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👓 The story of the internet is all about layers – More knock-on than network | The Economist
How the internet lost its decentralised innocence
IN “INFORMATION RULES”—published in 1999 but still one of the best books on digital economics—Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, two economists, popularised the term “network effects”, which means that in the digital world size easily begets size. The more popular a computer operating system, the more applications it will attract, drawing in even more users, and so on. Two decades ago the idea helped people understand the power of Microsoft and its Windows software. Today it is the default explanation for how Facebook, Google and other tech giants became dominant. The more people sign up to a social network, for instance, the more valuable it becomes for present and prospective users.
👓 How to fix what has gone wrong with the internet – The ins and outs | The Economist
The internet was meant to make the world a less centralised place, but the opposite has happened. Ludwig Siegele explains why it matters, and what can be done about it
👓 How itty.bitty works | itty.bitty
itty.bitty takes html (or other data), compresses it into a URL fragment, and provides a link that can be shared. When it is opened, it inflates that data on the recievers’ side.
Source Code: https://github.com/alcor/itty-bitty
An interesting way to create websites…
👓 About | Itty bitty
Itty bitty sites are contained entirely within their own link. (Including this one!) This means they’re…
💼 Portable – you don’t need a server to host them
👁 Private – nothing is sent to–or stored on–this server
🎁 Easy to share as a link or QR codeItty bitty sites can hold about as much as a printed page, and there is a lot you can do with that:
✒️ Compose poetry
🛠 Create an app
🐦 Bypass a140280 char limit
🎨 Express yourself in ascii
This is an curious and interesting way to build a website… but talk about a URL problem…
👓 Jury finds Rose Bowl Aquatic Center at fault in molestation case, awards family millions | Pasadena Star News
The family’s attorney said he and his clients “feel relieved” about the verdict.
How (and why) are people so blind to what is around them?
👓 What the IndieWeb on WordPress needs | Brad Enslen
Brad (Brad Enslen)What the IndieWeb on WordPress needs is to be much more robust. Or it just needs to be more robust in general even without WordPress. When it works its glorious. When it doesn’t then you get that free falling and forgot your parachute feeling. Just before you slam into the ground. It also need...
👓 Tumblelog | Zegnat
An interesting looking experiment by Zegnat.
👓 Three examples of annotations, bookmarking, & sharing in my digital commonplace book | W. Ian O’Byrne
I’ve been experimenting with some IndieWeb philosophies and tools on this site, but more importantly on my breadcrumbs website. My breadcrumbs website is my digital commonplace book. This is inspired by the website philosophy & structure developed by Chris Aldrich. My purpose is to switch up my relationship with others and social media networks while doing more to own my content online. To that end, one major purpose (for now) on my breadcrumbs site is to be more intentional in the materials that I share with others as I read and explore online.
Some interesting and useful UI examples here. May have to iterate on some of my own design now.
👓 ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans | Washington Post
As treasury secretary, Tim Geithner criticized predatory lenders. Now the private equity firm he leads runs a company that mails high-rate loans to risky customers.
👓 Brainstorming on Implementing Vouch, Following and Blogrolls | David Shanske
David Shanske (David Shanske)Vouch is an extension to the webmention protocol. Webmentions usually have two parameters…source and target. Target is the URL on your website that the Source URL is linking to. The vouch parameter is a third URL to help the target determine whether or not they should accept the webmention. This...
I like the sound of where this is going already! All these small little pieces loosely joined to build a much larger edifice is certainly interesting.
I’ve got a somewhat reasonable bookmarklet for quickly following people, though it’s not marked up with XFN data (yet) — perhaps another data field for Post Kinds? I do wish that there was either a mechanism for adding those to my Following page via the WordPress Link Manager or someone had a means of parsing lots of follow posts so I could quickly have data for both Vouch as well as for microsub readers either via my follow feed list or via OPML export and/or OPML subscription. WordPress obviously has some of the infrastructure built already, but there’s certainly a more IndieWeb way of doing it that wouldn’t require side-files like OPML.
👓 IndieBookClub | Manton Reece
As I mentioned in my IndieWeb Summit wrap-up, I added support for IndieBookClub while in Portland. IndieBookClub is a little like Goodreads, but built on standards like Microformats and Micropub so that you can post what you’re reading to your own blog. Now that I’m back in Austin, I’ve tweake...
👓 Sending your First Webmention from Scratch | Aaron Parecki
Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)Webmention is one of the fundamental indieweb building blocks. It enables rich interactions between websites, like posting a comment or favorite on one site from another site. This post will walk you through the simplest way to get started sending webmentions to other sites so that you can use your ...
A stupendous article, I just wish I’d had it all those many years ago. Thanks Aaron!
One useful thing for beginners that I don’t think got mentioned (pun intended!) in the article is that for receiving websites which don’t have a built in webmention form you can use a service like http://mention-tech.appspot.com/ which will allow you to manually put in the sending site and the receiving site and it will act as a bridge to send the webmention for you.
Reply to I attended IndieWeb Summit 2018 | Fogknife
Notes and thoughts from the eighth annual IndieWeb conference, held in Portland, Oregon.
My heart forever broken by social-media silos, I’m not really interested in using Micro.blog as yet another “Okay, I’m over here now” social network. I get the impression that it has potential for much deeper use than that, if I can only get my head around it.
Micro.blog can be many things to many people which can be confusing, particularly when you’re a very tech savvy person and can see all the options at once. I’d recommend looking at it like a custom feed reader for a community of people you’d like to follow and interact with. Spend some time in the reader and just interact with those you’re following and they’ll do likewise in return.
It’s purposely missing some of the dopamine triggers other social silos have, so you may need to retrain your brain to use it appropriately, but I think it’s worthwhile if you do.
I really need to hash out my domain situation! IndieWeb encourages its memership to claim a single domain and use it as their personal stamp for everything they do on the internet. I, though, have two domains: my long-held personal catch-all domain of jmac.org, and fogknife.com, which I use exclusively for blogging. My use of both predates my involvement with IndieWeb.
Don’t fret too much over having multiple websites. As you continue on the answer to what you want to do with them will eventually emerge more organically than if you force it to. For some thoughts and inspiration, check out https://indieweb.org/multi-site_indieweb.
👓 IndieWeb Summit 2018 wrap-up | Manton Reece
Last week I was in Portland for IndieWeb Summit. This was only my second IndieWeb conference (the first was IndieWebCamp in Austin). I had a great time in Portland and got even more than I expected out of IndieWeb Summit. The first day was short keynotes and sessions led by attendees on a range of t...