Clay Shirky gave a talk on the "Cognitive Surplus" (that has been spent watching TV, and is now partially getting moved into Social Networking, Participatory Media, etc.). (Slack in the Attention Economy?) If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the Sit Com. Starting with the Second World War (World War II) a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time (Leisure). And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV... However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter... Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. (more)

Medium: Show authors more (love)️ with (clap)s (more)

a way of Making A Living (more)

Roger Schank suggests Redesigning High School for Career Prep (Vo-Tech, Making A Living) via Engagement/excitement. (more)

Dave Thomas is Framing your personal Free Agent Off Shoring risk as needing a Pragmatic investment plan. (Making A Living) (more)

John Herrman: How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature (more)

David Wong On Why Your Favorite Sites Are Suddenly Asking For Money (more)

How to make your chatbot a huge success? Two dimensions and a tip! (more)

The idea of having a native MobileApp render a server-generated web page for a screen, rather than coding it native. A way of leveraging your existing WebApp work in the less-used portions of your site/app (because native is expensive, esp if you want to support both iOS and Android. (more)

Variant of React which compiles to iOS and Android MobileApps. (more)

JavaScript Rich Client FrameWork (more)

Ruby On Rails implementation of PJAX.

Push State + AJAX (more)

The real driver of regional inequality in America (more)

Silicon Valley billionaire Stewart Butterfield voices support for Universal basic income (more)

app I use to keep an entire Private Wiki folder of text files in synch between Drop Box and Android devices - because mobile-Drop Box will only keep manually-flagged files available Off-Line. (more)

see WikiLog

Martin Fowler suggests the Feature Toggle instead of (Version Control System) Branching to support Continuous Integration. Good for A-B Test, etc. The basic idea is to have a configuration file that defines a bunch of toggles for various features you have pending. The running application then uses these toggles in order to decide whether or not to show the new feature... It's very important to retire the toggles once the pending features have bedded down in production. This involves removing the definitions on the configuration file and all the code that uses them. Otherwise you will get a pile of toggles that nobody can remember how to use... Feature toggles can be used for permanent variable configuration too, such as different versions of a software for different contexts. This is a different usage to handling pending features but most of the implementation is the same. If you use feature toggles for other scenarios too, it's wise to clearly separate the pending feature case from the permanent cases. (more)

when people talk about Fixed Price contracts for Software Development Projects, they usually mean a contract that's fixed in price and scope. (And sometimes time/deadline.) (more)

WikiEngine by Martin Pool, in Python (more)