Flickr exists, in part, because I needed a photo-sharing tool to help me woo my long-distance girlfriend, who later became my wife, and whom I’ve been with now for 15 years — so I have watched the service’s long decline and neglect at the hands of Yahoo, and then…
Unicode pioneer Michael Suignard has submitted a “Revised draft for the encoding of an extended Egyptian Hieroglyphs repertoire” in Unicode, trying to replicate the expressivity of the 7,000 hieroglyphs used in Greco/Roman times. His taxonomy includes over 2,000 awesome, well-sorted glyphs, including the all-important “phallus” and “liquid issuing…
Cambodian dictator Hun Sen has ruled since 1998, and when an opposition leader used Facebook to challenge his election in 2013, Hun Sen teamed up with a fake news outlet called Fresh News to deploy a Facebook-based strategy to consolidate his control and neutralize democratic opposition. Hun…
Unpaywall is a service that indexes open access repositories, university, government and scholarly society archives, and other sources that make articles available with authorization from the rightsholders and journals — about 47% of the articles that its users seek. It runs as a browser extension that adds notifier…
XML pioneer and early blogger Tim Bray went looking through Google for some posts he knew about from 2006 and 2008 and found that Google couldn’t retrieve either of them, not even if he searched for lengthy strings that were exact matches for text from the articles; he concluded…
Foster Kamer has advice for people who want a better web in 2018: ditch Facebook and find cool stuff by checking bookmarks, visiting your favorite sites by typing their URLs in your browser bar, or searching for them on your favorite search-engine. The more publishers have to…
In Nieman Labs’s “predictions for journalism in 2018” roundup, there’s Kawandeep Virdee’s “Zines Had It Right All Along”: which celebrates the low-fi, experimental, handcrafted diversity of the golden age of zines (which was the environment that birthed Boing Boing, as it happens). As Tim Carmody writes, “They look…
By Cory Doctorow Tim O’Reilly has his finger on the pulse of technology and the people who make it in a way that is unmatched by anyone in the world; the publisher of the world’s best-loved computer books, the host of technology’s best-loved conferences, the convenor of the most important…
An excellent post to the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC2 WG2 mailing list sums up critical feedback over recently approved emojis, including a fierce denunciation of the (IMHO) excellent “frowning pile of poo” emoji, which is viewed as a slippery slope to an entire “a range of emotions to…
Writing in MIT Tech Review, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne points out the secret and, in retrospect, obvious driving force behind tech: it reduces the often awkward and unreliable process of dealing with people, so you can buy music without asking friends for recommendations, take a cab without talking…
