Megan McArdle says this week, in the Washington Post, that “Twitter might be replaced, but not by Mastodon or other imitators.” I’m not linking to the article, you can easily find… | Continue reading
I lasted tweeted on Dec 22. (It was, unsurprisingly, a link to a blog post about Mastodon.) Today I wondered what percentage of the people who appear in my Mastodon timeline today also appeared on … | Continue reading
I was determined to write my Mastodon #introduction today. To get started I used the tag search in the dashboard I'm building. The idea was to look at a bunch of other #introduction posts to get a feel for how mine should go. When you search specifically for hashtags, the Mastodo … | Continue reading
I was determined to write my Mastodon #introduction today. To get started I used the tag search in the dashboard I’m building. The idea was to look at a bunch of other #introduction posts to … | Continue reading
I’ve been discussing Mastodon UX wishlists with some new acquaintances there. This excerpt from A Bloomberg terminal for Mastodon concludes with part of my own wishlist. In a Mastodon timelin… | Continue reading
A month ago, when the Great Discontinuity happened, I started working on a Steampipe plugin to enable SQL queries against the Mastodon API, along with a companion Steampipe "mod" (suite of dashboards) to display and chart the results of those queries. I expect these dashboards wi … | Continue reading
A month ago, when the Great Discontinuity happened, I started working on a Steampipe plugin to enable SQL queries against the Mastodon API, along with a companion Steampipe “mod” (suite… | Continue reading
As a teaching fellow in grad school I helped undergrads improve their expository writing. Some were engineers, and I invited them to think about writing and editing prose in the same ways they thou… | Continue reading
For a friend’s memorial I signed up to make a batch of images into a slideshow. All I wanted was the Simplest Possible Thing: a web page that would cycle through a batch of images. It’s… | Continue reading
I’ve worked from home since 1998. All along I’ve hoped many more people would enjoy the privilege and share in the benefits. Now that it’s finally happening, and seems likely to c… | Continue reading
I’ve just rediscovered two digital assets that I’d mostly forgotten about. 1. The Reddit username judell, which I created in 2005 and never used. When you visit the page it says “… | Continue reading
At the 2018 I Annotate conference I gave a flash talk on the topic covered in more depth in Open web annotation of audio and video. These are my notes for the talk, along with the slides. Here̵… | Continue reading
While helping Hypothesis find its way to ed-tech it was my great privilege to explore ways of adapting annotation to other domains including bioscience, journalism, and scholarly publishing. Workin… | Continue reading
In episode 2 of this series I noted that the languages in which I’m writing Postgres functions share a common type system. It took me a while to understand how types work in the context of Po… | Continue reading
Visit the post for more. | Continue reading
In 2018 I built a tool to help researchers evaluate a proposed set of credibility signals intended to enable automated systems to rate the credibility of news stories. Here are examples of such sig… | Continue reading
Travel always has its ups and downs but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced both at the same time as intensely as right now. I’m at Moonstone Beach in Cambria, just south of San S… | Continue reading
Rich Kilmer is an old friend who runs CargoSense, a logistics company that gathers and analyzes data from sensors attached to products moving through supply chains. As the pandemic emerged he reali… | Continue reading
Web technology, at its best, has always occupied a sweet spot at the intersection of two complementary modes: interactive and programmatic. You interact with a web page by plugging its URL into a b… | Continue reading
I’ve come to depend on the outlining that’s baked into Visual Studio Code. So far as I can tell, it is unrelated to the tool’s impressive language intelligence. There’s no p… | Continue reading
You will probably never need to know about the Olson database, also known as the Zoneinfo or tz database. And were it not for my elmcity project I never would have looked into it. I knew roughly th… | Continue reading
I just found this never-published 2007 indictment of web commerce, and realized that if mom were still here 12 years later I could probably write the same thing today. There hasn’t been much … | Continue reading
On my first trip to Sonoma County I flew to SFO and drove north through San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and through Marin County on the 101 freeway. The next time I drove highway 1 up… | Continue reading
In a memorable episode of The West Wing, visitors from the Cartographers for Social Justice upend CJ’s and Josh’s worldviews. Cartographer: “The Peters projection.” CJ: R… | Continue reading
When I was in college, taking notes on textbooks and course readings, I often copied key passages into a notebook. There weren’t computers then, so like a medieval scribe I wrote out my selec… | Continue reading
The recommendations that matter to me — for books to read, movies to watch, products to buy, places to visit — almost never come from algorithms. Instead they come from friends, family,… | Continue reading
By the time Dave Winer asked me to listen to his talk at the recent Public Media conference, it was too late — I’d already heard it on a drive to the airport Saturday morning. It is an … | Continue reading
In a post on the company blog I announced that it’s now possible to use the Hypothesis extension in the Brave browser. That’s great news for Hypothesis. It’s awkward, after all, t… | Continue reading
If you drive all the way north on the eastern side of California, you’ll encounter three ancient lakebeds transformed by human engineering during the last century. The sequence goes like this… | Continue reading
The other day, while searching across various information silos — WordPress, Slack, readthedocs.io, GitHub, Google Drive, Google Groups, Zendesk, Stack Overflow for Teams — I remembered… | Continue reading
Dear Mr. Wilson, Your Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) first came to my attention in 1995 when I read an excerpt from Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder in the New Yo… | Continue reading
While spot-checking my mostly-reconstructed 2002-2006 blog, I found this plaint from 2002: When you are a writer whose entire corpus exists online, woven into a fabric of citation and commentary, i… | Continue reading
Workflows that can benefit from annotation exist in many domains of knowledge work. You might be a teacher who focuses a class discussion on a line in a poem. You might be a scientist who marks up … | Continue reading
Journalists are increasingly being asked to show their work. Politifact does that with a sources box, like this: This is great! The more citation of sources, the better. If I want to check those so… | Continue reading