Reply | Chris Aldrich

Reply to Remi Kalir on IndieWeb technology for online pedagogy

Replied to a tweet by

@remikalir You have to check out what @chrisaldrich is doing with webmentions in my https://t.co/pwE8fN9nGz class, he sends reads and watch posts to all assignments https://boffosocko.com/tag/edu522/feed/ #digped (https://t.co/6Inpwg9qKl)
— Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) August 4, 2018

thanks for sharing, will read in detail soon!
— Remi Kalir (@remikalir) August 4, 2018

For a bit more context on this⁮, perhaps start here: IndieWeb technology for online pedagogy.

👓 Exspiravit ex machina | Imani Mosley

Replied to Exspiravit ex machina by Imani Mosley (Imani Mosley)

Getting this started has proved more difficult than initially envisioned, who knows why. I say this because I have been completely overtaken by this work and the questions that have arisen from it so, naturally, writing about it should be easy, right? Right. Let's start with a little background...

Congratulations on the new website! Glad to see you’ve got a bigger presence for longer form thoughts that I can follow.

I’d sent you a separate note on your metadata problem, but while I’m thinking about the broader issues, one interesting person who does immediately come to mind (thought not a specialist in microformats) is Kris Shaffer, who is a digital humanist, data scientist, and a digital media specialist. Recently he was a scholar with the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at University of Mary Washington before heading into the private sector. I suspect he may have some interest as well as relevant experience for problems like this and could point you in some interesting directions.

👓 Classical music metadata | Imani Mosley

Replied to Classical music metadata by Imani Mosley (Imani Mosley)

This metadata project came about in a very practical fashion: NPR's in-house music database has a legacy file naming convention for its art music back from when it was digitizing LPs and moving from a physical collection to an online one. I won't go too much into why the system exists as it does but what's important to know is that it is as anachronistic as possible. There is very little connection between it and any other "standard" and makes it nearly impossible to discover anything as the search is exact rather than flexible. So being good librarians, we want to fix it. Making that statement was the easy part.

What followed was a very intense meeting in which my supervisor and I went through the pros and cons of various metadata & cataloging systems (our in-house database, iTunes, and others). There were far more cons than pros. It gave us a lot to consider and some things we could put in place but still left an uneasy feeling.

Imani, I didn’t see a comment box on your website and it doesn’t appear to support the Webmention spec yet, so I’ll post my reply on my site (something I’d do anyway) and send you a ping via Twitter.

I can’t help but thinking that this may be a potential use case for microformats. I notice there’s already some useful pages and research on music and even sheet music on their website.

If nothing else, I’d recommend that you or others delving into the process of looking at music metadata try to emulate the process behind what microformats are and how they work. I think it’s highly useful to take an overview of what and how people are already doing things in real life situations, figure out common patterns, and then documenting them to make the overall scope of work potentially smaller as well as to indicate a best path forward. Many companies will have created proprietary formats and methods which are likely to be highly incompatible or described, but not actually implemented in actual practice. (Hint: avoid unimplemented suggestions at all costs.) Your small polling sample already indicates a lot of variability, and I suspect your poll is very biased give people who would most likely be following your account.

A good starting point for answering your problem might be to do a bit of reading on microformats and then asking questions in the microformat community’s online chat. I suspect there are several people in the community who have done large-scale work on the web and categorization who might be able to help you out as well as point you in the direction of prior art and others who are working on these problems.

If you need help in understanding some of the microformats material, I’m happy to help you out via phone or online video chat and introduce you to some folks in the area.

👓 Learning to Love the Stable Link | Uncommon Sense

Replied to Learning to Love the Stable Link by

Karen Wulf (Uncommon Sense — The Blog | Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture)

When you’re striving to make your students’ lives just a click easier by embedding an article in your syllabus or posting it to Blackboard (or another online learning environment), however, it’s important to embed the link to the article rather than the PDF of the article itself. It’s easy to do; you simply paste the link from JSTOR or MUSE into the same field you would paste a document or PDF. It’s no more difficult for the students, and it makes a big difference to the journals whose articles you’re teaching.

I can’t help but read this and think that there’s a good use case for the Webmention spec here. Similar to my thinking in IndieWeb and Academic Research and Publishing, it seems relatively obvious that professors could be referencing the DOIs or other permalink URLs for journals and articles they’re assigning and sending webmentions so that the journal itself could receive webmentions of those facts. This in turn would help those journals have a better understanding of the number of incoming links as well as referrer traffic and potential readers they’ve got.

I’ve outlined a bit of how read posts on the web can send notifications to journal articles to allow them to better track traffic. Similar to use cases I’ve outlined for podcasts which have some large aggregate download data, but absolutely no actual “I listened to this particular episode” data, explicit read webmentions for journal articles could be a boon to these journals as well as to the greater research enterprise.

