we may finally be seeing the day where Google's search algorithm are like NBC Nightly News. Mostly stuff off YouTube and other Google properties.

    Node Foundation?
    Based on my experience with other standards, a foundation of BigCo's is probably not a great idea.

      This item became a post on Scripting News.
    TechCrunch says Medium is chasing Tumblr
      I remember noticing that Tumblr had added Medium-like features, which I cheered because Tumblr has an API (Medium does not).
      It didn't occur to me yesterday that the features Medium added were a possible answer to Tumblr. TechCrunch thinks they are.
      Mark Papadakis: "I suppose the Medium app is going to be updated soon, resembling a real twitter client, complete with ‘retweets’ and media uploads and all that. It’s only a matter of time."
      This raises a good question. Now that Medium is chasing Twitter, where is the end? What feature of Twitter's can they say does not belong in Medium?
  February 24
    First impression of Medium's new features
      1. I felt they were doing great with the long-form niche.
      2. I guess the numbers weren't big enough to justify their burn rate.
      3. Feels like they're hitting the Reset button.
      4. I'm often wrong about these things, but I think they made a mistake.
        Having a clear position has a lot of value.
        I never, even for a second, thought of it as having a timeline.
        Do people really use it that way??
      5. It has advantages over Facebook posts. Style and linking.
      6. Feed? API?
      7. Here's my first post over there.
      8. I'll keep using my liveblog outliner, and get it ready for others.
        I don't have to worry about how many people use it.
        My burn rate is less than $1K per month. ;-)
        And we have Emoji!! :kiss:
        :+1:
    Emoji in liveblog!
      I should now be able to type Emoji Cheat Sheet codes in my outline and have them expand properly in the outline.
      Star: :star:
      Boom :boom:
      Poop: :poop:
      How you can tell I like this feature.. :+1:
      The icon for Little Card Editor: :heart_eyes_cat:
      A dog: :dog:
      Feeling lucky? :four_leaf_clover:
      Here's a kiss: :kiss:
    Internet economics
      This became a post on Scripting News.
    Greetings to Emma
      My very good friend Emma is checking this out.
      I just wanted to say hi! :-)
    Indieweb
      We're going to be friends!
      And friends tell friends the truth, right? :-)
      I'm reading the wiki pages on RSS and feeds in general, and find that there's a lot of attitude there that imho is not helpful.
      For example, in the Past Work section on this page, they say:
        "There is a long history (since 1997) of the development of feeds, most of which has died to due the widespread abandonment of XML as a foundation of anything actually served on the web (largely replaced by HTML and JSON)."
      Rebuttal
        The web has two main standards: HTML and HTTP, and HTML is XML.
          So, XML is with us forever, even if RSS were to somehow disappear (which isn't happening either). Realistically, HTML is a fixture. Saying otherwise is just political spin, and really unnecessary.
          Aside from that, aren't microformats also XML? Or did it become JSON somehow?
      Now, that's just one example. The salesmanship against what is one of the most valuable sources of independence on the web is pervasive in all their writing. This is not good. We can't be picky about where we get our independence. Every source is vital.
    New command in the WTF? menu
      I'm putting all the vital functions that are not accessible in the phone version in the WTF? menu. The latest to appear there is "View comments". If you choose the command a modal window appears, displaying the comments for the cursor item.
      It's actually not a bad way to view comments on the desktop too, because there's more horizontal screen real estate.
    How to comment
      New: Commenting on my Liveblog.
      Sign in first
        You must be signed in, via the Sign On Here menu in the upper right corner of screen.
      How to
        1. Click on the main headline for this post, "How to comment."
        2. Click on the comment icon in the left margin. A small window should appear.
        3. Enter your comments. Tab and shift-tab indent and outdent. Return starts a new line. Double-click to expand and collapse, just as in the main outline.
        4. Click OK.
      Your comment should appear
        Look in the right margin. You should see a line that says "5 commenters" or something like that. Double-click to expand. You can look at everyone's comments of course.
