Why the super rich are inevitable
The interactive widgets embedded in this article are excellent teaching tools!
Link tags: distribution
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The Proprietary Syndication Formats - Chris Coyier
Guess which format is going to outlast all these proprietary syndication formats. I’d say RSS, which I believe to be true, but really, it’s HTML.
Notifier — Convert content sources to RSS feeds
A service that—amongst other things—allows you to read newsletters in your RSS reader.
Always Own Your Platform
Stop giving away your work to people who don’t care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms.
Gutenberg and the Internet
Steven Pemberton’s presentation on the printing press, the internet, Moore’s Law, and exponential growth.
The map we need if we want to think about how global living conditions are changing - Our World in Data
While a geographical map is helpful if you want to find your way around the world, a population cartogram is the representation that we need if we want to know where our fellow humans are at home.
Fears of the IndieWeb
Most of my online friends and acquaintances will never understand or participate in the IndieWeb, and so I require a bridge between these worlds. On one side I choose what content to post and how it is stored, and it exists mainly on an island that few visit regularly. On the other side is nearly everyone I know, blissfully ignorant of my real home on the web and unable to see any content shared there without manual intervention or working plugins.
This does not all seem bad, though. Maintaining control will require more attention be placed on managing my content, and this time must come from somewhere. I imagine that I’ll slowly begin using social media less, writing more, and learning more about how to develop solutions to problems that arise within my setup.
AMP letter
I signed this open letter.
We are a community of individuals who have a significant interest in the development and health of the World Wide Web (“the Web”), and we are deeply concerned about Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a Google project that purportedly seeks to improve the user experience of the Web.
Improving URLs for AMP pages – Accelerated Mobile Pages Project
Good news! Google will graciously allow non-Google-hosted AMP pages to get the AMP blessing in search results.
Bad news! It requires publishers to package up their AMP pages in a new packaging format that browsers don’t support yet.
The First Web Apps: 5 Apps That Shaped the Internet as We Know It
A great bit of web history spelunking in search of the first websites that allowed users to interact with data on a server. Applications, if you will. It’s well written, but I take issue with this:
The world wide web wasn’t supposed to be this fun. Berners-Lee imagined the internet as a place to collaborate around text, somewhere to share research data and thesis papers.
This often gets trotted out (“the web was intended for scientists sharing documents”), but it’s simply not true that Tim Berners-Lee was only thinking of his immediate use-case; he deliberately made the WWW project broad enough to allow all sorts of thitherto unforeseen uses. If he hadn’t …well, the web wouldn’t have been able to accommodate all those later developments. It’s not an accident that the web was later used for all sorts of unexpected things—that was the whole idea.
Anyway, apart from that misstep, the rest of the article is a fun piece, well worth reading.
Distributed and syndicated content: what’s wrong with this picture? | Technical Architecture Group
Hadley points to the serious security concerns with AMP:
Fundamentally, we think that it’s crucial to the web ecosystem for you to understand where content comes from and for the browser to protect you from harm. We are seriously concerned about publication strategies that undermine them.
The anchor element is designed to allow one website to refer visitors to content on another website, whilst retaining all the features of the web platform. We encourage distribution platforms to use this mechanism where appropriate. We encourage the loading of pages from original source origins, rather than re-hosted, non-canonical locations.
That last sentence there? That’s what I’m talking about!
Designed lines. — Ethan Marcotte
We’re building on a web littered with too-heavy sites, on an internet that’s unevenly, unequally distributed. That’s why designing a lightweight, inexpensive digital experience is a form of kindness. And while that kindness might seem like a small thing these days, it’s a critical one.
Browsers, not apps, are the future of mobile - Inside Intercom
There’s a whole category of native apps that could just as easily be described as “artisanal web browsers” (and if someone wants to write a browser extension that replaces every mention of “native app” with “artisanal web browser” that would be just peachy).
Here’s some more thoughts along the same lines:
We’re spending increasing amounts of time inside messaging apps and social networks, themselves wrappers for the mobile web. They’re actually browsers.
There’s an important take-away to this:
The web is and will always be the most popular mobile operating system in the world – not iOS or Android. It’s important that the next generation of software companies don’t focus exclusively on building native iOS or Android versions of existing web apps.
Just make sure those web apps render and work well in the new wave of mobile browsers – messengers. Don’t build for iOS or Android just for an imaginary distribution opportunity. Distribution exists where people spend most of their time today – social and messaging apps, the new mobile browser for a bot-enabled world.
The Progress of Web Apps | Microsoft Edge Dev Blog
The roadmap for progressive web apps from Microsoft; not just their support plans, but also some ideas for distribution.
Android Instant Apps and the web - Broken Links
I’ve been poking around at Google’s information on “instant apps” since they announced it at Google I/O. My initial impressions mirror Peter’s.
Either they allow access to more device APIs (which could be a massive security hole) or else they’re more or less websites.
The InterPlanetary File System Wants to Create a Permanent Web | Motherboard
I’m getting increasingly intrigued by the IPFS protocol and its potential for long-term digital preservation.
HTTP is obsolete. It’s time for the distributed, permanent web
The title is hyperbolic, and while I certainly think that the criticisms of HTTP here are justified, I don’t think it will be swept aside by IPFS—I imagine more of a peaceful coexistence. Still, there’s some really good thinking in here and this is well worth paying attention to.
Steve Albini on the surprisingly sturdy state of the music industry
Steve Albini’s barnstorming keynote address at Melbourne’s Face the Music conference.
We could make history — I.M.H.O. — Medium
I quite the look of Medium, but Dave Winer absolutely nails it with this feature request:
Let me enter the URL of something I write in my own space, and have it appear here as a first class citizen. Indistinguishable to readers from something written here.
I think it might get a tattoo of this:
There’s art in each individual system, but there’s a much greater art in the union of all the systems we create.
Scripting News: Upcoming: The minimal blogging tool
Dave Winer is putting together technology to battle share-cropping and enable the Pembertonisation of your content: you host the canonical copy and distribute to third-party services.