FeedCity

Skimming through some of the negative reaction to Mozilla’s new terms. I took a minute to update Micro.blog’s own privacy policy so that it’s current. Our terms of service has always said you own your data. Never even crossed my mind to sell data it’s such a foreign idea and counter to our mission.

Nice to see Doc Searls using WordLand. He's been an early user of every writing tool I've written for the web going back to the mid-late 90s.

[Bill Fitzgerald] What a missed opportunity. As Bill Fitzgerald points out: "Mozilla has given a masterclass, yet again, in how to erode trust among people who have loved your work." Mozilla rolled out a new terms of service and privacy policy that rolled ba...

[Edwin Wong and Andrew Melnizek at The Verge] This is much-needed research: "The Verge partnered with Vox Media’s Insights and Research team, along with Two Cents Insights, to better understand how American consumers are embracing this shift. The goal of the...

This is the 79th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Marco Giancotti and his blog, aethermug.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your in...

Messages don’t go anywhere aside from into my ears. Think of it as a very personal social media post with an audience of one.

What a delightful idea this is by Lucy. I love this type of simple projects that are just ways to facilitate human connections.

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Thursday session

I spent almost the entirety of my adult life creating content on—and for—the web. This is both professionally, as a freelance web developer for the past 14 years, and recreationally with countless side projects that have pretty much all failed in one way or another. The only...

Like many other people I love Severance, esp this season, and esp the most recent episode. And my favorite scene in the last episode took place at a Chinese restaurant. Anyway, I was just listening to the latest episode of the Severance podcast, about this episode, which you should definitely listen to if you like me love the show. They have an interview with Christopher Walken who plays Burt. Amazing stuff. But even more amazing is that I learned in the podcast that the restaurant mentioned earlier is actually a famous Kingston restaurant that just re-opened after a long hiatus, so I've not yet had a chance to eat there, but I want to, Eng's. This, after learning that the diner that's in two scenes, one in each season, is the Phoenicia Diner, one of my favorite local eating places.

iOS will have new APIs for getting the age of a user. Sarah Perez writing at TechCrunch:

It puts Apple in the position of collecting kids’ ages via parental input but still puts the onus on the third-party developer to extract and use this information to craft age-appropriate experiences in their own apps.

Seems helpful to me. It doesn’t appear to address the flip side of age verification, making sure someone is an adult, but Apple could add that later.

Me as a grad student at UW-Madison in 1977 or so, programming on a Unix system, probably working on my first outliner.

Note that the terminal I was using had uppercase and lowercase letters. This was a big innovation!

I was using a PDP-11/45 to write in C.

See the comment thread from 2014 on Facebook.

I lived in a big house with 10 roommates. And as weird as it must seem from the point of view of 2025, I was the only one who used a computer. I would tell them all the time that we'd all use computers someday. They rolled their eyes and smiled. "There goes Dave again." The reason I was so sure was email and writing tools.

Love an old train station getting a new life. Bloomberg article from a couple months ago, about the station in Detroit with new office space and green space:

But the main attraction is still the 18-story tower, designed by the same architects who worked on Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, Reed and Stem with Warren and Wetmore. Just like its New York sibling, Michigan Central features terrazzo and marble flooring, Doric columns and Guastavino tiles — all restored to their original glory.

Adding to my list to visit one day. 🚂

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.

WordLand is simply an editor for writers who publish to WordPress.

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