IndieWeb | Chris Aldrich

👓 Daniel Goldsmith’s reply to Sebastian Greger

Read a post by Daniel Goldsmith (View from ASCRAEUS)

Sebastian, first of all, thank you for your detailed write up on this issue. I think much of your roadmap is worthwhile, and of great interest.

I cannot, however, say that I am convinced by your contentions regarding the effect of GDPR and indieweb sites. In particular, I think your definitions are excessively broad, and you elide much information from both the Regulation itself and the Recitals.

It’s certainly interesting to see some of the replies to Sebastian’s article. It’s definitely stirring up some interesting thought. Daniel’s reply here is primarily to the legal issues at stake more than the design related issues, which have some interesting merit aside from the legal ones.

I think I fall somewhere in the middle of the two and see some of the moral and ethical pieces which are more important from a people perspective. I’m not as concerned about the law portion of it for a large variety of reasons. It’s most interesting to me to see the divide between how those in the EU and particularly Germany view the issue and those in the United States which may be looking at regulations in the coming years, particularly after the recent Facebook debacle.

As I think of these, I’m reminded about some of the cultural differences between Europe and the United States which Jeff Jarvis has expounded upon over the past several years. Europeans are generally more leery of corporations and trust government a bit more while in America it’s the opposite.

👓 The Web We Need to Give Students | BRIGHT Magazine

Read The Web We Need to Give Students by Audrey Watters (BRIGHT Magazine)

“Giving students their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web.”

Not sure how this surfaced into my feeds again today, but interesting to see it pop up. I’m also noticing that Audrey smartly posted a copy to her own site after it appeared in Bright.

In this article, she touches on some reasons why it’s important for students to have their own domain, but many of these ideas and arguments also work well for almost anyone. It’s interesting to see how similar the philosophy she describes here dovetails with that of the IndieWeb.

👓 I believe in the IndieWeb. It needs to believe in itself. | Jason McIntosh

Read I believe in the IndieWeb. It needs to believe in itself. by Jason McIntosh (Fogknife)

IndieWeb has forged keys to a better, more democratic web for everyone. They need to get organized before they can start really effecting change.

I love the enthusiasm and excitement here and still share it to a great extent myself. At the same time, however some of the tools are still growing and aren’t quite ready for prime time, particularly for the masses who don’t have the technical expertise yet. As a result, slow continued growth may still be the best course.

On the other hand, I think the area is incredibly ripe for businesses to come in and offer “IndieWeb as a service”. A few more things like micro.blog will certainly help to tip the balance.

Much like the featured photo on the post, while there’s some gorgeous blue sky, there’s still a few clouds, and some of the waters may be difficult to navigate for some without the correct boats. But at the end of the day, this is exactly the kind of paradise world many of us have wanted to live in for a long time!

👓 human beings | Khürt Williams

Read human beings (Island in the Net)

I’m saddened that a blog post linking to another blog post might need to include a disclaimer even if some of it is in jest. A part of me thinks we’re headed down a path of permission based interactions. Both online and offline. If that happens during my lifetime I’ll exit this experiment called the USA, to places where human beings are still human beings.

I was being facetious and satirical, but all the same… This is just the type of response I was aiming at eliciting.

Fantastic photo, by the way!

RSVP to IndieWeb Summit – June 26-27, 2018 – Portland, Oregon

RSVPed Attending IndieWeb Summit - June 26-27, 2018 - Portland, Oregon

The eighth annual gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their own personal websites, and build upon each others creations.

I can’t wait!

Reply to The Indieweb privacy challenge (Webmentions, silo backfeeds, and the GDPR) by Sebastian Greger

Replied to The Indieweb privacy challenge (Webmentions, silo backfeeds, and the GDPR) by

Sebastian Greger (sebastiangreger.net)

Originally intended to showcase a privacy-centred implementation of emerging social web technologies – with the aim to present a solution not initially motivated by legal requirements, but as an example of privacy-aware interaction design – my “social backfeed” design process unveiled intricate challenges for Indieweb sites, both for privacy in general and legal compliance in particular.

Again Sebastian Greger has written up a well-thought-out and nuanced approach to design. Here he discusses privacy and GDPR with a wealth of research and direct personal experience in these areas. He’s definitely written something interesting which I hope sparks the beginning of a broader conversation and evaluation of our ethics.

There’s so much to think about and process here, that I’ll have to re-read and think more specifically about all the details. I hope to come back to this later to mark it up and annotate it further.

I’ve read relatively deeply about a variety of privacy issues as well as the weaponization of data and its improper use by governments and businesses to unduly influence people. For those who are unaware of this movement over the recent past, I would highly recommend Cathy O’Neil’s text Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, which provides an excellent overview with a variety of examples about how the misuse of data can be devastating not just to individuals who are broadly unaware of it, but entire segments of society.

