👓 How Twitter, Micro.blog & Mastodon could team up to compete with Facebook | AltPlatform

Read How Twitter, Micro.blog & Mastodon could team up to compete with Facebook by Brian Hendrickson (AltPlatform)

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.

Reply to Gutenberg: First Impressions | MattCromwell.com

Replied to Gutenberg: First Impressions by Matt Cromwell (MattCromwell.com)
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’s Quill 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.

👓 “How Do I Get a Job at Automattic?” | Ryan Markel

Read “How Do I Get a Job at Automattic?” by Ryan Markel (Ryan Markel)
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...

👓 RicMac, part II | Scripting

Read June 23, 2017 by Dave Winer (Scripting News)
  • Richard MacManus keeps on truckin. There's nothing more powerful than a persistent and curious user who's relatively fearless. #
  • In a follow-up post I learned that there is an IndieWeb-approved feed reader called Woodwind. That's good news. RSS and related technolgies, including OPML import and export, are essential components of the open web. #
  • BTW, to Richard, I wrote up my rules for standards-makers, based on experience re what (imho) is important and what works and doesn't. Another item for your consideration. #

👓 Why Microformats | David Shanske

Read Why Microformats by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)
I’ve spent some time on this site commenting on the use of various Indieweb concepts, but I haven’t really touched on Microformats. Microformats just turned 11 years old. Microformats are human-readable markup that are easily human readable as well as machine readable. They appear as classes att...

👓 Is It Racist To ‘Call A Spade A Spade’? | NPR

Read Is It Racist To 'Call A Spade A Spade'? by Lakshmi Gandhi

What happens when a perfectly innocuous phrase takes on a more sinister meaning over time?

Case in point, the expression "to call a spade a spade." For almost half a millennium, the phrase has served as a demand to "tell it like it is." It is only in the past century that the phrase began to acquire a negative, racial overtone.

Historians trace the origins of the expression to the Greek phrase "to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough." Exactly who was the first author of "to call a trough a trough" is lost to history. Some attribute it to Aristophanes, while others attribute it to the playwright Menander. The Greek historian Plutarch (who died in A.D. 120) used it in Moralia.The blogger Matt Colvin, who has a Ph.D. in Greek literature, recently pointed out that the original Greek expression was very likely vulgar in nature and that the "figs" and "troughs" in question were double entendres.

I’m apparently the king of the microformat rel=”me”

Today, at the IndieWeb Summit 2017, Ryan Barrett, while giving a presentation on some data research he’s been doing on the larger Indieweb community, called me out for a ridiculous number of rel-me’s on a single page. His example cited me as having 177 of them on a single page! I tracked it down and it was actually an archive page that included the following post How many social media related accounts can one person have on the web?!.

What is a rel=”me”?

Rel=”me” is a microformat tag put on hyperlinks that indicates that the paged linked to is another representation of the person who controls the site/page you’re currently looking at. Thus on my home page the Facebook bug has a link to my facebook account which is another representation of me on the web, thus it has a rel=”me” tag on it.

His data is a bit old as I now maintain a page entitled Social Media Accounts and Links with some (but far from all) of my disparate and diverse social media accounts. That page currently has 190 rel=”me”s on it! While there was one other example that had rel-mes pointing to every other internal page on the site (at 221, if I recall), I’m proud to say, without gaming the system in such a quirky way, that each and every one of the rel=”me” URLs is indeed a full legitimate use of the tag.

I’m proud to be at the far end of the Zipf tail for this. And even more proud to be tagged as such during the week in which Microformats celebrates its 12th birthday. But for those doing research or who need edge cases of rel-me use, I’m also happy to serve as a unique test case. (If I’m not mistaken, I think my Google+ page broke one of Ryan’s web crawlers/tools in the past for a similar use-case a year or two ago).

The Moral of the Story

The take away from this seemingly crazy and obviously laughable example is simply just how fragmented one’s online identity can become by using social silos. Even more interesting for some is the number of sites on that page which either no longer have links or which are crossed out indicating that they no longer resolve. This means those sites and thousands more are now gone from the internet and along with them all of the data that they contained not only for me but thousands or even millions of other users.

This is one of the primary reasons that I’m a member of the Indieweb, have my own domain, and try to own all of my own data.

While it seemed embarrassing for a moment (yes, I could hear the laughter even in the live stream folks!), I’m glad Ryan drew attention to my rel-me edge case in part because it highlights some of the best reasons for being in the Indieweb.

(And by the way Ryan, thanks for a great presentation! I hope everyone watches the full video and checks out the new site/tool!)

You know it was an awesome Indieweb Summit for WordPress, when you log in and see all these awesome updates!

Just some of the WordPress related updates that were built and released at the Indieweb Summit this weekend in Portland.

Congratulations and Thank You to Matthias Pfefferle, David Shanske, Ryan Barrett, Michael Bishop, Asher Silberman, Brandon Kraft, Lillian Karabaic and all of the others in the Indieweb community who provided the setting, conversation, thinking, and underpinning that made all this possible!

👓 Allow me to explain why we don’t need words like ‘mansplain’ | The Guardian

Read Allow me to explain why we don't need words like 'mansplain' by Liz Cookman (the Guardian)
The man-shaming portmanteau undermines feminism’s message of equality

👓 Depressed Me Coping With The Black & White World of Social Networks | savethis.space

Read Depressed Me Coping With The Black & White World of Social Networks by Christopher SikkengaChristopher Sikkenga (Save This Space.)
The last couple of months I’ve exiled myself from Twitter and Facebook. I do miss many individuals, but overall I don’t think those sites have been good for me. I felt like shouting my troubles into the void would be wasting time that I could be using to do something about them. The thing tha...

The beginnings of a blogroll

Inspired by Richard MacManus’ recent post, I spent a little bit of time rebuilding/refreshing some old blogroll functionality (cum follow list functionality) into my site.

It’s far from finished (particularly from the data perspective), but it’s starting to shape up and look like something. I’m currently publishing an Indieweb blogroll on my front page. (Don’t presume anything if you’re not on it yet, I’ve a long way to go.) I’m still contemplating how to break it up into more manageable/consumable chunks primarily for myself, but also for others like Richard who were looking for ways to subscribe to others in this particular community.

For those who have readers that allow them to either subscribe to OPML files and/or import them, here’s my open OPML file. It’s a full firehose of everything, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to divide it into chunks more easily. I’d recommend subscribing to it if you can as it’s sure to see some reasonable changes in the coming weeks/months.

A snippet of the admin UI of my blogroll functionality. Pictures are always nice!

👓 Medium and the Scourge of Persistent Sharing Dickbars | Daring Fireball

Read Medium and the Scourge of Persistent Sharing Dickbars by John GruberJohn Gruber (Daring Fireball)
When people click a URL and see that it’s a Medium site, their reaction should be “Oh, good, a Medium site — this will be nice to read.” Right now it’s gotten to the point where when people realize an article is on Medium, they think, “Oh, crap, it’s on Medium.”