August, 2018 | Chris Aldrich

👓 A quick introduction to Blogmesh | Blogmesh

Read A quick introduction to Blogmesh (blogmesh.org)

Blogmesh aims to make blogging more social, and in doing so create an alternative for existing social networks. The main idea is to connect existing blogs in a way that resembles other social networks, like Twitter. Simply follow your friends and see a timeline of their updates.

Because blogs are usually self-hosted, this means Blogmesh has the potential to become a decentralized network that belongs to its users, and where every user owns their own content.

Blogmesh uses existing, well-established standards like RSS. This means that many existing sites are already Blogmesh-ready.

I ran across a reference to Blogmesh this morning via the Twitter hashtag for #IndieWeb. (hat tip to @Bjorn_W)

Hi @simonw remember blogmesh? my friend @roytanck behind blogmesh made this https://t.co/wMPe5tQpVC to show how to re-blog. This proof-of-concept uses WordPress. It’s super easy to re-create the social aspects of walled garden social media with RSS & #WordPress #Openweb #indieweb

— Bjorn W (@Bjorn_W) August 21, 2018

Blogmesh looks like an intriguing concept, and on its face it sounds like it’s in a tangential space to Alex Kirk‘s Friends plugin, which allows private connections to friends via WordPress, or even to PressForward, which is a very full featured RSS plugin for WordPress. It almost sounds like a version of Jack Jamieson‘s original Yarns reader which integrates a feed reader with micropub capabilities into one’s WordPress site, but perhaps may not be as powerful as Jamieson’s pending rewrite of Yarns as a Microsub server.

Clicking a post from a friend will take you to their blog, where you can read the full post and leave comments.

While this may be an interesting concept, it isn’t adding much to the broader IndieWeb stack of technologies which are already in place for WordPress. I don’t imagine greater power with this compared to the Micropub spec which might allow me to write a reply within the reader portion of the plugin, publish it to my website and then send a Webmention to the other site the way the coming wave of Microsub servers and reader interfaces will allow. ¹

While Blogmesh seems like a relatively solid solution and may fix a few UI issues for some, it doesn’t seem like as robust or decentralized a solution as Microsub, which I think has more promise and which almost any website (WordPress or otherwise) could support. This being said, I also suspect that Roy likely has a much broader vision for the plugin’s functionality that hasn’t yet been stated. It always impresses me the ingenuity and work that people are putting in to fix the problems that exist with current social media and this case is certainly squarely in that category.

I will say that it appears that Roy’s user interface is very solid–I wish there were more WordPress IndieWeb contributors with these kinds of design chops.

The repost functionality which Bjorn W highlights is very cool looking and quite intuitive. It has a simple, but intuitive user interface. However, it isn’t very different from David Shanske‘s solution for reposting content to one’s website using the Post Kinds Plugin. In this case, Post Kinds is even more powerful because it also includes a lot more social post types and can also be easily dovetailed with Webmention and Micropub for broader decentralized social interaction.

I’ve bookmarked the Github repository for Blogmesh and look forward to seeing what develops. I’ve also helped to stub some of Blogmesh on the IndieWeb wiki. I’d love to hear what others think of it if they try it out. I’m blocking some time for the weekend to add it to a WordPress instance I’ve already spun up to test it out.

References

Parecki A. Building an IndieWeb Reader. Aaron Parecki. https://aaronparecki.com/2018/03/12/17/building-an-indieweb-reader. Published March 12, 2018. Accessed August 22, 2018.

👓 I am completely baffled why some people seem to be choosing Mastodon over Micro.blog | Bruce Godin

Read I am completely baffled why some people seem to be choosing Mastodon over Micro.blog by Bruce Godin (brucegodin.ca)

It is completely baffling to me that a lot of people seem to be choosing Mastodon over Micro.blog as an alternative to Twitter lately. At least among tech geeks on Twitter anyway. I admittedly do not know a lot about Mastodon but it seems confusing AF to set up by all accounts and may be just yet an...

Micro.blog can be so many things to so many different people. We need to help them clarify to others exactly what it is that the service is doing and how to help people begin to use it. It’s not simply just a Twitter replacement as some might pitch it.

We should consider: How would Marshall McLuhan pitch it?

👓 Can We Ever Reset the Field? | Smokey Ardisson

Read Can We Ever Reset the Field? by

Smokey Ardisson (ardisson.org)

The rise of the massive corporate-run social networks—silos, where everything was stored inside and nothing left—changed distributed online social relationships. The silos replaced distributed with centralized; all of your social connections were now in one place, making it faster and “easier” to keep up with everyone. Easier in some ways, yes, but now everyone could see every aspect of you, even if you didn’t want them to. Worse, your constant software talk annoyed your bowling-league friends, and your one uncle could not stand the fact you supported the Democratic Party. All of that didn’t happen at once; it took time for these corporate social networks to consume all of your communities, to seize ownership of all of your connections and relationships, transforming something very human into mere pieces of computer data, eventually hollowing out your communities and your humanness in the process. But once it had happened, and once you realized those downsides (and others, such as abuse, Nazis, and anti-democratic propaganda), how could you escape? Was there even anywhere to escape to?

