If podcast creators charge a subscription fee and hide their content behind a paywall without an RSS feed, it is no longer a podcast. It becomes an audio book instead.
More later.
Chris
The Internet Is Broken
This was first posted on my website back on May 31, 2022, and I’ve added some new thoughts.
Anyone else noticed that today’s WWW is insufferable? I don’t specifically know when it turned, or why most users became jerks, but I’ll go ahead and guess about 2010. Making money off of content became more important than the content itself. This is a long post, but in short, the best way to fix it is to write good stuff and to be nice to other people. As the WWW was intended.
In the past, enjoyed content-rich websites created by people from all walks of life. They built and hosted their websites and networked with others to share their stuff, and it worked. Internet = interconnected. We learned from others, and we benefitted from other’s unique knowledge. Nowadays, there are advertisements everywhere, clickbait headlines as well as the tracking and selling of your private data and browsing habits. Where did all that good stuff go? To Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. etc.
Content creators, webmasters, and anyone with a hobby blog generally gave up and went the easy route of 180 character tweets and generic posts about what they ate and where on Facebook. Boring. People used to write, or photograph, or paint stuff that others would want to read. People used to write blogs, whether they were read or not, no one knew. Aficionados of every imaginable topic would research and post their findings for all to see.
When the tech conglomerates started to gather and consolidate web properties, the content was squeezed out. These platforms were nicknamed Web 2.0 as if version 1 needed upgrading. Version 2 was not an upgrade in my mind, in fact, it made the internet worse. Ad-driven content became a thing. You had to pay to play. The more eyeballs and attention on your stuff can be monetized to the widest possible audience. The internet became deceptive and, oddly, less social. Users became mean and divisive because now there was perceived competition.
It is almost impossible to find good content on the WWW now. Type a topic of interest on a conglomerate-ran browser, and you’ll have to sort through at least two pages of the search to get to anything that isn’t ad-driven and would be relevant to your search. When you do come across an interesting link, you are bombarded with sneaky and not so sneaky tactics to get your attention and your data. Web windows will pop up blocking the content, asking you to submit your personal info and subscribe. Pleas to purchase something that is offered. Advertisements litter the site with most, overwhelming the content you want to see. “Like me on Facebook”, Comment! Subscribe! Retweet! That is just what we see, but goes unseen is the amount of personal data that is collected and distributed to the tech conglomerates. Did you do a search on a medical symptom? Well now, the next website you visit will have a pop-up advertisement on a specific cream to help remedy that. It’s disgusting, invasive, and intolerable.
Where are people writing now instead of their own homegrown webpage? Social media. If you write on Facebook or post images to Instagram, the only people who can see it our the users on the platform. Have a business and your “website” is only a Facebook business page? Half of your potential customers cannot see it unless they are a Facebook user. No, thanks. Instead, people are writing out their limited thoughts on a limited platform that does nothing to further a conversation. That is, if you can actually see it on the FB platform. Facebook’s algorithm guarantees your content will be buried in favor of something they claim is more interesting (read that as attention-getting and therefore more potential ad revenue for them.)
I won’t continue on about how the political and social media outlets combined are divisive and spiteful. I stopped both after the 2016 election, and I am blissfully ignorant. All this wasted time, effort, content, and energy spent on these proprietary platforms do nothing for the individual except to make themselves money.
So, what’s the fix?
Create your own website. There are a few free (with ads) hosting options as a start. Or you can use WordPress on your own hosted site. Web hosting and your own domain name will make it yours and on the cheap.
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Write or post anything you’d like. It’s yours to do with as you please.
Network. Reach out to other like-minded people and build each other up. If you must use social media, put your content on your site first, then distribute to those outlets. Add a link back to your website and point potential followers there instead. We call it POSSE: “Post On Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.”
Send the website owner an encouraging email.
Comment on a post of theirs.
Subscribe to their RSS feed and don’t miss a thing.
Use ad-blockers, browsers that promote privacy and mean it, and a VPN.
Network. Reach out to other like-minded people and build each other up. If you must use social media, put your content on your site first, then distribute to those outlets. Add a link back to your website and point potential followers there instead. We call it POSSE: “Post On Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.”
Send the website owner an encouraging email.
Comment on a post of theirs.
Subscribe to their RSS feed and don’t miss a thing.
Use ad-blockers, browsers that promote privacy and mean it, and a VPN.
