I’ve just submitted a session proposal for the upcoming WordCamp Los Angeles in September.
Submissions are due before midnight. Get yours in now.
Month: June 2018
📺 IndieWeb Summit 2018 Green Room #nonprofit | YouTube
Discussing a non-profit org to benefit IndieWeb and the indie web
Playing catch up on some of the sessions I wish I’d had time to be at in person.
There are several ways of doing the non-profit thing in this venue. Many of them don’t bring a lot of additional benefit however. One could set up a side foundation to help on the fundraising and spending side, but as a group, I suspect we’re more than fine for right now.
📺 Scalar 2.0 — Trailer | YouTube
Learn about the features of Scalar, refreshed with the Scalar 2.0 interface.
This is an intriguing looking tool for potential academic use. I’ll have to find some time to download it and play around.
👓 How Facebook Punked and then Gut Punched the News Biz | TPM
In the digital publishing world, there’s been a buzz about this article in Slate in which slate staffer Will Oremus detailed the impact on the publication of Facebook’s dramatic retreat from the news business. The numbers are stark but not surprising for people in the industry. Indeed, Oremus makes the point that most news organizations are not willing to release these numbers. (We’ll come back to that point in a moment.) In January 2017 Slate had 28.33 million referrals from Facebook to Slate. By last month that number had dropped to 3.63 million. In other words, a near total collapse.
👓 A Close Look at How Facebook’s Retreat From the News Has Hurt One Particular Website—Ours | Slate
New data shows the impact of Facebook’s pullback from an industry it had dominated (and distorted).
(Roose, who has since deleted his tweet as part of a routine purge of tweets older than 30 days, told me it was intended simply as an observation, not a full analysis of the trends.)
Another example of someone regularly deleting their tweets at regular intervals. I’ve seem a few examples of this in academia.
It’s worth noting that there’s a difference between NewsWhip’s engagement stats, which are public, and referrals—that is, people actually clicking on stories and visiting publishers’ sites. The two have generally correlated, historically, and Facebook told me that its own data suggests that continues to be the case. But two social media professionals interviewed for this story, including one who consults for a number of different publications, told me that the engagement on Facebook posts has led to less relative traffic. This means publications could theoretically be seeing less ad revenue from Facebook even if their public engagement stats are holding steady.
From Slate’s perspective, a comment on a Slate story you see on Facebook is great, but it does nothing for the site’s bottom line.
(Remember when every news site published the piece, “What Time Is the Super Bowl?”)
This is a great instance for Google’s box that simply provides the factual answer instead of requiring a click through.
fickle audiences available on social platforms.
Here’s where feed readers without algorithms could provide more stability for news.
👓 Why 2016 Was the Year of the Algorithmic Timeline | Motherboard
2016 was the year that the likes of Instagram and Twitter decided they knew better than you what content you wanted to see in your feeds.
use algorithms to decide on what individual users most wanted to see. Depending on our friendships and actions, the system might deliver old news, biased news, or news which had already been disproven.
2016 was the year of politicians telling us what we should believe, but it was also the year of machines telling us what we should want.
The only way to insure your posts gain notice is to bombard the feed and hope that some stick, which risks comprising on quality and annoying people.
Sreekumar added: “Interestingly enough, the change was made after Instagram opened the doors to brands to run ads.” But even once they pay for visibility, a brand under pressure to remain engaging: “Playing devil’s advocate for a second here: All the money in the world cannot transform shitty content into good content.”
Artificially limiting reach of large accounts to then turn around and demand extortion money? It’s the social media mafia!
It disorients the reader, and distracts them with endless, timeless content.
👓 IndieWeb Summit 2018 wrap-up | Manton Reece
Last week I was in Portland for IndieWeb Summit. This was only my second IndieWeb conference (the first was IndieWebCamp in Austin). I had a great time in Portland and got even more than I expected out of IndieWeb Summit. The first day was short keynotes and sessions led by attendees on a range of t...
