Two savvy treats on one day. Jeremy Keith takes a general look at the power of internet companies in his post on Ends and means. Tim Bray focuses specifically on the utility that is Google Maps in his post Reviewing Ethics.

Jeremy: Going back to the opening examples of online blackouts, was it morally wrong for companies to use their power to influence politics? Or would it have been morally wrong for them not to have used their influence?

Tim: Call me crazy, but I’d pass leg­is­la­tion to keep Google from do­ing what they’re do­ing. They should be able to sell space on the map­s, and they should be able to pro­vide qual­i­ty fil­ter­s, and col­lect feed­back on re­views and down­grade or up­grade them ac­cord­ing­ly. But no damn way should they own the map and the crowd­sourced value-adds on the map.

No collusion, I'm sure, just two smart people addressing their concerns about good behaviour by those who make and use the web.

One of the good things about WordPress is how flexible it seems on the surface, able to perform all sorts of wizardry. One of the bad things about WordPress is how that very flexibility often makes it extremely difficult to achieve any sort of wizardry. That seems particularly true of anything to do with the #indieweb.

So I was surprised to learn that Aaron Davis was having difficulty implementing a ZenPress child theme

Surprised because I run fornacalia.com with a ZenPress child theme and cannot recall any difficulties in setting that up. I think there may have been some issues with capitalisation of various names, but beyond that, I'm at a loss. I'd love to help -- but not sure how best to do that.

Maybe I should just share my child theme.

Webmentions are the glue that sticks all the bits in all the sites together.

That’s my one-liner about one of the core ideas about the #IndieWeb, but it doesn’t actually tell you very much if you want to know how the glue works. I’ve kind of absorbed a moderately high-level abstraction over the past little while of playing with webmentions, but a friend asked for more:

Do you know of any diagrams that explain how this stuff works without all the … words that web communities seem to enjoy creating? I keep coming back to this topic every so often, and every time I return things just appear more complicated and broken than before …

I don’t think that last opinion is merited, but then I would say that. And right now I don’t have the time to write up my understanding. I’m pretty sure I saw something clear and to the point a little while back, but I’m blowed if I can find it now. So here are four pieces I have found.

• Implementing Webmentions, which contains a good verbal description of the flow.
• Adactio: Journal—Parsing webmentions, which explains some the technology too.
• So long Disqus, hello Webmention has a go at why webmentions are a good idea and some of the nuts and bolts of implementation.
• Webmentions · Rudiger Meyer is another good verbal description of the how, along with the why and the what.

These may not answer the question fully, but they are a start. And they might inspire me to write my own version, especially if I could have a synchronous discussion about it with my interlocuter.

I have only seen one side of Nick Snelgar's dispute with his local planning authority but I have no reason to doubt what I've seen there. To me it seems indisputable that, no matter what politicians like Michael Gove may say, there is no real desire to allow small farmers to reform the farming and food landscape in England.

Over at Scripting News, Dave Winer says:

Every blog should have a Subscribe button. In an open ecosystem this is a problem, a problem that silos don't have. Which is the advantage Twitter (a silo) has over the open web.

I guess I'm not smart enough to see what that problem might be.

Some of the people rediscovering independent publishing on their own domains are agonising over self-censorship, guilt and the like. I'm slowly continuing to bring old posts over into my main site. That goes for the ones that hurt a bit to read.

The only ones I'm not bringing are link posts that include dead links. A few are just too topical to bother with. The others are coming over, albeit not very quickly, even if I have to go searching for archived pages to link to.

Along the way, Salmon has this to say:

the world’s billionaires – the richest 2,000 people on the planet – saw their wealth increase by a staggering $762 billion in just one year. That’s an average of $381 million apiece. If those billionaires had simply been content with staying at their 2016 wealth, and had given their one-year gains to the world’s poorest people instead, then extreme poverty would have been eradicated. Hell, they could have eradicated extreme poverty, at least in theory, by giving up just one seventh of their annual gains.

Hang on a minute. Wouldn't the billionnaires need to make that awesome sacrifice every year? Or does the fact the people would slide back into extreme poverty next year not matter?

Catching up on reviewing my Christmas reading: Unbelievably dystopian

Latest episode of Eat This Podcast is up now. Bread as it ought to be.

It is always interesting to read of someone else deciding to give the IndieWeb a try. I like what Michael Singletary has to say, especially this

Most of my online friends and acquaintances will never understand or participate in the IndieWeb, and so I require a bridge between these worlds. On one side I choose what content to post and how it is stored, and it exists mainly on an island that few visit regularly. On the other side is nearly everyone I know, blissfully ignorant of my real home on the web and unable to see any content shared there without manual intervention or working plugins.

What really struck me, though, was the line in his bio: “Blogging since 2002, taking control of my content since 2018.”

I lost some of my pre–2002 posts, not through the actions of any evil silo (were there any, then?), but through my own idiocy in misplacing a crucial backup. And I never really got on board the silo first band-wagon, so in a sense I have always owned the content I care about owning. Most of my friends do consider it kind of weird that I didn’t see the photo they posted only to FB, but they’re only too happy to show them to me one on one. So yes, for now few people visit this island, and that’s OK. I enjoy the ones who do.

I'm using the IndieWeb in an attempt to make it easier for everyone to visit, and that works too.