This NYT article (no paywall) is a summary of how tech is moving quickly to bring ChatGPT-like functionality to people's content, through email and cloud-based documents.
It's remarkable how quickly this is happening, and not surprising because ChatGPT is such a compelling app, and it's doubly-so when applied to our own writing. But so far there's one glaring omission, these bots don't know where my blog is. Who is going to fill that gap, not with an experiment, but with something up to par at least with the way Bard understands Gmail, which is still pretty simple, but I imagine it's only going to get better, quickly.
Yesterday the "former president" as he's referred to on TV, or Mr President on NBC, shared a post that said Jewish liberals are destroying America.
Let's mark this line clearly. Talk like that is full of alarm for Jewish people, esp those raised by people who survived the last holocaust. If this doesn't stop you in your tracks, then you probably won't notice when they start calling us vermin, restricting our movement, take our property, move us to ghettos and then systematically incinerate us the way you would rid yourself of an infestation. You know the old story about the frog boiling in water. We all are on that path. This was always where Make America Great Again was going, an America with all the Jews dead. That this isn't Story One on every front page and newscast says everything you need to know about how journalism is failing us.I'm not sure spending $500 million to support local journalism will do more than buy a little time for a system that isn't working.
I've always felt the money would be better spent in teaching anyone who wants to learn the basic skills and practices of journalism, so that lots of approaches are possible. Sources go direct, ie blogging. I have long advocated that a semester of journalism should be encouraged or required for a university degree. What's the point of educating a mind if that mind doesn't know how to share the knowledge with others? My blogger colors are showing here. I still believe the people are our best hope. And I think journalism failed and propping it up will help keep reporters employed a little longer, but I don't think it will create a foundation that can be built on. We will still have an urgent need for news we can trust.Textcasting revisited
Textcasting applies the philosophy of podcasting to text.
It also describes what we should have done when Twitter first came along, what I would have done if I were them. We would have had a much different situation now.
Textcasting also says that all the tribulations of Activitypub aren't necessary. No one has bothered to think this through at the top level, everyone is working in niches, not really aware of what anyone else is doing.
Journalism also refused to look. So they were guided into a gulag by Twitter and now they don't like it. If anyone had thought through where they were going, that would have led to textcasting too. They should have owned the new news environment, instead they and we were controlled by it.
The thing that keeps me focused is writers. It's all about writers, what tools they need to think and collaborate, without boundaries.
