An online notebook
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An online notebook
"Why I quit my job at Google to work in local government" https://laurenjong.medium.com/why-i-quit-my-job-at-google-to-work-in-local-government-dc372221048b
The blog post that ‘invented’ hashtags: https://factoryjoe.com/2007/08/25/groups-for-twitter-or-a-proposal-for-twitter-tag-channels/
"Transforming Service Delivery in the Public Sector" (largely US based) https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14883/583381
Teignbridge Council are looking for a Head of Digital https://jobs.teignbridge.gov.uk/itlivetdc_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID=9431212Ag3&WVID=4966600DE4&LANG=USA
There’s a QR code scanner app built into iOS?! https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/qr-codes-iphone
Not That Kind of Open: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open
Essex County Council hosted "a generative AI Hackathon" https://servicetransformation.blog.essex.gov.uk/2023/06/19/hosting-a-generative-ai-hackathon/
Am really enjoying the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast – just the perfect pitch of cynicism and loathing of silicon valley https://techwontsave.us/
This is a fabulous read about an episode that was totally new to me: "‘Why I might have done what I did’: conversations with Ireland’s most notorious murderer" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/20/ireland-most-notorious-murderer-malcolm-macarthur-why-i-might-have-done-what-i-did
“Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?” https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/
On similar lines: “Bluesky Has Problems” https://nucleardiner.wordpress.com/2023/06/12/bluesky-has-problems/
I suspect Twitter will sort itself out before any of these others things manage to take off.
This seems interesting: https://blockprotocol.org/wordpress (Background: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2022/12/19/progress-on-the-block-protocol/)
Happy Bloomsday! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday
A fairly sensible take on AI stuff from dxw https://www.dxw.com/2023/06/artificial-intelligence-is-here-what-do-i-need-to-know/
Can’t work out if this is a good idea or not https://www.beeper.com/
"Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves."
― James Joyce, Ulysses
"Strive for alignment rather than aiming for universal agreement" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/strive-alignment-rather-than-aiming-universal-robert-musekiwa
"Multi-Cloud, Still an Actual Thing after All These Years" https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/state-of-kubernetes-2023-multi-cloud
"Proven Practices for Developing a Multicloud Strategy" https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/enterprise-strategy/proven-practices-for-developing-a-multicloud-strategy/
(Those last two both via Coté https://social.lol/@cote)
Am enjoying Spellcaster, a podcast about crypto-bozo Sam Bankman-Fried and his FTX disaster zone https://wondery.com/shows/spellcaster/ (I don’t necessarily understand it all but I feel better for having read it)
"Some blogging myths" https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/06/05/some-blogging-myths/
I published a thing on LinkedIn about why councils (etc) should take digital culture and skills seriously, if they want their transformation projects to succeed: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-culture-skills-make-digital-magic-happen-dave-briggs
"The next phase of technology-driven transformation is data. Are you ready to set your strategy?" https://www.bepivotl.com/insights/the-next-phase-of-technology-driven-transformation-is-data-are-you-ready-to-set-your-strategy/
So Lemmy is basically Redditodon? https://join-lemmy.org/
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
Am going to try this note without bullets, just to see how that goes. Feedback welcome!
I’ve deleted all the social media apps from my phone as an experiment.
Cote has done a daynote: https://cote.io/2023/05/30/day-note.html
“We Need to Rethink ‘Digital’ in Most Public Services” – I am really not sure what this article is suggesting? Rethink from what, to what? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-rethink-digital-most-public-services/
I’ve just discovered (🤦) the ‘advanced’ view in Mastodon, which is more Tweetdeck like with columns. Makes things a bit easier. Wondering if I should start paying some money towards Mastodon too https://www.patreon.com/mastodon
“Lisa’s Final Act: how Apple invented its future by burying its past” https://www.theverge.com/23724804/lisa-computer-apple-steve-jobs-burial-utah-sun-remarketing-documentary
In Our Time about Walt Whitman https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001l99w
I randomly wondered earlier what Marissa Mayer is doing these days. Turns out she’s running a startup trying to fix phone contacts, which is a worthy endeavour if not, if I am honest, a lucrative-sounding one https://sunshine.com/
I spent way too much time thinking about this stuff.
My recent playing around with the daily note format, plus tinkering with Mastodon etc, and following the exploits of Dave Winer and others on their blogs, has made me start to think a bit more about how I would really like my blogging to work in an ideal world.
Most of my posts these days are effectively snippets – a link here, an aside there. It’s rare that I actually write longer posts (like this one!) that feature more than a paragraph and a link, and which justify their own title.
I type everything into Obsidian – as a desktop text editor – which has a simple WordPress integration that sends the text to be published online, converting Markdown to HTML along the way. Offline typing just feels much more natural to me and reduces down any anxiety around hitting that publish button (totally irrational, but there you go). The main downside of this approach is that the snippets I post only exists as parts of a longer, daily post; and also I can’t tag posts, only put them into a category.
The other issue is that posting these snippets to places like Mastodon and Twitter only happens when I remember to copy and paste them into each of those sites, or when I post a link to the daily summary post manually. Posting interesting links to Twitter used to be something I did all the time, and I got good feedback on it from folk.
The way this used to work, maybe 10 years ago or more, what that I would bookmark links into delicious (remember that?!), adding tags and commentary along the way. That then automatically tweeted them out, but also, thanks to a WordPress plugin, added them to a daily aggregated link roundup post, which gout published automatically every 24 hours. That was great! Although of course it only works for link-snippets, not simple asides.
I love the format that Jason Kottke seems to be using now. He posts links throughout the day, which seem to exist on their own on the site itself, but which emerge in his RSS feed as aggregated posts (“5 quick links for Tuesday afternoon… etc”). This seems sensible to me – although of course it’s hard to know these days how much of a thing RSS is.
Kottke.org runs on Moveable Type and, given it has existed for over 25 years, probably has a fair bit of custom stuff going on. I’m not sure what he uses as the main editor.
Dave Winer uses the outliner format for his blogging, which I have never quite managed to get my head around. He mostly posts snippets, which are individual posts that get published under the heading of the date they were published. Longer, titled items are also published within the flow and under the date banner too. This is totally understandable when you remember the outliner format:
And so on.
Each snippet, and paragraph within a titled, longer, post has it’s own permalink, so you can point to just that item or paragraph. Dave’s system is custom, I guess, and having had a dig around his site, I can’t quite figure out which iteration of his online outliner tool is the current one to use for blogging. Am sure there would be a way of posting to it via a desktop text editor or outliner, but am not sure my tech chops would be up to figuring it out.
Maybe micro.blog is the answer, but I can’t see myself migrating away from WordPress for various reasons. But it must be possible to build out a micro.blog-esque approach in WordPress, using customer post types integrated with a desktop text editor, which maybe can also aggregate snippets into daily roundup posts like Kottke.org along the way? Oh, and which makes for easy tagging and distribution around place like Mastodon and (while it lasts) Twitter?
Maybe?!