Thoughts on blogging
Tag: blogging
Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to do my usual exercise due to not being able to wear contact lenses at the moment, I sat down yesterday evening with my back to our bedroom radiator to read Stefan Zweig’s Montaigne. It’s a short book, and quite odd, in that it doesn’t really quote much from Mont...
I’m thinking about giving up tweeting for one week, and instead write out all my thoughts and reactions on my blog. So far this year, I’ve been having a lot of fun blogging more. In the past decade when I have an idea, I would head to Twitter and blurt it out. Now, writing out …
Since he doesn’t support Webmentions yet, I’m manually syndicating my reply to his website in support of his efforts.
I have been reading ‘Blogs’ for as long as I have been “surfing” the web (it’s that a term I can still use?), even if at the time I wasn’t aware of what I was reading was a blog. To me was probably just another website. Then I started to get more serious about it and read more of some pe...
One reason we might see a resurgence of blogs is the novelty. Tell someone you’re starting a new newsletter and they might complain about how many newsletters (or podcasts) they already subscribe to. But tell them you’re launching a blog and see how that goes: Huh. Really, a blog? In 2020? Wow.
I do find myself wishing that she kept her own writing in a blog so I could subscribe to her longer form work there. She’s also got a fantastic sounding book on the history of the internet from the perspective of the user called Lurking that’s coming out in February!
Her piece doesn’t tacitly tie back to journalism as directly as many in this series generally do, but I feel like she’s suggesting that by getting back to the roots of the old (non-corporately owned and controlled) web, journalism has a better chance to recover. Much like her, I also think there is a beginning of a blogging renaissance that is brewing on the interwebz. It’s quite interesting to see people noticing and writing about it in contexts like the Nieman Lab’s annual predictions.
I’m not sure that I agree with her assertions about context collapse. Some of the most sophisticated information consumers are aware of it, but I don’t think that Harry or Mary Beercan are aware of the general concept.
Highlights and Annotations
But tell them you’re launching a blog and see how that goes: Huh. Really, a blog? In 2020? Wow. ❧
It’s been long enough now that people look back on blogging fondly, but the next generation of blogs will be shaped around the habits and conventions of today’s internet. Internet users are savvier about things like context collapse and control (or lack thereof) over who gets to view their shared content. Decentralization and privacy are other factors. At this moment, while so much communication takes place backstage, in group chats and on Slack, I’d expect new blogs to step in the same ambiguous territory as newsletters have — a venue for material where not everyone is looking, but privacy is neither airtight nor expected. ❧
She doesn’t have the technical terminology many use, but she’s describing the IndieWeb community pretty well here.
I have played around with many of Dave’s tools over the years and appreciated his UI and particularly some of his outliner tools. Given that he’s built and tested some very strong tools and interfaces, I’d be really curious to see him implement a Micropub client back end on some of them so that they not only allow one to post to his sites, but so that one could use them to create, edit, and publish to almost any website out there. Some of his tools are already set up to post content to Twitter, why not set them up to post to WordPress and many others too?
Given that CMSs and static site services like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, and Blot all support Micropub either natively or with simple plugins, Dave could easily take his various publishing interfaces and make them broadly available to almost any website on the planet. How many times have I desperately wished I could use Radio3, Little Outliner, Little Card Editor, pngWriter and others to be able to post to other websites instead of just Twitter?!
He might even implement them as Micropub clients just so that he could use his own interfaces to publish directly to his WordPress sites instead of worrying about their interface. I suspect that in day or two’s worth of work he could not only have half a dozen or more micropub clients, but he might also figure out how to dovetail them all together to make something more interesting and useful than Gutenberg, which has taken hundreds of developers and a magnitude larger amount of time to create.
Perhaps some additional competition against Gutenberg would help speed WordPress (and everyone else for that matter) toward making a simpler and more direct publishing interface? Micropub seems like a designer’s dream for making better posting interfaces, especially since it’s got such broad endpoint support.
People seem very focused on technological solutions to online communication (ActivityPub, Indieweb, this absurd BlueSky idea), but the hyperconversation approach is trying to prove that the problem is a human problem. If you read and listen to each other and try to respond thoughtfully and carefully - and try to
Rather interestingly, Instagram Blogger Rianne Meijer indulged in a meaningful and unique project. She put together some photos of herself that looked like something out of Vogue, and then placed a more natural picture right next to it, giving viewers a whole different perspective.
