My microblogging book is available on Amazon!
Many people are aware of microblogging, but how did microblogging get started? What are the practices of microblogging, and how is it different from regular blogging? Also, most people know about Twitter as a microblogging tool, but are there other tools available? This book describes the history of communication technology that led to microblogging, discusses common practices that apply to many tools, and an overview of five different microblogging tools you can use to start microblogging today!
Feedback is welcome!
How to avoid the corporate takeover of podcasting
Content providers trying to lock in users is not a new concept. All of the major video streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon) are producing original content that can only be viewed through their service. Apple and Google through iTunes and Google Play are gateways that people access podcasts, and Apple has been called out before for controlling podcast distribution through its extensive directory.
To me, these are the two ways of avoiding the takeover:
- Innovate on features and discoverability
- Find ways to help podcast producers know more about their listeners
Marco Arment took a nice step on point 1 with his clip feature that he added to the Overcast podcast app. Other innovations might be to support more distributed directories to assist in podcast discovery (OPML inclusion, anyone?).
Progress on point 2 might be difficult (requiring collaboration, between podcast app makers and other groups of people), but it might be better to band together to create new standards/processes/protocols than to be “picked off” one by one.
737-MAX software update still in progress, Collins Aerospace/UTC is involved
- Washington Post: Boeing’s 737 Max design contains fingerprints of hundreds of suppliers
- The Gazette (Cedar Rapids IA, former headquarters location of Rockwell Collins/Collins Aerospace): United Technologies is parent company of sensor maker under scrutiny for Boeing 737 Max failure
Read: How do we learn to work with intelligent machines
Read: Privileged
There’s an elephant in the room that I’ve been thinking about a lot over these last few weeks.
“Boeing 737 Max: What went wrong?” (BBC) contains a plot showing the angle of attack data being fed to Boeing’s MCAS software. Less than one minute into the flight, the left sensor spikes to an absurd roughly 70-degree angle of attack. Given the weight of an airliner, the abruptness of the cha…
Read: Discussing Social Networks, Again

Another week, another discussion on the state of social networks on TWiT network. This time it took place on the latest episode of This week in Google . The discussion went on and on about how Google Plus was great. And how other social networks have ruined what made them the best in the first plac…
Listen: A Parkland teacher’s homework for us all
Read: Introducing the Bootstrap Starter Kit
In other words, Bootstrap helps you make hand-coded websites, without them looking hand-coded.
The problem is that many of the themes don’t come with everything you need! For a seasoned designer/developer, that’s not a problem. But for students like mine, it can be a big problem. So I built something to try and help.