ProPublica: Local Newspapers Are Vanishing. How Should We Remember Them? As smaller newspapers shrink or disappear, it’s easy to romanticize the role they played. But one reporter’s memories of the heyday of local journalism reveal a much more complicated reality. (My local newspaper has shrunk its overall coverage, now combining content from another local paper).

Thoughts on POSSE and Textcasting

A number of people have posted recently on the subject of POSSE (Dave Winer, Tantek Celik, The Verge, and Bix Fronkonis). POSSE is an acronym for Publish On (your own) Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Dave Winer has also been talking about Textcasting, where he proposes that blogging/social media tools support a common set of features. Dave Winer also talks about “Two-Way RSS”, which I think means that a tool can generate RSS feeds and can use RSS feeds as an input to posts within the tool. I would like to explore these ideas further in the next few paragraphs.

Recently, I got the impression that a Textcasting use case is to allow a user to write in their tool/platform, and have that output be accepted on other platforms as “first-class posts”. What I mean by that is the post appears on the other platform to have been written by the user using the platform’s own tools. Now, a number of platforms don’t support all the features in the Textcasting spec, so even if the other platform accepts input from the user’s platform, it may not represent the text as it appeared in the original platform. In this instance, I might call that a “second-class post”. It may have all the text from the original user platform, but not the styling, or links, or an enclosure.

So, it seems to me that the target of Textcasting is to get Threads/Bluesky/Mastodon/Twitter/Facebook to support the Textcasting feature set (which I assume they don’t, or at least not equally). In each of these cases, the user must have an account on those platforms, so they have an identity and the platform can recognize who is posting. Dave Winer mentions that other blogging tools that support peering for the Textcasting feature set is WordPress and micro.blog. Again, both of these tools require a user account, same as the social media tools listed above, for the same reasons.

What about people who just want to post on your own site? Go ahead – nothing stopping you! For people that want their message to go further, we shall have to wait and see if those platforms are open to change. For open source platforms (Mastodon), someone could make changes in a Mastodon version to support Textcasting. The other aspect of the social media platforms, to me, is that they are social. If you are a writer that wants to have interaction with your readers, and your readers are on those platforms, it makes sense to “get your message out there”.

I recently had to “return to the office”. To make things easier, I am trying to prepare things at the end of the day to make things quicker in the morning (following Anna Havron’s checklist advice). So far, doing prep the night before is working!

Overheard as I passed some cleaners as I was getting off a plane: “Adults can be pigs”.

Podcast Announcement: GeorgiaVTrump.com

I have started a new website, GeorgiaVTrump.com, to cover the Georgia 2020 election interference trial in Fulton County, Georgia. Links to pertinent news coverage will be posted, as well as timeline information and court documents as they are made available. In addition, since the trial proceedings are being made available on YouTube, this site will host a podcast with the audio from those proceedings.

Comments and suggestions are welcome, they can be added to posts, or emailed to info@georgiavtrump.com.

Followup on tools for activism

Ken Smith writes again on this topic, referring again to the need to organize to be successful in activism or other group projects. I recently finished listening to a podcast called “Panther: Blueprint for Black Power“. The podcast tells the story of fighting for voting rights in Lowndes County, Alabama in 1965 and 1966, after passage of the Voting Rights Act. The “blueprint” is not very specific, basically the community organized with the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for voter registration and voting. The community also created a separate political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, to provide an alternate slate of candidates to oppose white supremacy Democratic candidates. Their symbol was the Black Panther, and this was the inspiration for the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

Ken Smith also brings up the topic of tools for organizing that were part of the 2008 Barack Obama campaign website. Thanks to Google, I found a site that collects presidential campaign websites, and saw there were several captures of the original Obama website. I looked at a page with the site after the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Reviewing the home page, there were ways for people to register with the site, to sign up for a newsletter, to find a local group where they could get involved, an area to volunteer to help, and (of course) a donation link. The bottom half of the page looked like a news blog where stories of interest could be posted and read. I assume that these “tools” are what Ken Smith is talking about.

All of these “tools” are pretty standard elements of website design for political websites (link is to collection of 2024 websites). I did a quick review of BuddyPress, a WordPress plugin that “helps you build any kind of community website using WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.” (from the home page). I found an example of a NGO using this application, as well as a collection of 20 other examples. On a broader note, the Action Network provides organizing tools for groups (at some cost). I mention these examples to demonstrate that there are tools and applications available at little to no cost to provide ways for people to organize, read, and write on a topic or issue, so I do not see the “tools” issue as a problem (they exist, but require time and effort to set up and use). The “problem” is that there needs to be a group of people sufficiently interested in an issue to want to organize, and to take the time to use available tools to support that organization. As I have written earlier, the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is a comprehensive set of tools/methods to help communities identify issues and organize to address them. I welcome Ken’s input on if the examples in this post meet his expectations of what people need to organize and take action.