I get a LOT of value out of using Hypothes.is, but one of my favorite parts is having the RSS feeds of about a dozen interesting peoples’ H feeds piped into my reader. I get not only interesting things to read, but highlights and annotations of the best of it all.
The general format for feeds to subscribe to is https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=XYZ. As an example my personal feed is at https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=chrisaldrich. Some of my other favorites are judell, actualham, nateangell, mpelzel, mrkrndvs, jgmac1106, and jeremydean.
(By the way, you can do a similar thing for tag topics like: https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?tag=OER.)
I wish that the system had some more social features to make discovery and following of friends and colleagues easier, but doing it the hard way sort of makes it that much more valuable.
Who are you following there? Which other interesting Hypothes.is users should I be following? Do let me know.
I get a LOT of value out of using Hypothes.is, but one of my favorite parts is having the RSS feeds of about a dozen interesting peoples’ H feeds piped into my reader. I get not only interesting things to read, but highlights and annotations of the best of it all.
The general format for feeds to subscribe to is
https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=XYZ. As an example my personal feed is at https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=chrisaldrich. Some of my other favorites are judell, actualham, nateangell, mpelzel, mrkrndvs, jgmac1106, and jeremydean.(By the way, you can do a similar thing for tag topics like:
https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?tag=OER.)I wish that the system had some more social features to make discovery and following of friends and colleagues easier, but doing it the hard way sort of makes it that much more valuable.
Who are you following there? Which other interesting Hypothes.is users should I be following? Do let me know.
Syndicated copies:
I get a LOT of value out of using Hypothes.is, but one of my favorite parts is having the RSS feeds of about a dozen interesting peoples’ H feeds piped into my reader. I get not only interesting things to read, but highlights and annotations of the best of it all.
The general format for feeds to subscribe to is
https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=XYZ. As an example my personal feed is at https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=chrisaldrich. Some of my other favorites are judell, actualham, nateangell, mpelzel, mrkrndvs, jgmac1106, and jeremydean.(By the way, you can do a similar thing for tag topics like:
https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?tag=OER.)I wish that the system had some more social features to make discovery and following of friends and colleagues easier, but doing it the hard way sort of makes it that much more valuable.
Who are you following there? Which other interesting Hypothes.is users should I be following? Do let me know.
Syndicated copies:
The other day, Chris Aldrich brought up an interesting point in decentralised systems: How to discover each other?I have some ideas on this (and likely write some code in the future to explore their feasibility).The easiest one would be: manually.I believe, since the very beginning, bloggers curated blogrolls to point to blogs they follow. This way you can build a social graph with a certain degree of confidence.Personally I would combine that with some kind of trust. How favorable is it to follow an other blogger?You could look at the links she gets. Ideally over time, so you could handle hypes or similiar.Recently I discovered FoaF. From what I understood it is a file you put on the root on your server and point to via
<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="/foaf.rdf" />.The structure lookslike this:<rdf:RDF
This code was generated using FOAF-a-matic.You could list your contacts there, too. I haven’t decided on whether I want this, though. My concerns are about privacy and respect:What does it tell about them and me if they show up there? Could people feel offended if they don’t make it on this list? Since you have to pick a predicate to describe the relationship, which one is the most appropiate?Another approach I discovered is called XFN. It is also XML-based.By using XML you express the semantics (like “A follows B”) in a machine readable way.This could be used by programs tohelp you discover more people.What I find more challenging is to parse podcasts for interesting people. This requires manual work from what I can say right now.xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/">
<foaf:PersonalProfileDocument rdf:about="">
<foaf:maker rdf:resource="#me"/>
<foaf:primaryTopic rdf:resource="#me"/>
<admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic"/>
<admin:errorReportsTo rdf:resource="mailto:leigh@ldodds.com"/>
</foaf:PersonalProfileDocument>
<foaf:Person rdf:ID="me">
<foaf:name>Full name</foaf:name>
<foaf:givenname>First name</foaf:givenname>
<foaf:family_name>Family name</foaf:family_name>
<foaf:nick>Nickname</foaf:nick>
<foaf:mbox_sha1sum>obfuscated mail address</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
<foaf:homepage rdf:resource="FQDN"/>
<foaf:depiction rdf:resource="FQDN with path"/>
</foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>
What a great prompt! Here are a few interesting off-label use cases I’ve used, imagined, or seen in the wild:
Greg McVerry, Ian O’Byrne, and I have integrated Hypothes.is into our digital/online commonplace books in different ways. Greg’s are embedded at https://jgregorymcverry.com/annotations, Ian discusses his process on his site, while mine show up as annotation or highlight posts.