      Moderation
        Moderation is coming. Right now I'm just testing. I have some new ideas in how to support intelligent discourse in this space.
      On a phone?
        Adding and viewing comments works differently.
        Choose the commands from the WTF? menu.
        Not a bad way to do it on the desktop too. ;-)
    Downloading your comments
      There's a new feature in the liveblog.co server that makes it possible for users to download their comments, in OPML. Here's an example URL that downloads my comments.
      http://data.liveblog.co/opmlcomments?user=davewiner
      You can include that in a Fargo outline, or in any outliner that knows how to include one outline in another. It's also a nice way to back up your comments. Or use them in your blog. Or whatever you like.
  February 23
    Tweaked the comments
      There's now a top level headline that says how many comments are below.
      It's collapsed. You can expand it to reveal the comments. When it's collapsed it takes up a lot less space. This is good.
      Changed the icon on the comments list to a comment icon from Font Awesome.
    That was a big milestone
      The comments display is a mess, but they're easy fixes. The big thing is that the whole network of stuff is in and it fucking works. And I think it's very scalable.
        Note: No longer a mess. Lots of tweaks. See above.
      There's no database on the back-end. It's all done with static JSON and OPML files in Amazon S3. The server is nodeStorage v0.70, and it's running on Heroku. If it needs more juice, we can just add more servers, all through the UI of the Heroku dashboard. No programming involved.
      JavaScript in the browser, and of course JavaScript on the server.
      This shit should be running when the cockroaches take over the world. ;-)
    Announcement on server-snacks list
      I posted this on the server-snacks mail list, explaining how the comments feature is actually laying the groundwork for the next step.
      As you may know, I've started blogging using a new tool, called liveblog.co, a couple of weeks ago.
      The development of the publishing and reader software kept going, while it was live and publicly visible. This is really the only way to figure this stuff out, to actually have people reading the stuff, and figuring out ways to interact. I was too, but first you have to experience the problem yourself to begin to know how to solve it.
      This is a problem I've been having, however, for 30+ years. How to get interactivity into outlining in a way that a critical mass of people will actually use, instead of scratch their head and click the Back button. ;-)
      Just enough people have to use it to get to the next level, and then hopefully the level after that. Without melting down in a hot mess of flames, trolls and shaming.
      Anyway, you guys are my friends so here's a chance to try something out and maybe help get to that elusive next level.
      http://reader.liveblog.co/davewiner?id=1424705586000
      I look forward to seeing your comments on the liveblog. ;-)
      Dave
    Comments test
      If you are a brave person you can add a comment to this post, in a fairly straightforward (I hope) way.
      Sign in first
        You must be signed in, via the Sign On Here menu in the upper right corner of screen.
      How to
        1. Click on the main headline for this post, "Comments test."
        2. Click on the comment icon in the left margin. A small window should appear.
        3. Enter your comments. Tab and shift-tab indent and outdent. Return starts a new line. Double-click to expand and collapse, just as in the main outline.
        4. Click OK.
      Your comment should appear
        You might have to click around the main outline to get it to show up.
        When you expand your name, you'll see the comments you entered, and of course so will everyone else.
      Moderation
        Moderation is coming. Right now I'm just testing. I have some new ideas in how to support intelligent discourse in this space.
    The Knicks are a disaster area
      Some government official should step in and put the team out of its misery.
      Condemn it. Offer to buy the team from Dolan for $1. He'll probably accept it.
      Shut it down. Have a big ceremony in the Garden. The Knicks had a great run, but they are here no more. Everyone go home. Thank you.
      Tear down the Garden, replacing it with a real downtown train station.
      It's not so terrible, there's still a NYC team, I hear they're called the Nets.
    Good morning everyone!
      Rise and shine!
      Strrrrretch.
      My brain is all foggy.
      Coffee. Yes. ;-)
  February 22

