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.

Just by accident found this piece on transcribing podcasts with IBM's Watson. I wonder how it compares with SwiftScribe? Need to give it a try, because as I attempt more complex stories it certainly helps to have a bit of text in addition to notes and markers on the audio.

Terrific video of a talk on #indieweb by Keith J. Grant, who kept remarkably cool during his live demos.

One could, for example, imagine an honest business model – in which people paid an annual subscription for a service that did not rely on targeting people on the basis of the 98 data-points that the company holds on every user. All it would need is for Facebook users to fork out $20 a year for the pleasure of sharing LOLcats with one another.

What’s the likelihood of that happening? You know the answer. Which is why Zuck will continue to keep mum about the sordid reality underpinning his money machine.

#indieweb

Interesting piece on "owning" your distribution channels. #indieweb.

Now, here’s the thing I’ll tell you—if I was running this site on, say, Medium or Tumblr, it would not have buckled. But to me, I think that independence from platforms is a hugely important thing to have in 2017. If you can spin up the server yourself and figure out a way to cobble together funding, you may miss out on some of the perks of larger sites, but you call the shots. 

As Rosalia Vittorini, the head of Italy’s chapter of the preservationist organization docomomo, once said when asked how Italians feel about living among relics of dictatorship: “Why do you think they think anything at all about it?”

Interesting piece on, among other things, Jacob Rees-Mogg

 [H]e’s authentic all right, but that will never make him a populist hero — because he’s not faking it.

I suppose things really have come to this.

I thought I was losing my mind, but this fixed it, and restored me to sanity ... once I remembered to quit and restart the application I was writing in.

[T]he sort of dining rooms that tend to do better on the World’s Top 50 Restaurants list than they do in the Michelin guide; the kitchens where the artistic imperatives of the chef tend to outweigh any questions of what a customer might want to eat; the meals after which a cynical diner, confronted with 20-plus courses of kelp, hemp and tree shoots, makes jokes about stopping for tacos on the way home.

Yeah. No.

And this is some text

Just need to test a non webmention webmention

And Wired doesn't want me to bookmark its page. Hey ho.

What is different about this iteration of white nationalism is how the movement is framing its ideas, and the place those ideas occupy in U.S. politics. One of the chants white nationalists repeatedly turned to as they marched in Charlottesville on Friday night and Saturday was “white lives matter” — a direct response to the “Black Lives Matter” movement that emerged after the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police in August 2014 and the resulting protests.

So depressing, and salutary to read this minutes after finishing listening to the latest episode of the astonishingly good series Seeing White, from Scene on Radio.

A link to a paper by Rich Borschelt, describing his frustration at the failed model of science communication. As Hawks notes:

The sad thing is that such workshops and conferences are funded again and again by organizations on the logic that they are going to do something about science literacy.

Amen.

Really super, fully comprehensive explanation that should make life easier for anyone wanting to make more use of WordPress in the IndieWeb.

Well, yes. And increasingly, as I read pieces like this one, I find myself thinking that although it isn't hard to take the necessary steps to reclaim the social interactions we want, it needs to be done. That makes it a positive step, which gives it extra weight. I've already set up Instagram so I see what I want as I want it. And some of Twitter. FB I really don't care about that much.

[T]he invisible hand is usually just giving you the finger if you care about what you make

This downbeat summary does seem to be on the mark, at least for good software. I didn't upgrade to Day One Premium, because Classic does all I need. Does that make me part of the problem? I don't believe it does, any more than darning my socks (which I don't do) or patching my trousers (which I do) makes me a bad consumer. Definitely, the people who make beautiful software need a better way to sell their creations, and no, I don't know what that might be.

No idea what happened to the million. But the page is an interesting artefact that, in its current state is, I venture, a more accurate keep[sake of the internet than it would be had it all stayed up and running.

The article suggests that:

Given the existence of powerful and widely accessible tools such as the Wayback machine, this kind of restorative curation may well be within reach.

To which I would be fairly vehemently opposed

Truly, I did not know this.

I just know I'm going to regret this. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of my life.