Scripting News podcast

Notes prepared by Claude.ai. It makes mistakes, like where it was recorded, but gets the story remarkably well.

A solo Dave Winer podcast, recorded over breakfast in a parking lot in Kingston, NY.

The episode starts with something Dave read from Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, arguing that open source developers have to care for ecosystems, not just their own source code. It landed, because Dave's spent the last couple of years getting close to WordPress and wrestling with a basic question: what is WordPress? Not a company with a single strategy the...

Notes prepared by Claude.ai.

In this episode, Dave returns to a theme he's been circling for years: the social web's central failure isn't a lack of features, it's the locked doors. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, and Amazon build genuinely useful tools, but they're designed to capture users and prevent the combining of one tool with another to make something new. This is the oldest fight in software—the tension between the "programming priesthood" who believe they have all the answers, and the tool makers and users who want new ideas to flow in around the pr...

As before I asked Claude.ai to do the show notes, from its point of view. I added links. As always if you really want to know what I said you have to listen. :-)

Dave Winer left a voicemail for his longtime friend NakedJen making the case that now is the moment to start playing with AI tools, particularly Claude. He describes a creative breakthrough he's been experiencing — not because AI has suddenly gained new capabilities, but because his own thinking has evolved to the point where he can see what's possible and act on it.

As before I asked Claude.ai to do a synopsis, from its point of view. I added a link to Brent's post and a postscript. As always if you really want to know what I said you have to listen. :-)

Dave opens by riffing on a post by Brent Simmons, who described feeling, for the first time in his career, that he has his app completely under control — no chaos in the source code. Dave almost believes it's possible, but notes the catch: you can only get there on the fourth or fifth implementation of a gi...

As before I asked Claude.ai to do a synopsis. I corrected one factual error (informing it, waiting for a new version, not correcting the writing). And I think it may have missed the big points of both, but I will respect its opinion. As always if you really want to know what I said you have to listen. :-)

Dave Winer responds to a recent episode of the David Frum podcast, in which Frum's guest was Tim Miller of The Bulwark. The topic that caught his attention: why young men are turning to Trump. He has...

As with previous podcasts I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes based on a machine-generated transcript. It makes mistakes, so you have to listen to the podcast if you want to know what I really think. But it's pretty good, and will help search engines find this.

Dave Winer's Twitter account was hijacked, and the experience crystallized something he's been thinking about: AI's first killer app in tech should be customer service.

The incident unfolded quickly and confusingly. Dave received an email from Twitter claiming copyright infringement on content he himself had created...

As with previous podcasts I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes based on a machine-generated transcript. It makes mistakes, so you have to listen to the podcast if you want to know what I really think. But it's pretty good, and will help search engines find this. Additionally, I refer to the Think Different piece as revealing the big missing piece in web apps, the problem I hope to solve with WordLand and the competitive products that I want to encourage.

Dave Winer reaches back nearly four decades to tell the story of Frontier, his...

As with the previous podcast I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes. It makes mistakes, so you have to listen to the podcast if you want to know what I really think. This time it wrote it in the first person, not third person which I would have preferred. At the end I have some of my own notes. DW

This story about XML-RPC's creation in 1998 feels relevant because we're on the verge of something similar today, but this time it might go much further.

Frontier was a comprehensive scripting environment with object...

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...

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.<...

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...

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.

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.

I'm in the homestretch on the next release of WordLand. This version has approximately twice as many features as the last one. Because, like Radio UserLand from long ago, it does both reading and writing. But the UI is different. It's patterned after all the twitter-like products. It answers the question -- could you do a nice social network with nothing more than RSS and WordPress. And the answer is an emphatic yes.

And of course there is no center to the RSS universe, it might have benefited from one (ask me about it) but it didn't...

When I started blogging, early on, I had a different system for discourse.

Here's how it worked:

First each post would go out via email to a group of eleven people. I was cc'd.

The group was randomly chosen each time, so you might not know anyone in your group, or you might know two or three. Each time it's a different group.

You could reply to my post by just replying to the email. You can do a reply-all so that everyone in the group sees your comment. I would...

