Blurts

I have long been an advocate of maintaining a personal presence on the Internet. Expressing your own perspective is a great way to learn. I also harbor the idealistic view that our collective comments are a way to counter the influence of those able to pay for amplifiers of their own views by way of television and radio. The potential of this approach seems to be slipping a bit as the more traditional information sources are moving online.

The “indieweb” movement is an attempt to keep this idealistic perspective alive. It proposes that we all should have an online presence that we control. The hard core among them do not accept Facebook, Twitter, etc. as a way to do this and argue each of us should have control at the server level. You may believe this is taking things too far, but controlling your own area of the web is not that difficult and informative.

Here are some resources:
A recent podcast from TWIG (this week in Google) contains an extended discussion of the philosophy and implementation opportunities for the indie web.

The software featured in the TWIG podcast is called Known.

Known and the idie web is discussed on GigaOm

I can’t say I have explored Known. As interesting as I find these ideas I already have a 12 year investment in blogging from my own server space and even longer offering what I now now is considered serving indie content. However, if I was starting from scratch, this software would be an interesting option. If you are an educator, listen to the TWIG podcast to understand the role they see for education.

Magazines have not been part of my content consumption effort for many years. Before the internet I used to subscribe to multiple computer magazines to keep up with tech trends. Internet content was sufficient to provide the info I needed and was less expensive.

A new service has caused me to reconsider my magazine decision. Next Issue is an app allowing “all you can eat” access to magazine content for $10 a month. Unlike the Amazon unlimited access book plan, the magazine options cover most of the magazines I am interested in reading. The opportunity to add multiple devices allows my wife and I to share an account.

One warning. The service is dependent on the formatting options allowed by the magazine. Some allow rotation of the page view or alteration of the text size and some do not. The pages look very attractive, but I have trouble with the small size font for some of my choices. The Kindle experience of altering text size to suit personal taste should not be expected. For example, I like the appearance of the content from the free MacWorld web site, but I have trouble reading the articles from the app. The free trial period is a good idea. I would recommend checking out the magazines you value and not being satisfied just knowing they are available.

So, this is not actual size, but you can see what I mean by an attractive page layout. The problem is that the pages from several of the magazines I want to read do not adjust themselves well to an expanded view and I need an expanded view to easily read the text.