Category: Read

Read Always. Own. Your platform. (alwaysownyourplatform.com)

Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms.

Be in charge of the relationship with your audience.

Deliver value and then ask for money. Avoid unnecessary middlemen.

I’ll admit that I love the meta data cards that Twitter, Facebook, et al. will display for this website will look roughly like this:

Stock photo of a punk 9 year old holding up his arms to make an X with text below from the meta data fields that reads I refuse to display meta data for other platforms. Nope. Not doing it. Always own your platform.

Reminds me a bit of Kevin Marks’ experiment Decaying Silos as Dead Malls, though I’ll have to see if this site went to the extremes that Kevin did.

Makes me think I should do something similar when I syndicate my content to social silos? Hmmm….

Liked Post social by Colin WalkerColin Walker (colinwalker.blog)
As Simon commented there was a lot of naivety in the early days of what we now refer to as "social media" - no one really knew what they were doing or where the road would take us. One thing is for certain, however, we didn't imagine we'd be where we are now. When I switched from my old way of blogg...
Read Can This Even Be Called Music? by Kicks Condor (Kicks Condor)
When I first discovered this link, it seemed that the music became more and more unlistenable as I scrolled down the page. Now that I’ve had time to listen to CTEBCM further, there is actually quite a bit of tame music here that is just strangely genred. Such as ‘the loser’, a solo opera based on the wonderful Thomas Bernhard novel of the same name which feels reminiscent of the meandering ‘Shia LeBeouf’ storysong. Or the sometimes-metal, sometimes-harpsichord of Spine Reader’s ‘Recorded Instruments’.
Shia!
Read Building a personal knowledge base by Kirill Maltsev (kirillmaltsev.net)
I try to unload all information that has any meaning to me from my brain to external storage because I don’t like to rely on my memory nor do I trust it. In this blog post, I’m going to describe my current approach of working with a personal knowledge base.
He’s got a solid listing of tools here, many I’ve either tried or am currently using myself. Looks like he hasn’t come across Roam yet which I like for it’s ability to change tags across many linked pages. I wish other tools had that one killer feature.
Read a thread by Venkatesh RaoVenkatesh Rao (Twitter)
My lifestyle could reasonably be called stochastic semi-retirement, trading money for time in a very unpredictable way to make room for doing things for which there is absolutely no economic demand. That, or it’s a very poorly tuned freemium hustle.
A short, but useful essay (in the guise of a Tweetstorm) about “solving for life”.

While this is focused on how one could/should help others, it can easily be applied to one’s own life. This is a fantastic reframing for how we should treat others not only with compassion, but with some additional pragmatism.

Read The future of local newspapers just got bleaker. Here’s why we can’t let them die. by Margaret SullivanMargaret Sullivan (The Washington Post)

It’s been a particularly rough couple of months for those who care about local journalism — which should be every American citizen.

Warren Buffett sold his 31 newspapers in January, a powerful vote of no confidence in their financial future. A rapacious hedge fund got its claws deeper into the Chicago Tribune chain in December, which includes the New York Daily News and the Baltimore Sun. Gannett and GateHouse, the two biggest newspaper chains, continued merging — a development almost certain to mean more staff cutbacks in already shrunken newsrooms.

And then on Thursday came more devastating news. Weighed down under enormous debt, the McClatchy newspaper chain — one of the nation’s largest newspaper publishers and owner of the Miami Herald among many others — was filing for bankruptcy protection.

Read - Finished Reading: How Saint George’s Dragon Got Its Wings (JSTOR Daily)
The lack of living dragons has never stopped people from drawing them. The trends for dragon design tend to organize along East-West lines: dragons in Asia are snakelike, wingless and benevolent, while European dragons are menacing winged lizards. When an artist situated right between Asia and Europ...
Read - Reading: Cold comfort for journalists by Bill BennettBill Bennett (Bill Bennett)
"The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style."
Stella Gibbons,
Cold Comfort Farm
And then there is Blaise Pascal. In 1657 he wrote:
"Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."
I agree wholeheartedly. Though I like the way that the first quote ties the idea more directly into journalism, the pedantic in me wants to attribute the broader original sentiment to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651). Doing this also allows us to frame all of humanity which seems to be having its own sort of problems–yet again.

“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Read - Want to Read: The Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Gaius Suetonius TranquillusGaius Suetonius Tranquillus
As private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, the scholar Suetonius had access to the imperial archives and used them (along with eyewitness accounts) to produce one of the most colourful biographical works in history. The Twelve Caesars chronicles the public careers and private lives of the men who wielded absolute power over Rome, from the foundation of the empire under Julius Caesar and Augustus, to the decline into depravity and civil war under Nero and the recovery that came with his successors. A masterpiece of observation, anecdote and detailed physical description, The Twelve Caesars presents us with a gallery of vividly drawn—and all too human—individuals.
Read My GPS Logs by Aaron PareckiAaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)
I've had a fascination with maps for as long as I can remember. During family road trips to San Francisco I remember tracing our route on a map with a highlighter in real-time. Many, many years later, I am able to trace my route automatically with a GPS receiver on my phone. https://aaronparecki.com...
Aaron has really done some awesome map related work with his GPS tracking. Looking at just his personal map data for a year or two will give you an idea about how much other corporations can gain from tracking millions of people this way.

Looking at some of the map pins like for Target on his map will tell you that Google could potentially be using aggregate data about visits to companies as a way of knowing how well or poorly a company is doing and then using that data to make bets for or against companies in the stock market. This could give them the ability to front run investments if they wanted to.

Read - Want to Read: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 121 180) embodied in his person that deeply cherished, ideal figure of antiquity, the philosopher-king. His "Meditations "are not only one of the most important expressions of the Stoic philosophy of his time but also an enduringly inspiring guide to living a good and just life. Written in moments snatched from military campaigns and the rigors of politics, these ethical and spiritual reflections reveal a mind of exceptional clarity and originality, and a spirit attuned to both the particulars of human destiny and the vast patterns that underlie it."
Read Fixing Times on EXIF by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)
I’ve been working on a patch for WordPress that involves fixing the incorrectly stored timestamp stored as part of WordPress image metadata. I already do something like this in my Simple Location plugin, but I’ve found a way that works more simply. To summarize the issue, there are multiple date...