There is a lot of publicly available data we reveal via social media and much of it one might flippantly consider “data exhaust” which has little, if any inherent value by itself. Unfortunately when used in aggregate, it can reveal striking things about us which we may either not be aware of ourselves or which we wouldn’t want to be openly known.

My brief thought here is that much like the transition from the use of smaller arms and handguns, which can kill people in relatively small numbers, to weapons like machine guns on up to nuclear weapons, which have the ability to quickly murder hundreds to millions at a time, we will have to modify some of our social norms the way we’ve modified our “war” norms over the past century. We’ll need to modify our personal social contracts so that people can still interact with each other on a direct basis without fear of larger corporations, governments, or institutions aggregating our data, processing it, and then using it against us in ways which unduly benefit them and tremendously disadvantage us as individuals, groups, or even at the level of entire societies.

In my mind, we need to protect the social glue that holds society together and improves our lives while not allowing the mass destruction of the fabric of society by large groups based on their ability to aggregate, process, and use our own data against us.

Thank you Sebastian for kicking off a broader conversation!

Disclaimer: I’m aware that in posting this to my own site that it will trigger a tacit webmention which will ping Sebastian Greger’s website. I give him permission to display any and all data he chooses from the originating web page in perpetuity, or until such time as I send a webmention either modifying or deleting the content of the originating page. I say this all with some jest, while I am really relying on the past twenty years of general social norms built up on the internet and in general society as well as the current practices of the IndieWeb movement to govern what he does with this content.

The registration page for the upcoming IndieWebSummit from June 26-27, 2018 in Portland is now up. Whether you’re just starting your first website or building bleeding edge web applications, this is the place to be. RSVP now! #Indieweb #BarCamp

If you’re game for an extended trip, I’ll note that it’s right after Open Source Bridge (@OSBridge) ~~June 20–23, 2017~~.

Oops, I’ve just noticed that OSBridge hadn’t updated their site from last year. This year’s conference is on June 29th, right after IWS!

A pencast overview (with audio and recorded visual diagrams) of IndieWeb technologies

I’ve seen a bunch of new folks coming into the IndieWeb community recently who are a bit overwhelmed with the somewhat steep learning curve of both new jargon as well as new ideas and philosophies of what it means to have one’s own domain and presence on the internet.

While parts of the IndieWeb’s overall idea are quite simple, where the actual rubber meets the road things can be a bit overwhelming, and more so if you’re a non-technical person. This doesn’t have to be the case. Generally I’d recommend to people to begin attending local Homebrew Website Clubs or, even better, to attend an IndieWebCamp in person to get a one day crash course followed by a day of building and help. Sadly, life can intervene making these not as quick and immediate a reality as one might otherwise like.

So toward the end of making the crash course to explain in relatively broad terms some of the basic terminology as well as some of the bigger individual pieces and what’s happening when using an IndieWeb site with most of the major new functionality built in, I’ve made a short pencast of what is going on. Naturally there’s still a tremendous amount to learn and do, and a million things which could always be better or improved, but if you’re setting up a site using WordPress this overview will hopefully get you a lot further a lot faster. (It may also be useful for those setting up Known or even something for micro.blog, though those will have different plugins and other small quirks that aren’t covered here.)

What is a Pencast?

Pencast?! What is that? It’s a technology that has been around for a while courtesy of Livescribe.com digital pens which not only record an audio file of what is being said, but also record penstroke by penstroke what is being written. Even better the audio and the penstrokes are crosslinked, so you can more easily jump around within a lecture or talk.

To do this you should download the version of the notes in Livescribe’s custom Pencast .pdf format. This seems like a standard .pdf file but it’s a bit larger in size because it has an embedded audio file in it that is playable with the free Adobe Reader X (or above) installed. With this version of the notes, you should be able to toggle the settings in the file (see below) to read and listen to the notes almost as if you were sitting with me in person and I was drawing it out in front of you as I spoke. You can also use your mouse to jump around within the pencast by touching/mousing to particular areas or by jumping forward and back by means of the audio bar. If you need to, also feel free to zoom in on the page to have a closer look.

Pencast version

An IndieWeb Crash Course [14.9MB .pdf with embedded audio]

Viewing and Playing a Pencast PDF

Pencast PDF is a new format of notes and audio that can play in Adobe Reader X or above.

You can open a Pencast PDF as you would other PDF files in Adobe Reader X. The main difference is that a Pencast PDF can contain ink that has associated audio—called “active ink”. Click active ink to play its audio. This is just like playing a Pencast from Livescribe Online or in Livescribe Desktop. When you first view a notebook page, active ink appears in green type. When you click active ink, it turns gray and the audio starts playing. As audio playback continues, the gray ink turns green in synchronization with the audio. Non-active ink (ink without audio) is black and does not change appearance.

