On The Verge, professional internet quitte Paul Miller provides Facebook-quitting advice:
What are you going to do every 15 seconds with your thumbs if you quit?
Spoiler: He suggests boredom. But explains why.
Peak Zuck: “What’s a shadow profile?” / Boing Boing. Those Facebook shadow profiles are shady…
Deleted my Facebook account tonight. Feels good. #byebyeFacebook
A good, straightforward explanation on what the Best Lenses for Landscape Photography to Show Scale are.
Of course it’s content marketing for the linked courses, but that’s the web nowadays…
Grass Snakes
Last year, we learned that there is a sizable population of grass snakes in our area. Today the circumstances were perfect (sunny, high temperatures) to go out and search for them. And we found them! 🐍😃
We often have a choice: speak up or leave. In commerce, if we don't like a brand, we leave. (..) Sometimes, instead of leaving, people speak up.
He touches upon an important distinction:
For most of my life, the biggest separation between government and economics was this distinction. In many cases, government has generally taken the idea of exit off the table.
Joel Spolsky in The Stack Overflow Age:
But we just wanted to fix the internet.
Jason Fried on Signal v. Noise: Where group chat works, and where it doesn’t.
Harold Jarche on an important aspect of the automation of work:
Much of the current analysis of the automation of work looks at replacing what people do with equal work done by machines. But the machines do not even have to be as good as a person, due to our bookkeeping systems that treat labour and capital differently. Labour is a cost while capital is an investment.
I did not know that…
The difference between the social internet, social media, and why we gradually move to smaller networks.
Bringing back Web Authoring and Ownership
Anil Dash’s article on The Missing Building Blocks of the Web made me think. If web culture reverts back just a little from consuming content to creating, it could have a profound effect. #wishfulthinking
While that would be an improvement, it would mainly cover public one-to-many sharing. And that is the opposite of what billions of people across the world were trained to do by friends and family: using private one-to-one and (small) group channels in their favorite messenger app. (e.g. WhatsApp outside the US, Wechat in China, Line, FB Messenger or iMessage). How do you bring those two together?
Dark Patterns
Kottke.org recently highlighted an interesting video about how we are tricked online by deliberately confusing user experiences a.k.a. dark patterns. What are dark patterns?
UI design that tricks users into doing things they might not want to do. For instance, as he shows in the video, the hoops you need to jump through to delete your Amazon account are astounding; it’s buried levels deep in a place no one would ever think to look.
All examples of very unethical design choices. But not illegal. So the only thing we can do to defend ourself against it is learning to recognize them.
Generation Z is Phone Bored. Maybe we have reached Peak App?
Habits are hard to break. Why Trying New Things Is So Hard to Do - The New York Times
The Smartphone Effect
Research shows that having your smartphone nearby takes a toll on your thinking:
Our research suggests that, in a way, the mere presence of our smartphones is like the sound of our names — they are constantly calling to us, exerting a gravitational pull on our attention. If you have ever felt a “phantom buzz” you inherently know this. Attempts to block or resist this pull takes a toll by impairing our cognitive abilities. In a poignant twist, then, this means that when we are successful at resisting the urge to attend to our smartphones, we may actually be undermining our own cognitive performance.
The best thing you can do is schedule time during your day where you put your smartphone in another room. (via Rian van der Merwe)
The Position of Phone Photography
Terry Burnes on Phone Photography
I think we should be open to all forms of photography and whatever any photographer uses to make good photographs, from wet plate to the phone.
Later in the article, he describes his phone photography kit. Which currently includes 4 (!) lenses.
So where the regular compact camera carrying public switched to phone photography, maybe amateur photographers will switch to advanced phone photography (with Moment lenses and other accessories)?