The Guardian has an article from yesterday that dicussses the fragility of content ownership in the digital age. Specifically it looks at how “My whole library is wiped out” after a streaming service stopped streaming content. It told people “pay 200 USD to move to service B”.
I encountered this issue eight or more years ago. I was using Spotify for a year or two, and one day realised that I was spending 300 CHF when I never spent more than 90 CHF in music on a single year.
Yesterday I was experimenting with the Static folder in Hugo. Hugo and other static site generators has a folder where you can usually put content that you don’t want to have changed. You can add php, css, js and more. By making this an option it is possible to have your blog as markdown files that are updated and published every time you make changes while other files remain intact.
Does the World Wide Web dumb is down to much to read is an article exploring the idea that we have too many distractions and that as a result we are unable to focus. Yesterday I wrote about blogging rather than writing twitter threads and this article goes some way to exploring the same theme.
The first thing I would look at is the quality of writing and the quality of information.
Facebook and Instagram both have “Stories”. Stories are temporary vertical pictures and video that are only available for a limited amount of time before they are backed up and saved for retrieval once you request your data.
In theory, they are a fantastic way of sharing life as it happens without worrying about something embarrassing being available for an extended period of time. In practise, they are a way for Facebook and Instagram to force users to be active every day if they do not want to miss out on what their friends are sharing.
Chloe Gilbert - 7 Jan, 2018
I’m finding that I’m doing the same these days. Twitter has become a torrent of noise and nobody seems to be really conversing these days. I had a lot of value out of early Twitter, and made some good friends as well as getting support for things like programming and events etc. Lately as you say it’s become useless. Facebook for me was always a way of keeping in touch with close friends and family, as well as getting support and organising events.
Finding time for Long Form Writing This morning I read twenty percent of a book whilst sitting in the car waiting for shops to open. In the process I occasionally looked up to see private jets and airlines fly over me. A few years ago in the same situation I would have been staring at my phone. I would have been refreshing twitter and Facebook looking for conversations. These days social media marketers and others are using social media as if they were Really Simple Syndication feeds, RSS.
I’m online from 10-15hrs a day on average and as a result I’m used to having everything available within a short amount of time. I also had access to a PVR with a hard disk upgrade for quite a long time. As a result of both these developments anything that is not available to me when I want to watch it goes unnoticed. That’s because “It’s an on-demand world” as was concluded in one edit I worked on for a client about the future of broadcasting.
I am happy that youtube is being sued because out of the hundreds of video sharing websites out there it is the most devious. It has taken hundreds of hours of content produced at great expense by teams of professionals and offered them in poor quality for nothing on their site. To make it worse it’s made them billions of dollars. How can the mega corporations, through the intermediary of the RIAA give so much trouble to those who share music let allow youtube to thrive.