In "How to Become Batman," Alix and Lulu examine the surprising effect that our expectations can have on the people around us. You'll hear how people's expectations can influence how well a rat runs a maze. Plus, the story of a man who is blind and says expectations have helped him see. Yes. See. This journey is not without skeptics.
Expectations are much more important than we think.
Is it possible that this podcast is getting more interesting as it continues along?! In three episodes, I’ve gone from fan to fanboy.
With one week remaining on its Kickstarter campaign, the Micro.blog indie microblogging project has surged past its original $10K funding goal with $66,710 pledged by 2,381 backers. This puts proje…
I love that Micro.blog is doing so well on Kickstarter! I’m even more impressed that DreamHost is backing this and doubling down in this area.
I coincidentally happened to have a great conversation yesterday with Jonathan LaCour before I saw the article and we spoke about what DreamHost is doing in the realm of IndieWeb and WordPress. I love their approach and can’t wait to see what comes out of their work and infectious enthusiasm.
I’m really surprised that WordPress hasn’t more aggressively taken up technologies like Webmention, which is now a W3C recommendation, or micropub and put them directly into core. For the un-initiated, Webmention works much like @mention on Twitter, Medium, Facebook, and others, but is platform independent, which means you can use it to ping any website on the internet that supports it. Imagine if you could reply to someone on Twitter from your WordPress site? Or if you could use Facebook to reply to a post on Medium? (And I mean directly and immediately in the type @mention/hit publish sense, not doing any laborious cut and paste from one platform to another nonsense that one is forced to do now because all the social silos/walled gardens don’t inter-operate nicely, if at all.) Webmention can make all that a reality. Micropub is a platform independent spec that allows one to write standalone web or mobile apps to create publishing interfaces to publish almost any type of content to any platform–think about the hundreds of apps that could publish to Twitter in its early days, now imagine expanding that to being able to use those to publish to any platform anywhere?
While Twitter has been floundering for a while, WordPress has the structure, ecosystem, and a huge community to completely eat Twitter’s (and even Facebook/ Instagram’s, Medium’s, & etc.) lunch not only in the microblog space, but the larger space which includes blogging, photos, music, video, audio, and social media in general. The one piece they’re missing is a best-in-class integrated feed reader, which, to be honest, is the centerpiece of both Twitter and Facebook’s services. They seem to be 98% readers and 2% dead-simple posting interface while WordPress is 98% posting interface (both more sophisticated/flexible and more complicated), and nearly non-existent (and unbundled) reader.
WordPress has already got one of the best and most ubiquitous publishing platforms out there (25+% of the web at last count). Slimming down their interface a tad to make it dead simple for my mom to post, or delegating this to UX/UI developers with micropub the way that Twitter allowed in the early days with their open API and the proliferation of apps and interfaces to post to twitter, in addition to Webmentions could create a sea-change in the social space. Quill is a good, yet simple example of an alternate posting interface which I use for posting to WordPress. Another is actually Instagram itself, which I use in conjunction with OwnYourGram which has micropub baked in for posting photos to my site with Instagram’s best-in-class mobile interface. Imagine just a handful of simple mobile apps that could be customized for dead-simple, straightforward publishing to one’s WordPress site for specific post types or content types…
With extant WordPress plugins, a lot of this is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet, to borrow the sentiment from William Gibson.
For just a few dollars a year, everyday people could more easily truly own all their content and have greater control over their data and their privacy.
I will note that it has been interesting and exciting seeing the Drupal community stepping on the gas on the Webmention spec (in two different plugins) since the W3C gave it recommendation status earlier this month. This portends great things for the independent web.
I haven’t been this excited about what the web can bring to the world in a long, long time.
The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second generation—powered by blockchain technology—is bringing us the Internet of value: a new, distributed platform that can help us reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better.
Blockchain is the ingeniously simple, revolutionary protocol that allows transactions to be simultaneously anonymous and secure by maintaining a tamperproof public ledger of value. Though it’s the technology that drives bitcoin and other digital currencies, the underlying framework has the potential to go far beyond these and record virtually everything of value to humankind, from birth and death certificates to insurance claims and even votes.
Perhaps not necessarily this particular book which appears to be on the overview side, but sometime this year I’d like to delve more deeply into the concept of blockchain and the tech behind it.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google delivered a sharp message to staff traveling overseas who may be impacted by a new executive order on immigration from President Donald Trump: Get back to the U.S. now.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google delivered a sharp message to staff traveling overseas who may be impacted by a new executive order on immigration from President Donald Trump: Get back to the U.S. now.
