85 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
  2. Jan 2024
    1. Show Ponies are typically built with limited grant funding that is allocated on a project basis. Sometimes they’re created merely to be a proof of concept. In other cases, their funders hope that “if you build it, they will come.” But because Show Ponies are usually funded by governments or non-profit organizations, they rarely have a revenue model. So even if they do gain traction and users, a Show Pony’s continued existence depends on continued support from governments or philanthropy rather than their users. This is a fragile existence, and the Internet is littered with neglected Show Ponies that aren’t being maintained.
  3. Dec 2023
  4. May 2023
    1. Those are good points.

      Reply to Dan Allosso at https://danallosso.substack.com/p/what-value-do-i-add-to-the-substack/comment/16463063

      I just saw this morning that Jillian Hess, a professor/researcher/writer at a community college in New York, is also contemplating some of the same territory and trying to balance out the necessaries: https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/introducing-ps-a-new-paid-subscriber

      I see that she's using both Amazon and Bookshop affiliate accounts and links in her stream. Have you delved into this for supplementation (albeit probably small)? I've done it for years and it never nets enough to even cover my hosting costs, though it makes the hobbyist portion of the outlay a bit more comfortable.

      Beyond this, you might appreciate her particular Substack on note books and note taking or her new book: Hess, Jillian M. How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. https://amzn.to/3VY4RU7

      You're probably beyond needing them, but Substack has been building their writer resources and tips for helping to build paid audience. Details at https://on.substack.com/s/resources and https://on.substack.com/s/office-hours

    1. Perhaps you're conflating too many things? Ask first, what value do I add to the world? (Arguably loads.) Then ask: How do I (best) distribute this value? To this perhaps one of your answers is Substack, which may or may not be one of many tools you use for this purpose. Then the follow on question is what value do you get back from it?

      Given HCR's numbers (especially in comparison with Twitter) and her time on the platform, I suspect she may have (or at this point had) some sort of special platform deal with Substack which isn't publicly known beyond the basics of what the typical person could get. It's probably the modern digital equivalent of the sort of deal a highly visible academic might get from a magazine like The Atlantic. The pay scale may be different but we can obviously see that the daily output is wildly different too. If you're not aware, when Substack started they reached out to a wide variety of famous/semi-famous people and helped them to build a quick audience that would have taken them far more time and effort than they would otherwise have ever invested. Part of this was providing initial payment/seed money which was really their early investment for getting lots of quality content on the platform as a means of drawing the masses to come to the platform to both read and create as well. Unless you're a massive name working with them directly, you're unlikely to get this sort of deal today, and this means a tougher up hill slog for the "rest of us" as the platform doesn't need to pay for this sort of scaling/network effect now. If nothing else, knowing these early economies of Substack (and really lots of other social platforms, Medium certainly followed this script as an example) will help you to have a broader perspective and better compare your apples to others' oranges.

  5. Mar 2023
    1. Legal affordances arise from relations within and between bodies of law at different scales, where questions of definition, jurisdiction and applicability configure the legal space of NAPFs’ strategy and the physical space of operations. We highlight how a focus on legal affordances as comprised of absences, ambiguity and arbitrage allows us to see how NAPFs use legal and spatial scaling to connect the local to the transnational. We also suggest that social activism concerned with property, labor, and public thoroughfare rights can challenge legal affordances. These challenges can then be pushed at different scales where adjudication may be on offer, but are also limited given that NAPFs have considerable resources to spend in fending off legal challenges.

      Interesting - but misses the 'alternative positive construction' of these affordances. The absences and ambiguity can be deployed regeneratively as well as in the form of resistance. This is building in the cracks rather than litigating the ugly new buildings.

  6. Jan 2023
  7. Dec 2022
    1. Mastodon is a sustainable, healthy network that reached – before the migration begun – an equilibrium of around 5 million overall, with half a million active users. So why does it need to grow further? Because millions more people need access to healthy, just, sustainable, user-friendly communication tools. Hans Gerwitz described it as seeing the network’s growth as “souls saved,” instead of “eyeballs captured.”  

      An eye-opening metric. 'souls saved' vs eyeballs. As in, the number of people with access to a community values reinforcing platform. Vgl [[EU Digital Rights and Principles]] and [[Digital Services Act 20210319103722]] more geared to things that aren't specifically aimed at the culture of interaction, but at things that can be regulated (in the hope that it will impact culture of interaction).

