I really do like RSS, so many of the things I enjoy and rely on everything are build on the back of this simple open protocol. 😍

Struggles administrating wordpress are real. Not what I want to be spending my time on.

Most of these politically motivated sites do not disclose who is paying for them, and in many cases, the content does not include bylines

GOP funds messaging sites that look remarkably like trusted local news

None of this article is surprising. The pollution of misinformation and echo chamber bias has been running ramped unchecked for years. I wish I knew a silver bullet resolution, but like everyone struggle with my own bias and opinions. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Open to practical suggestions.

In light of “meaningful regulation” from UK lawmakers Facebook continues to pat itself on the back for all of its “progress” they’ve made in the name of user privacy. 🙄

Facebook praised itself for recent changes it’s made, but the company said it’s willing to face tougher laws. Facebook’s statement continued:

We are open to meaningful regulation and support the committee’s recommendation for electoral law reform. But we’re not waiting. We have already made substantial changes so that every political ad on Facebook has to be authorized, state who is paying for it and then is stored in a searchable archive for seven years. No other channel for political advertising is as transparent and offers the tools that we do.

Facebook is a law-breaking “digital gangster,” UK government report says

But it recently came out that a legislator in Montana was attempting to have the state officially renounce the findings of the scientific community. And, if the federal government decides to believe the scientists and do something about emissions, he wants the Treasure State to somehow sit those efforts out.

Montana legislator introduces bills to give his state its own science

I remember reading about the battles between science and the church back in the Middle Ages. And look at us, centuries later, politicians are still at odds with the power and truth that science brings when it’s not convenient to their agenda. 😡

Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

Amazon’s behavior toward open source is self-interested and rational. Amazon is playing by the rules of what software licenses allow. But these behaviors and their undesirable results could be curbed if industry associations created standard open-source licenses that allowed authors of open-source software to express a simple concept:

“I do not want my open-source code run as a commercial service.”

It will be interesting to see how open source licensing evolves over the next couple years with the ever increasing grow of cloud services. 🤔

Little Spoon gets $7M for its organic baby food delivery service

subscription-based service delivers meals — a fixed $3 apiece — to customers’ doorsteps. To date, Little Spoon said it has delivered 1 million meals

I’m not sure what this says, good or bad about the current state of parenting ?

I often have thoughts about all the things I can learn or knock out as the weekend approaches. Won’t it be great to take time out to figure out X, or know how exactly to do Y? My plans are usually so beyond doable in a single weekend, even if I don’t have anything else planned. Things like ready that entire book cover to cover. These things are technically possible, but with even the slightest amount regular things to do, like laundry and the grocery store, these things are unrealistic. But won’t it be great? Yeah of course it would, but it’s definitely not practical.

I realize more and more, maybe it’s getting older, or having kids to steward, but the mind frame I try to put things in is less big push, and tons of little tiny pieces that I can chip away at. One small nibble at a time, that’s what is successful. I know that. It still doesn’t stop me from constantly setting up my weekend or time off to some level of disappointment when I don’t read that entire book, or complete that whole project start to finish. I guess there’s always next weekend.

Podcasts as an industry is going to experience same defining change sooner rather than later.

Spotify begins testing curated podcast playlists

The bigger goal of these tests is to improve podcast discoverability, an issue that plagues the industry.

The podcast industry expected to create $1 billion in annual revenue by 2021

the industry generated an estimated $479.1 million in revenue in 2018 and is expected to produce more than $1 billion by 2021, according to a new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC

😳 that’s quite a bit of growth !!!!!

Tim Cook recently penned an op-ed in Time Magazine, You Deserve Privacy Online. Here’s How You Could Actually Get It.

“I and others are calling on the U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation—a landmark package of reforms that protect and empower the consumer. Last year, before a global body of privacy regulators, I laid out four principles that I believe should guide legislation:”

Tim Cook

Tim goes on to outline several key points that any legislation would include. Things like avoid collecting unnecessary, consumers have the right to know, and the right for consumers to access and delete their data that companies have.

Following up Tim’s op-ed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has announced a new bill American Data Dissemination (ADD) Act

“provides overdue transparency and accountability from the tech industry while ensuring that small businesses and startups are still able to innovate and compete in the digital marketplace.”

