Open Source
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Our Chive
You start with a crater That’s how you make a town like this. Or, if you’re Canada, a reservoir. And exactly which one were you looking for? Anna’s Blog says Anna’s Archive has backed up Spotify’s entire music library: “This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique Continue reading
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My Three Hooks
For many years, I attended an annual gathering of folks who wanted to save the Internet for future generations. Aspirational guidance was provided by the metaphor “big hooks:” ones meant for catching big fish. Since I was a kid, my life has always been about big hooks, especially ones that maximize personal and collective agency, Continue reading
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Bookings
Even in a small city such as Bloomington, one can make fun discoveries all the time. Yesterday, for example, I discovered Redbud Books, which had a table set up to sell books from Cory Doctorow's increasingly vast oeuvre while the man himself spoke to a packed classroom in the Media School here at Indiana University. He'll Continue reading
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Remembering Dewayne Hendricks
Thank Dewayne Hendricks for Wi-Fi. Hell, thank him for what Bob Frankston calls ambient connectivity: the kind you just … assume. Like you are now, connected to the Internet without wires. Dewayne wasn’t alone, of course. Far from it. But he was instrumental. I learned about that during the 3+ hour memorial zoom we had Continue reading
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A Better Way to Do News
Twelfth in the News Commons series Last week at DWeb Camp, I gave a talk titled The Future, Present, and Past of News—and Why Archives Anchor It All. Here’s a frame from a phone video: DWeb Camp is a wonderful gathering, hosted by the Internet Archive at Camp Navarro in Northern California. In this post I’ll Continue reading
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The Personal Internet
—is not this: By now we take it for granted. To live your digital life on the Internet, you need accounts. Lots of them. Everything on the Internet that requires an account has a lock on you—for their convenience. They don’t know any other way. That’s because all the services we use in the online Continue reading
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Personal vs. Personalized AI
Personal AI is personal. It isn’t personalized. Context: There is a war going on. Humanity and nature are on one side, and Big Tech is on the other. The two sides are not opposed. They are orthogonal. The human side is horizontal, and the Big Tech side is vertical.* The human side is personal, social, Continue reading
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Start of an Era
After 17 years and 761 episodes, FLOSS Weekly ended its run on the TWiT network yesterday. I hosted the last 179 of those shows. My career as a professional (meaning paid) advocate of open source also ended with that show. The full span ran from 1996, when I first appeared on the Linux Journal masthead, until Continue reading