I read Bridging the Open Web and APIs: Alternative Social Media Alongside the Corporate Web because it was a good opportunity to fill some holes in my knowledge about the Indieweb and Facebook.

Brid.gy enables people to syndicate their posts from their own site to large proprietary social media sites.

Although I don’t use it myself, I’m often impressed when I see all the Twitter “likes” and responses that are backfed by brid.gy to the canonical post on a personal website.

The paper details the challenging history of providing the same for Facebook (in which even Cambridge Analytica plays a part) and helped me appreciate why I never see similar responses from Facebook on personal websites these days.

It ends on a positive note…

while Facebook’s API shutdown led to an overnight decrease in Bridgy accounts (Barrett, 2020), other platforms with which Bridgy supports POSSE remain functional and new platforms have been added, including Meetup, Reddit, and Mastodon.

Although it makes a good point, the "False balance" article seems to accept the widely held assumption that Rogan is just "letting people voice their views" without interrupting them but he did so recently with guest Josh Szeps to wrongly argue against covid myocarditis evidence.

Using data from healthdata.gov, this is a graph of the “total_pediatric_patients_hospitalized_confirmed_covid” column over time for Texas. A similar graph for the U.S was shown on Twitter by Rob Swanda.

A month ago, I learned about Katalin Karikó as I was reading Brendan Borrell’s The First Shots. She developed the modified mRNA (from which Moderna gets its name) that made possible the mRNA vaccines. The book describes how the University of Pennsylvania squandered her interest in the patent for her work by selling the rights to a company called Epicentre. Eventually, Moderna licensed the patent from Epicentre to complement the work of Derrick Rossi.

In an interview, she also credits Paul Krieg and Douglas Melton for their contributions.

As a recipient of 3 doses of the Moderna vaccine, I’m thankful to these researchers and was glad to read this book.