📅 RSVP to Early Tools For Thought, with Mark Bernstein | Tools for Thought Rocks!

RSVPed Attending Early Tools For Thought, with Mark Bernstein

Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems, Inc., is the designer of Tinderbox: https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ 

​Join Mark as he turns back the clock to examine some early Tools For Thought, and the people who created them. There’s quite a lot to learn from both, as well as a research literature that repays study.

​The infinite canvas as a thinking space now has a long history, but few of the early systems are well known.  I think some of them might be worth a brief look, in terms of the ideas they brought forward and in terms of the tasks they sought to address.  For example:

​Sketchpad: Ivan Sutherland’s system from the 1960 kicked off interactive computer graphics AND object-oriented programming.

​NLS/Augment: Doug Engelbart’s original outliner, the first system that explicitly sought to be a tool for thought.

​Xanadu: Ted Nelson’s early proposal for a hypertext docuverse.

​Storyspace: the first system intended for non-sequential narrative. Introduced in 1987 and still in use today.

​Intermedia: a platform for digital pedagogy, developed at Brown and BBN. 

​KMS: a hypertext system for technical documentation, the source of Akscyn’s Law

​Microcosm: A hypertext system based chiefly on contextual links, the ancestor of all sculptural hypertext.

​Aquanet: the 1990 system from Halasz, Trigg, and  Marshall at Xerox PARC, described as a tool to hold your knowledge in place.

​VIKI: the first spatial hypertext system, designed by Cathy Marshall as a reaction to Aquanet and the start of an enormously influential line of research

After a bit of experimentation and tinkering tonight, it appears that one can use their website to create threaded conversations on (and likely other portions of the ) using the IndieWeb syndication strategy of POSSE with backfeed of comments using and Brid.gy. I’d outlined the process using Twitter in the past, and the same principles seem to work well for Mastodon.
Replied to a post by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (hcommons.social)

@chrisaldrich Another #IndieWeb question for you! I'm syndicating blog posts from kfitz.info to Mastodon, where they appear from @kfitz@kfitz.info, and then I boost from this account. Replies to @kfitz@kfitz.info appear as comments to the blog post, as desired. But if I reply to the comment on the blog, that reply doesn't syndicate here, so the commenter doesn't know. And if I reply to the comment here, the reply comes from this account (and I'm not yet sure whether it appears as a reply on the blog or not). How do you manage this?

@kfitz I’m not sure that the straightforward functionality you’re looking for exists within the ActivityPub plugin (yet), but it’s certainly something you could potentially file as a feature request.

Since you have other Fediverse accounts you’re using, you might be able to follow the same general pattern I’d documented with Twitter for threading comments between my site and Twitter: https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/

Generally, you’d post on your site where it’s seen in the Fediverse via the ActivityPub plugin and/or optionally boosted by your native Mastodon account. Replies to your post (on Mastodon) show up on your site as comments and you reply to them there in your site’s comments section. Then you manually copy/paste the text of your reply from your website into your native Mastodon account and include the comment/reply permalink in that reply. If you’ve got Webmention set up with Brid.gy for Mastodon, replies to your replies on Mastodon should then make their way back to the proper threaded spot in your website’s comments section.

An example of this at work can be seen on my earlier mistake:

Related, I’ve been playing around with mirroring my WP site as an instance with the ActivityPub plugin and have boosted posts with my more broadly followed mastodon.social account the same way you mentioned that you were doing with yours. Somehow I’m anecdotally finding that I get more responses/reactions with native posts that with these boosts. I’m curious what your experience has been with this strategy so far? I’m still just starting my experimentation here, but I do like the fact that I’m able to include richer presentation of wrapped links in my WordPress native posts which are seen in the Fediverse while Mastodon seems to strip them out or not allow them (see an example of this in the post above this reply).

Replied to a post by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (hcommons.social)
One of these days, I'd like to find a way to post my archive from the other place in some space that I control. I've now got it in a couple of different formats, and some day when I get time. I'll look forward to playing with the possibilities.
@kfitz It looks like you’ve found at least one option for archiving your Tweets on your own site, but do watch out for the archived t.co shortlinks which may not survive if Twitter were to disappear altogether. 

I suspect that some version of this option I’ve done before will work, though I haven’t tried updating it recently: https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/

Our friend @jimgroom@social.ds106.us has recently written up some details that get around the t.co shortener problems: https://bavatuesdays.com/archiving-twitter/

I’ve also heard that @darius@friend.camp is working on something for a public release soon: https://friend.camp/@darius/109521972924049369. He may still be looking for beta testers if you’re interested.

For this week, I’m recommending a feed reader—a different sort of feed reader: https://fraidyc.at/. Kicks Condor has designed an interface that you can sort by frequency/time as well as tag. It also encourages you to read content on the person’s site directly, so you get the web experience they chose rather than a more vanilla interface.
In addition to following people on Mastodon in your feed reader via , you can also follow hashtags which appear there. For example, to follow try: https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb.rss. #FeedReaderFriday 

Keep in mind that the output of these feeds will be instance specific, and the tag feed will only get mentions from your instance and instances yours can “see” (or gets by follows with federation). So if you use a different instance, you may see more or less in your feeds. Because of its size and depth of federation, this makes mastodon.social a good bet for these sorts of subscriptions, but your experience may vary depending on your needs.

Replied to a post by Dr Hitchcock (@drh@hackers.town)Dr Hitchcock (@drh@hackers.town) (hackers.town)
What is the most simple and cheapest way to #selfhost your own #blog or #microblog? I’d really like something that fits in with the protocols used by the #IndieWeb massive. Also, something that is simple to post from a smartphone. Pleeeease
The Quick Start page at https://indieweb.org/Quick_Start has some inexpensive and user friendly options as well as some indication of their levels of IndieWeb friendliness. Beyond this, WordPress has a reasonably low self-host bar with lots of options depending on how much time you want to spend on the hosting/maintenance.
MEMO

TO: app developers considering and other related apps and interfaces

Perhaps spend a day or two to add Micropub support to the platform first, then your app could potentially be used to publish to ANY website/platform that supports the W3C spec.

Replied to a tweet by Aravind Balla (Twitter)
There are some fun collected experiments on this topic at https://indieweb.org/handwriting

📚 Acquisition: Oranges by John McPhee

Acquired Oranges by John McPhee (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux )
A classic of reportage, Oranges was first conceived as a short magazine article about oranges and orange juice, but the author kept encountering so much irresistible information that he eventually found that he had in fact written a book. It contains sketches of orange growers, orange botanists, orange pickers, orange packers, early settlers on Florida's Indian River, the first orange barons, modern concentrate makers, and a fascinating profile of Ben Hill Griffin of Frostproof, Florida who may be the last of the individual orange barons. McPhee's astonishing book has an almost narrative progression, is immensely readable, and is frequently amusing. Louis XIV hung tapestries of oranges in the halls of Versailles, because oranges and orange trees were the symbols of his nature and his reign. This book, in a sense, is a tapestry of oranges, too—with elements in it that range from the great orangeries of European monarchs to a custom of people in the modern Caribbean who split oranges and clean floors with them, one half in each hand.