Dave Winer

I’m back at WordCamp in a big room Matt Mullenweg to answer questions for the people here. Yesterday’s presentation went really well, lots of smart people really interested, fantastic discussion after. A very nice web culture. I went with three slides to get started, and then talked, demo’d, answered questions, and listened to ideas. Told a few jokes. Got a few laughs. It got the job done, help feed the word of mouth on WordLand.

Arrived at Carleton Univ, after a 6AM breakfast. Everyone is very cheerful. I met Ryan who is the developer of the WordPress API that WordLand uses. These are web people, one of the last bastions? We all have to work together. And I think we actually are working together. 🙂

Evan Prodromou is talking about long-form text in the social web in Ottawa on Friday. The very important role WordPress is playing to pull the twitter-like world into the actual web instead of their limited idea of the web. Sounds like harmony to me. 😉

It’s actually more than long-form-text that WordPress is supporting via ActivityPub, they’re covering all the basic features of HTML that WordPress supports. This is the web pulling the twitter-like world back to the web, instead of the other way, removing features from the web.

I call this textcasting. Same idea. 😀

BTW, something I’d like the WordCamp Canada folk to have a look at, the home page of my DaveVerse site.

There’s a blogroll down the right side, only it’s unlike any blogroll you’ve seen before.

1. The order changes, when a site updates it goes to the top of the list.
2. If you click on the wedge, you see the titles of the most recent five posts on the site. If they don’t have a title, that’s okay, we use the text of the description.
3. If you roll your mouse over the permalink for each post you can see how the story begins.

If you want to read more about these blogrolls, here’s a good place to start.

I was just catching up on tweets and saw an announcement earlier this week that Matt Mullenweg is going to lead a town hall discussion at WordCamp Canada next Friday in Ottawa. A week from today. I find that exciting. I’ll in the room for sure, and blogging it. Why not? 😉

I am presenting the day before, where I’ll do a demo of the new WordLand, explaining how it’s now twice the product it was last time you all saw it. It is still centered on WordPress as the place where all the user’s writing is published. And somehow through the magic of software, we manage to make it into a social network. And the cool thing about the whole stack of software we build on, all of it is replaceable and of the web, in every sense.

There are things that Bluesky and Mastodon can do that WordLand can’t. But there are also many many things we can do with the structure that WordLand creates that the others can’t touch. There’s a simple reason for that, if implementing something, no matter how attractive,  without limiting the web-ness of the system, we didn’t do it. This is the social network of the web. That means all the pieces connect with each other in fantastic unforeseeable ways. And anyone can discover these connections. That was the joy of the early web, the thought “Hey I think I can do that” and when you try, it works! We’re back there again, if the people come. The technical challenge is still there but now is smaller. Getting people to look and fall in love (hopefully) is the big challenge.

After WordLand 0.8 is ready, real soon now, who knows what’s next? That’s the glory of a bootstrap. Every step tells you where to go next. That’s how you know you’re hitting a target.

I don’t know if Matt will be there for my demo, I hope he is. He and Automattic and the community have created a fantastic platform. Finding WordPress has a super powerful API that I didn’t know about is  like finding a new web. Let me know if you see it too. 😉

So thanks Matt for your great contribution. I hope to be able to thank you for that personally in Ottawa next week. Perfect timing.

I was having a conversation with Dan Knauss from the WordCamp Canada team. He said that people in the WordPress world don't think of it as a blogging community. I can see why they resist that, blogging has gotten a lot of bad PR in the last 19 years. The same bad PR that RSS got, and I felt that was so wrong, as wrong as what people said about blogging. 

We like Twitter. So blogging must be dead. 

I understand — I get it. But that's marketing, and only necessary because Twitter wouldn't let blogging be part of what they did. I'd be happy to talk about that during my keynote if people want to hear why I think that. 

Anyway until 2017 I tried to fit in between the silos. 2017 is when I realized it was hopeless. I couldn't write for the web and for the silos at the same time, I had to choose, so I went with the web. Instant happiness. 

Okay so you don't emphasize blogging in the WordPress community. This imho is a mistake. 

Even if it was a community built around a style of sneakers or audio equipment I would say it's a mistake not to build a custom blogosphere just for the community. In the past we would have used Twitter for this, but I don't think anyone in their right mind wants to try to do that now. Esp a community, like WordPress, that has open web built into its bones. 

I don't have a lot of time to write this morning, so let me leave you with this story.

It took years to boot up blogging as a community. I thought everyone would want to do it as soon as they saw what it was, but there needed to be a critical mass before there could be a critical mass. Logically impossible, right, but somehow it happened anyway. But slowly, in fits and starts.