Separately but similarly, it would be nice if journals could take advantage of annotation platforms like Hypothes.is (especially if they sent webmentions to the canonical links or DOIs for .pdfs) to get a better idea of how closely, or not, academics are reading and annotating their works.

Reply to Becky Hansmeyer about A Micro.blog App Idea

Replied to A Micro.blog App Idea by

Becky Hansmeyer (Becky Hansmeyer)

Yesterday I realized that I would really love a standalone app for publishing to Micro.blog that was focused on WordPress. The app itself would be structured very simply: it would open to a list of…

This sounds like something I think a lot of people would want. I know I do. It’d be particularly great if one could also simultaneously update/edit micro.blog posts as well, particularly when one is syndicating them to micro.blog via a feed. (Or does micro.blog accept fat pings to update the content? and maybe add some UI to indicate it was edited at a later date to prevent people from doing a bait and switch post?)

The closest thing I can think of currently for this is Aaron Parecki’s open sourced Quill app which works via micropub (to both WordPress and/or micro.blog hosted, or to WordPress and then syndicated via feed to micro.blog). I suspect that, depending on how one authenticates, Quill could (?) be aware of syndicated copies to micro.blog and be able to edit the posts on both platforms after-the-fact. Since Quill is a (progressive?) web app, it could be used as a mobile app on both iOS and Android.

As an aside, I notice your WordPress blog shows a generic: “This Article was mentioned on micro.blog.” line in many of your comments. Are you doing this by design, or are you unaware of the Symantic Linkbacks plugin which will help to take webmentions to your site and help turn them into more friendly looking replies within your comments section?

👓 Making changes | Colin Walker

Replied to Making changes by

Colin Walker (colinwalker.blog)

I've been doing some thinking - I know, always dangerous.

Returning to pen and paper on the way to work this morning I started making a few notes in response to James' post and extrapolated somewhat to the point where I set some things in motion internally. I think they're continuations of how I've been thinking and feeling for a while but have coalesced into something more solid.

Being largely offline for a number of days felt right, it felt like how I need to be at the moment. So I'm going to be stepping back.

Since reading James’ post I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and how to best respond myself. I haven’t figured it all out yet. I’ve been considering taking a bit of a break, particularly as Facebook and other platforms are making drastic changes to how they operate on the web.

I’ve also been thinking about it in light of the Greg McVerry’s EDU522 course which has a bit of a social media purge built into it.

That said, I’m not sure what I’ll ultimately be doing, but I find it refreshing that Colin’s made this decision for himself. It sounds like it’s coming from a genuine place and I know he probably needs the break as much as many of us do.

Colin, I know many of your friends stretched across the world will miss your regular presence, even if we don’t say it on a regular basis, but good luck, and know that we’re always here for you if you need anything!

I miss him already…

👓 #EDU 522 Daily Update: RSS and WordPress | Greg McVerry

Replied to #EDU 522 Daily Update: RSS and WordPress by

Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)

Hello in today’s first daily update I wanted to share about RSS if you wanted a little background here you go:

My feeds for the class would be:

for the tag edu522: https://boffosocko.com/tag/edu522/feed/
for the dailyponderances: https://boffosocko.com/tag/dailyponderance/feed/

I don’t have everyone in it yet, but I’ve started an OPML file for the class that one could use to subscribe to in Inoreader. Otherwise you can save the file (typically with the extension .xml) and upload it into the reader of your choice, however you’ll need to come back and get updates as I add new feeds. If you’d like me to add you to the list, drop your details into the comments as you’d like them to appear on my Following Page or send my original post a webmention from your site.

Some thoughts on silos, divisions, and bridges

Replied to a tweet by

Cruce Saunders (Twitter)

Instead of 'eliminating' divisions, or 'blowing up' silos....let's use metaphors about bridging, connecting, unifying, transcending, collaborating across borders.... connecting all of the groups within an organization in a coherent way so that they all work seemlessly together.
— Cruce Saunders (@mrcruce) July 31, 2018

The #IndieWeb community has been working on this for a while. There’s even a service called Brid.gy to help enact it. At the same time, as Ben Werdmüller indicates, we need to be careful not to put too much reliance on silos’ APIs which can, and obviously will, be pulled out from underneath us at any moment.

As any kindergartner can tell you, “It’s difficult to play ball when the local bully owns the ball and wants to make up their own rules or leave in a huff.”

One of the things I love about IndieWeb is that we’re all trying to create a way for balls to be roughly standardized and mass manufactured so that everyone can play regardless of what the bully wants to do or what equipment people bring to the game.¹

And as Nikhil Sonnad has reminded us very recently, we also need more than just connections, we need actual caring and thinking human interaction.²

References

Aldrich C. Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet. A List Apart. https://alistapart.com/article/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet. Published July 19, 2018. Accessed July 31, 2018.

Sonnad N. Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason. Quartz. https://qz.com/1342757/everything-bad-about-facebook-is-bad-for-the-same-reason/. Published July 30, 2018. Accessed July 31, 2018.