Casey Newton on Facebook and Google vs Australia wrote
It’s worth mentioning that any Australian publisher aggrieved by an unfair exchange of value with Google here could opt out of search results at any time by adding one line of HTML to their website. But almost none of them do because traffic from Google drives significant advertising and subscription revenue to them. On the news that Facebook blocked all news in Australia after refusing to make a deal, it’s easy to blame the big blue F and move on.
I posted this very tongue in cheek recently. A brief thought that passed through my mind whilst walking my dog and listening to Break The Twitch. Weirdly the act of posting it made that thought stick around longer than it would have, and it is a useful thing to remember.
In my early teens I wanted to be a teacher, and only when I did some work experience and found out what it was actually like, were the rose-tinted glasses knocked from my eyes.
Matt Birchler nailing it once again:
One man’s bullshit is another man’s essential features, but for me, Ghost does away with all the stuff I don’t need and excels at what I do need. This can be expanded to soooooo many things that people get upset about. I’m the person Matt knows personally and moved to Ghost. While I moved back to WordPress for other reasons a year later I get exactly what Matt is saying here.
Perhaps avoid is the wrong word, but we’ve all felt that annoyance that we opened the app to send a quick tweet and all of a sudden time has disappeared. There are a number of ways to avoid this and the Twitter muscle memory that goes with it, but getting feedback from my blog posts is still an important loop for me to fill.
So, the indieweb comes to the rescue and provides much of what I seek through webmentions.
Chris Hannah on blog growth
That made me think, if money isn’t going to be a significant factor in any decision, and I have no desire to write for a specific audience, then I may as well just write for myself. Then if people like what I write about, then great, and if not then it doesn’t particularly matter. I’ve been banging on about this for a while, but not taking my own advice (I’m good at that).
Matt Birchler on his purchase of a MacBook Air:
Next up is figuring out an angle to talk about this machine, because it’s great and I want to shout about it from the rooftops.
I’m going to use it a bit more than normal over the next week or so because it’s new and shiny. Maybe I’ll leave my iPad for good because of how good it is…but that’s not likely 😛 Matt does these posts every now and again that sum up why he’s done something.
After trying and failing several times, I am starting to move further and further away from Twitter. I still check in every once in a while, but a good long break is helping to stop my impulses and curb my impusive usage.
I don’t hate Twitter, far from it, I love it, I just want it to do more than it does. It offers a platform that has barely moved forward for years, and just isn’t powerful enough for the modern web.
There are numerous things that I cannot remember when and why I started doing, I just do. But running I know exactly when and why. I was in my second year of secondary school, and we were doing cross country. I’d never been a highly active kid, but it was a nice day, and I couldn’t be bothered to walk it like the ‘cool’ kids did, so I ran.
Turns out I quite enjoyed it, and despite what half the school would tell you, it was lots of fun.
Chaitanya wrote
The crux of having other significant others (as coined by psychologist Eli Finkel) is to have your needs met from more than just your romantic partner. Your partner cannot always meet all your needs even if you expect them to. So, these are the people who would go along with you to exercise or listen to you vent about things your partner isn’t interested in hearing. This is some of my issue and why I keep a lot of things to myself.
When Apple announced the requirement for apps to be transparent about their privacy implications, I nodded in agreement and never gave it a further thought. Of course they should let users know what is being tracked and the information being used. In fact, the surprising part is that it’s taken until now for something so obviously Apple to be introduced.
It is one of those “of course they should do that” moments for people that follow along with Apple, but will it actually mean a lot to the end user?