Bloglog

Where have all the websites gone?: Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms. Most of us did it in exchange for an endless content feed. By most, I mean upwards of 90% who don’t make content on a platform as understood by the 90/9/1 rule. And that’s okay!

Louder, louder still.

Losing interest in everything. And some blog notes.

I’ve seen a number of people linking to Kyle Chayka’s ”Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet” piece in the The New Yorker. It is an excerpt from his book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture and it is worth reading. Chayka is younger than I am. He writes of first encountering AOL Instant Messenger when he was in middle school; my introduction to the internet was my first year of college when I logged onto the Cleveland Free-Net for the first time.

Sometimes I like to imagine my performance in life as a report card, grading myself based on the amount of effort I expend on important activities in my life...

Let’s just state the obvious here: AIs are not human. Should be obvious but apparently it’s not. I say it’s not because the amount of people who …

🔗 Noah Hawley’s Alien prequel show is just going to skip past all that Prometheus stuff, thanks: “Ridley and I have talked about this — and many, many elements of the show,” Hawley stated in the interview “For me, and for a lot of people, this ‘perfect life form’ — as it was described in the first film — is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space.

After reading the at least billionth thinkpiece wondering why voters don’t think the US economy is doing well despite all economic indicators looking quite good, I have to wonder if maybe we need a different measure for this sort of thing. Like, I keep hearing about how employment is strong. Yes, I am currently fully employed and that is better than being unemployed or under-employed. But that measure does not capture the general, constant sense that my job could end at any moment based on the whims of my employer and that if it did, I would then be facing a months-long search for a new job in a nationalized market mediated by intermediaries like LinkedIn, Ziprecruiter, and Indeed, all of whom have their own interests.

over the past couple of weeks, i've been pleasantly surprised at discourse popping up on my feeds, surrounding creating your own blog, making the independ...

Most of the US is below freezing right now, and the cold is making me crave everything warm and soupy. I can't get any of it because I don't have any reason ...

It's funny how being sick changes your perspective on things. Many of my past goals and wants, all seem so vain when measured against the ever changing-ness ...

Copper is produced in massive stars, and is one of a few metallic elements with a natural color other than gray or silver.

Ello launched in 2014 with big dreams, but the artsy social network suddenly shut down last year, deleting nine years of posts without warning. What happened?

I got asked to host an edition of the IndieWeb carnival and who am I to say no to such a request? As you know, I love blogging and I think more …

So, it’s freezing outside. Like, I can’t even feel my face kind of cold. Hey, is this what Botox feels like? Thank goodness I work from home, because I don’t know how people are f…

Apple doesn’t have to make a platform-destructive money-grab policy change to ruin the Mac. They can ruin it simply by planting the seed of doubt that they *might*.

I received a grim reminder today.

This is the 21st edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Tom …

A biting first sentence from Robin Berjon: No one can explain what you do. Let’s face it, you don’t do a great job explaining it either. The Chimeralogists I’ve always wanted to b…

I have seen a bunch of posts and conversations lately about “Why isn’t the web fun anymore?” I understand where people are coming from with this question and I think it is good that we are asking it and talking about it, but I also think that we are making it much more complicated than it needs to be. The web isn’t fun anymore because instead of being a space used for weird creative expression, it’s been turned into a business, and turning anything into a business sucks all the fun and joy out of it.

In which I try to explain what a "real" webmention is compared to a Mastodon "webmention"

I am pretty quickly coming to the conclusion that the default functionality for feedback and responses to posts in any blogging platform should be “Reply by email.” I’ve got this functionality on my primary blog. That blog is hosted on Micro.blog and there is a plug-in on offer that offers reply-by-email. I don’t get a ton of responses that way, but the ones that do come through are nearly always thoughtful.

Whenever people ask me about my plans these days I never have any idea what to answer. Without a 9-to-5 the weekends might as well be weekdays. I wake up, ge...

Last year I started sketching, and for the first time in my life I started bringing art materials on my travels. I did the same when I went to Japan, except a couple of days into the trip at a...