Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

Satur Daze

A view of Winter from my attic office in Arlington, MA in 2009. Still miss living there.

Nows

[5 January update] For some reason, this set of posts I wrote last Saturday appeared on 20 November of last year. Dunno why. Anyway, right now I am in San Marino, California, where it is finally sunny and paradisal, after monsoons soaked the holidays. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Bloomington, Indiana, which (seriously) moved half its population to the Rose Bowl for the Hoosier football team’s victory over Alabama. There is no snow on the ground right now in Indiana, but it’s Winter, so there will be. That’s my excuse for the photo above.

Feel and Look

First, Ethan Mollick’s latest on AI is thoughtful and informative. It also introduced me to Nano Banana Pro, Google’s Gemini-based image creator/editor. This comes at a time when I have sworn off using AI-generated art, because all of it looks like AI-generated art.  My own arc with AI-generated art has gone like this: interested—>fascinated—>practiced—>expert-ish—>tired—>avoidant. That last stage is easy for me, because I have a library of half a million photos of my own to choose from, and I’d rather raid that for an image that works.

I’ll try NBP. (Is it called that yet?) But not soon. I’m too busy looking for ways a personal AI can help me find exactly what I’m looking for inside those half-million photos. And yes, I know Apple has “intelligence” for that. But I think it sucks, and I want an extra brain that’s all mine.

It’s earlier than it appears.

One of my readers tells me another reader (they’re social!) told him she liked it when this blog was all long posts, rather than almost-daily sets of tweet-like ones, such as I posted yesterday and the day before.

My original blog was a mix of both. But my writing streams branched when I started blogging here using WordPress in 2007. Social media was taking off, and writers began using Twitter, Facebook,  Linkedin, and other social media platforms for publishing short stuff. In the midst, tweet became a verb. So I wrote long stuff here, and tweeted the short stuff elsewhere.

What I’m doing now with Wordland is shifting my short-burst bloggings from social media platforms that are not mine to this blog, which is mine: going from dependence to independence. Dave, father of Wordland and much else, is leading that shift, and I advise paying attention to what he’s writing and doing.

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5 responses to “Satur Daze”

  1. Dave Winer Avatar
    Dave Winer

    Thanks for the shout out. I look forward to showing you the next steps, soon I hope.

    Reply
  2. Stephanie Booth Avatar
    Stephanie Booth

    Oh, oh! So are you writing the “subheadings” one at a time as the day moves on? And WordLand puts them all in the same blog post in WordPress?
    “Rebooting the Blogosphere” has fallen in my backlog with my return to work and brain struggles, and it pains me, each time I share stuff on the socials I cringe inside because I know the better system is just out of reach, and it’s one of the so many things I have had to accept to let slide right now…

    Reply
    1. Doc Searls Avatar
      Doc Searls

      Correct. That’s how it works. Wordland reboots the blogosphere on WordPress.

      Reply
      1. Stephanie Booth Avatar
        Stephanie Booth

        Does it publish incrementally as the day and your short-burst bloggings progress, or does it stay in draft and publish at the end of the day? (I think I know the answer but not certain…)

        And can I have my cake and eat it? 🤣 — post to WordPress AND the socials at the same time?

        Reply
  3. Henrik Hemrin Avatar
    Henrik Hemrin

    I can sympathize with your approach to have all your public posts on your own web site. I’m not there, but I have a strategy (not always executed) to write my “important” stuff on my own site.

    Currently I have three categories on my site, each with its own RSS-feed (knowledge, wisdom and Linux). I’m not sure I will keep it that way, because it is not always obvious which category each article belongs to. Maybe better to have one flow but more tags. But one advantage in theory is that a subscriber can choose category. I use Joomla (ie not WordPress), so terms and functions above are for Joomla. On Joomla, my short micro blog posts on social media (mostly Mastodon) should be possible to instead publish on my own site with its own RSS feed if I want to.

    Carl Heath use a WordPress feature/plugin on his own site (https://carlheath.se/) that publish his blog post to a dedicated Fediverse account, where responses from Fediverse also are reflected as post comments at his site. As I understand, he use this: https://wordpress.com/blog/2023/03/17/making-the-social-web-a-better-place-activitypub-for-wordpress-joins-the-automattic-family/ So for WordPress users who wants their posts to interect with Fediverse, this can be interesting.

    Reply

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