Publishing | Chris Aldrich

Gardens and Streams II: An IndieWebCamp Pop-up Session on Wikis, Digital Gardens, Online Commonplace Books, Zettelkasten and Note Taking

Event Details

Date: Saturday, September 25, 2021
Time: 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific
Event page: https://events.indieweb.org/2021/09/gardens-and-streams-ii-pPUbyYME33V4

We’ll discuss and brainstorm ideas related to wikis, commonplace books, digital gardens, zettelkasten, and note taking on personal websites and how they might interoperate or communicate with each other. This can include IndieWeb building blocks, user interfaces, functionalities, and everyones’ ideas surrounding these. Bring your thoughts, ideas, and let’s discuss (and build).

This will be a continuation of the ideas from the Garden and Stream pop up session in 2020. Everyone is welcome and need not have attended prior sessions.

Format

We’ll try to do something between a traditional all day IndieWebCamp and a single session pop-up over the span of several hours so that we can accommodate a brief introduction and three BarCamp topic related sessions. Feel free to brainstorm session ideas in advance of the mini-camp, but we’ll choose session topics the morning of the event.

Tentative Schedule

All times Pacific.

9:00 AM 30 minute introduction & IndieWeb building blocks
9:30 AM 20 minute session pitches and scheduling
9:50 AM 10 minute break
10:00 AM 60 minute Session 1 (including 10 minute break)
11:00 AM 60 minute Session 2 (including 10 minute break)
12:00 PM 50 minute Session 3
12:50 PM 10 minute closing remarks
1:00 PM pop up finished

Hack day? Yes, we’ll all gather the following day for 3 hours at roughly the same time with a short demo session to follow for folks to show off what they’ve been working on. Details for this will be forthcoming.

Everyone is welcome to attend.

Resources

Technology for attending
IndieWeb Chat Room
Etherpad: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/GardensAndStreams (for real time session planning, chat, questions, and note taking during the session)
hashtag: #GardensAndStreams
Code of Conduct: This event is covered by the IndieWeb Code of Conduct. By participating, you’re acknowledging your acceptance of this code.
Notes and archived video for this session, once finished, can be found at https://indieweb.org/2021/Pop-ups/Gardens_and_Streams_II

RSVP (optional)

If your website supports it, post an indie RSVP as a reply to this post or to the event page.
Or, log in to indieweb.org and on the event page click “I’m Going”.
Or, RSVP your attendance to this syndicated Tweet
Or, Add a comment below indicate that you’ll be attending.

And if none of the above methods means anything to you or you can’t log in to use them, don’t worry about it; just show up on the day!

Questions? Concerns? Volunteers?

Feel free to ask in the IndieWeb chat: https://chat.indieweb.org/indieweb/ or post a question below or on the call for volunteers post.

Replied to Introducing a Microformats API for Books: books-mf2.herokuapp.com by

Jamie Tanna (Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer)

Announcing the Microformats translation layer for book data.

This is awesomeness!

h-book ❧

h-book is an experimental microformat at best.

I might recommend for minimizing the vocabulary that one might use the existing h-product instead and allow parsers to find an ISBN, Library of Congress book number, ASIN, UPC, or other product code to determine “bookness”.
Annotated on August 01, 2021 at 09:13AM

Read Collaborative Community Review on PubPub by Heather Staines

In preparation for Peer Review Week, I wanted to take a closer look at some of the collaborative community review experiments that have happened recently on PubPub. Finding new ways to harness engagement in scholarly communications is a goal of the Knowledge Futures Group, and inline annotation is a technology that I rely upon every day to organize my thoughts and track my online reading. I reached out to the authors of three forthcoming MIT Press books that have undergone this type of review during the last year. I was excited to learn about their experiences and to share some of their observations here.

A short text “interview” with the authors of three works that posted versions of their books online for an open review via annotation.

These could be added to the example and experience of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.

