Maha Bali from YouTubeOriginally bookmarked to watch on September 28, 2018 at 09:17AM. Missed the live stream due to time zone differential.
Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)This reminds me of these “useless web” sites—this being the primary one—that have managed to stay very popular. (A lot of YouTubers make videos of themselves clicking through this site and I often see kids at school using the site.) And it’s basically a webring. But it’s not a code-based...
Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)This is Part II of my series on the Death of Webrings. Part I is here. For this article I am going to use two examples. I want to make it clear that I am not picking on the example rings, their creators or their intended uses. I do want to point out what I see as flaws in their model that unle...
Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)Long term I see it as potential revenue stream. I don’t believe in decentralized web. I believe in hyper local web. The newspapers or local libraries can be backbone. Provide dead simple publishing software on subscription, coupon newsletters, take back the marketplace from facebook.
The web is local news. Local news belongs to the people. thanks for what you do.
BTW here is library project I am working on https://checkoutmydomain.glitch.me
I’ve documented a piece of it here and there’s some detail on the IndieWeb for Journalism wiki page which I encourage everyone to contribute to as they can.
As for Ben Keith’s concern about spam, yes, Webmention can be a potential vector like trackbacks and pingbacks, but it does learn from their mistakes with better mitigation and verification. Work on the Vouch protocol/extension of Webmention continues to mitigate against these issues. I’ll also note that Akismet for WordPress works relatively well for Webmentions too, though there have still yet to be examples of Webmention spam in the wild.
For publishers using WordPress, there are some excellent plugins including Webmention (which has some experimental Vouch plumbing included already) and Symantic Linkbacks which work with WordPress’s native comments. I’ll note that they’re developed and actively maintained by several, including the core maintainer for pingbacks and trackbacks in WordPress.
I’m happy to help if anyone has questions.
The idea of microblogging on my own website is something I’ve been kicking around for years. Instead of posting short pieces of text to Twitter, longer pieces of text to this blog, and photos to Instagram, why not just post all of that stuff here? I could still cross-post to other sites if I wanted to, but my intention has always been that this website should represent me on the web and so it only makes sense to put all of my work here.
My microblog is a new part of this site where I’m posting the kinds of things that I posted on Twitter and Instagram. I’ll still post things on those sites for the foreseeable future, but only a subset of the things I’m posting here. You can follow my microblog using a feed reader (well, more on that later) using the links on my new feeds page.
It's been six months since we added Tags to Technorati (where I'm Senior Designer), and as it turns out, it was a pretty big deal. So before we get too far away from it, here's the story of how it came about. From my perspective, anyway.
The page was set up to show any post that contained a link to it – in other words, if you linked to that page, then your post appeared on that page. ❧
Just a rehash of Refbacks? or an early implementation of Webmention?!
October 04, 2018 at 09:19AM
I mention it because I was specifically intrigued by a small piece of excellent user interface and social graph data that Reading.am unearths for me. I’m including a quick screen capture to better illustrate the point. While the UI allows me to click yes/no (i.e. did I like it or not) or even share it to other networks, the thing I found most interesting was that it lists the other people using the service who have read the article as well. In this case it told me that my friend Jeremy Cherfas had read the article.1
In addition to having the immediate feedback that he’d read it, which is useful and thrilling in itself, it gives me the chance to search to see if he’s written any thoughts about it himself, and it also gives me the chance to tag him in a post about my own thoughts to start a direct conversation around a topic which I now know we’re both interested in at least reading about.2
The tougher follow up is: how could we create a decentralized method of doing this sort of workflow in a more IndieWeb way? It would be nice if my read posts on my site (and those of others) could be overlain on websites via a bookmarklet or other means as a social layer to create engaged discussion. Better would have been the ability to quickly surface his commentary, if any, on the piece as well–functionality which I think Reading.am also does, though I rarely ever see it. In some sense I would have come across Jeremy’s read post in his feed later this weekend, but it doesn’t provide the immediacy that this method did. I’ll also admit that I prefer having found out about his reading it only after I’d read it myself, but having his and others’ recommendations on a piece (by their explicit read posts) is a useful and worthwhile piece of data, particularly for pieces I might have otherwise passed over.
