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.