Friends,
Welcome to our new blog here on the Internet. AltPlatform is a co-op nonprofit tech blog infused with the spirit of Open Web. Richard summed up our goals in his manifesto.
We realize that the world has changed a lot since our good old ReadWriteWeb days. Web 2.0 is no longer relevant. Things are changing so quickly in tech that even Marc Andreessen’s “software is eating the world” mantra is no more. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang puts it, now AI is eating the software.
We’re in the early stages of a new period of humanity, where bots and robots will take over not only labor-intensive jobs but also artistic ones. Computers have been fixing punctuation and grammar in our writing for some time now. But soon, well-trained networks will be able to consume the latest news articles and generate an opinion article in a snap. A decade from now, Saturday Night Live jokes will be produced not by a factory of writers, but by neural networks. Need proof? Just look at what the Prisma app can do without human intervention.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 Introducing AltPlatform & our manifesto for the Open Web | AltPlatform
Welcome everyone to AltPlatform, a non-profit tech blog devoted to Open Web technologies. What do we mean by “Open Web”? Firstly, we want to experiment with open source (like this WordPress.org blog) and open standards (like RSS). We’re also using the word open to signify a wider, boundary-le...
👓 New open web social apps to check out | AltPlatform
People love sharing on the internet and the technology is always evolving. Enthusiasts recently flocked to Kickstarter to back a new blogging tool, Micro.blog, RSS and podcasting pioneer Dave Winer released a new open source app, 1999.io, and the old bones of micro-blogging phenom identi.ca are bac...
👓 The Future is Meow! A Bakery in Japan Makes Cat-Shaped Bread | Nerdist
There’s just no limit to the wonderfully weird pieces of cuisine that Japan comes up with. They’ve made cream puff desserts into drinks, put Kit Kats on sushi, turned meat into cakes, and even made it possible to bathe in maple syrup! And their latest foray in overtaking internet searches and Twitter trends might be their cutest yet. Yes, we’re talking about cat bread.
Just what the world needs!
👓 The Coat of Arms Said ‘Integrity.’ Now It Says ‘Trump.’” | New York Times
The emblem used by the Trump Organization in the United States had to be changed in Britain, since it belongs to another family.
Donald Trump stole a British coat of arms and ironically removed the word “Integrity” and replaced it with “Trump.”
You really just can’t make this stuff up…
👓 Jared Kushner’s Role Is Tested as Russia Case Grows | New York Times
It is unclear how Jared Kushner’s high-profile woes will affect his hard-won partnership with his father-in-law, perhaps the most stable in an often unstable White House.
👓 Why Do Coptic Christians Keep Getting Attacked? | The Atlantic
Egypt’s preexisting climate of pro-Islamist sectarianism is an important, and sometimes overlooked, reason.
If we replace Egypt with America, ISIS with the KKK or alt-right, and Copt Christians with African Americans are the optics really that much different?
👓 Examining Decentralized Social Networks | The Stream Blog
Most companies who create a social network do so with the end goal of collecting information, interests and habits of their users in order to monetize that data (usually through advertising). They guard this data heavily and many of the largest social networks are trusted enough to be Identity Provi...
👓 Trump used to be more articulate. What could explain the change? | STAT
STAT asked experts to compare Trump's speech from decades ago to that in 2017. All noticed deterioration, which may signal changes in Trump's brain health.
STAT reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable.
Research has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive decline. STAT therefore asked experts in neurolinguistics and cognitive assessment, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to compare Trump’s speech from decades ago to that in 2017; they all agreed there had been a deterioration, and some said it could reflect changes in the health of Trump’s brain.
👓 Facebook blocks Pulitzer-winning reporter over Malta government exposé | The Guardian
Temporary censorship of Matthew Caruana Galizia – who worked on the Panama Papers – raises concern over Facebook’s power to shape the news
I agree wholly with Ben Werdmuller. Here’s yet another example why journalists should be posting their material to their own websites first before syndicating it to Facebook. Sure Facebook may help you get more eyeballs, but it doesn’t help if you’re locked out of your account or the content disappears altogether.
I’d written about some ideas related to this in the recent past: The Indieweb and Journalism.
I’m happy to help any journalist who is interested in creating their own easily maintainable website that uses Indieweb principles.
👓 Introducing Susan’s Book Club | Susan Fowler
I've been searching for the perfect monthly book club for years, one that could send me new science, math, philosophy, and technology books every month. I contacted several publishers, reached out to various existing companies, and nobody seemed to be interested. Finally, earlier this year, after he...
👓 Life Without a Destiny | Susan J. Fowler
I have no singular destiny, no one true passion, no goal. I flutter from one thing to the next. I want to be a physicist and a mathematician and a novelist and write a sitcom and write a symphony and design buildings and be a mother. I want to run a magazine and understand the lives of ants and be a philosopher and be a computer scientist and write an epic poem and understand every ancient language. I don't just want one thing. I want it all.
👓 Five Things Tech Companies Can Do Better | Susan J. Fowler
I believe that tech companies should make a commitment to their employees, a commitment that they will act ethically, legally, responsibly, and transparently with regard to harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and other unlawful behavior. In my opinion, this commitment requires five things: ending forced arbitration, ending the practice of buying employees' silence, ending unnecessarily strict confidentiality agreements, instituting helpful harassment and discrimination training, and enforcing zero-tolerance policies toward unlawful and/or inappropriate behavior. Without further ado, here is a list of those five things, the reasons they're important, and how companies can implement them.
This sounds like for solid advice for all companies, not just those in the tech sector.
👓 We tracked the Trump scandals on right-wing news sites. Here’s how they covered it. | Vox
We’re experiencing these historical events very differently.
👓 I worked in a video store for 25 years. Here’s what I learned as my industry died. | Vox
Some interesting analysis of what we’re loosing with the death of video stores. In particular, we’re losing some of the same type of recommendations and serendipity we’re loosing with the rise of e-books and less use of libraries/librarians. In particular, loosing well-curated collections is a big issue as we replace them with streaming services which don’t seem to have the same curatorial business models.
I particularly enjoyed this quote:
A great video store’s library of films is like a little bubble outside the march of technology or economics, preserving the fringes, the forgotten, the noncommercial, or the straight-up weird. Championed by a store’s small army of film geeks, such movies get more traffic than they did in their first life in the theater, or any time since. Not everything that was on VHS made the transition to DVD, and not every movie on DVD is available to stream. The decision to leave a movie behind on the next technological leap is market-driven, which makes video stores the last safety net for things our corporate overlords discard.