It’s great to see nonprofit organizations getting into the business of operating public Mastodon / Fediverse instances. Two announcements recently caught my attention. First, Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, announced that they would launch a public server (“instance”) in early…
Dec 26
Hallmark Christmas Movie Bingo Cards – and the Fascinating History of the Hallmark Channel
This past holiday weekend our older daughter brought a new fun activity – “Hallmark Christmas Movie Bingo”. If you are familiar with the “Hallmark Channel” here in the USA, they produce many seasonal romance movies. They vary widely in quality and some are a bit cheesy and cringe-worthy. Many of the movies follow a common formula … something like… high-powered marketing exec in New York City finds out her fiancé is cheating on her, and so goes away to spend Christmas with one of her old friends at her house in some rural location (often Vermont). While there, something happens…
Dec 26
FIR #305: We See You And You Can’t Come In
A petulant venue owner is using facial recognition software to keep people with whom he has issues from entering his spaces — including a mom with a Girl Scout troop. Also in this monthly long-form episode of the “For Immediate Release” podcast, Neville and Shel discuss the value of virtual goods and whether brands should start taking them seriously; business schools are exploring the potential for teaching in the metaverse — especially classes about digital technology; it hasn’t been a great year for metaverse activations, but at least brands are learning; it has been a year since Lush closed its Instagram and Facebook accounts, which means it’s time to see how that decision turned out; and the better ChatGPT (the AI text-generating chatbot) gets, the more worried some people get about its impact on truth; and Dan York shares a year-end Tech Report with a range of updates including using WordPress for newsletters, WordPress’s State of the Word 2022, and Tumblr Live.
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Dec 25
The Christmas Story, As Told by ChatGPT in Iambic Pentameter
For those who celebrate Christmas, as I do… MERRY CHRISTMAS! As I am off celebrating the holiday with my family, I thought I’d ask an AI to tell the Bible’s Christmas story. So I went to ChatGPT and asked: > Tell the biblical Christmas story in iambic pentameter Why iambic pentameter? I don’t know… other than thinking it could be more interesting than just having Chat GPT regurgitate blocks of text. This requires a little bit more effort. After getting the first version, I found the focus on Herod to be a bit odd, so I pressed the “Regenerate response”…
Dec 24
Two Major Challenges For Operating Mastodon Servers – Scaling and Content Moderation
As more people embrace the decentralized world of the Fediverse – and as we WANT more people to migrate to the Fediverse – we are seeing an explosion of new Mastodon servers/instances set up by all sorts of people and…
Dec 22
Automattic Promotes WordPress.com as a Platform for Email Newsletters (and provides improved support)
Just as Twitter is killing off it’s Revue newsletter service, Automattic is promoting their hosted WordPress.com service for newsletters – and providing some new tools to make that easier. In their announcement blog post, they note that WordPress.com has already…
Dec 21
Ceremonies of Light and Dark
I have always enjoyed our ceremonies of light and dark, here in the cold mid-winter of northern New England. The winter solstice here is always a time of celebration. For us, it is the shortest “day” in terms of daylight – and the longest night. It is cold here at this time of year. The solstice gives us hope. From here on out, the days only get longer… and at some point will start to actually get warmer. (We have to go through some much colder periods first, though!) We celebrate here so often with candles… with fires… with flames……
Dec 19
Mastodon – The Server You Are On Is Most Important When You Are Starting Out
“How do I choose which Mastodon server to join? It’s SO CONFUSING! I just want to sign up to ‘Mastodon’!” This seems to be a common refrain from some people exploring Mastodon as part of the Twitter migration/exodus. The reality…
Dec 17
The Term "Weblog" Is 25 Years Old Today
By way of a Mastodon post this morning, I learned that the term “weblog” is 25 years old today! The Wikipedia article for “Blog” says that the term was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. Reading the Wikipedia…
Dec 15
Google IPv6 stats consistently peaking over 40%
When I looked at Google’s IPv6 stats recently, it was great to see that the peaks are now consistently all over 40%. Back in January, I wrote about crossing the 35% threshold, so there’s been a 5% growth over the space of the year. Would we who advocate for IPv6 want it to grow quicker? […]
