The Semiotics of Networked Content

Explore how networked content transcends platforms, focusing on the significance of signs over replication in the evolving digital landscape.

Working on content interop super-ontology in the #mastodon, #micro.blog, #twitter, #feedland, and #wordpress multiverse.

Posts are actual pieces of content. They are mostly made on the platform where you find them.

Timelines are views into (yours and others’) posts. These views are made possible by transmitting information about the post via #RSS (or something else) and aggregating into a timeline. Timelines can include feeds from yours or others’ sources.

What’s interesting is that timelines can also be published and consumed, also via #rss.

This means that, if you consume a feed, you don’t know if the source-content in the feed originates with that feed. Feed elements could “pass through” as signs to their sources. In fact, it doesn’t even matter.

In this sense, we don’t want to replicate content around the networks, we want to replicate signs.

Featured writing

When your brilliant idea meets organizational reality: a survival guide

Transform your brilliant tech ideas into reality by navigating organizational challenges and overcoming hidden resistance with this essential survival guide.

Server-Side Dashboard Architecture: Why Moving Data Fetching Off the Browser Changes Everything

How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.

AI as Coach: Transforming Professional and Continuing Education

Transform professional and continuing education with AI-driven coaching, offering personalized support, accountability, and skill mastery at scale.

Books

The Work of Being (in progress)

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The Practice of Work (in progress)

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Recent writing

The bully pulpit: why AI slop only matters to people who write about AI slop

This article exposes how the 'AI moral crisis' narrative is amplified by the very people who control media—and why the 90% of workers actually using AI don't share the panic.

Why your job matters more than mine: the selective morality of job loss

This article reveals the uncomfortable pattern behind which jobs get moral protection and which get called 'market forces'—and what that means for everyone outside the creative class.

AI in writing: the end of a professional monopoly

This article reframes the AI writing debate: the panic isn't about creativity—it's about a professional class losing control of the systems they've gatekept for a century.

View all writing →