“Criticism is a marker of respect and an acknowledgement that others see in us the ability to learn.” they noted. ❧

quote from Catherine D’Ignazio, Assistant Professor, Emerson College, and Lauren Klein, Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology, authors of Data Feminism.
Annotated on June 21, 2021 at 07:57AM

He notes that authors of such projects should consider the return on investment. It take time to go through community feedback, so one needs to determine whether the pay off will be worthwhile. Nevertheless, if his next work is suitable for community review, he’d like to do it again. ❧

This is an apropos question. It is also somewhat contingent on what sort of platform the author “owns” to be able to do outreach and drive readers and participation.
Annotated on June 21, 2021 at 05:12PM

RSVPed Attending April Webinar: Inside Pressbooks with Steel Wagstaff

The next Cooking with H5P and Pressbooks webinar takes place Thursday, April 29 at 9:00 am PT (check for your local time). For this episode, we invited into the kitchen Steel Wagstaff, Educational Product Manager for Pressbooks. From his position, he will be able to share much about the features and capabilities of Pressbooks, how H5P integrates with it, examples worth looking at, and maybe some insight into future directions for the platform.

A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains 2021 Conference

The Association of Learning Technology and Reclaim Hosting hosted the OERxDomains 2021 Conference last week.

They’ve just opened up the entire conference program with links to all of the sessions and videos for those who’d like to watch them.

You’ll see my presentation video embedded above. If you’d like you can also watch it in the custom player made for the conference, though I notice that it doesn’t replay the live chat.

Due to scheduling issues beyond my control just before the conference, I had to shorten my hour-long workshop down to a 20 minute talk. I intend to do a couple of separate hands-on workshops at upcoming Domain of Our Own meetups so that people can implement the moving pieces I demonstrate into their own websites. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll let you know when they’re scheduled.

I’m hoping that when the next conference rolls around at least some of us can participate using our own domains and not need to rely on Twitter’s infrastructure.

I posted a link to the slides last week if you’d like to follow along that way and have links to some of the resources. (You should also have access to some of my notes/rough transcript as well as alt-text for some of the images included.) The slides still have some context and links to portions of the original version that got cut out.

For those unaware of the conference or topics, it was two days of great presentations about the topics of Open Education Resources (OER) and A Domain of One’s Own which is focused on giving teachers and students to websites and underlying technology of their own for daily personal and professional use. Those interested in the IndieWeb may particularly find the Domains track enlightening. Others interested in teaching, pedagogy, and publishing will get a lot out of the OER tracks.

Read The Future of Publishing? by

Dan Allosso (History4Today.com)

I got a note from the senior executive editor at Yale, who has been my main contact throughout the process of getting my book published. Peppermint Kings has not been flying out of the warehouse so…

Sorry to hear this Dan, but I might be able to help in terms of providing some perspective for moving forward.

These days the idea of bestseller means selling in the range of 10,000 books. The average book released these days sells only 250 copies, so if you’re over that, you’re doing well.

It’s also incredibly uncommon for any publishers to put any serious money behind promoting their titles unless PR opportunities are falling off the trees for them. (This means that unless you’ve been selling a million copies of everything you write, they probably don’t care.) Many publishers will assign you a pro-forma publicist to help when they can, but don’t expect much from them. Most publishers will tell you to hire your own book publicist (usually for about $1,500-3,000 a month).

My guess is that the first run of your book was probably 1,000 to 2,000 books, which will bring the cost of raw printing down to $2 a copy. If you need copies of your book and they’re remaindering them, you might offer the publisher $1-2 a copy plus shipping to get 50 or 100 copies for yourself for hand sales over the next decade (for speaking engagements, etc.) or selling a few copies from your own stash on platforms like Amazon, Abebooks, Alibris, etc. The cost of keeping a book in print these days is usually around $12 a year and then they print them on demand.

Some of the methods you mentioned, talks, online readings, etc. can be useful marketing for both you and your book(s). Look around your local community/state for book events, fairs, bookstores that invite authors, etc to supplement this.

Depending on your next title, it might be worth hiring a publicist if you’re going the route of a text accessible to a broader public.Often this can be a reasonable risk but getting copies into reviewers’ hands can be helpful, as can radio or print appearances. Another option is to pay for adds in appropriate print magazine outlets related to your material.

It’s an uphill slog, but getting a publisher to take most of the risk and offering you all the free amenities of editing, proofreading, typesetting and distribution can be worth it in the end to get your material out.

