Author: Seth Werkheiser

Saw Groundhog Day tonight in our local theater, the night before Groundhog Day. I live about four hours east of Punxsutawney, PA, but I’ve thought about getting up at like 4am and making the drive (but actually there’s no way I’ll be doing that).

“I understand that Gmail is trying to make the product more user friendly, but I think it’s making some questionable decisions without the user’s knowledge. And unlike some email clients that allow users to choose whether to include contact names when sending, Gmail enforces this behavior with no setting to disable it.”

Maybe you wanna check your CONTACT NAMES in Gmail. Yikes. Read more here.

FRAIL CONNECTIONS

Our connections are only as strong as the technology in place that allows it. This is why I warn against using Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family – if that connection is cut, you account is suspended, the company implodes – you are no longer connected with friends and family.

All this talk now of new social media networks, as if the only way forward is based on the idea of setting up new accounts and importing our address books, when in fact we already have our address book from which we can communicate with friends and family.

Seems we like to stay in touch from afar, though, which is weird to me. I don’t need to know the breakfast choices of the kid who sat behind me in 10th grade science class. I don’t need to know every career move of people 1,000 miles away who can only be troubled to drop a “happy birthday!” text when prompted by a algorithm to encourage engagement.

Our brains are only capable of so many connections. There are a few people in our life, right now, nearly in arms reach, who we could grow closer to and go deeper with. Instead we keep seeking these lite-connections with people who only think of us when an algorithm deems it so.

IT’S EMBARRASSING TO POST THINGS ON THE INTERNET NOW

From Noah Kalina:

I was out taking pictures and I made a picture that I really like. I was working on it and I was like, “This is so good.” And I was like, “What am I going to do with this?”

My natural inclination is to want to post it on the internet, but why? I almost feel like it’s embarrassing to post things on the internet now.

More thoughts here.

HOW TO WRITE ONLINE

Solid advice for writing online, from Sean Goedecke:

  • Try and find opinions you have that lots of people disagree with. Those are the interesting opinions others might want to read about
  • Ideas should come naturally from doing actual work, not from sitting and reflecting on what a good blog post would be
  • It’s OK to write multiple posts about the same thing
  • I deliberately don’t include every caveat – good readers will know I’m only writing about my old experience; bad ones won’t care anyway
  • I try to be upfront about my experience so readers can judge how seriously to take what I’m saying
  • Set up a RSS feed and some kind of analytics

Read more at ‘Writing a tech blog people want to read‘ (via Hacker News).