📗 Started reading No Coins, Please by Gordon Corman
This was always one of my favorite books in my childhood.
Category: Read
👓 Kardashian Index | The Informational Turn
The Kardashian Index is a measure of the discrepancy between an academic's social media profile and publication record based on the direct comparison of numbers of citations and Twitter followers.
The Kardashian Index (K-index) can be calculated as follows:
K - index = F(a) / F(c)
F(a) is the actual number of Twitter followers of academic X. F(c) is the number academic X should have given their citations C; given a trend identified in the original paper, it is calculated as:
F = 43.3C0.32
The author of the index says that "a high K-index is a warning to the community that researcher X may have built their public profile on shaky foundations, while a very low K-index suggests that a scientist is being undervalued. ... those people whose K-index is greater than 5 can be considered 'Science Kardashians'.
👓 How different types of knowledge impact the growth of new firms | MIT News
Study explores the micromechanisms underlying regional economic diversification.
👓 Your Vagina Is Terrific (and Everyone Else’s Opinions Still Are Not) | New York Times
One year ago I wrote about my vagina and men’s opinions of it. Things have not improved.
👓 Towards the Future Book | Kottke
Writing in Wired, Craig Mod expertly dissects both the e-book revolution that never happened and the quieter one that actually d
👓 Planning as an act of hope | Robert Talbert
How do you approach planning short- and long-term goals, when you have no idea what the next 120 days will be like, or even if you'll be around at the end of it?
Sometimes flipping your life as well as your classroom can yield some excellent results. Robert has some excellent reflections here.
👓 about | href.cool
This directory is somewhat inspired by the old, failed link collections like the original Yahoo! and DMOZ. They were terrible—you couldn’t find anything, but what you did find was often unexpected. My ‘archivist’/‘forager’ tendencies want to do this.
I ran into this website courtesy of Brad Enslen and thought it was a cool looking little directory. I should have known better, but it appears it’s a new experiment by our friend Kicks Condor.
I love nothing more than seeing where the discussions between Brad, Kicks and others (along with their experiments) end up going. One day they’re going to fix what’s wrong with the web. I hope everyone is following along and cheering them the same way I do.
👓 Some thoughts on: My Url Is (Episode 3) mostly around applying some indieweb concepts to the web accessibility space | Amanda Rush
Amanda J. Rush (Customer Servant Consultancy)My URL Is is a podcast which features a new guest every two weeks to talk about how they got involved with the IndieWeb and what hopes, goals and aspirations they have for the community and for their website. The guests are a combination of those both new to the IndieWeb and those who have helped bu...
Some interesting thoughts about screen readers here.
As I think about it, I consider how I take for granted just how visual my consumption of websites is. Naturally when I look at a rendered page I can immediately see what is wrong with it while someone with impaired vision may not. What’s missing in either my CMS, my browser, or my bag of tools is a way to visually “see” or indicate the accessibility pieces my own website is missing or when they’re done improperly. If there were visual indicators in my administrative dashboard to tell me that accessibility pieces were missing from a page so that I could tell they were missing, then it would be as painfully obvious to me as if I had inadvertently put a picture in my post sideways. I know if I put a picture in sideways, I’d immediately go into my post, fix the photo, and republish. I know that if my CMS or even my browser was rendering my inaccessible pages to highlight the problems in red (and maybe turning those elements upside down), I’d be far more apt to fix them immediately so that they work not only for my visual bias, but for those who don’t have that luxury.
👓 Simple Location Version 3.5.2 Released | David Shanske
David Shanske (david.shanske.com)As an update to the release I did earlier this week, I’ve released version 3.5.2 of Simple Location for WordPress. It fixes a long standing visibility issue, fixes widget titles which were introduced in 3.5, and adds a variety of style changes provided by a third party submitter(Thanks Asuh.com). ...
👓 Just Say It’s Racist | The Atlantic
The American press is caught between describing Trumpism accurately and avoiding the wrath of the president and his supporters.
👓 Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended | Nieman Journalism Lab
"The media landscape is overrun with toxic narratives and polluted information not because our systems are broken, but because our systems are working."
👓 Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work | Nieman Journalism Lab
"In reality, many forms of both radicalization and infiltration would be more difficult with a media literate audience — particularly if those with the most influence had better skills and habits around assessing reputation and intent."
👓 Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms | Nieman Journalism Lab
Marie K. Shanahan (Nieman Lab)"Local news organizations should become a driving force for better online public discourse, because Facebook and Twitter aren’t cutting it."
I wonder in an age of caustic social media why newspapers don’t build their own (open and IndieWeb-flavored) social media platforms into their products as a benefit to not only their readers but for the communities they service? This could help not only their bottom line, allow them to add a useful service to their product, but fight the vagaries of what social media networks have done to them and give them some additional ways to help improve community conversations.