I'm starting to roll up the user interface of the new product, and so it's time to start talking about the features that are coming, and also let's talk about the mistakes we made last time, almost always caused by people not working with each other, and let's not do it this time. If you care about this stuff and you're a developer, please have a listen. This is a good time for us to start really working together. All I can do is put out the invitation, it's up to others to show up.

I cover...

I wrote a blog post last week about WordPress and the open web, and what I want to do there. It's the first time I've laid out in one place my plan for rekindling the open web, with my new editor providing a really easy way to write for the open web that does not otherwise exist today. It came out on the opening day of a WordPress conference in Portland, OR, and it made an impression, which I'm grateful for, and led to some discussion. Now I'm going to do some podcast interviews and next month I'm going...

I recorded this podcast in New Orleans on December 16, 2005. I had just spent three days there, visiting New Orleans and the Gulf coast of Mississippi, post Katrina.

I've always been fascinated by the evolution of cities, here was a chance to see a city that I was familiar with, having gone to Tulane in the early 70s, with its structure (roads and large buildings) still mostly in place but most of the people and their homes gone. As you might imagine the things I learned were not the things I thought I would learn. That's what this...

My house has a view of a pond, which is endlessly interesting, year-round, through all seasons.

And we have all the seasons here in the Catskill Mountains.

Yesterday, I spied a large bird in the pond, so I grabbed my binoculars, and I'll tell the rest of the story in the podcast, don't want to spoil the surprise! :-)

Dave Winer explores his frustrations with ChatGPT's tendency to overcomplicate simple programming tasks. What should be a straightforward request for pagination code—a standard feature in virtually every application—becomes an exhausting back-and-forth where the AI insists on offering alternatives and asking unnecessary follow-up questions rather than directly answering what was asked.

This experience leads to a broader observation about modern digital services: they seem deliberately designed to waste time. Whether it's ChatGPT dragging out interactions, Google's labyrinthine customer support, or intentionally confusing billing statements, there's a pattern of artificial friction that benefits the service provider at the...

On Thursday I wrote: "It would be interesting if Pocket Casts had an API. I would love to be able to one-click subscribe to a podcast in my feed reader. I mention Pocket Casts because it's the podcast client I use on my phone, but I would obviously like to see them all support an API, ideally a common API."

Today I explain why that would open things up nicely.

Basically I do my feed discovery on my desktop. My phone is for listening to podcasts, either while driving, walking or riding. My eyes are...

I've been thinking a lot about Harvard lately, and a revealing podcast interview with the top editorial person at Wired.

Elon Musk wasn't over-exposed, he burned out. If he hadn't saluted like a Nazi, boasted about putting USAid in a wood chipper, pranced around on stage with a chainsaw, and done so much damage to the US government, we still don't know how much, he could have chilled out, sold a fleet of Teslas to Trump, and gone on to his next adventure. We would have all been glued to our sets.

Twitter elected a...

"Behave like a computer. That's where we start."

ChatGPT is not a programming partner, it's a very fantastic improvement over search engines. That's reality.

Having used ChatGPT and various other AI tools for over two years now, and using it in my programming work every day, I can now report a basic flaw in the design of the tool, which is what it is. It tries to be a programming partner. A control freak and fairly ignorant programming partner. An incredible search engine though.

Now, this approach works well for things I don't...

I listened to an Evan Osnos podcast interview with Katie Drummond. Osnos is a reporter at the New Yorker, Drummond is the top editor at Wired.

Summary: AI is not just hype — it’s a transformative breakthrough on the scale of past revolutions like the web and personal computing. But journalism risks missing the story by filtering it only through billionaires or old frameworks. What’s needed is realism, openness, and listening to a wider range of voices.

PS: Sorry for the abbreviated show notes. Technical difficulties prevented me from iterating over it last night.

WordCamp Canada is doing a great job of creating a little community around my keynote there in October.

I have some experience running blogging conferences, I did the first ones in the US starting in 2003 called BloggerCon.

In a lot of ways I want to see if we can reboot the blogosphere in the age of social media and get the web and twitter-like services to merge. Until then imho the idea of the "social web" remains a dream.

I also feel very strongly that WordPress is a key part of that ecosystem...