This is a followup to the podcast of June 17 where I advised NYC voters to hold their noses and vote for Cuomo. Well, they didn't. They voted their hearts, and I believe forgot the context. What they're doing to LA is coming to every city in the US. Who will stand up for NYC? Not Mayor Adams, he's a Trump hostage. And now, the voters of NYC have spoken. Everyone's very happy because they forgot about ICE. This is AOC's first big flub, imho, and the city will pay for it. ICE is still out there, t...
Jun 25, 2025
I wanted to do a brief podcast to explain how WordLand came to be, and what I learned on my exploration of WordPress. This, for me, was like time travel. They had picked up on a lot of what we were doing in the 90s and early 00s, and even though I was alive while this was happening, my attention was focused elsewhere. So when I found the wpcom package in Node.js, I was astounded. I thought you worked on WordPress in PHP, which I've never developed in (long story). And further, I found that the A...
Jun 23, 2025
Today is a good day to talk about where the Democrats should go. The Democratic Party tolerates no dissent. If you don't toe the line, you're next in line for destruction. I'm not kidding. This episode of my at-least-monthly podcast explains why Cuomo is the right choice for a Trump-opposed mayor of New York, and why we have to revolt against the Democratic Party as much as we need to revolt against the attempt to overthrow the Constitution by the Republican Party. Both are sadistic autocracies,...
Jun 17, 2025
I've been tuned in for the NBA playoffs this year, as I am every year, but especially this time because my team the NY Knicks have made it to the Eastern Conference Finals. The series is now 3-2 in favor of the Indiana Pacers. Last night's game was a must-win for the Knicks, if they lost they would not move on to the NBA Finals which starts next Thursday, June 5, in Oklahoma City. As often is the case, NakedJen and I are managing the team's space for this playoff season. Emotionally, each of the...
May 30, 2025
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 Al...
Apr 29, 2025
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...
Apr 27, 2025
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 universit...
Mar 20, 2025
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 t...
Feb 14, 2025
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 h...
Jan 28, 2025
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, 2025
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 08, 2025
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 technica...
Dec 19, 2024
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 09, 2024
"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: I...
Dec 05, 2024
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
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
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
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....
Oct 24, 2024
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 att...
Oct 20, 2024
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 08, 2024
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 syste...
Oct 07, 2024
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 ...
Oct 02, 2024
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 ea...
Sep 17, 2024
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
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
