The Federalist: Battle-Tested Trump Brings A New And Improved Ground Game To Iowa – A summary of how Trump’s campaign organization has built a strong network of caucus captains to get out the vote in the Iowa caucuses.

Washington Post: Why Trump is winning, as shown in Wednesday night’s dueling programming (Philip Bump). The key quotes: “Trump is famous and powerful and viewed by many Americans as the country’s salvation….[The caucus captain hat] was a symbol that Kim was part of Trump’s essential inner circle. Kim and her fellow caucus captains are, for the next week or so, some of the most important people in Trump’s world, and that hat proves it….This is what Trump gets about politics that his opponents don’t: Voters — and particularly his voters — want to be part of something outside of themselves. Trump has effectively commuted their frustrations about the world into a sense of optimism about how he’ll overcome or destroy those frustrations.”

James’ Coffee Blog: Advent of Technical Writing – a series of posts on the topic of technical writing, published in December 2023, lots of good nuts-and-bolts writing advice.

Remembrance of the 3rd anniversary of the January 6th Insurrection

There were two major events yesterday (January 5, 2024) remembering the events of the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. A news conference was held by members of Congress:

President Joe Biden visited Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and gave a speech on the insurrection and other topics:

This excerpt from the Valley Forge speech emphasized that “democracy is on the ballot in 2024”:

On January 5th, 2024, the Supreme Court accepted the case to review the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that Donald Trump should be removed from the 2024 primary ballot in Colorado. With oral argument scheduled for February 8th, 2024, there should be some clarity soon as to whether the attempts to use the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution to keep Trump off the 2024 election ballot will succeed.

Other resources:

  • My liveblog of the events of January 6th
  • My assessment of the electoral vote count events
  • My remembrance of the second anniversary of the January 6th insurrection
  • CNN: Timeline of January 6th coup (published November 5, 2021)
  • CNN: January 6th coverage
  • CNN: In pictures: The January 6th Capitol Riot
  • NBC News: January 2022 remembrance events coverage (over 8 hr)
  • NPR: Audio timeline of January 6th events
  • Wikipedia: Timeline of the January 6th US Capitol Attack
  • CNN: Joe Biden speech on January 5, 2024: ‘Trump did nothing’: Biden reflects on January 6 insurrection
  • The Hill: Jan. 6 anniversary falls as experts sound alarm over risks to American democracy
  • Indivisible Project: January 6 Day of Action Guide (links to Google Doc)
  • US Dept. of Justice: Three Years Since the Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol (update on prosecutions)

Who should be working together on Textcasting?

In recent posts, Dave Winer has been bringing up the “working together” mantra in regards to the Textcasting concept. This has been a difficult concept for me to grasp – working together with who? Today, Dave sheds a little more light on this:

When I say textcasting is “applying the philosophy of podcasting to text” — what I mean in practical terms is that my flow of ideas is available “where ever you get your text.” Choice in subscribing has to be that fluid, commonsense, and choice is something people feel entitled to, as they do with podcasts. I’ve been told people would never understand the philosophy of podcasting, but they do, they understand they’re entitled to choice in how to listen and thus producers are free to choose where to publish. Somehow text, which is so much easier to transmit than audio, is far less flexible. That’s a mistake I want to undo, but I can’t do it alone. I need to work with other people who have writing and reading tools, and people who have something to say and want all the features of writing to be at their disposal, and for it to be easy, inexpensive but not free of charge, and not owned by the titans of tech. (bold/italics emphasis by Andy Sylvester)

from http://scripting.com/2023/12/30.html#a160414

I think the key part of the highlighted text is “other people who have writing and reading tools” – that is, people who are involved in developing writing and reading tools, or the primary developers of reading and writing tools. Dave Winer did press Bluesky to add RSS feeds as a native feature in the Bluesky client, and this occurred on December 22. He has also developed some software to be able to post to WordPress, Mastodon, and Bluesky via a REST call, so I guess these three platforms are not the ones Dave wants to work with?

Two other concepts in this paragraph also deserve some review:

  • my flow of ideas is available “where ever you get your text.”
  • Choice in subscribing has to be that fluid, commonsense, and choice is something people feel entitled to, as they do with podcasts.

To me, this moves beyond the “feature list” as defined at Textcasting.org. The first bullet implies that a writer should be able to publish their writing such that it can be seen in any tool. Apps that create RSS feeds of content could be read in any RSS reader, so if all writing apps created RSS feeds of the output of their apps, a user could use a RSS reader app to read that content. However, I don’t think that is the direction that the first bullet is heading. My feeling is that the real message of this bullet is “my flow of ideas should be able to be posted on any social media network without me having to re-enter my ideas into some other editor or tool”. THAT would definitely require app developers to work together to make that happen. And why would they do that? I have been thinking about the struggle to get Twitter/X/Facebook/Threads to create RSS feeds. My simplistic thought is that if users could get the content using RSS feeds without going through the platform app/interface, the users would not be exposed to the ads that that the platform has, which is the primary means of support for those applications. From that standpoint, it does not make business sense for those applications to give the content placed in their apps away in that manner.

This brings me to the second bullet mentioned above. To me, this could be a description of the “pain” experienced by Mastodon users when trying to follow another Mastodon user on a Mastodon instance different from the one that hosts their accounts. Similarly, it could also describe the pain of trying to subscribe to a RSS feed. As I mentioned earlier, THAT would definitely require app developers to work together to make that (cross-app subscription and forwarding of content) happen. And why would they do that? I don’t know. As an aside, for many podcasting apps, their feed search feature is good enough to find a podcast feed from search terms, so I don’t think that is the use case being highlighted by the second bullet.

To return to the title of this post, I think the people that need to work together on textcasting are primarily developers. As the developers have applications, they should then evangelize their work to potential users. To me, this seems to be the approach that the Textcasting “movement” needs to follow.