One Man's Notes

Six Colors, Jason Snell: The Kindle is fine. It could’ve been much more than that.

Agreed. I would love to have seen the Kindle evolve into a more general reading device - but it probably won’t happen.


A walk through the blogging graveyard

Moving from Feedly to @NetNewsWire via Feedbin has been largely a positive experience. The one oddity, though, has been the sudden reanimation of a whole bunch of dead feeds. I’ve probably been subscribing to RSS feeds for 15 years, so the effective “reset” of my feed read status means that, unexpectedly, blogs which last published nearly a decade ago are showing up again.

And reading through it is a melancholy experience. The worst, of course, are the blogs of people who have died, often with final entries which give no clue as to what is coming. There’s a lot of blogs of student journalists, some of whom have gone on to big things, many of whom have left journalism entirely. There’s sites that moved - but the old site still survives while the new site is gone from the web.

There are people whom I got to know through blogging, and who became face-to-face friends for a while — and then who disappeared from the web for reasons of their own, unknown to me and never advertised. Some of them I’d love to catch up with, but have no way of contacting them now.

There are online services that have come and gone, including the last post on the Google Reader blog. Posts from optimistic startups that flamed out, and many, many promises to “restart the blog” that never came true.

We are, I hope, in the early stages of a blogging renaissance. But ploughing through this graveyard made me experience a little touch of how the very old must feel, still living their life long after all their friends are dead, and wondering if there’s anyone left who cares.


This looks spectacularly lovely - but is waaaaay out of my price range: Bang 8 Olufsen unveils premium AirPlay 2 and Chromecast soundbar ahead of IFA


The traditional camera bloodbath is here, it appears.

On my Om, Om Malik: PhotoRealism


Wow. Fell behind on these. Here’s July - over a months ago - in 1 Second Everyday.


Look at this. A blog post with actual comments. That takes me back…


Today’s Engaged Reading Digest - chat apps in protests, how the internet is changing our language and influencer reverse psychology.


This is why I carry on blogging.


Understatement of the day:

”It’s almost seven years, now, since David Cameron decided that an EU referendum would reunite the Conservative party. I wouldn’t want to speak too soon, but just at the moment, it doesn’t seem to be going entirely to plan.”


Interesting, but not transformative. It’ll help with the mental heath issues around social media. Be interesting to see what the lack of social proof does to reach, though.

The Next Web, Ivan Mehta: Facebook is testing removing like count from its post


Unintended consequence of the day: Wild popularity of CBD forces Christian bookseller to rebrand


My lunch meeting has arrived.


Working in the M&S Café while my wife and daughter do some final school shopping. I am getting the evil eye from pensioners, whose regular spot I have probably accidentally occupied.


The slow erosion of the democratic norm

Rachel Sylvester makes an important point in The Times:

Democracy is about persuasion rather than obliteration and there are rules underpinning political conflict that don’t apply in military combat. The prime minister seems to have forgotten that, far from being the nation’s commander-in-chief, he is only “first among equals” in the cabinet and depends for his power on the House of Commons. The scorched-earth approach being pursued by No 10 will make it almost impossible to unite the Tory party, let alone the country, when the skirmishes are over.

There is an autocratic streak in a lot of current politics that should concern anyone who values democracy.


It’s been a long time since these two shared a spot in my dock together.


Spending a lot of time in spreadsheets today. Not something that happens a lot in my work, but weirdly satisfying when it does.


Don’t look now folks, but I think autumn might be here…


A nice reminder that blogging was always a complicated and often unpleasant community. Shakesville’s unravelling and the not-so-golden age of blogging - The Outline.

On the other hand, it wasn’t a vast multinational company harnessing all the value, either…


Does anyone else use FeedBin? Considering trialing a switch from Feedly - but would like some informed experience before I make the jump.


This is a fascinating theory (based on a source) on why Apple’s sudden change in beta releases happened: iOS 13’s beta split is down to Trump’s threatened tariffs, not missed features


Prorogue — or prorogation?


Well the good news is that a lot of people have a much deeper understanding of how our parliamentary democracy functions than they did yesterday.


Serfing USA

Jeremiah Owyang : Chances are, you’re probably a serf.:

To modernize the last word of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin’s famed quote; “In antiquity, slaves were, in all honesty, called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called users.”

I’m taking a new approach to link posts on One Man & His Blog. What do you think?

Feedback gratefully received.


This is a massive dose of nostalgia - I was on a lot of these networks. But, thankfully, not all:

Why These Social Networks Failed So Badly