👓 We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites | Motherboard

Read We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites (Motherboard)
Personal websites and email can replace most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online.
There’s a lot of talk about leaving Facebook again in the last day or two, but very little on where to go other than a few people talking about Twitter or other toxic social media that will just end up starting the same cycle of pain and frustration again. This is at least a start, but it could lean more towards a full IndieWeb approach.

An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 12 Gutenberg

Episode 12: Gutenberg

Running time: 1h 49m 01s | Download (34.2MB) | Subscribe by RSS | Huffduff

Summary: We have a late night discussion of the new WordPress Gutenberg editor and the usual project talk.

Recorded: Thursday, December 13, 2018

Shownotes

TK

👓 The Web Finally Feels New Again | KicksCondor

Read The Web Finally Feels New Again by Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)
(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.  

I love the idea of this.

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.  

Only in the last hour I’ve had a thought about a subtle change to one of the ways I link. It’s not a drastic thing, but it is a subtle change to common practices. Also as I think about it, it removes some of the obviousness of links on social platforms like Twitter that add the ugly @ to a username in addition to other visual changes when one mentions someone else.

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

Read a post by john john (John's World Wide Wall Display)
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
This seems like a cool potential way of doing all sorts of things in the IndieWeb space for WordPress. I’m curious what it looks like from other perspectives. I’ll have to think this through a bit…

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

Read Overthinking Instagram by Ana Ana (Oh Hello Ana - Blog)
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...
This post has a lot of great things to think about for people either designing social media related websites, or even IndieWeb site designers who might want to take advantage of these things for themselves. I don’t see these issues being written or talked about enough in the community, so I’m glad that designers and developers like Ana are starting to consider them.

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”.  

I’ve been seeing a lot about (Japanese) minimalism this past year in relation to physical goods, but hadn’t considered what a minimal social media presence would look like. This is definitely something that could use some more thought, both in minimalism of code, typography, and even design.

December 19, 2018 at 02:57PM

👓 Two spikes in my posting history | doubleloop

Read Two spikes in my posting history by Neil MatherNeil Mather (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 should look at the data for posting on my own site to see what the underlying mechanisms may be. Of course just the move to own all of my online posting and the general ideas behind IndieWeb, but before looking at data, I suspect most of it is related to bookmarklets for Post Kinds being so simple to use. 

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

Read Walt Mossberg, Veteran Technology Journalist, Quits Facebook by Daniel Victor (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.

This is a HUGE silo quit! There are few who watch the technology sector so closely as Walt Mossberg has for the past several decades.

Since it will be gone soon, I’ve archived a copy of his Facebook post.

🔖 JSON-LD And You – Google Slides | Aram Zucker-Scharff

Bookmarked JSON-LD And You: A Guide to Structured Metadata for Journalism by Aram Zucker-ScharffAram Zucker-Scharff (docs.google.com)

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.

Aram Zucker-Scharff is about as sharp as it gets when it comes to journalism, adtech, and technology. I do wish he’d spent some additional time on Microformats (or even the v2 implementation) as they’re still broadly supported and much less likely to be treated as the flavor-of-the-month that JSON-LD and schema.org are currently.

I dug around a bit and didn’t see any video from this session.

🎧 This Week in Google 481 Stoned on Cheese | TWIG.tv

Listened to This Week in Google 481 Stoned on Cheese by Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham from TWiT.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
Leo Laporte doesn’t talk about it directly within an IndieWeb specific framework, but he’s got an interesting discussion about YouTube Content ID that touches on the ideas of Journalism and IndieWeb and particularly as they relate to video, streaming video, and YouTube Live.

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

Read Top 5 Technology Trends of 2018 (ricmac.org)
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.
A solid analysis of much of tech this past year. I’ve also noticed a slowing of the blockchain story this year and his statement “Perhaps the technology will yet prove useful, but the crypto community has a lot of work to do before that happens – not the least in re-focusing on product, rather than price.” is right on target.

👓 The Slow Web | Paul Robert Lloyd

Read The Slow Web by Paul Robert Lloyd (paulrobertlloyd.com)
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

Read Is there a RSS revival going on? by Andy Sylvester (andysylvester.com)
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...
Interesting that it looks like she subsequently deleted the original post….

👓 Beyond #DeleteFacebook: More Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media | Cal Newport

Read Beyond #DeleteFacebook: More Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media by Cal Newport (Study Hacks)

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

Replied to Is YouTube Fundamental or Trivial? by Cal Newport (Study Hacks)

As a public critic of social media, I’m often asked if my concerns extend to YouTube. This is a tricky question.

As I’ve written, platforms such as Facebook and Instagram didn’t offer something fundamentally different than the world wide web that preceded them. Their main contribution was to make this style of online life more accessible and convenient.

I suspect that people have generally been exploring some of this already, particularly with embedding. The difficult part on moving past YouTube, Vimeo, et al. with streaming or even simple embedding is that video on the web is a big engineering problem not to mention a major bandwidth issue for self-hosters. I’ve seen scions like Kevin Marks indicate in the past that they’d put almost any type of content on their own websites natively but video. Even coding a JavaScript player on one’s site is prohibitively difficult and rarely do major corporate players in the video content space bother to do this themselves. Thus, until something drastic happens, embedding video may be the only sensible way to go.

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).