This started out as an open podcast to my friend Jeff Jarvis.

But it soon became a story about how in a few months we're going to be writing about how we gave up control of our last social network to the government. We could have made it decentralized, so users couldn't be shut down at the government's request, but we didn't make it an issue.

Instead, we were building the next network for a billionaire to own

We could have fixed it, but we didn't.

We need to get tougher. Watch the interviews Alex Wagner did on MSNBC did with marchers in Hungary (looking for a link to the video). They have the clear eyes Americans are just starting to get. We'll look back on this having been an easy problem to solve back when we could have fixed it.

Look forward and imagine the value of a truly decentralized social network. It's within reach. Rather than put Bluesky at the center, put them at the edge. That's where they say the want to be. We can make that happen now.

What we need is two-way RSS on Bluesky, ie imperfect decentralization now, so we can re-establish contact and flow if they go down or sell out.

I'd love to read an article or listen to a mainstream news podcast that explained how people are using ChatGPT-like apps, and why they think it's such a big deal, as opposed to debunking it for not being intelligent, or making stuff up, or stealing intellectual property. This has all been adequately reported.

It also is the most revolutionary use of computer technology ever, in terms of the augmentation of human intelligence. And yes, dear news person, this matters.

It's a tool for our minds, it makes up for our relatively slow processes, how long it takes us to learn new facts, and is able organize organize things to help us make better choices.

It really is amazing.

20 minutes

Another permanent rant -- about how universities can be reorganized to do more for us, and we need places where lots of people come face to face to learn and build things, but let's go back to school every ten years.

I went to Harvard in 2003 wanting to bring the minds of Harvard onto the open web, instead they brought my mind into the university, and we brought the open web into Harvard. And long after I got my last degree, with new maturity and experience I found much bigger ways the university could be used as a tool to grow and evolve, to create new stuff. But we didn't finish the job, Silicon Valley did. And we got a result similar to what we'll get if we let the Musk process go forward much further.

It's remarkable how some of the rich of Silicon Valley want to do to the world what they did to the web! If you extrapolate, we'll go from a world with great potential, to a lot of grunting and snorting and not much else. The new AI technology is not ready to run the world. The rich people should use their own wealth to build something great and then show the rest of us how to use it. That's the proper role for Silicon Valley, not to rule.

Lots of ideas buzzing around, but yet all this seems so freaking familiar.

22 minutes.

PS: Developing better Developers blog post.

This is my permanent political rant, podcast-style.

The Repubs figured it out via Trump in 2016, use Twitter to campaign every day of every year.

The Dems campaign intensely for a few months every four years.

The rest of the time it's as if the Dems don't even take the field.

They don't know what to say when they get interviewed, they mumble they don't make eye contact. It's creepy. There are a few who can do it. AOC gets a big shout out here. They should have a conference where she's on stage teaching and they're in the audience listening.

It's so simple, we need to market, to sell, to position the opposition and ourselves. Kamala Harris was doing it, it was great. When we lost the election all communication stops. That's when you need to ramp it up. We have no leadership, no coaching, no simple ideas to bring it home. That's the main reason we continue to lose and now we're not just losing elections, we're losing our world.

In this podcast I start with a story of how I was recruited to lead a rally on a bus from NYC to DC in 1971 as very small part of a march against the Vietnam war. That's where I learned that in a country where the people rule, we have to be part of the government. We can't wait for the Dems to lead us, they never will. Instead we have to lead them. That will work, when we do it.

All we need is campaign and money management, and people who do great advertising. We have to bring the war home, be a source of good information for our voters. Right now the Repubs are the only ones speaking, with predictable results.

21 minutes.

PS: I mention Natural Born Blogger in this podcast.

PPS: There's a transcript.

On Bluesky, I wrote a post to Oliver Willis, who writes at Daily Kos:

This podcast elaborates on that simple idea. We still have media, we don't have to wait for the leaders of the Democratic Party to tell Americans what the Repubs are doing in terms that mean something to them as people.

Saying we're losing rights, or government workers are losing their jobs, or immigrants are being deported -- these aren't as clear as a simple message that you depend on things they are terminating.

And they hired crazy people to determine whether you survive the next pandemic, and btw there's one brewing, you can see how fast by how high the prices of chicken are.

I've thought we should have a Qanon of our own, that tells the truth about what's actually happening, not in the vague bullshit terms the Pelosi's et al explain them. Their time is past, they lost the whole fucking government. If we let them continue to speak for us, a lot of us are going to be dead.

It really is that serious.

It's time to use the media we have to organize and refine the truth down to simple terms everyone can understand.

I hope you listen.

There is a transcript.

I posted this to both Bluesky and Mastodon just now.

I see people betting on the idea of federation in Bluesky.

At the same time, we should bet on simplifying Mastodon at scale.

Approach the problem from both directions.

We may need and not have federation in Bluesky at some point.

It couldn't hurt to have a better lifeboat.

This podcast goes into more depth of this idea.

There is a transcript.

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 usually 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. 😀

A place for comments and questions about this podcast.

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.