Marco Rubio

Here’s the catch, in the text of the bill as it currently stands is the phrase, “shall supersede” , which has wide sweeping implications. Jon Brodkin’s article at ARS Technica, Sen. Marco Rubio wants to ban states from protecting consumer privacy goes into the reaction from several groups, and sufficed to say, none of them are positive. Super seeding any state action in this area clearing isn’t going to stand. California for instance, has already passed privacy law in 2018 that was passed unanimously.

To say that things in the privacy data sector are heating up this year is an understatement, while federal and local governments historical move very slow, this battle will likely play out over the next several years. You can bet that it will be a hot issue in the run up to the 2020 election.

I talked about themes the other day. One I didn’t mention, but wanted to outline was, read more. I love to read, but I don’t ever make it a priority in my daily life. When I was younger traveling the world, before iPhone and Kindle’s, I would always have a couple paperback books with me. What I remember and still feel, is reading is a different kind of relaxing. It feels less vegging out, when watching a movie. Not better, just satisfying a different type of down time. Make no mistake, I won’t be missing G.O.T. Or West World, but more reading is in my future for sure, maybe I’ll start with some Recommendations

I came across RRS feed in the early 2000’s through great Indie apps on the Mac like Net News Wire and others. It was a great was to aggregate all the news for hundreds, and when things got really crazy more than a thousand sites into a single convenient location. You could sync all the read articles, star and favorite ones you wanted to keep around, and share via IRC or AIM the ones you thought your friends should see, or even email something to family member or co-worker. It was a deep well of knowledge, and easy to flip through a couple times a day and stay in the know. This same publish and subscribe model of RSS is the underpinning to podcasts, which makes it beyond the reach of a single company, but also makes discovery a bit of a challenge.

You could set your watch to the regular occurance to which someone will announce that RSS is dead, today it just happened to be MotherBoard with an article, The Rise and Demise of RSS . With quotes like –

The future once looked so bright for RSS. What happened?

MotherBoard

In Author, Sinclair Target’s, defense the article is a well written history as it played out from the 90’s up til today. And I think is correct, that RSS isn’t consumer friendly or easy to understand. But I don’t think it needs to be. The gritty details of how SMS isn’t something consumers pour over, they just send their messages and have a certain level of expectations in regards to what will happen on the other end. RSS powers podcasts subscriptions, and regular people find, listen to, and are coming to the medium in big numbers than ever!

Point is RSS isn’t every exciting to most people. The question I’d pose is, what is exciting that you can do with a feature powered by RSS ?

There are early adopters, and then there are early adopters. Anyone who bites the bullet and picks up Samsung’s $1,980 and up Galaxy Fold falls into the former category. And then there are those who’ll be the first to Samsung’s site when the company opens up pre-orders on its inaugural foldable tomorrow.

TechCrunch

The question is when will you actually see one in the wild?

With Apple and other companies out of runway on growing smart phone revenue, where will they turn? We can probably figure out a lot of possibles by looking at how this has played out in other industries over time. The PC went through this very recently, maybe to much so to be of any help. Have industries like auto or luxury good gone through market saturation? If so, what could we learn from it?

The idea is to be in control of the content and customize it to be more reflective of my own thoughts and ideas. It was a faint pain to set up, but I thing in the end it will be well worth it.

A program that allows drug agents to obtain a pool of billions of call records from AT&T is “still active,” according to a watchdog report.

DEA says AT&T still provides access to billions of phone records

It’s all in the title, how is this seriously still happening? How many programs for getting private data from customers do these telecoms have? There seems to be more open programs being uncovered every day. Enough already, I am becoming numb to the constant revelation of programs like this.

It’s got it’s own domain, and rough outline of a theme. HTTPS of course. Ability to post from any device and kick off a build on new content from here, or site changes from there.

Now for the hard part. More content. But the idea was to make it silly easy to push out content. Right?

Still need to set up these:

• Projects page
• Products page
• About
• Footer
• Social accounts

The new design places bolded headings for “music” and “podcasts” on the app’s library page that offer a much quicker way for people to find episodes of podcasts they subscribe to or might be interested in. Spotify users currently have to sift through six categories at the top of their library page to find a dedicated podcast section. 

