Month: December 2019

Read Publicly Sharing RSS Libraries i.e. My RSS Feeds are Yours by Kevin SmoklerKevin Smokler (Kevin Smokler)

Inspired by Matt Haughey’s public posting of the RSS Feeds he subscribes to, I’m doing the same (below).

What is RSS, you ask? A method to subscribe to what your favorite websites publish and have their updates all in a single place. Think of it as DVR for the Internet, food delivery instead of pickup except for the web. Podcasts would on the same technology and concept: Subscribe once, receive forever without asking again.

Lately though, its been making a bit of a comeback. Idea being that self-selecting your daily information diet (see: No Trump-loving-creepy-brothers-in-laws) probably means less unwilling toxicity and restless nights of non-sleep. ❧

–highlighted December 08, 2019 at 04:26PM

This is the third time I’ve heard about RSS coming back in almost as many days, and this not long after highlighting some recent advancements in feed readers. (One of the others was Jeremy Keith at this weekend’s IndieWebCamp in San Francisco.) Kevin highlights a fantastic reason why using a feed reader can be important and more healthy than relying on the social aggregation algorithms in your not-so-friendly-neighborhood social media platforms.

Like Kevin and Matt, I think it’s a nice thing to share one’s sources and feeds. A while back I created a following page where I share a huge list of the people and sources I’m following regularly via RSS feeds, Atom Feeds, JSONFeed, and even h-feed. Everytime I follow or unfollow a source, the page auto-updates. I also provide OPML files (at the bottom of that page) so you can import them into your own feed reader. If you’re using a feed reader like Inoreader that supports OPML subscription, you can input the OPML file location and your copy of my feeds will automatically update when I make changes.

Happy reading!

Replied to a tweet by Ela_HadrunEla_Hadrun (Twitter)

[Raymond] Llull is the first author to use the expression “Immaculate Conception” to designate the Virgin’s exemption from original sin.[19] He appears to have been the first to teach this doctrine publicly at the University of Paris.

–via Wikipedia referencing Mary in the Middle Ages: the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Thought of Medieval Latin Theologians, Fr. Luigi Gambero, S.M., Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2005.

On the caustic focus on temporality in social media

In thinking about the temporality of social media, I’ve realize that sites like Twitter and Facebook focus incredibly hard on the here-and-now. At best you may get a few posts that go back a day or two when reading. I find it’s very rare that anyone is interacting with my tweets from 2010 or 2013, and typically when those are being liked, it’s by bots trying to give themselves a history.

We’re being trained to dip our toes into a rapidly flowing river and not focus on deeper ideas and thoughts or reflect on longer pieces further back in our history.

On the other hand, reading more and more from my variety of feed readers, I realize that on the broader web, I’m seeing people linking to and I’m also reading much older blog posts. In the last few days alone I’ve seen serious longform material from 2001, 2005, 2006, 2011, and 2018 just a few minutes ago.

The only time I see long tail content on Twitter is when someone has it pinned to the top of their page.

Taking this a level deeper, social is thereby forcing us to not only think shallowly, but to make our shared histories completely valueless. This is allowing some to cry fake news and rewrite history and make it easier for their proponents to consume it and believe it all. Who cares about the scandals and problems of yesterday when tomorrow will assuredly be better? And then we read the next Twitter-based treat and start the cycle all over again. 

Replied to a tweet by Jon UdellJon Udell (Twitter)
Does this cast you as Dr. W. C. Minor in the story, albeit not in the same sort of mad man way to wordnik’s Sir James Murray? Seriously though, this is an awesome use case.
Replied to a tweet by Dr. Ryan StraightDr. Ryan Straight (Twitter)
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.

Read Hypothesis for Web Developers by Jon Udell (Hypothesis)
We’ve written a lot here about Hypothesis for teachers and students, for publishers, for fact checkers, for reviewers and curators of scholarly literature, and for any individual or team that gathers and organizes pieces of web content. One constituency we haven’t addressed, though, is web developers. Annotation enlarges the web’s surface area. Formerly we could locate resources identified by billions of URLs. Now we can also locate segments defined within those billions of resources. It was already true that the emergent properties of the URL-addressable web continued to surprise me on a regular basis. Nowadays annotation delivers even more delightful surprises. Here’s the latest one, and it’s a real mind-expander.
Replied to a post by Jane Van GalenJane Van Galen (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)
We've talked about and experimented with various video projects in our Learning Community. Reading this piece by sociologist Jess Calarco this week reminded me that we haven't talked as much about audio production and editing as a means having students show what they know and to share what they've learned on the open web.
I recall seeing a lot of resources for audio media creation and podcasting via KQED Teach, which was geared toward a broad level of students and technical abilities.

