Remix Icon - Open source icon library
I love how easy it is to use these icons: you can copy and paste the SVG or even get it encoded as a data URL.
Link tags: past
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Fandom Relics and the Enthusiastic Past - Long Now
Not much stays in one place for one long, especially when it comes to digital artifacts. When the Yahoo Groups archive was summarily deleted by parent company Verizon just a few years ago, fandom suffered massive losses, just as it had during the Livejournal purges of the late 02000s, and during the Tumblr porn ban in 02018. Fandom preservation, then, ties into the larger issue of digital preservation as a whole, and specifically the question of how individual and group emotions and experiences — which make up so much of what it means to be a fan — can be effectively documented, annotated, and saved.
A Long Bet on Link Rot is Resolved, but Questions About the Durability of the Web Still Remain - Long Now
The Long Now foundation has a write-up on my recently-lost long bet:
On February 22, 02011, Jeremy Keith made a prediction that he hoped would be proven wrong.
A Long Bet Pays Off - Internet Archive Blogs
The bet was been won (not by me, thankfully) and Jason has some thoughts.
On a long bet – A Whole Lotta Nothing
Matt’s thoughts on that bet. Not long now…
Adam Curtis’s Seaside Dream (Phil Gyford’s website)
chef’s kiss!
(you know my opinion of Adam Curtis’s documentaries
)
the Web at a crossroads - Web Directions
John weighs in on the clashing priorities of browser vendors.
Imagine if the web never got CSS. Never got a way to style content in sophisticated ways. It’s hard to imagine its rise to prominence in the early 2000s. I’d not be alone in arguing a similar lack of access to the sort of features inherent to the mobile experience that WebKit and the folks at Mozilla have expressed concern about would (not might) largely consign the Web to an increasingly marginal role.
PastWindow - outdoor installation on Behance
This is a pretty close approximation Bob Shaw’s slow glass.
The monitor shows what’s behind it, with 6 months delay.
Bound in Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift
If a human civilization beyond Earth ever comes into being, this will be unprecedented in any historical context we might care to invoke—unprecedented in recorded history, unprecedented in human history, unprecedented in terrestrial history, and so on. There have been many human civilizations, but all of these civilizations have arisen and developed on the surface of Earth, so that a civilization that arises or develops away from the surface of Earth would be unprecedented and in this sense absolutely novel even if the institutional structure of a spacefaring civilization were the same as the institutional structure of every civilization that has existed on Earth. For this civilizational novelty, some human novelty is a prerequisite, and this human novelty will be expressed in the mythology that motivates and sustains a spacefaring civilization.
A deep dive into deep time:
Record-keeping technologies introduce an asymmetry into history. First language, then written language, then printed books, and so and so forth. Should human history extend as far into the deep future as it now extends into the deep past, the documentary evidence of past beliefs will be a daunting archive, but in an archive so vast there would be a superfluity of resources to trace the development of human mythologies in a way that we cannot now trace them in our past. We are today creating that archive by inventing the technologies that allow us to preserve an ever-greater proportion of our activities in a way that can be transmitted to our posterity.
The Arrogance of the Anthropocene - The Atlantic
If, in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries before forgetting to carry the one on an orbital calculation, thereby sending that famous valedictory six-mile space rock hurtling senselessly toward the Earth themselves—it would be virtually impossible to tell.
A nice steaming cup of perspective.
If there were a nuclear holocaust in the Triassic, among warring prosauropods, we wouldn’t know about it.
Chaos Design: Before the robots take our jobs, can we please get them to help us do some good work?
This is a great piece! It starts with a look back at some of the great minds of the nineteenth century: Herschel, Darwin, Babbage and Lovelace. Then it brings us, via JCR Licklider, to the present state of the web before looking ahead to what the future might bring.
So what will the life of an interface designer be like in the year 2120? or 2121 even? A nice round 300 years after Babbage first had the idea of calculations being executed by steam.
I think there are some missteps along the way (I certainly don’t think that inline styles—AKA CSS in JS—are necessarily a move forwards) but I love the idea of applying chaos engineering to web design:
Think of every characteristic of an interface you depend on to not ‘fail’ for your design to ‘work.’ Now imagine if these services were randomly ‘failing’ constantly during your design process. How might we design differently? How would our workflows and priorities change?
Bruce Lawson’s personal site : Structured data and Google
Bruce wonders why Google seems to prefer separate chunks of JSON-LD in web pages instead of interwoven microdata attributes:
I strongly feel that metadata that is separated from the user-visible data associated with it highly susceptible to metadata partial copy-paste necrosis. User-visible text is also developer-visible text. When devs copy/ paste that, it’s very easy to forget to copy any associated metadata that’s not interleaved, leading to errors.
HTML Symbols, Entities, Characters and Codes
For all your copying and pasting needs:
A delightful reference for HTML Symbols, Entities and ASCII Character Codes
A Public Record at Risk: The Dire State of News Archiving in the Digital Age - Columbia Journalism Review
This well-researched in-depth piece doesn’t paint a pretty picture for archiving online news:
Of the 21 news organizations in our study, 19 were not taking any protective steps at all to archive their web output. The remaining two lacked formal strategies to ensure that their current practices have the kind of longevity to outlast changes in technology.
The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected | WIRED
Craig writes about reading and publishing, from the memex and the dynabook to the Kindle, the iPhone, and the iPad, all the way back around to plain ol’ email and good old-fashioned physical books.
We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.
Peter Gasston | People don’t change - YouTube
This talk from Peter—looking at the long zoom of history—is right up my alley.
Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape - IEEE Spectrum
It turns out that a whole lot of The So-Called Cloud is relying on magnetic tape for its backups.
The Amish understand a life-changing truth about technology the rest of us don’t — Quartz
The headline is terrible but this interview is an insightful look at evaluating technology.
I remember Kevin Kelly referring to the Amish as “slow geeks”, and remarking that we could all become a little more amish-ish.
It’s not that the Amish view technology as inherently evil. No rules prohibit them from using new inventions. But they carefully consider how each one will change their culture before embracing it. And the best clue as to what will happen comes from watching their neighbors.
Google and HTTP
I share many of these concerns.
The web is huge. Even bigger than Google. I love that the web preserves all the work. I don’t think anyone has the right to change the web so they no longer work.