Hey, Jack—just want you to know that your post showed up on Indieweb.xyz… but it showed up as a reply to the link on BoffoSocko. Here’s where it ended up.
Huffduff
Summary: Our first episode since January. David Shanske and Chris Aldrich get caught up on some recent IndieWebCamps, an article about IndieWeb in The New Yorker, changes within WordPress, and upcoming events.
Recorded: May 19, 2019
6 camps later…
Austin
Online
New Haven
Berlin
Düsseldorf
Utrecht
National Duckpin Bowling Congress
Duck Tours
Streaming rigs for remote participation at IndieWeb Camps
Ad hoc sessions (🎧 00:11:28)
Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? (The New Yorker) by Cal Newport (🎧 00:13:50)
Swarm Account deletions and posting limits
New Checkin icon within the Post Kinds Plugin: example https://david.shanske.com/kind/checkin/
Weather now has microformats mark up in WordPress
Fatwigoo problems with icons
IndieWeb Bingo
Project of updating Matthias Pfefferle‘s Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins (🎧 00:26:10)
Readers & Yarns update (🎧 00:40:50)
X-Ray
Indigenous Replacement: Final Indigenous Log: The Future of the App
Post Kinds and new exclude functionality (🎧 00:48:15)
David’s list of 24 IndieWebCamps he’s attended
Looking back at past IndieWebCamp sessions and wiki pages for interesting ideas and new itches
Date and time stamps on webmentions
Call for tickets in WordPress
Subscribing to h-cards with WebSub
Is Mastodon IndieWeb?
Fixing IndieAuth
Improving scoping, particularly for multi-user sites
IndieWeb Book Club is coming up featuring Mike Monteiro’s book Ruined by Design(🎧 01:13:04)
9th annual IndieWeb Summit (Portland) is coming up in June. RSVP now.
Feel free to send us your questions or topic suggestions for upcoming episodes. (Use the comments below or your own site using Webmention).
Perhaps a future episode on Micro.blog?
Jim Luke (EconProph)I’ve been saying for awhile now in discussions of the commons, OER, and higher education that a “commons doesn’t scale, it scopes”. Before I explain why I think a commons doesn’t scale very well, I probably need to briefly clarify what’s meant by scale and scope. Like many terms in economics, they’re both commonly used terms in both business and everyday life, but in economics they may carry a subtly different, more precise, or richer meaning. Both terms refer to the production of an increasing volume of output of some kind. Enthusiasts of particular good(s), be they an entrepreneur producing the a product they hope will make them rich or an open educator advocating for more open licensed textbooks because it will improve education, generally want to see their ideas scale. And by scale, they generally mean “be produced in larger and larger volumes”. Larger volume of output, of course, brings a larger volume of benefits to more users. More output –> more users –> more benefits. But it’s the behavior of costs that really intrigues us when we think of “scaling” as a way to increase output. More benefits is nice, but if more benefits also means an equal increase in costs, then it’s not so attractive.
I’m also reminded of a post I annotated the other day:
Data sharing and how it can benefit your scientific career (Nature)
Crowther offered everyone who shared at least a certain volume of data with his forest initiative the chance to be a co-author of a study that he and a colleague led. Published in Science in 2016, the paper used more than 770,000 data points from 44 countries to determine that forests with more tree species are more productive.
I suspect a similar hypothesis holds for shared specs, code, and the broader idea of plurality within the IndieWeb. More interoperable systems makes the IndieWeb more productive.
I also can’t help but think about a reply to a tweet by Chris Messina in relation to the IndieWeb related article in this week’s The New Yorker:
I’ve been tinkering with this again lately. Basically none of it is productized and much of the code is stale and/or only works for single user setups.
So yeah – classic car at best. What does a Model T assembly line look like for IndieWeb?
— Boris Mann (@bmann) May 20, 2019
Boris is asking a problematic question not remembering early issues with the Model T, which Jim Luke reminds us of in his article:
Remember Henry Ford’s famous quote about “the customer can get [the Model T] in any color they want as long as it’s black”?
We’ve already got the Model Ts of social media–it’s called Facebook. It’s Twitter. It’s Instagram. And they’re all standardized–black– but they all require their own custom (toxic and limited) roads to be able to drive them! I can’t drive my Model Twitter in Facebookville. My Instagramobile has long since broken down in Twittertown. Wouldn’t you rather “See The U.S.A. In Your [IndieWeb] Chevrolet“?!