    1. We will also run into some issues when we consider adding new channels to Service Desk like an API. We should have a streamlined process of rendering notes (messages) etc. Having a base64 image (or even attachment) in mail but not in the API might be inconsistent and also adds a lot of code that needs to be maintained.
  8. Nov 2022
    1. Dr. Johnathan Flowers @shengokai@zirk.usThis is a good one. My response? These platforms host publics, but are not publics themselves. Publics form through using the affordances of the platforms to give rise to a community of shared interests which enable members to cooperate for mutual flourishing.https://sci

      https://mastodon.social/@shengokai@zirk.us/109352048879045130

      https://sciences.social/@Chanders/109352022415374012

    1. Most radically, Digitalland is a place where the substrate of reality itself is open, like text in a book. If you know how to read that text, you can see anything that’s happening in your part of Digitalland. And if you know how to write the text, well, then you can change reality itself. And so Digitalland affords some people a form of omniscience and omnipotence that in Physicalland we could make sense of only by reference to God.

      This is a great observation - platforms are typically described today as "walled / closed gardens" - Plunkett observes that they are in fact an "open substrate" - it's just that it's open to but a few platform owners / controllers.

    2. So what about the platforms that these companies spend their time designing, building, and optimising? The platform is a thing so new that we don’t yet have the words to describe it. That I’m using the word ‘thing’ shows that even the category is unclear. Is a platform a tool? Or a service? Or an institution? We could argue that it’s all or none of these. And so the best we can do, to avoid the trap of the horseless carriage, is to use metaphor to grasp the kind of thing a platform is, and what its ramifications might be.

      This is interesting. My intuition is that by now - after at least 5 years of public debate - platforms are becoming something quite well defined (in general terms of the public debate): two sided markets, etc. Curious to see this argument develop - that in fact we still lack words to describe them.

  9. Oct 2022
    1. as a reaction to the techlash, the power centers of Silicon Valley have diverted our attention by spinning up tales about the next chapter of the digital revolution.
  10. Sep 2022
    1. the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can’t moderate the content on their platforms.
    1. At first, TikTok was exciting because there was culture that could only happen there. Now that on-platform culture is being overwhelmed by viral arbitrage, and the actual content is getting closer to what you see on every other network. As the platform gets bigger, it gets more generic, and there’s less to distinguish it from every other mass-market social network.

      There was a sense of newness to TikTok that's gone. Instead of a "TikTok culture", there's a sense that it's part of a bigger, algorithmically arbitraged and filtrated whole.

      And that's by the way an interesting idea, that "viral arbitrage" is cross-platform - as there are so many narratives about platforms as closed gardens with moats, pitching their services against each other.

    1. the interconnected world of the open internet

      This is the "open internet" that is a tool for furthering freedom and democracy - a mission that FB supports. There's another take on "open internet", where it is about curbing the power of corporate monopolies.

    1. Machine learning generated content is just the next step beyond TikTok: instead of pulling content from anywhere on the network, GPT and DALL-E and other similar models generate new content from content, at zero marginal cost. This is how the economics of the metaverse will ultimately make sense: virtual worlds needs virtual content created at virtually zero cost, fully customizable to the individual.
    1. Since moving to Texas, however, the clock has become a lightning rod for criticism and scorn. In 2012, the eco-philosopher Michelle Bastian dismissed it as a distraction from “the other ‘clock’ Bezos is building” — the “clock of Amazon,” powered by one-click ordering immediacy, fulfilment center time-crunches, short-term labor contingency and federal tax avoidance.

      THis indeed a paradox, that the principal funder of the Long Now clock is also the inventor of one-click purchase

    1. We believe that the net benefits of scale outweigh the costs associated with these qualifications, provided that they are seriously addressed as part of what scaling means. The alternative of small, hand-curated models from which negative inputs and outputs are solemnly scrubbed poses different problems. “Just let me and my friends curate a small and correct language model for you instead” is the clear and unironic implication of some critiques.

      This is the classical de/centralization debate, visible today also with regard to online platforms. Which, by the way, are or will be inserting LLMs into their infrastructural stacks. Thinking about de/centralization always reminds me of Frank Pasquale's "Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3197292

  11. Aug 2022
    1. The ability to exit with your data intact is a core tenet of web3; web3 turns your data into your personal, programmable property.

      Yes, but without other platforms to go to (or the capacity to code own platform) the data, though owned, has little value. Thus the user remains dependent on platforms also in the web3 space

    2. As design theorist Yin Aiwen puts it, “joining a platform today is much like going to a new town; not only do you need to familiarize yourself with the interfacial environment, you also must adapt to a particular culture to communicate, exchange, and so on.”

      This is not necessarily the only option of using a platform - that of adjusting to the dominant / mainstream mode. Platforms are relatively flexible tools, creating opportunities for idiosyncratic uses / niches. And these actually are often encouraged by platforms, as they aim to spawn new niches.

  12. Jun 2022
    1. If you want to write a book, you could dial down the scope andwrite a series of online articles outlining your main ideas. If youdon’t have time for that, you could dial it down even further andstart with a social media post explaining the essence of yourmessage.

      This does make me wonder again, how much of this particular book might be found in various forms on Forte's website, much of which is behind a paywall at $10 a month or $100 a year?

