read | Chris Aldrich

👓 Pictures of Death: Postmortem Photography | The Atlantic

Read Pictures of Death: Postmortem Photography by Nancy West (The Atlantic)

When photography was new, it was often used to preserve corpses via their images. An Object Lesson

Fascinating to read about some of the cultural shifts and norms in our society over the past century or so.

👓 Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it | Aeon

Read Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it by Jon Tennant (Aeon)

The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25 per cent of the global corpus of research knowledge is ‘open access’, or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

I agree with much of what he’s saying here, but it’s so dense and talks around the issue so much that it’s simply just another diatribe against the system. While there is a prescriptive portion, we’re going to need a whole lot more in terms of a list of what individuals and institutions should be doing.

So yes, more of the how to fix it piece please.

👓 Why Some of Instagram’s Biggest Memers Are Locking Their Accounts | The Atlantic

Read Why Some of Instagram's Biggest Memers Are Locking Their Accounts (The Atlantic)

More meme accounts are going private. Their owners say it’s a new way to gain followers on a crowded platform.

👓 Farewell Social Media | James Shelley

Read Farewell Social Media by

James Shelley (jamesshelley.com)

I recently purged the data from my Facebook account. This effort was shockingly labour intensive: it took a browser script all weekend to crunch, and still many aspects of the process required manual execution. Torching years and years of old Facebook activity felt so liberating that I found another...

A short, but solid piece on why James has left social media and consciously moved to his own blog and feed reader. I’m curious what his thoughts are a bit on into his experience. He’s definitely worth a follow.

Read Why You Should Never Pay For Podcast Hosting by

Nir Zicherman (Medium)

Thanks to modern cloud services, the cost of storing and serving content on the internet is incredibly cheap in 2018. With a podcasting platform like Anchor, there is no need for podcasters to pay anymore. So why are traditional podcast companies still charging creators to host files like it’s 2008?

He’s definitely got a major business behind this pitch, and he’s pitching people awfully hard to get them to give away all of their data for a “free” product. There’s the old adage though, “when the product is free, you’re the product.”

I’ve had friends online who’ve noted that this is at least the third time that Anchor.fm has “pivoted”, always seemingly to a larger and larger audience. I find myself wondering when the company is going to finally eat itself? Given that their product seems to change every six months or so, I also wonder if they last another 6 months?

Apparently he’s so bought into the idea of not owning your own data, that at least he’s posting this on one of the worst social silos out there. Just give it all away.

👓 Feeds and Gardens | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Read Feeds and Gardens by

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

My last post, Connections, gathered a fair bit of response — enough that you can see a good example of Webmentions in action below it. There’s a little back-and-forth discussion there that mostly took place on Twitter, as well as a lot of likes and mentions that came from there as well.

👓 You’re Not Cool Enough For Micro.blog | Greg Morris

Read You’re Not Cool Enough For Micro.blog by Greg Morris (Greg Morris)

It’s become a bit of a running joke amongst my tech friends. A personal meme that I keep repeating the same sort of phase when questioned about a whole range of topics. Anything from GDPR to Social Media harassment my answer – micro.blog. Many people don’t understand. I’ve tried and failed t...

Micro.blog can certainly be many things to many people–possibly too many. In large part, what it is depends on what tools you’re bringing into it and how you’d like to use it.

It can be:

a web host
a Twitter replacement
a Twitter client that allows you to own your own data
a Instagram replacement
a microcasting platform
a full blogging platform
a new, well-curated community with a strong code of conduct
a customized feed reader for a new community
a syndication platform for one’s personal blog
a low barrier entryway to having your own IndieWeb-capable blog on your own domain.
a first class IndieWeb citizen with support for multiple types of posts, IndieAuth, Webmention, Micropub, and Microsub.

Because I already have my own domain, my own hosting, and my own website, I personally use it to syndicate my content into an interesting community of individuals which I’d like to engage. I use the main interface as a feed reader to see what others are up to and to communicate with them directly. My site supports Webmention so comments to my posts on micro.blog come right back to my site and provide me notifications there.

Perhaps micro.blog ought to make a chart for a variety of potential users to indicate what they would potentially be bringing with them and then have an indicator what they might use it for with those particular tools? Because of the arrays of technologies that micro.blog supports, it’s far from a simple marketing problem, particularly to a non-technical crowd. You certainly can’t say it’s “just” a Twitter replacement because Twitter only supports a small fraction of what micro.blog is capable.

👓 Giving Up On IndieWeb | Glenn 2.0

Read Giving Up On IndieWeb by

Glenn Dixon (glenn.thedixons.net)

(Further update: webmentions are working!!!) (UPDATE: It’s now been a year since I first posted this. Just today I discovered a year-old blog post which mentioned this one, and an ensuing discussion. Of course I knew nothing of this because – well, I couldn’t get webmentions to work! I have ...