I get about a half-dozen emails a year via my contact form asking me this question or asking related questions, like how to craft a resume, or what it’s like to work at Automattic. I thought I’d jot something down so I can just send a link the next time this happens, as my advice hasn’t chan...
Gutenberg is the future of content in WordPress. It will deliver the elegance of Medium but with far more power and flexibility of layouts and content types
I love how this looks and works and it’s certainly about time that WordPress had alternate means of publishing to its platform. (I miss the days when Twitter had thousands of different configurable apps to post to it, though these were far simpler.)
Not only does it remind me a bit of Medium.com’s interface, it is highly reminiscent of Aaron Parecki’sQuill editor which uses the open Micropub spec to publish to the Micropub endpoint on my blog. Though his isn’t as fully featured as the Gutenberg example, he could certainly add to it, but then it could be used to publish to any site that supports the spec.
A sample of the Quill interface for posting to WordPress via Micropub.
The nice part about Micropub (and the fact that there’s already a Micropub plugin for WordPress) is that developers can build multiple competing publishing interfaces to publish to any website out there. (Or developers could even build custom publishing interfaces for their clients.)
In fact, if they wanted to do a highly valuable pivot, Medium.com could add publishing via Micropub to their platform and really become the billionaire’s typewriter that some have suggested it to be.
There’s a good reason for the “@“ character in the middle of your email address. It separates the two parts: your user name and your web site. Someday you might see something similar on social networking sites – Mark Zuckerberg could write on Facebook and mention Jack Dorsey “hey jack@twitter.com” and Jack could write back from Twitter “hi mark@facebook.com!” — that would be the Silicon Valley equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson’s first telephone call. When small social networks like Twitter and Google Plus start to interoperate with open source networks and blogs, they could eventually form a large enough base of users to “flip the iceberg” and have more usage than the dominant, non-interoperable player: Facebook.
On micro-blogs like Twitter, the @mention (“at-mention”) is the way to link to another micro-blogger by user name. Facebook has a similar mention feature for calling out friends by name. But these versions of mention technology are missing the “web site” aspect, because they only work within one site.
On open source micro-blogs like Mastodon, cross-site mentions are already working – and for blogs it’s easy to install a Webmention plugin. These are the beginnings of what could eventually be a large collection of sites interoperating.
In 2008 the micro-blogging community proposed that Twitter interoperate with the micro-blog networks of the time. Twitter today could allow Mastodon and Micro.blog users to “follow” updates from its micro-bloggers. The Twitter search engine could aggregate updates from many different networks. Micro-blogging at Twitter would be a first-class open web experience, if it interoperated with other micro-blogs.
Open source tools like WordPress, 1999.io and Mastodon.social are creating many small networks of publishers, and popular tools like Twitter and Micro.blog could peer with them. If all of the social networks outside of Facebook interoperated at some level, they might eventually “flip the iceberg” and become the dominant form of social networking.
Eli suggests that bloggers could come together for an "Indieweb Podcast Club" - like a book club but for Podcasts.
The idea is someone posts about a specific podcast episode, others read that post, listen to the same episode and then a conversation ensues between posts.
I think that's a great idea!
A number of folks have previously listed what podcasts they are listening to so I think I'll start with that and see if this goes anywhere.
I really like the idea of an IndieWeb podcast club (or any other kind of podcast club). I’ve been listening to more podcasts lately. A club would aid discussion & discovery.
…like a book club, but for podcasts, and distributed over the indieweb.
Anyone interested?
Here is how I imagine it would work. You listen to a podcast, you enjoy the podcast or have thoughts otherwise about it. You blog about said podcast on your indieweb compatible or at least indieweb-friendly ...
Gutenberg is the future of content in WordPress. It will deliver the elegance of Medium but with far more power and flexibility of layouts and content types
The most powerful aspect of the Internet is the open web. From the very beginning, there has been a conflict with on one side walled gardens and closed networks with open standards and interoperability on the other.
Richard is one of the old school bloggers. He started ReadWriteWeb in 2003. It started as a Radio UserLand project and grew into a leading tech publication, something which I'm personally proud of. #
He has a new blog up and running. I've added it to my personal river here on Scripting News. He asks about where the blogrolls have gone, a topic I wrote about a couple of days ago. Richard would certainly be in my blogroll.#
Knowing that I’ve read a lot about Shannon and even Vannevar Bush over the years, I’m pleasantly surprised to read some interesting tidbits about them that I’ve not previously come across. I was a bit worried that this text wouldn’t provide me with much or anything new on the subjects at hand.
I’m really appreciating some of the prose and writing structure, particularly given that it’s a collaborative work between two authors. At times there are some really nonstandard sentence structures, but they’re wonderful in their rule breaking.
They’re doing an excellent job so far of explaining the more difficult pieces of science relating to information theory. In fact, some of the intro was as good as I think I’ve ever seen simple explanations of what is going on within the topic. I’m also pleased that they’ve made some interesting forays into topics like eugenics and the background role it played in the story for Shannon.
They had a chance to do a broader view of the history of computing, but opted against it, or at least must have made a conscious choice to leave out Babbage/Lovelace within the greater pantheon. I can see narratively why they may have done this knowing what is to come later in the text, but a few sentences as a nod would have been welcome.
The book does, however, get on my nerves with one of my personal pet peeves in popular science and biographical works like this: while there are reasonable notes at the end, absolutely no proper footnotes appear at the bottoms of pages or even indicators within the text other than pieces of text with quotation marks. I’m glad the notes even exist in the back, but it just drives me crazy that publishers blatantly hide them this way. The text could at least have had markers indicating where to find the notes. What are we? Animals?
Nota bene: I’m currently reading an advanced reader copy of this; the book won’t be out until mid-July 2017.
John Johnston (John's World Wide Wall Display)
Eli Mellen (eli.li)
Matt Cromwell (Matt Cromwell)