    Boyhood for Best Picture
    It does something important no movie has ever done before.

      I haven't seen Whiplash, otherwise I have seen all the nominated movies. I liked American Sniper, it's a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, with a different star, and a different setting. That makes it an entertaining movie, and shows that the formula still has legs.
      Birdman didn't really hold my interest, the story -- meh. I can understand why it appeals to Hollywood people, it's an insider movie, but I'm not one of them, and I honestly don't care. Though the acting was great, and Keaton is great. It deserves a nomination, but Boyhood should win.
      Why? It's beautifully acted, and presented, and draws you into a compelling story, and it does something important no movie has ever done before. All movies that have aging actors will never be as convincing as this one. I really cared about the characters, I felt they told our story, not Hollywood's. And did it with grace and feeling, and communicated what we all seek and really never find -- a sense of purpose to our lives. Yet there's a lot to do in a life, a lot of small victories, and love, and what a sweet sweet movie, and I'm a sucker for a heart-grabber. I admit it.
      So -- Boyhood.
        1. What a launch for Ellar Coltrane. Seems he might be another Leonardo Di Caprio or Brad Pitt. Some people say he's a new James Dean, I hope not, he died at 24.
        2. Another reason it works. This is the era of TV serials. Boyhood was a serial with a 12-year run, and a binge-watch in a single sitting. It's so totally in tune with our times. Even more so than The Wire or Mad Men.
    Good fences make good neighbors
      This became a blog post on Scripting News.
    Disclaimer -- It's not about you
      Sometimes people act as if a piece I wrote on my blog was either about them or addressed to them. Recently someone told me that a piece I wrote told him to do something. That's ridiculous.
      Unless you are named in the post, it's not about you.
      Unless it says Mary Smith should do X, and you are Mary Smith, it's not telling you to do anything.
      I learned this early-on, that general stories about people will be misinterpreted this way. Many people are narcissists. They think everything is about them, and aren't aware that there are other people in the world. This can make it hard for me to write about people in a general way. But I do it anyway. And (this is aimed at you) you are wrong if you think it is about you. It isn't.
  February 21
    Hey when I die you can dis me if it's your truth
      You know how there's a convention on the net never to speak ill of the dead. Well someday I'm going to die. And you gotta know that there are people around who don't like me. I don't expect you to say nice things about me. Don't dishonor yourself. Stick by your guns.
      I say what I have to say, and I know it pisses some people off. I'm not trying to piss you off, please be sure of that. But I don't care if you don't like me. And I sure won't care when I'm dead! :-)
      So go ahead and tell it like it is sister or brother.
      Namaste and all that good happy shit. ;-)
    Got a shitload of good stuff done today
      Tomorrow should be an interesting day on the server-snacks list.
      Now it's time to go out for dinner. It's a nice night for comfort food. ;-)
    How could anyone respect the United States?
      We let a tiny country of 3 million people push us around.
      We don't even respect ourselves, we elect a government that doesn't protect the integrity of the country. They're selling us out.
      It's not really Israel that's buying us for pennies on the dollar.
      It's Shelly Adelson.
      Which if you come from tech of the 80s, as I do, is amazing.
        Adelson made his fortune by monopolizing the computer industry's annual conference in Las Vegas, Comdex. This was before the Internet, and the annual meeting was much more important a way of getting info about products out.
      It's like the line in Woody Allen's Bananas. Let me see..
        The protagonist is transported to the future, where he is told that the old world was destroyed when "a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead."
        It turns out it was Shelly Adelson, not Albert Shanker. ;-)
    ReadWrite on Node.js governance
      As a Node.js developer who isn't part of any of the processes, I want the foundation I'm building on to remain solid. I'm tired of having platform vendors rip up the pavement. I remember what the BigCo's did to SOAP and tried to do to RSS. Which makes me wary of the moves that Joyent just made. This ReadWrite piece captured that.
    Just installed the new server software
      This is a test. Will this survive a refresh?
      Yes it most certainly did. ;-)
    Today I dug a new hole
      The nodeStorage server is getting a new feature.
      Support for comments.
      Here's the plan...
        Liveblog Reader will soon be something you can sign on to, using your Twitter identity. It will be a nodeStorage client.
        There will be a command in a menu, or an icon, not sure that allows you to comment on a post here on my liveblog.
        However it will only work (or be accessible) if you're logged in.
        Each item on my blog is a new namespace. You get one outline per namespace. You can write as much as you want, but it will only appear once. And that's subject to moderation. At first it will be loose, but then it will tighten up. That's assuming that "community" here obeys the natural order of things, friendly at first, later controlling. Once the control starts, I'll add approval features. Probably before it happens (I've been around this block many times).
