Scripting News podcast

Blogger of the Year

As with the previous podcast I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes. It chose to write it in the third person, which is great with me. It even filled in the first name of Jack Smith, when I couldn't remember it in the podcast, so in some ways the show notes are more informative than my almost 40 minute ramble. And it misunderstands some of what I'm saying, but I left it in as-is. The situation with Venezuela feels like a replay of Iraq - emotional, cowboy-style decision making reminiscent of George W. Bush's revenge mission for his father. This isn't how a 21st century nuclear-armed nation with a powerful economy should operate.Trump's real estate buddies went to meet with Putin to make deals for the Trump brand, while Putin and Xi have professional teams in constant contact. The naïve plan to split the world into three pieces reflects the same 'move fast and break things' mentality that tech leaders have now abandoned.Facebook and Zuckerberg no longer move fast and break things - their system is reliable and steady. They're efficient at achieving goals while deliberately misleading people about what they're doing. They established Threads as an alternative to Twitter, though we know who owns it unlike Blue Sky.The naivety extends to journalists proudly publishing on Substack without checking who owns it or understanding the old saying: if you can't figure out what the product is, you're the product.A powerful personal story about jury duty reveals how you realize 'the jury is in me' - it's an education process that never leaves you, where judge and attorneys develop you as a juror to make crucial decisions about someone's fate.Biden is criticized as an idiot who should have disqualified Trump from running. He let the Justice Department handle it while trying to get things back to normal for four years, but Trump should have been constitutionally ineligible for insurrection.Hakeem Jeffries is making the same mistakes as Biden - just saying Trump's actions were illegal and hoping Republicans will see the importance of legality. The Democrats aren't up to this moment, and we're running out of time.Jack Smith's investigation and case against Trump never got heard because the Supreme Court ruled on immunity. The transcript and video were released on Christmas Day as a news dump, and mainstream media completely failed to cover it - no one at MSNBC or CNN broke their holiday to report this historic information.David Frum gets recognition as 'blogger of the year' for his podcast where he talks about what he doesn't know - exactly what bloggers should do. The advice: keep doing what you're doing, be drawn to topics that interest you even if you don't know about them, and bring on experts to teach you.Brian Lehrer is cited as a model - he brings on experts in areas where he's prepared but lets them teach from their full-time experience. The key is finding experts and reading lots of blogs without caring about qualifications.Podcasting was created by the speaker and Adam Curry to be a medium open to everybody with no gatekeepers. The success means it's hard to find good stuff, so we need better discovery tools - let people be the algorithms, not opaque AI systems.Examples of programming your own algorithm: asking ChatGPT to build RSS feed lists for NBA news without paywalls, or student newspapers at US universities. The speaker's blog at scripting.com features an innovative blog roll that's actually a feed reader.Final advice to David Frum and others: get out of your bubble, discover people with intelligent expertise who interest you, but only do it if it feels good - learning is supposed to be enjoyable.Dave WinerPS: I wrote up the Blogger of the Year award on Scripting on January 6.

What Would Firefox Do?

