I had my first confrontation about what's stirring in the WordPress world.

I've tried to record this podcast a few times before, but today it became clear that I could get embroiled in the emotions flowing around WordPress now. There's a strong community there, and the angst is familiar, I've had it myself, because the people and companies we depend on rarely live up to our expectations of them.

Since most of the people who lead my industry are either my age or younger, I never idolized them. I certainly respect people like Bill Gates and others who made great fortunes and had great power for a long time. But I only care about that when it's in my way.

Right now I see a huge need for a tools for writers that builds on WordPress. The opportunity has been there for the full 20+ year history of the product. Because of who I am and what I did in blogging systems before WordPress, I have a perspective on what's missing, and I see the potential for a large market for writing and other creative tools that simplify the process.

There's too big an opportunity to let the economics of the platform on a large scale get in the way of moving forward. I'm going for it.

In this podcast I offer some of my experience being deeply entrenched in platforms that were going in directions I couldn't go in with them. It's painful to give up. I empathize. But I'm in a different place. I'm a 50+ year developer, about to turn 70, and feeling my age. This may be my last big project.

I think WordPress will be around and evolving for many years to come. I want to make a contribution, and I don't have time to wait for all this to be resolved. There is no other platform that can do what WordPress can do now. So this is where I've made my bet.

So I'm going ahead, and I'm going to try to stay away from the problems, and just try to make some good software and make some users happy. :smile:

There is a transcript.

It's been a while since I released a podcast so here goes..

As a programming partner, ChatGPT is encyclopedic but is not good at strategy. It will drive you down blind alleys. It's also really irritating that it rewrites your code to conform to its standards. And it has a terrible memory. Forgets things you told it specifically not to forget. It does not keep promises. People who say the bubble is fully inflated on this stuff are not paying attention. We're still dealing with very basic technical problems.

"What we needed was an encyclopedic, conversational simulated programming partner, that has infinite knowledge of everything. But unfortunately not the best judgment."

There's a transcript.

I keep having to answer the question of what I think about Podcasting 2.0, I thought I should say it clearly, in a podcast of course. 😀

A lightly edited quote from this cast: "Podcasting is in trouble and needs our help and it needs good ideas that accentuate the power of having no boundaries between different voices. You can listen to my podcast and you can listen to one that comes from somebody else, from a big company if you want to. There are no gatekeepers. There's nobody who controls what you can listen to here. And that's important. That's powerful. That makes it a place for creativity, and for art, and for really unpopular ideas, because it's open."

It's insidious to form an organization whose name says you own the future of something that is open. Even the W3C wasn't that brazen, even Apple said they wanted developers to innovate on their platform. But claiming to be the 2.0 of something as hugely consequential as podcasting is not supportable and I can't overlook it.

I've proposed an innovation in podcasting, for the benefit of everyone, and I could have done it even if I didn't even know what a freaking podcast is (but I do).

I'm tired of people trying to own things that are unownable.

There's a transcript.

"I hope this doesn't give Trump any ideas" is what I thought when I heard that the president of South Korea had out of the blue declared martial law. You probably thought it too.

I decided it was time to tell the story of how we elected Trump even though we had a 4-year demo, including COVID and an attempted overthrow of the US government.

We knew who he was, and we said give us more of that.

We are out of our minds.

Includes a transcript.

PS: Recorded on Tuesday, published on Thursday.

PPS: It turns out the president of South Korea was actually trying to give Trump an idea.

PPPS: The people of South Korea told the president to go to hell.

Sources Go Direct is the way everything works now. Ad dollars and gotchas are not how you get known. The only way that works is patience over long periods of time so the voters feel comfortable with the candidate. The story keeps repeating.

This is how the political system works now, but the Democrats haven't adjusted to the new reality. It's past time. We need to get going before the transition is complete.

Here's a transcript.

I've been saying this for twenty years -- the Dems shut down their campaign presence on the social web on Election Day, and they come back when they need our money (to give to the huge media companies for ads) and vote, and that's it. We play no role in governing.

Meanwhile the other party, starting when Trump discovered Twitter, was on the air 24-by-7-by-365 every freaking year whether or not there's a presidential election. Their voters are led, ours are left to drift around in the wind, asked to resist with no answer to the question How? We have no leadership.

Now we may be able to get the Harris campaign back on the air on the social web. We found the team that did it. Like the rest of us they lost their way on Election Day which was only two weeks ago, believe it or not. Anyway I wanted to share the good news. There are links on my blog for today.

PS: Here's a transcript.

We start with what didn't work about the election of 2024 as the question du jour, and the answer is basically everything. The Democratic Party is a funnel which tries to funnel what the elites think we need without triggering Jake Tapper or Maggie Haberman or the publisher of the NYT. As the Bidens discovered this is a hopeless cause, so no one liked Joe, and they didn't have a feel for Kamala, and they aren't wrong they're right.

The world changed and it's time for the old Democratic party to be replaced by a completely new version, as happened already with the Repubs. We're going to be much better at what we believe in, as they are much better at what they believe in. Our goals won't change, but we'll have candidates that rise from the people, instead of being filtered and handed down from above.

We're not connecting with people because they're not connecting with the people we give them. These people do know how to run the US government, but they aren't doing it the way we want them to. Change isn't happening fast enough to keep up with the demands of a changed country. I doubt if the Dems would disagree with that. Okay we see how to fix this. I explain in this long ramble, if you're patient enough to listen that long!

The piece that inspired this post.

The net-net is that WordPress is everything that remains of what's useful in the blogging world.

It carries the banner for the format writers need to be able to communicate meaningfully, which I call textcasting.

I wanted to develop a writing tool for WordPress because it needed to start developing in that direction. There should be hundreds of ways to write with WordPress, and it should be able to flow writing through all the social networks. That's the idea. It's doable, now, more so than ever before. And then once we have that working, we can see what's next.

But the writer's web has been reduced to a small fraction of its potential.

I think this may be a time when people will be looking for something new, but there doesn't need to be a cost. You don't have to pick up your whole thing and move somewhere else, we can build on what WP already is.

It's a 37 minute podcast, that also includes a long story about Napster, how revolutionary it was, and how the music industry failed to see the value in having all the music availalbe to everyone in one place. All the applications of music that didn't happen because of their approach.

We're lucky now that it's all in one place, and the software underlying that is open source, and the APIs are clonable. And the social web is just beginning to get it together, and btw Mastodon is sitting there ready for us to play with them. You just have to make the software, work with others and connect the dots.

In 2017 I wrote that Twitter, which had just elected the US president could be bought for $12 billion. (In the podcast I got the number wrong.)

Given that the US budget is over $6 trillion, and the assets of the government are worth much more, this was a bargain.

Not only did VCs not see this, but Elon Musk did. People kept saying he overpaid for it at $44 billion, but I have a hunch he may be able to make them eat their words.

Anyway, the leadership of the Democratic Party should play close attention to what he's doing, and don't dismiss the waste of money, or whatever you see that he's doing wrong. He hires clever people who see their way around corners that you probably don't. He has better tools that you, in many ways. His server capacity is world class. And obvious brainpower and creativity.

I was right in 2017 and right now in 2024. He could make the difference that puts Trump over the topo.

The quote I cited was by Ann Richards at the 1988 DNC. "He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple."

Quick podcast explaining what worked today that blew my mind.

I surprised myself by editing a post that appeared in WordPress and Mastodon at the same time, with no loss of fidelity.

We're pretty damned close to the ideal of textcasting. How about that!

Sorta snuck up on me.

Bing!