        Lots of outlines, basically. A liveblog serves as an anchor for a community.
      Where I'm at
        I have the two halves of the puzzle working.
        I have an outliner that runs on top of this outline, and I have the server.
        I also have the ability to turn on membership in the reader.
        So I have to hook all these things up. Not a small task, I assume. ;-)
    Freedom of the press
      A.J. Liebling said, famously: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." That's so true, and with blogging everyone can own their own, and therefore be free. However, we're trading that in for a bit more engagement.
      If you leave your best ideas in other people's space, you're subject to their whims. If you post a great comment on my blog, if I think it's off-topic, I'll delete it. That's why I think you should post on your own blog and link to what you're commenting on. It preserves the most freedom for everyone.
      Among the tech giants, Google is uniquely positioned to support this, yet they haven't been supportive. Their search engine used to be the glue that tied the blogosphere together. But they're moving in different directions now.
    I get to start the day by fixing a bug
      When you click on the Share icon in the reader app, you get a bad link.
      But it's not reproducible. I got this last night, when trying to share something from my iPad.
      It is reproducible on the iPad.
      The link it generates has undefined where it should say davewiner.
      Time to look at the source code.
      Found the problem, in getItemPermalink, it was calling a routine that won't work in the reader app at least not the same way as it works in the editor.
      I even understand why it worked on my main computer and not on the iPad.
      Easily fixed.
    The Dude and the Eagles
      I had a rough night and I hate the fucking Eagles.
  February 20
    What's the story with Rudy Giuliani?
      He's a fame junkie. A NYC politician who thought he hit the jackpot with 9/11, and that he could just trade fame for more fame. But it was just luck, not talent.
      He's got a NYC-size personality. His kind of character works on the local news in New York. But he's never figured out how to play a role nationally other than asshole New Yorker with a huge head. Outside of New York (and inside NY too) everyone sees him for what he is. He is entertaining, for a few minutes, but not enough to have a full-fledged Internet shamefest over.
    The killer app of the iWatch
      I'd like to predict two things:
      1. The iWatch will have a killer app.
      2. The heartbeat app is it.
      How it works.. (they announced it, btw)
        I'm wearing an iWatch and so are you.
        We love each other. You're my son or daughter.
        Or lover. Or somehow we're close, but..
        We spend a lot of time apart.
        My iWatch has a haptic interface, which I have told it to reflect your heartbeat, which it can sense because you're wearing an iWatch too.
        And if you want you may listen to my heartbeat if I choose to share it.
      Why it's wild
        First, it's viral. If I have an iWatch it makes you want one too.
        And it's nice that you can feel the beat of a loved-one's heart, but like all new media platforms of huge size, it's asymmetric.
        You love Justin Bieber you say. How about hooking up with his heart beat.
        And then there's the music you can play with heartbeats.
      It's ridiculous
        It's also the ultimate in vanity, and insignificance.
        It's pathetic, because it's a simulation of closeness.
        You're tricking yourself, it's not intimacy.
        That's why it's so perfect. ;-)
      NSFW
        What's next? The iButtPlug?
        Sorry. ;-)
      Update: Steven Levy agrees..
        In this piece on Medium, written at the Apple intro of iWatch.
        "The most telling image of the day was a beating heart."
    Librarians and the web of collaboration and lists
      There's another web coming. The web of collaboration and lists. Organizing information and coming up with new ways to share it.
      We've just begun to scratch the surface of this art. We were off to a good start with the web, but then the focus turned to smaller and smaller bits of information sharing.
      Look at the sequence...
        Blog post
        Tumblr post
        Tweet
        Like
        Heartbeat
          The Apple watch has the feature that two people can share their heartbeats. So I can feel your heart on my wrist and vice versa. I suspect this will be the killer app of the iWatch.
      However like evolution, each level of the hierarchy has potential that can be developed. We just stopped developing at the higher levels.
      I now have a tool for communicating a wide variety of sizes of ideas. This one is a structure. Some of them are essays (scroll down) and others are just short snippets with a link.
      They are all meant for people who think about stuff.
      Anyway, the first instance of the web was started in newsrooms and libraries. The newsroom part of it was famous, the library part, not so much. But I remember. The first websites at companies were done by their in-house librarians. Apple.com is a good example.
      There's a reason for that. Librarians are mavens of information, and networks of computers are ideal structures for hanging information on.
      Let's do some more building.

