Be constructive, be helpful, be kind. Make your blog posts not too long, not too short, not too stream-of-consciousness and not too terse. Remember your elementary writing classes. Have a thesis, make your argument, restate your thesis.
Be constructive, be helpful, be kind. Make your blog posts not too long, not too short, not too stream-of-consciousness and not too terse. Remember your elementary writing classes. Have a thesis, make your argument, restate your thesis.
In other Microsoft behaviour any reasonable person would object to, is stealth bloatware(woo!)
Being treated as the parasite of enterprise software is becoming less bearable with each passing day. If the Mac is half as pleasant as its fans say it is, I’ll be gone ASAP.
For Micro Monday I’m making it two image-centric GMT-located people in a row by pointing you to @robertbrook who primarily photoblogs his journeys in and around London. His posts are a great reminder of just how interesting so much of this world we have built can be!
Compared to hosting your own blog and auto-posting it to Micro.blog, which won’t cost you and won’t make Micro.blog any revenue, posting for a hosted blog seems to decrease your ownership.
Note: Self-hosting actually costs a lot.
There’s a lot of good spirit in this conversation but so far I’ve only seen a suggestion to give Manton and Jean more work that is not the user-side platform itself; now instead they would spend time on better organising the feedback system for users. I think this is a good idea but should not be a priority at the moment, since there are still a few good things Manton and Jean are more than capable of implementing without the attached better organised feedback system.
Whilst things take longer or might frustrate certain people, this is the reality of a smaller operation (as I’m sure Josh knows much better than I do, what with his and Belle’s company) and at this point I don’t think it would be good for Micro.blog to move closer to, say, the whole federated system where lots of people easily have lots of input – Mastodon is the well-known example of this and it’s just a mess as compared to Micro.blog.
There’s an assumption in Josh’s post that I have seen elsewhere; Micro.blog is presented as a viable alternative social network. I understand where this assumption comes from but it is just not true and so at a fundamental level a lot of these ideas are coming from a false position. The whole point, in so far as I have understood it is for individual ownership of your content to be the relevant point of difference (from social media) and then Micro.blog is a social layer to help connect those blogs upon which you have ownership, should you wish to do so.
And, frankly, I like that. Not least because it has been built and maintained in a way that does not involve Manton and Jean coming out with big statements about how “everybody can be involved” without evidence of that actually working, but rather it is a focused effort, transparently maintained on the most appropriate front; where people can find it usable before anything else.
Whilst I appreciate the spirit of “super ease of input from the community will solve lots of things!” I think this only has tangible worth if the platform is in a better condition than it currently is, both from a user perspective and from the developer perspective. I do not think it will work if it comes from a tiny team and a platform still in need of usability upgrades, especially because the strength of the endeavour is in its patient, calm approach; opening the floodgates should not happen, at least not yet.
The iPhone XS is faster than an iMac Pro on the Speedometer 2.0 JavaScript benchmark.
Sure, go ahead and talk about the cost of this device as if it’s just a phone.
The Builder’s High is a near-five year post I just read. It’s another piece of motivation for me this weekend.
You can’t post your performance of Bach on media platforms because Sony owns his “audio”, 300 years after his death.
This shit makes me tired.
Some weekend late night motivation: Marco Arment at XOXO, 2013
26 minutes well spent.
The last line in this piece by @brentsimmons hits the nail on the head.
If you ever find yourself in the process of using the words “RSS needs innovation” or anything near that, just stop. Seriously, don’t do that to yourself.
When we talk about a week starting particularly well, we talk about the return to Micro.blog of Sameer Vasta. 🎉🙌🏻
Please keep this Twitter. Please!
– Colin Devroe on Twitter seemingly fixing the timeline
Assuming this isn’t just another experiment it’ll be interesting to see if Twitter are pressured into backing out of their bad decisions.
I was on a podcast! 🎉 For the first time. 😅
It was a great experience being on @monday with @macgenie who is so good at making things easy and a joy to talk to. Thanks Jean!
Here’s the epsiode, including a guest appearance from my early autumn cold. 🍂🤒
Oh look, Micro Monday time!
I love it when artists join our community and @skysandison is the latest to grace us with their presence. Love their work, it’s only making Edinburgh more tempting than ever, and yay another GMT member!
Awesome. ✌
Some updates:
And it’s only Monday. 😎
Yet more proof that when it comes to the closed, privacy invasive web you cannot compete against Facebook. Also @manton continues to be right with increasing certainty; the only viable alternative is the open web.
USA: “Look how we can ruin the internet!”
EU: “Hold my beer.”
This article on Politico has a terrible headline but I consider it another big item in the case against metrics. When they become politicised in this way, which is now inevitably common, we see the way we are dehumanised by each other.
I binged a lot of Casey Neistat’s vlog and ended up running into a wall. You can have too much of a good thing, however!, I’m now back on that Neistat train and re-watched this video. This is great, I just forgot how great he is at what he does.
Next Thursday, FEMA will do its first test of a system that allows the president to send a message to most U.S. cellphones.
News To Let You Know You Are Already Living In A Dictatorship No Really It Is Happening Right Now Why Are You Reading This
(source)
A few things for you:
Enjoy your weekend!
Micro.blog has grown unevenly, likely against expectations from different quarters, and is now in a somewhat odd position within the context of the wider web. Inevitably, its early members are conflicted as the plastic wrapper is peeled away.
The big update to Omnibear is really good. I look forward to better support of non-Note types from Micro.blog.
In reply to: Why I hate Advertisements by @vishae
Here’s a thing I think is important; now we can actually ask these questions. Back in the day before the web and ideas centred around mainstream social networks, what did you have? Vote with your money? Well that excluded a hell of a lot of people. Now people can voice opposition and it can actually be heard.
For all of the bad of modern advertising, there is also good advertising out there and the bad stuff can now be voted against in ways that are much more inclusive; for example, boycotting a social media site’s most valuable accounts, just to pick an example out of the air.
We need to be realistic about a lot of the noise being made regarding advertising, privacy, social media and so on; much of it comes from people who previously were unaware of such issues, and in past generations many people lived in ignorant bliss. Again, I am thankful this has changed, it is great to see people asking questions and being heard and actually taking part in such important discussions.
Things are bad, sure. But they used to be so much worse.