Notices by Richard MacManus (ricmac@mastodon.social), page 5

@evan Good point, but as I noted in my post, even Blogger didn’t provide RSS feeds until sometime in 2000, so you could’ve had a Blogger blog but no RSS feed. Also RSS 0.90 and 0.91 were quite limited.

There’s a couple of days left on this poll. Note that I’m referring to blogs, i.e. linky commentary ordered by date. I think some people who have chosen 90s have been referencing GeoCities, Homestead, etc. While those services could’ve been used to run journals / weblogs, it wasn’t normally the case. By all means choose 90s if you were writing a blog on GeoCities, but just wanted to clarify that. https://mastodon.social/@ricmac/115113003418086356

@Gargron Ah yes, I definitely want to see that.

It’s all a bit serious on the socials today. Anyone got a good tv show recommendation? I recently finished ‘Dept Q’, which I enjoyed. I binged all of ‘Halt and Catch Fire’ before that. ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ was another fave this year. I’m up to date with ‘Severence’. What else is out there to binge on a Friday evening with a glass of vino?

@stefan much I want to support this, it seems like a rather dubious 'day'. Seems like Automattic invented it in order to sell its .blog domains? All they say in the post is "Since the early 2000s, August 31st has been known as World Blog Day." -- but they provide no link as evidence of that claim? https://my.blog/2022/08/25/what-is-world-blog-day-and-how-can-you-celebrate/

(And yes, I wouldn't so suspicious of Automattic if it weren't for Matt Mullenweg's antics in recent times. But, I am now...)

@stefan I would be in favour if you started a brand new 'day' to celebrate indie blogs, though :)

@stefan I agree at the start of Blaugust would be ideal. Sorry, I didn't mean to put you off celebrating on 31st though — I'd get behind that too. I actually have a relevant Cybercultural post I'm working on...

@stefan I think that's fine — especially if Automattic hasn't actually mentioned it since that 2022 post?

@stefan Maybe @evan can run a poll for us?

To date, I don't think we've ever seen something on the internet as destructive to the cultural industries as Napster was in 1999 (although AI is threatening that now!). By coincidence, 1999 was when David Bowie became the first major artist to sell an album online as a digital download. The two storylines — Napster and Bowie's Hours — became entwined in intriguing ways. https://cybercultural.com/p/napster-1999/ #InternetHistory #Napster #Bowie

I admit, I am fascinated by how X users see the internet. I think some of them genuinely don’t know what websites are.

This is such a 2002 site: before blogging had taken off and got adapted for media purposes, so it was still like writing a personal journal. Kind of that halfway between personal homepages and the 'pro blogging' that people like me ran with later. (Maciej Cegłowski created Pinboard, but I'm not sure where he hangs out these days social media wise)
https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/115050703964734993

@buttondown Feedburner vibes

Tim Berners-Lee on 6 August 1991:

“The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!”
https://cybercultural.com/p/1991-tim-berners-lee-trys-to-convert-the-hypertext-faithful/

Notice he said collaborators and not parasites (yes, I mean AI, but also human SEO parasites). With the open social web, we have a chance for human collaboration again.

Ok Mastodon dev community, get ready for a reality in which GPT-5 makes React redundant! Lesser of 2 evils?

Latent Space review:

"When we were invited to test GPT-5 out early, we all made personal websites. Turns out GPT-5 mostly one-shotted this entire thing, including the paint app. [...] Amazingly I’ve really never even looked at the code and it’s all just HTML/CSS/JS.

No React, no bundling, no frameworks."
https://www.latent.space/p/gpt-5-review

@Gargron Thanks for the feedback. Yes, this could be an issue with the specific Ghost template I'm using. I will look further into it and bring it up in Ghost forum if there is an issue there.

@feed One design thing I'd love to see tweaked: the Mastodon embeds are very skinny and hence take up too much vertical space. If you compare to the Bluesky and X embeds in the post, I'd prefer the Mastodon embeds were the same width as those. Not sure whose fix this would be, but tagging @staff and @index for consideration. See: https://webtechnology.news/wtn-1-www-34-ghost-6-apis-2-0/

First issue of Web Technology News has just been published! My new Ghost newsletter that you can find here on Mastodon: @feed. Let me know what you think...it's just a start and I want this to be easy to read every week. Also, I'm looking for a catchphrase to end each issue :) Suggestions welcome... https://webtechnology.news/wtn-1-www-34-ghost-6-apis-2-0/

"The intersection of technology and culture is where Meta focuses."

Hey Zuckerberg, back off! This is my territory over at Cybercultural. I challenge thee to an MMA fight!!

Ref: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMu3RoogZri/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D

I take a look at how Online Identity has evolved through the years, from the fluid identities of BowieWorld to the neutered identity culture that Facebook introduced in the 2000s. David Bowie himself played with virtual personas (how could he not?!) and I also look at a 1999 book by US sociologist Sherry Turkle. https://cybercultural.com/p/online-identity-bowieworld-1999/ #InternetHistory #OnlineIdentity