Read | Chris Aldrich

👓 You’re Not Cool Enough For Micro.blog | Greg Morris

Read You’re Not Cool Enough For Micro.blog by Greg Morris (Greg Morris)

It’s become a bit of a running joke amongst my tech friends. A personal meme that I keep repeating the same sort of phase when questioned about a whole range of topics. Anything from GDPR to Social Media harassment my answer – micro.blog. Many people don’t understand. I’ve tried and failed t...

Micro.blog can certainly be many things to many people–possibly too many. In large part, what it is depends on what tools you’re bringing into it and how you’d like to use it.

It can be:

a web host
a Twitter replacement
a Twitter client that allows you to own your own data
a Instagram replacement
a microcasting platform
a full blogging platform
a new, well-curated community with a strong code of conduct
a customized feed reader for a new community
a syndication platform for one’s personal blog
a low barrier entryway to having your own IndieWeb-capable blog on your own domain.
a first class IndieWeb citizen with support for multiple types of posts, IndieAuth, Webmention, Micropub, and Microsub.

Because I already have my own domain, my own hosting, and my own website, I personally use it to syndicate my content into an interesting community of individuals which I’d like to engage. I use the main interface as a feed reader to see what others are up to and to communicate with them directly. My site supports Webmention so comments to my posts on micro.blog come right back to my site and provide me notifications there.

Perhaps micro.blog ought to make a chart for a variety of potential users to indicate what they would potentially be bringing with them and then have an indicator what they might use it for with those particular tools? Because of the arrays of technologies that micro.blog supports, it’s far from a simple marketing problem, particularly to a non-technical crowd. You certainly can’t say it’s “just” a Twitter replacement because Twitter only supports a small fraction of what micro.blog is capable.

👓 Giving Up On IndieWeb | Glenn 2.0

Read Giving Up On IndieWeb by

Glenn Dixon (glenn.thedixons.net)

(Further update: webmentions are working!!!) (UPDATE: It’s now been a year since I first posted this. Just today I discovered a year-old blog post which mentioned this one, and an ensuing discussion. Of course I knew nothing of this because – well, I couldn’t get webmentions to work! I have ...

👓 Why I Needed to Pull Back From Twitter | Maggie Haberman

Read Why I Needed to Pull Back From Twitter by Maggie Haberman (nytimes.com)

The viciousness, toxic partisan anger and intellectual dishonesty are at all-time highs.

👓 Connections | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Replied to Connections by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (kfitz.info)

There are still some wrinkles to be ironed out in getting the various platforms we use today to play well with Webmentions, but it’s a real step toward the goal of that decentralized, distributed, interconnected future for scholarly communication. ❧

...the upshot is that this relatively new web standard allows for round-tripped connections among discrete domains, enabling the conversation about an individual post to be represented on that post, wherever it might actually take place. ❧

The fun, secret part is that Kathleen hasn’t (yet?) discovered IndieAuth so that she can authenticate/authorize micropub clients like Quill to publish content to her own site from various clients by means of a potential micropub endpoint.

I’ll suspect she’ll be even more impressed when she realizes that there’s a forthcoming wave of feed readers^1,2 that will allow her to read others’ content in a reader which has an integrated micropub client in it so that she can reply to posts directly in her feed reader, then the responses get posted directly to her own website which then, in turn, send webmentions to the sites she’s responding to so that the conversational loop can be completely closed.

She and Lee will also be glad to know that work has already started on private posts and conversations and posting to limited audiences as well. Eventually there will be no functionality that a social web site/silo can do that a distributed set of independent sites can’t. There’s certainly work to be done to round off the edges, but we’re getting closer and closer every day.

I know how it all works, but even I’m (still) impressed at the apparent magic that allows round-trip conversations between her website and Twitter and Micro.blog. And she hasn’t really delved into website to website conversations yet. I suppose we’ll have to help IndieWebify some of her colleague’s web presences to make that portion easier. Suddenly “academic Twitter” will be the “academic blogosphere” she misses from not too many years ago. 🙂

If there are academics out thee who are interested in what Kathleen has done, but may need a little technical help, I’m happy to set up some tools for them to get them started. (We’re also hosing occasional Homebrew Website Clubs, including a virtual one this coming week, which people are welcome to join.)

References

Aldrich C. Feed reader revolution: it’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media. BoffoSocko. https://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/. Published June 9, 2017. Accessed July 20, 2018.

Parecki A. Building an IndieWeb Reader. Aaron Parecki. https://aaronparecki.com/2018/03/12/17/building-an-indieweb-reader. Published March 21, 2018. Accessed July 20, 2018.

👓 An ethical framework for the digital afterlife industry | Nature Human Behaviour

Read An ethical framework for the digital afterlife industry by Carl Öhman, Luciano Floridi (Nature Human Behaviour)

The web is increasingly inhabited by the remains of its departed users, a phenomenon that has given rise to a burgeoning digital afterlife industry. This industry requires a framework for dealing with its ethical implications. The regulatory conventions guiding archaeological exhibitions could provide the basis for such a framework.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

four categories of firms:
(1) information management services,
(2) posthumous messaging services,
(3) online memorial services and
(4) ‘re-creation services’

…the online security company McAfee claims that the average Internet user puts a value of US$37,000 on their digital assets.

they all share an interest in monetizing death online, using digital remains as a means of making a profit.

For example, financially successful chat-bot services represent not just any version of the deceased, but rather the one that appeals most to consumers and that maximizes profit. The remains thus become a resource, a form of (fixed) capital in the DAI [Digital Afterlife Industry] economy.

To set the direction for a future ethical and regulatory debate, we suggest that digital remains should be seen as the remains of an informational human body, that is, not merely regarded as a chattel or an estate, but as something constitutive of one’s personhood. This is also in line with European Union legislation’s terminology regarding ‘data subjects’. Given this approach, the main ethical concern of the DAI emerges as a consequence of the commercially motivated manipulation of one’s informational corpse (that is, the digital remains of a data subject). This approach suggests we should seek inspiration from frameworks that regulate commercial usage of organic human remains. A good model is provided by archaeological and medical museums, which exhibit objects that, much like digital remains, are difficult to allocate to a specific owner and are displayed for the living to consume.

👓 Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter unite to simplify data transfers | Engadget

Read Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter unite to simplify data transfers (Engadget)

The open-source Data Transfer Project should make it easier to switch services.

👓 How big should your house be? | Curbed

Read Our homes don’t need formal spaces by Kate Wagner (Curbed)

The entertaining rooms meant to make us social actually foster isolation