Category: Technology

My Tweets, Links, Music, and Books

Tweets, Links, Music, and Books - Sam Harrelson

I’ve put together a page here on my blog to aggregate all of my updates, music listening patterns, bookmarks on the web, and books I’m reading:

Twitter: updates etc

Music: iTunes / Spotify / Google Play Music / Pandora / Last.FM

Bookmarks: Pocket and Pinboard

Reading and Books: Goodreads

I was pretty proud of myself. I like having all of my consumption in one spot. I’m working on Instagram now, but they don’t have RSS feeds and clearly aren’t fans of users pulling their own pics out of their silo.

Tweets, Links, Music, and Books – Sam Harrelson.

You Don’t Need A Mediator to Blog

It’s very easy to blog. You should do it on your own domain. You don’t need a venture capital funded company to help you.

If you need help, let me know. The future is independence from these sorts of silos.

Medium is introducing a host of features aimed at encouraging users to post shorter, less polished pieces.

via Medium adds new features to encourage shorter posts.

Visualizing Who Is Tracking You On the Web

Lightbeam for Firefox :: Add-ons for Firefox

Granted, you have to use Firefox for this plugin, but after a morning of doing my daily work routine I found this rather astonishing and revealing about the depth of the tracking being done on the web today…

Using interactive visualizations, Lightbeam enables you to see the first and third party sites you interact with on the Web. As you browse, Lightbeam reveals the full depth of the Web today, including parts that are not transparent to the average user. Using two distinct interactive graphic representations — Graph and List — Lightbeam enables you to examine individual third parties over time and space, identify where they connect to your online activity and provides ways for you to engage with this unique view of the Web.

via Lightbeam for Firefox :: Add-ons for Firefox.

Change Your Verizon “Super Cookie” Privacy Settings

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If you’re a Verizon customer like we are, I’d recommend you take a few seconds to go uncheck a few of these “enhancements” to your account that Verizon shares for marketing purposes if you care about privacy and our data…

Consumer information includes information about your use of Verizon products and services (such as data and calling features,device type, and amount of use) as well as demographic and interest categories provided to us by other companies (such as gender, age range, sports fan, frequent diner, or pet owner).

via Verizon Wireless – Privacy Settings.

Apple’s Marketing Problem

I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing has a bit too much power at Apple today: the marketing priority of having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.

via Apple has lost the functional high ground – Marco.org.

Another Digital Divide Coming

Niels Ole Finnemann, a professor and director of Netlab, DigHumLab in Denmark, said: “The citizens will divide between those who prefer convenience and those who prefer privacy.”

via The Future of Privacy | Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

I’ve long said that as the web continues to evolve, particularly as a social medium, we’ll see privacy and the idea of a federated web help shape a new digital divide.

On one side, there will be people who choose convenience and ease by utilizing networks akin to our current ones (ie Facebook). They’ll trade their privacy and data for connections for social connections in a walled garden with pretty flowers.

On the other side will be the federated web by those who are able (either technologically or financially or both) to have and sustain their own web presence that they own and control.

This isn’t a geek vs non-geek distinction as it has been since the web started or something like we have in 2014-2015 where people who care about things like federation or privacy are outsiders.

Now we just need to kill apps.