Des Paroz' Micro.Thoughts - Des Paroz' Micro.Thoughts

Rabaul: Under Vulcan's Shadow

Rabaul in Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain province is a picturesque township.

Today’s sleepy town does not represent the once bustling town that was pivotal in two world wars, and saw two devastating volcano eruptions in the 20th century.

The two volcanoes in the Rabaul Caldera, Tavurvur and Vulcan, erupted in 1994. Warnings had meant Rabaul was evacuated with no loss of life, but the town was wiped out.

Many people and businesses, along with the seat of the provincial government moved to the nearby town of Kokopo, and a new Rabaul township was built nearby.

The overview photo shows the new town in front and centre, while the site of the old town is on the left. Today it is a flat area, with little evidence of the once thriving township there.

The image of the road with the volcano in the background is taken on what was the main street’s

The last image shows the volcano in the background with a boiling hot spring in the foreground, leading into the bay.

I was in Rabaul for work, so did not have my camera. These images were made on my iPhone 7 Plus.

I’d love to get back to Rabaul for some diving and photography. Beautiful location.

A feature wish—Lists for micro.blog

A lot of people are in the process of leaving Twitter behind forever. I’ve certainly switched off most of my Twitter usage, and have even abandoned cross-posting by default from micro.blog.

What I still do use Twitter for, daily, is following people around a couple of key topics—photography, diving and work related stuff. I do this chiefly using Twitter’s Lists function.

Lists¹ is one of Twitter’s better features. Lists allows me to follow multiple accounts grouped around a topic, without having to have those accounts clutter my core timeline. I can review individual Lists as my time, interest and context allow.

With the influx of new micro.blog users I suspect that Amit Gawande’s concerns may be real:

I fear though if the place becomes bigger before there are tools in place to handle the scale, we may inundate it with too many voices and interactions.

With this in mind perhaps @manton could consider adding Lists like functionality to the roadmap for micro.blog. This might provide a simple tool for individual micro.bloggers to curate their personal consumption of micro.blog activity.

I am not suggesting that Twitter-style Lists would solve the problem entirely—if it did the atrocious signal-to-noise experience on Twitter wouldn’t be a thing. What I am wondering is if there is an opportunity to leverage one of Twitter’s better features into our world.

As “Lists” is the proper name for the Twitter feature I refer to it in the singular. Its confusing for me, but it would be incorrect to use it in the plural. ^[return]