You'll like this new gmap app.
http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/21/google-maps-your-timeline-keeps-track-of-your-travels/
Ack!
That's it. I'm ordering the new iExtra iBiggie iPhone when it comes out in the Fall.
It's not that different to location history. Wasn't there a hoo-haa before when the same was found unannounced on iPhone and apps had access to it?
Yeah, Iphone had a resident text file with your coords on it. They've learned better now ...moved it to the cloud, where it's perfectly safe and secure.
https://old.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/r5tuo2/they_still_dont_understand_internet/
> I'm ordering the new iExtra iBiggie iPhone when it comes out in the Fall.
I put Amy on a 13 pro max, we'll see how it goes. Waiting for the new macbook air to come out myself. Man it's weird typing that out. hhh
I am not saying that I want to live under an authoritarian government... but one thing about China is that in general you rise as a politician by showing competence at the lower level with nuts and bolts things, so you have tons of engineers and technical people at the highest levels.
We have a bunch of lawyers.
As a result, China is much better at execution (see what I did there?)
Heh, In the meantime I've already ditched the iPhone for an /e/ Phone as per other threads.
My old iPad went into a kernal panic after an update and I'm thinking of getting a new iPad of some sort or model. (I looked at Amazon Fire tablets, figuring they will phone home to Amazon but they won't report to Google, but none are 4G capable and I want 4G.)
Congress is clueless, mostly. Heck, the people who design gov't websites are not much better.
"Don't bring wall street to a web fight"
Make Free Stuff | Max Böck
https://mxb.dev/blog/make-free-stuff/
>>web fight
I have a lot of inchoate thoughts floating around on the ideas in that article.
One that has been on my mind - with current browsers, what are the possible dangers of clicking on a popups?
Max describes the Web I fell in love with. It was a seemingly endless street fair to explore. Now it's pretty heavy on branded commercial dreck, silos, wackos, slickers and grifters that suck the life and creativity out of everything.
There is still life out there with the Indieweb blogs and Neocities html sites but you wouldn't know it much from the search engines. People are finding them by surfing, communities and wandering new style webrings even.
>> Web I fell in love with.
Brad, I know a podcast is not as easy as skimming a text article, but check out the one I posted about a solar powered website
http://th3core.com/talk/web-development/low-tech-magazine's-solar-powered-website/
I posted that link with you in mind based on your comments about the text-based web and all that. I think you would find it worth 18 minutes or whatever it is.
>> check out
Ergo, I gave it a listen. Interesting stuff and it touches on some of the problems of Web 2.0, but there are so many I'm not sure were to start.
I think much of it comes down to intent, attitude and silos.
Intent: The Web was more fun when people posted thoughts, knowledge, expertise, opinions etc. and were not worried about monetizing. Example: decades ago some guy built a 1:1 scale model of the Robot from the TV show Lost in Space. He built a Geocities site posting photographs and a detailed howto about how he did it. Just sharing his hobby and how he replicated something cool. It's not so much about hand coding html for static pages or compressing photographs for faster loading or using Wordpress, it's about the free sharing of information no matter how niche.
Attitude: Making your own website is a matter of attitude. You aren't waiting for permission, you just do it, for you, and if others enjoy it that's a bonus. If you want to make an episode guide for your favorite TV show with your own thoughts about why each episode was special or terrible you just do it. You don't have to be content with Wikipedia's (silo alert) format of just giving a neutral one sentence plot summary. You don't need Wikipedia's permission. Just do it.
Silos: When you post your stuff to a corporate silo (Facebook, Twitter, even Wikipedia) you lose control. You have to conform to their format. And they are using you to monetize your content. Web 2.0 was all about silos and who controls the silos.
There is room for both commercial and non-commercial we've just gone way to far to the commercial side and we have destroyed the Web 1.0 infrastructure that supported the non-commercial Web. Certainly Ford or BMW should have their own websites talking about their products. But IMHO it's about balance, if all we have is Ford corporate websites writing corpspeak that gets boring pretty quick. The fun stuff is the stuff you find by exploring, surfing, sharing URL's and sometimes finding via search.
Some of the concepts I found interesting in that podcast, which is, after all, a site that is monetized as I understand it. I love the idea that they are willing to go offline for a certain amount of time each year (with the caveat that their main/legacy site is still in a data center)
>> Intent... monetizing
>> Attitude... permission
Everything follows from that. My own blog used to get a mere 6K to 10K visits per month. That is not enough to bother with trying to monetize it. I had trained myself, however, through other websites and working in marketing that everything should be monetized. So I had some affiliate links, basic Google Analytics, Search Console and so forth. I thought about keywords in titles.
At some point, though, I realized that its purpose (intent, I should say) was never to make money, build a following, or become and "influencer." The original reason I started the blog was because I wanted a place to write outside of my scholarly work where I did not need to be so formal, did not need a full editorial review process, did not need to worry about what people would think. I felt that years of scholarship had made my writing really boring and I was hoping to be less boring.
It took me a long time, but I eventually realized that writing for SEO and tracking the results would also make me boring. Affiliate links would make it even more boring. So I eventually removed all tracking, all analytics, switched to using the exact (often cryptic) titles I wanted. Since I have no analytics, I don't know for sure whether anyone reads it, though I do have a contact form and I occasionally get messages thanking me for this post or that one. Strangely... there are a few affiliate links I cannot seem to find that still bring in about $20/mo on Amazon LOL. I even grepped the database.
