FeedCity

This is the 109th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Kris Howard and her blog, web-goddess.org To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inb...

I love the culture of freestyle rap, it’s so inspiring to see how people can create such rich poetry riddled with allusions and puns on command. Last week I got to meet Harry Mack and see him improvise live and it totally makes sense that he has a jazz drums background. If you’re not familiar … Continue reading Harry Mack →

Thursday session

A contrast in two announcements today. This is why OpenAI is a different kind of company than Meta and should not be distracted with an ad-based business.

ChatGPT Pulse from OpenAI. Fidji Simo:

Pulse has already helped me discover new emerging treatments for my health condition, recommended new painting techniques for my art practice, surfaced great weekend events for my family, and more.

Vibes from Meta. Mark Zuckerberg:

Introducing Vibes – a feed of expressive AI-generated videos from artists and creators in the Meta AI app.

While I’ve been listening to Hounds Of Love, I’ve also been reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Here’s a passage from an early chapter as the crew of the International Space Station watch a typhoon forming: How wired and wakeful the earth seems suddenly. It’s not one of...

Started listening to the latest WP Tavern podcast earlier, with Dave Winer. Great so far. Dave’s fired up! I like it. As he blogged today about not waiting for the silos:

I’m not intimidated any more, I’m fed up and going ahead without them.

We can build a better web. Open, connected, portable.

This came up in a thread on Mastodon about "social network" vs "social media." I also think social web should be used sparingly. Because imho there is such a thing as the social web but we haven't developed very much of it, i think because we were intimidated by the silos. I'm not intimidated any more, I'm fed up and going ahead without them.

A few days ago there was a discussion on the Social Web Incubator Community Group mailing list about fediverse handles. I sent an email to the list that I want to capture on my blog here. There is also a relevant issue in Mastodon’s repo, with comments going back to 2022. Wh...

I love this conversation.

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Preparing viable alternatives for broadcast censorship and a restricted internet.

Alex Heath writing on his new blog / newsletter site Sources that Fidji Simo is planning for ads in ChatGPT. I’m disappointed in this. It is going to be very difficult to do ads without compromising something.

Sources say that Simo has recently been meeting with potential candidates, including some of her former Facebook colleagues, to lead a new team that will be tasked with bringing ads to ChatGPT.

Matt Birchler has been in App Store review limbo, waiting for a week while his customers can’t upgrade to pay for his own app. So frustrating. Quick Subtitles looks like a cool app.

Over the summer we started including little book cover previews on the Micro.blog timeline when a book is mentioned. People loved this, and of course wanted it on their own blog too. That is starting to roll out now.

As an example, here’s what the books category page looks like on my own blog. If there is already a photo included in the post, it skips including the cover:

To accomplish this, Micro.blog inserts a bit of HTML into the published post, without modifying the source Markdown. The cover image can be further styled using the CSS class microblog_book. Because we also add some inline styles, you may need to add !important in your CSS to adjust margin and padding.

Happy reading! 📚

I just heard about thinking errors, via Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

I think I’m starting to feel what I can only describe as digital fatigue. I believe this is the result of a combination of two main factors: I spend most of my time in front of a screen for work, coding sites for clients and friends (and sometimes for myself). My RSS feed h...

Today there is a new podcast, this one for members of the WordPress community. I was interviewed by the very capable Nathan Wrigley of WP Tavern. I thought it was a great conversation, we talked about the remarkable position WordPress is in to serve as the OS for a rebooted web. I love the introduction they wrote, I also figured out how to make content management work in the browser, which was the foundation for blogging and eventually WordPress, though it seems that legacy is a bit lost in all the other stuff I've had my fingers in over the years. I hope you listen to this podcast, and if you have questions or comments, here's a good place to post them.

Good morning sports fans!

The album Hounds Of Love by Kate Bush turned 40 years old this month. It has really stood the test of time. It still sounds like nothing else. It’s kind of two albums in one. There’s the A side with all those perfect pop songs—Running Up That Hill, Hounds Of Love, Cloudbus...

I’ve added this handy little bit of CSS to my starting styles.

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