Last week, a friend asked me what I thought of IndieWebify.Me, a movement intended to allow people to publish on the web without relying on the tools and storage of the giant corporations that currently control the majority of the social web. I’m the kind of person who gladly supports her local independent bookstores and farmers’ markets and food purveyors, links to IndieBound.org instead of Amazon to buy books, and admires the ideals of Open Source Software. So, I’m biased towards an independent and open experience.
IndieWebCamp, the conference devoted to strengthening the Indie Web, describes the concept of the “Indie Web” thus: “We should all own the content we’re creating, rather than just posting to third-party content silos. Publish on your own domain, and syndicate out to silos. This is the basis of the ‘Indie Web’ movement.” You’d think I’d be all over a movement aimed at bringing back more of that feeling to the modern internet.
I’d love to be, but I can’t just yet. IndieWebify’s an ideal with some pretty serious barriers to implementation; key among them, the base level of knowledge necessary for the average citizen of the internet to “Indie Webify” themselves.
If you look at IndieWebify’s main page, there are three levels of “citizenship,” each with two steps to implementation. In theory, six steps don’t seem that challenging. Unfortunately, the reality is more like WordPress’ Famous Five Minute Install – it assumes familiarity with technical concepts that your mainstream Internet citizen lacks. I’m a reasonably tech-savvy person. I can write HTML and CSS and SQL and work with JavaScript and JQuery; I’ve maintained self-hosted websites for almost 15 years now. Steps 1 and 2 seem fairly straightforward – set up a domain name, then on the home page, add a few slightly enhanced links. Not too difficult. But Step 3 (the first step to publishing on the “Indie Web”) is more confusing: “Mark up your content with microformats2.”
Okay, clearly, I’ve got some reading to do, so I click through to learn about microformats2. The general idea isn’t too difficult for someone accustomed to writing HTML and CSS – microformats2 is a collection of standardized class names that should be applied to web content to help computers contextualize things like blog posts and comments. But this leads me to a lot of questions: Can I make my existing installation of WordPress automatically include the microformats2 markup when I write blog posts? (No.) Do I need to manually mark up my content every time I write a post? (Maybe, but that’s a long list of class names to memorize or be constantly referring to.) What is an h-card in this context? Why does it seem to represent multiple opposing standards? … and who do I know that knows how to use the existing “implementations” (which are actual code libraries to be imported and implemented, rather than more user-friendly plugins)?
Talk about jargon-filled! The amount of technobabble here depends on any users possessing a fairly high baseline of coding knowledge. Though I’m willing to click on the links to learn more, this process is nowhere near as quick and simple as joining an existing social site. And this is just step 3 of 6 – we haven’t even gotten to implementing the technology to have the federated (whoops, more technobabble) cross-site conversations that are the core that would allow for you to properly “own” and attribute all of your words to you in the context of your personal domain. Compare this to the existing Corporate Web options, like Facebook and Twitter and Google, where the only thing you need to know how to do is type the natural language words you want to share.
Even assuming you have the motivation to learn, this is not an easy proposition. Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel wrote of Twitter: “Ask a longtime user to tell you about their first experience with Twitter and they’ll probably lead with some variation of, “Somebody showed me how to use it…” The idea [is] that, unlike most social networks [today], you didn’t usually just discover and use Twitter – you are taught, or at least climb a fairly steep learning curve.” He then goes on to explain that this isn’t good enough anymore; that for Twitter to continue growing, they need to cater to the mainstream, and make it easier to understand. IndieWebify’s version of this is so far from that point of being accessible to the mainstream that even early adopters are barely on the horizon.
Noted tech evangelist Anil Dash has pointed out how this technical insularity burned the development of the Open Web in the past: “We took it as a self-evident and obvious goal that people would even want to participate in this medium, instead of doing the hard work necessary to make it a welcoming and rewarding place for the rest of the world. We favored obscure internecine battles about technical minutia over the hard, humbling work of engaging a billion people in connecting online, and setting the stage for the billions to come.” Right now, IndieWebify.Me feels like it’s a lot of technical minutia. Maybe that’s how it starts, but it needs to get beyond that for broader adoption.
