This week, I’m trying something different: adding Category names between my links’ shares/text. I wanted to give a quicker way for folks to browse my content, and go straight to their fields of interest.
Keywords this week: history of blogging; Ed Zitron; personal branding; billionaire tech money; beautiful art account to follow; some inspirational images; and a lot of opinion and articles on the subject of how bad Google Search is becoming.
To Read
- “We’ve been waiting 20 years for this“: This is an article about the history of blogging and its potential resurgence, discussing its rise in the early 2000s and its impact on journalism. It also explores the reasons why blogging declined, the possibility of a new blogging revolution, and that the new wave of blogging will be focusing on personal expression and niche communities rather than mass audiences. You’ll understand that this article got my interest as I consider myself a blogger from the first wave, having started blogging back in 2000 on LiveJournal!
- Quote: “Go for a walk. A long walk can free you from even the most vicious of mental prisons.”
I can’t agree more! Walks have kept me sane for decades, and have always been my ways of healing, taking time to explore my surroundings, and take the time to just breathe while enjoying the views. I even used to have my own category of blog posts, called “Chroniques du Voyeurisme”, where I wrote about what I saw when I was able to view inside people’s houses and inner lives for a moment. On another note, this tip for long walks from Kottke’s website is full of wisdom. - Author I’ve discovered this last week – Ed Zitron: I’m sharing 3 articles I’ve read from this author, which I’ve loved for his intake on the economy (it’s rotting), Google Search (it’s getting shittier), and AI (did it peaked yet?). Lots to simmer, but I think there is something rotting in the land of Tech & the Economy, and Ed has a way with words.
- “The Gravitational Force of Tech Money“: Dave Karpf examines the significant influence that large sums of money from the tech industry have on various sectors, particularly politics and innovation, arguing that the massive influx of tech money has reshaped the landscape, often dictating the direction and priorities of technological advancements and political campaigns in a wrong direction, not for the benefits of humankind. It points out that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few tech companies can stifle competition and limit the diversity of ideas and innovations. Additionally, the sway these companies hold over political processes raises concerns about the health of democratic institutions and the potential for policy decisions that favour corporate interests over public good.
- “Elite College Admissions Have Turned Students Into Brands“: Everything is becoming a matter of personal branding now, and how you “sell” yourself to the masses. In this article, it goes over how younger generations are being pushed to forge an “impressive identity” and personal brand in their teenage years to have a better chance for contingented school programs and work opportunities. It’s getting crazy hard out there in our society, and I am scared for the pressure of performance it’s going to have on my own teenager in the next couple of years…
Images
Music
- Playlist to listen to: All Tabs: One of the newsletters that I follow, Today in Tabs, has shared a HUUUGGGGGEEEEEE music playlist on Spotify, and so far, I love it. Lots of new musical discovery, but also lots of classic songs I liked in the past, relistening to them is fun.
To Follow
- I’ve discovered this Artsy Page, Il Mondo di Patty, on Facebook this week, and I really love it! It’s not at all become they had interesting arts with cats, noooooooooooooo 😉
Design
- Brushes for Photoshop: “20+ Best Free Halftone Photoshop Brush Sets for Digital Artists“
- Fonts: “20+ Best Free Futuristic Fonts for Designers” and “30+ Best Free Heavy & Ultra-Bold Fonts for Designers” Always fun to have various fonts for your design projects
- Architecture: beautiful chalet-styled house in Maine, serving as an inspiration for my future house lost in the wood next to a lake…
Cybersecurity
- Like this person wrote on her LinkedIn page, do more searches on Bing search engines! Not only is it becoming more accurate than Google, but its ways of evaluating content – and showing it in results – seems much more solid than currently on Google. “Bing and Google have different ways of ranking websites in search results. Bing focuses more on traditional SEO (search engine optimization) factors like keywords in domain names, page titles, and metadata, while Google prioritizes context and semantics (this is a good example for why you should use both!). Bing tends to prioritize content that has been around for a while or has already attracted significant traffic. It also has a preference for websites with top-level domains like .gov or .edu.”
- Interesting PDF on online searches theories that I stumbled upon in my OSINT newsletters I am reading. Learning about +Fravia and its impacts on the community was a nice rabbit holes on this weekend!
Web & Tech
- There are a LOT of talks online over the Google Search and AI Overviews these last few days, and boy is it going wrong for Google right now. This article is resuming how websites have suffered tremendous views on their webpages, and how Google’s algorithms seems to be prioritizing forums over credible websites. I have a feeling it’s going to be an intense debate in the next few months over Google’s credibility and usefulness as a search engine, and I suspect a rise in other search engines tools like Bing, DuckDuckGo and – yes, still existing! – Yahoo as Google continues to force AI into users’ throats…