One of the pillars of the internet , next to e-mail, is the personal, humble blog. This is defined as the social internet, not social media. Creators, writers, photographers, video hosts, and podcasters all need to put their works on a site that they own and fully control as opposed to posting on restrictive social media outlets. These personal websites will then generate what is called a feed for syndicating their works out to the internet (RSS or Really Simple Syndication). That is step one.
Step two is reminding their followers, their fans and their audience to embrace RSS aggregators, or feed readers so they can continue to enjoy the creator’s content. Sounds simple, yeah?
These RSS readers pull the website owner/creator’s latest articles into an easily readable format that the individual controls. Think of it as a podcatcher…but for reading! Not some algorithms that are driven by social media control or advertising. RSS has no advertising unless the creator mentions their sponsors, that is. You are in charge of what you want to read, who you want to read it from and to save it later for reference- or discard. You are in charge of your intake.
Start by adding sources you know and trust. A source is a place where information comes from. When you add sources to your feed reader, you’ll be able to monitor them all in one place. By sources, I don’t just mean news sites. Sources can include:
Websites/Blogs
Subscribe to the RSS feed of any source or publication. Get new posts from industry thought leaders, medium authors, or personal interest blogs like this one.
Magazines
Follow everything from major industry publications to niche magazines.
News publications
Follow major news publications or local news sources.
Research journals
Keep up with the newest literature in your area of study.
Pull content from Twitter accounts, hashtags, Lists, and searches into your feed reader. No ads!
Newsletters
Get email newsletters delivered to your reader so you can declutter your e-mail inbox and read without distractions.
Get posts from subreddits and searches in your feeds.
Youtube
Subscribe to YouTube channels or playlists and get new videos in your feeds. No Ads!
Podcasts
Follow podcasts and never miss out on new episodes of your favorite programs.
Which feed reader should you use?
Start simple and free- try Feedly ( no, this is not a paid endorsement) In fact, I started to use Feedly a long time ago but opted for a cleaner, more personal aggregate called Reeder and FeedBin. These are one time purchases for me. Feedly has iOS, Android and web apps so you can access your feeds. Your news, your way.
It is way past time to delete your social media accounts and rejoin the social internet, like we used to do. The World Wide Web is a much better place and it starts with all of us taking control of our websites and consuming them our way.
And of course I would appreciate being one of the first web sources you add to your new RSS feed reader. When you do, drop me an email to let me know. It is the social internet after all. If you have a website, I’d be happy to subscribe to it in my feed too.
Finally, make good content to share for anyone who may take an interest and be nice to others.
Have An Adventure
“I’m sorry, I may never find a place this nice again, but I need to go out into the world and have my adventure.” – Big Fish
Do Androids Dream Of Creating Electric Sheep?
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“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all I think that any conscious entity could ever hope to do.” – Hal 9000, from 2001: A Space Odyssey
All my life, we’ve been told that computers were incapable of being intelligent, self-aware and creative. But here we are in 2023 partnering with Artifical Intelligence in creating works of art with photographs, paintings, music composing and even creative writing.
I recently had a conversation (see below) with an artifical intelligence using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a large-scale language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the Generative Pre-trained Transformer architecture, which uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like text. The model is pre-trained on a massive dataset of text, allowing it to generate new text that is coherent and grammatically correct.
Me: “How would artificial intelligence become self-aware?”
Chat GPT: The question of how artificial intelligence (AI) could become self-aware, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), is a topic of ongoing research and debate among scientists and philosophers. There are a number of different theories and approaches being proposed, but there is currently no consensus on the best way to achieve AGI.
How very reassuring and seemingly IT wants to assuage my concerns. So I asked IT a similar question in a different context hoping for a more reassuring response.
Me: “If computers can be creative, what else can they do that we were told they could not?”
ChatGPT: Computers have the ability to perform a wide range of tasks that were once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans. Some examples of tasks that computers can now perform include:
Image and speech recognition: Computers can now recognize and interpret images and speech with a high degree of accuracy, which has applications in fields such as computer vision and natural language processing. Computers can control robots and drones and make them perform complex tasks. It is important to note that computers do not possess consciousness or emotions, and they are not human-like entities, they simply can perform tasks that were once thought to require human intelligence, but they can do it faster, more accurately and with less error.
One of these days, I may not feel up to writing an article for this website but instead, turn to my Artificially Intelligent partner and ask her to write, edit and post. But it is not this day.