So... in my long roundabout way... that has me thinking a lot about the Web 3 promise of NFTs for everything, so that my Twitter posts can be tokenized and monetized and that just strikes me as moving in the wrong direction. The idea that we would solve the current problems with the web by monetizing things that cannot yet be monetized, does not seem like the right solution.
>> Silos
Separate problem, but again why I have a blog even if I only post once a year. I don't mind that I have generated hundreds of thousands of words of content for The Core, but I just don't want to be working on the Zuckerberg/Dorsey content farm.
>> Ford
One of the things I liked in the podcast was his position that there is a place in the world for websites with 99.9999% uptime, like the NOAA website. People can actually die if some websites go down for a few hours. But on the other hand, for most websites, 98% uptime is just fine. I particularly liked his calculation that going from 95% uptime to 99.99% uptime would require seven times as much infrastructure. I appreciated the idea that there is a real cost to the "constant on" web, just like there is to the 24-hour grocery store or whatever
Ergo, others are thinking about the same things even as we speak.
QuoteWhen did it become the norm that a blog is a marketing tool? What's wrong with simply using a blog as a way of airing your thoughts and feelings?
https://colinwalker.blog/?date=2022-04-13#p2
That guy is a kindred spirit. We even read the same books. We both find audiobooks move too fast.
But above all, one of the things he calls out that I have long hated about the blogosphere is that since blogs became platforms for self-promotion, the standard advice was to find a niche and never stray from it. If you blog about HO model trains, you can get away with the occasional post on O scale, but do not think about blogging about anything that is full scale. Niche blogs have their place, of course. Just like Popular Science magazine cannot suddenly publish an issue about the fashion choices at the Oscars. But I would like to see more people writing more things that matter to them without thinking about whether it fits their niche.
Again, if you are not trying to get rich or be an influencer, it doesn't matter. This one of Seth Godin's broken record tracks - significant benefit from writing and putting it out in public accrues to the writer even if nobody else reads it.
In the article by Om Malik that Colin Walker links to, Om says
Quotenormals find our attention being colonized
I've been thinking of this a lot. My life now is calm in general. Capacious, to use a word I have never used before, but heard recently in an interview with poet Ocean Vuong. Great word.
Anyway, I have been thinking that I always think of being "occupied" as synonymous with "busy." "My mind is occupied" means "my mind is busy." It's churning. It's maybe stuck on a problem. I have a large mental To Do list.
Lately, though, I have been thinking of it in a more military sense where "occupied" is a synonym for conquered, colonized, under occupation by a hostile force, such as Elon Musk or Donald Trump or Will Smith or anyone else who leverages the open nature of modern media to try to colonize minds.
> niche
I'm always at war with myself between starting new niche blogs and just dumping everything into one. Some bloggers treat their blog like a Commonplace book which I think is a good solution if one is not selling anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book
A really good example is Chris Aldrich's massive blog.
https://boffosocko.com
The search engines facilitate the online Commonplace book format with their page by page indexing whereas web directories have a hard time finding the right pigeonhole for them.
This is where RSS readers really come into play and it looks like RSS readers are making a comeback as a blogging alternative to social networks (although I still syndicate my blog posts out to Twitter, Mastodon and Micro.blog because it's free and a source of readers independent from search engines.)
An Argument for a Return to Web 1.0
https://vhsoverdrive.neocities.org/essays/oldweb.html
Site design makes my eyes bleed.
> bleed
Me too.
But that pretty well summarizes the old web arguments. And notice it has the equivalent of a blogroll type link list with all those buttons (which I can't read) which help you to surf the web. The retro-web movement is a bit wary of reliance on search engines. This group does surf the web.
Reminds me of the day in 1997 when I realized that I could write a little HTML and make a web page. And because I liked the idea, it had a faux-space/faux-star background with light text.
Some aspects of Web 1.0 are best relegated to the dustbin.
QuoteHand coding is a dying art, but it's worthwhile to learn the ins and outs of coding a page and having the page come out exactly the way you want.
I remember a lot of WMW stalwarts insist (brag) about this as if there was some quasi-moral superiority to coding HTML pages one at a time. In my case, I really came to the web with a programming background and was motivated because I had an app that my team used and I wanted to be able to update it in real time without sending CDs or email attachments back and forth.
The idea of doing a repetitive task over and over that could be automated seemed completely daft to me and I never understood these people.
> hand coding
Yeah, no. Not for me. I like scripts that automatically sort my navigation menus so give me something like Wordpress. Although fashions that go through themes in the blog world annoy me to no end. Like "hero picture headers" that take up everything above the fold or sidebar vs. no sidebar. Gah!
For me the focus is on what you want to say. But I will say that html pages without all the Javascript are durable and still renderable decades after they were published.
Still, it's nice webmasters have a choice to hand code while crawling on bare knees across broken glass, WYSIWYG editors, blog scripts or whatever. Create, publish something, share, think, listen.
Blogless — Writing Articles online without a Blog
https://blogless.datenbrei.de/
> Blogless
Interesting but it seems like it makes you more dependent on third parties: FB, Twitter and Disqus.
I do know one person who blogs like this:
He either hand writes his blog post with a fountain pen in cursive on an index card or he types it on an index card with a manual typewriter.
He photographs the index card and uploads that to his photo blog on Micro.blog.
He seems happy.
Static HTML comments | Derek Sivers
https://sive.rs/shc
War Mapper | Global Conflict Tracking
https://warmapper.org/
Thanks for that. Very interesting.