    Dear Charles Barkley...
    You're entertainment. Not a prophet.

      Last night Charles Barkley let something slip in one of his epic rants, about how the people who don't know anything about basketball, i.e. the fans... and just went on, never pausing to explain what he meant.
      Whether we understand it as they do, whether we understand the game they play, that's not the issue. Really. Because if you want to get real about it Charles, the game you really play is how to get more money out of what you're doing and keep doing it as long as you can.
      And Charles, you do know where from the money comes? Yes?
      So I think we actually do understand basketball Charles. In a way that you don't, and I suspect not many of your peers do either.
      To us basketball is a story. It's doing something for us, giving us a sense of tribe, fellowship, but not with YOU, with each other. So when you guys act like jerks, or like a selfish little club we roll our eyes at each other, and say geez these guys kind of forgot that they're just entertainment. A way for us to feel a bond with each other.
      I mean really. NY basketball fans get it. Our teams lose. All the lies you guys tell yourselves about how you want to win championships, and I do believe Mr Melo tells himself that he wants to win one, we see right through that. It's part of our story.
      So okay you make a lot of money. Big fucking deal. But you're the entertainment, you're not the sage, not the prophet. We don't look at you and say "Now there's someone I'd like to be." Kind of the opposite actually.
    Whew, backups work
      I'm still digging huge holes here in liveblogland, and as a result just wiped out my whole outline. Thankfully this is not the first time that happened, and this time I had a backup system that saved my ass. Next time, maybe not, but this time, all is not lost. ;-)
    Instant outlining
      Here's a great article about Instant Outlining.
      And my story of Instant Outlining, and why Radio 8 was such a good release.

    Indiana Jones approach often works
    It may not be pretty, but it works.

      Last night while watching OKC vs Dallas I tried entering reader.liveblog.co in the address bar of the browser, and to my surprise, the browser hung, then returned an error.
      I thought about it a bit and realized, oh geez that's something I hadn't planned for (the reader app is a very weird beast because we want to have good metadata for Facebook and Twitter, o the things we do).
      This morning I fixed it. Started out on a very straightforward approach that required a rewrite of some "callback hell" code.
      Then I realized an Indiana Jones approach was possible, so I restored from a backup, took the shortcut and moved on.
      Net-net: If you click this link you will see my liveblog (which will be the default for the community, once it boots up).
  February 19
    Our icons come from Font-Awesome
      Which are of course, awesome!
    Liveblog now reads well on iPad Mini
      It was using the iPhone version, and there was no need, the screen is wide enough even in portrait mode, to show the same version as the desktop.
    New liveblog feature
      When you're reading my liveblog, in the left margin, there's a new Share icon. When you click it, Radio3 comes to the front, ready to shoot a link to the item to Twitter and your own RSS feed. You just have to sign in using your Twitter account. If you log into Facebook it can send the link there too.
    Modal dialog for outline editor
      Starting to work on a mechanism for people to communicate with the author of a liveblog. That's going to be done through an outliner. So I'm doing a modal dialog that has an outline that can be edited by the user, and submitted, then sent to the author of the blog.
    Criteria for software worth investing in
      Still need to come up with a list of criteria for software that respects users well enough for users to feel good about supporting it with their time.
    Developing better developers
      I'm still looking for a university, preferably on the east coast, to host this program.

