FeedCity

Sad news: Longtime friend Pam McQuesten passed away on January 1 after a brief illness. I knew Pam in Silicon Valley, as we were starting up Living Videotext in 1983. Our office was on Elwell Court in Palo Alto, just off 101, near the golf course and airport. Pam was managi...

A few random observations posted on Bluesky in the early morning hours.

5:09AM: "Biden had one job to do, and he didn’t do it."

5:17AM: "The NYT had one job to do, and they didn’t do it."

5:21AM: "The NYT is the saddest excuse for the leading news org of the most significant democracy in human history. They flushed it down the fucking toilet. They, like the Washington Post, deserve to die in darkness."

7:39AM: "Being impartial about last year’s election was not an option for the NYT. It was democracy’s Pearl Harbor. We will never forget or forgive what they did."

Editor's note: Soon, I will do all my writing in one place, and these kinds of snapshots will be easier to assemble.

I’ve been reading lots of modern takes on Greek classics. So when I saw that there was going to be a short of run of Sophocles’s Electra at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, I grabbed some tickets for the opening night. With Brie Larson taking on the title role in this production, ...

Trump’s second term — which apparently started a day early — is going to be a series of mismanaged, real crises and completely dumb, fake issues. Gonna try to ignore both. 🇺🇸

ByteDance was been trying so hard to sell TikTok and they just ran out of time. Thankfully, Trump is going to extend the deadline, giving TikTok more time to find a buyer! Whew. I’m sure TikTok will be sold real soon now. 🤪

Steve Jobs: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

We all know that corporations do weird shit. In their never-ending quest to maximise profits, they’re happy to exploit us and try all sorts of wacky shenanigans. We’re all aware of this. We all know that they try to use all the weaknesses of our monkey brains against us. And...

I’ve optimized a few things with our Twitter / X import. If you never imported your tweets, now is a great time! Micro.one and Micro.blog copy all your tweets and photos (minus RTs and videos) to a space you can control. Full API access to the data, easy to embed on your blog.

Molly White:

The TikTok ban, the Musk Twitter takeover, the Facebook moderation policy changes, the Republicans’ rapidly intensifying crackdowns on speech… let these be the proof you needed to move anything you care about online to a space you control.

Get your own domain name. If you don’t know where, Micro.one hosting is $1/month.

[Mike Masnick at TechDirt] On Zuckerberg's claims about why he's changing Meta's fact-changing policy: "If you only remember two things about the government pressure campaign to influence Mark Zuckerberg’s content moderation decisions, make it these: Donald...

[Ethan Zuckerman in The Atlantic] I completely agree with the points Ethan makes here. The TikTok ban was a spectacular own-goal for all kinds of reasons. In particular: "[...] This is a depressing moment for anyone who cherishes American protections for spe...

When I put an image in the margin of a post I often pause and think about what I want to convey with the image as it relates to the writing that it's next to. In the previous piece the idea was interop. I tried to think of what images I've used in the past, then I thought why don't I just look. I switched into Daytona, entered interop, and found one I loved, but then kept scanning, and found another that I liked even more. Tools are important. Web writers haven't gotten any new tools in a long time. All the tool development has been for other stuff. Let's make tools for users again, as we did in the olden times. Craftwork in software. Playin in the band!

How easy would it be to create a twitter-like app using RSS, and in what ways would it differ from other twitter-like apps. Here's the deal. You need a place to write a posts and a way to read a timeline of posts. That's the basic functionality. To do that with RSS you would start with a blogging app like WordPress, and a feed reader like FeedLand or NetNewsWire. Manton has integrated the two into a single user interface at micro.blog. I'm going to approach it in a somewhat differently, not sure yet how it will work, but I'm getting there. And I will offer a way for people to hook in any feed reader they want, thus opening up innovation to tech-curious users. The take-away is that you need to handle inbound and outbound feeds. That's the basics of being twitter-like.

I’ve written a few times about how blogging has been the single most important accelerant in my career. I mentioned this when I asked more of you to blog, in remarks about other peoples’ posts on blogging, and so on. But I’ve never actually explained how. The arc of this jou...

[Matthew Green] I think this is the most important discussion with respect to AI: "[...] I would say that AI is going to be the biggest privacy story of the decade. Not only will we soon be doing more of our compute off-device, but we’ll be sending a lot mor...

TikTok’s “not available” message is blatantly manipulative… So a fitting end to the app, for now.