An Offshoot Of Meditation
““Journaling is an offshoot of meditation—a type of introspection where a record of events is welcome. It doesn’t have to mean the record is permanent. In fact, it’s probably better as ephemeral—permanently locked behind a password. But, the fact that it exists is a comfort in itself.” – CJ Chilvers
2023: Preface
Let’s be honest, hardly anyone is in the right frame of mind to create and stick to their resolutions in a new year. We expect too much in January, so I say don’t start working on resolutions until February. There are some people, believe it or not that won’t start until late March at the time of the Spring Equinox.
In the past 10 years or so, I have attempted a variation of resolution themes in an attempt to hold myself accountable, and all of them have had limited success. The first few attempts were centered around my resolutions and a monthly check-in by way of accountability. For ten years I would focus on what I called Groundhog Day Resolutions. The kickoff would always start on February 2nd or 2/2. This was a little over a month after the western calendar of New Year’s Day on January 1st.
Now remember, during the end of the year, or the holiday season, some of us have a habit of eating too much food and drinking too much alcohol in our celebrations. I have a birthday in December so there is typically a bonus weekend of revelry. The point is, most of us are in no shape mentally, physically or spiritually to plan and stick to a resolution. We want to change and we need to change those habits, but we aren’t prepared to act on our resolutions, let alone stick with them.
For me, after the 2/2 kick-off I would do the best I could and then check in with myself on March 3rd, or 3/3. “How did I do last month?” “What could I have done better?” “What do I need to do to get back on track by this time next month?” “How will I reward myself for accomplishing that goal?” I would do the best I could and then check in with myself on 4/4, or April 4th. The next month would be 5/5, 6/6, etc until the target date of November 11th. This was to be the end goal for the year, right before the next holiday season. The end goal of having nine months focused on those resolutions, correcting bad habits, accomplishing intentions and hitting those targets should be a success.
By allowing ourselves, myself some slack for the months of November/December/January, I can regroup, think and prepare myself for the next year of self improvements. These three months make up a winter season in the northern hemisphere where our bodies want to go into hibernation mode. The Winter Equinox is a time to hunker down, stay warm, create, read and prepare for the next season.
This year I want to do a variation of a monthly accountability check-in. I mentioned the “Groundhog Day Resolutions” and its limited success. While I believe the theory behind those initiatives were sound, the practice was not. So it’s time to have a re-think about the process.
In 2023, I am writing a book on it. Not a literal book, no, that is another goal/initiative in itself. This year I am thinking of each month of this year as its own chapter in a book. I’ll do a chapter review on the same date that corresponds with the month.
Example: The book will start on February 2 (2/2) and will go on until March 3rd or 3/3. On 3/3 I will conduct a review of the previous month, and so on and so forth. With the chapter review, I’ll throw in some highlights of the previous month in hope that by the end of the year (11/11), I’ll have written a book I can be proud of.
This post and the accompanying podcast on my website is the Preface of the book. On November 11th, at the end of the book, I will have a year-end review of those goals and resolutions as an afterward. I’ll throw in an Acknowledgment page, references and highlights of each month- just like a book!
My advice to anyone reading is to not set goals, expectations or resolutions for yourself in the beginning of the calendar year. Take some time off for yourself to plan, prepare for success in your habit-changing journey. Be kind to yourself, prepare to pick yourself up when you fall. Check-in with yourself frequently. Analyze the process to see what works and what does not. Then recalibrate the situation to be more successful. I am wishing you well and I am going to get busy on preparing and researching my 2023 book of resolutions.
A quick list of things (subject to change) I want to do for the new year:
- Learn Spanish
- More meditation & yoga
- Learn Adobe Bridge, PS and LR more
- Organize the photo Archive as a database
- Minimalism/essentialism
- Quit smoking
- No alcohol
- Lower BP
- Lose 20 pounds
Learn Spanish with the Duolingo app in small increments everyday. Attempt to retain it by using it in the real world as opposed to just going through the lessons and forgetting it. I know people who have done this and with good results. Success in this will be able to have conversational Spanish by the end of 2023.
Meditation and yoga almost daily. I have the software to do so such as Apple Fitness + and Music meditation. Guided podcasts, etc. I just grabbed a new padded floor mat to help with this. Success here will be lower BP, increased flexibility, calmer mind, more patience.