    Bill Gates' strategy reeked
    He should have nurtured the web, not tried to stifle it.

      Bill Gates had some things right, like not breaking developers. But big picture, his whole business strategy reeked. He raped and pillaged and held back one of the most vital industries of his time, so he could make billions, that he would then give away later in life. His leverage was so much greater when he was young. $1 worth of kindness to the Internet in the mid-90s would have equaled $1 million in vaccinations.

    Why I bought Apple stock
    The answer might surprise you! :-)

      I bought Apple stock because I hated Apple, but I felt they were going to make a shitload of money, and that I could pay for my Mac habit with the profits from my Apple stock.
      It meant that every time a thought bubbled up about how much I hated them, I could remind myself that my quantity of hate was protportional to the amount of money I'd make. So I got to smile. :-)
      This came up in a comment in a Facebook thread, and was a story worth preserving.
  February 18

    Yes Jim, there is a Santa Claus
    Outliners are like Peter Pan. If you believe, they are updated.

      Over in a thread on Facebook, Jim Forbes who used to write about software at InfoWorld, is lamenting that ThinkTank never made it to Windows. He was a fan.
      I wonder if it would blow his mind to know that I never stopped working on outliners. I have a new one in development right now. It's just that the world stopped listening somewhere along the line.
      I still think they're the best tools for organizing your work, and they have special power when networked.
      Outlines are at the heart of blogging too, btw. Even podcasting uses them.
      It's one of those technologies that's actually so ubiquitous you don't even notice it after a while. That was always a problem for outliners. They fit in so well people couldn't see what the big deal was. ;-)
    A new liveblog feature
      In the Outliner menu, choose Show Arrow Pad.
      A little box opens in the right corner of the page.
      It makes it easy to navigate the outline, expanding and collapsing.
      As you move around the outline, the arrows are enabled and disabled, depending on whether you can move in the direction.
      Expand changes to collapse when you move over an expanded headline.
      So it also teaches you how structure works in outlines.
    Better Call Saul
      If you wanted more Breaking Bad, BCS is for you.
      Same style, same writing, many of the same characters.
      I loved Breaking Bad, so BCS is making me happy.
  February 17

    We need a Wikipedia for hashtags
    Hashtags are a new language with a booming vocabulary.

      Hashtags are a new language, maybe even a new kind of language. The vocabulary evolves so rapidly, it costs nothing to create new ones, anyone can do it, any time, without getting anyone's permission.
      Imagine if someone had written about hashtags in a science fiction novel 20 years ago. How weird it would have seemed. Yet we are doing it.
      Language is being reshaped more rapidly than it probably ever has been. We've never had such an incredible tool for distributing new concepts. In a way that's the real meaning of the net, it's a way of creating new memes and sending them around the world.
      How much more interesting it would be if, integrated into Twitter, was a way of documenting new tags as they came up. Even documenting the originator of it. It seems that's something the network knows. We used to have something in the early blogosphere called BlogTree that did that for whole blogs.
      Basic functionality: When I'm looking at a tag I don't know, I could hover the mouse over it to find out what it means. It wouldn't even require a click.
      Problem: Because we've got a centralized system, perhaps no one but Twitter can do it. Unless it pops up in the user interface of Twitter, it's fairly useless.
      However: It could be a feature that a browser vendor adds. Hey it might catch on pretty quickly. Firefox or MSIE, a way to catch up quickly? Hmmm.

    You can't do arithmetic on people
    Sometimes 1 + 1 + 1 = 0.