These types of literacies are really important to explore.

Replied to Networking as Time Saving by Jane Van GalenJane Van Galen (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)

We talked in our group last week about the time that it requires to develop course websites and "open" assignments, and to make new tech function as it should when there may not be enough support, and when these sorts of investments may not be valued in faculty reviews.

I talked briefly about the "innovation" part is often simply building off the work of others, when so many faculty now share their work on the open web.

A great example of this just came through my Twitter feed.  I have a column set up in Tweetdeck  where I'm following the  conference.  With a Tweetdeck column, I can just glance or scroll for a minute between other things I'm doing,  to see if anything looks interesting.  People at this conference are working on open pedagogies, particularly via the Domains of Ones Own work we've talked about.  Most sessions are being live-tweeted, with a rich trove of links.

One attendee Chris Aldrich, has created a Twitter list of past attendees at the conference and others who do work related that that presented at this meeting.   I can skim this to find new people from whom to learn.  I can follow them and then, as I have time, check their Twitter feeds for updates on what they're doing.   If I don't find myself learning from these new follows, I just unfollow and move on.

And inevitably, over months and years, I'll find people who will generously invest in teaching me and others about the work they're doing, about why they're doing it, and about how that work is recieved by their students.

This is the open web I hope we're teaching our students about --  place of innovation, generosity, value-driven discourse and always, always, something new to learn. 

Thanks for the shout out! Making those kinds of lists can certainly be repetitive, time consuming, and thankless. The only thing worse is that hundreds or thousands should try to reinvent the same wheel. 

If you appreciated that bit of trickery, you might better appreciate a more open web version of the same with respect to the following page I made of various people and publications I’m following in my various feed readers. It provides OPML feeds so others can easily import them into their feed readers as well. You can find some additional documentation about it here.

Here’s some additional reading and links for background, if you’re interested. 

Replied to Agenda for Nov. 22nd Meeting by Todd ConawayTodd Conaway (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)

We should make some agreements about our focus.

  • Are we continuting with various tools and sharing them on this site?
  • Should we focus more on building out our own domains and share that process?
  • Both? Other? 
  • Where shall we go?
Todd, I’ve randomly come across this post today and thought I’d toss out some additional ideas to consider if you haven’t already made up your minds.

If you’re thinking about doing something like WithKnown (aka Known, the CMS your post is on), and interested in the WordPress portion, you might consider doing a full/partial Domain of One’s Own program through Reclaim Hosting or even rolling your own. Even if you go small with just a few classes, you might consider adapting the Homebrew Website Club model at your site where you invite students to tinker around, help each other out, and then show off or demonstrate their work. The related IndieWeb wiki and online chat are free to join and can provide a wealth of information and help for students (and educators!) working at owning their own domains.

Incidentally, if you’re unaware, WordPress now has a suite of plugins that will allow it to have a lot of the site-to-site communication capabilities that Known does. I’ve not done it before, but I’m fairly certain you could run it on a multiuser installation of WordPress much the same way you’re using http://janevangalen.com/cms/.

Another interesting option would be to have students try out accounts on micro.blog which are relatively inexpensive, though I suspect if you touched base with Manton Reece and explained what you were doing, he might offer free or significantly reduced hosting for a reasonable period of time. I know he’s given away a year of free hosting to attendees of IndieWebCamps who are starting out with their own domains. If he did then you might be able to use some institutional funds to purchase domains for students to get them started.

I’m happy to spitball ideas in these areas if you’re interested. I’m glad to see others experimenting around with the ideas around DoOO and IndieWeb for Education!

By the way, good on you for opening up your planning process for teaching and learning on the open web. It certainly sets a useful example for others who are exploring and following in your footsteps.

Read a post by Jacky AlcinéJacky Alciné (Jacky Alciné)
I should probably finish the demo for the Vouch tool first but I REALLY want to begin looking into this Akismet for Abuse (that’s the operative name) tool. My idea for it is a bit of what I’ve seen so far in solutions from other people. Someone (Client A) receives a post from someone else (Actor...
Read a Twitter thread by Mx. Aria Stewart Mx. Aria Stewart (Twitter)
It just crystallized for me what I think has been mistaken about thinking of unwanted interaction on social networks as a "privacy" problem. It's not.