I asked Claude.ai to do the show notes -- something I really don't enjoy or have time for. So if this doesn't adequately describe the podcast, blame the AI. ;-)There's tired frustration among web developers who remember Firefox's heyday. This podcast is for those who experienced Firefox's rise and understand its impact on the web.The browser wars started with Mosaic and Netscape in the early days of the web. The Netscape IPO changed everything in tech - shifting company valuations from profit-based to potential-based metrics, marking the beginning of the tech boom.Microsoft dominated the PC market when the web emerged as an existential threat. Bill Gates had promised years earlier to learn from minicomputer companies' mistakes - to be scrappy when disruption came for Microsoft. This led to their aggressive entry into the browser market with Internet Explorer.Microsoft's browser strategy was smart. They created a quality browser, especially for Mac, understood the value of developer community, built developer tools and platforms like Visual Basic and ActiveX, and ultimately won the browser war against Netscape through platform integration.Firefox emerged as a lightweight alternative to the bloated Internet Explorer, built by a small team focused on core browser functionality. It succeeded where Netscape had failed, much like Chrome would later challenge Firefox itself.My personal history with Firefox and Mozilla involves my work on RSS development. When invited to give an RSS seminar at Mozilla, I was met with hostility. The Mozilla developers were dismissive of independent developers, asking who I was and why I was involved. This personal animus eventually led me to switch to Chrome.Firefox faces a current crisis - dependent on Google payments for default search, with a shrinking user base leading to layoffs. The silver lining is that employees who resisted developer community engagement are gone, creating an opportunity to refocus without internal resistance.Firefox's AI strategy is failing. They're trying to compete with AI features, but browsers should remain pure web platforms. AI doesn't belong in browsers, and Firefox can't compete with larger companies on AI integration anyway.The solution is for Firefox to become a developer platform. Forget AI features and focus on being a fantastic platform for web app developers. Let developers grow the platform.Firefox should create a storage service - sell accounts directly to users for $5/month, provide APIs for developers to access user files with permission, use standard file formats, and stay in the distribution and banking business rather than trying to be product visionaries.This approach works because it solves developers' storage reselling problem, enables independent developers to focus on development, creates an ecosystem where developers convince users to buy services, and aligns with Firefox's original mission.The only way to save Firefox is to ask 'What would Firefox do?' and then do exactly that. Return to roots as a lightweight, developer-friendly platform. Stop trying to compete where bigger companies have advantages. Focus on the unique position as an independent browser with developer focus.

Boastful story of Frontier and how it relates to today

I recorded this 23 minute podcast on October 31. I didn't publish it then, but I figured at some point I would. It's the story of how a product like Frontier comes into existence.I had done this before, in 2020, in an oral history I did for a book a friend was writing. This podcast is how I remember it in 2025. :-) If you want to hear how a complicated project comes together when you're developing as you're designing, which I always do -- this is for you. It takes a while to get started, and then I talk fast, and use technical terms without explaining them. Sorry for all that.I want this kind of story told, because the folklore about how software is built or even that software is built at all, by humans, is usually wrong. It's not about invention, it's about building a new machine out of mostly pre-existing parts. Note that in the story there are zero components in the mix that we had not already perfected and commercialized. Some of them came from other developers, but most of them were remixes of themes that had appeared in earlier stories, or maybe ones that had been considered for inclusion but ended up on the cutting room floor, as in a movie editing process.The thing about Frontier is that it made it easy for us to iterate over blogging tools when the time came to work on those. Frontier was the ideal platform for that kind of work, it's why were able to move so quickly and try out lots of approaches. But our runtime was no competition for PHP or Python with SQL. Our database wasn't written to work at that scale, unfortunately -- or a lot more of the world we use today would still be running in our environment. But the ideas persist. Interesting sidebar not mentioned in the podcast, when we did MORE which was a really popular product on the Mac platform of the mid-late 80s, we took everything we had and put it into the product. We didn't leave a single thing out. This was because we had a devteam that could do it, and we were fairly desperate as an ongoing business just before we shipped it (1986). Apple had to loan us $400K to get to shipping! Anyway -- it worked. And that's why we called it MORE, we had no idea which if any of the features would pull people in. Turned out it was the presentations. Anyway -- glad to finally get this out there. Happy Thanksgiving! :-)

Sarah Kendzior and Bluesky

A short podcast about Sarah Kendzior being banned from Bluesky, and why this shouldn't be like any other such event. We should learn, that systems like Bluesky depend on moderation, and they don't have a clear business model, and they've grown very large, and they can't afford to hire moderators who understand the difference between a line from a powerful song, and a threat. If we want a literate web, and I desperately want that myself, it has to be made in a different way. That's what this short podcast is about. And to Sarah, if you hear this, I love your work. You've done here what you usually do so well, you've shown us the truth. Keep on truckin! Dave Winer

It's faster and even simpler than RSS

If I could grab you by the shoulders I would urge you to pay attention. Here's a way to push news around the net that's as fast as you can imagine it being, and even simpler than RSS. It's all about WebSockets, rssCloud and WordPress. Would you spend a few minutes thinking about that? Then here's a podcast for you.Here's the blog post I wrote this morning with all the links you need to explore the sockets tech in FeedLand.