      First the Knicks signed Stoudemire. Then Melo. Then Tyson Chandler.
      The theory, these are three stars. Three big men. Enough, if you add up all the talent, to win a championship for the Knicks.
      The dollars they paid them certainly added up to a championship, if that's how it worked. But this idea has now run its course, and it not only didn' t win a championship, it never made it out of the 2nd round of the playoffs.
      Basically, you can't do arithmetic with people. There's a certain thing known as chemistry that determines if you get mush or a delicious cake.
      Yet the Knicks won't truly be out of this era until they say goodbye to Melo too. Because, to use another metaphor, he's not a coral reef. Some basketball players are. Probably LeBron James. Look at how former Knicks are thriving under his leadership.
    Nice-to-have software components
      A File Open dialog for in-browser JavaScript
        A callback that fills in a level of a directory.
        Return with a set of files (basically refs into the structure).
        Prior art: Mac, Windows.
      A blog post editor that works like Medium's
        Browser-based JavaScript.
        Drag an image here.
          Type a title here.
          A description.
          Paragraph.
          Paragraph.
        Settings for the user.
        Real simple for the user, highly factored for the developer.
        No storage system, that's for the app developer to provide.
        Liberal open source license.
    Working on Scripting News today
      The About tab outline was fully expanded, fixed that.
      Added a Liveblog tab, second-to-last. It works, but shows glitches.
        If there's an img attribute on a title headline, that shouldn't be included in the river.
        Items are not being interpreted as outlines. That's a shame because they all are outlines in this feed.
          The fix was in riverRenderTypedOutline in rivers.js. See the comment at the head of the routine in the Changes section.
    Blog flow changes for a lot of reasons
      Everyone's talking about Marco's post. Which led me to think about his blog. He had a good thing going, I think his growth was being driven by TechMeme. He doesn't talk about that kind of flow. Also I wonder if the narrowing the RSS reader market changed things. If everyone was migrating from Google Reader maybe they didn't tak all their old subs with them, opening up room for other voices that compete with Marco.

    Knicks: Trade Melo, if you can.
    Do a full tear-down. Let someone else build on Melo.

      Right about now Melo must be thinking, hmmm, I'm only 2 years younger than Amare. Hmmm.
      Check out this Bleacher story on Knicks trades leading up to the Thursday deadline. I'd add this -- let's really tear it down and trade Melo.
      If you do the math, you can see that the Knicks will never rise to the top tier of the NBA, the tier now occupied by Golden State, Portland, Cleveland, San Antonio, Toronto, Atlanta, as long as Melo is on board.
      He's a #2. And he thinks he's a #1. As long as that what's going on, no #1 is going to join up with the Knicks. And Melo with a handful of 3's is what the Knicks have been the last few years. It's why the team is being rebuilt from a tear-down.
      However, there might not be a market for Melo unless he can convince his new team that he's prepared to be a player and not a leader. And Melo has to approve of any deal. So he has to believe it too.
  February 16
    For people who love outlines as networked objects
      I just added an interesting feature to reader.liveblog.co.
      If you add this to the end of a url: &format=opml
      You will get the OPML source behind the entry you're pointing to, instead of the reader view. This is pretty handy if you want to build links between apps.
      Here's an example URL, a pointer to a quote I had here yesterday.
      When you click the link you just get the OPML version.
      Now what can you do with that?
        Let's see...
      It works!
        Here's what's going on.
        Theory
          Invisibly, each headline in the outline has a set of attributes that control how the software interprets them.
            For example, every headline has a text attribute and a created attribute.
              The text is what you read, and created serves as a unique ID for the headline. It's how we generate addresses to specific headlines in the outline, that work even if the headline moves.
            Another important attribute is type. Most headlines don't have this one. But if you see a special icon next to a headline, that almost certainly indicates that it has one.
              If you look up the screen a bit, the one that has the arrow pointing to the right, that's an include node. It must have a url attribute that points to an OPML file.
              If you're familiar with the C programming language, that's where the idea of the include node came from. They have an include statement that simply places the text from another file at that location exactly as if it were part of the file containing the include.
              Outline includes work the same way.
              And when the included outline changes, the included view changes too. They're the equivalent of hyperlinks in outline-land. ;-)
        Practical
          If you have an outliner, this works in Fargo, for example, grab the url of any node in this outline by clicking on the Eye icon in the left margin.
          Add &format=opml to the URL.
          Go over into Fargo, and choose Add Include from the Outline menu.
          Paste the URL.
          Expand the headline.
          Voila, a door opened into my liveblog.
          It's one of the most cool things about outlines. ;-)
          You can combine them.
    NYC rules
      Just realized the two big fake-news events last night both were happening live at the same time in NYC. Of course I'm talking about the NBA All-Star Game and SNL/40.
    Bill Gates said this about getting rich
      "I can understand about having millions of dollars. There's meaningful freedom that comes with that, but once you get much beyond that I have to tell you, it's the same hamburger."
      Heres a video of his full comments. The rest of it is similarly wise. But I bet for Gates, when he met the billionaires at Intel, being as competitive as he is, he decided he wanted to be one of them.
      He also said it's good to strive to do great things. That's very important. You should try to make the most of your life. Money may or may not come as a result.

