Read The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd by Jay RosenJay Rosen (PressThink)

That disinformation was going to overtake Republican politics was discoverable years before he says he discovered it.

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I keep saying that anyone who has Kellyanne Conway or her ilk on their airwaves is actively suborning perjury in the public commons. Kudos to Jay Rosen on this excellent piece.

It’s honestly hard to believe that even Christianity Today seems to have come around on  some of the truth of what is happening before Chuck Todd has.

I’m glad that at least Chuck Todd knows/understands what is happening now and may change course to help protect it. Perhaps he needs to spend a few days with George Lakoff to attempt an intervention and a solution?

Looking back at our history of reportage of white power/white nationalism will provide some additional immediate ideas. WNYC’s On the Media has had some great material in the last few years on these topics:

One might suggest, “just replace the word ‘racist’ with ‘Republicans'” in these stories, but I think many of them have generally done that for themselves already.

Read Indieweb Plugin Version 3.4.2 Released by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)
The Indieweb plugin was updated with an icon refresh. This used some of the same code updated in Syndication Links earlier this week. It also added a Mastodon field to the user profile and added a way of displaying that as a Mastodon icon in the profile links on the page.
Read Retroactive continuity (Wikipedia)
Retroactive continuity, or retcon for short, is a literary device in which established facts in a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which breaks continuity with the former.
I’ve known of the concept for a long time, but I’ve only seen this word for the first time today.
Read Instagram Bloggers Gives Her Followers An Incredible Reality Check (comedy.com)
Rather interestingly, Instagram Blogger Rianne Meijer indulged in a meaningful and unique project. She put together some photos of herself that looked like something out of Vogue, and then placed a more natural picture right next to it, giving viewers a whole different perspective.
While written for the clicks, this article has an important message about social media.
Read Blogger Gets Slammed For Committing Ultimate Instagram Sin (comedy.com)
It’s no secret that bloggers, vloggers and pretty much anyone on social media tend to ‘bend the truth’ a little bit. There are countless apps you can download to turn your very average photo into what looks like photographic gold. With a little tweaking and cropping, a few saturation and contrast adjustments, you can fake just about anything. This may have become a trend that caught on a little too well. Johanna Olsson is one of the many bloggers who have photoshopped her images to suit the theme of her page. In an attempt to gain points for her reputation, her photo-shopping mishap caused her more publicity than she could have ever imagined. However, it was not for the reasons she was hoping.
Read The Accidental Side Project by Drew McLellanDrew McLellan (24ways.org)
Fifteen years ago, on a bit of a whim, I decided it would be fun to have a Web Standards version of something like the Perl Advent calendar. A simple website with a new tip or trick each day leading the readers through December up until Christmas. I emailed a bunch of friends that kept web design an...
Liked Backfeed without code by Ryan BarrettRyan Barrett (snarfed.org)
I’ve spent most of my time in the IndieWeb on backfeed: sending interactions from social networks back to your web site. Bridgy, the service we built, has served that need wel...
I’ve obviously read this before, but somehow I’ve now got some new respect for the basis of the broader underlying idea.
Read PESOS for Pocket by Charlotte AllenCharlotte Allen (charlotteallen.info)
A few weeks ago, I made a post about how I got PESOS working for Facebook and Instagram using IFTTT. Now, I’ve gone ahead and done something similar with Pocket and IFTTT!
The code is similar to my linked post. As always, you’ll want to customize everything for your own needs, as well as add your own auth token.
A great way to leverage Micropub!
Read Hedge (linguistics) (Wikipedia)
In applied linguistics and pragmatics (sub-fields of linguistics), hedges allow speakers and writers to signal caution, or probability, versus full certainty. Hedges can also allow speakers and writers to introduce or eliminate ambiguity in meaning and typicality as a category member. Hedging in category membership is used in reference to the prototype theory, to signify the extent to which items are typical or atypical members of different categories. Hedges might be used in writing, to downplay a harsh critique or a generalization, or in speaking, to lessen the impact of an utterance due to politeness constraints between a speaker and addressee. Typically, hedges are adjectives or adverbs, but can also consist of clauses such as one use of tag questions. In some cases, a hedge could be regarded as a form of euphemism. Linguists consider hedges to be tools of epistemic modality; allowing speakers and writers to signal a level of caution in making an assertion. Hedges are also used to distinguish items into multiple categories, where items can be in a certain category to an extent.
Read about CROWDLAAERS (crowdlaaers.org)
Welcome to the “Crowd Layers” dashboard, a public service for ​Capturing and Reporting Open Web Data for Learning Analytics, Annotation, and Education Researchers ​(CROWDLAAERS). This real-time dashboard visualizes group – or ​crowd​ – discourse ​layers​ added via Hypothesis open web annotation to online documents. Developed by researchers at the University of Colorado Denver, CROWDLAAERS visualizes social learning analytics associated with open and collaborative web annotation. The dashboard has been iteratively designed in partnership with educators and researchers to support the social life of reading and the social life of documents across the open and annotated web.