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Listened to The poster’s guide to the new internet – The Vergecast | Podcast on Spotify

In episode three of our connectivity mini series, The Verge’s David Pierce explores the idea of and , two syndication models for posting on the internet that don’t rely on a single platform.

Along with the companion article POSSE: a better way to post on social networks – The Verge this was a mostly straightforward account of POSSE.

The highlight for me was listening to Manton explaining his philosophy in a very clear way. Manton always makes perfect sense to me.

One of the original premises was just, could we rebuild a Twitter-like user experience, but based on blogs?

The timeline in micro.blog is just post from lots of feeds, lots of RSS feeds, whether they’re hosted on micro.blog, or they’re hosted somewhere else.

How do we merge those together so you don’t just have a few tabs open with your favourite websites and you’re typing in the domain name, it’s more of a newsfeed timeline experience, and that’s what people want.

But if the foundation of that, if the protocols can be open, it allows us to build so many interesting apps, so many different types of experiences.

It’ll just be way better.

What is particularly delightful to me is the way Manton starts with RSS feeds. micro.blog is almost the opposite of most other networks as it doesn’t try to lock you in an any way. I’ve been using the service since the beginning, completely free of charge as I have my own blog here.

Manton is also clear on the difficulty of getting more people away from the silos and on to their own domain and using more open services.

 

The comments by Matt Mullenweg, any positive move towards IndieWeb ideas from WordPress will have a huge effect.

I was quite frustrated in looking for an RSS feed for the The Vergecast. Ironic given the subject of this episode. I finlly found it on their pod.link page. I do wish RSS feed links were not becoming harder to find.

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Montage of screenshots of some webpages discussed in article

School

Magic Tools – MagicSchool.ai

MagicSchool is your AI assistant for all things teaching. We think #TeachersAreMagic – and we are on a mission to fight teacher burnout with Artificial Intelligence.

Limitations
May occasionally produce biased or inaccurate information
Only has knowledge up to the year 2021
Cannot search the internet or produce images (yet)

A large set of AI tools for teachers, I’ve only tried one so far. I wonder how they will make money. Sign up for fee is the only thing I can see. I’ve used ChatGPT is a fairly casual way, making crosswords questions and cloze procedures for H2P.

Kevin’s Meandering Mind | Generative AI and the Writing Classroom: WMWP Workshop

Overall, our intentional message was not “the world is ending so ban AI” but more, “this is our new reality, so how can we start to think of AI as a partner to help us as teachers and maybe help our students as writers?” and I think that theme really resonated with the educators who joined us last night.

Also from Kevin, Write Out: Gathering Sensory Details for Haiku which if the weather permits and we can get to the woods I’ll try next week.

Holiday rabbit hole

This

02 Mississippi River Sheet 15 Landscape

from Tom Woodward

lead to a collection of links including: Dan Coe Carto – The Community Library 2023—Rivers Revealed

Lidar (light detection and ranging) is a technology that uses laser light pulses to create intricate three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface. These models can be used to create stunningly detailed images of rivers and floodplains. These depictions often reveal previously unseen channels where rivers have flowed in the past and invite viewers to visually meander along these pathways through both space and time.

And some local data Scottish Remote Sensing Portal makes me wonder how difficult this would be, it would be nice to do from places I know.

Glow Blogs

I also spent a fair bit of time in the wet weather on Glow Blogs help. Although the classic editor is default on Glow Blogs, we are getting ready for using Blocks. I’ve been updating information and using the blocks editor to do so. I’ve tried all the blocks and am now a lot happier using it.

Featured image: a montage of screenshots of some of the lined pages, my previous script had a few problems with cookie banners, so this one used Safari & takes screenshots. Not as elegant and I think there are a few daft decisions, but it works.