The moral is, in a way, obvious: it’s a confirmation of Bruce Schneier’s original observation that “surveillance is the business model of the Internet”. Being a pedant, I would have said “of the Web”, but since many people can’t distinguish between the two, we’ll leave Bruce’s formulation stand.

Gratuitous, but fun:

Ernst Mayr, a prominent figure in biology had opined that hybridization was an unimportant factor in evolution, as far as I can tell for no particular reason at all. For equally mysterious reasons, people paid attention to him.

I  have a sneaking suspicion that if tomorrow Apple or Google just subscribed everyone to 99% Invisible and waited, FM radio would be dead in a year.

Sweet thought, but unlikely. 

Owning your content isn’t about portable software. It’s about portable URLs and data. It’s about domain names.

Cannot say this often enough.

Thanks to Adactio for the link.

This is the question that underscores all the subsequent ones:

[S]hould we be trying to appease Google?

Also, I hope I'm not the only one to be grateful that the article is from Anil Dash.

This one is really interesting, and had never occurred to me. Not that I have much choice when changing continents.

PROPERLY BREAKING UP A FLIGHT JOURNEY

Simple rule, I’ve learned the hard way: 2 equal length legs of a journey are far better than one long leg and one short one. If the entire world is conspiring against you, and you cannot get a non-stop flight, pick the one with the most equal durations of flying times and try to get a 2 hour layover. That’s enough to pee, stretch, eat, and not stress if your incoming flight is delayed. Also: it’s always better to fly in and out of larger airports as there’s far better food options.

Duncan says:

(Researchers themselves are sometimes the most reluctant to undertake user research before spending serious amounts of money on ineffective websites.)

Strange, isn't it.

(The 9 rules themselves are at Medium and, I hope, somewhere else too. Because you never know.)

The principle puzzle of podcasting lies in the fact that because it has an extremely low barrier to entry, it has an extremely high barrier to scale.

I've never done this myself, honest, but I can understand that it is tempting for a whole reason. And I like both ends of the spectrum of justification:

The authors further proposed that retailers bore some blame for the problem. In their zeal to cut labor costs, the study said, supermarkets could be seen as having created “a crime-generating environment” that promotes profit “above social responsibility.”

... and ...

“Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron,” reads one of the more militant comments in a Reddit discussion on the subject. “There is NO MORAL ISSUE with stealing from a store that forces you to use self checkout, period. THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE.”

The white man, Tocqueville wrote as he observed race relations in America, ‘is to the men of other races what man himself is to the animals’, in the sense that he ‘makes them serve his purposes, and when he cannot make them bend, he destroys them.’ A social order built on systemic violence made the black man, Tocqueville recognised, an ever present menace in his white master’s imagination. 

Still I find it hard to internalise this understanding, no matter how much I may "know" it.

“Years later I can hear the sizzle of my right retina as the burning ember connected with the delicate, light-sensitive tissue”

Not to defend the special hell that is a cruise, but is there not one person in the editorial chain of that piece who actually understands the anatomy of the eyeball?

I want to make listening to or subscribing to a podcast as easy as sending an email. Or easier!

A very worthy goal, I don't doubt it. Sounds a bit like the universal Subscribe button that some people think is needed to get #IndieWeb writing going again. 

In any event, I wish them much luck and will be attempting to keep an eye on podTo.

Gavin belonged to a school of one. Throughout most of his career – which was a vocation conducted on his own terms – it was evident to anyone of the slightest sentience that he was the eminent architectural writer of his generation. During much of that time architectural criticism in Ingerlandlandland was no such thing; it was a matter of giving great forelock to a few big names, it was fawning, anilingual sycophancy, a barely dissembled form of PR.

He also, and this may be a little-known fact, designed letterheads for like-minded colleagues, myself included.

PESOS from https://www.reading.am/p/4VaG/https://www.rousette.org.uk/archives/jeans-and-freedom/.

PESOS from https://www.reading.am/p/4VdJ/https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/20....

Atlantic City came up in iTunes shuffle today, reminding of this absolute masterpiece (best enjoyed while listening along; also, if the images seem like ancient history, note they’re from just 3 months ago) 

 

So very fine; I had never seen this before. I hope it never vanishes.

I've set out in as much detail as I can understand what is happening when I try to POST a Bookmark with a Description to WithKnown.

And to add insult to injury, I'm adding this Description by hand, so I can include a blockquote:

[I]f you try to POST anything other than the URL of the bookmark, it simply never appears. With the help of good IndieWeb people, especially zegnat and cweiske, we worked out what was happening.

#indieweb #withknown

#testtag

And a bit of description

It’s almost as if the ubiquitous surveillance of people’s every move on the web wasn’t a very good idea in the first place.

