Month: May 2018

On the mission of the IndieWeb movement

What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) is fine when you’re given all the functionality and control you need or want. It’s when you have additional needs and desires than the tools allow that WYSIWYG becomes a problem.

Social media WYSIWYG platforms like SnapChat, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, et al. have become a problem as they’re not allowing us the control, flexibility, and privacy we would all like to have while they pursue their own agendas.

In these terms, the general mission of the IndieWeb movement is to be the proverbial simple text editor meant to give everyone increasingly easier, direct control over their own identity and communication on the open internet.

hat tip: Greg McVerry

👓 Want To Upend An Entire Industry? Change Its Revenue Stream | Co.Design

Read Want To Upend An Entire Industry? Change Its Revenue Stream by Ryan Baum (Jump Associates) (Co.Design)

By looking at the eight possible revenue models you can reinvent a business.

There may be an infinite number of variations a company can use to make money, but they really all boil down into eight types:

  1. Unit sales: Sell a product or service to customers. GE uses this method when they sell microwaves.
  2. Advertising fees: Sell others the opportunities to distribute their message on your space. Google uses this method with its search product.
  3. Franchise fees: Sell the right for someone else to invest in, grow, and manage a version of your business. McDonald’s uses this method with its stores that are independently owned and operated as franchises.
  4. Utility fees: Sell goods and services on a per-use or as-consumed basis. Most electric companies use this model when they charge customers only for the electricity they use.
  5. Subscription fees: Charge a fixed price for access to services for a set period of time. Gold’s Gym charges a monthly or yearly subscription fee for people to access their gym.
  6. Transaction fees: Charge a fee for referring, enabling, or executing a transaction between parties. Visa charges a transaction fee to retailers each time a customer purchases a product in their store.
  7. Professional fees: Provide professional services on a time-and-materials contract. H&R Block makes money by charging customers for the time it takes to prepare their taxes.
  8. License fees: Sell the rights to use intellectual property. Every time a customer buys a T-shirt or a hat with the logo of their favorite sports team on it, that team makes money from license fees.
Hat tip: Ben Werdmuller

📺 Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance | Lifetime

Watched Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance from Lifetime
Directed by Menhaj Huda. With Parisa Fitz-Henley, Laura Mitchell, Melanie Nicholls-King, Burgess Abernethy. The meeting and courtship of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
Dear God, what have I done. This was about as dreadful as I should have expected. The casting of the likenesses was dreadful, though the actress portraying Meghan had her personality and sound down relatively well. The Britishness was dreadful… Lifetime’s other offerings in advance of the royal wedding are much better than this.

Synopsis: Like I’ve said three times already: dreadful, dreadful, dreadful.

📺 Harry and Meghan: Royal Rebels | Lifetime

Watched Harry and Meghan: Royal Rebels from Lifetime
A look at the history and rules of British Royal Weddings and which traditions have been updated for the ceremony of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
A relatively straight up effort for the Lifetime network. It was nice to have a general theme of rebel to highlight the narrative thread of the piece, though several points they kept making were about how they weren’t rebels at all. It would have been nice to have more Harry history here to balance out the excess of Meghan presented, particularly in relation to the several other shows that are almost equivalent to this one.

An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 5 “Indieweb Summit and More”

Episode 5: IndieWeb Summit and More
https://david.shanske.com/2018/05/13/an-indieweb-podcast-episode-5-indieweb-summit-and-more/

Running time: 1 h 18m 25s | Download (24.4 MB) | Subscribe by RSS

Summary: With the IndieWeb Summit coming up at the end of June in Portland, David Shanske and I discuss it, participation, and other parts of the IndieWeb community.

 

Huffduff this Episode

Show Notes

Related Articles and Posts

Related IndieWeb wiki pages

👓 GDPR will pop the adtech bubble | Doc Searls

Read GDPR will pop the adtech bubble by Doc SearlsDoc Searls (Doc Searls Weblog)

Since tracking people took off in the late ’00s, adtech has grown to become a four-dimensional shell game played by hundreds (or, if you include martech, thousands) of companies, none of which can see the whole mess, or can control the fraud, malware and other forms of bad acting that thrive in the midst of it.

And that’s on top of the main problem: tracking people without their knowledge, approval or a court order is just flat-out wrong. The fact that it can be done is no excuse. Nor is the monstrous sum of money made by it.

Without adtech, the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) would never have happened. But the GDPR did happen, and as a result websites all over the world are suddenly posting notices about their changed privacy policies, use of cookies, and opt-in choices for “relevant” or “interest-based” (translation: tracking-based) advertising. Email lists are doing the same kinds of things.

Some interesting thought and analysis here on the pending death of adtech with the dawn of GDPR in the EU. I’m hoping that this might help bring about a more humanistic internet as a result.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but it looks like some tremendously valuable links and resources embedded in this article as well. I’ll have to circle back around to both re-read this and delve more deeply in to these pointers.

