The magic, unexpected, unanticipated positive outcomes, connections, that spring from sharing something online.
Just when one might think the glorious, joyful, unlimited potential of the internet has cratered to an ad-laden pool of machine generated goop, amazingness happens again. The odds of what I will lay out here seem improbable. Well, someone can likely do a back of the napkin estimate. While I have hung up efforts to […]
I never thought I’d learn something from dumping paint. Once upon a time when I was living in Arizona, I decided to do the right thing and dispose of my cans left over paint. The Gila County dump had a special collection day for disposing of paint, so I arrived with my box of various […]
I have a thing for web serendipity and following tunnels to places not on my to do list. Hopefully it’s not curable. It happens without foreshadowing. Today I saw a Mastodon post from a favorite tech writer I remember Clive Thompson specifically vividly for a 2007 piece Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social […]
I am more than comfortablly qssured that no generative AI can really hallucinate my writing. See those trademarked typos? Me. See a quirky nonsensical title? Me. I digress, as usual. Here is a typical small tale of unexpected adventure of one thing leading to another, like a neural path, but none one that can be […]
Here we go. Again. That old web magic is still there, the stuff I lump as web serendipity, what happens when unexpectedly, something tickles the curiosity, it leads to something else, lather, rinse, repeat. It’s my variety of Vannevar Bush’s associative trails, what I like to play with the title “As We May Link”, especially […]
Keep the internet weird and un-expected, not managed by machine languages and corporatized algorithms, but by the small human acts of sharing. Ok? This has happened to me countless times yet never gets old. So via Mastodon, all the way from New Zealand, my colleague Stephen Harlow thinks to share this: Indeed, in a YouTube […]
All the places are full of doom, gloom, apocalypse about the state of the bird site or the impending end of _____ at the hands of AI or just the regular invoking of internet as burning dumpsters. I do not deny that these foul things are happening nor is this head in the sand. It’s […]
In all the frenzied exodus from the deck of the Musk Boat, mass acts of tweet deletion, self announcements in the fediverse, I wonder about how far we’ve come from Mike Caulfield’s classic (to me) pondering of the Garden and the Stream. Pretty much the last few years the garden has been left dusty for […]
“Does Alan only blog these days about Creative Commons images?” It. Seems. That. Way. But it’s a break from SPLOT, SPLOT, SPLOT. But look, for this one you get a tool out of the deal, here it is before you have to wade through all my type-ridden, long-winded, whinge tinged verbiage. Because it’s been around […]
When I was teaching DS106 there were not many rivals for teaching the craft of audio storytelling than to ask students to listen closely to the way what I consider the standard bearer of the form is- This American Life. I’ve gotten back to listening to more episodes lately, and they maintain that form. Episode […]