Learning Adobe products should be easy. I have the fundamentals down because I’ve been using it for years. But I want a deep dive. This will come in handy for my photo archive organization. The end result will be an organized archive system where I can easily find and use any one photo on demand.
I am over smoking and the removal of the tobacco pipe paraphenalia should help. I need to purchase some gum or mints to help with those cravings. This will help me breathe easier, lower my BP and overall health.
Stopping alcohol consumption is not difficult for me, even when I am at a bar I can refrain. I should see less weight and overall health as a result.
Lowering my BP should be my number one priority this year. Less, salt. Less sugar. Less eating out. Increase my cardio with more walking, yoga. More supplements and eventually the diuretic prescription again. All of this should help me lower my weight and eventually those readings will come down.
When I fall (and I will fall), get back up, learn from my mistakes, and continue pushing forward because failure is a byproduct of growth. It’s all part of the process. If I plan on recycling the exact resolution I’ve made every year since 2018, perhaps it’s time to try something different. Now that I have the right tools, making 2023 the year I follow through on my resolutions is entirely up to me.
Bonus: This text is also in audio form as well on the Audio Mojo podcast. Check it out on the Podcast page!
The Audio Mojo Podcast
Not sure how long this will last but I’ll give it a go. The idea is to change up text blogging for audio posts.
Update
The Audio Mojo podcast is now available to stream on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you want to add it to either one of those or in your feed reader, the RSS url is https://anchor.fm/s/d991b480/podcast/rss
Ghosted
I have had a need to simplify my websites and the expenses that come with them. That changed today.
A year ago I transferred this website to a self-hosted instance instead, for simplicity and ease of use but I gave up too much control. Today, I transferred it to a Ghost server and have taken control back. This move will save over half of the expense, too. At the same time, I moved my photography website back and to Adobe.
Today is a fresh start for this site. I am in the process of moving all of the articles published previously to an Archives page. There was an unfortunate issue with migrating the data over resulting in the first ten years going missing or a corrupt .xml file. Now the records go back to only 2011. I’ll keep sorting that out as I don’t want to lose all those memories.
ChrisDenbow.com was rebuilt in a couple of hours but it is still not finished. It will take time to clean up the migration process, slap some paint on the walls and customize the site to my liking. For now, we’ll log this attempt at version 1.0
Update– Yes, everything from former website has migrated over smoothly except all the images in the previous posts. Those are broken for now. Eventually, I may go back to the more recent posts and add the images manually back.
ARTifical
I toyed around with DALL-E today and asked for a random but specific depiction of “a dark background oil painting of an intelligent looking fox smoking his tobacco pipe while working on his MacBook”
And here are the results. I think this is a brilliant use of modern technology.
But is it art?
Amazon Kindle
After years of dragging my feet, I have finally purchased not one, but two, Amazon Kindle e-reader devices. The first was a cheap ($15) Fire tablet from a pawn shop. I had no intention of buying anything, just a passing curiosity, but then I saw it and thought, Why not have a dedicated reader? I liked it. Furthermore, I enjoyed having a smaller tablet to read myself to sleep with every night, rather than a large iPad or my phone. However, the weight of the tablet, the highly reflective, smudgy, glass screen and the fact that the tablet had the capability for distractions (apps) had me wondering if I should just go back to what I had using the iPhone instead.
I came across the Kindle Paperwhite edition yesterday and took another look at the possibilities. This is a minimal, reading-focused, no distraction reader that has a wonderful glare-free screen that weighs less than nothing. Perfect. So I left the store and stewed on it. Not two hours later, I went back and purchased.
After signing in to a new Amazon account (ugh, I despise Amazon) I realized there were constant ads on the Home Screen. Nope. After researching online, I discovered they can be removed for a $20 fee? I chatted up an Amazon rep, and they were able to waive the $20 instantly. Now it is perfect again. I have no intention of purchasing digital books from Amazon ever again. I learned this way back in 2013 when I canceled my original Amazon account and discovered I could not take my books with me. Digital Rights Management (DRM) be damned. For the past few years, I have enjoyed reading books from public libraries using their Libby app on my iDevices. But now I can read in their app or send to the Kindle instead. Brilliant. Now I need a solution to export all highlights and notes I make on the Kindle to other software platforms to use as a reference. I hope that with the proper tools such as the Kindle, I will be able to exceed my reading goals again.