Today, I’m introducing a new handle for myself. I was a teenager when I originally chose "jlleblanc", which is my first and middle initials combined with my last name. In the late-nineties Internet, a lot of people took the opportunity to create handles not involving their real names. This made...

I’ve started a community to discuss designing a post-social-media world that puts people before platforms and algorithms. As a part of that, we’re having a discussion about the values we would like to see in the Local Web. Here is a draft list of those values: Privacy A Local Web...

Last updated: January 28, 2021 I need your help. If you know anything about me, you know that I’m a coder. One of the quirks of being a coder is that whenever I see a problem, I want to grab my laptop and start writing software. The older I get,...

Throughout the history of user interfaces, we’ve had a lot of metaphors used to make them easy to reason about. For instance, all computers have folders and files. It doesn’t cost you anything to create a new folder or a new file. You can put files in folders and folders...

Note: This is a blog series about “The Pipeline”, you can read more about it here. We are becoming ever more aware that personal data is now as valuable as (if not more than) money. Corporations want our purchases, politicians want our votes, and nonprofits want our donations. Attempting to...