M'kay. Tell that to the squillionaires.

Essentially, the non-semantic web is a balkanised hellscape of competing open and proprietary metadata standards.

And I don't blame him one bit. Moreover, I'm increasingly fed up with the idea of modifying my website to do the work of undoing the Balkan megalomania.

#indieweb

But now here's the thing, when I do this by hand directly in WithKnown, it allows me to post some lines of description.

And a #testtag

But I ddo not seem to be able to do the same thing with micropub. Probably because I am doing it wrong.

PESOS from https://gregorlove.com/2017/12/indieweb-wordpress-feedback/">reading.am

PESOS from https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/09/03/Murder-chez-Hitler">reading.am

PESOS from https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/09/03/Murder-chez-Hitler">

PESOS+from+%3Ca+href%3D%27https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reading.am%2Fp%2F4Njk%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.tbray.org%2Fongoing%2FWhen%2F201x%2F2017%2F09%2F03%2FMurder-chez-Hitler%27%3Ereading.am%3C%2Fa%3E

PESOS+from+%3Ca+href%3D%27https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reading.am%2Fp%2F4Njk%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.tbray.org%2Fongoing%2FWhen%2F201x%2F2017%2F09%2F03%2FMurder-chez-Hitler%27%3Ereading.am%3C%2Fa%3E

Carrier argued that gift wrap transforms something impersonal into something personal—ritually turning an anonymous commodity into an idiosyncratic gift. In today’s terms, for example, the iPhone anyone can buy becomes, when wrapped, the iPhone I got for you. Carrier pointed out that this is why homemade gifts, such as a jar of jam, don’t require full wrapping. A simple bow around the top will do.

So interesting to read things like this at the same time as enjoying The Circle by Dave Eggers.

Plus, a really good reminder to get my head around why I am tracking things and what to do about that.

So interesting to see this, not only as a piece of history but also as a personal reminder.

Back when the web was young and shiny, an otherwise extremely intelligent BBC television producer, a friend at the time, asked my help in understanding the promise of the new shinyness, especially in visual terms. I told him about the famous coffee pot web cam (and maybe, also, about the link to the Coke machine).

"Isn't that great," I said, "that you can see whether there's coffee in the pot without having to leave your computer."

"But you could just get up and look."

"Well yes, but the coffee pot could be anywhere in the world."

"What's the point of that? You can't go and get a cup of coffee there."

"True. But it doesn't have to be a coffee pot. It could be, oh, anything."

"I just don't see the point."

Of couse he went on to produce a highly acclaimed series, and much else besides.

The simplest way to describe the attitude of software engineers and companies to linguistic interfacing with their customers would be to say that they do not give a monkey's fart about such matters. Not only do they never have a linguist check the use of language in the programs they expect us to use (that'll be the day), they don't have anybody at all checking it.

If they program interfaces this carelessly, just how likely is it that robots are going to respect the Three Laws of Robotics?

Not just software engineers.

I suppose I'm just not enough of a herd-dweller to understand either why some people insist that RSS is dead or are surprised that it remains alive and well. Colin Walker, in one of his characteristically thoughtful pieces, has this to say:

When Google Reader closed people had to actively seek an alternative in order to continue consuming their RSS feeds. This pushed many towards simply using their social streams - they couldn’t be bothered to find an equivalent service and re-add all their feeds.

No such need would exist with something like webmentions. People may not be able to immediately interact with as many properties but things wouldn’t stop working for those not hosted on the major player’s platform.

Well, OK. But that's not how it went for me. I found Newsblur pretty quickly and have stuck with it, although I hear good things about lots of other readers. I never really took to the idea of any of the social silos being a substitute for a reader, and as they become more algorithmic they became less and less interesting on that score.

I do wish Newsblur would do more on the sharing front. For a while it allowed cross-posting to ADN and I can't imagine it would be that hard to allow more generalised cross-posting, but the developer just doesn't seem that interested.

The huge draw of RSS for me is that it costs nothing if a site lays dormant for months or even years. Just last week, a site I subscribe to sprang back into life after more than three years. I can't believe that would ever have made it into my timeline at a silo.

This is just so astonishingly cool and Jetson-like.

Sunk costs rears its ugly head again:

Little Boy cost, well, a bomb. It seemed a shame after all that effort not to drop on somebody.

As proven by his stunts, Richard Branson knew how to drive a tank. Unfortunately for Virgin Cola, Coke knew how to control an army.

The things you find when going through old stuff.

Can't say I am too surprised. But I wish I were.

Such a sensible analysis. I ought to think a bit more myself along these lines. 

Effectively, Google’s autocomplete function is working as my “desktop dashboard,” a flow of messages from the deep space of the Google data sphere.