So, if you’re one of the few who actually knows how to implement these new Open Web tools and want to see the Open Web succeed, what can you do to spread this? As I mentioned above, “somebody showed me how to use it” doesn’t scale, so new tools require accessible design and/or tutorials. The challenge is that IndieWebify.Me currently has a simplified set of instructions, but these still need to be translated further to the technical capabilities of the early adopters, not all of whom are programmers. In comparison, most new social apps and websites come with engaging tutorials that do not require learning a complex set of standards or platform protocols, or being tied to a dictionary of these terms. This is the opportunity for evangelists who are serious about the development of the Indie Web as a competitive and viable alternative: create tools that will let users add these capabilities to existing publishing platforms as easily as I installed Facebook and Twitter on my phone. Heck, WordPress itself is already Open Source. I’d love to be able to install a WordPress plugin that would IndieWebify this blog; there are some plugins out there for older microformats standards, but none fully supporting the microformats2 standard as far as I can tell. I don’t want to have to write my own CMS just to connect this blog to the Indie Web communications mechanisms.
Despite my idealism and my honest desire for an Open Web, I am concerned about IndieWebify’s ability to support this dream; it can’t be just a niche for techies. They need better outreach targeted to idealists like me whose desires outweigh their current coding capabilities, and they need to make the process itself much simpler. I hope the current model of IndieWebify is an intermediate step towards a simpler adoption pattern that will compete with Apple and Google from a usability perspective. In today’s computing world, usability has proven to be the ultimate judge of adoption as social tools such as Tumblr and WhatsApp have proven. By bridging the knowledge gap, the IndieWebify movement can go a long way towards building the next generation of the Open Web.
(Editor’s note: sometime prior to 1/20/18, the site with the original copy of this post disappeared from the internet. A copy of it can be found on the Internet Archive.
Day 40. This is mostly me playing the piano live. In a few places I adjusted the timing, and I added a couple notes that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to reach. I doubled the piano with two slightly different piano sounds, and they are panned hard left and hard right. This adds a bit of depth to it. I added the drum track at a relatively low volume to kind of keep things moving a bit more than it would without the drums. This one came out a lot more melancholy than I thought it was going to despite it being in a major key.
Listened toEntanglement from Invisibilia | NPR.org
In Entanglement, you'll meet a woman with Mirror Touch Synesthesia who can physically feel what she sees others feeling. And an exploration of the ways in which all of us are connected — more literally than you might realize. The hour will start with physics and end with a conversation with comedian Maria Bamford and her mother. They discuss what it's like to be entangled through impersonation.
I can think of a few specific quirks I’ve got that touch tangentially on mirror synethesia. This story and some of the research behind it is truly fascinating. Particularly interesting are the ideas of the contagion of emotion. It would be interesting to take some complexity and network theory and add some mathematical models to see how this might look. In particular the recent political protests in the U.S. might make great models. This also makes me wonder where Donald Trump sits on this emotional empathy spectrum, if at all.
One of the more interesting take-aways: the thoughts and emotions of those around you can affect you far more than you imagine.
Four episodes in and this podcast is still impossibly awesome. I don’t know if I’ve had so many thought changing ideas since I read David Christian’s book Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. [1] The sad problem is that I’m listening to them at a far faster pace than they could ever continue to produce them.
References
[1]
D. Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Univ of California Press, 2004.
This has to be the most awesome Indieweb pull request I've seen this year.
Heres why I did it: Trump
WithKnown is a fantastic, free, and opensource content management service that supports some of the most bleeding edge technology on the internet. I’ve been playing with it for over two years and love it!
And today, there’s another reason to love it even more…
This is also a great reminder that developers can have a lasting and useful impact on the world around them–even in the political arena.
The Web Cryptography Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of the Web Cryptography API. This specification describes a JavaScript API for performing basic cryptographic operations in web applications, such as hashing, signature generation and verification, and encryption and decryption. Additionally, it describes an API for applications to generate and/or manage the keying material necessary to perform these operations. Uses for this API range from user or service authentication, document or code signing, and the confidentiality and integrity of communications.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A man who President Donald Trump has promoted as an authority on voter fraud was registered to vote in multiple states during the 2016 presidential election,
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A man who President Donald Trump has promoted as an authority on voter fraud was registered to vote in multiple states during the 2016 presidential election, the Associated Press has learned.
Gregg Phillips, whose unsubstantiated claim that the election was marred by 3 million illegal votes was tweeted by the president, was listed on the rolls in Alabama, Texas and Mississippi, according to voting records and election officials in those states. He voted only in Alabama in November, records show. Continue reading Trump’s voter fraud expert registered in 3 states | Associated Press