Apparently the evacuation warning has been lifted for Altadena. Hooray! We can sleep easy tonight. (And unpack the suitcases in the morning…)
Notes
Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes
“Title” idea from a friend for my next batch of business cards:
Chris Aldrich, vaguely famous
Definitely a useful phrase in Welsh that one would want to know early in their studies:
Dw i’n hoffi cwrw a siocled.
Fifteen: A Call to Action—Start your Own Digital Commonplace Book Today
Start your own digital commonplace today! There are some platforms mentioned above, but none of them have the flexibility and adaptability that WordPress provides. I’d love to see how others are doing this and what it allows them to create.
#HeyPresstoConf20
Thanks for coming to my presentation!
Feel free to ask questions about any of the notes here on my website or from any of the Tweets. Comments on the Tweets will ping my site (using Brid.gy as mentioned), and I’ll be able to reply directly from my commonplace book. You can also use Webmentions from your website and then our sites/commonplace books can carry on a conversation of ideas.
If you’d like, feel free to explore my commonplace book (or at least the public portions—I post a lot of work privately). You can find today’s presentation and all the other things I collect under the label for the conference at #HeyPresstoConf20.
Did you present today and want to own a copy of your presentation on your own website? Take a look at some notes I made about using ThreadReaderApp to roll up all your tweets and publish them to your site using Micropub, which I mentioned earlier in this presentation.
Fourteen: Networked collection and curation
No longer does a thinker have to collect and curate their own material, they can allow others to help them grow and curate it too!
#HeyPresstoConf20
Thirteen: Backfeeding ideas with Brid.gy
Let’s say I syndicate a thought to Twitter. I can use Bri.gy to backfeed ideas and interactions with my Tweet back to my original in my digital notebook (where it’s most useful). This helps outside ideas filter into and interact with my own ideas.
#HeyPresstoConf20
You knew ideas can have sex, right?!!
Twelve: Webmention for backlinks
For my backlinks I’m relying on the W3C recommendation Webmention spec which I’m implementing with the WordPress Webmention plugin. This allows me to cross link my own posts to look like “comments” or “replies”, but it allows others to ping me and interact with my public posts and their syndicated copies.
#HeyPresstoConf20
Need a primer on what webmentions are and what they can be used for? I’ve got you covered:
Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet
https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/19/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet-2/
Eleven: Bi-directional links or backlinks
The internet allows multi-directional linking of thoughts and ideas.
Backlinks are the new cause célèbre in the broader learning space that uses the names wiki (a communal shared commonplace), digital gardens (personal wikis), and online notebooks & productivity tools like Zettelkasten and products like Notion, Roam Research, Obsidian, Evernote. These are all just variations of the commonplace in digital settings.
#HeyPresstoConf20
Ten: A not-so “Hypothetical” Example
I use all the data I capture online using Hypothes.is to port my annotations, highlights, and notes I make online into my commonplace book.
#HeyPresstoConf20
More details and a video example:
Nine: Micropub for collecting data
The Micropub plugin helps me by creating an endpoint on my site for quickly and easily capturing lots of data. IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, n8n can all help to aggregate this data too.
#HeyPresstoConf20
Here are some more in-depth details about how I use some of these tools and recipes/walk-throughs so you can too: Using IFTTT to syndicate (PESOS) content from social services to WordPress using Micropub.
Eight: Data types and Structure
There’s lots of data I want in my commonplace: likes, bookmarks, things I read, annotations, notes, quotes, watches, listens, etc.
I implement them with Post Kinds Plugin to provide both structure, presentation, and context to most of my notes.
#HeyPresstoConf20
Each post can have its own category and tags for a variety of taxonomic and (most importantly) search purposes.
Seven: Enter WordPress
Why not aggregate all of the data to one central location on a website? This is what I’m doing with my own personal website using WordPress to make my digital commonplace book.
#HeyPresstoConf20
Six: Social Media?
Social media provides a bit of a simulacrum of the sort of networked thinking we might like to have, but you need to have dozens of accounts for different pieces of knowledge and collection and have followerships in all for interaction. Here we’re missing the idea of centralization.
#HeyPresstoConf20
It’s also painfully difficult to search for your data across the multiple information silos which often block search engines.
Five: The Memex
This is just what Vannevar Bush suggests in his famous article As We May Think in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic. Here he posits the Memex, and opens up the idea of networked information.
#HeyPresstoConf20
The internet itself could be though of as a massive living and ever-growing commonplace book which can be digitally queried to provide the answers to nearly every conceivable question.
(Some may forget that Bush was the thesis advisor of Claude Shannon, the father of the modern digital age.)
Four: Networked Thinking
Handwritten commonplaces could be a person’s own version of “networked thinking” and mode of creation. So why not take the additional step further and have a digital online commonplace?
#HeyPresstoConf20
The ability to tag, hyperlink, and search sites adds to their general usability in a way that traditional handwritten commonplace books lacked.