Peter Rukavina (ruk.ca)Ton continues to wrap his head around Webmention, and wonders about how mentions should be displayed on the “mentioned” site: What strikes me as odd now is how little control I have over how the Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins actually deal with webmention data. The stuff I’d like to...
Ton Zijlstra (Interdependent Thoughts)I very much appreciate how Sven Knebel extensively responded to my previous posting on some Webmention issues I came across. Some of his responses do make me have new questions. About the wrong URL, i.e. not the source of the webmention, showing up in a Webmention, Sven writes: …. There’s a href...
Het voordeel van bloggen en zo je gedachten publiek maken, is dat anderen mee kunnen denken en je van mogelijke oplossingen voorzien. Na mijn vragen over webmentions, kwam Ton al snel met een eigen blogpost, gevolgd door Peter (digging the title and URL there Peter!). Ton geeft een korte uitleg over...
Peter Rukavina (ruk.ca)One of the points of writing on the Internet is our ability to link pages together in a web. We do this in HTML with links, like this: My friend Ton writes about Webmention. When that HTML appears here on my websi...
Ton Zijlstra (Interdependent Thoughts)Webmentions is what makes it possible for me to write here about someone else’s blogpost and have my response show up beneath theirs. And vice versa. Earlier mechanisms such as pingback and trackback did the same thing, but slipped under the radar or succumbed to spam. Webmention is a W3C recommen...
I’m a researcher and educator in the intersection between education, literacy, and technology. As such, my framing of this is primarily informed by those perspectives. I believe literacy and education, in all of its forms, are essential human rights. I also believe that the Internet is the dominant text of our generation. As such, it is imperative that we help all individual build and utilize the competencies required to not only survive, but be successful online.
Yes, even in the age of the Modern Web™ Let’s say you have a blog and you just published an article. Ideally, that article will be shared on the web, linked from other people’s blog posts and mentioned in social media comments. These links that point back to your article are fittingly called LinkBacks. Monitoring these linkbacks is important to website owners and bloggers. They allow you to follow the spread of your articles through the internet. The idea is; when someone on the internet links to your article, you get a linkback notification from them. Some bloggers choose to display those publicly (usually under the article), some of them only save them to their database while others just disable the functionality entirely. Regardless of your intent, you will eventually receive them. Handling them will prove useful to you.
Aaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)I moved departments and subsequently desks. It is interesting how the space you work can influence you. It has provided me a totally different perspective on the project, as well as feel more at home as I was the only one in my old team bridging the ...
Stopping the internet from getting too concentrated will be a slog, but the alternative would be worse
As John Sherman, the senator who gave his name to America’s original antitrust law in 1890, put it at a time when the robber barons ruled much of America’s economy: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessaries of life.” ❧
Conventional antitrust thinking is being disrupted from within
It is not the data that are valuable, he says, but the services powered by them. Some firms are just better at developing new offerings than others. ❧
So big piles of data can become a barrier to competitors entering the market, says Maurice Stucke of the University of Tennessee. ❧
“When feedback data from large players is available to smaller competitors, then innovation…is not concentrated at the top,” he argues in “Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data”, a new book co-written with Thomas Ramge, a journalist. ❧
This sounds like something which could be worth reading.
A perfect example of a Hamiltonian internet for maximum control
Leading thinkers in China argue that putting government in charge of technology has one big advantage: the state can distribute the fruits of AI, which would otherwise go to the owners of algorithms. ❧
Such thinking has also been gaining some traction in the West, although so far only at the political fringes. The underlying idea is that some types of services, including social networks and online search, are essential facilities akin to roads and other kinds of infrastructure and should be regulated as utilities, which in essence means capping their profits. Alternatively, important data services, such as digital identity, could be offered by governments. Evgeny Morozov, a researcher and internet activist, goes one step further, calling for the creation of public data utilities, which would pool vital digital information and ensure equal access to it. ❧
When it comes to democracy and human rights, a Jeffersonian internet is clearly a safer choice. With Web 3.0 still in its infancy, the West at least will need to find other ways to rein in the online giants. The obvious alternative is regulation. ❧
‘I’m now dedicating myself to doing things in a completely different way,’ HarperCollins Children’s Books’ executive editor Sara Sargent says, ‘combining a non-traditional way of sourcing books with traditional storytelling’ with Wattpad. Sara Sargent By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chie...
Psychologist Michal Kosinski says artificial intelligence can detect your sexuality and politics just by looking at your face. What if he’s right?
Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, and the pace has continued in July
For 20 years, privacy advocates have been sounding the alarm about commercial online surveillance, the way that companies gather deep dossiers on us to help marketers target us with ads. This pitch…