Scripting News podcast

Scripting News podcast

Dave Winer

Podcasts from Dave Winer, editor of the Scripting News blog, since 1994.

Dems must campaign 365 days every year

Dems must campaign 365 days every year

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 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

Feb 14, • 0:00

The Repubs are trying to kill you

The Repubs are trying to kill you

On Bluesky, I wrote a post to Oliver Willis, who writes for 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 ha

Jan 28, • 0:00

It couldn't hurt to have a better lifeboat

It couldn't hurt to have a better lifeboat

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.

Jan 13, • 0:00

How I view WordPress

How I view WordPress

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

Jan 8, • 0:00

Don't let ChatGPT strategize for you

Don't let ChatGPT strategize for you

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

Dec 19, 2024 • 0:00

We all own and no one owns podcasting

We all own and no one owns podcasting

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

Dec 9, 2024 • 0:00

Don't give him any ideas

Don't give him any ideas

"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

Dec 5, 2024 • 0:00

We elected Archie Bunker

We elected Archie Bunker

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.

Nov 26, 2024 • 0:00

We found the kamalahq team!

We found the kamalahq team!

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

Nov 19, 2024 • 0:00

A Wednesday morning ramble

A Wednesday morning ramble

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

Nov 13, 2024 • 0:00

WordPress is too valuable to overlook

WordPress is too valuable to overlook

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

Oct 24, 2024 • 0:00

Warning: Musk could push Trump over the top

Warning: Musk could push Trump over the top

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 atte

Oct 20, 2024 • 0:00

Editor => WordPress => Mastodon

Editor => WordPress => Mastodon

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!

Oct 8, 2024 • 0:00

Pseudo code and kitchen table conversations

Pseudo code and kitchen table conversations

Today's podcast has nothing to do with the 30 year milestone, except that it is totally unscripted, stream of consciousness, for 30 minutes, on two topics.1. The idea of what a programming language is, is about to be completely overturned. The verbs and nouns will, at least at first, be pretty much exactly like we do it now, but the way you specify how they work, how they interact both in the UI and on the backend, will be done more or less as you would document the user interface. The AI system

Oct 7, 2024 • 0:00

The Podcast0 Feed

The Podcast0 Feed

My fifth podcast release today, the others were all on the Podcast0 feed, which I explain is the flow of two feeds, Morning Coffee Notes and Trade Secrets. Also the idea of subscription lists you subscribe to, the next level of power in feeds, which should be imho supported broadly by all apps that implement OPML subscription lists, which is a pretty strong standard in the world of feed readers, which of course includes podcast clients. The users are so powerful when they realize they have the p

Oct 2, 2024 • 0:00

Let's use feeds to hook together pieces of the twittersphere

Let's use feeds to hook together pieces of the twittersphere

I want to talk about interop among the products that do more or less what Twitter does, including Twitter.I think we're doing a replay of the way hypertext developed in the 80s, and then took off when TBL produced a much simpler product with one-way links instead of two. It made developing a website a matter of writing a text file and uploading it to a server. Almost no configuration.Same kind of experience with Napster, in a minute you had access to all the music of the world. It was super easy

Sep 17, 2024 • 0:00

Twitter President Kamala

Twitter President Kamala

Harris must become president of Twitter before becoming president of the United States.After the debate, Harris should be interviewed anywhere they'll have her. Go ahead and be overexposed. Answer every question with one of your major positioning statements. Call in to radio talk shows, podcasts, whatever you can think of. Biden hardly ever promoted himself. Not being heard all the time was his biggest sin. Harris should get accustomed to being accessible when she's in office. Keep the kamalahq

Sep 10, 2024 • 0:00

Kamala's acceptance speech

Kamala's acceptance speech

Full audio for Kamala Harris's acceptance speech at the DNC. Thanks to Ian Landsman for converting the video to MP3. My blog post about the speech. Podcast: 37 minutes.