The answer to Boris is that the IndieWeb has been working on the scope problem first knowing that once the interoperable kinks between systems can be worked out to a reasonable level that scale will be the easy part of the problem. Obviously micro.blog has been able to productize IndieWeb principles (with several thousands of users) and still work relatively flawlessly with a huge number of other platforms. There have been tremendous strides towards shoehorning IndieWeb principles into major CMSes like WordPress (~500+ active users currently) and Drupal (~50+ active users) not to mention several dozens of others including Known, Perch, Craft CMS, Hugo, Kirby, etc., etc.
I haven’t heard aggregate numbers recently, but I would guess that the current active IndieWeb user base is somewhere north of 10,000 people and individual websites. Once the UI/UX issues have all been ironed out even a single platform like WordPress, which could easily add the individual pieces into its core product in just a few hours, would create a sea-change overnight by making more than 30% of the web which runs on it IndieWeb friendly or IndieWeb compatible.
Yes, friends, scale is the easy part. Plurality and scope are the the far more difficult problems. Just ask Zuck or Jack. Or their users products.
Rep. Katie Porter (Twitter)I asked @SecretaryCarson about REOs - a basic term related to foreclosure - at a hearing today. He thought I was referring to a chocolate sandwich cookie. No, really. pic.twitter.com/cYekJAkRag
— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) May 21, 2019
I’ll be he follows this up with something idiotic like, “I’m a big picture guy.”
Those big time motivational speakers who talk about starting to learn with a problem you want to solve have never really accounted for serendipitous learning. Is everything as simple as problem
Mr. Pei, a committed modernist, was one of the few architects equally attractive to real estate developers, corporate chieftains and art museum boards.
Tuesday on the NewsHour, the power struggle between Congress and the White House continues, prompting renewed talk of impeachment. Plus: Senators react to U.S. intelligence on the threat from Iran, miserable conditions for migrants on a Greek island, a hearing for the police officer who killed Eric Garner, a college program to bridge the urban-rural divide and letter writing in a digital world.
What do you do with 11,000 blogs on a platform that is over a decade old? That is the question that the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) and the UMW Libraries are trying to answer. This essay outlines the challenges of maintaining a large WordPress multisite installation and offers potential solutions for preserving institutional digital history. Using a combination of data mining, personal outreach, and available web archiving tools, we show the importance of a systematic, collaborative approach to the challenges we didn’t expect to face in 2007 when UMW Blogs launched. Complicating matters is the increased awareness of digital privacy and the importance of maintaining ownership and control over one’s data online; the collaborative nature of a multisite and the life cycle of a student or even faculty member within an institution blurs the lines of who owns or controls the data found on one of these sites. The answers may seem obvious, but as each test case emerges, the situation becomes more and more complex. As an increasing number of institutions are dealing with legacy digital platforms that are housing intellectual property and scholarship, we believe that this essay will outline one potential path forward for the long-term sustainability and preservation.
Bryan Carmody, a freelance reporter in San Francisco, awoke Friday to the sounds of someone trying to break into his house. About 10 officers from the San Francisco Police Department were bashing the front gate of his home in the Outer Richmond neighborhood with a sledgehammer, he said. It was just after 8 o’clock in the morning.
Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine)Alex Rosenberg, a philosopher of science at Duke, pulled this rug of storytelling out from under me with his new book How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories. In it, heargues that the human addiction to the story is an extension of our reliance on the theory of mind. That theory holds that in our brains, humans balance beliefs and desires to decide on action. The theory, he explains, springs from lessons we as humans learned on the veldt, where we would mind-read — that is, use available information about our environment and others’ goals and past actions to predict the behavior of the antelope that is our quarry; the lion we are competing with; and our fellow tribesmen with whom we either compete or must trust to collaborate. “Since mind readers share their target animals’ environments, they have some sensory access to what the target animals see, hear, smell, taste, and so on,” Rosenberg says.
Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired.
To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature.
Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading―the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators―to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history―what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States―by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.
WordPress plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang continues to plough forward with new features for EditorsKit, a collection of page building block options for Gutenberg. What began as a block visibilit…
