📺 "The West Wing" On the Day Before S3 E5

Watched "The West Wing" On the Day Before S3 E5 from NBC (via Netflix)
Directed by Christopher Misiano. With Rob Lowe, Stockard Channing, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney. While the White House is hosting a gala dinner for Nobel Prize winners, Leo and the president learn of a suicide bomb in an Israeli cafe that took the lives of two American students in Tel Aviv for a soccer match, and the staff attempts to manage the president's first veto, of a House bill eliminating the estate tax, and the threat of an override the same night. Sam and Toby first try to sway a contentious Dem. From Tennessee who wants a whole list of farming and ranching concessions in exchange for his vote and three proxies; after a pep talk from Leo, they devise a substitute plan that may prove even more effective, if it works. Josh takes the governor of Indiana into a private meeting to determine if the man plans to challenge Bartlet in Democratic primary. C.J. takes heat from a smarmy Dallas entertainment reporter who is in town for the Nobel dinner but winds up having to cover the veto and override vote, but after the reporter embarrasses her during a live stand-up, C.J. one ups the woman in front of the press corps. Later, Sam, Toby and Josh try to help the president decide what to say to the parents of the two murdered students.
Replied to a post by Jeff Doshna (facebook.com)
I have a real problem. I HATE FACEBOOK, what they are doing with our data, how they control access to information and news for millions of people, and the fact that they've insinuated themselves into every aspect of our lives.

So I'm inclined to walk away from it entirely.

But....

There's real information on here that I need, about people I care about, about things going on in my communities, and keeping connected with folks who've been part of my life over the years.

So, what to do?
You can add people to custom Facebook lists and just read those, but then you’re not necessarily getting all the data you want given the Facebook algorithm deciding what you see.

There’s lots more I could advise doing, but if you’re only using Facebook for reading content you want to get out of Facebook, then lock the whole thing down as best as you can (privacywise) and then use https://facebook-atom.appspot.com/ to suck the data you want out as a feed and pipe it into a feed reader.

You can unsubscribe or unfollow folks to limit your feeds to the bare minimum. The atom feed the appspot tool gives you will be everything and it will be reverse chronological. Good feed readers like Feed.ly and Inoreader will allow you to filter out posts you don’t want to see using a variety of keyword filters.

If you need specific help in setting it up or the instructions are unclear, let me know; I’m happy to help.

If you want to set up and run your own custom private system/server for close family, I can make some suggestions for doing that too.

Reposted Aaron Parecki on Twitter (Twitter)
It never occurred to me that people would be blaming @oauth_2 for the Facebook mess. Friendly reminder that OAuth is what lets you control *which* parts of your Facebook data apps get access to, and what lets you revoke that access, which you can do here: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications
Quoted Slack chat by Chris BeckstromChris Beckstrom (chat.indieweb.org)
...holy crap this stuff [IndieWeb] is great. When I started getting webmentions from social media using Bridgy I flipped. It's like we're in the future!!!
I remember the early days of Twitter when people were excited about what it was and what it could do. Even then I don’t think people were as excited as Chris Beckstrom was when he made what is certainly the IndieWeb quote of the week this morning.

👓 The Google News Initiative: Building a stronger future for news | Google

This article is even more interesting in light of the other Google blog post I read earlier today entitled Introducing Subscribe with Google. Was today’s roll out pre-planned or is Google taking an earlier advantage of Facebook’s poor position this week after the “non-data breach” stories that have been running this past week?

There’s a lot of puffery rhetoric here to make Google look more like an arriving hero, but I’d recommend taking with more than a few grains of salt.

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what’s true (and not true) online.

we’re committing $300 million toward meeting these goals.

I’m curious what their internal projections are for ROI?

People come to Google looking for information they can trust, and that information often comes from the reporting of journalists and news organizations around the world.

Heavy hit in light of the Facebook data scandal this week on top of accusations about fake news spreading.

That’s why it’s so important to us that we help you drive sustainable revenue and businesses.

Compared to Facebook which just uses your content to drive you out of business like it did for Funny or Die.
Reference: How Facebook is Killing Comedy

we drove 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites for free.

Really free? Or was this served against ads in search?

We worked with the industry to launch the open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages Project to improve the mobile web

There was some collaborative outreach, but AMP is really a Google-driven spec without significant outside input.

See also: http://ampletter.org/

We’re now in the early stages of testing a “Propensity to Subscribe” signal based on machine learning models in DoubleClick to make it easier for publishers to recognize potential subscribers, and to present them the right offer at the right time.

Interestingly the technology here isn’t that different than the Facebook Data that Cambridge Analytica was using, the difference is that they’re not using it to directly impact politics, but to drive sales. Does this mean they’re more “ethical”?

With AMP Stories, which is now in beta, publishers can combine the speed of AMP with the rich, immersive storytelling of the open web.

Is this sentence’s structure explicitly saying that AMP is not “open web”?!