A privacy problem is things becoming known more widely than they should, subject to surveillance and contextless scrutiny. 
The onslaught of sexual harassment on platforms like early Twitter (and later twitter for people of notability), @KeybaseIO, every naive social network is an attack on the right to exist in public. It is the inverse of a privacy problem. 
But the conceiving of this as a privacy problem brings the wrong solutions. It means we are offered tools to remove ourselves from public view, to restrict our public personas, to retreat from public life. It means women are again confined to private sphere, denied civic life. 
 It's so endemic, so entrenched, and so normal that women should have to retreat to protect ourselves that we think of this as part of femininity. A strong civic life is seen as unfeminine, forward. It poisons us politically, socially, and personally. 
It is, at its core, an attack on democracy as well. 
The only way to undo this is to reconceive of this, not as a privacy problem but as an attack on public life. There will be new problems with this but at least they will be new. 
There has been work done on this, but I've never seen it connected to civic life, and this connects with my thoughts and work on community. The unit that social networks must focus on cannot be the individual. We do not exist as individuals first but as members of our communities 
When a new user joins a social network, their connection must be to their peers, their existing social relationships. A new user can only be onboarded in the context of relationships already on the network. 
Early adopters form such a community, but extrapolating from the joining of those initial members to how to scale the network misses the critical transition: from no community to the first, not from the first users to the next. 
New communities can only be onboarded by connections from individuals that span communities. New communities must be onboarded collectively, or the network falls to the army of randos. 
The irony is that surveillance capitalism has the information to do this but not the will, because as objects of marketing, we are individuals, statistics and demographics, not communities. The reality lies in plain sight. 
There have been attempts at social networks, sadly none dense enough to succeed, but that treat people as part of a web, and that their peers can shield and protect them. The idea is solid. 
The other alternative is to stop trying to give people a solitary identity, a profile and onboarding to a flat network, but instead only provide them with community connections. Dreamwidth is this to a large degree, if too sparse for most people to connect. 
Our social networks must connect us, not to our "friends" but to our communities. The ones that succeed do this by intent or by accident.

Facebook has a narrow view of community, but for those it matches, it works. With major flaws, but it does. 
Twitter, its community of early adopters, its creepy onboarding by uploading your contacts and mining data to connect you works. If I were to join and follow a few people I know, it would rapidly suggest many more people in my queer and trans community. It works. 
And this is why Ello failed. This is why Diaspora failed. This is why Mastodon succeeded, if only by scraping by the bare minimum. This is why gnu social failed. This is why a random vbulletin forum can succeed. The ones that succeed connect a dense community. 
Note that gnu social and mastodon are the same protocol! But they are different social networks. The difference in their affordances and the community structures they encourage are vastly different, despite interoperating. 
I'd say I don't know how apparent this problem is to white men — the ones largely designing these networks — but I do know. I know because of the predictable failures we see.

Part of this, I think boils down to how invisible community is when you are the default user. 
At no time am I unaware that I am trans, that I am a woman, that the people I follow and who follow me are distinct from the background. I can spot my people in a crowd on the internet with precision, just like a KNN clustering can. 
Trans culture in particular is Extremely Online. We are exceptionally easy to onboard to a new platform. But the solution can scale if we focus on solving it. And by knowing who is in the community (likely) and who is not, we can understand what is and is not harassment. 
We don't need to even know what the communities are — Twitter does not — and yet it knows how we cluster, and that suffices.

If we stop thinking of this as a privacy problem — letting us hide from the connections that are our solution — we can enlarge public life. 
That exceptional article — — about how bots sow division shows us another facet of this problem and way of thinking. Conceiving of this as a privacy problem fundamentally reacts with division when solidarity is needed. 
We can only fight this with a new, loose solidarity and an awareness of community boundaries. We can build technology that makes space for us to be safe online by being present with those that support us, and react together, rather than as individuals and separating us for safety 
This thread has meandered a bit, but I'm dancing around something important. We fundamentally need to stop organizing online activity the way we do. Follow and be followed is not where it's at.

It's join, manage attention, build connection. 
Stop sorting things topically and trying to find connections in content.

Start looking for clusters of relationships between people.

The question should not be "what is this about?" but "who is this for?"
Some interesting ideas on social hiding in here.