Digital Crossroads

Every time I launch Thunderbird to read my RSS feeds, I’m reminded that not one, but two people I follow have the same names as friends who are no longer with us. I noticed this on Mastodon too, before I took my current social media hiatus. It’s… oddly nice to see them still going? Even though I kno...

Ranking improvements, multi-story event detection, sleeker UI, and more.

I've joked here and there that I should make an RSS app. I genuinely didn't really mean it, but a couple months ago, after doing some work with RSS in Quick Reads, I thought, hey, I think I could do this better in a few ways,

The US startup Operation Bluebird has launched a new social media platform under the Twitter name, claiming that Elon Musk's X Corporation abandoned the trademark. The post Pssst, Hey There Elon Musk! Twitter Is Coming Back appeared first on CleanTechnica.

This has been one of those low level thoughts that bobs up from the neural surface (the Little Limited Machine in my skull). The bemoaning of web search devolving from the list of ranked blue links to something that zeroes on on what some machine language thing suggest. And what gets portrayed in th...

A trailer for The Social Reckoning, directed by Aaron Sorkin, which opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday 8 October 2026, and follows-up 2010’s The Social Network, which Sorkin co-wrote. As I wrote a few months ago, The Social Reckoning is a far darker continuation of the Facebook story. That said...

Stroll lets me earn time on social media by walking first.

This is the second of two parts on media creation. You can find the first part over here: Creating media with an uncooperative mind Infinite negatives # In trying to figure out what I should write and talk about, I could spend the rest of my life outlining all the topics I don’t care about. The wor...

This week, both Meta and Roblox took steps to keep young users from getting brain-rotted by algorithms

A little over eighteen months ago, I wrote a post where I talked about writing resources that I discovered while working on my first book that I recommend. Well, now I've written two books, I'm in the middle of working on a third, and I've found my fair share of additional resources that I'd like to...

We’ve got a pair of apps that help you get a little reading done, albeit with two different approaches. Still, whether you prefer having someone else read the articles to you or if you just prefer a cleaner feed of articles, there’s something for everyone in this week’s App Report.…

Mike lists his preferred ways to interact with blog posts he sees in his feed reader. I look at where my blog satisfies his list, and also suggest a few other contact mechanisms that I, or others, might facilitate.

Quick Reads is a read-it-later service built by one person who made the app he wished existed. What makes it worth writing about isn't what it does; it's how it connects openly to the rest of my digital life, and what that reveals about building tools that actually fit the way I work.

Algorithms on X tend to bring you posts that contradict your values, and it happens more to Democrats than Republicans.

My phone used to be my biggest source of distraction. Here's how I turned it into a focused tool using a hidden iOS feature.

And everything else I learned about productivity this year

ABC News has officially introduced Searched, a livestreamed show that highlights stories people are discussing on social media and searching on the web, as reported earlier by Variety. Though the network just announced the show now, Searched began airing on the ABC News Live streaming channel in Apr...

This is sacrilegious among some parts of Apple fandom, but I like using web apps. Oh, sure, I can imagine a world in which there’s a carefully crafted Mac app that has all the functions of a website I use but has all the Mac-like interface features I love and isn’t hobbled by a web UI. But I don’t l...

The Aussie experiment comes amid a lack of clear evidence that the apps harm most adolescents. It may take a dramatic research pivot to finally reveal what’s going on and how to fix it.

Chronology, reversed. Bubbles in my browsers. Blaugust. A quest for knowledge.