Paul Jacobson (Paul Jacobson)Facebook News (or, rather, a Facebook News tab), is rolling out in the USA, and there are valid concerns about this already, for various reasons. Whether you’re in the USA, or not, you don’t need (and may not want to rely on) Facebook News to keep up with the news. Instead, there is a tried, tested, and widely available alternative that you can configure to suit your preferences right now: feed readers.
End end screen of Soylent Green with a caption that described the difference between the IndieWeb and the corporate, siloed web.
Digital journalism and online culture.
I wonder how IndieWeb specific his version of journalism is?
After having watched the livestream of Tantek Çelik’s invited talk at WordCamp US entitled Take Back Your Web, I’ll note that my intention is to generally pick up from where he left off and get into some of the nuts and bolts of what some of the IndieWeb philosophies and technologies are and how they work with WordPress. (Though don’t worry if you missed his talk, I’ll put all the ideas into their larger context.) I’ll approach it from the perspective of a WordPress beginner, but will have some pointers to lots of in-depth resources for designers and developers. In short, I’ll attempt to provide a crash-course overview of what the IndieWeb looks like from a WordPress perspective.
Below is a brief teaser for the talk:
I can have phone service on Verizon and you may choose to use AT&T, T-Mobile, or Sprint, but as long as we’ve got phones we can talk to each other or any other phone number that’s connected to the network. But why can’t Facebook users interact directly with Twitter users or Instagram users or vice versa? Crucially why couldn’t one website built on WordPress talk to another website built with Drupal or Kirby? The internet is an open communication platform after all! I’m going to show how this (and so much more magic) can all be done with some simple plugins in under an hour!
Over the past several years a group of dedicated bloggers, technologists, and designers has been innovating, building, and testing a suite of open W3C web standards to allow their personal websites to recreate the major pieces of interactive functionality that are part of the largest social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, SoundCloud, etc. These larger pieces are now all working together across dozens of content management systems including WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, ProcessWire, Elgg, Nucleus CMS, Craft, Django, Kirby, static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll and services like Micro.Blog and Mastodon. This means that instead of relying on smaller non-interoperable social media sites that obsessively surveil you and then pollute your stream with obtrusive ads, you can now better own and control your own data and comprehensive identity on your own domain name. In this talk we’ll take a high level look at W3C web specs including Webmention, WebSub, Micropub, and the forthcoming Microsub to see how you can make your own website a first class citizen on the (social) web. Using WordPress and a few simple plugins you can now close the circle of website-to-website intercommunication across the open web. Use your own website to read and consume web content, post your own status updates, bookmarks, likes, and replies while interacting directly with other websites. In many cases you can also do this with social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, GitHub, Mastodon, and Micro.blog.
While I’ve learned a lot in my experiment, I’ll have to ruminate on it a bit longer before writing any specific takeaways. One of my favorite portions has been some work to pull more data out of the books I’m reading in terms of highlights, notes, and marginalia for research purposes.
In general, not much has changed here directly, but I will have to get used to the the posting interface and some of my old workflows again. I’ll also need to get around to some general updates and fixes that I’ve let slide for far too long. I’ll also have to catch up on some change logs for things that have improved since my hiatus began.
I will say that while I’ve been very productive during my hiatus, which has included stepping away significantly from other forms of social media consumption as well, I also very much miss interacting with a lot of my online friends and colleagues on a more regular basis. It’ll be good to ease back into my feed reader and see what everyone has been up to for the past several months.
Growing toxicity on Twitter, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, algorithmic feeds, and a myriad of other problems have opened our eyes to the ever-growing costs of social media. Walled gardens have trapped us with the promise of “free” while addicting us to their products at the cost of our happiness, sense of self, sanity, and privacy. Can we take back our fractured online identities, data, and privacy to regain what we’ve lost?
I’ll talk about how I’ve used IndieWeb related technologies in conjunction with WordPress as a replacement for my social presence while still allowing easy interaction with friends, family, and colleagues online. I’ll show how everyone can easily use simple web standards to make WordPress a user-controlled, first-class social platform that works across domains and even other CMSs.
