Month: December 2019

Listened to Moxie Bread, Louisville, CO by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Turkey red wheat seedsAndy Clark left Massachusetts in 1994 and wormed his way into one of the iconic bakeries of Boulder, Colorado. After that, he spent 15 years running bakeries for Whole Foods Market. All the while, he was squirreling away ideas and thinking of his own place, where he could focus on 30 great loaves a day, instead of 30,000 for The Man. The result is Moxie Bread Co in Louisville, Colorado, as warm and welcoming a place as I have ever had the pleasure to visit. We talked about bread, and grain, and about creating a welcoming experience. Oh, and perhaps the most decadent pastry I have ever tasted.

kouign amann pastry

That pastry is the kouign amann, an impossibly delicious amalgam of yeasted dough, butter and sugar that comes originally from Brittany in northern France. All the write-ups of Moxie agreed that their kouign amann was out of the world, and I was somewhat miffed that I had never heard of the things.

Now that I have …

Notes

  1. Huge thanks to Andrew Calabrese for making the introductions and the arrangements. What a great day.
  2. Also to our family and friends in Colorado for their friendship and hospitality.
  3. Moxie Bread Co is, of course, online.
  4. To learn more about kouign amann, I turned first to David Lebovitz, for a recipe and some alleged history.
  5. Eater turned to David Lebovitz too, for its informative piece about The Obscure French Pastry Making it Big in America.
  6. There’s apparently even a National Kouign Amann Day, on 20 June. If I can find one, I’ll be eating it.
Ah! The kouign amann! I hadn’t heard of it myself until the last year or so when it turned up on an episode of the British Baking Show, but even there it was featured as a specialty and rare dish (in a technical challenge if I recall, which makes things harder if you’ve never seen or eaten one). I’ve yet to see any in pastry shops here in the LA area, but I have pulled off a few myself at home and they are quite lovely. Sadly most home bakers are unlikely to work with heavily laminated dough much yet a yeasted version.

For the lost, here’s a short segment from BBS with a quick introduction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S179EYnsGwM

Listened to Food and diversity in Laos by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Today’s guest, Michael Victor, has spent the past 16 years living in Laos and getting to know its farming systems and its food. To some extent, that’s become a personal interest. But it is also a professional interest that grew out of his work with farmers and development agencies in Laos. Most recently, he’s been working with The Agro-biodiversity Initiative, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The idea is to make use of agricultural biodiversity in a sustainable way to reduce poverty and improve the livelihoods of people in upland regions. One thing the project has done is to collect all the information it can about agricultural biodiversity and make it available online. When Michael visited Rome recently, I grabbed the chance to find out more about Lao food and diversity.

Notes

  1. The Pha Khao Lao website is available in English and Lao.
  2. I think that the restaurant Michael mentioned is Thip Khao in Washington DC. Duly noted for next time. Any reports gladly received.
  3. I seem to be way behind the times on riverweed. A couple of years ago even BBC Good Food had tried it. (Scroll down.)
  4. Banner photograph by Periodismo Itinerante from Flickr
Some interesting tidbits here, particularly about a society seemingly on the cusp of coming and greater industrialization. I can’t help but thinking about Lynne Kelly’s thesis about indigenous peoples and cultural memory. I suspect that Laotians aren’t practicing memory techniques, but because of technological and cultural changes they are loosing a lot of collective memories about their lifeways, food, and surrounding culture that have built up over thousands (or more) generations.
Read Six uses for Huffduffer by Karin Taliga (The Pilcrow)
I keep thinking of new and creative ways to use Huffduffer. If you haven’t heard of it, or used it, let me explain what it does. It’s a service that creates a personal podcast feed out of audio links you add to it.
Karin mentions a lot of great material here that isn’t always obvious about how one an use Huffduffer. The one thing she didn’t mention was what her handle on the service is so others can follow her or some of the discovery related uses of Huffduffer.

While most of my readers will see all of my Huffduffer activity here on my own site, you can also follow all of my audio bookmarking there as well if you wish.

Read Why I Listen to Podcasts at 1x Speed by Brent Simmons (inessential.com)
We’re in danger, I think, of treating everything as if it’s some measure of our productivity. Number of steps taken, emails replied-to, articles read, podcasts listened-to. While accomplishing things — or just plain getting our work done — is important, it’s also important that not everything go in that bucket. The life where everything is measured is not really a full life: we need room for the un-measured, the not-obsessed-about, the casual, the fun-for-fun’s sake.
Liked a tweet by ALIFE Conference 2020 (Twitter)
Followed Dr. Alexandra Samuel (alexandrasamuel.com)

Alexandra Samuel speaking on a stage

I am a freelance writer, researcher and speaker, and the author of Work Smarter with Social Media: A Guide to Managing Evernote, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Your Email (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015). My work helps people and organizations cope with the transition to a digital world by tackling everything from the business and social impact of big-picture trends like the emergence of the collaborative economy, to the nitty-gritty of making productive use of digital tools.