      It's become more common in the past decades for writers to turn their blogs into books and then use their platform to sell those books.

  13. May 2022
    1. Content moderation takes place within this ecosystem.

      The essay makes the point that "Facebook has many faces - it is not a monolith". But algorithmic content moderation is monolithic. Let's see whether this tension is investigated.

  14. Apr 2022
  15. Feb 2022
    1. I think that making sure the apps and website we use are accessible to everyone is really important. I liked how this reading broke down the different levels in terms language accessibility and internet access. Sometimes I think teachers can overlook that aspect and accidentally have students trailing behind.

  16. Dec 2021
  17. Nov 2021
  18. Sep 2021
    1. You can help make Node.js and browsers more unified. For example, Node.js has util.promisify, which is commonly used. I don’t understand why such an essential method is not also available in browsers. In turn, browsers have APIs that Node.js should have. For example, fetch, Web Streams (The Node.js stream module is awful), Web Crypto (I’ve heard rumors this one is coming), Websockets, etc.
  19. Aug 2021
    1. First, how technologically feasible is it for competitors to remotely process massive quantities of platform data? Can newcomers really offer a level of service on par with incumbents?

      Do they really need to process all the data?

    2. The First Amendment precludes lawmakers from forcing platforms to take down many kinds of dangerous user speech, including medical and political misinformation.

      Compare social media with the newspaper business from this perspective.

      People joined social media not knowing the end effects, but now don't have a choice of platform after-the-fact. Social platforms accelerate the disinformation using algorithms.

      Because there is choice amongst newspapers, people can easily move and if they'd subscribed to a racist fringe newspaper, they could easily end their subscription and go somewhere else. This is patently not the case for any social media. There's a high hidden personal cost for connectivity that isn't taken into account. The government needs to regulate this and not the speech portion.

      Social media should be considered a common carrier and considered as such. It was an easier and more logical process in the telephone, electricity and other areas to force this as the cost of implementation for them was magnitudes of order higher. The data formats and storage for social should be standardized (potentially even in three or more formats) and that should be the common carrier imposed. Would this properly skirt the First Amendment issues?

  20. Jul 2021
  21. Jun 2021
  22. May 2021
    1. Your new home on the web

      Understory is a digital garden, a micro-publishing space for you to plant the seeds of your ideas and grow them into bi-directionally linked web portals.

      via IndieWeb Chat

    1. Email tools/clients are inconsistent in how they render HTML and CSS. A designed email might look great in Gmail, broken in Outlook, and unreadable in Apple Mail. Half of all emails are opened on mobile devices (according to one study). Email looks good in different clients? Great, now make it work on a 4" screen just as well as on a desktop.
  23. Apr 2021
    1. i found that for the osx host "gonzo" , the vanished files (not the warning message itself) appear in stdout - for linux hosts they _both_ appear in stderr , but nothing in stdout (rsync.err.#num is stderr, rsync.log is stdout)
  24. Mar 2021
    1. Folks like Ben Thompson are effectively writing books. Take a year of his essays, edit them for brevity and clarity, and you’d have a brilliant edition of This Year in Tech. And so in a strange way, Stratechery in paid newsletter form is as much a Future Book as a bounded Kindle edition.

      And this isn't a new thing, publishers were mining the blogosphere for books from websites in the early 2000s.

  25. afarkas.github.io afarkas.github.io
    1. If set to true the UI of all input widgets (number, time, month, date, range) are replaced in all browsers (also in browser, which have implemented these types). This is useful, if you want to style the UI in all browsers.
  26. Jan 2021
    1. This is a by-product of the success of Ubuntu. Whether people like it or not, most software available for Linux will target Ubuntu first. There may be packages available later for other distros / systems, but on the whole, you can be sure a software developer will target Ubuntu if they target Linux.
  27. Nov 2020
    1. The same emoji will not look the same across every device. Each operating system has its own design language. For example, take a look at how the smiley face renders across various platforms:<img src="https://www.smartrmail.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/image15.png" alt="smiley face across different mobile devices" class="wp-image-5429"/>The differences are subtle, but for some emojis the differences are much more pronounced. The t-shirt for instance completely changes color.<img src="https://www.smartrmail.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/image6.png" alt="how t-shirt renders across different mobile devices" class="wp-image-5430"/>So one subject line you definitely don’t want to send your email with is “Flash Sale on Blue T-Shirts ”
  28. Oct 2020
    1. usually overwhelmed by misconceptions (the charitable interpretation) or lies and propaganda (the more accurate one). Some of the most prominent politicians in the country — notably Senator Ted Cruz — routinely lie to the public about what the law says and how courts have interpreted it.

      LOLGOP

    1. But what if, in 2019, we take a step back and decide not to let the platform decide how to run the show?

      The IndieWeb has already made some solid strides.