In some sense, some of this functionality isn’t too different from that provided by Hypothes.is, though that is hidden away within another browser extension layer and requires not only direct examination, but scanning for those whose identities I might recognize because Hypothes.is doesn’t have a specific following/follower social model to make my friends and colleagues a part of my social graph in that instance. The nice part of Hypothes.is’ browser extension is that it does add a small visual indicator to show that others have in fact read/annotated a particular site using the service.
I’ve also previously documented on the IndieWeb wiki how WordPress.com (and WordPress.org with JetPack functionality) facepiles likes on content (typically underneath the content itself). This method doesn’t take things as far as the Reading.am case because it only shows a small fraction of the data, is much less useful, and is far less likely to unearth those in your social graph to make it useful to you, the reader.
I seem to recall that Facebook has some similar functionality that is dependent upon how (and if) the publisher embeds Facebook into their site. I don’t think I’ve seen this sort of interface built into another service this way and certainly not front and center the way that Reading.am does it.
The closest thing I can think of to this type of functionality in the analog world was in my childhood when library card slips in books had the names of prior patrons on them when you signed your own name when checking out a book, though this also had the large world problem that WordPress likes have in that one typically wouldn’t have know many of the names of prior patrons necessarily. I suspect that the Robert Bork privacy incident along with the evolution of library databases and bar codes have caused this older system to disappear.
This general idea might make an interesting topic to explore at an upcoming IndieWebCamp if not before. The question is: how to add in the social graph aspect of reading to uncover this data? I’m also curious how it might or might not be worked into a feed reader or into microsub related technologies as well. Microsub clients or related browser extensions might make a great place to add this functionality as they would have the data about whom you’re already following (aka your social graph data) as well as access to their read/like/favorite posts. I know that some users have reported consuming feeds of friends’ reads, likes, favorites, and bookmarks as potential recommendations of things they might be interested in reading as well, so perhaps this would be an additional extension of that as well?
[1] I’ve certainly seen this functionality before, but most often the other readers are people I don’t know or know that well because the service isn’t huge and I’m not using it to follow a large number of other people.
[2] I knew he was generally interested already as I happen to be following this particular site at his prior recommendation, but the idea still illustrates the broader point.
People often ask why WordPress has both a Category and a Tag functionality, and to some extent it would seem to be just for this thing–differentiating between topics and objects–or at least it’s how I have used it and perceived others doing so as well. (Incidentally from a functionality perspective categories in the WordPress taxonomy also have a hierarchy while tags do not.) I find that I don’t always do a great job at differentiating between them nor do I do so cleanly every time. Typically it’s more apparent when I go searching for something and have a difficult time in finding it as a result. Usually the problem is getting back too many results instead of a smaller desired subset. In some sense I also look at categories as things which might be more interesting for others to subscribe to or follow via RSS from my site, though I also have RSS feeds for tags as well as for post types/kinds as well.
I also find that I have a subtle differentiation using singular versus plural tags which I think I’m generally using to differentiate between the idea of “mine” versus “others”. Thus the (singular) tag for “commonplace book” should be a reference to my particular commonplace book versus the (plural) tag “commonplace books” which I use to reference either the generic idea or the specific commonplace books of others. Sadly I don’t think I apply this “rule” consistently either, but hope to do so in the future.
I’ve also been playing around with some more technical tags like math.NT (standing for number theory), following the lead of arXiv.org. While I would generally have used a tag “number theory”, I’ve been toying around with the idea of using the math.XX format for more technical related research on my site and the more human readable “number theory” for the more generic popular press related material. I still have some more playing around with the idea to see what shakes out. I’ve noticed in passing that Terence Tao uses these same designations on his site, but he does them at the category level rather than the tag level.
Now that I’m several years into such a system, I should probably spend some time going back and broadening out the topic categories (I arbitrarily attempt to keep the list small–in part for public display/vanity reasons, but it’s relatively easy to limit what shows to the public in my category list view.) Then I ought to do a bit of clean up within the tags themselves which have gotten unwieldy and often have spelling mistakes which cause searches to potentially fail. I also find that some of my auto-tagging processes by importing tags from the original sources’ pages could be cleaned up as well, though those are generally stored in a different location on my website, so it’s not as big a deal to me.