I’ve not published the full idea yet, but I’ve spent some time contemplating using Hypothes.is as a blogging platform/CMS. It might require a bit of flexibility, but it generally has reasonable support for:
Writing posts with a reasonably full-featured text editor and the ability to edit and delete posts later;
HTML and markdown support;
Public and private posting as well as sharing content with other private groups;
The ability to reply to other websites;
The ability for others to comment on your posts natively;
A robust tagging functionality;
The ability to socially bookmark web pages (blank page notes);
An RSS feed;
The ability to share posts to other social platforms including meta data for Twitter cards;
Naturally, it’s very easy to use for writing short notes, creating highlights and annotations, and keeping track of what you’ve read;
It has a pseudo-social media functionality in that your public posts appear on a global timeline where people can read and interact with them.
It’s also opensource, so you can self-host, modify it, or add new features.
I have been personally using Hypothes.is to follow the public feed, several tag feeds, and several friends’ specific feeds as a discovery tool for finding interesting content to read.
And a final off-label use case that could be compelling, but which could have some better UI and integration would be to use Hypothes.is as an embeddable commenting system for one’s own website. It has in-line commenting in much the same way that Medium does, but the entire thing could likely be embedded into a comment section under a traditional blog post and be used in much the same way people use Disqus on blogs. I’ll note that in practice, I find Hypothes.is far faster than Disqus ever was. I’ve yet to see anyone offloading the commenting functionality of their blog this way, but I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that someone could hack it together as a simple iframe or via the API pretty quickly and with solid results.
And naturally I’m missing many, potentially including some I’ve thought about before. Maybe worth checking the old Hypothes.is tag in my digital notebook?
If people have others, I’m enamored to hear them.
I’ve seen a few people in the wild using Hypothes.is as a blog commenting system.[1][2] Since they don’t yet have separate support for Webmention or require a bit of programming to get notifications, I thought I’d highlight this particular implementation as it has a simple, but relatively elegant user interface for creating feeds to provide notifications for just such a use case.
One could easily wire up the output from this through a service like IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, etc. to push the notifications to email, or other modalities as desired.
It doesn’t give anything over and above what a Hypothes.is addict with some programming skills could already produce, but for those who are code averse, or just too busy with building other pieces of the Domain of One’s Own this could allow some simpler outputs.
If you are a tinkerer, there is a GitHub repo for the project.
While you’re at it, why not throw in the usernames of some of your favorite annotators and subscribe away in your favorite feed reader? Some of the best things I discover online are through colleagues’ annotations, I think, in part, because it’s a much higher level of engagement with the material than the pablum found in many Twitter feeds.
It could also be a good means of following annotations on some of your favorite hashtags in the system as well. Want to learn some new words? Follow wordnik in your feed reader. Want to know the state of the art in Open Education Resources? There’s a tag serious people are annotating with that you could follow in your reader.
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pseudoevagrius
tl;dr
It’s too painful to quickly get frequent notes into note taking and related platforms. Hypothes.is has an open API and a great UI that can be leveraged to simplify note taking processes.
Note taking tools
I’ve been keeping notes in systems like OneNote and Evernote for ages, but for my memory-related research and work in combination with my commonplace book for the last year, I’ve been alternately using TiddlyWiki (with TiddlyBlink) and WordPress (it’s way more than a blog.)
I’ve also dabbled significantly enough with related systems like Roam Research, Obsidian, Org mode/Org Roam, MediaWiki, DocuWiki, and many others to know what I’m looking for.
Many of these, particularly those that can be used alternately as commonplace books and zettelkasten appeal to me greatly when they include the idea of backlinks. (I’ve been using Webmention to leverage that functionality in WordPress settings, and MediaWiki gives it grudgingly with the “what links to this page” basic functionality that can be leveraged into better transclusion if necessary.)
The major problem with most note taking tools
The final remaining problem I’ve found with almost all of these platforms is being able to quickly and easily get data into them so that I can work with or manipulate it. For me the worst part of note taking is the actual taking of notes. Once I’ve got them, I can do some generally useful things with them—it’s literally the physical method of getting data from a web page, book, or other platform into the actual digital notebook that is the most painful, mindless, and useless thing for me.
