By choosing images over links, and by restricting markup, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are hostile to HTML. This is leading to the plague of infographics crowding out text, and of video used to convey minimal information. The rise of so-called infographics has been out of control this year, though the term was unknown a couple of years ago. I attribute this to the favourable presentation that image links get within Facebook, followed by Twitter and Google plus, and of course though other referral sites like Reddit. By showing a preview of the image, the item is given extra weight over a textual link; indeed even for a url link, Facebook and G+ will show an image preview by default.
Category: Publishing
👓 The Infographic Plague is actually a plague of lazy journalists and bloggers | The Next Web
I breathed a sigh of relief when I read Megan McCardle's Ending the Infographic Plague on The Atlantic a few days ago. Someone had said it at last! As useful as a really well-produced infographic can be, there's some real dross out there and it's time we talked about the problem.
Started playing around with PressBooks for WordPress tonight. Some interesting and useful book collaboration, editing, and production tools hiding in here.
👓 Why We Removed Pressbooks from the WordPress Plugin Repository | PressBooks
Ned Zimmerman (Pressbooks)A couple weeks ago, we removed Pressbooks from the WordPress Plugin Repository. We want to offer an explanation for this decision to our users, and give some insight into our plans for the distribution of Pressbooks moving forward. Press...
Wondering why @sfiscience’s excellent website has no RSS, ATOM, JSON, or other feed available? #scicomm
👓 Digital Literacy, Identity and a Domain of One’s Own | Connected Learning Alliance
Doug Belshaw (Connected Learning Alliance)Ten years ago, if I knew someone primarily through online means, you could guarantee they had their own domain name. It was just before the big explosion in social media use which meant that if you wanted a space online, you had to create it. This provided a barrier to entry in terms of the digital literacy skills required to register a domain, set up the necessary software and, of course, design, build and upload a website. The upside was that your digital identity was yours. That domain name could be your gamer tag, it could be your real name, it could be a heteronym — it was up to you!
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Ten years ago, if I knew someone primarily through online means, you could guarantee they had their own domain name. It was just before the big explosion in social media use which meant that if you wanted a space online, you had to create it. This provided a barrier to entry in terms of the digital literacy skills required to register a domain, set up the necessary software and, of course, design, build and upload a website. The upside was that your digital identity was yours. ❧
Why have we gotten away from this? In short, I think it’s because it was easier for big companies with massive resources to do the initial heavy lifting.
If we look at history, Gutenberg created the first printing press and guarded it heavily for years. Eventually others figured out how to do it and printing presses spread like wildfire. Now, with some modest means and some time, almost anyone can publish.
With simple standards and accessible hosting people can now broadly own their own domain name and create their own websites using a variety of content management systems. In a few years, this will be even more ubiquitous. Facebook is going to be just like Gutenberg attempting to hold onto his monopoly, but failing miserably.
The best part, I think, is that the speed of digital technology means that the Facebook edifice is going to crumble faster than Gutenberg’s.
Twitter and Facebook are publicly-traded companies and beholden to shareholders looking to make a profit. Google, which owns YouTube and processes over 70% of the world’s search traffic, is likewise legally obliged to return a profit. ❧
legally obligated? they’re definitely supposed to try or shareholders may move their money elsewhere, but why can’t they create things for the common good as well?
A world where one’s primary identity is found through the social people-farms of existing social networks is a problematic one. Educators and parents are in the privileged position of being able to help create a better future, but we need to start modeling to future generations what that might look like. ❧
This is exactly what I’ve been attempting to do with my own website. Naturally I use it selfishly for my own purposes, but I’m also using it to model potential behaviours for friends, family and colleagues.
I’m sometimes tempted to change the tagline on my website to “A digital canary in the coalmine”.
Some thoughts on silos, divisions, and bridges
Cruce Saunders (Twitter)Instead of 'eliminating' divisions, or 'blowing up' silos....let's use metaphors about bridging, connecting, unifying, transcending, collaborating across borders.... connecting all of the groups within an organization in a coherent way so that they all work seemlessly together.
