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? […]

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 …

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Dec 14

Au Revoir Revue! Twitter to Kill Off Newsletter Service at End of 2022 – I Guess I Need To Move My Newsletter!

I was a little surprised to learn this morning that Twitter is shutting down its Revue newsletter service. Casey Newton first wrote about this back on November 3 in his Platformer newsletter, but subsequent articles after the massive layoffs confirmed…