Yahoo’s misplaced focus ruined every aspect of Flickr that was ahead of the curve, and so they became behind all of them.

Hawaii was always going to be a tricky state to cover, detached from the mainland by some 2000 miles its music scene is naturally very insular. Of course I found the usual Ukulele music, but in my eyes no one plays the Uke as wonderfully as Elsa Rae. I also found a lot of hip hop, reggae, a little bit of indie and of course my Hawaii representative Welwing. The first and only instrumental entry into the State Of Music project, Welwing is a one man show headed by Matthew McVickar, a mainland exile doing his thing in the Pacific Ocean.

Tens of millions of people made a decision to spend their time with the simple, mobile photo-sharing application that was not Facebook because they liked its subtle interface and little filters. And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.

I was pleased to see the measured tone of the White House response to the citizen petition about SOPA and PIPA, and yet I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups.

On ‘mediated experiences’ and the ways that different types and generations of people experience them.

Two years and several reports later, we thought we’d try to look at how Expert Labs fared. The premise behind the project was that the federal government could and should engage in conversations with people on their existing social networks. The idea was to use existing commercial social networks to crowdsource policy decisions and to synthesize the responses in an intelligent manner.

Readability has no right collecting money in my name without my consent. Now, realistically, I have given Readability consent by signing up — but what about other publishers that have not only not signed up, but have actively chosen to not sign up? Is it still OK for Readability to be collecting money in their name? I think not. But how do you solve this problem? I don’t know, but it is a very real problem.

I’m almost never alone with my thoughts anymore.

Tao Lin and his band of followers at Muumuu House are some of the most vehemently disliked—and discussed—writers on the internet. Critics call them hip. Haters call them frauds. But their fiction may be just what our digital lives deserve.

The art we like the best is generally the art that has the greatest access to us. So. This tweet has tremendous access to my feelings about Aaliyah. Aaliyah’s voice had tremendous access to me.

He Marries the Stuffed Owl Exhibit At the Indiana Welcome Center and The Feeling of Needing a Pen

‘Anonymity is used as a way to stick your finger in a pot of something to see if it changes the flavor without taking responsibility for doing so.’

The flâneur would wander the streets, observing and sometimes recounting what he saw. Nowadays, no one ‘surfs’ the web anymore.

‘In this light, a large portion of Pinterest's content starts to look largely like the great, white, suburban dreamscape of the 1950s pathologized, now crowd-sourced to showcase today's insecurity with the messier, dirtier, and much less wealthy lives we actually lead. It's an extension of the pleasure machines we've been trained to be: we please the perceived tastes of others with images of things that have little or no relation to who we actually are or what we do — most of which images are of things that are, in themselves, about creating pleasure for others — with hopes of little more than to continue being pleasing.’

‘Alexey Kouznetsov is a 30-something Russian web developer. Kuznetsov has been designing websites since at least 2002, and on his portfolio site, he markets himself with this modest tagline: “If… you want your pages to be more impressive and dynamic than before, contact the author of this site to order elaboration, introduction and development of new graphic effects on your pages.”’

‘In the moments immediately following the MegaUpload shutdown, global internet traffic dipped an astounding 2-3 percent. Unfortunately for the feds, that didn't last for long. According to an assessment recently published by DeepField Networks, file-trading volumes basically returned to 'normal' as rival services started picking up the slack. So, same volumes, less snappiness and cost-efficient delivery, at least in the short term. Or, maybe the long-term, depending on how over-the-top this anti-piracy enforcement campaign grows. But does that mean the shutdown was essentially useless? Outside of file-trading volumes and routing details, the 'ripple-effect' of policy changes and shutdowns is getting a lot of attention. Most recently, the shut-and-run list includes BitTorrent tracking giant BTjunkie, with others likely to follow.’

‘Over the last 10 years, we have deregulated high-speed Internet access in the hope that competition among providers would protect consumers. The result? We now have neither a functioning competitive market for high-speed wired Internet access nor government oversight.’

‘There are a lot of stories out there which are genuine examples of terrible government overreach and/or the evils of the current copyright system. Megaupload’s story is not one of them. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is not a universal truth—and sometimes it puts you in the company of pretty crappy friends.’

‘The trouble with taking a political stance on one issue is that your silence on every issue becomes a stance. Human rights abuses in Libya? Not as important as SOPA. Roe v Wade? Not as important as SOPA. Everything else that’s happened in the world until now, and everything that will ever happen from this day forward? Not as important as SOPA. This Wednesday, with its quixotic yelp in support of the Internet community’s issue-du-jour, Wikipedia will do more damage to its independence than SOPA ever could.’

‘Use these tools running on M-Lab to test your internet connection and perform diagnostics.’ Test connection speed, see if your ISP is throttling/blocking certain apps or traffic, or is traffic shaping, etc. etc.

What to do in the short and long term about SOPA.

‘A letter back then might simply ask one question. The reply would answer it. Just that. A letter might describe a single event, or pass on a single piece of news. I’m pregnant. Your father is dying. I was sent on patrol last night, and I survived. I love you. I still love you. I no longer love you.’

‘So it was as proponents of the Hollywood-funded bill curmudgeonly shot down all but two amendments proposed by its opponents, who fought to dramatically alter the document to preserve security and free speech on the net. But the chilling takeaway of this whole debacle was the irrefutable air of anti-intellectualism; that inescapable absurdity that we have members of Congress voting on a technical bill who do not posses any technical knowledge on the subject and do not find it imperative to recognize those who do.’

Reflecting on his newly self-released $5 internet-only special. ‘I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.’

‘Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won’t do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you’ll be the only game in town!’

‘Every image of a human, ever, is of a human reacting to something.’

On China’s satirists and what happens to them.

Why Anil favorites so much. ‘In short, favoriting or liking things for me is a performative act, but one that's accessible to me with the low threshold of a simple gesture. It's the sort of thing that can only happen online, but if I could smile at a person in the real world in a way that would radically increase the likelihood that others would smile at that person, too, then I'd be doing that all day long.’

‘The emergence of the Social Media Exile essay has been swift and smug. A language expert dissects a genre while also being seduced by its allure.’