John Siracusa in the episode of Reconcilable Differences mentioned yesterday: For all the imagined advancements, the big thing about the plot of a (futuristic) film like Star Wars is the absence of any kind of internet-like communication.

Snippets.today: Building on today’s open web, Manton Reece has opened up a little on his long time microblogging project. He talks about it with Daniel Jalkut on Core Intuition. They also cover some thoughts on the value and future of the open web. Ev Williams claiming the future is centralised and Matt thinking otherwise.

Of course Ev is going to paint a picture of centralised convenience when that is the principle that Medium is built on. And Medium engineers try to convince us on how complex the technology behind it is. If you’re building Medium that might certainly be the case, but for individual sites it can be quite straightforward. Hands off the blogs. How about helping empower people by bringing them closer to the technology they use on a daily basis?

John Siracusa and Merlin Mann on a roll in episode 29 of Reconcilable Differences. Humans and the future: Putting a timeline (and endgame perspective) on current hopes for VR and biolgical advances.

Is the Internet Being Ruined? The latest episode of Freakonomics Radio. Ferguson, Facebook, and the open web.

And speaking of the open web, in my Twitter feed, the W3C browser DRM story continues. (Also Tim Berners Lee campaigns for European Net Neutrality and Kevin Marks takes notes from the Homebrew Website Club)

Open web, IndieWeb. Christian Heilmann voices reservations about the IndieWeb onboarding requirements in Marc Thiele’s Twumble podcast series. A nice (open air) interview with Eva-Lotta Lamm too. On drawing.

Yesterday I mentioned Cory Doctorow getting freaked out by the W3C’s moves to include DRM as an open standard. He’s now taken action, and suggested a smart compromise. In an open letter to the W3C (as a representative for the EFF) he clearly lays out the concerns touched on in the O’Reilly podcast and, based on a precedent concerning patents, suggests a way forward.

After yesterday’s look at the issues surrounding podcasts and proprietary formats, today a listen to Cory Doctorow’s concerns regarding the future of the open web. While one can choose which (indie) software to use when subscribing to RSS feeds (be they of web pages or podcasts) Cory is concerned that when it comes to web browsers the options are shrinking. He’s concerned that with the new W3C proposal to add DRM as a web standard only the handful of big browser players have a future, not to mention the bunch of security vulnerabilities that come with the DRM can of worms. He spells it all out on the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast.

Alongside the daily festival of articles that flow in on my RSS readers (Unread on my iPhone and iPad, Reeder on my Mac) I’ve gotten heavily into listening to podcasts during the last few years. RSS is the technology that makes it all possible, and the great thing about it is that it’s an open format. I can choose exactly which feeds to subscribe to and easily change to another set of apps should I wish.

Overcast is the app I use for listening to podcasts. Marco Arment, it’s creator, recently published a response to an article on the New York Times in which he takes a strong stance against wishes in certain circles to turn podcasts into something more proprietary – read: data, tracking, monetization. Frederico Viticci sums up some of what’s at stake in his follow-up on MacStories:

I want podcasting to be a spoken extension of the written web – available to everyone, indexed with an open format, unbound by agreement terms and proprietary file formats. I want to know that, 30 years from now, I’ll be able to look up one of my podcast episodes from 2016 like I can look up a 2009 blog post on my server today.

And Jason Snell and Myke Hurley, holding similar views, discuss the whole kerfuffle in the podcast medium itself.