general

Good comment by "twitter" (who even has a bird avatar) in response to the Rhizome top-level-domain article:

For the American registrant, domain names are historically apolitical and more of a fashion thing. It's startling to an American, to whom .com is little more than a suffix, when a TLD exercises some arbitrary rule over who gets domains. For instance -- Domains ending in .uk are not available, only .co.uk. Domains in some countries require a domestic tax ID or local agent (Russia is an example). .Edu requires you to be an educational institution (but this was not always the case). .Cat is only available for people who speak Catalan. And so on.

The American's grasp of geography is tenuous. Can you find Tuvalu on a map? Or Niue? Does .ch correspond to China or Switzerland? There is greater danger with dot-art falling into the hands of someone who treats art with a capital A, as opposed to handling it as an empty signifier. Which is more American -- the musty odor of the sacrosanct, or a yearly subscription fee? Which one will let me register golfc.art?

This discussion does not take into account where the TLD's servers will live -- in a dry county or a wet one. .Tv was once administrated by the guy for whom the Android phone is named, and the servers lived in his friend's garage. An amusing anecdote:

"So what are you going to do about Rubin?" Kim asks, referring to a WebTV executive who at one point managed to get administrative control of .tv without the government in Tuvalu knowing about it. ...

1996: "I was scanning the list of ISO 3166 country codes, and I was like, 'Wow! TV!'" An online database, though, showed that IANA had given administrative authority for .tv to Andrew Rubin, manager of communications software for WebTV. But Kim noticed something he thought was strange: No .tv names were being sold. So he called Funafuti. "I got in touch with the finance secretary, and I said this guy Andrew Rubin is not maximizing your revenue. And he was like, 'Who is Andrew Rubin?'"

Someone with a clue, whereas most art types are "Anton seems cool, I'm sure we can trust him to run the .art domain better than some stinky commercial outfit and as for whether we need an .art domain I don't know much about computers." As for geographic cluelessness, some forgiveness might be in order if you confuse Tuvalu with Tuva.

golfc.art

Have been following RSS-reader Feedly as it makes its Dunkirk migration from the Google mainland. Oh, sorry, they're calling it Normandy, which I guess means they are invading The Cloud.
Up to now Feedly has been an "app," or in my case, a Firefox extension, but now they've announced they have a browser-independent web version of Feedly, or what they're calling the "cloud" version.
The logo that Google arbitrarily assigned me as an "avatar" (a screenshot of a YouTube from my now-deleted account) is not showing up in Feedly so I guess my data (RSS feeds) has been successfully migrated to the Feedly Cloud ("sublimed" might be a better term for transition into a fog state).
Now what remains to be seen is how they'll handle logins. I'm still having to log into Feedly through my Google account, which automatically jacks me into all the Google services I don't want to be logged into, such as YouTube.
A commenter asked "Now when is the non-Google login coming? lol"
The Feedly rep responds with an ominous non-sequitur: "Definitely. We will be adding twitter, linkedin, tumblr, microsoft and facebook logins very soon."
Ominous because it looks like they mean to be punks to all the big boys so those bruisers can yoke your data, as opposed to just having a Feedly login. [mixed metaphors corrected --ed.]
Will be posting that list of other feed readers soon.

Addendum: The post linked to above ends with Feedly obsequiously saying "let’s all wish Google Reader a happy retirement!" Barf out, as the Valley Girls used to say.

From a "chan-like forum" RA linked me to:

humphreybog.art
shoppingc.art
didyoujustf.art
walm.art
sh.art
littlet.art
iamsm.art
genitalw.art
getthep.art
simpson.b.art

Background
Would-be .art owner Anton Vidokle assures us that .art will not be curated so all these should pass muster. It's not that difficult to conceive that artinamerica.art and davidzwirner.art could share a top-level domain with genitalw.art, in our classless e-society.

Was complaining about the web-as-cesspool and comment-spamming a few posts back and should add that Google has much blame in this. The company that helped put obscure bloggers on the map in the early '00s then turned those highly-trafficked blogs into link farms later in the decade, not so much by design as through lack of ethics. In 2007, Anil Dash described how this happened:

Connecting PageRank to economic systems such as AdWords and AdSense corrupted the meaning and value of links by turning them into an economic exchange. Through the turn of the millennium, hyperlinking on the web was a social, aesthetic, and expressive editorial action. When Google introduced its advertising systems at the same time as it began to dominate the economy around search on the web, it transformed a basic form of online communication, without the permission of the web's users, and without explaining that choice or offering an option to those users.

Worse, the transformation was retroactive and the eventual mechanisms for opting out were incomplete in that the economic value could not be decoupled from the informational value. Inevitably, spammers arose to take advantage of the ability to create high-economic-value links at very low cost, causing vast damage to the ability to use links as a purely informational exchange. In addition, this forced Google to become more and more opaque about the refinements and adjustments it makes to its indexing algorithms, making a key part of their business less and less transparent over time. The eventual result has been the virtual decimation of communications systems like TrackBack, and absurdities like blogs linking to their own tag search results for key words in lieu of useful links, in an attempt to appease a search algorithm that they will never be allowed to fully understand.

An awareness of how a transformation in the fundamental value of links from informational to economic could have led Google to develop a system that separated editorial and aesthetic choices from economic ones, preventing the eventual link-spam arms race.

Good discussion at adactio about RSS and its enemies (hat tip naked capitalism).

It’s not like RSS is a great format—it isn’t. But it’s just good enough and just versatile enough to enable non-programmers to make something cool. In that respect, it’s kind of like HTML.

The official line from Twitter is that RSS is “infrequently used today.” That’s the same justification that Google has given for shutting down Google Reader. It reminds of the joke about the shopkeeper responding to a request for something with “Oh, we don’t stock that—there’s no call for it. It’s funny though, you’re the fifth person to ask today.”

And:

In a post called The True Web, Robin Sloan reiterates the strength of RSS: "It will dip and diminish, but will RSS ever go away? Nah. One of RSS’s weaknesses in its early days—its chaotic decentralized weirdness—has become, in its dotage, a surprising strength. RSS doesn’t route through a single leviathan’s servers. It lacks a kill switch." I can understand why that power could be seen as a threat if what you are trying to do is force your users to consume their own data only the way that you see fit (and all in the name of “user experience”, I’m sure).

A feed reader is still a good way to follow non-social-media sites that post infrequently (so you don't have to keep checking them); a collection of these "indies" is strong intellectual medicine in a web fast becoming homogenized and company-fied. In the next few days, ahead of the Google Reader shutdown, I'll post a handful of feed-reader alternatives.

Also of interest are Anil Dash's posts on The Web We Lost and rebuilding it.