👓 This Is How a Newspaper Dies | Politico

Read This Is How a Newspaper Dies by Jack Shafer (POLITICO Magazine)
It’s with a spasm of profits.
This article outlines an intriguing method for plundering the carcass of a dying business to reap as much profit from it as it dies as one can. I suppose that if one is sure a segment is on its way out, one may as well exploit its customers to turn a profit.

I wonder how long it will take for traditional television and cable related businesses to begin using this model as more and more people cut the cord.

👓 Kushner-backed health care project gets ‘devastating’ review | Politico

Read Kushner-backed health care project gets ‘devastating’ review by Arthur Allen (POLITICO)
The Pentagon report could delay the VA’s plans to install the multibillion-dollar software project begun under Obama.

🎧 Hunger and Malnutrition | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Hunger and malnutrition by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

One week jam, the next global hunger and malnutrition. That’s the joy of Eat This Podcast; I get to present what interests me, in the hope that it interests you too. It also means I sometimes get to talk to my friends about how they see the big picture around food. Dr Jessica Fanzo, Assistant Professor of Nutrition at Columbia University’s Insitute of Human Nutrition, Special Advisor on Nutrition Policy at the Earth Institute’s Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development, also at Columbia, and much else besides, is one such friend. She was in Rome recently for a preparatory meeting for a big UN conference on nutrition next year, so I took the opportunity to catch up, and to ask some very basic questions about global hunger.

I confess, I have very little time for the global talk shops that meet so that, somehow, magically, the poor can eat. And having attended a few, there does seem to be a dearth of people who have studied malnutrition and hunger first hand, and made a difference. Jess Fanzo has been promoting the idea of nutrition-sensitive agriculture as a way to make a difference locally, while recognizing that there can be no simple, global solutions. You have to see what works in one place, and then adapt it to your own circumstances. There are no simple global solutions. The primary point – that governments have some responsibility for ensuring that their citizens at least have the opportunity to be well-nourished – seems often to be lost in the din of governments talking about other things. And interfering busybodies declaring war on hunger don’t seem to have much luck either. I don’t have any solutions.

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Notes

  1. Check out Dr Fanzo’s credentials at the Institute of Human Nutrition and the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development.
  2. She was also the first winner of the Premio Daniel Carasso; there’s a videoabout that too.
  3. She’s written about her fieldwork and how it informs her global view. (And, as an aside, how come big-shot bloggers don’t care about spam? Come on, people. Your negligence makes life worse for everybody.)
  4. The Integration of Nutrition into Extension and Advisory Services: A Synthesis of Experiences, Lessons, and Recommendations reports on ways to promote nutrition-sensitive agriculture. And the research extends to social media.
  5. The paper I mentioned, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is Comparative impact of climatic and nonclimatic factors on global terrestrial carbon and water cycles.
  6. Photo of Jess Fanzo in Timor Leste by Nick Appleby.
I love plumbing the archives of this podcast and relistening to old episodes. This is easily my second time around on this episode.

👓 Facts | Herve This, vo Kientza

Read Des faits by Herve This (hervethis.blogspot.com)
Il se dit beaucoup de choses à propos de la gastronomie moléculaire et de la cuisine moléculaire, il se publie beaucoup de choses à propos des rapports entre la science et la cuisine, et je vois une immense confusion.
French scientist and molecular gastronomist Herve This bemoans the state of molecular gastronomy and provides some early recollections of his experience in the field.

🎧 Bonus: Malcolm Gladwell debates Adam Grant | Revisionist History

Listened to Bonus: Malcolm Gladwell debates Adam Grant by Malcolm GladwellMalcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History

In a special live taping at the 92nd Street Y in New York, Malcolm talks with WorkLife’s Adam Grant about how to avoid doing highly undesirable tasks, what makes an idea interesting, and why Malcolm thinks we shouldn't root for the underdog.

While there was a great conversation here, I was most struck by the incredibly well done and specific nature of the way Gladwell did the embedded advertisement in this episode.

🎧 ‘The Daily’: The Allegations Against Ronny Jackson | New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: The Allegations Against Ronny Jackson by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

The nomination of Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, President Trump’s personal doctor, as the next head of Veterans Affairs has come to an abrupt stop. Now, Congress is beginning to examine several alarming allegations from unidentified whistle-blowers that derailed the doctor’s Senate confirmation process.

On today’s episode:

• Michael D. Shear, a White House correspondent for The Times.

Background reading:

• President Trump hinted at a midday news conference that Dr. Jackson might soon withdraw from consideration for the role of Veterans Affairs secretary. By the evening, however, the White House moved to aggressively defend the doctor, calling his record “impeccable.”