Taking a moment to send a warm thank you to all the work (both visible and invisible) that Dr. Martha S. Jones and her lab are doing for the Johns Hopkins Community and far beyond. Where ever you live, I heartily recommend their newsletter Hard Histories at Hopkins.
Replied to a tweet by codexeditor (Twitter)
@brunowinck @codexeditor @alanlaidlaw When thinking about this, recall that in the second paragraph of The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois Press, 1949), Claude Shannon explicitly separates the semantic meaning from the engineering problem of communication. 
Highlight from the book with the underlined sentence: "These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.
For those who’ve been waiting for it to show up, the digitized version of box 9 of Niklas Luhmann’s second zettelkasten is now available online. It contains many of his notes on the zettelkasten itself.
https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8g_V
Replied to YimingWu is painting? by https://twitter.com/ChengduLittleA (Twitter)
@ChengduLittleA @gordonbrander @mrgunn @hypothes_is There’s also the living fragmention spec by @kevinmarks which lists a large number of similar other prior art not in your original article.
https://indieweb.org/fragmention

Unable to search or find public replies to annotations in public stream

Filed an Issue GitHub - hypothesis/client: The Hypothesis web-based annotation client. (GitHub)
The Hypothesis web-based annotation client. Contribute to hypothesis/client development by creating an account on GitHub.

Replies (with or without tags) to primary/original annotations are unable to subsequently be found in the main public stream or via search at https://hypothes.is/search.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Make a reply to any public annotation (with or without tags)
  2. Use https://hypothes.is/search to search the username of the reply or one of the original tags
  3. The reply can’t be found

The original (more complicated) example that uncovered the issue

From https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/8350 which redirects to https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/8350, I can click on the pdf icon to get to https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/8350/8272 which I can download locally and then reopen in Chrome to annotate with the Hypothes.is client.

I was able to make an original public annotation: https://hypothes.is/a/Nysv1HyTEeyaC2cnv3ZCPQ

Having subscribed to my public individual user feed, this annotation (via the annotation permalink and not via the original document) was found in Ton Zijlstra‘s RSS reader, and he was able to reply to it: https://hypothes.is/a/p3uUBJc8EeyuRmfRyGEGfQ.

Oddly the URL https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/8350/8272 when activated for Hypothes.is doesn’t show any of the annotations though I would suspect that the .pdf fingerprint should match that of the downloaded and annotated version. Alternately visiting https://uni-bielefeld.de/soz/luhmann-archiv/pdf/jschmidt_niklas-luhmanns-card-index_-sociologica_2018_12-1.pdf shows 51 annotations in the Chrome extension, though none of them are visible and the .pdf file doesn’t load on the page which returns a 404. Ton Zijlstra, having none of these URLs would otherwise not have been able to find or reply to annotations I’ve made other than having the original pointer via his RSS feed.

This last part non-withstanding, after making his reply to my annotation (directly at https://hypothes.is/a/Nysv1HyTEeyaC2cnv3ZCPQ), Ton Zijlstra is now no longer able to find his original annotation in the https://hypothes.is/search online interface. It’s as if it’s completely disappeared as the main web search interface is unable to find it via username and/or tags and (likely by design) the main public thread only shows top level annotations and not replies.

I’ve tried some similar experiments on my own replies to annotations. I’m unable to search my own annotations (via https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich) or use either a user-based or tag-based search to find those same annotations after they were made, thus they’re essentially lost to me and others unless I can find the original document and trace my way back to them. These replies are obviously available via feeds (RSS/ATOM) and the API (using the urn:x-pdf:471902ab75f5683c53518d14f95f0dfe key), but they are essentially lost to the vast number of users who won’t have recourse to these methods.

Similarly searching Ton Zijlstra’s user name: https://hypothes.is/users/tonz, one will see no public annotations despite his public reply to a public annotation. The reply can be found at https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=tonz and via API calls.

Expected behaviour

After having made a reply to an annotation (with or without tags), one should expect to be able to search their own annotations or specific tags and find those public replies to annotations again.

Whether or not the main web stream (https://hypothes.is/search) filters out replies, they should still be able to be found via subsequent direct search.

Actual behaviour

Searching for one’s previous replies, via user, tag, or otherwise doesn’t find them, though they certainly exist and are findable in feeds and API.

Additional details

Related, possibly helpful for the above

Browser/system information

I’ve tried on other platforms and browsers and platforms with similar results, but I’m using Windows 10 and see the same behavior in both Chrome (Version 98.0.4758.102 (Official Build) (64-bit)) and Firefox (97.0.1 (64-bit)).

SEO Traffic Increases for IndieWeb Reads, Watches, Listens, and other Bookmarked Content

I usually think not a wit about SEO and web stats/traffic with respect to my personal website, but a recent WordPress notification about an unusual spike in traffic got me thinking.

In the past, I’ve very often posted some social bookmark-type posts of what I read, watch, and listen to online. They’re usually of a very small microblog or linkblog sort of nature and have very little intrinsic value other than to people who may want to closely follow this sort of minutiae to see what I’ve been interested in lately.

Recently I noticed that there’s been a 4-5 fold increase in web traffic to my site, so I thought I’d take a look and it turns out that I’m getting some larger than usual numbers of visitors to my site for an article I bookmarked as having read three years ago.

Here’s a list of the top ten most highly trafficked pages on my website over the past year. 

Most visited pages on my website over the past year

The top post with almost 18,000 views in the last year is essentially a link to an article I read about gaslighting in 2018 which includes a brief reply context (reminder) of what the original post is about. The next two are slightly differently named links to my homepage for a total of 6,500 views followed by an article I wrote about TiddlyWiki (1,500 views). Articles I wrote about commonplace books, my furniture hobby, and my about page are also among my native content in the top ten.

However a watch post about How to Buy a Velomobile (1,310 views), and read posts about configuring an iPhone (I don’t even own one) (654 views) and an article about opinions and fact checking in the Houston Press (619) round out the bottom of the list.

I don’t know what to really think about these short bookmark posts accounting for so many views or that my site ranks so highly in terms of SEO for some of these oddball topics (look at the mnemonics and commonplace aficionado calling the kettle black).

I’m wondering if I should look at my little widget that recommends content and begin to narrow it down to more of my own native content? Should I tamp down on content I was tangentially interested in at some point but don’t really care about or want to rank on? Gaslighting and fact checking are interesting broad topics to me, but velomobiles and iPhones really aren’t. Of the tens of thousands of things I’ve linked to, why should these stick out in particular? I get that there’s probably only a limited number of people writing about velomobiles, but the others?!?

It does make me wonder if other IndieWeb site owners have experienced the same sort of quirky behavior? What implications might this have on SEO if more of the wider web was taken over by personal sites instead of corporately controlled silos like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? I’m sure there are other great questions to be asked here. Brainstorming of ideas, answers, and implications are encouraged below.