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Jay Hoffmann

I work at Reaktiv. I write at The History of the Web.

I'm starting to put some content on Flipboard, given how cool some of their federated social work is looking. Is anybody using it regularly?

https://flipboard.com/@HistoryOfTheWeb

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It's taken me this long to finally dig into the history of progressive enhancement

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-inclusive-web-of-progressive-enhancement/

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It happened

Considering the implications of "it happened," which is common and useful throughout history.

How MAGA Media Is Like Improv Theater

The game described here by professors at the University of Washington is only possible because a complete lack of interest in what may or may not be factual, even from the angle of bias. What people feel is far more important than what is real, and if a meme or a talking point speaks to the way people feel, then the will validate it. This is impossible to fight against. I don't think that there is anything we can do about it.

From this perspective, influence doesn’t just flow from influencers on stage and out to the audience, but also flows from the audience to the influencers. These dynamics make the right-wing media ecosystem extremely reactive. Feedback is instant, and the right “bits” get laughs and likes. Influencers — and political leaders — can quickly adapt their messaging to their audiences’ tastes, preferences and grievances, as well as to the events and trends of the day, unencumbered by the lag of traditional news media.

This morning, I surreptitiously snuck some kale into my three year olds breakfast smoothie. He appears to not have noticed. One more battle won against his own lack of self presevation. 🥬

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Making New Year’s Resolutions with Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog on having a point of view, in film, and in all things.

I want to be involved. I want to shape and sculpt, to stage things, to intrude and invent. I want to be a film director. I was the only person at the festival arguing against these morons. . . . I couldn’t take it any longer. I grabbed a microphone and said, “I’m no fly on the wall. I am the hornet that stings.” There was an immediate uproar, so not having anything more to say, I shouted out, “Happy New Year, losers.” And that was that.

Never Forgive Them

It is difficult, I think, to account for the trends of recent years where people have been "lost" to the algorithm. Friends, family members, former heroes, with brains rotted away systemically, and unrecoverable. And Zitron describes exactly how.

The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years.

In the early 2000's, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) laid out a multi-phase plan for bringing standards to the web.

Phase I, push browsers towards standards compliance.

Phase II, educate the community on why it's important.

And then they did it. Kind of incredible.

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Steven Champeon and Shirley Kaiser - Digital Web

In the early 2000's, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) laid out a multi-phase plan for bringing standards to the web.

Phase I, push browsers towards standards compliance.

Phase II, educate the community on why it's important.

And then they did it. Kind of incredible.

And I think Champeon correctly identifies here how quickly anti-patterns become "best practices" because everything on the web moves so quick.

On the Web, you see, such short-lived tactical decisions have a tendency to stick around and become strategic. So we’re all trying to make sure that everyone takes the long view into account.

One definition of design is that it isn’t possible without a set of constraints, that it is the relationship between the constraints and the solution that makes design possible. All they mean when they complain about these constraints is that they either don’t know how to work within them, or they’re unhappy that they have to work within them—which mean they’re unhappy being designers, and just want to play with colors and shapes and call that design.

When I got started

When I first started out on my web career, I had a lot of hope for what the web could be. And then somewhere along the way, we lost the thread.

Over and over I kept coming back to this post about the term "mainstream media". But I finally got the research together.

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/where-did-mainstream-media-come-from/

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Remembering Cyberia, the World's First Ever Cyber Cafe

source. “It was all very utopian. We thought the internet would solve everyone’s problems. All we’d need to do was connect everybody and we’d have democracy forever. It didn’t quite pan out like that,” Eva says

Artists and Technologists

What do we do when we no longer have technologists with any interest in art, or even, humanity. Technology for technology's sake.

Thanksgiving Recipes

I cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving this year. It was first time, but I've roasted chickens before and this turned out to be not all that different.

Creativity cannot be computed by Hidde de Vries

She wrote, in Note G: ““It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. ””