Scripting News: Saturday, December 9, 2023
I've been working all week on the mobile version of FeedLand. It's the best mobile version of anything I've done. I finally figured out how this works, I think. So if you're using FeedLand on a phone, sometime in the next 24-48 hours you may see a significant improvement. I will of course write a blog post about it with screen shots when it does become available. #Braintrust query: Yesterday there was a meeting with people from Meta about their plans to support ActivityPub in Threads. A bunch of people I follow went there saying they'd report on what transpired. I haven't seen one yet. Pointers appreciated.#
After listening to Thursday's Countdown podcast I'd like to read a short book about the presidency after the Lincoln assassination, leading to the impeachment and trial of his successor, Andrew Johnson. This is where the 14th Amendment came from. Some days Olbermann really nails it, this was one of those episodes, left me wanting more. This may be the book, I'm still looking for suggestions. I am not a history scholar, just an interested citizen. #
How I know Twitter was great. When something was going on anywhere, any kind of thing, I'd go to Twitter and it happened there 14 minutes ago. It was the pulse of the news. And somehow they couldn't figure out how to make a business of that! Amazing.#
Heard on ski lift: "I'm not particular, I'll work with anyone as long as the goal is to keep one company from controlling something worthwhile."#
An alert to readers who remember how great it was to have Twitter be the meeting place for news people and their stories prior to the Musk takeover. I think Facebook's new Threads service is poised to replace Twitter in this role, once they add an API that allows pubs to post links to their stories on their service. We will, in a few weeks or months, wish we had proactively formed a non-Facebook news service, a place where by convention we know we can get links to the hot stories as they become available. I think Bluesky is the perfect place to go for this now, but it would require the company behind the service to work with news orgs and independent software developers to quickly build the network. It's possible. They already have the API, we just need to do a little marketing. It's even possible without the help of Bluesky itself, if a few leaders from the news industry got involved, either individuals like Jay Rosen, Emily Bell or Jeff Jarvis, or Richard Gingras who leads news at Google (who thankfully doesn't have a horse in this race) or a big news org or two, acting proactively against turning this valuable space over to a much untrusted big tech company like Facebook. (I don't call them Meta, I think that was a con to give them cover for exactly a move like this, who would ever trust Facebook with such power after what happened in the 2016 election, but Meta is just confusing enough.)#
Follow-up on yesterday's bits about The Atlantic. 1. It is available on newsstands, I did a search and found I could pick it up at the Barnes & Noble in Kingston, a 1/2 hour drive from where I live. $2.20 per issue. A fair price imho. I advertised I'd be willing to pay $5 to read all the articles in the special issue about the second Trump presidency. Driving one hour round trip raises the price considerably. 2. A couple of readers wrote to say that the full text of the Atlantic is available in their RSS 2.0 feed. I knew that, but that isn't the issue. It's very generous of The Atlantic to offer their publication that way, but I'm not looking for a free ride, just a fair deal. I might want to subscribe to The Atlantic, what better way to offer it than on a piece-price basis. I might end up paying more than the subscription price. If I was doing that regularly you bet I'd subscribe. 3. I really dislike the term "micropayments." It's disrespectful of the customer's money, and businesses that do that don't deserve our patronage. When you add up the per-article expense of great pubs like The New Yorker or The Atlantic there would be nothing micro about the money I'd spend. It's the commitment I want to avoid. Magazines are notoriously difficult to unsub from. I'd rather pay more and stay anonymous to them. Anyway, as always thanks to my readers who always offer up good food for thought! 😄#"I'd like a drawing of a sewing room with a perplexed grandma looking at a cat who was playing with balls of yarn and spools of threads, all unwound. The grandma is tangled up in the threads. The cat is smiling, mischievously as if she planned to entangle grandma like this!"#
Linkblog items for the day.
ActivityPub in Threads. There was a meeting last week. Still no clue who said what to whom. github.com
Shohei Ohtani agrees to record $700m, 10-year contract with LA Dodgers. theguardian.com
Threads reveals countdown for an EU launch next week. theverge.com
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