Personal websites and email can replace most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online.
Category: IndieWeb
Following Ana R
My name is Ana and I'm a front end developer in London. I started developing for the web over 10 years ago, as a hobby. I am interested in ethics, indie web, sustainability and cats.
An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 12 Gutenberg
👓 The Web Finally Feels New Again | KicksCondor
(Joe’s full article is here.)
Yes, here we are again—I think what you’re saying is that even a single-line annotation of a link, even just a few words of human curation do wonders when you’re out discovering the world. (Perhaps even more than book recommendations—where we know that at leas...
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
it made me feel like we were trying to send some kind of concentrated transmission to the author—linking as a greeting, links as an invitation. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 04:14PM
I do find that Webmentions are really enhancing linking—by offering a type of bidirectional hyperlink. I think if they could see widespread use, we’d see a Renaissance of blogging on the Web. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 04:17PM
I’m really not sure if linking, in general, has changed over the years. I’ve been doing it the same since day one. But that’s just me. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 04:22PM
👓 I’ve now removed the titles in the RSS feed from posts in the micro category using the_title_rss | John Johnston
I’ve now removed the titles in the RSS feed from posts in the micro category using the_title_rss. So I’ve reenabled adding of titles through wp_insert_post_data. If this works this post will have a title in my dashboard, but all get through to micro.blog
In the end though, it still feels too much like individuals trying to solve problems that should be better handled by feed readers and the platforms.
👓 Overthinking Instagram | Oh Hello Ana
I very rarely share online if something isn’t going well in my life. I’ve always treated my social media the same way most of us do: we only share the good bits. I thought I was doing that but nowadays, I look back at some photos of what looks like an excellent time of my life but now I know ver...
As I think about it, some personal-related posts could potentially be marked to auto-expire (unpost themselves) at some future date and be auto-archived to one’s back end so that they’re no longer public, but so that they exist if one wants to look at them personally, but also so that they’re also hidden from the site owner and need to be actively searched for. As an example, I can imagine something along the lines of a “dating” tag so that when one creates an “engaged” or “married” post that all the old dating history disappears? There is some existing artwork and thought about this on the IndieWeb wiki that I came across a week or so ago in relation to Last.fm’s expiring content, but more work and motivation could be added.
Incidentally, like many, I’ve begun reading her regularly and she’s not only quite the writer, but she’s got a pretty little site as well. I highly recommend folks give her a look and subscribe.
Maybe during this Christmas break I will find the guts to do a purge but I know that it will be a “fake purge”. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 02:57PM
👓 Two spikes in my posting history | doubleloop
I’ve been playing around with Metabase to view a few stats about my website. frequency and spikes
It was fun to look at the frequency of my posts over time – you see quite a prominent spike around March and April 2017, and then there’s a slowish decline in frequency until around August/Septemb...
I haven’t really delved into microsub yet, but I suspect it’s going to have an even more profound effect on my reading and posting habits.
👓 Walt Mossberg, Veteran Technology Journalist, Quits Facebook | The New York Times
Mr. Mossberg has spent decades chronicling the privacy implications of Facebook’s policies. On Monday, he opted out.
Walt Mossberg is far from alone in giving up on Facebook. But as a leading technology journalist who has spent decades chronicling the impact of Silicon Valley’s policies, his exit from the social network speaks louder than most.
Since it will be gone soon, I’ve archived a copy of his Facebook post.
🔖 JSON-LD And You – Google Slides | Aram Zucker-Scharff
A presentation on Google Docs.
Hi, I’m Aram Zucker-Scharff and now that we’re settled in, I’ll take a minute to introduce myself. I’m the Director of Ad Tech Engineering at The Washington Post, where I work with teams across the organization to help the Post make money and, through our Arc platform, help other publications make money as well. But I’ve taken a long road to this point, I started off as a journalist, then an editor, a social media manager, a product manager, a freelance strategy consultant and developer and last a full stack developer. I even spent some time being very bad at selling ads.
I dug around a bit and didn’t see any video from this session.
🎧 This Week in Google 481 Stoned on Cheese | TWIG.tv
Foldable Phone, Online Civility
- The Samsung Developers Conference Keynote features a foldable phone, SmartThings IoT, and Bixby innovations.
- Android will support foldable phones.