Audio Control Bar

Pencast PDFs have an audio control bar for playing, pausing, and stopping audio playback. The control bar also has jump controls, bookmarks (stars), and an audio timeline control.

Active Ink View Button

There is also an active ink view button. Click this button to toggle the “unwritten” color of active ink from gray to invisible. In the default (gray) setting, the gray words turn green as the audio plays. In the invisible setting, green words seem to write themselves on blank paper as the audio plays.

If you have comments or feedback, I’m thrilled to receive it. Feel free to comment below, or if you’ve already IndieWebified your site, write your comment there and send it to me via webmention, or add your permalink to the box below. Ideally this version of the pencast is a first draft and I’ll put something more polished together at a later date, but I wanted to get this out there to have a few people test-drive it to get some feedback.

Thanks!

An Indieweb Podcast: Episode 3 “Syndication”

Episode 3: Syndication

Running time: 52m 56s | Download (24.9 MB) | Subscribe by RSS

Summary: Facebook has recently announced it will be shutting off its API access on August 1st for automating posts into its ecosystem. For a large number of users this means it will be much more difficult to crosspost or syndicate their content into the platform. As a result, this week David Shanske and I discuss the good and the bad of this move as well as some general thoughts around the ideas of syndicating content from one site to another.

David also discusses plans he’s got for changes to both the Bridgy Publish Plugin and the Syndication Links Plugin.

Huffduff this Episode

Show Notes

Resources and mentions within the episode

ThinkUp (#) — (my instance is still up,though no longer working!)
BBC Audio Archive (#)
IndieNews a community-curated list of articles relevant to the IndieWeb (#)
- WordPress Indienews a plugin to automatically send mentions to IndieNews (#)
Convoy a syndication tool for WithKnown (#)
Faux-casts (#)
Related IndieWeb wiki pages
Related WordPress Plugins

# Indicates a direct link to the appropriate part of the audio within the episode for the mentioned portion.

Reply to Bridgy Registration

Replied to Bridgy Registration · Issue #102 · indieweb/wordpress-indieweb (GitHub)

I have some functionality in the Bridgy app that allows someone to register for Bridgy for various services. I'm thinking of moving this functionality into the Indieweb plugin. All it is is a series of links that redirect you to the Bridgy site and redirect back when done.
That seems like Indieweb plugin territory.

I think there’s certainly a case to be made that it may make sense to include it in the IndieWeb plugin, particularly as it’s often a one time set up operation.

I also think that it might make a lot of sense to put that piece into the Syndication Links plugin as well since that’s a piece that directly relates to something Brid.gy is looking for to do backfeed. Doing this may also make even more sense if Syndication Links becomes a tool for POSSE as well. It would be nice to have a definitive one-stop-shop for syndication and backfeed related functionality.

As a “throw-away” aside, if you’re looking for a good name for such a thing, perhaps Boomerang? Throw your content out there and all the responses return back to your site?

Setting up WordPress for IndieWeb use

I spent some time this morning doing a dry run through setting up a suite of IndieWeb plugins on a fresh WordPress installation. Going off of a scant outline I talked for almost two hours describing IndieWeb functionality as I set it all up. Hopefully it will provide a useful guide to newcomers to the space until I can write up a more solid outline and take a more polished approach. Apologies in advance for the roughness of the audio, lack of quality, and even live mistakes. Hopefully folks won’t mind suffering through until we can come up with some better tutorials.

As prerequisites, I assume you’ve already got your own domain and have installed WordPress on a server or other host. I actually finish setting up the WordPress install as I start the video and then sign in for the first time as we begin.

While many of the core plugins are straightforward, there is a huge amount of leeway in how folks can choose (or not) to syndicate to sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others. Here I make the choice to use the Bridgy Publish plugin and only demonstrate it with Twitter. With one example shown, hopefully other silos can be set up with Brid.gy as well. The IndieWeb wiki details other options for those who want other methods.

At the end I walk through creating and syndicating a post to Twitter. Then I demonstrate commenting on that post using another CMS (WithKnown) from a separate domain.

I do my best to provide verbal descriptions and visual examples, but these can certainly be supplemented with further detail on the IndieWeb wiki. I hope to come back and add some diagrams at a later date, but this will have to suffice for now.

For those who would like an audio only version of this talk, you can listen here (.mp3):

👓 An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet | GoDaddy

Read An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet by

Aaron Parecki (The Garage: GoDaddy)

What if you could reply to a blog post in your feed reader, and your reply would show up as a comment on the original post automatically? Or if you had one place to go to follow all of your friends’ blogs and more? An IndieWeb reader might be the answer. Get insight from the cofounder of the IndieWeb movement.

/me salivates…

Category: IndieWeb

An Indieweb Podcast: Episode 3 “Syndication”

Show Notes

Related Articles and Posts

Resources and mentions within the episode

Reply to Bridgy Registration