On Blogs in the Social Media Age

“Succeeding in this market, like succeeding with a business venture, can be ruthlessly difficult. There’s lots of competition for the attention you’re trying to attract, and even skilled writers often find that something about their voice, or the timing of their topic, fails to catch on.”

Cal Newport

“Blogs represent a loosely coupled system, where the friction of posting and linking slows down the discourse enough to preserve context and prevent the runaway reactions that are possible in tightly coupled systems like Twitter, where a tweet can be retweeted, then retweeted again and again, forming an exponential explosion of pure reactive id.”

Cal Newport

“If you set out to design a platform that would poison America’s discourse and its politics, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more destructive than Twitter.”

Cal Newport

The Full Story

Cal Newport reminding us how hard all of this is and maybe explains why people continue to hang around the twitter cess pool water cooler.

“It’s not the most important thing in the world but after March I’ll need a visa to travel across Europe again. I won’t be able to leave and move to Berlin or Paris and that’s heart-breaking to me; the loss of potential connections, potential threads, relationships.”

Robin Rendle

The Full Story

… with him

What’s in a Name?

House Labor Committee Reborn.

“And what are the evil labor bosses advocating? A fair minimum wage, fair and meaningful immigration reform, affordable health care, a secure retirement and Social Security, workplace fairness, better pay and benefits, an end to sexual harassment in the workplace, safer and healthier workplaces—and respect for all workers.”

David Crook

The Full Story

The Slippery Slope of Complicity

“A wannabe Mussolini and his party of apparatchiks.”

Paul Krugman

The Full Story

My Thoughts

Says so much with so few words. This data back to August 18th, 2018 - see what I mean about getting behind!

…. What Are Your Thoughts?

When Do You Stand Up And Say ‘NO’?

“Cory talks about how Airbnb and other tech companies try to circumvent local regulation by lobbying statehouses.”

Priya Anand

The Full Story

Been saying it for years .. large companies get away with bypassing local laws just by ignoring them and then paying the odd paltry fine when someone stands up and says no … enough. Another reason why I think GDPR needs to be tried out in courts. Properly. Soon.

What’s Wrong with Tech? Late Stage Capitalism

“It’s not tech itself that is the problem, it’s late-stage capitalism.”

Cognizant - Of All ‘People’.

The Full Story

I have often found myself at odds with Cognizant in the past two years, but for this I will make an exception. A well thought through article - and pretty much spot on … said as much myself (though not so eloquently).

SpaceX Announces First Private Passenger for Moon Trip

“Yusaku Maezawa is the creator and chief executive of the online clothing store Zozo. Maezawa wants to take a trip around the moon using the planned Big Falcon Rocket in 2023. He also announced that he plans to invite six to eight artists, architects, designers and other creative people to join him. He said he wants to “inspire the dreamer in us all.”

Phil Dierking - and Reuters

Great idea - I wonder what the insurance costs are going to be like?

US Customs and Border Protection Sued Over iPhone Search and Seizure

“An American woman is suing US Customs and Border Protection over what she claims is the illegal seizure and search of her iPhone at Newark airport.”

Ben Lovejoy

The Full Story

My Thoughts

Been watching other shenanigans around this kind of activity for a while now. Quite apart from the seizure being illegal (in my highly non legal mind) … and that is part of a much larger story - this is not just about the physical phone - but the data on the physical phone.

Bottom line, the phone was returned - and the data on the phone was returned - BUT the data was also copied into some government database aswell - that’s the rub.

And remember - this woman is a US Citizen - not just a visitor, where the US government has already decided that ‘your data’ is ‘their data’.

Free Photo Resources

I built this list a couple of years ago - prompted by work that Dustin Senos was doing. I had forgotten all about it, and then out of the blue - someone pinged me this morning asking if I could add them … which I did. And then I thought maybe I should promote this list more?

Really Need To Add In This Lot

New Old Stock http://nos.twnsnd.co/

Superfamous (requires attribution) http://superfamous.com/

Picjumbo http://picjumbo.com/

The Pattern Library http://thepatternlibrary.com/

Gratisography http://www.gratisography.com/

Getrefe http://getrefe.tumblr.com/

IM Free (requires attribution) http://imcreator.com/free

Jay Mantri http://jaymantri.com/

Women of color in tech https://www.flickr.com/photos/wocintechchat/

Public Domain Archive http://publicdomainarchive.com/

Magdeleine http://magdeleine.co/

Foodiesfeed http://foodiesfeed.com

Picography http://picography.co/

Raumrot http://www.raumrot.com/10/

ISO Republic http://isorepublic.com/

Just Received From AhHa

http://pixabay.com

https://depositphotos.com

https://www.pexels.com

Introducing Living Notes For Better Timeliness

As I am building out my new sites at ‘Words’, ‘Pictures’ and ‘Sounds’ … purging dross, reorganizing and moving content from social silos, creating new material, commenting on threads that stream through my feeds, it is clear that I am fighting an uphill battle. And I can tell because of just how much I can see in my drafts folder, compared to that which is public.

But there is nothing that wrong with the unpublished stuff … it just isn’t public.

So, today I open a new section here on Words … ‘Living.Notes’.

I hope that the words appearing here will be more timely … ‘of the moment’ if you will and therefore more relevant. Some, who knows - maybe all, of these words will eventually move into other parts of the site, but for now at least they will be here.

And if this ogoing stream of consciousness is too much, I have also launched a newsletter that will pick up on the highlights … roughly weekly … so if you just want the cream, you can join over 300 other people … and counting … by signing up here.