I wonder if Amy protected her tweet account after the 'other Amy' got more famous ?

It's Friday - who can resist Drew Carey. But if you are still at work - maybe put headphones on first ...

Finally, someone is listening to the plight of poor people. - via NextDraft

Good Read

... you just don’t !

... distressing !

The fine people over at Quandl made me aware of their new campaign focussed on data presentation. As a fan of the 'information scientist' Edward Tufte and someone who has devoted a few years of his life to Structured Visual Thinking with John Caswell, I am always on the look out for software that can help us mortals better present our data in consistent, reliable and understandable ways. Guys like Nathan Yau of Flowing Data just boggle my mind. It looks so easy. And then you try it.

Read All About It Here. 

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” 

I think I disagree with him on some points ...

Last Friday I visited the Internet Archive. This organization was started by Brewster Kahle, who started Alexa and sold that to Amazon. He took his money and started buying servers to back up the Internet.

Its headquarters is in a former church off of 19th Ave. in San Francisco. Walking in, there are pews and a stack of servers in the corners. It’s a wacky place, but fitting. It felt like visiting the church of the Internet. This is a church that I want to attend!

But as I walked around with Mark Graham, who works on the team that runs the Wayback Machine, I learned about the various things the Internet Archive does, from scanning books to keeping the Grateful Dead’s archive up and running for everyone to enjoy.

I’m taken back to conversations that Internet pioneer Dave Winer and I have had (he’s starting an open web content production service, er, blogging tool at http://1999.io. He continues to push me to support the open web. I used to think of that as everything that isn’t Facebook. Now, however, I think of it as everything that the Internet Archive can get to, back up and make new use of.

Unfortunately, I’ve bet most of my life on the closed web. What’s that? Things like Facebook or even things like Periscope or Snapchat. The media I put into those things are inside walled gardens that the Internet Archive can’t get to. You can’t even view most things on Facebook unless you log in. But worse, I use things like Facebook Live Video, which even if the Internet Archive could get to, it couldn’t back up and use. Why? The format is pretty much only available on Facebook.

More and more things are hidden from the Internet Archive. Uber and Lyft’s data? Hidden. Spotify’s music? Hidden. China’s WeChat? Hidden.

That said, there are millions of things that are backed up and viewable on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org and that’s something we should all celebrate.

You might be shocked by what you find, from old time radio to tons of books and other things. It’s definitely worthy of our support and I’ll try to create more media that the Internet Archive can see and use in the future.

It’s good to know there’s a group of people at the Internet Archive who are working to keep the open web accessible and easy to use like all the great closed web services. If the ‘Internet church’ ever closes down it’ll be a sad day indeed.

To put a punctuation point on this, when I arrived in London this morning I saw this on Facebook, written by Hossein Derakhshan, which says that Zuckerberg, er, Facebook, has destroyed the open web:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mark-zuckerberg-hypocrite-facebook-has-destroyed-open-web-1559298

I disagree. The open web destroyed the open web (by not keeping up with the closed web’s filtering, commenting, identity systems and yes, even advertising).

J P Rangaswami writes ...

There’s a lot of anger in the world right now. Maybe it’s always been there, but right now it feels to me as if I’ve never seen this level of anger before.
If that anger was deeply rooted in seriously depressed economies, large swathes of people completely unable to make ends meet, increasing ill health, severe repression, considerable growth in crime, a general and growing concern about personal safety,  and a bleak outlook for the future overall, then it’s the kind of anger that makes for revolutions. Maybe. My gut says it isn’t so. My gut says it’s more to do with the sweeping changes we’ve had even in my short lifetime, and the disaffection that such change entails.

I disagree. The anger is palpable. How else do we find The Donald as presumptive nominee for The Republican party ?

As for "seriously depressed economies, large swathes of people completely unable to make ends meet, increasing ill health, severe repression, considerable growth in crime, a general and growing concern about personal safety," ..take a look around you.

Then again - it might be that capitalism is dying - and of course those that don’t ike THAT change would be the ones that have benefited from the manipulation the most.

My goodness Apple News is pernickety. Just spent two hours tracking down why three of my posts hadn't made it into the Apple News stream. All came down to tiny tiny errors in the HTML that Wordpress accepted and rendered quite happily - but Apple News - nope . #FAIL.

In the end I have a single post left that hasn't published to News - interestingly titled : Top 5 Pranks Apple Have Played On Us - I originally thought it was a conspiracy - I think I now know that in that post - it is long is a link error. 

Going to let that one slide.

Just finished listening to the @davewiner rough podcast, where he talks about technology and politics coming together as one. I was reminded of Jeremy Heimans who talks of Old/New Power - Old/New Values. [ If you want to actually listen to the podcast - click on the headphones at the top of the post ].

How will this affect the 2016 presidential election? Heimans and Timms believe that like Barack Obama in 2008, the candidate who prevails will need to channel emerging new power forces and unleash the self-organizing potential of his or her supporters. This time, however, they'll need to go much farther than posting videos to YouTube or doing a Twitter town hall.
"The impact of new power in politics is just beginning," Heimans said, although he noted that new power has proved more effective at driving the outcome of campaigns than influencing the business of government.
"We should be cautious with the idea the rise of new power will necessarily lead to instant democracy. New power dramatically lowers the barriers to participation -- but it doesn't guarantee more inclusiveness or more representation," Heimans said. "In this sense, new power is more flash mob than General Assembly."

The words (my bold) above come from CNN's site from January 2015 - prescient, when you observe the Trump phenomena.

When I first saw this reported on - Fusion.net - I assumed it was a piece of 'Onion' - but no - here is the Philadelphia News reporting how a Maths equation is 'frightening' - and 'terrorist-like' ..

the woman "thought I was a terrorist because I was writing strange things on a pad of paper. I laugh. I bring them back to the plane. I showed them my math."

... not so much a bug report as a list of enhahncements ...

I have to post first - and then go back to add title, attachments etc - would be good to be able to do this all at once.

A simple way to allow links to pop up in new window - rather than in the space you are already working in

Tagging for rapid finding

A quick visual reference to quickly tell if your post is published or not.

Maybe I am missing it - but ability to embed video - not just have a link - if that is what enclosures are - not working for me.

I want to be able to repost someone else’s post - like as in Tumblr or on Wordpress

Easy sharing into other networks - and vice versa

Now that outspoken critic of Uber - Sadiq Kahn is mayor of London - I wonder if he will do anything about them ... certainly Rachel Whetstone isn't as connected to him as the Cameroon (sic) / Boris cabal.

and the new Radiohead is released ... listening already. #InstantGratification

"Labour’s Ken Macintosh, who has held the Eastwood seat since 1999, in fact ended the night in third place, behind the Conservatives and the SNP."

My new About Me page is live.