Let’s democratize social media using WordPress and the open web, the last social network you’ll ever need to join.
One of the things I’d love to see pop up out of the discovery explorations of the IndieWeb or some of the social readers in the space is the ability to uncover some of this social reading information. Toward this end I thought I’d collect some user interface examples of things that border on this sort of data to make the brainstorming and building of such functionality easier in the near future.
If I’m missing useful examples or you’d like to add additional thoughts, please feel free to comment below.
I don’t often search for reading material directly, but Google has a related bit of UI indicating that I’ve visited a website before. I sort of wish it had the ability to surface the fact that I’ve previously read or bookmarked an article or provided data about people in my social network who’ve done similarly within the browser interface for a particular article (without the search.) If a browser could use data from my personal website in the background to indicate that I’ve interacted with it before (and provide those links, notes, etc.), that would be awesome!
I’ll note here that because of the way I bookmark or post reads on my own website, my site often ranks reasonably well for those things.
In some cases, others who are posting about those things (reading, commenting, bookmarking, liking, etc.) in my social network also show up in these sorts of searches. How cool would it be to have a social reader that could display this sort of social data based on people it knows I’m following?
Hypothes.is is a great open source highlighting, annotation, and bookmarking tool with a browser extension that shows an indicator of how many annotations appear on the page. In my experience, higher numbers often indicate some interesting and engaging material. I do wish that it had a follower/following model that could indicate my social sphere has annotated a page. I also wouldn’t mind if their extension “bug” in the browser bar had another indicator in the other corner to indicate that I had previously annotated a page!
It doesn’t do it until after-the-fact, but Reading.am has a pop up overlay through its browser extension. It adds me to the list of people who’ve read an article, but it also indicates others in the network and those I’m following who have also read it (sometimes along with annotations about their thoughts).
What I wouldn’t give to see that pop up in the corner before I’ve read it!
Nuzzel is one of my favorite tools. I input my Twitter account as well as some custom lists and it surfaces articles that people in my Twitter network have been tweeting about. As a result, it’s one of the best discovery tools out there for solid longer form content. Rarely do I read content coming out of Nuzzel and feel robbed. Because of how it works, it’s automatically showing those people in my network and some of what they’ve thought about it. I love this contextualization.
Naturally sites for much longer form content will use social network data about interest, reviews, and interaction to a much greater extent since there is a larger investment of time involved. Thus social signaling can be more valuable in this context. A great example here is of Goodreads which shows me those in my network who are interested in reading a particular book or who have written reviews or given ratings.
Are there other examples I’m missing? Are you aware of similar discovery related tools for reading that leverage social network data?
https://indieweb.org/2019
https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamps/Attendance
https://chat.indieweb.org/indieweb/
What will be your future in open education? It will likely not be written inside a fortune cookie, but you can make sure you get the fortune you want.
Use the PhotoFunia Fortune Cookie Generator to produce the one you would like to see happen for yourself.
Borrowed from the Mural UDG Daily Opener 17
Photo made using PhotoFunia
April 6, 2019, 3:30 pm Horseshoe Ranch Room, University Center, College of the Canyons — The W3C recommended Micropub specification (2017) allows developers to create custom posting applications for a wide variety of data targeting any content management system that supports the spec.
Chris Aldrich provides an overview of the available plugin and endpoint for WordPress and a variety of client applications like Quill, Teacup, OwnYourGram, OwnYour Swarm, Omnibear, that allow one to post status updates, bookmarks, likes, check-ins/location data, photos, and more directly to WordPress sites.
We’ll also talk about how developers can create custom posting interfaces to drastically simplify content creation and posting for clients in ways that can be even simpler than working with Gutenberg.
Katherine Moss (Twitter)Has anyone from the #IndieWeb gotten OwnYourSwarm to show the number of coins on a #Wordpress configured site? I get all of my webmentions except for those. I'm still trying to figure that one out. Thanks.
— Katherine Moss (@Cambridgeport90) June 22, 2019
I’ve definitely get them on my site. I think David Shanske updated the Semantic Linkbacks plugin a year or more ago to pares and display them correctly, so it should be just a matter of making sure that the toggle is set to on to get them.