Aug 25, 2024 • 0:00

Why I feel bad about Biden in a personal way

Why I feel bad about Biden in a personal way

Podcast: 17 minutes.Note: You can skip the first five minutes, it's a long preamble on a different subject. I left it in because it's interesting imho. It's possible that what happened to Joe Biden in the debate is like something that happened to me almost ten years ago when I was turning 60. I tell the story in this podcast. It's still possible he was the best choice to go against Trump. We'll know soon enough. But there's something to learn here. No one wants their life to be over. No one want

Aug 22, 2024 • 0:00

ChatGPT slows down my programming, and that's good

ChatGPT slows down my programming, and that's good

Podcast: 27 minutes.Sorry about the recording quality, I was in a large space with bad acoustics. I'll try to remember not to do that in the future. I've noticed I spend less time programming, I go more slowly and carefully because now I can know a lot more about each problem I'm solving, and use the packages I build on, jQuery, MySQL, Node, the browser, Bootstrap, Font-awesome, Frontier, to greater advantage. A new kind of programming is possible, and it's better. I go into some detail in this

Aug 21, 2024 • 0:00

Musk is just getting started

Musk is just getting started

Podcast: 11 minutes.I see happy talk all over the place that Twitter is done, Musk is killing it, blah blah blah. It's bullshit. In the next few months Twitter is going to morph into the political system that Barack Obama could have and should have built.It turns out creating a president of the United States is worth a lot of money. Trump is inept at squeezing the money out of it, he's a loudmouth who proved one thing, Twitter is all you needed in 2016 to get elected president. That's going to c

Aug 15, 2024 • 0:00

Why Walz was the perfect choice

Why Walz was the perfect choice

Lakoff talks about the Nurturing Mother and the Strict Father as models for Democrats and Republicans respectively, and how the Dems never got this, and never campaigned accordingly. Now they're doing it. Owning the nuturing mother mode, but also the Protective Father, tough and angry when necessary, but a fun dad, a sweetheart. Biden was that, but we caught him too late in life for that to really flourish, hence the low approval ratings. I think we can afford now to ignore the NY Times et al. W

Aug 10, 2024 • 0:00

My first ChatGPT app

My first ChatGPT app

4-minute podcast about my first venture into ChatGPT via its API. There's an accompanying GitHub repo, with an example app in JavaScript that runs in the browser.Includes instructions for setting up and funding a developer account, which was the biggest hurdle. Functionality: It tells you who Bull Mancuso is. Much excitement as I think about integrations I can now do. Don't know why I waited so long. :smile:

Aug 9, 2024 • 0:00

It's time to create our own media, again

It's time to create our own media, again

We're depending on big companies that are nuzzling up with Trump, at best hedging their bets, to let us use their networks to organize ourselves politically. That's never worked for us, in fact it's worked against us. Trump's election in 2016, for example, could he have done it without Twitter letting him go direct to organize? The Harris organization is doing great, they have to take on the journalists, where previous Democrats had no answer, they've done it in a clever way, by using their chan

Aug 4, 2024 • 0:00

The NYT is weird

The NYT is weird

Someone in charge at the NYT needs to take a step back and view events, and the NYT role in those events, from the point of view of an ordinary non-NYT-employed citizen, bewildered at the enormous risks journalists are taking with the system of government of the United States. In the context of who we are as a country, and what the Repubs do and say about the country, "weird" is pretty mild. What word would you prefer the Democrats use? Imagine William Safire were here, the great linguist column

Jul 31, 2024 • 0:00

Google Recorder is what I wanted

Google Recorder is what I wanted

I lost my iPhone a few days ago. I think all the data is safe. First time I ever lost a phone. I ordered a new iPhone 15 Pro with 256GB, it will arrive on Monday hopefully. In the meantime I've needed to use my Android phone to record voice memos. Google's product is called Recorder. It's just what I wanted. It has a website, so you don't have to export your recording to get it where you need it to be, and it automatically does a transcript. There's an editor on the website, which again is exact

Jul 26, 2024 • 0:00

Podcast starts with linkblogging

Podcast starts with linkblogging

A 20-minute morning coffee notes rambler podcast, started with a narration of how we do linkblogging these days, mostly by hand, and how Bluesky is being hurt by not having a large-enough character limit. Another plea for textcasting, some standards for what we put on the wire over the social web.Also talked about twitter-like systems, and idea borrowed from algol-like and lisp-like. I talk about what made Unix so great. Eric Raymond once told me that XML-RPC was very much like Unix, and I said

