Read Mothering Digital by Nate AngellNate Angell (xolotl.org)
Today folks are gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (“MOAD”), a notorious event held in 1968 in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, where SRI’s Douglas Engelbart and others demonstrated computer systems they were developing and which many folks point to as one of the most important events to presage and shape our digital technology environment today.
Read Opinion | How Professors Help Rip Off Students by Tim Wu (New York Times)
Textbooks are too expensive.
OER is a nice way to go, but I’ve also mentioned before how to restructure the textbook business so the economic balance is righted.

tl;dr: Professors aren’t doing the learning, so at most they should recommend one or more textbooks, but never require them. The students should choose their own textbooks or otherwise fend for themselves (many are already doing this anyway, so why disadvantage them further with the economic burdens) and direct market forces will very quickly fix the problem of run-away book prices.

Professors should not be middle-people in the purchase decisions of textbooks.

Liked a tweet by Jeffrey B. PaulJeffrey B. Paul (Twitter)
I’m living this same story…
Read How to Add to Blogging Conversations by SerenaSerena (supine-owl.com)

Liked How to Add to Blogging Conversations... And Eliminate the Echo Chamber (ProBlogger)

Just going through my old bookmarks and found this article. Some interesting ideas to keep in mind. Although I wonder where this current post would sit in his 11 ideas? This post doesn’t add to the conversation, but it just introduces the conversation to a wider audience…

Read Twitter's Project Bluesky by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
This morning, Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter would be funding an independent group that would develop an open standard for decentralized social networking, with the expectation that the company would use it. Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engine...
An intriguing take on this (bitcoin pieces aside), though I wonder what sorts of larger scale pieces Twitter might really need and how they’d need to structure things to mitigate those issues. In the early days, their open API gave them cover to allow others to build on their platform while they worked at scaling and keeping the servers up. Once those were stable, they pulled the rug out from under everyone. If things open up and the service is more broadly distributed, are those scale pieces still so necessary (except for their scraping purposes)?
Read About Known by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
In 2013, my mother had a double lung transplant. The rules for recovery post-transplantation are that you can't have a bridge between you and the hospital; they don't want you to be stuck in traffic if you need emergency attention. So we rented an apartment in the Inner Sunset, where we all sat with...
Read The Influencer and the Hit Man | Do It For State Snaps: How How a Feud Over a URL Ended in a Bloody Shootout by Ian FrischIan Frisch (onezero.medium.com)

How a years-long domain name feud ended in a bloody shootout

When Ethan Deyo’s small, sandy-haired dog cocked his head and perked up his ears, Deyo knew something was wrong. Deyo stepped out of the second-floor office of his Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home and peered down the stairs. That’s when he saw a man with a gun standing in his foyer, and he began to understand the peril he was in.

“Come here, motherfucker!” Deyo remembered the man screaming, pointing a gun at him. The gunman wore a baseball cap, had pantyhose pulled over his face, and sunglasses covered his eyes.

An extreme case where owning “your” domain may run you into trouble…
Read “Link In Bio” is a slow knife by Anil Dash (Anil Dash)
We don’t even notice it anymore — “link in bio”. It’s a pithy phrase, usually found on Instagram, which directs an audience to be aware that a pertinent web link can be found on that user’s profile. Its presence is so subtle, and so pervasive, that we barely even noticed it was an attempt to kill the web.
This is another good example of how social media is destroying value and preventing new value creation to keep the power for itself. 

I like how Anil has managed to find a purple colored knife for the featured image.

I originally read his post on my cell phone and was surprised that it tool almost 30 seconds for the post to resolve because it’s apparently hosted on Glitch and it took the app ages to start itself back up. Not necessarily good UI for hosting a personal website, but bully to Anil for selfdogfooding his own work to host his site. I’m sure the speed will improve in the future.

Read Against “Excellence” by Briallen Hopper (Avidly | Los Angeles Review of Books)
Harvard just denied tenure to an award-winning Latinx scholar and teacher who is working in the field of Latinx studies. (Yale did the same thing last year.) Thousands of students and scholars have already signed an open letter in protest. There is so much to say, and so much already eloquently being said, about the ways that, over and over and over, elite universities fail to support people of color and the fields of knowledge that center them. These repeated failures to recognize excellence in non-white forms demonstrate the systemic racism that pervades these institutions