  29. Aug 2020
    1. It’s a sure sign, when there are four or five different coexisting subsystems for doing literally the same thing, that underlying it all is a commitment to backwards compatibility. Which in the Platforms world, is synonymous with commitment to your customers, and to your marketplace.

      This same sort of thing applies to WordPress for its backwards compatibility.

      I wonder if there were some larger breaking changes in Drupal 7 and 8 that removed their backwards compatibility and thereby lost them some older websites?

  30. Jul 2020
    1. A growing number of platforms, vendors, and partners support the AMP Project by providing custom components or offering integration with AMP pages within their platforms.

      I guess AMP is actually open-source software, but it still feels like it's something non-standard. I guess it's just an alternative open standard to the "main" web open standards.

    1. If you have worked with emails before, the idea of placing a script into an email may set off alarm bells in your head! Rest assured, email providers who support AMP emails enforce fierce security checks that only allow vetted AMP scripts to run in their clients. This enables dynamic and interactive features to run directly in the recipients mailboxes with no security vulnerabilities! Read more about the required markup for AMP Emails here.
  31. Jun 2020
    1. 5 Best Live Streaming Platforms for Private Live Stream

      These private events for a family, employees of a company, or a class of students, importantly need to be secure. Making use of private live streaming solutions you can ensure that your live stream is secure and is available to the right audience.

    1. Just as journalists should be able to write about anything they want, comedians should be able to do the same and tell jokes about anything they please

      where's the line though? every output generates a feedback loop with the hivemind, turning into input to ourselves with our cracking, overwhelmed, filters

      it's unrealistic to wish everyone to see jokes are jokes, to rely on journalists to generate unbiased facts, and politicians as self serving leeches, err that's my bias speaking

  32. Apr 2020
    1. for-profit tech companies — most notably Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA) — built software and services that rapidly outpaced the capabilities of open protocols
    2. Huge web properties were started during this era including Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the process, the importance of centralized platforms like AOL greatly diminished.
  33. Jan 2020
    1. But as I sat there I saw something missing: the larger goal and soul of the effort and thus of the company and the communities it wants to foster. They have structured this effort around a belief, which I share, in the value of freedom of expression, and the need — recognized too late — to find ways to monitor and constrain that freedom when it is abused and used to abuse. But that is largely a negative: how and why speech (or as Facebook, media, and regulators all unfortunately refer to it: content) will be limited.Facebook’s Community Standards — in essence, the statutes the Oversight Board will interpret and enforce and suggest to revise — are similarly expressed in the negative: what speech is not allowed and how the platform can maintain safety and promote voice and equality among its users by dealing with violations.

      Jarvis raises the issue of a lack of positive vision for online space / communication

  34. Dec 2019
  35. Nov 2019
    1. New technologies make it possible for students to tailor their course schedules, online classes, and brick-and- mortar learning venues to attain targeted degrees.

      With society and technology always changing. Learning new technology is key to getting ahead in higher education. Rate: 3/5

  36. Apr 2019
    1. Scalar is a more comprehensive multimodal publishing platform

      I just watched the Scalar video and my brain sorta exploded. Will definitely have to return there and explore it a bit more...

  37. Aug 2018
    1. Publishers and other sites can include a simple line of javascript to enable annotation by default across their content.

      Publishers and platform hosts who want to learn more about embedding annotations can learn more about best practices here.

  38. Feb 2018
  39. Oct 2017
    1. As I find the conversation in the OpenEd community start to concentrate around platforms–specifically OER textbook platforms–I want to ask to what standards are we holding these platforms accountable?

      What literacies do we need to evaluate platforms?

  40. Jul 2017
    1. F1000Research is an Open Research publishing platform offering immediate publication of articles and other research outputs with no editorial bias. All articles benefit from transparent peer review and the inclusion of all source data.

      Wellcome is basing its platform on F1000Research.

  41. Jan 2017
    1. benefits

      Of course they do - but benefits like this cost money. Publishers run businesses; businesses need profits 2 keep shareholders happy. But, so far, the platforms make learning more costly for students.

    2. doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to design and create better versions that maximize the benefits while minimizing the problems

      Who are these mythical platform developers? And why wouldn't they follow in the footsteps of the very profitable publishers?

  42. Feb 2016
    1. It is important as well to recognize that “platforms” are not only a technical architecture; they are also an institutional form. They centralize (like states), scaffolding the terms of participation according to rigid but universal protocols, even as they decentralize (like markets), coordinating economies not through the superimposition of fixed plans but through interoperable and emergent interaction.

      Platforms centralize/standardize interface definition and thereby decentralize flow.

  43. Aug 2015
    1. Publishing to these other platforms will be automated.
    2. Platform content policies—many of which are short and vague, and written mainly with typical users in mind—will be tested as editorial guidelines
    3. . In exchange for audience, platforms ask for some degree of labor and conformity and control.