Listened to The Latest: The Irregular Channel from New York Times

Testimony from Fiona Hill, a former top White House adviser, showed that even the witnesses in the impeachment inquiry may only now be learning the full picture of the part they played in the Ukraine story.

Throughout the impeachment inquiry, an image has surfaced of the Trump administration’s two policymaking channels on Ukraine — one regular, one not. Today’s testimony from Fiona Hill, President Trump’s former top adviser on Russia and Europe, raised the question: Which was which?

Listened to The Daily: ‘We Followed the President’s Orders’ from New York Times

In highly anticipated testimony, a top envoy said the operation to extract a political favor from Ukraine was done at the direction of the president, vice president and secretary of state.

Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, has evolved from a loyal Trump campaign donor to a witness central to the impeachment inquiry. But his testimony has been contradicted on multiple occasions.

Today, we look at how both Democrats and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee handled their most complicated witness to date.

Watched Jeep® | “Groundhog Day” | Bill Murray | 02.02.2020 from YouTube

It’s “Groundhog Day” all over again as Jeep brand debuts a Big Game spot starring Bill Murray (in his first-ever national television commercial). But this time reliving the same day over and over again is always a new adventure when you’re driving the 2020 Jeep Gladiator.

Terrifically clever and well done!
How is it that a major podcast producer like Pushkin Industries doesn’t even have raw RSS feed link on their podcast pages? Why should I have to hunt for simple links like feeds.megaphone.fm/happinesslab on their website? If they’re worried about potential UI issues, why not use something like SubToMe?
Earlier today I filled out a survey for WNYC Studios’ podcasting. It was easy to fill out because I keep all the data on my website.

For those interested, here are the podcasts I’m subscribed to: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Podcasts

And here’s a running historical list of what I’ve actually listened to: https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/

Replied to Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? by Wendy Hanamura (Internet Archive Blogs)
We agree. Much work has been done and some of the fundamentals are in place. So on January 21, 2020 the Internet Archive hosted “Exploring Decentralized Social Media,” a DWeb SF Meetup that attracted 120+ decentralized tech builders, founders, and those who just wanted to learn more. Decentralized social media app builders from London, Portland and San Francisco took us on a tour of where their projects are today.
Something important to notice about this article. Not a single person here is linked to using their own website, or via a link to their presence on any of their respective decentralized networks. All the people whose names are linked are linked to on Twitter. All of the people who’ve written pieces or articles linked to in this piece are writing on Medium.com and not on their own sites/platforms. How can we honestly be getting anywhere if there isn’t even a basic identity for any of these people on any of these decentralized networks? At least most of the projects seem to have websites, so that’s a start. But are any of them dogfooding their own products to do so? I suspect not.

I’ll circle back around shortly to watch the video of the event that they recorded. I’m curious what else they’ve got hiding in there.

Interestingly, I’ll note that it appears that my site will at least somewhat federate with the Internet Archive’s as they support pingback. (Great to see technology from almost 20 years ago works just as well as some of these new methods…)

Graber helped us understand the broad categories of what’s out there: federated protocols such as ActivityPub and Matrix; peer-to-peer protocols such as Scuttlebutt, and social media apps that utilize blockchain in some way for  monetization, provenance or storage.

Missing from this list is a lot of interop work done by the IndieWeb over the past decade.
Annotated on February 03, 2020 at 06:48PM

Thought leader and tech executive, John Ryan, provided valuable historical context both onstage and in his recent blog. He compared today’s social media platforms to telephone services in 1900. Back then, a Bell Telephone user couldn’t talk to an AT&T customer; businesses had to have multiple phone lines just to converse with their clients. It’s not that different today, Ryan asserts, when Facebook members can’t share their photos with Renren’s 150 million account holders. All of these walled gardens, he said, need a “trusted intermediary” layer to become fully interconnected.

An apt analogy which I’ve used multiple times in the past.
Annotated on February 03, 2020 at 06:50PM