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Read OMG! Twitter release an OFFICIAL conversations API! by Terence Eden (shkspr.mobi)
One of the most requested Twitter API features is now available – the ability to get replies to a Tweet as a thread.
Long time readers know that I’ve long been a fan of Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. But up until now you had to use horrible hacks to get the data. As trailed in th...
Read Stop Giving af and Start Writing More by Joel Hooks (joelhooks.com)
In 2019 I wrote more than the previous 5 years combined, at least publically. There's several places that I write that aren't as obvious. I spend quite a lot of time writing and curating howtoegghead.com . I also write a lot of emails that…

Instead my approach now is to publish my thoughts more freely with less premeditation. Particularly in this space, which is mine, for me, by me. ❧

a good philosophy for a personal website
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 11:21AM

Look, nobody was flipping through pages on your blog to find anything anyway, so it’s fine. ❧

so true…

but I do search on my own site frequently…
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 11:22AM

Read Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra by Joel Hooks (joelhooks.com)
What is a badass? I love the word itself, because there is practically no way to use it in a negative way. It's a good word. In Kathy Sierra's book, the word badass is used to describe an expert. Somebody that has learned a skill…
As I read this while thinking about the context of the IndieWeb and it’s wiki, I’m thinking two cognitively dissonant thoughts: 1. The current technical uses are creating content more for themselves and their research and use and 2. They’re not creating it to help out the users who may necessarily need a ladder or a bigger platform to get to where they are.
It’s going to take a layer of intermediate users, creators, or builders to help create a better path to bring the neophytes up to a higher level to get more out of the wealth of information that’s hiding in it. Or it’s going to take helpers and mentors to slowly build them up to that point.
How can we more consistently reach a hand down to pull up those coming after us? How can we encourage others to do some of the same?
Read On Digital Gardens, Blogs, Personal Spaces, and the Future by Justin Tadlock (WordPress Tavern)
I have been thinking a lot about digital gardens this week. A blog post by Tom McFarlin re-introduced me to the term, which led me down a rabbit hole of interesting ideas on creating a digital space…

My blog posts were merely random thoughts — bits and pieces of my life. ❧

Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:52AM

Despite having something that worked sort of like a blog, I maintained various resources and links of other neat ideas I found around the web. It was a digital garden that I tended, occasionally plucking weeds and planting new ideas that may someday blossom into something more. ❧

The idea of a thought space hiding in here….
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:53AM

“The idea of a ‘blog’ needs to get over itself,” wrote Joel Hooks in a post titled Stop Giving af and Start Writing More. “Everybody is treating writing as a ‘content marketing strategy’ and using it to ‘build a personal brand’ which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.”
It is almost as if he had reached down into my soul and figured out why I no longer had the vigor I once had for sharing on my personal blog. For far too long, I was trying to brand myself. Posts became few and far between. I still shared a short note, aside, once in a while, but much of what I shared was for others rather than myself. ❧

For many, social media took over their “streams” of thoughts and ideas to the point that they forgot to sit, reflect, and write something longer (polished or not).

Personal websites used for yourself first is a powerful idea for collecting, thinking, and creating.

Getting away from “branding” is a great idea. Too many personal sites are used for this dreadful thing. I’d much rather see the edge ideas and what they flower into.
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:56AM

Personal websites can be so much more than a progression of posts over time, newer posts showing up while everything from the past is neatly tucked on “page 2” and beyond. ❧

This is an interesting idea and too many CMSes are missing this sort of UI baked into them as a core idea. CMSes could do a better job of doing both: the garden AND the stream
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:57AM

While I lament the loss of some of the artistry of the early web and lay much of the blame at the feet of blogging platforms like WordPress, such platforms also opened the web to far more people who would not have otherwise been able to create a website. Democratizing publishing is a far loftier goal than dropping animated GIFs across personal spaces. ❧

WordPress has done a lot to democratize publishing and make portions of it easier, but has it gone too far in crystalizing the form of things by not having more wiki-like or curation-based features?
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:01AM

