Daily notes

I don’t do so well in this heat.

I’m really enjoying an Apple Music playlist, Living the Library – fairly quiet, mostly instrumental ‘electronic’ music. Good to work to.

Interesting point made by Brandon on Software Defined Talk, that I hadn’t really thought about before. The advantage of distributed networks like Mastodon for organisations is the ability to host a server and control who has accounts on that server. So rather than (say) BBC employees going through a verification process to prove who they are, like on Twitter in days gone by, instead they just have an account on the official BBC Mastodon. Bit like having a bbc.co.uk email address. Makes sense. https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/414

Neville Hobson shares his thoughts on Bluesky, an invite only Twitter clone https://www.nevillehobson.com/2023/06/06/early-days-experiences-on-bluesky/

Some really interesting jobs going in Birmingham, to embed digital culture and capabilities into the team https://jobs.digitalbirmingham.org/culture-capability/

"Communities of Practice within and across organizations: a guidebook" https://www.wenger-trayner.com/cop-guidebook/

Busy couple of days, hence no notes until today.

"Are.na is a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge" https://www.are.na/ via Coté.

"Inside Snopes: the rise, fall, and rebirth of an internet icon" https://www.fastcompany.com/90901113/inside-snopes-the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-an-internet-icon

Emily Webber has published The Team Onion Book, which describes "a model to keep teams small, break down silos and create shared responsibility across team boundaries" https://teamonion.works/buy-the-book/

"Is web3 bullshit?" (yep) https://blog.mollywhite.net/is-web3-bullshit/

I love markdown but using it for presentations might be pushing it a bit https://ia.net/presenter

"Why did Usenet fail?" https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/06/why-did-usenet-fail/

Log into twitter. Ooh! Notifications. 5 tweets in a row from someone called Elon Musk who I don’t follow. Log out again.

…and on that note, "Twitter Briefly Pretended To Take A Stand Against Hate, But Then Elon Admitted It Was All A Mistake (Or A Marketing Campaign?)" https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/02/twitter-briefly-took-a-stand-against-hate-but-then-elon-admitted-it-was-all-a-mistake/

A pleasant walk along the drain at lunchtime. Merlin enjoyed having a swim and a sprint.

“Redbridge Council launches digital housing repairs service” https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/redbridge-council-launches-digital-housing-repairs-service/

I spend most of my working day using a Windows all-in-one desktop thing, and less time on a Macbook. I use way more web based stuff in Windows, and way more native apps on the Mac.

https://12ft.io/ is a service that makes me nervous, as stealing is always wrong. However it’s also tempting. What solves this ethical conundrum for me is that it hasn’t ever worked when I have tried it.

To quote my favourite tech philosopher, Taylor Swift, I think I’ve seen this film before and I didn’t like the ending: “DWP, Home Office, MoJ and Defra launch £1bn tender for shared services tech providers”

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” James Joyce, Ulysses.

2 cracking posts from dxw on what service designers get up to during the beta phase of a project https://www.dxw.com/2023/05/what-do-service-designers-do-in-the-beta-phase-of-a-project-part-1/ (there’s a link at the bottom to part 2)

Videos from the 2022 Service Design in Gov conference: https://govservicedesign.net/videos

Fab stuff from Polly Thompson on helping "colleagues (who aren’t interested in tech) understand the health of an IT estate" https://medium.com/valleys-to-coast-design-tech-blog/the-state-were-in-c7549cb03938

Quite enjoying The Color of Nothing by ford. https://fordsounds.bandcamp.com/album/the-color-of-nothing

Have been a John Naughton fan for a loooooong time and his blog has been following a kind of daily note / commonplace book type approach for a while now. His follows a kind of structure I would find it impossible to stick to. https://memex.naughtons.org/

And one of John’s posts pointed me to "The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Thomas Pettitt on parallels between the pre-print era and our own Internet age" https://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/the-gutenberg-parenthesis-thomas-pettitt-on-parallels-between-the-pre-print-era-and-our-own-internet-age/

Cote gives his take on my blogging formats post from yesterday https://cote.io/2023/05/31/193136.html

Another good In Our Time, this time on the Dead Sea Scrolls https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001ljc0