Jul 23, 2024 • 0:00

NYT just stop podcast

NYT just stop podcast

A two-minute podcast where I dictate an op-ed the NYT should run in its own name, apologizing for trying to take over the US government, and promising to return to being a news organization. I am so fed up with it. Today they ran an op-ed written by Aaron Sorkin giving advice to Democrats based on his experience writing scripts for a fictional White House television show in the late 90s and early 00s. Yeah the NYT has lost its way. I hope some people down there think they're way out on a limb an

Jul 21, 2024 • 0:00

Respect yourself podcast

Respect yourself podcast

A 25-minute ramble with the themes of the Dreaming piece I wrote earlier today. Spoiler alert: I reveal the ending of the movie Casablanca. Respecting yourself means sticking to problems we can and need to solve, and work together. We can't make anything to happen until we start listening to and working with each other. There is no perfect super-Democrat. Our candidate is Joe Biden. Any real candidate is going to suck.It's like We Make Shitty Software, all candidates suck. But we do a great job.

Jul 20, 2024 • 0:00

Hello from 2024

Hello from 2024

A podcast about listening to the podcasts from 2004. This is a short episode about what I learned, and what's coming up.Humbling experience.

Jul 17, 2024 • 0:00

Jon Stewart, yes you should STFU

Jon Stewart, yes you should STFU

The problem is elites grabbing the wheel with no clue about what comes next, and driving us off a cliff.Every Tuesday I look for Jon Stewart's opening for the Daily Show on YouTube. It's always funny, great comedy, whether or not you agree with what he says, and I usually do agree. But not when it comes to him pushing President Biden out, without any idea of what comes next, and how the people, even some people who love his show, feel about having no voice. If the voters organize, using the tool

Jul 9, 2024 • 0:00

The SF newspaper strike of 1994

The SF newspaper strike of 1994

In this podcast I tell the story of the move from print to the web in 1994 when the San Francisco newspapers went on strike. I was part of that process, a step in the bootstrap that led to the social web. I'm thinking about that process as journalism system is losing its mind, like everything else, and we need to find a way to flow intelligent news to people who need it, so we can start to organize, and we need to do it now. The flow are out there, smart people who know stuff and have ideas, but

Jul 6, 2024 • 0:00

It could happen!

It could happen!

My blog is also a podcast. I wonder if anyone else does that. The title of this episode is "A peneer of legitimacy," but what I really meant is veneer. I describe a dream where the owner of the NY Times is, in March 2025, being tried by a military tribunal for not sufficiently helping Trump get re-elected as he was told to do. Sulzberger, in his own defense, points out that they covered Biden's Age, the official new version of Hillary's Emails, while ignoring other possible issues. The tribunal

Jul 4, 2024 • 0:00

Second podcast of two

Second podcast of two

This is the second of two podcasts for a two-podcast Tuesday, today.Very likely there will be another tomorrow. So much going on! :smile:25 minutes.

Jul 2, 2024 • 0:00

A two-podcast Tuesday

A two-podcast Tuesday

This is the first of two podcasts for today. It started out being one podcast, but I hit the wrong button after 14 minutes and ended up with two audio files instead of one.I don't like editing, so you get two for the price of one. :-)It's a rambler, starts out with me talking about Elie Mystal on abortion and slavery. The second podcast explains how we're in a war, and it's about time we recognized it as such. We need the Democrats to do what we elected them to do, save the freaking United State

Jul 2, 2024 • 0:00

Jeff Jarvis and Dave in conversation

Jeff Jarvis and Dave in conversation

I just did an approx 40 minute podcast interview and discussion with Jeff Jarvis. I know Jeff from the early days of blogging. He was one of the best discussion leaders at BloggerCon. And he's an accomplished author and educator. We talk about how to organize news for people who are information starved by whatever it is that our news sources are doing, which is really hard to figure out, but in the end (I argue) who cares why, we have a problem to solve, so let's get on with it.I talk about the

Jul 1, 2024 • 0:00

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