Jeremy Cherfas

One could, for example, imagine an honest business model – in which people paid an annual subscription for a service that did not rely on targeting people on the basis of the 98 data-points that the company holds on every user. All it would need is for Facebook users to fork out $20 a year for the pleasure of sharing LOLcats with one another.What’s the likelihood of that happening? You know the answer. Which is why Zuck will continue to keep mum about the sordid reality underpinning his money machine.#indieweb

Interesting piece on “owning” your distribution channels. #indieweb.Now, here’s the thing I’ll tell you—if I was running this site on, say, Medium or Tumblr, it would not have buckled. But to me, I think that independence from platforms is a hugely important thing to have in 2017. If you can spin up the server yourself and figure out a way to cobble together funding, you may miss out on some of the perks of larger sites, but you call the shots. 

As Rosalia Vittorini, the head of Italy’s chapter of the preservationist organization docomomo, once said when asked how Italians feel about living among relics of dictatorship: “Why do you think they think anything at all about it?”

Interesting piece on, among other things, Jacob Rees-Mogg [H]e’s authentic all right, but that will never make him a populist hero — because he’s not faking it.I suppose things really have come to this.

By what insane twisted logic of airport security theatre is it OK to have soft cheese in the hold but not in the cabin? Bereft

It may well be a known bug, but as it isn’t my site that is affected, I cannot investigate in any detail. I feel odd about reporting “issues” that don’t affect me directly and that I have only witnessed and wondered about. So I just draw attention to them. I haven’t seen similar behaviour on my child of Independent Publisher, I don’t think.

If anyone is going to report it, I would think it would be you or James

A #followfriday for micro.blogs is certainly a good idea, but there’s something odd about the way Jimmy Baum’s site renders webmentions. I’m seeing Chris Aldrich’s comment – which brought me there in the first place – as “Chris Aldrich mentioned this Article on amongthestones.com”.

Shouldn’t it be “Chris Aldrich mentioned this Article on boffosocko.com”?

I do wish people wouldn’t do Medium’s dirty work for it. John Naughton (and plenty of others) said what a great couple of pieces Dave Eggars had written in Medium, without saying that the work wasn’t available without signing up for Medium. That may not be the worst thing in the world, but is it too much to hope that Dave Eggars will syndicate his own work to a place where anyone can enjoy it? Maybe eventually it will be in a book I will happily pay for.

I haven’t used it,but I think Jared Sinclair’s Stormcrow app is intended to build a tweetstorm from z bigger chunk of text, so it would be reasonably easy to use either before or after writing the blog post, if that’s what you’re doing. There’s clearly a difference between text and tweetstorm, though, and, like @nitin, i would prefer to promote something I had written with selected tweets.

This anguishing about comments has been going a good long while. Fun to uncover this one.