Blogger of the Year

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 for his father. This isn't how a 21st century nuclear-armed nation with a powerful economy should operate.

Trump's real estate buddies went to meet with Putin to make deals for the Trump brand, while Putin and Xi have professional teams in constant contact. The naïve plan to split the world into three pieces reflects the same 'move fast and break things' mentality that tech leaders have now abandoned.

Facebook and Zuckerberg no longer move fast and break things - their system is reliable and steady. They're efficient at achieving goals while deliberately misleading people about what they're doing. They established Threads as an alternative to Twitter, though we know who owns it unlike Blue Sky.

The naivety extends to journalists proudly publishing on Substack without checking who owns it or understanding the old saying: if you can't figure out what the product is, you're the product.

A powerful personal story about jury duty reveals how you realize 'the jury is in me' - it's an education process that never leaves you, where judge and attorneys develop you as a juror to make crucial decisions about someone's fate.

Biden is criticized as an idiot who should have disqualified Trump from running. He let the Justice Department handle it while trying to get things back to normal for four years, but Trump should have been constitutionally ineligible for insurrection.

Hakeem Jeffries is making the same mistakes as Biden - just saying Trump's actions were illegal and hoping Republicans will see the importance of legality. The Democrats aren't up to this moment, and we're running out of time.

Jack Smith's investigation and case against Trump never got heard because the Supreme Court ruled on immunity. The transcript and video were released on Christmas Day as a news dump, and mainstream media completely failed to cover it - no one at MSNBC or CNN broke their holiday to report this historic information.

David Frum gets recognition as 'blogger of the year' for his podcast where he talks about what he doesn't know - exactly what bloggers should do. The advice: keep doing what you're doing, be drawn to topics that interest you even if you don't know about them, and bring on experts to teach you.

Brian Lehrer is cited as a model - he brings on experts in areas where he's prepared but lets them teach from their full-time experience. The key is finding experts and reading lots of blogs without caring about qualifications.

Podcasting was created by the speaker and Adam Curry to be a medium open to everybody with no gatekeepers. The success means it's hard to find good stuff, so we need better discovery tools - let people be the algorithms, not opaque AI systems.

Examples of programming your own algorithm: asking ChatGPT to build RSS feed lists for NBA news without paywalls, or student newspapers at US universities. The speaker's blog at scripting.com features an innovative blog roll that's actually a feed reader.

Final advice to David Frum and others: get out of your bubble, discover people with intelligent expertise who interest you, but only do it if it feels good - learning is supposed to be enjoyable.

Dave Winer

PS: I wrote up the Blogger of the Year award on Scripting on January 6.