I told Doc we had arrived at the Holy Moment in debugging — reproducibility. I told him “reproducible” is the programmer’s favorite word. If you can tell me the steps to reproduce the problem, then I can find it and fix it. Until it’s reproducible all I can do is share your frustration.
Dave Winer – Reproducible.
Podcatch.com. A collection of podcast feeds via friends and friends-of-friends of Dave Winer. It’s a neat idea for discovering something new to listen to. There’s more background, too, on what led to building it.
When you let it be itself, everything on the Internet belongs to everything else. The walls tech people try to raise, to convince investors that there’s dollar value there, are fake. They don’t hold anything behind them that has any lasting value. The only things that stand a chance are things that flow. And for that, the walls get in the way.
What is a Public Editor? I’m curious which news organization will be the first to implement this because eventually one will.
There’s a big bug in our news system.
We like to say it’s a 24-hour news cycle. And maybe it is, but there’s real news, stuff that effects our lives, that happens over a much longer span of time. Boring or not, we have to keep cycling back to it, for our own good.
Dave Winer – Some news is slow.
Amen.
There’s lots of stuff going on right now that I’m not part of. That’s the way it goes. Me and Facebook are over. It’s going to stay that way. And if I’m on a ship that’s sinking, well I’ve had a good run, and I can afford to go down with the ship, along with people who share my values. It’s a cause, I’ve discovered, that’s worth giving something up for.
Dave Winer – Scoble: I’ll go down with the ship.
One day the Times will have the courage to devote a serious amount of their space to self-criticism. To teach the readers how to file bug reports, and actually learn how to listen to them. And their product quality will soar. Until then, we should all be following the Examiner so there’s at least some balance to the reporting in the Times.
Dave Winer – NY Times Examiner.
I don’t think we can afford to view politics or technology as we view baseball. In baseball, I can personally insult Yankees fans, or condescend to Cubs fans, or feel a soulful affinity with fellow Mets fans, and it’s all fun. Because we know it totally doesn’t matter. But these other things do matter. So we really can’t afford to think of it as Us vs Them. It’s not Republicans vs Democrats, it’s Americans deciding what we want our government to do. And in technology, it’s the people of the world, in very much the model of Jefferson, deciding what we want to be. And not having corporations and their need for profit, be the sole determinant.
Dave Winer – Baseball vs real life
I happen to think journalism was a response to publishing being expensive. It cost a lot of money to push bits around the net before there was a net. They had to have huge capital-intensive printing plants, fleets of trucks and delivery boys with paper routes. Now we can hear directly from the sources and build our own news networks. It’s still early days for this, and it wasn’t that long ago that we depended on journalists for the news. But in a generation or two we won’t be employing people to gather news for us. It’ll work differently.
Dave Winer – Arrington is the future of what we used to call journalism.
I’ve been saying this for fifteen years. It’s one of those ideas that at first seems unbelievable, then you realize it means freedom and responsibility in a whole different way. Sources Go Direct is the biggest single change in the way news works in the age of the Internet.
Dave Winer – Sources Go Direct in today’s news.