Reply to I attended IndieWeb Summit 2018 | Fogknife
Notes and thoughts from the eighth annual IndieWeb conference, held in Portland, Oregon.
My heart forever broken by social-media silos, I’m not really interested in using Micro.blog as yet another “Okay, I’m over here now” social network. I get the impression that it has potential for much deeper use than that, if I can only get my head around it.
Micro.blog can be many things to many people which can be confusing, particularly when you’re a very tech savvy person and can see all the options at once. I’d recommend looking at it like a custom feed reader for a community of people you’d like to follow and interact with. Spend some time in the reader and just interact with those you’re following and they’ll do likewise in return.
It’s purposely missing some of the dopamine triggers other social silos have, so you may need to retrain your brain to use it appropriately, but I think it’s worthwhile if you do.
I really need to hash out my domain situation! IndieWeb encourages its memership to claim a single domain and use it as their personal stamp for everything they do on the internet. I, though, have two domains: my long-held personal catch-all domain of jmac.org, and fogknife.com, which I use exclusively for blogging. My use of both predates my involvement with IndieWeb.
Don’t fret too much over having multiple websites. As you continue on the answer to what you want to do with them will eventually emerge more organically than if you force it to. For some thoughts and inspiration, check out https://indieweb.org/multi-site_indieweb.
Dinner on the lawn followed by Muse/ique summer concert
Instagram filter used: Clarendon
Photo taken at: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Limitless/Lenny
Mingling and dining 6pm | Performance 8pm
Superhero of the American arts Leonard Bernstein gets a 100th birthday bash filled with limitless imagination! Bernstein expanded the dimensions of classical music and defied all categories and stereotypes during his legendary career. In the process, he completely redefined the American sound, collaborating with people like Paul Simon and Frank Sinatra and counting the Beatles and Motown among his influences—even as he introduced new audiences to classical music through the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts from 1958-1972: the first such project to be aired on broadcast television. The only way to celebrate this kind of legacy is an event featuring groundbreaking artists and innovative performances:
- Classical crossover violinist Charles Yang lends his “guerrilla-style” flair to a suite of songs from West Side Story, plus a few surprises.
- and the LA Choral Lab stirs the soul and shows us the promise of tomorrow with selections including “Make our Garden Grow” from Candide.
- Kitty McNamee’s dancers and DJ E.Z. Mike take us on an electrifying journey of what Bernstein’s score for On the Waterfront can mean for us today, with projected visuals by artists from JPL.
Featuring:
The Muse/ique Orchestra Charles Yang – Violin – Recipient of the 2018 Leonard Bernstein Award | Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera House | Carnegie Hall LA Choral Lab – Vocals – Colburn School | First Congregational Church of Los Angeles | First United Methodist Church Kitty McNamee Dancers – Dance – LA Philharmonic | LA Opera | Secret Cinema Dan Goods and David Delgado – Visual Strategists – The Studio at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory | Museum of Awe EZ Mike – DJ – Santana’s Grammy Award-winning Album Supernatural | Zoolander Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | Fight Club Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
👓 Sending your First Webmention from Scratch | Aaron Parecki
Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)Webmention is one of the fundamental indieweb building blocks. It enables rich interactions between websites, like posting a comment or favorite on one site from another site. This post will walk you through the simplest way to get started sending webmentions to other sites so that you can use your ...
A stupendous article, I just wish I’d had it all those many years ago. Thanks Aaron!
One useful thing for beginners that I don’t think got mentioned (pun intended!) in the article is that for receiving websites which don’t have a built in webmention form you can use a service like http://mention-tech.appspot.com/ which will allow you to manually put in the sending site and the receiving site and it will act as a bridge to send the webmention for you.
👓 IndieBookClub | Manton Reece
As I mentioned in my IndieWeb Summit wrap-up, I added support for IndieBookClub while in Portland. IndieBookClub is a little like Goodreads, but built on standards like Microformats and Micropub so that you can post what you’re reading to your own blog. Now that I’m back in Austin, I’ve tweake...