Kartik

My challenge is officially over. Here are some observations:

Time spent during the Challenge Week (#24) vs past 5 weeks

The following table shows time spent on the top 10 apps on my phone sorted in decreasing order of those used in the challenge week:

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In this episode, Mr. Anupam Sinha and Mr. Sanjay Gupta discuss the First Issue of Raj Comics Superhero Super Commando Dhruva, the story of his Origin and how he came into being. Just came across this video (Hindi) on the new Raj Comics Motion Pictures YouTube channel. I have never written about it (except a little here and here) but growing up, comics, especially those from Raj, were my first love. [Read More]

My friend Laurence Warner is running a challenge called #FirstWeekFlipPhone and I wanted to give that a try. He has written more about his motivations at Why I’m giving up my smartphone for one week each month. In my case, I realized the friction of getting a flip phone, a SIM card (my phone doesn’t have a physical SIM card, it uses an eSIM) and finding someone to keep me honest were preventing me from coming onboard, so, I came up with a different version of the challenge. [Read More]

Google’s decision to kill Google Reader was a turning point in enabling media to be manipulated by misinformation campaigns. The difference between individuals choosing the feeds they read & companies doing it for you affects all other forms of media. — find me at @anildash@me.dm or anildash.com (@anildash) April 2, 2018 Seems like people popular on Tweetosphere are just coming to this realization. Later in the same story, Dash continues: [Read More]

Wired: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and it was first stitched into the tapestry of the open web around the turn of the millennium. Its aim is straightforward: to make it easy to track updates to the content of a given website in a standardized format. In practice, and for your purposes, that means it can give you a comprehensive, regularly updated look at all of the content your favorite sites publish throughout the day. [Read More]

Cal Newport continues writing about the distinction between social media and the social internet: Perhaps more pernicious than the ability of these “walled industrial sites” to exploit your labor, however, is their ability to control your behavior — nudging you toward certain ways of describing yourself and encountering the world that make you more profitable to the social media barons, but might alienate you from your humanity. (This is the chief concern voiced by Jaron Lanier, who first warned us about these issues over twenty years ago. [Read More]

There’s a distinction between the social internet and social media. The social internet describes the general ways in which the global communication network and open protocols known as “the internet” enable good things like connecting people, spreading information, and supporting expression and activism. Social media, by contrast, describes the attempt to privatize these capabilities by large companies within the newly emerged algorithmic attention economy, a particularly virulent strain of the attention sector that leverages personal data and sophisticated algorithms to ruthlessly siphon users’ cognitive capital. [Read More]

We saw it with Google, who built Gtalk on XMPP and even federated with other XMPP servers, only to later stop federation and XMPP support in favour of trying to herd the digital cattle into the Google+ enclosure. Facebook, who also built their chat app on XMPP at first allowed 3rd party XMPP clients to connect and then later dropped interoperability. Twitter, although not using or supporting XMPP, had a vibrant 3rd party client ecosystem which they killed off once they felt big enough. [Read More]

Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”. And remember that you are your own audience! Small b blogging is writing things that you link back to and reference time and time again. [Read More]

Years ago, I used Google Talk with almost everyone I talked to. Nowadays, I talk with almost no one on Hangouts. Google Talk has changed from “so good I can recommend to everyone” to a nightmare called Hangouts. So how did we get to this point? You don’t know how the fuck to reliably have a conversation with someone. On the new Hangouts, you really have no idea when, where, and whom it delivers your messages to. [Read More]