I’ve been listening to the Grateful Dead today. Today my most favorite Dead song is Ripple. I love the bass beat, and the simple lyric. A wonderful sing-along. Let there be songs to fill the air. A song about singing. Love it. #

Twitter has yet to realize its potential as a coral reef. The idea was lovely, they had solved two important problems, identity and world-scale publishing. It took years to get there, but they did eventually do it. They were also liberal in granting access to their API, though because of some dick moves leading up to their IPO, they got a rep for the opposite, as in no good deed goes unpunished. In the big picture, what they offered was tantalizing. If they had added storage to it, which I understood from Jack Dorsey was their plan, then some amazing stuff would have happened. I still believe tech companies can play a very important role in the open internet, as long as they are willing to treat users as customers and sell a product that has value without the usual michegas. #

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People are trying to figure out the answer to Substack. The answer isn’t that people should run their own servers or buy their own domains. You don’t have to buy a bus to take a bus to work, you can rent a seat, it’s a lot more economical. You don’t have to find a place to park the bus, or pay to maintain it, someone else is happy to do that for you. What you need is a pass that lets you ride the bus. What that means for services like what Substack does, is you need a place to store your writing, that you pay for. And an app can get at (with your permission) and take a document that you specify and mail it to the people you allow to subscribe. You pay for that too, but it’s not much because it doesn’t cost much. The piece that’s missing is storage you can pay for that doesn’t come with a dot-com business model. That’s the thing we really need to esccape from, being monetized. The only respectful way to be monetized is to pay for something worth paying for, roughly what it costs, plus a reasonable margin of profit. #

My night at the Dean campaign

I’d love to tell you a story about the time I had the authority to post to the Dean campaign home page, and they deleted a post I wrote on the night of the famous Dean Scream that might have saved the campaign. They were trying to make the story go away. As we know the story didn’t go away. #

2008: “The campaign had video that showed clearly that the press was actively trying to kill his candidacy. They had a website, and they had enough money to pay for the bandwidth to run it. They knew what the press was trying to do. They could have fought it. But they didn’t.”#

That night I became friends with Nicco Mele, he was the webmaster at Dean who gave me the power. I was in their Burlington headquarters at the moment the whole thing imploded, the night of the Iowa caucus. I’ve also become friends with Joe Trippi, the campaign manager for Dean in 2008. They probably accelerated the adoption of online media in American politics by a decade or more. However, a lot of the ideas from that time are gone, but hopefully not forever.#

The biggest idea was that it gave people a sense of belonging, that they weren’t powerless to influence or even control the US government. We all felt that the war in Iraq was wrong, Dean gave Americans a way to say that clearly, with their own actions. I think if we want to achieve our destiny in the 2024 election, we need to get some of that into the campaign, or democracy won’t prevail.#

There’s a story about how Trump makes people feel like they belong in the Washington Post written by Philip Bump that Joe and Nicco should read if they haven’t. This is something Trump gets that the Democrats have forgotten they know. People don’t vote on policy, they vote to belong to something they believe might fix things, whatever that means to them.#

PS: I also blogged about my adventure at the Dean campaign headquarters in January 2004 before and during the Iowa caucus and the Dean campaign implosion. #

PPS: A picture of the blogging room in Burlington the night of the Iowa caucus in 2004.#

PPPS: In February 2004, I wrote a piece summing up what we learned from Dean. “In a virtual sense, the Internet was looking for a candidate, and Howard Dean fit the bill. He was bloggable.”#

Fixed a bug in news.scripting.com that caused it to display only the All tab, leaving the other tabs inaccessible. Glad to get it fixed now and sorry for the breakage. Please keep the error reports coming. #

It’s good that people are thinking of leaving Substack. I didn’t like what they were doing because they were yet another place that requires you to use their editor to publish through their platform, probably because their business model requires a fair amount of lock-in. I like using the editor that I do all my writing in, and I don’t see why I can’t just post directly from there. Even if they don’t have an API, it’s pretty easy to set it up so it posts from a feed. If you’re thinking about leaving Substack, good for you. Please insist that your new platform lets you post via a feed. If they say it’s too hard, give them my email address, and I’ll show them how to do it. #

Ideas for Reading Lists

A reading list is a list of feeds you can subscribe to.#

The author of the list can add or remove feeds. When they do, people who subscribe to the list are subscribed to the new feeds and unsubbed from the ones that leave.#

Reading lists are not a new topic, I and others have been writing about them for years. But they’ve not been used seriously in the past because they weren’t widely supported in feed readers. FeedLand, my latest feed manager, has reading list support built-in. And we’re serious about starting new communities of feeds and users with this feature. #

If you’re a feed reader user, you probably know about using OPML to move your subscriptions from one app to another, or to share lists with friends. #

Reading lists take it one step further, you can subscribe to a reading list, so you can control one app from another. #

Say I had a reading list with my favorite podcasts and my podcasting client could subscribe to it. Then when I add a feed to that list on my desktop computer, the podcast client would automatically be subscribed to it. Or if I used two or more podcast clients (say one on Android and one on iOS), I could control both from the same subscription list.#

It factors out subscribing. Now you can use one app to manage subscriptions and use lots of apps to read them.#

What’s cool about this is that it opens up the possibility for lots of viewer apps. A podcast client is a special kind of feed reader. I’m sure others are possible. But first, to make this practical we need to do better with subscriptions. That’s what reading lists are for. #

Another idea. Suppose we wanted to put together a big list of great blogs about Major League Baseball (just an example). I might know a few about the Mets, and my friend Scott who lives in Mountain View, CA, would have a bunch about the Giants. We could put together a group of 100 avid baseball fans, and one of us could put out a reading list for all of our feeds merged into one list. It’s not so far-fetched, FeedLand can do that today. #

I could see a similar “big blogroll” for the IndieWeb, or for Bluesky developers — or really anything. We just have to get started, prime the pump, and learn how this works. #

I felt it was really important to get reading lists built into FeedLand in the current release, because now we’re in a position, with the improvements in scaling, to act as a organizing node for new activities with feeds. #

This is another form of federation, it’s more ad hoc, and doesn’t require very much technical knowledge. If you know how to use a feed reader, and move around OPML files, you can do all of what I describe in this piece. #

It would be better if journalists did not gravitate to a Facebook-owned Twitter clone. #

For a guy who likes to write, I am probably not a lot better about writing docs than most other developers. We’re supposed to leave a good trail behind us, but I’ve only managed to do that in certain ways. For example, I have standardized on a worknotes.md file for each of my projects and I’m pretty good about updating it. I also publish the OPML source of my code, which contains a lot more in the way of internal docs than the JavaScript files I publish alongside them, simply because the outline format lends itself to inline docs, and I have been doing that systematically for at least thirty years. And I now include the OPML source in most projects in a file called source.opml. There’s a big comment at the top of each of the files at the top that explains. If you’re interested, work backward through the directory of my repos. #