The Verge

I wonder if the average Spotify user knows what podcasts are right out of the gate. Are they more likely to explore them now that they are front and center? There is a lot to be said for having podcasts as a default, think Apple’s podcast player on iOS, but it is certainly welcomed to have podcasts as a first class citizen on a popular platform like Spotify.

Tesla released version 9.0 of its software, which featured a number of updates, including a new UI on the center display and the ability to use the forward-facing camera. The dash cam feature is available only in Tesla vehicles built after August 2017.

TechCrunch

I find it more and more unbelievable that other automakers haven’t built a platform to continually update a vehicles software and add new features. We expect it from our $1,000 mobile devices, why don’t we have the same expectations for our car or truck that is 10-100 times that expensive?

Previously I’d given my thoughts on a Propublic article on a bill currently making it’s way through the Senate to ban the IRS from making a free online tool for filing. Turns out if you dig a little deeper you’ll find more of the good work from Propublic showing Intuit actively burying their free version making it as difficult to nearly impossible for regular people to find it.

To effectively bury its free filing service, TurboTax included a snippet of code in the page’s robots.txt file instructing search engines not to index it. 

Instead of pointing users toward its free file tool, TurboTax funnels the vast majority of users toward its paid and premium services, whether they qualify for free filing or not.

TurboTax and H&R Block hide their free tax filing tools from Google on purpose

Wow. I mean just wow. I really struggle to see how anyone can argue that this is in the best interest of the general public.

Giving my first conference talk today at Github headquarters for Reactathon. It’s gonna be a blast, tune in live. And follow along at home if you’d like, slides. A huge thanks to my wife and family for all their support and feedback, it really does take a village. ☺️

Messaging platform Telegram claims to have had a surge in signups during a period of downtime for Facebook’s rival messaging services.

Telegram Get 3M new signups during FB’s outage

I have a theory that fb could easily be displaced or replaced by something else, that doesn’t necessarily have to be better, just available and easily accessible. It’s clear that privacy isn’t the catalyst to get people to migrate. So that lends the question, what will get people to move to a more secure, private focused platform?

In the year of content I’ve been thinking a lot about how blogs and self publishing have made a comeback in some areas from those that want to take back control of their content. Moves away from Medium for self hosting, moves away from twitter for Micro.blog, and of course the #deletefacebook trends. So how to get the mainstream to move from these centralized, locked in platforms to more open friendly places? I have no idea really, so I’ll list something out more as food for thought.

1. Easy to engage
2. Connection with most of the people they know
3. Easy to share images and re-share
4. Marketplace, options, the idea of not being locked in. The idea of take your content / timeline with you
5. RSS is an implementation detail, not a feature.
6. People understand the idea of subscribe and share.
7. Public vs Private sharing. The ability to share with select people.
8. Clean, ad free interface. The tracking and aggregation is needs to curtailed. So what is the business model? Free / Pro / Business tiers ? I dont know. :-/
9. Cross models Reddit, wordpress, micro.blog ?

So what would a open platform using open internet standards look like ?

By creating a Firefox account you can increase convenience while decreasing your exposure to some harmful parts of the web. An account unlocks the full potential of tools like Lockwise, which securely manages passwords, and Monitor, a service that notifies you when your email has been part of a known data breach.

We’re offering privacy protections by default as you navigate the web because the business model of the web is broken, with more and more intrusive personal surveillance becoming the norm. While we hope that people’s digital rights and freedoms will ultimately be guaranteed, we’re here to help in the interim.

Chris Beard, CEO of Mozilla

I like that Mozilla has put in effort to diverse their offerings and become less dependent on the money from Google for default search. The idea of privacy as a product is red hot right now, while most feel opportunistic I would say this is very much inline with what Mozilla has always strived for.

A yearly theme is a great way to keep a general focus for the long run. This is different then goals or actions. This is more like a guiding North Star. I picked up the idea from Rely FM’s Cortex which just had their yearly theme episode.

My theme this year is gonna be Creating Content. I’ll go into more detail as we progress, but really less consuming content and more creating, whatever form that happens to take.