— Cruce Saunders (@mrcruce) July 31, 2018
The #IndieWeb community has been working on this for a while. There’s even a service called Brid.gy to help enact it. At the same time, as Ben Werdmüller indicates, we need to be careful not to put too much reliance on silos’ APIs which can, and obviously will, be pulled out from underneath us at any moment.
As any kindergartner can tell you, “It’s difficult to play ball when the local bully owns the ball and wants to make up their own rules or leave in a huff.”
One of the things I love about IndieWeb is that we’re all trying to create a way for balls to be roughly standardized and mass manufactured so that everyone can play regardless of what the bully wants to do or what equipment people bring to the game.1
And as Nikhil Sonnad has reminded us very recently, we also need more than just connections, we need actual caring and thinking human interaction.2
References
1.
Aldrich C. Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet. A List Apart. https://alistapart.com/article/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet. Published July 19, 2018. Accessed July 31, 2018.
2.
Sonnad N. Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason. Quartz. https://qz.com/1342757/everything-bad-about-facebook-is-bad-for-the-same-reason/. Published July 30, 2018. Accessed July 31, 2018.
The IndieWeb and Academic Research and Publishing
A microcast with an outline for disrupting academic publishing
A microcast with an outline for disrupting academic publishing
#openscience #edtech #phdchat #DoOO #scholcomm #scicomm #libchat #acwri #samizdat #higherED
https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/28/the-indieweb-and-academic-research-and-publishing/
🎙 The IndieWeb and Academic Research and Publishing
Running time: 0h 12m 59s | Download (13.9 MB) | Subscribe by RSS |
Huffduff
Overview Workflow
Posting
Researcher posts research work to their own website (as bookmarks, reads, likes, favorites, annotations, etc.), they can post their data for others to review, they can post their ultimate publication to their own website.
Discovery/Subscription methods
The researcher’s post can webmention an aggregating website similar to the way they would pre-print their research on a server like arXiv.org. The aggregating website can then parse the original and display the title, author(s), publication date, revision date(s), abstract, and even the full paper itself. This aggregator can act as a subscription hub (with WebSub technology) to which other researchers can use to find, discover, and read the original research.
Peer-review
Readers of the original research can then write about, highlight, annotate, and even reply to it on their own websites to effectuate peer-review which then gets sent to the original by way of Webmention technology as well. The work of the peer-reviewers stands in the public as potential work which could be used for possible evaluation for promotion and tenure.
Feedback mechanisms
Readers of original research can post metadata relating to it on their own website including bookmarks, reads, likes, replies, annotations, etc. and send webmentions not only to the original but to the aggregation sites which could aggregate these responses which could also be given point values based on interaction/engagement levels (i.e. bookmarking something as “want to read” is 1 point where as indicating one has read something is 2 points, or that one has replied to something is 4 points and other publications which officially cite it provide 5 points. Such a scoring system could be used to provide a better citation measure of the overall value of of a research article in a networked world. In general, Webmention could be used to provide a two way audit-able trail for citations in general and the citation trail can be used in combination with something like the Vouch protocol to prevent gaming the system with spam.
Archiving
Government institutions (like Library of Congress), universities, academic institutions, libraries, and non-profits (like the Internet Archive) can also create and maintain an archival copy of digital and/or printed copies of research for future generations. This would be necessary to guard against the death of researchers and their sites disappearing from the internet so as to provide better longevity.
Show notes
Resources mentioned in the microcast
IndieWeb for Education
IndieWeb for Journalism
Academic samizdat
arXiv.org (an example pre-print server)
Webmention
A Domain of One’s Own
Article on A List Apart: Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet
Synidicating to Discovery sites
Examples of similar currently operating sites:
IndieNews (sorts posts by language)
IndieWeb.xyz (sorts posts by category or tag)
Kathleen did you own the domain where Planned Obsolescence1 was peer-reviewed? It may be one of the first major examples of book-length online academic samizdat of which I’m aware. Perhaps you know of others which could be documented? I suspect we could help provide additional exemplars and links to other web technology, platforms, plugins, etc. to make this an easier and more commonplace practice.
