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Ari discusses his recent struggles with teaching and social media.

So that’s a thing now.

So it seems Twitter didn’t kill its RSS feeds after all. They just threw them down a well and didn’t tell anyone about it (via my man in Omaha).

Boxers or briefs?

Oh wait, I just totally dated myself.

Anil Dash:

Favoriting is the most fundamental, natural action to perform on the permalink, which is the atomic unit of content on the web.

Me in February:

@anildash i’d rather have a 1-click no options/popup bookmarklet that saved liked links to a simple, dedicated, public tumbleblog (with RSS)

Is it any wonder I like this guy? Pun very much intended.

The Hill (via Political Wire) reports that politicians are holding back their twitters in response to Anthony Weiner’s social media disaster:

The day Weiner held his press conference when he admitted he lied about being hacked, there was a noticeable decline in tweets by Democratic lawmakers. On Monday, June 6, only 120 Democrats tweeted. That’s about 30 percent less than what they tweeted two Mondays before. On the Republican side, 338 tweeted the Monday of Weiner’s presser, about an 18 percent drop from two weeks before.

Totally irrational behavior. Why would a member of Congress feel the need to pinch the flow if they weren’t sending cock shots?

Twitter is getting a ton of attention right now, and after constituents are done looking for lewd trails on Weiner’s Twitter page, some of them might search for their own representatives offerings. This is an opportunity to impress voters with high quality (and cock shot-free) tweeting.

It’s pure Fenno 2.0.

Yeah, I went there. Deal with it nerd.

It seems in 2011 and the era of Facebook and Twitter we’ve completely lost any care for open standards. Maybe it’s not just RSS that is dying - it’s the entire premise of open standards that is dying, and I think that’s really sad, and really bad for not just developers, but users in general.

I don’t think think this sentiment is true. Well it is in the short term. And maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but every time Twitter tightens it’s grasp on its web service, I assume they make themselves ever more vulnerable to an upstart challenger wielding open and decentralized communication technologies. Unlike the case of content-based DRM, I don’t see any longterm advantages of having a global scale gated web community. There should be tremendous pressure for the Facebooks and Twitters of the world to end up like email in which they are only big providers among many who facilitate the communications of their own customers.

So yeah, it’s always darkest before the dawn something, something free-as-in-naïveté.