John McWhorter (The Atlantic)They suggest not just inadequate manners or polish, but inadequate thought.
👓 Trump’s Typos Reveal His Lack of Fitness for the Presidency | The Atlantic
John McWhorter (The Atlantic)Month: January 2019
John McWhorter (The Atlantic)👓 The Woman With Lapis Lazuli in Her Teeth | The Atlantic
An analysis of dental plaque illuminates the forgotten history of female scribes.
👓 The Instagram-Husband Revolution | The Atlantic
The men behind the camera are ready to step into the spotlight.
Good for them for helping out their wives this way. Interestingly not odd that they move into the sub-influencers game themselves though.
President Trump said Thursday that he will “maybe definitely” declare a national emergency to free up funds for his long-promised wall at the southern border. One reason for the president’s hesitation might be that he is awaiting word from the people who would be asked to give such a declaration the green light: Justice Department lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel, or OLC, where I worked from August 2016 until I quit in mid-November.
👓 $30 plug-and-play kit converts a Bird scooter into a “personal scooter” | Boing Boing
👓 Bird Scooter tried to censor my Boing Boing post with a legal threat that’s so stupid, it’s a whole new kind of wrong | Boing Boing
👓 2019.01: Href.Cool Updates | Kicks Condor
Okay, so I’ve added outgoing Webmentions to Href.cool. This means that sites will be notified if they are linked in any of my category.
Incidentally, the directory itself has also has Webmentions. So, if you have an Indieweb blog and you want to recommend a link to the directory: make a post containing the link you want to submit and a link to the category page you think it belongs on and I will get the message. I may also choose to list submitted links at the bottom of the page. Or, yeah, you tell me if this is useful to you.
👓 The Rise and Demise of RSS | Motherboard
Before the internet was consolidated into centralized information silos, RSS imagined a better way to let users control their online personas.
👓 Passive Tracking > Active Tracking | Eddie Hinkle
Eddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)In the most recent episode of Two Dads Talking, Jonathan and I talk about tracking our information and whether we are using active or passive applications. Jonathan is using mostly passive applications that collect his behavior and translate that into posts on his website. I, on the other hand, spen...
Soccer practice on a brisk evening. And so my soccer coaching career begins…
🎧 “The Daily”: Senator Claire McCaskill on Losing Missouri and the Politics of Purity | New York Times
As the senator prepares to leave office, she sat down with us to talk about her defeat in the midterm elections and the path forward for the Democratic Party.
The final statements of Claire McCaskill in this podcast are some of the most uplifting things I’ve heard about politics in the past two years. I’ve only heard one or two other people talk about “political purity” in this way, and I suspect it’s one of the things that is truly killing our democracy and political norms in our country. We need more reporting on these types of pragmatism.
🎧 “The Daily”: The Ethics of Genetically Editing Babies | New York Times
A scientist in China claimed to have created the world’s first gene-edited human beings. How should the U.S. respond?
Checking out their potter set up–they’re pretty serious and have several kilns as well as lots of space and several wheels. May have to take up a new hobby. Who knew this was hiding up here?
They’ve also got a small, makeshift little free library/book exchange inside their office space.
Reply to More thoughts about Micro.blog as an indie social network by Paul Jacobson
Brad Enslen is doing some great work over at Micro.blog, spreading the word about this innovative service. He published a post titled “The Case for Moving Your Social Network to Micro.blog…
Paul, I like how you’re questioning what is going on with micro.blog and what it is. The toughest part about it is that it is being sold by many different people in many different ways and it’s something slightly different depending on who you are and what you’re coming to it with. It’s all a question of framing.
I might suggest that you’re framing in an odd way, particularly given what I think you’d ultimately like to see on the web which you mention in your closing paragraphs.
To put things somewhat in “Automattic” terms, micro.blog is almost just like WordPress.com in that it’s a hosted content management system with a somewhat both open and closed community attached to it. If you’ve got a WordPress.com account you can easily post replies and likes on other blogs within the WordPress.com ecosystem and WordPress.com also has a slick feed reader you can use to easily subscribe to content (and even more easily subscribe if you’re within that WordPres.com community).
Just like WordPress.com, micro.blog-based sites (if you’re using their CMS) provide you with a physical website that includes RSS feeds and most of the other typical website functionality, so in fact, if you’ve got a micro.blog-based site, you’re fully on the web. If you’d like you can take your domain, export your content and move to WordPress, Drupal, SquareSpace, or any other CMS out there.
The real difference between micro.blog and WordPress.com happens in that micro.blog sends webmentions to provide their commenting functionality (though their websites don’t receive webmentions in a standalone way technically and in fact they don’t even allow manual comments as micro.blog-based websites don’t have traditional commenting functionality (yet?).) Micro.blog also supports Micropub natively, so users can use many of the micropub apps for posting to their sites as well.
Now where things get a bit wonky is that the micro.blog feed reader will let you subscribe to other m.b. users (and recently ActivityPub accounts like those on Mastodon) which is why it feels like a Twitter or Facebook replacement. But the difference is that while it feels like you’re in yet-another-silo like Twitter or Facebook, over on the side, you’ve got a traditional free standing website!
Incidentally micro.blog also uses their feed reader as a side method for displaying the replies of others to your posts within the ecosystem. If you have a non-micro.blog website that feeds into the system (like you and I–and incidentally Brad too–do with WordPress) then micro.blog sends webmentions to those sites so that they don’t necessarily need to be “within the community” to interact with it.
In summation, I might suggest that while some people might be framing micro.blog as a replacement for Facebook or Twitter, the better framing is that micro.blog is really what you were hoping it might be. It is a traditional web host with its own custom content management system that supports web standards and newer technologies like Webmention, Micropub, WebSub, and pieces of Microsub. Or similarly and more succinctly, Micro.blog is a turnkey IndieWeb CMS that allows users to have a website without needing to manage anything on the back end.
Now that we’ve re-framed it to look like what you had hoped for, let’s see if we can talk Manton into open sourcing it all! Then Automattic might have some more competition. 😉