“There are only three places that have a ‘the’ in the front of their name: the Vatican, The Hague, and the Bronx.” ❧
—Mary Higgins Clark
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Annotated content
📑 Why I’m Leaving Medium | Praxis – Medium
Online media, despite being so different from traditional printed media, is still trying to maximize its potential audience, and in order to do that, going for quantity over quality. ❧
📑 Welcome to my online sandbox. | Joyce Garcia
Joyce Garcia (Gratuitous Web Presence)commonplace book ❧
Now I’ve got to follow her…
📑 Welcome to my online sandbox. | Joyce Garcia
Joyce Garcia (Gratuitous Web Presence)Then I learned about the IndieWeb movement and Micro.blog, and I fell in love with the Internet as I once hoped it would be: a place where people could congregate, converse, and learn from one another with somewhat minimal rancor — and without an overtly overarching need to make a buck with their “content.” ❧
📑 Contact | Devon Zuegel
This site is where I can riff on ideas, be wrong, and learn from those mistakes. Of course I try to be correct, and I always write what I believe to be true, but the greatest value most often comes from someone messaging me to point out a body of research I missed or angle I misinterpreted.
In this vein, please don't hesitate to let me know what you think! The whole point is to share what I know and to learn the rest. ❧
In addition to collecting the quote above, I’ll also note that Devon’s site now has an RSS feed (which I’m positive it didn’t before), so one can now follow her writing there directly.
📑 I don’t want to be a brand. | Cheri Baker
Cheri Baker (social.cheribaker.com)To participate in the economy, we’re encouraged to shape ourselves into a strategically pleasing form, always with a sale in mind.
Isn’t the phrase
we’re encouraged to shape ourselves into a strategically pleasing form
almost exactly what women have been attempting to fix with much of the feminist movement? We should all just be ourselves. Trying to “stay on message” is just painful. The message should be: “This is my life, and I’ll do with it as I please.”
📑 I don’t want to be a brand. | Cheri Baker
Cheri Baker (social.cheribaker.com)“You should write down your brand statement, and then EVERYTHING you communicate online (or around your customers) should be in line with that statement. In short, if it doesn’t advance your brand, don’t share or say it.”
And my heart rose up in revolt and shouted: F@CK THAT SH*T!
Almost as iconic as “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”
📑 Blind Person-Tagging | Kicks Condor
Unlinked mentions…? What if you had an individual who was the subject of the text, but you didn’t want to notify them? You may want to include an unlinked @boffosocko, to refer to someone without summoning them. But—what if you wanted to link readers to the person without notifying them? ❧
I thought about this case in the not-so-recent-past and came up with the possibility of creating a “submention” similar to the idea of a subtweet. If you scroll down on that particular post, you’ll see a response from Colin Walker about actually implementing it, which he implemented as a nomention plugin for WordPress.
Of course doing things this way doesn’t necessarily prevent the person from possibly seeing it through the natural course of events, others notifying them directly (snitch-tagging), or even the use of things like refbacks, which would send them notifications anyway. And then there’s Voldemorting…
📑 Bullet Journal: One Book to Rule Them All | Jamie Todd Rubin
Isaacson pointed out that more than 7,000 pages from Da Vinci’s notebooks survived to today–a stretch of 500 years. He asked how many of our tweets and Facebook posts will survive even 50 years. Paper, it turns out, is a durable medium of information storage. ❧
Of course one also needs to think about reach and distribution as well. His notebooks have much more reach and distribution now than they ever did in his own lifetime. Where’s the balance? Blogging about it, syndicating to social media, and then printing paper copies in annual increments?
📑 One Tool To Rule Them All | Oki Doki Digital
Marie Poulin (Oki Doki Digital)Looking at some of those bullet journal masterpieces made me wonder, how much of bullet journaling is just...productivity porn? ❧
How many times have I thought this myself?
My bullet journal has to be the most spartan and utilitarian book of lists ever created.
📑 Publishers build a common tech platform together | Nieman Lab
Jonathan Gill (Nieman Lab)One way to meet the many needs that most if not all publishers share would be to collaboratively develop their digital products. Specifically, they should build for interoperability. One publisher’s CMS, another’s content APIs, a third company’s data offering — they might one day all work together to allow all ships to rise and to reclaim advertising and subscription revenue from the platforms. This might allow publishers to refocus on differentiating where it truly matters for the user: in the quality of their content. ❧
Some of this is already afoot within the IndieWeb community with new protocols like Webmention, Micropub, WebSub, and Microsub. Journalists should know about this page on their wiki.
📑 The grand sweep of Literature and History | Indie Digital Media
“I’m always genuinely happy to interact with listeners,” [Doug Metzger, Ph.D.] said, “and since some prefer social media, I use it. But my (thus far only modestly effective) strategy has been to try and produce enduring content and let it speak for itself, rather than posting ephemera on Facebook and Twitter at regular intervals.” ❧
I love his use of the word “ephemera” in relation to social media, particularly as he references his podcast about ancient history.
📑 What I learned at work this year | Bill Gates
Unfortunately, there were more cases [of polio] in 2018 than in 2017 (29 versus 22). ❧
The numbers and rosy picture here aren’t quite as nice as other—more detailed—reporting in the Economist recently would lead us to believe.
In some sense I do appreciate the sophistication of Bill Gates’ science communication here though as I suspect that far more Westerners are his audience and a much larger proportion of them are uninformed anti-vaxxers who might latch onto the idea of vaccine-derived polio cases as further evidence for their worldview of not vaccinating their own children and thereby increasing heath risk in the United States.
📑 What I learned at work this year | Bill Gates
So has Warren Buffett, who says his measure of success is, “Do the people you care about love you back?” ❧
📑 India’s Tighter E-Commerce Rules Frustrate Amazon and Walmart Plans | Wall Street Journal
With Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and Facebook Inc. and its WhatsApp messaging service used by hundreds of millions of Indians, India is examining methods China has used to protect domestic startups and take control of citizens’ data. ❧
Governments owning citizens’ data directly?? Why not have the government empower citizens to own their own data?