Evernote and OneNote
Older note taking services like Evernote and OneNote come with browser bookmarklets or mobile share functionality that make taking notes and extracting data from web sources simple and straightforward. Then once the data is in your notebook you can actually do some work with it. Sadly neither of these services has the backlinking functionality that I find has become de rigueur for my note taking or knowledge wrangling needs.
WordPress
My WordPress solutions are pretty well set since that workflow is entirely web-based and because WordPress has both bookmarklet and Micropub support. There I’m primarily using a variety of feeds and services to format data into a usable form that I can use to ping my Micropub endpoint. The Micropub plugin handles the post and most of the meta data I care about.
It would be great if other web services had support for Micropub this way too, as I could see some massive benefits to MediaWiki, Roam Research, and TiddlyWiki if they had this sort of support. The idea of Micropub has such great potential for great user interfaces. I could also see many of these services modifying projects like Omnibear to extend themselves to create highlighting (quoting) and annotating functionality with a browser extension.
With this said, I’m finding that the user interface piece that I’m missing for almost all of these note taking tools is raw data collection.
I’m not the sort of person whose learning style (or memory) is benefited by writing or typing out notes into my notebooks. I’d far rather just have it magically happen. Even copying and pasting data from a web browser into my digital notebook is a painful and annoying process, especially when you’re reading and collecting/curating as many notes as I tend to. I’d rather be able to highlight, type some thoughts and have it appear in my notebook. This would prevent the flow of my reading, thinking, and short annotations from being subverted by the note collection process.
Different modalities for content consumption and note taking
Based on my general experience there are only a handful of different spaces where I’m typically making notes.
Reading online
A large portion of my reading these days is done in online settings. From newspapers, magazines, journal articles and more, I’m usually reading them online and taking notes from them there.
.pdf texts
Some texts I want to read (often books and journal articles) only live in .pdf form. While reading them in an app-specific setting has previously been my preference, I’ve taken to reading them from within browsers. I’ll explain why in just a moment, but it has to do with a tool that treats this method the same as the general online modality. I’ll note that most of the .pdf specific apps have dreadful data export—if any.
Reading e-books (Kindle, e-readers, etc.)
If it’s not online or in .pdf format, I’m usually reading books within a Kindle or other e-reading device. These are usually fairly easy to add highlights, annotations, and notes to. While there are some paid apps that can extract these notes, I don’t find it too difficult to find the raw file and cut and paste the data into my notebook of choice. Once there, going through my notes, reformatting them (if necessary), tagging them and expanding on them is not only relatively straightforward, but it also serves as a simple method for doing a first pass of spaced repetition and review for better long term recall.
Lectures
Naturally taking notes from live lectures, audiobooks, and other spoken events occurs, but more often in these cases, I’m typically able to type them directly into my notebook of preference or I’m using something like my digital Livescribe pen for notes which get converted by OCR and are easy enough to convert in bulk into a digital notebook. I won’t belabor this part further, though if others have quick methods, I’d love to hear them.
Physical books
While I love a physical book 10x more than the next 100 people, I’ve been trying to stay away from them because I find that though they’re easy to highlight, underline, and annotate the margins, it takes too much time and effort (generally useless for memory purposes for me) to transfer these notes into a digital notebook setting. And after all, it’s the time saving piece I’m after here, so my preference is to read in some digital format if at all possible.
A potential solution for most of these modalities
For several years now, I’ve been enamored of the online Hypothes.is annotation tool. It’s open source, allows me reasonable access to my data from the (free) hosted version, and has a simple, beautiful, and fast process for bookmarking, highlighting, and annotating online texts on desktop and mobile. It works exceptionally well for both web pages and when reading .pdf texts within a browser window.
I’ve used it daily to make several thousand annotations on 800+ online web pages and documents. I’m not sure how I managed without it before. It’s the note taking tool I wished I’d always had. It’s a fun and welcome part of my daily life. It does exactly what I want it to and generally stays out of the way otherwise. I love it and recommend it unreservedly. It’s helped me to think more deeply and interact more directly with countless texts.
When reading on desktop or mobile platforms, it’s very simple to tap a browser extension and have all their functionality immediately available. I can quickly highlight a section of a text and their UI pops open to allow me to annotate, tag it, and publish. I feel like it’s even faster than posting something to Twitter. It is fantastically elegant.