I’ve tinkered a bit with CROWDLAAERS, but it’s always seemed to me geared toward a very niche audience including teachers potentially using it for grading? Perhaps I’m missing some more of its flexibility? Remi Kalir might be able to help elucidate it or indicate if he’s noticed anyone using it for off-label usage.
I might see it being more useful if one could analyze site-wide annotations on a domain with a wild-card search of this sort: https://tomcritchlow.com/*.
I have to imagine that it would be cool to see all the annotations and conversations across something like the New York Times with a data visualization tool like this.
Jon Udell and gang are aware of Webmention, but haven’t pulled the trigger (yet) on making the decision to build them in. I’ve outlined some methods for making their platform a bit more IndieWeb friendly by adding markup and some additional HTML to allow people to force the system to be able to send webmentions. I do frequently use Jon’s facet tool to check highlighting and annotation activity on my website.
I have found Crowdlaaers useful several times in that I’m aware that some pages are annotated, but they’re either not public or are part of other groups for which I’m not a member. An example of this is this page on my website which has one annotation which I can’t see, but by using Crowdlaaers, I can. Another example is viewing annotations on sites that have subsequently blocked Hypothes.is like this example. Of course, sometimes you’ll do this and find odd bugs floating around in the system.
I used to, every year, name a Blogger of the Year.
— Dave (@davewiner) December 21, 2019
I wanted to keep the idea alive, that amateur writing has a place on the web.
The last couple of years my focus has been elsewhere, even though in 2017, I took a fresh approach to my own blog, with imho excellent results.I don't have a choice for this year.
— Dave (@davewiner) December 21, 2019
If you have a favorite blogger, perhaps a blog that goes with a favorite podcast, please add a link to this thread.
Here's to another great year in 2020, and remember it's even worse than it appears. ;-)https://t.co/xTqU4jQYEoAnybody participating in the #IndieWeb my favorites include Chris Aldrich at https://t.co/aXPjOBmFXn but there are tons more.
— ((( Amanda ))) (@megarush1024) December 22, 2019
Most of the convo, if any, seems to happen on the socials vs comments left on the blog these days. ❧
The sad part of this is how painfully limiting the conversation can be on social with the character limitations and too many issues with branching conversations and following all the context.
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 12:51PM
By the numbers ❧
I’m curious what things would look like if you similarly did an analysis of Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Where are you putting more time? What’s giving you the most benefit? Where are you getting value and how are you giving it back?
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:01PM
I still find blogging one of the most professionally satisfying things I do. It is a powerful thing to feel like you have a voice. ❧
–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM
2020 will also bring a more concerted effort on my part to both amplify the women in my network who blog, and both comment and refer back to their blogs. To use what they write as a starting off point for my own posts more. ❧
–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM
And I am planning on cutting back on my personal use of social media (easier said than done) and want to try to return to using my blog more than Twitter for sharing. ❧
certainly a laudable goal!
It helped me a lot to simply delete most of the social media apps off of my phone. I scribbled a bit about the beginning of the process back in November and there’s a link there to a post by Ben doing the same thing on his own website.
More people are leaving social feeds for RSS feeds lately. I’ve recently started following Jeremy Felt who is taking this same sort of journey himself. See: https://jeremyfelt.com/tag/people-still-blog/
Kudos as well to making the jump here:
Taking a bit of a Twitter break. I’m going to try to stay off until the new year, but likely lack the willpower to stay off for more than a few hours. Wish me luck!
….but silently. Not via reply to to this tweet. Cause that’ll just suck me back into the vortext.
— Clint Lalonde (he/him) (@edtechfactotum) December 19, 2019
In part, it’s what prompted me to visit your site to write a comment. (Sorry for upping your cis-gendered white male count, but 2019 was a bad year, and hopefully we can all make 2020 better as you’ve indicated.)
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM
The secret to low-cost academic blogging is to make blogging a natural byproduct of all the things that academics already do.
- Doing an interesting lecture? Put your lecture notes in a blog post.
- Writing a detailed email reply? "Reply to public" with a blog post.
- Answering the same question a second time? Put it in a blog post.
- Writing interesting code? Comment a snippet into a post.
- Doing something geeky at home? Blog about what you learned.
Liked How to Add to Blogging Conversations... And Eliminate the Echo Chamber (ProBlogger)
Just going through my old bookmarks and found this article. Some interesting ideas to keep in mind. Although I wonder where this current post would sit in his 11 ideas? This post doesn’t add to the conversation, but it just introduces the conversation to a wider audience…
Here's a quick demo of how I write on my blog. It's more like using Twitter than WordPress.