But podcasting, in contrast, happened much more quickly. The reason? We already had blogging to build on. We had a way to communicate without the press in the middle. That's the power of blogging. We build our own news system. Do things the journalists don't understand or are counter to conventional wisdom. 

So imho it's only coincidence that WordPress happens to be a great blogging tool. It can be that and all the other things it is. It's going to be something else too, if I have my way — it's going to define the basic software that powers the social web. Not peripheral, but central. That and RSS. Incredibly powerful combination, and I think ready to be a strong alternative to the silos. In order for that to work, we have to reboot the blogosphere, so we will do that. 🙂

For a piece on my main blog, I gathered up links to my blog posts about WordPress, they go back further than I thought. 

For example, in 2010 for the Rebooting the News podcast I did with Jay Rosen, we used a WordPress site for the show notes and to distribute the podcast audio. Not surprisingly we had some feature requests/fixes, and of course being bloggers, the requests went on my blog, so they're still there. 

Another example, when Medium was gaining popularity, I wondered if it were possible to make a similar user interface for WordPress. Now we know for sure that it is possible. 

Then I wanted to see how many podcasts I had done about WordPress, I've only had my shownotes site for a short while, but there are a lot more than I thought. 

I use podcasts and blog posts to "think out loud" and also to keep track of how ideas develop. 

If my memory serves, the aha moment for me was a similar one that Nick describes in this wonderful piece about bringing the Cool Kids back to WordPress. It was when I discovered the Node.js package for their API which covered all the functionality of WordPress. It's how their browser software works, not something most people think about, but developers like me do. 

I think we can easily rekindle a blogging community like the one we had in the 90s and 00s, you just have to put your mind to it, and write blog posts that stimulate interest and ideas for others.

Back then we blogged about blogging itself, and then podcasting. Guess what, it's going to be the same now. Every medium primarily talks about itself. I've lived that, but Marshall McLuhan predicted it with his Medium Is The Message soundbite. 

In blogging we used to say we were watching them watch us watch them watch us etc. That's really all human beings do. We love stories about ourselves and each other, friends, family or foes. Inside we're all the same and as they say it's really simple. 😄

I just recorded a podcast to Jeremy Herve, who we’ve been working with, at Automattic.

First, he responded to my piece from last Thursday, Think Different about WordPress.

Then I recorded a 20-minute podcast in response, Last chance for the open web. That’s what it’s really about. WordPress embraced the open web and maintained that support for 22 years. It’s the best platform to build on if your intent is to create an easy writing platform for the open web.

I’m going to do more podcasts in the WordPress community in the coming months, and I think this episode would make good background. I’d be happy to elaborate on any of what’s in this podcast or in the Think Different piece.

I've been reading various interesting WordPress community blogs. 

I'd love to compile a list of these blogs. I would publish the list in a form that others can plug it into their feed readers, or use it as a start for creating their own lists.

I figure the WordPress blogging community should be the best curated list out there? 

Given that it is used to create and edit blogs.. 🙂

Anyway if you know of a few excellent WordPress community blogs please post a comment in response to this post or send me an email at dave at scripting.com.

BTW, here's the list of feeds I have so far.

I’m primarily a writer, my podcasts reflect that, so most of the work I do on each podcast, beyond recording the audio, is in writing the show notes. 

I have a template the writing and audio flow through. Fairly standard stuff, the same approach used by Tumblr and many other blogging systems, including UserLand's Manila and Radio UserLand (I am the founder of UserLand). 

Here's an example of a show notes page rendered through that template. 

The idea of WordLand is to do all the block-oriented work once, outside of the writing environment, then flow the writing through it, far away from the heavy lifting. It’s always how I’ve done my blogging tools. 

I understand WordPress so far has a steady workflow through the block editor, but these are workflows for designers and programmers. WordLand is the flow for writers.  

Note: This post originally appeared on my personal blog.

The nice thing about a blogroll is that it can become a feed reader, in a very small space. It's been on my blog home page for over a year, and I use it a lot, largely because I have to go to that page a lot to see how something I've written looks. Then I see that one of my favorite sites has updated, and I take a quick look to see what's new.

From a technical standpoint, it's hooked into a FeedLand instance where I have created a category called blogroll, and put all the feeds I want in my blogroll in that category. All I have to do to add a new one is subscribe to it in FeedLand, and click the blogroll checkbox. 

Another developer wrote a post about using their blogroll as a feed reader, and I wanted to put my hand up and say yes — this is a good idea. People should do this. 

I like it because it's real innovation in reading, something that imho has been lacking in the feed world. Lots more potential here. 

And you're welcome to use my blogroll as your feed reader. I have put it on its own page but it's at a confusing location. Something to fix, maybe later today if I have some time or tomorrow. 🙂