Category: Read

Read Subscriptions are attention, but what about blogrolls? by Leslie Michael OrchardLeslie Michael Orchard (decafbad.com)
Ah hah. Here's a use case where I agree OPML has undeniably become king: Exporting and importing feed aggregator subscriptions. Because Radio UserLand was the first aggregator to really take off—and because OPML is Radio's lingua franca, any new aggregators have needed to speak OPML to facilitate migration. It grew from there, with nearly every aggregator supporting some basic form of OPML import/export for subscription lists. OPML has won the "feed subscription list format war" before there was ever a notion that there might be such a war.
Read Boycotting the attention economy in December by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
Last year, on a whim, I left social media on Thanksgiving, and didn't return until January 1st. It led to massive improvements in my mental and physical health, overall happiness, attention span, and engagement with the world. This year I've been with my mother while she spent months in the hospital...
Definitely worth serious consideration.
Read a post by Jacky AlcinéJacky Alciné (Jacky Alciné)
The progress I’ve been making with projects like https://lwa.black.af and https://fortress.black.af are giving me more hope in seeing what I’d like to for the IndieWeb. I really want to build stuff that I can gladly show to friends and help them join as well. That’s part of the reason why I jo...
RSVPed Attending Concept Modeling Your Disruptive Idea to Perfect It
Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 8:15 AM

How long have you been working on your idea? Or looking for that next disruptive investment? Better still, how do you perfect your skill in doing all that? How do you lock-down your idea, your technology, your business or even your approach to investments? Consider this: the key stems from a very practical understanding how the abstract world (where disruptive innovations come from in the first place) actually works. Amazingly, it is something we were never accurately taught. Hard to believe right? But change that…and we change everything. So take a step into both the past and future. Come to a talk that will change the way you understand the world forever – something that will actually make you smarter. How cool would that be?

Winston is the founder of a discipline called Concept Modeling, which is at the root of all other disciplines – but don’t let the word “discipline” scare you. This talk will be very practical and may just be the key to your success going forward. He is the author of an award (Visionary Award) winning new book, Concerning the Nature and Structure of Concept. Reviewers have called his book (thus his work) “brimming with insights,” “intellectually fun,” “a startling fresh perspective on our world.” NY Times has called him “the guru of concept modeling.”

With past and present clients that include Warner Bros., Dreamworks, NBC/U, Interscope, Relativity and many others, Winston works on films, TV Shows, technologies, businesses and management models for executives. How cool is Bug Bunny? Very. With dozens of movies, technologies under his belt, his presentations are unique, insightful, informative, and yes, fun — he even concept modeled baseball. Love that! As Winston always says: “Let’s rock this thing!”

📖 28% done reading The Unteachables by Gordon Korman

Another school-centric story. And again with alternating chapters from the different perspectives of the characters. It’s certainly a good way to breed empathy for the characters and also not a bad way to get the readers to identify with one or more of them along the way.

Book cover of The Unteachables by Gordon Korman featuring a cartoon image of a middle school desk and a trash can on fire

Read The rootless ed tech units by Martin WellerMartin Weller (blog.edtechie.net)
One common complaint when I hang around with ed tech/learning technologist people (to be fair, we have a few) is that often universities don’t know quite what to do with them. They know they want them, but they’re n...
This is a good indicator of why some of the big corporate EdTech companies have such heavy influence. Higher education just doesn’t know what to do with technology and knee-jerk changes give corporations the upper hand despite the good intentions of the urgency of teachers.
Read Sending Webmentions More Intelligently by Jamie Tanna (jvt.me)
In Reader Mail: Webmention Spam I mentioned that since I started to send Webmentions post-deployment of this site I happened to be spamming everyone multiple times a day with my Webmentions. I received a few comments from folks about reducing this (or completely stopping it) because some Webmention servers don't de-duplicate sent Webmentions, so a server could see each new Webmention as a new one, and could i.e. send a push notification to the user. Not ideal!
Read Gear by jackyalcinejackyalcine (jacky.wtf)
This page reflects a listing of the tools I use for my every day activity. This ranges from my cameras to terminal shell of choice. Good chance that you've learned here out of curiousity or because I pointed you to it. Quite frankly, this page serves as a point of reference for me whenever I have to discuss what I use on my day-to-day with people.
I was curious to see what he put on his own website after his appearance on the What I Use website. Reminds me I need to update mine from ages ago.
Read Jacky Alcine (usesthis.com)
Who are you, and what do you do?
I'm Jacky Alcine, using he/him/his pronouns. I'm a software developer that puts a lot on his place, community advocate for cooperative economics and sustainability and a wanna-be historian. What hardware do you use? A lot of it is Dell stuff. My personal laptop is th...
Liked Happy International Men's Day! by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
AKA the answer to all those people who ask "why isn't there an International Men's Day?" on International Women's Day. Guess what: there is, and it's today. In the list of identities I carry, being a man isn't something I think about most of the time. Which, of course, is part of the hidden privileg...
I’m reminded of children on Mother’s Day who ask, “When is children’s day?” The answer, naturally, literally every other day of the year.
Liked The best way to blog in 2020 by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
I've been blogging - albeit not consistently on the same site - since 1998. That's a long time in internet years, and in human years, and over time I've conditioned out any self-editing impulse I might have. I write, hit publish, and share. Done. Because I'm fairly prolific, friends and colleagues o...
Amen Ben!
Read Loosely Joined by CJ Eller (blog.cjeller.site)

I’ll agree that there is no silver bullet, but one pattern I’ve noticed is that it’s the “small pieces, loosely joined” that often have the greatest impact on the open web. Small pieces of technology that do something simple can often be extended or mixed with others to create a lot more innovation.

I want to emphasize the “loosely joined” part of the above from Chris' comment. We need more people loosely joining software together in ways that create more possibility for writing on the web. In his talk “Don't Make Things”, Darius Kazemi phrased it as “Don't Create, Mutate” – to not think about building from the ground up but extending and remixing what's already there.