BlogFlock

When was the last time you walked quietly while kicking a pebble on the ground over and over again? Just letting the time pass by for a little while, without picking up the phone from a pocket, without checking the time on my wrist watch. Just walking back and forth,…

This cybersecurity book is badly written, contains multiple offensive stereotypes, is technically inaccurate, and spends more time focussing on the author's love affair with the New York Times than almost anything else. Seriously, if you take a drink every time the book mentions the NYT, you'll spend most of the…

This short position statement was prepared for the FediForum Growing the Open Social Web Un-Workshop, which is held online on March 2, 2026.

The question is: why do we want to grow the open social web, and for whom? Presumably we don't want to become just another in…

What’s going on, Internet? Ferry ride over, no kids. Bus to Onetangi.

Alibi for a late lunch. Picanha steak with seasonal vegetables. Unfortunately, they had some type of beer shortage, so their usual selection was limited to four tap beers. I enjoyed the Ruru Hazy, even though it was a…

OK, so here we are at the end of the first week of Step Aside, Phone. Quick re-cap from last week - my average phone and tablet usage combined was approximately 4 hours per day (2.5hrs on phone, and 1.5hr on tablet).

That's high! Hopefully this week was better?

A good friend of mine at work was recently promoted to the same level as I was before I stepped down. I'm happy for him, as he's a good friend and it's nice to see people achieve their goals.

However, a day or so after he told me the…

[Falk Steiner in Heise Online]

A series of articles by Switzerland’s Republik magazine resulted in Palantir being rejected by Swiss authorities as a potential security risk: it appears to have determined that there weren’t sufficient protections against Swiss data falling into American hands, which in turn led other…

At the recent "Protocols for Publishers" event, a group of us were talking about news paywalls, social media promotion, and the embarrassment of having to ask for money.

What if, we said, you could tip a journalist directly on social media? Or reward your favourite creator without leaving…

A citizen of Rome in 117 AD, under Emperor Trajan, would've found it difficult to imagine the empire not existing. The roads, the aqueducts, the legal system, the trade networks stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia: all of it seemed to be a near-fact of nature, like gravity // the Mediterranean…

I've been making some updates to my personal commenting system. Before they looked like this:

It was just a simple table that contained every comment, both original and replies, in one table. As more people commented, it got a little unwieldy and confusing, so I've changed the layout to…