I am a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Harvard Business Review and The Christian Science Monitor’s Passcode, and the digital columnist for JSTOR Daily.  My writing on technology issues has appeared in media outlets like Macworld, Oprah.com, The Atlantic.com, The Toronto Star, CBC Radio, Business 2.0, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. I am a frequent commentator on tech stories, appearing regularly in broadcast and print to talk about the business of tech, the latest digital scandals or the drama of managing kids’ screen time.

My perspective on the tech world is informed by my experience as a web strategist and by my research background. I am the former Vice President of Social Media at Vision Critical, a customer intelligence software provider, where I worked with the company’s F1000 customers to develop innovative approaches to social media research and to deliver groundbreaking reports like Sharing is the New Buying and What Social Media Analytics Can’t Tell You About Your Customers. Before joining Vision Critical, I was the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where I worked on applied research challenges with BC-based companies.

As the founder and principal with Social Signal, one of the world’s first social media agencies, I have shaped the online strategy for a wide range of online community projects, including Tyze, Change Everything and NetSquared. This work builds on my consulting, research and writing on online community and civic participation by harnessing the latest generation of web tools — tools like blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS — to the challenge of community engagement.

Listened to We Made a Lipstick For You! from On the Media | WNYC Studios
Lipstick designer Poppy King is a devoted OTM listener. In collaboration with our own Brooke Gladstone, she has designed a lipstick called Well Red. How to get one? Just listen!

While this segment is assuredly about lipstick, I also hear it as a discussion of identity and how we present ourselves. I can’t help but thinking about a version that’s a bit closer to my heart of online identity. Sometimes I’ll use website themes in the same way Poppy discusses her lipstick and how it makes her feel internally.
Read What Happened to Tagging? by Alexandra SamuelAlexandra Samuel (JSTOR Daily)
Fourteen years ago, a dozen geeks gathered around our dining table for Tagsgiving dinner. No, that’s not a typo. In 2005, my husband and I celebrated Thanksgiving as “Tagsgiving,” in honor of the web technology that had given birth to our online community development shop. I invited our guests...
It almost sounds like Dr. Samuel could be looking for the IndieWeb community, but just hasn’t run across it yet. Since she’s writing about tags, I can’t help but mischievously snitch tagging it to her, though I’ll do so only in hopes that it might make the internet all the better for it.

Tagging systems were “folksonomies:” chaotic, self-organizing categorization schemes that grew from the bottom up. ❧

There’s something that just feels so wrong in this article about old school tagging and the blogosphere that has a pullquote meant to encourage one to Tweet the quote.
–December 04, 2019 at 11:03AM

I literally couldn’t remember when I’d last looked at my RSS subscriptions.
On the surface, that might seem like a win: Instead of painstakingly curating my own incoming news, I can effortlessly find an endless supply of interesting, worthwhile content that the algorithm finds for me. The problem, of course, is that the algorithm isn’t neutral: It’s the embodiment of Facebook and Twitter’s technology, data analysis, and most crucial, business model. By relying on the algorithm, instead of on tags and RSS, I’m letting an army of web developers, business strategists, data scientists, and advertisers determine what gets my attention. I’m leaving myself vulnerable to misinformation, and manipulation, and giving up my power of self-determination. ❧

–December 04, 2019 at 11:34AM

You might connect with someone who regularly used the same tags that you did, but that was because they shared your interests, not because they had X thousand followers. ❧

An important and sadly underutilized means of discovery. –December 04, 2019 at 11:35AM

I find it interesting that Alexandra’s Twitter display name is AlexandraSamuel.com while the top of her own website has the apparent title @AlexandraSamuel. I don’t think I’ve seen a crossing up of those two sorts of identities before though it has become more common for people to use their own website name as their Twitter name. Greg McVerry is another example of this.

Thanks to Jeremy Cherfas[1] and Aaron Davis[2] for the links to this piece. I suspect that Dr. Samuel will appreciate that we’re talking about this piece using our own websites and tagging them with our own crazy taxonomies. I’m feeling nostalgic now for the old Technorati…

Read What Happened to Tagging? by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (Read Write Collect)
Alexandra Samuel reflects on tagging and its origins as a backbone to the social web. Along with RSS, tags allowed users to connect and collate content using such tools as feed readers. This all changed with the advent of social media and the algorithmically curated news feed. Samuel wonders if we h...

Alexander Samuel reflects on tagging and its origins as a backbone to the social web. Along with RSS, tags allowed users to connect and collate content using such tools as feed readers. This all changed with the advent of social media and the algorithmically curated news feed. ❧

Tags were used for discovery of specific types of content. Who needs that now that our new overlords of artificial intelligence and algorithmic feeds can tell us what we want to see?!

Of course we still need tags!!! How are you going to know serendipitously that you need more poetry in your life until you run into the tag on a service like IndieWeb.xyz? An algorithmic feed is unlikely to notice–or at least in my decade of living with them I’ve yet to run into poetry in one.
–December 04, 2019 at 10:56AM