People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Nick Heer is impressed with Alexa+, except:
But there is no part of me that would ever want Alexa or any other voice-controlled assistant buying tickets to a show, or booking a vacation rental, or even buying groceries.
I also don’t trust AI for this. And yet, in 1995 a lot of people didn’t trust entering credit cards on the web. I’m open to the possibility that in 10 years, AI buying things for us will be normal.
If you’re in town around SXSW, check out Fediverse House, a 2-day event hosted by Flipboard and Surf. Amazing lineup of folks including Mike McCue, Molly White, Evan Prodromou, and Paul Frazee. I’ll also be giving a short presentation during the developer meetup about Micro.blog and the fediverse.
Many news sites and social networks have a headlines section for trending news. Maybe we need to take a hint from traditional newspapers and replace that with a high-profile “corrections” section that is just all the news that’s factually wrong with a summary of the truth.
I'm also interested in social networks and RSS and have written a lot about that in the context of WordLand, because it generates RSS, it can connect to any app that understands RSS, basically because WordPress does. But don't get confused that WordLand is somehow a twitter-like silo. There are already too many of those. I want something much simpler and I believe more useful and less spammy and abusive -- a social network built around RSS.
The measles outbreak here in Texas is such a sad reminder of the real harm of misinformation. So many little kids are in the ICU that it seems likely more will die. Tragic and preventable.
The stage is set for #ResearchByTheSea
I still want to do more with Open Library. Our app Epilogue can search and get covers from Open Library. But the database just isn’t complete enough and needs more apps to help users add and curate book metadata.
When I added tracking what books you’re reading (and blogging about) to Micro.blog, I used ISBN as the identifier. Every once in a while that’s a problem, like my post today for a short story. I added it manually using the Goodreads ID with a “G” prefix. Not great but maybe a possible convention.
There’s another lawsuit against Matt Mullenweg and Automattic, this time from a WP Engine customer. It seems to conflate the project code and the servers into a single “WordPress ecosystem”, but that’s not how open source works. The software can be totally free and companion services less free.
Finished reading: Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent by Scott Lynch. Great to have another Gentleman Bastard story. Split into two parts in Grimdark Magazine. 📚
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
:)
I'm interested in knowing what browsers people who use WordLand are using, so I asked ChatGPT to write code that makes sense of them in some human-readable way. This is what it came up with. Interested in knowing what people think? I imagine there are packages that do this but I haven't looked yet.
Alexa+ pricing makes no sense. $20/month or free for Amazon Prime subscribers… Prime is $15/month. I can think of a few reasons to do it this way and none of them justify user confusion.
Getting ready to host Research By The Sea tomorrow:
This is very nice HTML web component by Miriam, progressively enhancing an ordered list of audio elements.
This describes how I like to work too.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
I’m following the Verge’s live blog for the Alexa event. Amazon really should be leading in this space since they created the Echo out of nothing 10 years ago. Fun to re-read my first blog post about the Echo.
Alexa+ will be a paid upgrade. Tim Cook is now wondering how he can charge for Siri too.
People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of shit, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years.
Fascinating to imagine what the web would look like if WordPress didn’t exist. What would fill the void, and would it be as open?