When choosing your next publisher/editor, have a bit of this conversation with them at the outset to see what expectations they have for themselves. Don’t tip your hand though by letting them know prior sales numbers.

Since you’ve got your own website/newsletter/social media presence, you should also look into affiliate accounts with the bigger online platforms. Chances are you’re actually selling most of your own copies, you may as well get a 4% or larger cut of the referrals you’re giving. Your link on this page alone could give you a reasonable little return on top of the boilerplate 7% you’re probably getting from the publisher.

Updates to the Boffo Socko Newsletter

I’d done some previous work to help improve the newsletter that my website sends out. I’ve iterated a bit on that process today.

Hopefully the changes are a well-balanced solution for both my readers and me. One that allows readers to get what they’d like what they’d like and when, and for me to be able to own the relevant data and relationships rather than selling it off or heavily farming it out to one of the newsletter silos like Substack. Hopefully it also cuts down on the manual portions of the problem that I’ve had in the past.

Part of my concern is that, depending on the day, I can be posting just a few items to my website while other days will see 50 or more posts. (It’s amazing how many posts you have when you try to own everything that you post publicly to the web.) Naturally not everyone may be interested in all of my content, and people will have different preferences on how often they receive updates.

New options

To kick off some new options, I’ve updated the email sign up process to allow people to choose some broad categories of content and types they may be interested in receiving. Most of these categories only have a smaller handful of updates within a month, so those indicating some of the specific categories as a preference will only receive them on a monthly basis.

If you’re subscribing to everything, the status updates, the link blog, or portions of the social stream those will be delivered in a weekly newsletter, so readers will get as much as possible without missing out on anything.

I’m starting to collect the preference data for the future, but I’ve also got a beta section of the sign up form to specify the frequency with which you’d like to receive updates. (Note: this isn’t fully functional yet as there are some plumbing issues to handle.)

Folks who are subscribed should start seeing the changes propagate to their subscriptions within the next month.

Caveats and Potential Issues

I’ve been receiving less interaction from those who had previously subscribed to my old WordPress.com website over a decade ago, so I’m leaving those subscribers behind (you should receive an email about this separately). If you find you’re in that old group, just sign up and select the content categories or types you’d like to receive from the new system.

I’m sure there will be some initial bumps and bruises in the transition, so bear with me and don’t hesitate to send your feedback in a way that makes you most comfortable. I’m sure some of my custom posts may not work as well with the newsletter, and hopefully I’ll get those sorted out shortly too.

If you’d like to change your preferences at any time, know that there’s a link at the bottom of the newsletter for changing them. If you would prefer some other custom newsletter with specific categories, content types, or frequency, feel free to email me, and I can set you up with something that most closely meets your specific needs.

Eventually I hope there will be a more streamlined system that will allow people to choose categories, post kinds, and frequency options (daily, weekly, monthly) to suit their specific needs.

Other Subscription Methods

I’m still providing a number of different ways (RSS, email, etc.) of helping people to subscribe to what they’d like to receive, so take a look at all of those if you have other needs. If you have questions or need some custom help for receiving exactly what you’re looking for, don’t hesitate to reach out.

As always, thanks for reading!

To sign up/subscribe, visit our subscription page.

Replied to a post by Patrick Rhone (patrickrhone.net)

I created a shop on Bookshop.org for all the books I read this year for easier browsing and, if interested, purchase.

I like this idea Patrick. I’d recently used Bookshop to create a list of books I’m currently reading. Having finished one or two, perhaps it’s time to start a read shelf like you have?

It might be interesting to see them build out some UI to make a less corporate Goodreads-esque site as well.

Watched The Booksellers (2019) from Amazon Prime

Directed by D.W. Young. With Parker Posey, Fran Lebowitz, Gay Talese, Susan Benne. A behind-the-scenes look at the New York rare book world.

Rating: ★★★½

My sort of catnip. How do they not ask about whether or not these sellers use the internet that is killing them?

Read Standing up for developers: youtube-dl is back (The GitHub Blog)

Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.

Good to seem them taking a positive stance on this.