Dries Buytaert (dri.es)Why I'd like to find a way to combine longer blog posts with shorter updates and cover a larger variety of topics.
👓 Reclaiming my blog as my thought space | Dries Buytaert
Dries Buytaert (dri.es)Category: Read
Dries Buytaert (dri.es)👓 The Tech ‘Regrets’ Industry | Audrey Watters
Audrey Watters (Audrey Watters)Silicon Valley has lost some of its shine in recent months, what with the “fake news” and the bots and the hacks and the hate speech. All the promises about the democratization of information and power ring a little hollow nowadays. I’d say they rang a little hollow all along. Of course that’s what I’d say. I’ve been saying it for years now. There’s a new tale that’s being told with increasing frequency these days, in which tech industry executives and employees come forward – sometimes quite sheepishly, sometimes quite boldly – and admit that they have regrets, that they’re no longer “believers,” that they now recognize their work has been damaging to individuals and to society at large, that they were wrong. These aren’t apologies as much as they’re confessions.
An essay about technologists saying the equivalent of “Do as I say, not as I do.” and “Don’t pay any attention to that man behind the curtain.”
👓 I Cracked Facebook’s New Algorithm And Tortured My Friends | Buzzfeed
Or, how to lose friends and influence people.
Black box algorithms are simply the bane of the world. How hard would it be to give us some manual and granular control over our own feeds. That’s really the next killer app. If the rise of the independent and decentralized web isn’t the thing that kills social media, it’s going to be a company that figures out how to act more human and give people the ability to control what they read.
👓 Simplenote Outage Due to DMCA | CMichael Tsai
Your data (temporarily) disappears because of something posted by a completely unrelated user.
👓 Web Application Outage Details | Simplenote
Tuesday at about 4:50pm Pacific time our web application at app.simplenote.com went down, displaying a generic 404 error message. We discovered shortly after that Google Cloud Platform, which hosts the web application, had shut down the site due to a DMCA notice for allegedly infringing content that...
A bit crazy for a major web app to go down for a silly reason like this.
👓 My POSSE plan for evolving my site | Dries Buytaert
Dries Buytaert (dri.es)How I plan to evolve my site to take back control over my data and reclaim my blog as my thought space.
An excellent layout of itches for improving a website.
👓 Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement | EFF
Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and...
This is an insane bit of news and could have some chilling effects on all areas of the web.
📖 Read pages 59-74 of Ramona the Brave by Beverly Cleary
📖 Read pages 59-74, Chapter 4: The First Day of School, of Ramona The Brave by (William Morrow and Company, , ISBN: 0-688-22015-0)
That wicked Howie and his need to stick to a hyper-strict version of the facts. If only we had more in government like him.
👓 Porn star who alleged Trump affair: I can now tell my story | AP News
NEW YORK (AP) — Stormy Daniels, the porn star whom Donald Trump’s attorney acknowledges paying $130,000 just before Election Day, believes she is now free to discuss an alleged sexual encounter with the man who is now president, her manager told The Associated Press Wednesday. At the same time, developments in the bizarre case are fueling questions about whether such a payment could violate federal campaign finance laws. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, believes that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, invalidated a non-disclosure agreement after two news stories were published Tuesday: one in which Cohen told The New York Times he made the six-figure payment with his personal funds, and another in the Daily Beast, which reported that Cohen was shopping a book proposal that would touch on Daniels’ story, said the manager, Gina Rodriguez.
📖 Read pages 45-58 of Ramona the Brave by Beverly Cleary
📖 Read pages 45-58, Chapter 3: The Hole in the House, of Ramona The Brave by (William Morrow and Company, , ISBN: 0-688-22015-0)
I really love the idea of playing Brick Factory!
👓 FAQ: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon? | Salon
Like most media companies, Salon pays its bills through advertising and we profoundly appreciate our advertising partners and sponsors. In this traditional arrangement between reader and publisher, we are able to offer our readers a free reading experience in exchange for serving them ads. This relationship — of free or subsidized content in exchange for advertising — is not new; journalism has subsisted on this relationship for well over a century. This quid pro quo arrangement, ideally, benefits both readers and media. Yet in the past two decades, shifting tides in the media and advertising industries threw a wrench in this equation.
Just the other day I was reading about third party plugins that injected code that allowed websites to mine for bitcoin in the background. Now publications are actively doing this in the background as a means of making money? In addition to the silliness of the bitcoin part, this just sounds like poor editorial judgment all around.
👓 Crowdsourcing trusted news sources can work — but not the way Facebook says it’ll do it | Nieman Journalism Lab
A new study finds asking Facebook users about publishers could "be quite effective in decreasing the amount of misinformation and disinformation circulating on social media" — but Facebook will need to make one important change to its plan.
👓 Facebook’s Campbell Brown: “This is not about us trying to make everybody happy” | Nieman Journalism Lab
“If someone feels that being on Facebook is not good for your business, you shouldn’t be on Facebook. Let’s be clear about that…I don’t see us as the answer to the problem.”
👓 Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20 | Nieman Lab
"I am like a vaudevillian. I'm the last guy dancing on the stage, by myself, and everyone else has moved on to movies and television."
An interesting take of blogging twenty years on. Most of the other blogs that he mentions don’t have a monetization strategy at all, but it’s great to hear a sketch of how a “one person” blog attempts to monetize.
👓 Jetpack 5.8: A Focus on Speed with Faster Search and Lazy Loading Images | Jetpack for WordPress
Today’s release of Jetpack 5.8 includes several features that have graduated from beta testing. We are very excited to bring them out for you to try. Let’s take a closer look at what we’ve included in this update, and how today’s additions will help you speed up your site and deliver faster...
I like the idea of Elastic Search being added in here and that alone might make it worth the subscription price! I’m surprised that it wasn’t bundled in from the start or that Elastic Search isn’t making an smaller subscription version available via plugin for a smaller price.