Read Removing IndieWeb WordPress Plugins by Khürt Williams (Island in the Net)
I am reevaluating my use of certain IndieWeb technologies. In 2018 I added a set of plugins to my website and started using a microformats 2 theme, SemPress to mark up my website so that content could be interpreted by other sites. SemPress is the only theme in the WordPress repository that is fully...
Having watched some of his issues, I totally get where Khürt is coming from here. Sometimes it can be a pain, especially a manual pain. In the end, it isn’t the plugins that make you independent, it’s having your own domain and your own site where you control your own content. He’s still got that and so much more.

I think of IndieWeb in terms similar to Churchill’s quote about Democracy:

Many forms of social media have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that the IndieWeb is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that IndieWeb is the worst form of social media except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…

Some thoughts and questions about online comments

Podcast cover art reading "On the Media" and "WNYC Studios" on a simple white backgroundI’ve spent part of the morning going town a rabbit hole on comments on news and media sites and reading a lot of comments from an old episode of On the Media from July 25, 2008. (Here’s the original page and commentary as well as Jeff Jarvis’ subsequent posts[1][2], with some excellent comments, as well as two wonderful posts from Derek Powazek.[3][4])

Now that we’re 12 years on and have also gone through the social media revolution, I’d give my left arm to hear an extended discussion of what many of the principals of that conversation think today. Can Bob Garfield get Derek Powacek, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Marks, Jay Rosen, Doc Searls, and Ira Glass back together to discuss where we’re at today?

Maybe we could also add in folks like danah boyd and Shoshana Zuboff for their takes as well?

Hopefully I’m not opening up any old wounds, but looking back at these extended conversations really makes me pine for the “good old days” before social media seemingly “ruined” things.

Why can’t we get back more substantive conversations like these online? Were we worried about the wrong things? Were early unfiltered comments really who we were and just couldn’t see it then? Does social media give us the right to reach in addition to the right to speech? How could we be doing better? Where should we go from here?

Read Dear Bob, by Jeff JarvisJeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine)
You caused a lot of discussion in your OtM piece about comments — and that discussion itself — in the comments on WNYC’s blog, in the comments on mine, and in blogs elsewhere — is an object lesson in the value of the conversation online.

But note well, my friend, that all of these people are speaking to you with intelligence, experience, generosity, and civility. You know what’s missing? Two things: First, the sort of nasty comments your own piece decries. And second: You. 

Important!

Annotated on February 25, 2020 at 10:54AM


The comments on this piece are interesting and illuminating, particularly all these years later. 
Annotated on February 25, 2020 at 11:07AM


Why can’t there be more sites with solid commentary like this anymore? Do the existence of Twitter and Facebook mean whe can’t have nice things anymore? 
Annotated on February 25, 2020 at 11:11AM

Liked Post social by Colin WalkerColin Walker (colinwalker.blog)
As Simon commented there was a lot of naivety in the early days of what we now refer to as "social media" - no one really knew what they were doing or where the road would take us. One thing is for certain, however, we didn't imagine we'd be where we are now. When I switched from my old way of blogg...
Read Feed readers/content aggregators by Dan MacKinlay (danmackinlay.name)
Upon the efficient consumption and summarizing of news from around the world.

Facebook is informative in the same way that thumb sucking is nourishing.

Annotated on February 09, 2020 at 10:28AM

Upon the efficient consumption and summarizing of news from around the world.
Remember? from when we though the internet would provide us timely, pertinent information from around the world?
How do we find internet information in a timely fashion?
I have been told to do this through Twitter or Facebook, but, seriously… no. Those are systems designed to waste time with stupid distractions in order to benefit someone else. Facebook is informative in the same way that thumb sucking is nourishing. Telling me to use someone’s social website to gain information is like telling me to play poker machines to fix my financial troubles. Stop that.

Annotated on February 09, 2020 at 10:40AM

Acquired Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)

America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us—and how we are polarizing it—with disastrous results.

“The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.”

In Why We’re Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.

America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.

Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the twentieth century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.

This is a revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.

Ezra Klein Why the media is so polarized — and how it polarizes us (Vox) () (#)
Listened to Episode 9: Make 'Em Laugh by Dr Laurie SantosDr Laurie Santos from The Happiness Lab

The world's greatest expert on canned TV laugh tracks helps Dr Laurie Santos demonstrate how the emotions of those around us can make us feel happier or more sad. If happiness is so contagious... can we use them to bring joy to ourselves and our loved ones?

Jeff’s research showed that participants pick up other people’s emotions through text— in say, a quick email note or an online comment— just as easily as they do in face-to-face real world interaction.”

Hancock, J. T., Landrigan, C., & Silver, C. (2007, April). Expressing emotion in text-based communication. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 929-932). ACM.

The social media giant allowed Jeff to run an experiment to figure out the emotional impact of Facebook posts.

Kramer, A. D., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788-8790.

This is particularly an interesting listen for web developers and designers who could be thinking about the emotional contagion that their products may have on others.

The original link has some additional references and research, but I’ve excerpted some small portions of the ethically questionable research Facebook allowed on emotional contagion several years back. 

This research reminds me of things like Tantek Çelik‘s 100 Days of Positive Posts.

Read Opinion | The Post’s misguided suspension of Felicia Sonmez over Kobe Bryant tweets (Washington Post)
A veteran reporter tweets out a news story about Kobe Bryant. What's the problem?
There is an odd standard here. I’m hoping she’ll be reinstated quickly when the editors realize they’re idiots.