Link text color is #f1ebff, surrounding text is #ffffff. They have a contrast ratio of 1.2:1. Not only is hard to see links that are so close in color to the text, they also require a pointing devi...
It’s a question that’s been debated more and more as the years go by. Each January is Braille literacy month, and each year I hear arguments advocating its decline. Each time, I shake my head and ask myself again how people can be so?...
Manton Reece (manton.org)For the 7th post in our 12 days of microblogging series, I want to talk about linkblogging. Micro.blog users have a variety of approaches to posting links on their blog. Some people read an interesting article and type in a summary of it, pasting in the URL to the full article, and some people prefe...
Manton Reece (manton.org)We’ve seen a lot of people use their microblog as a daily log to track activities, from running or cycling routes, to meditation or posting photos of food. Some apps even make this easier, like indiebookclub.biz for sharing reading progress in a book. In 2016 when I visited a different library in ...
Manton Reece (manton.org)For the 9th day in our 12 days of microblogging series, we want to talk about developer blogs. Most developers on Micro.blog use their blogs like everyone else — posting photos, sharing stories, recording a microcast, or linking to articles they’ve read — but some developers use the microblo...
Manton Reece (manton.org)It’s day 4 of our 12 days of microblogging series. Today we want to highlight how Micro.blog supports blog themes and what people can do to give their blog a unique design. There are 3 ways to customize your microblog: Pick from one of the default 7 themes. These themes are based on existing desig...
Manton Reece (manton.org)It’s the 8th day in our 12 days of microblogging blog post series. Most Micro.blog accounts use the author’s name — personal blogs, writing about everyday topics or sharing stories and photos. But since Micro.blog-hosted blogs can have a custom design, separate pages, and a domain name, you ca...
Manton Reece (manton.org)Today Substack announced support for sending audio episodes in email newsletters: Subscription podcasting through Substack works in the same way as publishing newsletters. Once the feature is enabled, you can create an audio post that is just like a normal post and can go out to everyone or only to ...
Michigan State University // Spring 2019
Sameer Vasta (Flashing Palely in the Margins)After twenty years of always having something to say, I have recently forgotten the concept of blogging as exhale, the notion of using this space as a place to breathe ideas and thoughts into existence.
Greetings, people of the future!
This piece has gotten a lot of attention over the years. I have heard a lot of people saying that they had been "inspired" by it. I fear that what they meant was that they were inspired by the one pull-quote that people tend to quote from it, and ignored the rest. So if someone has linked you to this page, or if you've googled that pull-quote and ended up here, let me give you some context. I wrote this in 2005, which was was more than a year before Facebook was open to the general public.
The world was different then.
When I hear people say that they were "inspired" by this, I fear that the result of such inspiration was most likely to cause them to participate in the construction of the Public-Private Surveillance Partnership. These people told themselves that they were building tools to "bring people together" when in fact what they were doing was constructing and enabling the information-broker business models used by companies like Facebook and Equifax, where people are not the customers but rather are the raw materials whose personal details are the product.
I was talking about decentralization and empowerment of the individual. They went and build the exact opposite.
It's not a great feeling to think that someone may have read your words and then gone on to construct the dystopian hellscape that we're now living in, where Twitter is the prime enabler of actual Nazis and Facebook's greatest accomplishment has been to put a racist rapist in the White House.
If all the people who claimed to have been "inspired" by this piece hadn't been, and had just kept writing middleware for banks or whatever, the world might have been a slightly better place.
I wish I had never published this.
- jwz, 24-Nov-2017
"What we’re talking about here are sets of facts that I borrowed."
Kevin (The Tattooed Professor)A few days ago, news broke in the higher-ed sphere about a new paper in the Educational Psychology Review, “How Much Mightier Is the Pen Than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014),” which seemed to undercut a study that’s become the go-to ...
Spotify is making a major move into podcasts, where it appears to have clear designs to be the sort of Aggregator it cannot be when it comes to music.