Twenty years ago I saw in the Millennium, at home recovering from flu. My daughter was a toddler, I had no money, and was just beginning my career in web design. I had no idea what building websites would lead to, or what the web would look like 20 years on.
I used all the spare minutes I could cobble together to read.
Every day, millions of people rely on independent websites that are mostly created by regular people, weren't designed as mobile apps, connect deeply to culture, and aren't run by the giant tech companies. These are a vision of not just what the web once was, but what it can be
Have you seen this tool that makes any phrase into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo? GEEEEEEEE! Just type any words in, and MAGICALLY your words transform into the TMNT logo. It’s incredible. I love it love it love it. Here’s Super Duper Fun Potatoes. Why does this incredible tool exist? This tool came about …
Can’t wait to play with this generator…
I’m brainstorming ways of describing art museum guards. Art museum security guardArt protectorGallery attendantLaw enforcementMuseum access controlMuseum patrolMuseum protectorObserver of visitorsParcel inspectorPolicy enforcerPreventer of suspicious actionsPreventer of touchingProper propriety maintainerProperty guardProtection services officerSecuritySecurity officerVandalism deterrent My favorite might be the last one, Vandalism deterrent. It’s so true, but also feels so odd to describe that …
Ever come across a fun or interesting security guard at an art museum? Here’s my encounter with a security guard at the Art Institute of Chicago sharing her love of tiny details of paintings, encouraging visitors to get closer to the artworks. After spending about ten minutes with a post-impressionist painting, over to the right …
I have a long-standing goal of whenever I see a xerox machine in a public place, to scan my face. My wife and I did one on our honeymoon in France. The copy machine was tucked away in the back of a Monoprix supermarket in Avignon while we were picking up some food storage containers. …
A few days ago I xeroxed my face on our copier at work. The scanning bed was left open, and was just begging for something fun to be done. The copier machine at Tribune Content Agency and Chicago Magazine I did one copy of my face, then I grabbed a coworker and we each did …
Practicing this with kids is an even more fun idea.
Where’d I put my Xerox machine???
Jan-Lukas Else (jlelse.blog)On a lot of IndieWeb sites, I noticed that profile images of webmentions get directly embedded from their original source. For example, Twitter profile images are loaded directly from Twitter servers (pbs.twimg.com) or even my profile image is directly embedded from my site. However you should consi...
David Byrne (MIT Technology Review)We are beset by—and immersed in—apps and devices that are quietly reducing the amount of meaningful interaction we have with each other.
I came to it via an episode of the podcast The Happiness Lab.
The consumer technology I am talking about doesn’t claim or acknowledge that eliminating the need to deal with humans directly is its primary goal, but it is the outcome in a surprising number of cases. I’m sort of thinking maybe it is the primary goal, even if it was not aimed at consciously. ❧
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:35AM
Most of the tech news we get barraged with is about algorithms, AI, robots, and self-driving cars, all of which fit this pattern. I am not saying that such developments are not efficient and convenient; this is not a judgment. I am simply noticing a pattern and wondering if, in recognizing that pattern, we might realize that it is only one trajectory of many. There are other possible roads we could be going down, and the one we’re on is not inevitable or the only one; it has been (possibly unconsciously) chosen. ❧
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:36AM
What I’m seeing here is the consistent “eliminating the human” pattern. ❧
This seems as apt a name as any.
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:39AM
“Social” media: This is social interaction that isn’t really social. While Facebook and others frequently claim to offer connection, and do offer the appearance of it, the fact is a lot of social media is a simulation of real connection. ❧
Perhaps this is one of the things I like most about the older blogosphere and it’s more recent renaissance with the IndieWeb idea of Webmentions, a W3C recommendation spec for online interactions? While many of the interactions I get are small nods in the vein of likes, favorites, or reposts, some of them are longer, more visceral interactions.
My favorite just this past week was a piece that I’d worked on for a few days that elicited a short burst of excitement from someone who just a few minutes later wrote a reply that was almost as long as my piece itself.
To me this was completely worth the effort and the work, not because of the many other smaller interactions, but because of the human interaction that resulted. Not to mention that I’m still thinking out a reply still several days later.
This sort of human social interaction also seems to be at the heart of what Manton Reece is doing with micro.blog. By leaving out things like reposts and traditional “likes”, he’s really creating a human connection network to fix what traditional corporate social media silos have done to us. This past week’s episode of Micro Monday underlines this for us. (#)
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:52AM
Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at USC wrote about a patient he called Elliot, who had damage to his frontal lobe that made him unemotional. In all other respects he was fine—intelligent, healthy—but emotionally he was Spock. Elliot couldn’t make decisions. He’d waffle endlessly over details. Damasio concluded that although we think decision-making is rational and machinelike, it’s our emotions that enable us to actually decide. ❧
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:56AM
And in the meantime, if less human interaction enables us to forget how to cooperate, then we lose our advantage. ❧
It may seem odd, but I think a lot of the success of the IndieWeb movement and community is exactly this: a group of people has come together to work and interact and increase our abilities to cooperate to make something much bigger, more diverse, and more interesting than any of us could have done separately.
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:58AM
Remove humans from the equation, and we are less complete as people and as a society. ❧
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:59AM
A version of this piece originally appeared on his website, davidbyrne.com. ❧
This piece seems so philosophical, it seems oddly trivial that I see this note here and can’t help but think about POSSE and syndication.
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 11:01AM
With more than a quarter of all readers globally using ad blockers, the news media industry has had to come up with new ways to overcome this, whether it be technically or through new strategies. But as the industry makes the move towards reader revenue strategies, we’re seeing more readers employ...
A common idiom is to differentiate Notes (small microblog-like posts) from Articles (longer blog posts with a title). Right now Goldfrog has a basic blog Post type, with (ID, Title, Slug, Tags, Body). I’d like to keep the posting experience as simple as possible, so I’m thinking about how to handle something that literally just has a Body (and Tags, because I parse and attach any #hashtags - see? - in the content).
gRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)I saw Jamie Tanna has been posting weekly notes. I like the idea so figured I would try it out. No guarantees about consistency; I’m not treating this like a NaBloPoMo challenge. :] For the week of 2020-01-12, in no particular order: I have been working on a passwordless login system for my site s...
Eliminating an unfair tradition made our university more accessible to all talented students.