Excursions

Here’s a snapshot with all the “new” Android smartphones being sold online, placed right next to one another. Yeah, there is so much of innovation, so much of “choice” in this space. 🙃

When you have “magic” in your name, you tend to suffer later. I was always sceptical of the promises Magic Leap was making. Demos looked too good to be true. Finally, their marketing team have realised they’ve overstayed their welcome. Back to reality.

Another day, another AMP horror story. AMP has to be the ideal use-case on how an incumbent on web muscles its advantage to make others embrace its proprietary non-standard technology. Will anyone even consider AMP without its prominence in search?

This is a running list of things I need to implement in Blotpub. I intend to pour my thoughts and prioritise. This may also go to github on things to come once finalised.

1. [Low] Support like and reply with data pulled xray. I am not sure what I plan to achieve out of this. It is primarily when I like a twitter post or an image posts, xray gives data in nice format. I would want to use that.
2. Media upload as multipart. I thing this should address the need for photo upload, mainly from quill. It is simpler as I have a reference of voxpelli’s project.
3. Media endpoint(?q=config). This is a big ask. First need to implement one without any reference. Second use it for photo upload.
4. Syndication (?q=syndicate-to). This should be simpler. Need to support sending posts to twitter. Again, I have the reference from voxpelli’s project.
5. Support for update/delete posts
6. Handle authentication issues reported by micropub.rocks

I would like that world. However, I think we tend to ignore the social aspect that Twitter has enabled. Yes, people need to own their content. But there will always be space for that one place where they can share their content and trigger discussions.

It would be important, and is incumbent on all players involved to not let that place become a mess like Twitter. Engaging community guidelines and stringent checks & policies for bots would need to be ingrained in the design.

It is important, but extremely difficult, to hit that right balance between being productive and being healthy. I often tend to hit the zones when I ignore my health, the sleep primarily, just because I do not know when to stop. I need to learn to say “no” to myself.

This is a must read article from Ben Werdmüller where he concisely conveys the problem around fake news¹ and also presents how different players in the system can contribute in their own way.

How can trust be regained by the media, and how could the web become more credible?

There are a few ways to approach the problem: from a bottom-up, user driven perspective; from the perspective of the publishers; from the perspective of the social networks used to disseminate information; and from the perspective of the web as a platform itself.

Social networks have to play a big part, changing their outlook, their perspective to the problem is important. And that is one aspect that is discussed the most. However, the other players in this - we the users, the publishers and the web as a platform will also have to play a significant role if this increasingly painful blight is to be addressed.

It was really fascinating to read Ben talk about the web - in his words “a peaceful, decentralized network of human knowledge and creativity, designed and maintained for everyone in the world”. That is perfect. As I had shared recently as part of another post, it is high time the web, and the gateways to the web, introduce more ways to capture the context from the readers and present the same in a simpler manner for all the future readers. A link can stay contextless, but it is important that the information it lays out is vetted by every one who consumes it.

It is welcome to see that groups like W3C Credible Web Community Group already exists and even the established players are getting involved to build a “more credible web”.

I wonder how is this still allowed on the App Store.

★ Liked “How I gained commit access to Homebrew in 30 minutes”

As an industry, we need to invest in the well being of core OSS software that we all use and depend on.