James Shelley, I’ve noticed your draft efforts2,3 as well. I’m curious if you could take a moment to document them, i.e. what you’re using, how you’ve planned it, etc. to help others as well.
If you’ve already blogged about these in the past, then even links to those could be helpful to others using similar publishing practices in the future. Thoughts on brainstorming, best practices, pros/cons, could be highly useful as the landscape changes.
References
1.
Fitzpatrick K. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. NYU Press. https://amzn.to/2NAfIPF. Published November 1, 2011. Accessed July 23, 2018.
2.
Shelley J. System Thinker Notebook. James Shelley. http://jamesshelley.com/drafts/simple.html. Published July 11, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2018.
3.
Shelley J. On the Simple Life. James Shelley. http://jamesshelley.com/drafts/simple.html. Published July 22, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2018.
Nir Zicherman (Medium)Thanks to modern cloud services, the cost of storing and serving content on the internet is incredibly cheap in 2018. With a podcasting platform like Anchor, there is no need for podcasters to pay anymore. So why are traditional podcast companies still charging creators to host files like it’s 2008?
He’s definitely got a major business behind this pitch, and he’s pitching people awfully hard to get them to give away all of their data for a “free” product. There’s the old adage though, “when the product is free, you’re the product.”
I’ve had friends online who’ve noted that this is at least the third time that Anchor.fm has “pivoted”, always seemingly to a larger and larger audience. I find myself wondering when the company is going to finally eat itself? Given that their product seems to change every six months or so, I also wonder if they last another 6 months?
Apparently he’s so bought into the idea of not owning your own data, that at least he’s posting this on one of the worst social silos out there. Just give it all away.
Reply to Sara Soueidan about front end development feeds
Sara Soueidan (Twitter)If you have a blog and write/share useful things (big or small) about Web design / front-end dev and you provide an RSS feed to the blog, please respond to this tweet w/ the URL for it — I’d like to add more useful content feeds to my reader.
— Sara Soueidan (@SaraSoueidan) July 20, 2018
I tinker on my own website and frequently write about IndieWeb related technologies because the web is my social media platform. The feed you might appreciate most is https://boffosocko.com/category/indieweb/feed/.
I have feeds for nearly every tag/category or post type on my site for convenience (just add /feed/ to almost anything). You could subscribe to my firehose feed, but I suspect even my mother would tire of it quickly.
I’m curious if you have OPML files or similar bundles of feeds you follow that are shareable or subscribe-able?
👓 Community Review | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)In my last book, Planned Obsolescence, I argued for the potentials of open, peer-to-peer review as a means of shedding some light on the otherwise often hidden processes of scholarly communication, enabling scholars to treat the process of review less as a mode of gatekeeping than as a formative moment in which they could learn from and contribute to their communities of practice. In Generous Thinking, my focus is somewhat different—less on the ways that scholars communicate with one another and more on the ways we invite the world into our work—but the emphasis on opening up our processes and imagining the ways that they might invite new kinds of conversations remains.
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The Los Angeles area conference for all west-coast things Drupal — July 21-22, 2018
👓 Sourcing Content: Sara Sargent of HarperCollins Children’s Books on Working With Wattpad | Publishing Perspectives
‘I’m now dedicating myself to doing things in a completely different way,’ HarperCollins Children’s Books’ executive editor Sara Sargent says, ‘combining a non-traditional way of sourcing books with traditional storytelling’ with Wattpad. Sara Sargent By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chie...
Finding material can be difficult and this certainly sounds like an interesting partial solution. Seems like there could be much larger solutions as well.