- Google employees stage a walkout over sexual harassment
- Tim Berners-Lee's Contract for the Web
- How to encourage civility online
- YouTube Content ID
- Facebook and "White Genocide"
- Young people are deleting Facebook in droves
- Facebook's holiday pop-up store
- Everybody gets free Amazon shipping
- Amazon's new HQ2(s)
- 8 new Chromebook features
- Google Home Hub teams up with Sephora
- Ajit Pai's FCC is hopping mad about robocalls
Picks of the Week
- Jeff's Number: Black Friday home tech deals
- Stacey's Thing: Extinct cables, Alexa Christmas Lights
While most people are forced to rely on Google as their silo of choice for video and specifically live streaming video, he points out a painful single point of failure in their system with regard to copyright rules and Google’s automatic filters that could get a user/content creator permanently banned. Worse, as Leo indicates, this ban could also extend to related Google accounts (YouTube, Gmail, etc.) One is thus open to potential chilling effects of intimidation, censorship, and deplatforming.
Leo discusses the fact that he’s not as beholden to YouTube because he streams and hosts all of his content on his own website and only utilizes silos like YouTube as ancillary distribution. In IndieWeb parlance what he does is known as POSSE or Post to your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere and this prevents his journalism, commentary, and even his business from being ravaged by the whims of corporate entities whose rules he can’t control directly.
The discussion starts at 1:05:11 into the episode and goes for about 10 minutes for those who are interested in this particular sub-topic.
This idea also impinges on Cal Newport’s recent article Is YouTube Fundamental or Trivial? which I read the other day.
👓 Top 5 Technology Trends of 2018 | Richard MacManus
Every December going back to 2004, I’ve done an end-of-year review of the top Internet technology trends. As a source for this year’s review, I’m using the nearly fifty weekly columns I’ve written over the course of 2018. They’re a good indicator of what I’ve focused on during the year, and what has defined this year in terms of online technology.
👓 The Slow Web | Paul Robert Lloyd
While the rise of blogging in the early 2000s can be seen as enabling true democratisation of publishing, the emergence of social media – within whose walled gardens content is curtailed and controlled – has begun to undermine it.
👓 Is there a RSS revival going on? | Andy Sylvester
Earlier this week, Taylor Lorenz, staff writer for The Atlantic on Internet culture, posted this on Twitter: Is there any good way to follow writers on a bunch of diff websites, so anytime they post a story I see a link or something in a single feed? This resulted in a series of over 40 replies with...
👓 Beyond #DeleteFacebook: More Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media | Cal Newport
Last week, I wrote a blog post emphasizing the distinction between the social internetand social media. The former describes the internet’s ability to enable connection, learning, and expression. The latter describes the attempt of a small number of large companies to monetize these capabilities inside walled-garden, monopoly platforms.
My argument is that you can embrace the social internet without having to become a “gadget” inside the algorithmic attention economy machinations of the social media conglomerates. As noted previously, I think this is the right answer for those who are fed up with the dehumanizing aspects of social media, but are reluctant to give up altogether on the potential of the internet to bring people together.
👓 Is YouTube Fundamental or Trivial? | Study Hacks – Cal Newport
As an interesting aside, I’ll note that just a few months ago that YouTube allowed people to do embeds with several options, but they’re recently removed the option to prevent their player from recommending additional videos once you’re done. Thus the embedding site is still co-opted to some extent by YouTube and their vexing algorithmic recommendations.
In a similar vein audio is also an issue, but at least an easier and much lower bandwidth one. I’ve been running some experiments lately on my own website by posting what I’m listening to on a regular basis as a “faux-cast” and embedding the original audio. I’ve also been doing it pointedly as a means of helping others discover good content, because in some sense I can say I love the most recent NPR podcast or click like on it somewhere, but I’m definitely sure that doesn’t have as much weight or value as my tacitly saying, “I’ve actually put my time and attention on the line and actually listened to this particular episode.” I think having and indicating skin-in-the-game can make a tremendous difference in these areas. In a similar vein, sites like Twitter don’t really have a good bookmarking feature, so readers don’t know if the sharing user actually read any of an article or if it was just the headline. Posting these things separately on my own site as either reads or bookmarks allows me to differentiate between the two specifically and semantically, both for others’ benefit as well as, and possibly most importantly, for my own (future self).