Throughout the platform’s history, end-users have remained at the mercy of their WordPress theme. Most themes are built around what WordPress allows out of the box. They follow a similar formula. Some may have a fancy homepage or other custom page templates. But, on the whole, themes have been primarily built around the idea of a blog. Such themes do not give the user true control over where to place things on their website. While some developers have attempted solutions to this, most have never met the towering goal of putting the power of HTML and CSS into the hands of users through a visual interface. This lack of tools has given rise to page builders and the block editor. ❧

an apropos criticsm
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:02AM

I also want them to be able to easily build something like Tom Critchlow’s wikifolder, a digital collection of links, random thoughts, and other resources.
More than anything, I want personal websites to be more personal. ❧

Those in the IndieWeb want this too!! I definitely do.
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:03AM

Read Timeful Texts by Andy Matuschak, Michael Nielsen (numinous.productions)
How might one escape a book’s shackled sense of time, extending the authored experience over weeks and months?
It looks to me like Andy and Michael are grasping at recreating with modern technology and tools what many (most? all?) indigenous cultures around the world used to ritually learn and memorize their culture’s knowledge. Mnemonics, spaced repetition, graded initiation, orality, dance, and song were all used as a cohesive whole to do this.

The best introduction to many of these methods and their pedagogic uses is best described by Lynne Kelly‘s book Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

If they take her ideas as a basis and then layer on their own thinking, I think they’ll get much further much quicker. Based on my reading of their work thus far, they’re limiting themselves solely with western and modern cultures or at least those of a post-Peter Ramus world.

As an example, I’ve recently been passively watching the Netflix series The Who Was? Show which is geared toward children, but it does a phenomenal job of creating entertaining visuals, costumes, jokes, songs, dances, over-the-top theatricality, and small mnemonic snippets to teach children about famous people in our culture. Naturally this is geared toward neophytes, but it’s memorable, especially when watched with some spaced repetition. To follow it up properly it needs the next 10 layers of content and information to provide the additional depth to move it from children’s knowledge to adult and more sophisticated knowledge. Naturally this should be done at a level appropriate to the learner and their age and sophistication and include relevant related associative memory techniques, but it’s a start.

I’ll note that our educational system’s inability to connect (or associate) new knowledge with previous knowledge is a major drawback. 

Bookmarked Please be patient - This Page is Under Construction! (textfiles.com)
This small collection was saved from the rapidly dying Geocities, which Archive Team is working desperately to save for a historical archive. Please consider visit our site and helping us with collecting, education, and writing.
Bookmarked A.N. Lucas's 88x31 button Collection (anlucas.neocities.org)
Here is a collection of more than 700 88x31 web buttons from the 1990's and 2000's, including the famous "Netscape NOW" and "Internet Explorer" buttons as well as various other buttons for websites of past and present. All were rescued from a now defunct http://harrypagerubbish.webs.com/buttons just before it disappeared without warning. These buttons are an historic example of advertising in the earlier days of the World Wide Web. Enjoy these buttons and use them to your liking.
Read - Want to Read: Don’t ask if artificial intelligence is good or fair, ask how it shifts power by Pratyusha Kalluri (Nature)
Law enforcement, marketers, hospitals and other bodies apply artificial intelligence (AI) to decide on matters such as who is profiled as a criminal, who is likely to buy what product at what price, who gets medical treatment and who gets hired.
Bookmarked Generalized Word Shift Graphs: A Method for Visualizing and Explaining Pairwise Comparisons Between Texts (arXiv.org)
A common task in computational text analyses is to quantify how two corpora differ according to a measurement like word frequency, sentiment, or information content. However, collapsing the texts' rich stories into a single number is often conceptually perilous, and it is difficult to confidently interpret interesting or unexpected textual patterns without looming concerns about data artifacts or measurement validity. To better capture fine-grained differences between texts, we introduce generalized word shift graphs, visualizations which yield a meaningful and interpretable summary of how individual words contribute to the variation between two texts for any measure that can be formulated as a weighted average. We show that this framework naturally encompasses many of the most commonly used approaches for comparing texts, including relative frequencies, dictionary scores, and entropy-based measures like the Kullback-Leibler and Jensen-Shannon divergences. Through several case studies, we demonstrate how generalized word shift graphs can be flexibly applied across domains for diagnostic investigation, hypothesis generation, and substantive interpretation. By providing a detailed lens into textual shifts between corpora, generalized word shift graphs help computational social scientists, digital humanists, and other text analysis practitioners fashion more robust scientific narratives.