IndieWeb | Chris Aldrich

👓 The year we step back from the platform | Nieman Journalism Lab | Ernie Smith

Read The year we step back from the platform by

"Let's replace the shadows that Twitter and Facebook and Google have been on the media with some business-model fundamentals. As 2018 has shown, they've offered us a lot more heartache than it feels like they're actually worth."

This is a very staid and sober statement about the ills of social media platforms (aka silos) and a proposed way forward for 2019. His argument is tremendously bolstered by the fact that he’s actually got his own website where he’s hosting and distributing his own content.

Ernie, should you see this, I’d welcome you to come join a rapidly growing group of creators who have been doing almost exactly what you’ve prescribed. We’re amassing a wealth of knowledge, tools, code, and examples at Indieweb.org to help you and others on their journey to better owning and controlling their online identities in almost the exact way in which you’re talking about in your article. Both individually and together we’re trying to build web websites that allow all the functionality of the platforms, but in a way that is both easy and beautiful for everyone to manage and use. Given the outlet for your piece, I’ll also mention that there’s a specific page for IndieWeb and Journalism.

I’d invite you to join the online chat and add yourself as an example to any of the appropriate pages, including perhaps for Craft. Also feel free to discuss your future plans and ask for any help or support you’d like to see for improving your own website. Together I hope we can all make your prediction for 2019 a reality.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

But what if, in 2019, we take a step back and decide not to let the platform decide how to run the show? ❧

The IndieWeb has already made some solid strides.

January 09, 2019 at 07:55AM

I’ve been working on a redesign of my site recently, using a more robust CMS, and the advantages of controlling the structure of the platform soup-to-nuts are obvious, even if it requires more upfront work. ❧

January 09, 2019 at 07:57AM

2019 is the year when publishers — whether big ones like Axios or the Los Angeles Times or tiny ones like mine or Judd Legum’s Popular Information — move away from letting someone else call all the shots. Or, at least, they should. ❧

There’s already some work and movement in the IndieWeb with respect to journalism.

January 09, 2019 at 08:01AM

👓 5 CMS tools for indie bloggers | Indie Digital Media

Read 5 CMS tools for indie bloggers by Richard MacManus (Indie Digital Media)

This is a golden age for indie digital media creators, who have more content creation options than ever in 2019. In fact, there are arguably too many tools to chose from. That’s why I’m going to regularly examine the tools of digital media creation here on IDM - for everything…

🎧 IndieWebCamp Berlin 2018 Session Summaries | Marty McGuire

Listened to IndieWebCamp Berlin 2018 Session Summaries by

Marty McGuire from martymcgui.re

Listen to a summary of all the sessions at IndieWebCamp Berlin 2018!

Session notes: https://indieweb.org/2018/Berlin/Sessions

Narration by Marty McGuire
Edited by Aaron Parecki

This is a repost of https://aaronparecki.com/2018/11/18/7/indiewebcamp-berlin.

Interesting to see this served from Aaron’s domain when it looks and sounds just like another of Marty’s podcast. I’m guessing they collaborated at camp to put it together. I love the idea of not only having this as a quick audio summary of all the sessions, which I’ll now have to go back and watch a few, but of having this as a simple section at the end of day one at IndieWebCamps.

The sessions on Microformats, Displaying Responses, Data Ethics, Making your website work offline, and Location sound like interesting things to take deeper looks into. I particularly like the idea of separating the legal and the ethical portions completely away from each other and doing the ethical portion first and then secondly filtering that through any legal loopholes. Ideally the legal filter won’t actually be filtering anything out if the ethical is done properly, and if it does, then perhaps the legal has some issues.

👓 Blocking Domains in webmention.io | Aaron Parecki

Read Blocking Domains in webmention.io by

Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)

For the past week or so, I've been getting a series of Pingbacks from a spam blog that reposts a blog post a couple times a day as a new post each time. It's up to about 220 copies of the post, each one having sent me a Pingback, and each one showing up in my reader as a notification, which also cau...

👓 2019 Book Industry Predictions: The Butterflies Will Flap Their Wings | Smashwords

Read 2019 Book Industry Predictions: The Butterflies Will Flap Their Wings (blog.smashwords.com)

Welcome to my annual publishing predictions. I’ll start by sharing some thoughts on the state of the indie nation and then I’ll jump int...

This post is very anti-Amazon and has an IndieWeb flavor. Sadly, it comes mostly from the perspective of yet-another-silo that is competing with Amazon. A better and more holistic solution would be for them to be supporting authors owning their own platforms for publishing and distribution.

There’s also a useful question brought up here about the idea of discovering new authors and new books. It’s a similar problem faced by websites and other online content in general. Silo’s general nature and the algorithms they can bring to bear have solved some of the discovery question (for their own enrichment). Solving this from an indie perspective isn’t just useful from the website content perspective, but it’s also very important for the book sales perspective.

A cursory look at my website for 2018

I just added it up quickly and realized that I posted publicly to my website/blog/commonplace book a total of 4,694 times in 2018! Holy cow!

I don’t have quite the crazy analysis that Jeremy Keith has done of his posts, and I initially thought that there was no way I’d posted as much as he had. Perhaps it might be worth delving deeper into the numbers to see exactly what is going on?

Possibly worse(?!), that total posting number is up from 1,762 public posts in 2017. I can only attribute the increase in quantity to the ability to increasingly easily post to my site via micropub clients and some simple bookmarklets I use in conjunction with David Shanske’s brilliant Post Kinds plugin. G-d bless the IndieWeb and its tremendously helpful community for helping me take back ownership of my digital online life. I can only imagine how much higher that number goes this coming year if I can manage to build a Microsub set up and indie reader into my website and make the entire processes even more friction-less.

I unwittingly spent a few minutes last night on cleaning up some plumbing on my back end that will make it easier to follow up (when necessary) on likes, reads, and bookmarks that I collect.

I can’t bear to go through and count the number of private posts for the year, but I will say that having my own online searchable database of things I’ve written, replied to, bookmarked, read, listened to, watched, annotated, etc. has been incredibly useful over the past few years.