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.

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.