Author: Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
RSVPed Attending Respectful Responses

How do we enable more positive serendipity & discovery via our websites, between both existing friends & family, and new positive interactions. And how do we raise barriers to spam, harassment, and other unpleasant social media interactions.

It's not just "fixing comments", it's much more than that.

Respectful responses include even simple interactions like likes, bookmarks, and reposts, as well as indirect comments like quote tweets.

A broader user-centric conversation about the problem that Vouch is designed to solve one or some parts thereof.

Plywood wall with various posters glued up featuring one that reads POST NO ILLS

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash
Hammersmith, London, UK |
A comment on the fragile state of society today, by artist Tim Fishlock

Many who attended @WeAreNew_Public‘s #NewPublicFestival earlier this week may be interested in this upcoming IndieWebCamp pop up session.

Watched "Game of Thrones" Baelor from HBO Max
Directed by Alan Taylor. With Sean Bean, Michelle Fairley, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Lena Headey. Robb goes to war against the Lannisters. Jon finds himself struggling on deciding if his place is with Robb or the Night's Watch. Drogo has fallen ill from a fresh battle wound. Daenerys is desperate to save him.
Replied to Bookish, Chapter Type Theme by cogdogcogdog (Reclaim Hosting Community)
I’ve recently rescued the formatted version of my 1986 MS thesis (originally in Mac Word 3.0 files on floppy disks) with plans to publish in my domain. I know most people will just say “do Pressbooks” but I want my own site/theme w/o all that overhead. If anyone has a suggestion for a good clean WP theme for creating content organized into Chapters, let me know. Or maybe I should be doing in some kind of static generator.

Alan,

Did I hear someone whisper “Book SPLOT”?!

There are a few examples of this sort of publishing pattern at https://indieweb.org/academic_samizdat and https://indieweb.org/book that use a variety of technologies.

The easiest method is obviously to publish a .pdf copy and simply link it. If you have a text version of it and want .epub or .mobi files for e-readers I’ve got infrastructure for converting text into those I could put into service for you. I’ve done it in the past for Stommel and Morris’s Urgency of Teachers. (I have a small publishing house on the side and can help you out with ISBN numbers for much cheaper than usual if you like.)

@kfitz has done it a few times during the process of writing and subsequently publishing books, so she may have ideas/opinions. If I’m not mistaken, she used CommentPress, so that may be most comfortable for you from within the WordPress world.

Jeremy Keith has an awesome example at https://resilientwebdesign.com/ and if you pinged him, he may have a flat html file “shell” that you could cut and paste into. (Or you could view source and manually get the same result.)

Amy Guy’s example on Github which she published using Github Pages is nice and could make a fun little project for you as well.

It would be so much nicer if there were a one click install of PressBooks, but I’ve quit holding my breath on that front. (Maybe it’s a future possibility for Reclaim Cloud though???)

 

Watched January 14, 2021 - PBS NewsHour full episode from PBS NewsHour
Thursday on the NewsHour, more arrests as investigations and calls for justice pick up after the Capitol riot that led to President Trump's second impeachment, Michigan's former governor is charged with criminally mishandling the deadly Flint water crisis, and a growing number of businesses distance themselves from the president and the Republican Party following last week's violent insurrection.
Watched "Game of Thrones" The Pointy End from HBO Max
Directed by Daniel Minahan. With Sean Bean, Michelle Fairley, Lena Headey, Emilia Clarke. The Lannisters press their advantage over the Starks; Robb rallies his father's northern allies and heads south to war; The White Walkers attack the Wall; Tyrion returns to his father with some new friends.
Watched "Game of Thrones" You Win or You Die from HBO Max
Directed by Daniel Minahan. With Sean Bean, Mark Addy, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Lena Headey. Robert has been injured while hunting and is dying. Jon and the others finally take their vows to the Night's Watch. A man, sent by Robert, is captured for trying to poison Daenerys. Furious, Drogo vows to attack the Seven Kingdoms.
Watched January 13, 2021 - PBS NewsHour from PBS
Wednesday on the NewsHour, the U.S. House of Representatives votes to impeach President Trump for fomenting the violent mob that attacked Congress, the delayed response by the Pentagon and the National Guard to riots at the Capitol raises concerns about security ahead of the inauguration, and doctors scramble to solve the mystery 'long haulers" from COVID-19.

A few quick notes from the New_Public Festival:

Darius Kazemi:

Darius is running a project called Friend Camp, a Mastodon instance https://friend.camp/about/more

rabble:

Just launched a new social app in the Apple store a few minutes ago. Working on the project https://planetary.social/.

Golda Velez:

Has a proposal for Twitter’s Blue Sky for message encapsulation. More details by searching Blue Sky on Hacker Noon.

rabble:

Building because there is a path in social media 2.0 that we lost. There is a lot of adversiting money to be made, and that’s fine, but it’s deeply problematic.

It’s easy to criticize Twitter and Facebook, but it’s an unfair problem. They have an impossible task because the structure is wrong. How can we come together as humans instead of having the shopping mall do the enforcement?

Bolting on work to existing platforms where one can be deleted is not a good idea.

Darius Kazemi:

Hopes that you’ll have different political places, but other places too. Places built around ethoses that aren’t tied to particular political parties or idologies.

I want to provide a place where people don’t hate their lives. The hook isn’t that it’s decentralized, but that you’ll be happier here.

Golda Velez:

We want to have a safe space where people can do creative things together.

You have to have a federated system with accountability. A graduated system of sanctions. Some democratic way of determining what those things are.

Eli Pariser 🏞📲:

Loved what @tinysubversions wrote on https://runyourown.social/

Golda Velez:

Any tool you build, attackers will use (and abuse) it.

Darius Kazemi:

Keeping nodes of communities smaller (50 people) helps to prevent context collapse. It also minimizes the reporting system from being an attack vector.

Eli Pariser 🏞📲:

Next up https://newpublic.org/festival/event/701/showcase-glimpses-of-our-digital-public-futures

Tracy Chou:

Working on building @blockpartyapp_ https://www.blockpartyapp.com/

I just ran across and am happy to follow Anasuya Sengupta (@Anasuyashh) and
Whose Knowledge? (@WhoseKnowledge) via the New_Public Festival (#NewPublicFestival). Whose Knowledge is “a global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities (the majority of the world) on the internet.”

As I’m reading Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly‘s (@Lynne_Kelly) Songlines: The Power and Promise, I’m curious to explore how the work of  Whose Knowledge might possibly help to empower oral cultures that are neither written down nor on the internet? Also how might this also empower their “third archive”?