Tagged: internet

I'm reading the internet...

So in the days of newspapers, did you read the highway system? No you didn't.

The internet is not a thing; it's a way of getting to all the things. So you're actually reading a bunch of sites, or voices, or people, or corporations. Everything that's right/wrong with the internet is what's right/wrong with those sites. So you need to tune your sources.

"The internet" has become the word we use to capture the unfathonable multiplicity of sources that are now available to us. And, not surprisingly, most of them take on the character of late industrial capitialism; shallow, crappy, attention and money seeking.

But you choose the sites you visit, you choose your own Internet. Your internet coexists with everyone else's. That's what makes it the Internet.

Tags: internet

Date created: 2015-11-15

Imagine a book

Imagine a book that was interesting and always new stuff is being added. That's my phone or the net.

It's more interesting than being present. Not very substantial though.

Tags: internet

Date created: 2013-07-30

what is the internet in the absence of Google?

Finding things through stuff you've already found.

Contributing in smaller communities.

Finding stuff by following up references, to references, to references.

Twitter immensely more important.

PLN (Personal Learning Network) very significant. Personal reccommendations.

Is this what we're moving too? Because the surplus of information availble from Google is so overwhelming, people just rely on friend's reccommendatiionss, Facebook streams for stuff that's mildly interesting?

Tags: internet

Date created: 2013-07-06

Indyweb (draft)

There's been a recent flurry of activity around the Indyweb (Indieweb?)

Since the announcement of Google Reader's impending demise, there's been quite a lot of internetention to Indyweb ideas.

Here's some that I found useful or nicely put.

Douglas Rushkoff is quitting facebook

Marco Arment,speaking about email says

You must own any data that's irreplaceable to you.

and in Own Your Identity he says

But there will always be the open web for the geeks, the misfits, the eccentrics, the control freaks, and any other term we can think of to proudly express our healthy skepticism of giving up too much control over what really should be ours.

He was a co-founder of Tumblr, which offered custom domain support free from its inception.

If you're not paying, you're the product Own Your Words Dave Winer Jon Udell

Use majors for syndication

Tantek talks about On Silos vs an Open Social Web looking at why the silos are far more attractive to people.

expressed the POSSE philosophy -- Publish Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere

this is much smarter than my facebook approach of avoiding it as much as possible.

celik? Anil? Steps/Degrees blog; tumblog indiwebcamp.org

Use services that will liberate your data google so far wordpress/blogger -- can move entire blogs flickr

IndieWebCamp has some good resources to get started.

Tags: internet

Date created: 2013-04-07

I hate Facebook

I thought it was great initially, a way of connecting with people i'd lost contact with, a way of feeling in contact with friends overseas. She poked me, so she thought of me, even if just for an instant. And then it grew, and grew, and grew.

It turned out that if I'd wanted to maintain contact, I would have. If I wanted to regain contact with someone, I'd defintely use Facebook, initially. It's great for organising school reunions. But commenting on someone's facebook post is not all that rewarding.

If I'm looking at people's posts on facebook, it's because I feel a bit lonely, and I want to feel some frisson of social contact. Seeing the proof of my friend's independent inner lives, even on facebook, is good. I can believe in my friends, believe in the world, and get my head to shrink down to normal size.

There was a Star Trek TNG episode, a quite stupid one, about Beverley Crusher being trapped inside her own head, and her friends ceasing to exist. Some quantum thing, sure.... But the basic notion is right-- my imagination can't contain you. Facebook gives a channel to let you in. A thin, kind of nasty channel, but a channel nonetheless. It would be good if my friends had blogs, or wrote long emails, but they don't. So facebook is all I have.

Facebook makes it easy to not have a blog, to not upload photos, to not write long emails. It's the Xmas letter form of contact; occasional status posts, blasted out to hundreds of people. Not personal.

Facebook controls all that stuff, of course, though perhaps the details change. AFAIK, facebook can do whatever it wants, make your posts visible outside, or not, make old ones dissappear, or not, keep them around after you've deleted your account, or have died. It's their house, you just play in it.

If I have anything to say of any significance, I want my own house to say it in. I want control over it.

Blogs and feeds are brilliant for this. Thanks to @davewiner there are great meechanisms for tracking what you want to track, ordering it and reviewing it the way you want. Of course, you can't do that with stuff on facebook. Facebook decides what to show you.

Journals are giving up their online presence for a presence in facebook. People are publishing links to facebook in the form of like buttons. I hate like buttons. If you care about something enough, write about it, tweet about it, in a way i can find out on the real internet. In a way that lasts. In a way that doesn't mix your like with thousands of others I don't care about.

Google's circles seems better this way. If you trust google more than facebook. Which I don't, really.

Sure it's nice to see what the mass of people are thinking, if you're marketing a product. I'm not.

Inauthenticity. Likes mean you clicked a button. if you've only clicked that button once, is your like worth more than someone who clicks it a hundred times every day? No.

I worry that people are throwing away the free printing press they control, for the free one they don't control, but that everyone else is using.

Back before the Internet, there was the Source, and CompuServe, and later, AOL. AOL had lot of people, companies had a presence on AOL. It was a classic walled garden, until they attached it to the internet. AOL users considered harmful. Now it seems that everyone is flocking back into the garden. Seeing the rush, companies are too. Probably some are Facebook only.

It's just too depressing.

Tags: internet

Date created: 2012-06-16

Sharing work

I was working on a word list app for my kids.

It strikes me that I'm doing what my parents did when they wrote out some words on about 6 pieces of cardboard. It's taking me longer, but the results are generalisable, and shareable.

My first memory of reading is of some flash cards my parents had made. They were quite big, made of thick corrogated cardboard, but white, not brown. On each my parents had written a word in brown marker. There were probably six or so, but I only remember "teddy bear". I think I always got this one right, because it was the biggest. Maybe it having two words helped, but I don't remember knowing about spaces.

Cut to this weekend. I'm making flash cards for my daughter, who is learning to read. I'm not very good with scissors and pens, but I can program, so I'm writing a web page with some javascript to populate it. The words can go into categories, and can have associated images and audio files. The set can be expanded or changed relatively easily. It's taken a lot longer for me to make this that it would have taken my parents to make their set. But, anyone who wants it can grab a copy of what I've done and customise it themselves. So rather than making some flashcards, I've made a way for anyone to make (and share) flashcards. And it's available to any one of the billion people with internet access.

This change in reach is a benefit of the Internet. Another benefit of the internet is that I didn't even need to do this, no doubt somebody somewhere has already done it better. But I like programming, like my daughter likes scissors, and markers, and glue.

Tags: internet

Date created: 2012-04-14

Death of the open web?

Scoble thinks the Open Web is dead. The battles needed to be fought 4 years ago. No one blogs, everyone shares on Facebook, twitter etc.

I think "who cares?"-- if someone's entire presence is on Facebook, I won't be reading them.

If I can't get a feed, I'm not interested.

I've never seen anything serious on Facebok. Lots of social contact, which is ok, and lots of great links, finds, which I might prefer be on tumblr or posterous would be preferable, but ok.

But if you're wanting to do something real, are you going to choose Facebook?

Tags: internet

Date created: 2012-04-01