John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged communication · everything

en.wikipedia.org

Webmention - Wikipedia

This W3C recommendation documents the Webmention protocol, which lets a site notify another when it links to it, enabling decentralized comment/reply threads across independent domains—essentially federated commenting without a central platform. Grown out of the IndieWebCamp movement, it deliberately simplifies earlier linkback mechanisms like Pingback by using plain HTTP form-encoded requests instead of XML-RPC, and it also handles edge cases like edited or deleted source pages. Worth keeping as a reference for implementing IndieWeb-style interlinking or understanding how it compares to Pingback, Trackback, and Refback.

Permalink communicationsoftware

camillestyles.com

27 Long-Distance Relationship Ideas to Stay Close—Even When You’re Miles Apart

A personal roundup from a writer navigating a Portland-to-San-Francisco relationship, offering a curated list of nearly 30 concrete ways to stay connected across distance—ranging from shared playlists and voice notes to virtual cooking classes and surprise care packages. The framing is less about "surviving" long-distance and more about building small, repeatable rituals that make everyday intimacy possible despite the miles. Worth keeping for its practical, low-effort ideas rather than abstract relationship advice.

Permalink technologyrelationshipsromancecommunication

www.upworthy.com

How do you know someone is smart?

The Dunning-Kruger effect causes less intelligent people to overestimate their abilities while highly intelligent people underestimate theirs, yet humans have evolved to judge others' intelligence reasonably well. Drawing on Reddit responses, the piece identifies eighteen behavioral markers of genuine intelligence, including intellectual humility (admitting what you don't know), adaptability (changing views with new evidence), clear communication tailored to your audience, and curiosity. Rather than displaying confidence or dominance, truly intelligent people tend to listen more than talk, ask thoughtful questions, and focus on getting things right rather than being right.

Permalink communicationpsychologyadviceeducation

www.cnbc.com

Want to sound and feel more confident? Ditch these 11 phrases from your vocabulary, say psychologists

The piece presents eleven negative self-talk phrases that undermine confidence and accomplishment, offering alternative reframes for each based on insights from behavioral scientists and psychologists. The core argument is that small linguistic shifts—from "I have to" to "I get to," from "I failed" to "this attempt didn't work," from passive to active language—can fundamentally change how we perceive challenges and our ability to overcome them. The reframes work by reducing the sense of obligation and finality in our internal dialogue, replacing fatalism with growth mindset and agency.

Permalink self-improvementcommunicationleadershippsychology

Harvard Business Review

When You Feel Powerful You Talk Too Much, and Your Subordinates Perform Poorly - Andrew O’Connell - Harvard Business Review

Feeling powerful makes leaders more likely to dominate conversations and appear closed-minded, which undermines team performance—a simulation of a Mount Everest expedition found teams with dominant leaders achieved 59% of their goals versus 76% for teams with more restrained leaders. The researchers suggest organizations can counteract this tendency through egalitarian cultures, reminding leaders of their teams' value, and empowering employees to challenge overly dominant behavior.

Permalink communicationleadershippsychologyresearch

ChatJS

Tech N Marketing

9 Advanced Twitter Tips | Mobile and Social Media

This post offers nine practical tips for experienced Twitter users seeking to optimize their engagement and information management on the platform. The advice covers technical issues (avoiding ampersands in profiles, leaving character room for retweets), discovery strategies (searching for yourself instead of using reply columns, using Friendfeed to find old tweets), and social practices (starting replies with periods to broadcast conversations, using groups to organize large follow lists). The underlying philosophy emphasizes that Twitter's value lies in dialogue and interaction rather than status updates, and that thoughtful sharing and reciprocity—through retweets and direct mentions—strengthen the network for all users.

Permalink productivitysocial mediacommunicationtips

blog.ted.com

noupe

Tips and Tricks On How To Become a Presentation Ninja - Noupe Design Blog

This guide breaks presentation design into three phases—planning, producing, and performing—with the core argument that presentations are performances designed for specific audiences, not artistic expressions. Key principles include avoiding bullet points (which force audiences to process competing visual and verbal information simultaneously), using visuals to support rather than duplicate your spoken words, and applying design principles like simplicity and aesthetic beauty to build audience trust and focus. The practical workflow emphasizes extensive preparation: knowing your audience, outlining with the "tell them what you'll say, say it, tell them what you said" structure, sketching on paper before digital production, practicing four rehearsal rounds, and delivering with confident body language and strategic pauses rather than relying on notes or screens.

Permalink designcommunicationtipspresentation

blog.ted.com

TED Blog | 7 steps to giving your own TEDTalk, courtesy Fast Company

Anya Kamenetz argues that TED has become a prestigious educational brand comparable to universities, emerging as the first such brand in over a century, while exploring what the format's viral success reveals about modern audiences' hunger for ideas and their capacity for sustained attention. She offers practical insights into TED's strategic use of the 18-minute talk length and provides guidance for those wanting to deliver their own compelling TED-style presentations.

Permalink communicationeducationpresentation

BigBlueButton - Open Source Web Conferencing

Home | www.bigbluebutton.org

This is promotional material for BigBlueButton, a virtual classroom platform designed specifically for educational use rather than general video conferencing. The platform emphasizes pedagogical features like breakout rooms, polling, whiteboards, and live engagement analytics, and claims adoption by major learning management systems serving over 75% of the LMS market worldwide, with a case study showing students in online GCSE Maths and English classes achieved full grade points higher than in-person equivalents.

Permalink communicationeducationtoolsopensource

ReadWriteWeb

10 Chat Widgets to Consider

This article reviews ten embedded chat widgets for websites, evaluating each on features like ease of setup, design, and functionality, with examples ranging from MeeboMe and Zoho Chat (praised for simplicity and polish) to ParaChat (criticized for dated appearance and intrusive ads). The author acknowledges that while chat widgets enable real-time engagement with visitors, they carry tradeoffs including potential page slowdown and distraction from site design, so implementation should be tailored to individual website needs. The review concludes by encouraging readers to test these options themselves and suggest alternatives in the comments.

Permalink communication2010stools

Asterisk

Asterisk :: The Open Source Telephony Platform |

This is the Asterisk project's landing page rather than an article with a single argument: it promotes the open source communications framework and its 2027 AstriCon call for speakers (Pasadena, April 1–2, alongside SCALE), then lists three security advisories dated June 25, 2026. The advisories cover a privilege-escalation and remote code execution flaw in ast_loggrabber via a world-writable /tmp path, an unauthenticated LDAP filter injection in res_config_ldap triggered by a SIP username, and SQL injection in the cel_pgsql and cel_tds modules through the CELGenUserEvent eventtype field. Saved for the advisories, the page is most useful as a record of those three vulnerabilities and their GHSA identifiers.

Permalink communicationsecurityinternetopensource

anothr.com

www.fastcompany.com

The Five Most Common Lies in Business

Paul LaFontaine, who left a major music company to consult on business honesty, identifies five pervasive lies in corporate culture: claiming people are a company's most important asset (when financial assets actually are), presenting decisions as rational when they're really personal preferences, judging performance objectively when favoritism determines outcomes, separating business from personal stakes (when everything in business is personal), and prioritizing customers over self-interest (when people actually prioritize themselves). He argues that these lies persist because executives avoid honest conversations about what's really motivating their decisions, and that genuine candor—even anger—handled directly would be more truthful than the euphemisms that typically cloak business dealings.

Permalink culturecommunicationleadershipadvice