This idea isn’t too dissimilar to Greg McVerry’s idea of having local libraries allow users to “check” out domain names and pre-built IndieWeb content management systems to use. (Greg, have you fleshed this out on your site somewhere?)
In any case, I’ve outlined a bit about how newspapers and journalistic outlets could use read posts in an IndieWeb way to take more control over their comments sections instead of farming them out to caustic social media platforms that they have no control over. There’s at least one outlet that has begun experimenting with these types of read posts. Some of these ideas (and similar ones on podcasting) might begin to address Marie’s idea about improving online discourse and making a better forum.
I see she’s got a book on the topic entitled Journalism, Online Comments, and the Future of Public Discourse. I’ll have to take a look at it soon.
👓 The power to publish as an individual | DaveNet
Weblogs: A new source of News
An awesome “old” and prescient post about blogging and journalism. It’s interesting to look at this through the modern lens of social media and IndieWeb. Of course this article was written at a time when IndieWeb was the only thing that existed.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
media organizations would do well to incorporate them [blogs] into their Web sites as an important new addition to the journalistic toolkit. ❧
December 21, 2018 at 08:09PM
Regular readers of Gillmor’s eJournal will recognize his commitment to user participation. “One of the things I’m sure about in journalism right now is that my readers know more than I do,” he says. “To the extent that I can take advantage of that in a way that does something for everyone involved ó that strikes me as pretty cool.”
One fascinating aspect of Gillmor’s Weblog is how he lifts the veil from the workings of the journalism profession. “There have been occasions where I put up a note saying, ‘I’m working on the following and here’s what I think I know,’ and the invitation is for the reader to either tell me I’m on the right track, I’m wrong, or at the very least help me find the missing pieces,” he says. “That’s a pretty interesting thing. Many thousands more people read my column in the newspaper than online, but I do hear back from a fair number of people from the Weblog.” ❧
Awesomely, this sounds almost exactly like something that David Fahrenthold would tell Jay Rosen about Twitter nearly 16 years later in an interview in The Correspondent.
My listen post
My listen post
December 21, 2018 at 08:20PM
Anyone who’s dealt with networks knows that the network knows more than the individual.” ❧
December 22, 2018 at 09:15AM
Man, this is a beast that’s hungry all the time.” ❧
Mind you he’s saying this in 2001 before the creation of more wide spread social networks.
December 22, 2018 at 09:18AM
While many blogs get dozens or hundreds of visitors, Searls’ site attracts thousands. “I partly don’t want to care what the number is,” he says. “I used to work in broadcasting, where everyone was obsessed by that. I don’t want an audience. I feel I’m writing stuff that’s part of a conversation. Conversations don’t have audiences.” ❧
Social media has completely ignored this sort of sentiment and gamified and psychoanalyzed its way into the polar opposite direction all for the sake of “engagement”, clicks, data gathering, and advertising.
December 22, 2018 at 09:22AM
“The blog serves as a kind of steam valve for me,” he says. “I put stuff out there that I’m forming an opinion about, and another blogger starts arguing with me and giving me feedback, and I haven’t even finished what I was posting!” ❧
An early written incarnation of the idea of blogs as “thought spaces”.
December 22, 2018 at 09:24AM
The Weblog community is basically a whole bunch of expert witnesses who increase their expertise constantly through a sort of reputation engine.” ❧
The trouble is how is this “reputation engine” built? What metrics does it include? Can it be gamed? Social media has gotten lots of this wrong and it has caused problems.
December 22, 2018 at 09:28AM
His dream is to put a live Web server with easy-to-edit pages on every person’s desktop, then connect them all in a robust network that feeds off itself and informs other media. ❧
An early statement of what would eventually become all of social media.
December 22, 2018 at 09:31AM
He suggests that struggling sites like Salon begin broadening their content offerings by hosting user-created Weblogs, creating a sort of farm system for essayists. “Salon could highlight the best ones on page one and invest time and effort in the ones that are inspiring and exceptional.” ❧
This is a rough sketch of something I’ve been thinking that newspapers and media outlets should have been doing all along. If they “owned” social media, we might all be in a better place socially and journalistic-ally than if advertising driven social media owned it all.
December 22, 2018 at 09:35AM
Indeed, Winer says his most gratifying moments come when he posts an entry without running the idea by his colleagues first. “It can be a very scary moment when you take a stand on something and you don’t know if your argument holds together and you hit the send button and it’s out there and you can’t take it back. That’s a moment that professional journalists may never experience in their careers, the feeling that it’s just me, exposed to the world. That’s a pretty powerful rush, the power to publish as an individual.” ❧
December 22, 2018 at 09:36AM
👓 Why Books Matter for the Long Run | Knowledge@Wharton
Book publishing is a business and increasingly a technical one, but at its heart it is an art, writes Peter J. Dougherty in this opinion piece. He is the editor-at-large at Princeton University Press,
A nice little essay here.