The one problem I have with it is that while it’s great for collecting and aggregating my note data into my Hypothes.is account, there’s not much I can do with it once it’s there. It’s missing the notebook functionality some of these other services provide. I wish I could plug all my annotation and highlight content into spaced repetition systems or move it around and modify it within a notebook where it might be more interactive and cross linked for the long term. Sadly I don’t think that any of this sort of functionality is on Hypothes.is’ roadmap any time soon.
There is some great news however! Hypothes.is is open source and has a reasonable API. This portends some exciting things! This means that any of these wiki, zettelkasten, note taking, or spaced repetition services could leverage the UI for collecting data and pipe it into their interfaces for direct use.
As an example, what if I could quickly tell Obsidian to import all my pre-existing and future Hypothes.is data directly into my Obsidian vault for manipulating as notes? (And wouldn’t you know, the small atomic notes I get by highlighting and annotating are just the sort that one would like in a zettelkasten!) What if I could pick and choose specific course-related data from my reading and note taking in Hypothes.is (perhaps by tag or group) for import into Anki to quickly create some flash cards for spaced repetition review? For me, this combination would be my dream application!
These small pieces, loosely joined can provide some awesome opportunities for knowledge workers, students, researchers, and others. The education focused direction that Hypothes.is, many of these note taking platforms, and spaced repetition systems are all facing positions them to make a super-product that we all want and need.
An experiment
So today, as a somewhat limited experiment, I played around with my Hypothes.is atom feed (https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=chrisaldrich, because you know you want to subscribe to this) and piped it into IFTTT. Each post creates a new document in a OneDrive file which I can convert to a markdown .md file that can be picked up by my Obsidian client. While I can’t easily get the tags the way I’d like (because they’re not included in the feed) and the formatting is incredibly close, but not quite there, the result is actually quite nice.
Since I can “drop” all my new notes into a particular folder, I can easily process them all at a later date/time if necessary. In fact, I find that the fact that I might want to revisit all my notes to do quick tweaks or adding links or additional thoughts provides the added benefit of a first round of spaced repetition for the notes I took.
Some notes may end up being deleted or reshuffled, but one thing is clear: I’ve never been able to so simply highlight, annotate, and take notes on documents online and get them into my notebook so quickly. And when I want to do something with them, there they are, already sitting in my notebook for manipulation, cross-linking, spaced repetition, and review.
So if the developers of any of these platforms are paying attention, I (and I’m sure others) really can’t wait for plugin integrations using the full power of the Hypothes.is API that allow us to all leverage Hypothes.is’ user interface to make our workflows seamlessly simple.
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In fact, it’s become quite a lot of data lately, sometimes up to 50 items a day. I’ll have to add you to my list of people to follow on @hypothes_is
https://boffosocko.com/2019/11/07/following-people-on-hypothesis/
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The current list of people I’m following can be found on my blogroll at https://boffosocko.com/about/following#Hypothesis%20Feeds.
Does hypothesis have a people follow feature? For now I’m bookmarking your profile. Looking through your notes, it’s helpful to see the highlight/note count per article (to find the more engaging articles)
No follow feature beyond RSS/ATOM feeds. Old school methods like rganically stumbling on other users or searching tags and the public timeline are the only methods I’m aware of for discovering people.
Who else at #IAnno21 has a practice of public annotation using Hypothes.is? Or perhaps on your own website, or other platform? Please share your usernames, URLs, and feeds so we can all have a richer group of examples.
For example, you can find me at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich, much of which is mirrored on my personal website in various ways as bookmarks, read posts, notes, and even a custom annotation post. Here are a few others I follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds
Many annotation tools have scant social features, but there are ways to follow others’ work.
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This is a terrific post for those of us, like myself, who have used Hypothes.is but who aren’t as familiar with the RSS-related features. I have a related question that may be better asked elsewhere but here goes: Are you using a Microsub server to read these RSS/Atom streams from Hypothes.is? If so, which one? The Microsub server I use, Aperture, does not seem to recognize the RSS/Atom streams.
I take a lot of notes, the majority of them in public using Hypothes.is. I follow a handful of others’ public notes myself, but until today I didn’t think anyone was following back or reading.
I wish this were a more common practice.
https://diggingthedigital.com/abonneren-op-aantekeningen/
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