    Design tweaks for myword.io
    Titles and descriptions are easier to read. Body text stays where it belongs.

      Last night while watching the SNL 40th Anniversary show, I was tinkering around with the CSS of myword.io, and fixed a few things that had been bothering me.
      1. There's a transparent dark rectangle around the byline-title-description section, which makes the text jump out a bit more over the picture.
      2. The two main sections are both positioned absolute, so the text will always begin at the same vertical place no matter how much descriptive text there is.
      3. There's a footer section at the bottom, but I haven't done any CSS for it yet, and there's no way to set it via the JSON.
      Here's a link to this post when viewed in myword.io.
      This is now released as v0.48.
    Fifty shades of what?
      I have to admit I have no idea what this movie is about.
  February 15
    Melo is no champion
      In tomorrow's NYT: "Why is there such strong sentiment that the Knicks will never be true contenders with Anthony as their leading man?"
      Melo is a #2 but there's no room around him for a #1.
      He doesn't seem to know.
    indie.wtf
      I needed an "indie" name and this was available.
    Embrace the creativity of others
      1995: "Here's an invitation to truly embrace the creativity of others. Instead of beating your breast about how great you are, try saying how great someone else is. Look for win-wins, make that your new religion. Establish a policy that nothing will be announced unless it can be shown that someone else will win because of what you're doing. How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity."

    The meaning of life
    Perhaps the purpose of life will reveal itself when two people connect and figure it out together.

      This is now a blog post on Scripting News.
    MyWord and Fargo
      I've been creating a connection between Fargo and myword.io.
      Just by accident (I swear) this was the first essay I viewed, when testing.
      The feature is released.
    Testing a new feature
      I figured out a faster way to get the JSON for myword.io, and one that should work in Fargo too. I'm testing it here.

    Wrote an emergency backup script
    I lost my whole liveblog outline today. Now the backups start. ;-)

      The backup script runs every hour. Reads the OPML for my noteblog, sees if it changed, if so, it saves it to a folder in my Dropbox, with a serial number. So not only will they be mirrored and backed up by Dropbox, there will also be a sequence of updates, so a bad backup doesn't overwrite a good one.
      Eventually I will build backups into the software. This is a bit of scaffolding to be sure (heh, murphy's law) that this kind of failure can't happen again.
      Knock wood. Praise Murphy. My mother loves me. I am not a lawyer.
      BTW, if you're a young programmer, and you think to yourself "This is the last time I will ever have to learn this lesson," trust me, it isn't. I've been programming more than forty years. I've said that sooo many times. Yet I still get lulled into trusting this stuff. And always can learn this lesson again. And again. And again.
    Oy the joys of using in-development software
      I just lost my entire work outline in the liveblogging tool.
      So when people ask why they can't use the software yet -- this is the answer. It loses data. Sometimes.
        It felt so solid, that's why I wasn't paranoid about backups.
        I keep having to learn this lesson. How long have I been programming?
      I looked everywhere possible, there's no backup.
      The amazing thing about the liveblog software is that it synchronizes with other copies of itself and with readers. So when my main outline got nuked, it sent the nuked version everywhere there might be an old copy sitting around.
      There was a lot of good stuff in there.
      Needless to say, backing up is going to the top of my list. ;-)