IndieWeb | Chris Aldrich

Reply to Flogging the Dead Horse of RSS by Dean Shareski

Replied to Flogging the Dead Horse of RSS by

Dean Shareski (Ideas and Thoughts)

And I think it’s true. I don’t use RSS the way I did in 2004. That said, I remember reading that blogging was dead ten years ago. And while it’s maybe not trendy, many educators have seen its value and maintained a presence. Apparently, RSS has some valid uses as well but like most everyone, I tend to use social as a place to find new and emerging ideas. But I also think using Twitter and Facebook to haphazardly find content lacks intention and depth. I also value reading a person’s blog over time to understand better their voice and context. So I’m asking for some advice on how to update my module on finding research. What replaces RSS feeds? What works for you that goes beyond “someone on Twitter/Facebook shared….” to something that is more focused and intentional?

Dean, I can completely appreciate where you’re coming from. I too am still addicted to RSS (as well as a plethora of other feed types including Atom, JSON, and h-feeds). I didn’t come across your article by feed however, but instead by Aaron Davis’ response to your post which he posted on his own website and then pinged my site with his repsonse using a web specification called Webmention. We’re both members of a growing group of researchers, educators, and others who are using our own websites to act as our social media presences and using new technologies like Webmention to send notifications from website to website to carry on conversations.

While many of us are also relying on RSS, there are a variety of new emerging technologies that are making consuming and replying to content online easier while also allowing people to own all of their associated data. In addition to my article about The Feed Reader Revolution which Aaron mentioned in his reply, Aaron Pareck has recently written about Building an IndieWeb Reader. I suspect that some of these ideas encapsulate a lot of what you’d like to see on the web.

Most of us are doing this work and experimentation under the banner known as the IndieWeb. Since you know some of the web’s prior history, you might appreciate this table that will give you some idea of what the group has been working on. In particular I suspect you may appreciate some of the resources we’re compiling for IndieWeb for Education. If it’s something you find interest in, I hope you might join in our experimentations. You can find many of us in the group’s online chat.

I would have replied in your comments section, but unfortunately through a variety of quirks Disqus marks everything I publish to it immediately as spam. Thus my commentary is invariably lost. Instead, I’m posting it to a location I do have stricter control over–my own website. I’ll send you a tweet to provide you the notification of the post. I will cross-post my reply to Disqus if you want to dig into your spam folder to unspam it for display. In the meanwhile, I’m following you and subscribing to your RSS feed.

👓 Retroactive Webmentioning | Peter Rukavina

Read Retroactive Webmentioning by

Peter Rukavina (ruk.ca)

By way of testing out my Webmention module for Drupal, I took the 256 posts I’ve written here this year, ferreted out all the external links, discovered their Webmention endpoints, and sent a Webmention. Those 256 posts contained 840 links in total; of those links, 149 were to a target that suppor...

There are some interesting/useful statistics here. There’s also an interesting kernel of an idea about how one links to one’s own website internally as well. I find this very intriguing with respect to owning a digital commonplace book. Perhaps there are some ways to modify IndieMap for extracting some useful metadata out of one’s own website?

👓 Controlling How Webmentions are Rendered | ruk.ca

Read Controlling How Webmentions are Rendered by

Peter Rukavina (ruk.ca)

Ton continues to wrap his head around Webmention, and wonders about how mentions should be displayed on the “mentioned” site: What strikes me as odd now is how little control I have over how the Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins actually deal with webmention data. The stuff I’d like to...

👓 Wrapping My Head Around Webmentions Pt 2 | Interdependent Thoughts

Read Wrapping My Head Around Webmentions Pt 2 by

Ton Zijlstra (Interdependent Thoughts)

I very much appreciate how Sven Knebel extensively responded to my previous posting on some Webmention issues I came across. Some of his responses do make me have new questions. About the wrong URL, i.e. not the source of the webmention, showing up in a Webmention, Sven writes: …. There’s a href...

👓 There is no single solution to making the internet more decentralised – The art of the possible | The Economist

Read There is no single solution to making the internet more decentralised (The Economist)

Stopping the internet from getting too concentrated will be a slog, but the alternative would be worse

This has generally been an interesting series of articles in The Economist.

As John Sherman, the senator who gave his name to America’s original antitrust law in 1890, put it at a time when the robber barons ruled much of America’s economy: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessaries of life.” ❧

👓 Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags | Locus Magazine

Read Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags by Cory Doctorow (Locus Online)

For 20 years, privacy advocates have been sounding the alarm about commercial online surveillance, the way that companies gather deep dossiers on us to help marketers target us with ads. This pitch…

Reply to Tom Critchlow on feeds

Replied to a post by

Tom Critchlow (tomcritchlow.com)

This is a list of the feeds I'm reading. The page auto-updates every 10 minutes or so. Why? Because we need to resist the hyperfeeds and build our own small feeds in the open

I’m curious how you’re generating your particular feeds. For over a year now I’ve been using a simple bookmarklet system to post what I’m reading, listening to, and watching to my own website and providing it as various feeds (RSS, JSON, and a microformats-based hfeed/h-feed) for others as well as syndicating some of these to other sources. (For the RSS feeds just add /feed/ to the end of the links above. You can also chain them like so http://boffosocko.com/kind/read,listen,watch/ to get multiple feeds at once.)

I wish others were providing this type of data outside of the big silos as well, but it obviously needs to be much simpler.

👓 Microsub and the new reader evolution | skippy.net

Read Microsub and the new reader evolution by

Scott Merrill (skippy.net)

I was an avid Google Reader user. When it shut down, I started hosting my own RSS reader: first tt-rss, and later miniflux. I very much liked being able to subscribe to sites and read them at my leisure. I also appreciated not having my reading habits tracked or quantified. I had maybe two dozen f...

What I was really after was the confluence of RSS feeds and Twitter and the ability to post to my own site.

👓 OAuth for the Open Web | Aaron Parecki

Read OAuth for the Open Web by

Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)

OAuth has become the de facto standard for authorization and authentication on the web. Nearly every company with an API used by third party developers has implemented OAuth to enable people to build apps on top of it. While OAuth is a great framework for this, the way it has ended up being used is ...

👓 Planning a DoOO Summer Camp – Newbies Corner | Reclaim Hosting Community

Read Planning a DoOO Summer Camp by

Alan Levine (Reclaim Hosting Community)

For participants in the eCampus Ontario Extend project, some of whom have gotten Reclaim hosting, some who will be starting. I’m planning on running a 4 week online “summer camp” workshop. This will be open for anyone who wants to get involved. It will likely be a weekly “lesson” with some activities, an intro how to video, a weekly open office hours via Zoom, and a lot of tweeting & blogging. I’m curious to hear from others who have developed intro materials what sort of topics you find are m...