Naturally I find myself also thinking about the ontogeny/phylogeny problems of how I do these things versus how others at large do them as well, so feel free to chime in with your ideas, especially if you take tags/categories for your commonplace book/website seriously. I’d like to ultimately circle back around on this with regard to the more generic tagging done from a web-standards perspective within the IndieWeb and Microformats communities. I notice almost immediately that the “tag” and “category” pages on the IndieWeb wiki redirect to the same page yet there are various microformats including u-tag-of and u-category which are related but have slightly different meanings on first blush. (There is in fact an example on the IndieWeb “tag” page which includes both of these classes neither of which seems to be counter-documented at the Microformats site.) I should also dig around to see what Kevin Marks or the crew at Technorati must surely have written a decade or more ago on the topic.
cc: Greg McVerry, Aaron Davis, Ian O’Byrne, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Jeremy Cherfas
Lior Pachter (Bits of DNA)Six years ago I received an email from a colleague in the mathematics department at UC Berkeley asking me whether he should participate in a study that involved “collecting DNA from the brigh…
This post, Gowers’, and Tao’s are all excellent reasons for a more IndieWeb philosophical approach in academic blogging (and other scientific communication). Many of the respondents/commenters have little, if any, indication of their identities or backgrounds which makes it imminently harder to judge or trust their bonafides within the discussion. Some even chose to remain anonymous and throw bombs. If each of the respondents were commenting (preferably using their real names) on their own websites and using the Webmention protocol, I suspect the discussion would have been richer and more worthwhile by an order of magnitude. Rivin at least had a linked Twitter account with an avatar, though I find it less than useful that his Twitter account is protected, a fact that makes me wonder if he’s only done so recently as a result of fallout from this incident? I do note that it at least appears his Twitter account links to his university website and vice-versa, so there’s a high likelihood that they’re at least the same person.
I’ll also note that a commenter noted that they felt that their reply had been moderated out of existence, something which Lior Pachter certainly has the ability and right to do on his own website, but which could have been mitigated had the commenter posted their reply on their own website and syndicated it to Pachter’s.
Hiding in the comments, which are generally civil and even-tempered, there’s an interesting discussion about academic publishing that could have been its own standalone post. Beyond the science involved (or not) in this entire saga, a lot of the background for the real story is one of process, so this comment was one of my favorite parts.
Jacky Alciné (jacky.wtf)I’m not an veteran blogger but I do wonder what blogging or just sharing our thoughts on the Internet will look like in the next decade or so.
Rick Wysocki (Rick Wysocki)[...] I’ve been reading a bit about the IndieWeb movement, and am becoming increasingly interested in the possibility of a more decentralized model for distributing web content.
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To make a greater effort to create or at least have some hand in designing digital tools for my own work work. To this end, I’ve begun developing a (very small scale) Jekyll template for creating and disseminating oral history archives (called Oryll Hystory). With my scholarly background in both new media and archival theory, I’m hoping to use this as a prototype for thinking through questions regarding digital archives, circulation, and public humanities work. If that doesn’t work out, it will at least be practice for a bigger and better project. Feel free to follow the Github repository for the project if you’re interested. But don’t judge me–I’m at the early stages of the project and its currently extremely basic (and doesn’t look particularly good yet either).
I particularly love your idea of using some of your digital knowledge and tools for research and education related work. In case you haven’t found it yet there are a growing number of educators, researchers, and practitioners applying IndieWeb philosophies and principles to the education space not only for ourselves, but for the benefit of our students and others. I hope you’ll take a moment to add yourself and some of your work to the list. If there’s anything any of us can do to help out, please don’t hesitate to touch base with us via our websites or in chat.
undo is a common action you can take (often a button or menu item) to reverse the effects of the previous action, as if the action had never occurred; on the indieweb, you may want to undo a post, a deletion, or an update.
IndieWebCamp from YouTubeCongratulations to everyone who attended! Special thanks to Greg McVerry, David Shanske, Marty McGuire, and all of the sponsors who helped put it all together! And special thanks to all the rest of the community (both in person and remotely) that came together to make it what it was–you all know who you are, so I won’t person tag/@mention/webmention everyone individually.
For those who missed it, there’s a wealth of information on the wiki, on the YouTube channel, and in the chat logs.
Would you be interested to give a talk at Innovate Pasadena sometime during the month of October? I’m putting together a session, set a date and secure a venue to talk on variety of topics like WordPress, CSS, Accessibility, Performance or the IndieWeb.
Let me know what’s entailed, and I’m happy to help.