Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)Thanks to everyone for coming to IndieWeb Summit 2017! We had a fantastic and productive weekend! This year was the best documented IndieWeb event yet! Thanks to everyone who contributed to documenting the sessions and demos! Saturday We started off with a few keynotes, videos of which you can find ...
Martijn van der Ven (licit.li)Last weekend, I (remotely) attended the IndieWeb Summit in Portland. I am still processing everything that has been said, and reading back through the sessions I missed. They have all been uploaded to YouTube, so you could be doing the same! That said, here are some take-aways:
Jon Udell (Jon Udell)Back in April, Audrey Watters’ decided to block annotation on her website. I understand why. When we project our identities online, our personal sites become extensions of our homes. To some online writers, annotation overlays can feel like graffiti. How can we respect their wishes while enabling ...
One of the questions that the PressForward team gets repeatedly is how publications can use custom fields to automatically print data about a post once it is published. Publications often wish to display a generic name, such as “The Editors,” on a post rather than the name of the user who published the post. On Digital Humanities Now we use custom fields to store the names of our Editors-at-Large for the week a piece is featured as well as the name of the Editor-in-Chief for that week.
Audrey Watters (Audrey Watters)It’s been well over a month since I blocked annotations (Hypothesis and Genius) on my websites. I’m a little taken aback that some folks are still muttering about it. Perhaps I need to restate a couple of things:
- You can still annotate my work. Just not on my websites.
- My work here and on Hack Education is openly licensed. As long as you follow that license – CC BY NC SA – you can copy and redistribute my articles without my permission.
- The CC license on my work also means you can post my articles in another file format or medium – that is, they needn’t stay in HTML. You can publish my articles as PDFs. You can hit “print.”
We are beginning to see a few universities taking concrete steps to show that they value viewpoint diversity and the free and open exchange of ideas. An article over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal describes some of these steps and discusses them in the context of HxA’s newly revised Guide to Colleges. (See Colleges Pledge Tolerance for Diverse Opinions, But Skeptics Remain, by Douglas Belkin.)
The article opens with a discussion of an extraordinary step at Johns Hopkins (for which we just raised its HxA score and its rank):
A string of protests on college campuses that shut down events hosting conservative speakers has prompted universities around the country to pledge more tolerance for diverse opinions, but skeptics say they’ll believe it when they see it. Johns Hopkins University announced Thursday a $150 million effort to “facilitate the restoration of open and inclusive discourse.”… The new initiative at Johns Hopkins, an institute funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, hopes to “examine the dynamics of societal, cultural and political polarization and develop ways to improve decision-making and civic discourse,”
The article contrasts Hopkins with Harvard (as well as Berkeley and Yale):
Harvard University, which has repeatedly been in the crosshairs of free-speech advocates, was 103rd out of 106 schools in the Heterodox ranking. Heterodox, which weighs schools’ regulations as well as the ratings of other first-amendment groups, cited Harvard’s history of censoring outside speakers, a blacklist on private clubs, fraternities and sororities, and a laminated “social justice” place mat handed out to students before winter break in 2015.
The article closed by discussing our top-ranked school:
The top-ranked school is the University of Chicago. Provost Daniel Diermeier said the ideal of viewpoint diversity is central to the university’s mission. “We believe that the best education we can provide students to prepare them for the world is to hear diverse points of view even if they feel uncomfortable,” Dr. Diermeier said. “We want to provide them with the tools to find counterarguments.
Manton Reece (manton.micro.blog)A few years ago, Jon Hays and I built an app for photos called Sunlit, powered by the App.net API. We evolved it to work with other services, like Flickr and Instagram, but as App.net faded away we could never justify the investment to rewrite significant parts of the app to bring it forward and kee...
Richard MacManus (ricmac.org)Colin, you hit the nail on the head. The IndieWeb community has done brilliant work over the years, but I think 2017 is the year to make it easier for “the users” to tap into these Open Web technologies too. It feels quite similar to 2003/04 in that way.
DAY 1 ===== Keynotes: • “we got building blocks” -- aaronpk, • “we have grown this last year” -- tantek, • “I built websites for 20 years but still do not code and want your tools to be easy” -- anomalily, • “I used my laptop to crawl the internet, it got hot, but now I have fancy network graphs” -- snarfed.
This is my experience “indiewebifying” my personal WordPress site. A user test from a “Gen 1” UX guy who just heard about this stuff last week. Hopefully none of this comes across as too critical. I am REALLY impressed by what is already working. This is my experience “indiewebifying” my personal WordPress site. A user test from a “Gen 1” UX guy who just heard about this stuff last week. Hopefully none...
John Gruber (Daring Fireball)When people click a URL and see that it’s a Medium site, their reaction should be “Oh, good, a Medium site — this will be nice to read.” Right now it’s gotten to the point where when people realize an article is on Medium, they think, “Oh, crap, it’s on Medium.”
Christopher Sikkenga (Save This Space.)The last couple of months I’ve exiled myself from Twitter and Facebook. I do miss many individuals, but overall I don’t think those sites have been good for me. I felt like shouting my troubles into the void would be wasting time that I could be using to do something about them. The thing tha...
The man-shaming portmanteau undermines feminism’s message of equality
Today marks two years of #indieweb for me. I've been reflecting on my experience joining the community and my plans for the future.
What happens when a perfectly innocuous phrase takes on a more sinister meaning over time?
Case in point, the expression "to call a spade a spade." For almost half a millennium, the phrase has served as a demand to "tell it like it is." It is only in the past century that the phrase began to acquire a negative, racial overtone.
Historians trace the origins of the expression to the Greek phrase "to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough." Exactly who was the first author of "to call a trough a trough" is lost to history. Some attribute it to Aristophanes, while others attribute it to the playwright Menander. The Greek historian Plutarch (who died in A.D. 120) used it in Moralia.The blogger Matt Colvin, who has a Ph.D. in Greek literature, recently pointed out that the original Greek expression was very likely vulgar in nature and that the "figs" and "troughs" in question were double entendres.