Category Archives: enviable stuff

Talking about it isn’t good enough / But quoting from it at least demonstrates / The virtue of an art that knows its mind. // Seamus Heaney : Squarings

On the other hand, people have taken to calling any audio file a ‘podcast’, which is less great. It’s a podcast only if it is syndicated; otherwise, it’s just an audio file.

Open Word—The Podcasting Story ~ Stephen Downes

It is nice to see the increased interest in podcasting in generally, in the tech realm and in education. Good too to see this important point. An MP3 is not a podcast, the delivery system of an RSS feed with enclosures is. Or the fact that a podcast, if you subscribe is pushed to a you or your podcatcher.

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The Web itself is pretty special – Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a global hyperlinked information system. A system that was – ideally at least – openly available and accessible to everyone, designed for the purpose of sharing information and collaborating on knowledge-building endeavors. That purpose was not, at the outset, commercial. The technologies were not, at the outset, proprietary.

Source: Why ‘A Domain of One’s Own’ Matters (For the Future of Knowledge)

Nice concise post about why the web is important as compared to silos on the web.

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     And that’s the Web. That’s your domain. You cultivate ideas there – quite carefully, no doubt, because others might pop by for a think. But also because it’s your space for a think.

 

Google says it can’t trust our self-hosted AMP pages enough to pre-render them. But they ask for a lot of trust from us. We’re supposed to trust Google to cache and host copies of our pages. We’re supposed to trust Google to provide some mechanism to users to get at the original canonical URL. I’d like to see trust work both ways.

Source: Adactio: Journal—In AMP we trust

Reading above my pay grade again.

More about Google’s AMP stuff here: Google AMP is good for mobile web users – but what about publishers? | Media | The Guardian

One of the things it does is present your content quickly without all the javascript that slows pages down, but it also seems to hijack the ULR and give the material a google one.

Given Schools should teach pupils how to spot ‘fake news’ – BBC News, it might make understanding and evaluating content even harder.

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Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

from: Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media | Politics | The Guardian

Carole Cadwalladr’s article in today’s Observer, is both fascinating and frightening. The technology used by Cambridge Analytics is incredibly  powerful the use it has ben put too worrying. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s comms director in the quote above doesn’t have a Facebook account quoted in the same article:

It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.

Featured image on this post created with a wee AppleScript Makes auto complete google search gifs.

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I’ve seen this linked a few times recently, finally clicked.

– […] we may keep, use and share your personal information with companies connected with Instagram. This information includes your name, email address, school, where you live, pictures, phone number, your likes and dislikes, where you go, who your friends are, how often you use Instagram, and any other personal information we find such as your birthday or who you are chatting with, including in private messages (DMs).

from: A lawyer rewrote Instagram’s terms of service for kids. Now you can understand all of the private data you and your teen are giving up to social media — Quartz

I’ll be sharing this with my pupils soon.

Intervision, the 70s Soviet answer to the Eurovision Song Contest, was judge by electricity grid voting: “those watching at home had to turn their lights on when they liked a song and off when they didn’t, with data from the electricity network then being used to allocate points.” [Nick Heady] (Fluxx have been working with National Grid on several projects this year)

Just one of 52 things I learned in 2016 – Fluxx Studio Notes – Medium found via kottke

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maybe, in concert with an emphasis on making and collaborating and bug reporting and embracing other values of the open web, individuals can help reorient the cultural attitude toward technology away from entanglement and back to a place of enlightenment.

The Age of Entanglement – The Atlantic

Interesting Article. More grist for the ‘why we need to teach digital literacy and curiosity’ mill via @livedtime

Featured image Qsquare quantum pseudo-telepathy from flickr
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