To a large extent, some of the questions and observations in this article are the things that drive me to have my own domain and have my own website. I and many others in the IndieWeb are still working on the infrastructure to support the web we’d like to have instead of the web we’re given. We’re still not there yet, and it may never be the utopia we’re hoping for, but we’ll never get there if we don’t try.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Just like in real life, where your bar trivia team doesn’t really overlap with your work softball team or your church bowling league, all of your online communities gathered in their own places, ones best suited to them, and you didn’t have to act as all facets of yourself simultaneously when trying to only interact with one. ❧

August 21, 2018 at 01:19PM

our brains have been trained to believe that we want, that we need, a single place where all of “our people” can gather, where it is “easy” to keep up with all of them: a massive network service, just without all the “bad stuff” of the existing ones. ❧

August 21, 2018 at 01:21PM

You find them in a place that you curate yourself, not one “curated” for you by a massive corporate social network intent on forcing you to be every part of yourself to everyone, all at once. You should control how, when, and where to interact with your people. ❧

August 21, 2018 at 01:23PM

web we lost ❧

https://indieweb.org/lost_infrastructure
August 21, 2018 at 01:24PM

we can’t just recreate the same thing we’re trying to escape, and we can’t expect the solution to be precisely as easy on us as the problem was. ❧

August 21, 2018 at 01:25PM

👓 Indiepaper, an open alternative to Instapaper and Pocket | Cult of Mac

Read Indiepaper, an open alternative to Instapaper and Pocket (Cult of Mac)

Indiepaper is a read-later service built for the open web. Save your articles, and never again get locked out by a proprietary service like Instapaper.

👓 Why a professor buys his books from the bookstore | Chuck Pearson

Read Why a professor buys his books from the bookstore by Chuck Pearson (Another fine mess)

Friday, I made a visit to my campus bookstore, and I bought my books. The guy who runs Tusculum’s bookstore, Cliff Hoy, is a great guy, and the work that Tusculum’s bookstore does is fi…

🔖 OpenStax

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Access our free college textbooks and low-cost learning materials.

👓 ‘Inclusive access’ takes off as model for college textbook sales | Inside HigherEd

Read 'Inclusive access' takes off as model for college textbook sales (insidehighered.com)

Hundreds of colleges are signing on to publishers’ programs, with apparent savings to students. Some applaud the movement, while others are skeptical.

Inclusive Access is a great marketing term. It sounds nice, but has some insidious implications. It would be interesting to do some additonal in-depth reporting on the economics of these models. The article could have done at least a back of the envelop calculation and been far more skeptical of what was going on here.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

The “inclusive” aspect of the model means that every student has the same materials on the first day of class, with the charge included as part of their tuition. ❧

It almost sounds to me like they know they’re not getting a cut of the money from poorer students who are finding the material for free online anyway, so they’re trying to up the stakes of the piece of pie that they’re getting from a different angle.

This other model of subscription at the level of the college or university is also one that they’re well aware of based on involvement with subscription fees for journal access.
August 21, 2018 at 10:17PM

She said that her institution, which has inclusive-access agreements with more than 25 publishers, had saved students more than $2 million this semester alone. Morrone said this figure was calculated by taking the retail price of a textbook, subtracting the cost that students paid for the equivalent etextbook and then dividing the cost saving in half to account for the fact that many students would not have bought the book new. ❧

$ 2million compared to what? To everyone having purchased the textbooks at going rates before? This is a false comparison because not everyone bought new in the first place. Many bought used, and many more still probably either pirated, borrowed from a friend, from the library, or simply went without.
August 21, 2018 at 10:21PM

Students like the convenience of the system, said Anderson, and all have access to the most up-to-date content, instead of some students having different editions of the same textbook. ❧

They’re also touting the most up-to-date content here, when it’s an open secret that for the majority of textbooks don’t really change that much from edition to edition.
August 21, 2018 at 10:24PM

A key difference between inclusive access and buying print textbooks is that students effectively lease the content for the duration of their course, rather than owning the material. If students want to download the content to access it beyond the duration of their course, there is often an additional fee. ❧

So now we need to revisit the calculation above and put this new piece of data into the model.

Seriously?! It’s now a “rental price”?
August 21, 2018 at 10:26PM

Campus stores are often the ones driving inclusive-access initiatives, as they receive a cut of the sales. While the profit margins are smaller than for print, inclusive access means that the stores receive revenue from a larger number of customers. Donovan Garcia, course materials manager at the University of Mary Washington, said that lower margins were also mitigated by lower overheads. “We’re not purchasing books, we’re not paying shipping, we’re not having to put any time or effort into returning unused books or paying restocking fees,” said Garcia. ❧

I suspect the publisher is also saving on sales commissions to their sales staff as well.
August 21, 2018 at 10:27PM