More meme accounts are going private. Their owners say it’s a new way to gain followers on a crowded platform.
Reads, Listens
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
👓 Owning and controlling my own content | Laura Kalbag
Laura Kalbag (Laura Kalbag)One of the ultimate goals we have at Ind.ie is owning and controlling our own data. That means I want to have ownership and control over my own personal information, rather than it being in the hands of big corporations. My personal information could range from something as intensely private as my m...
👓 Beyond my means | Laura Kalbag
When I wrote about owning and controlling my own content, I talked about trying to keep my “content” in its canonical location on my site, and then syndicating it to social networks and other sites. Doing this involves cross-posting, something that can be done manually (literally copying and pas...
A nice discussion about hurdles that non-developers face.
👓 Farewell Social Media | James Shelley
James Shelley (jamesshelley.com)I recently purged the data from my Facebook account. This effort was shockingly labour intensive: it took a browser script all weekend to crunch, and still many aspects of the process required manual execution. Torching years and years of old Facebook activity felt so liberating that I found another...
A short, but solid piece on why James has left social media and consciously moved to his own blog and feed reader. I’m curious what his thoughts are a bit on into his experience. He’s definitely worth a follow.
Nir Zicherman (Medium)Thanks to modern cloud services, the cost of storing and serving content on the internet is incredibly cheap in 2018. With a podcasting platform like Anchor, there is no need for podcasters to pay anymore. So why are traditional podcast companies still charging creators to host files like it’s 2008?
He’s definitely got a major business behind this pitch, and he’s pitching people awfully hard to get them to give away all of their data for a “free” product. There’s the old adage though, “when the product is free, you’re the product.”
I’ve had friends online who’ve noted that this is at least the third time that Anchor.fm has “pivoted”, always seemingly to a larger and larger audience. I find myself wondering when the company is going to finally eat itself? Given that their product seems to change every six months or so, I also wonder if they last another 6 months?
Apparently he’s so bought into the idea of not owning your own data, that at least he’s posting this on one of the worst social silos out there. Just give it all away.
👓 Feeds and Gardens | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)My last post, Connections, gathered a fair bit of response — enough that you can see a good example of Webmentions in action below it. There’s a little back-and-forth discussion there that mostly took place on Twitter, as well as a lot of likes and mentions that came from there as well.
👓 Michael Cohen privately questions Trump's fitness to be president | Axios
Things have been heating up since the tape was reported Friday.
👓 Adding Webmentions to Jekyll | Jordan Merrick
Jordan Merrick (jordanmerrick.com)I've added some basic support for webmentions to my Jekyll-powered site using webmention.io and this Jekyll plugin. If any of my posts are mentioned elsewhere and my site receives a webmention, it's displayed below the post content. Since Jekyll is a static site generator, the plugin can only check ...
👓 The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview | Clay Shirky
The W3C's Semantic Web project has been described in many ways over the last few years: an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, a place where machines can analyze all the data on the Web, even a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful. The problem with descriptions this general, however, is that they don't answer the obvious question: What is the Semantic Web good for? The simple answer is this: The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms. A syllogism is a form of logic, first described by Aristotle, where "...certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so." [Organon]
Not sure I like the logic on his vampire example as the language is missing some simple subtlety in it’s definition.
👓 You’re Not Cool Enough For Micro.blog | Greg Morris
It’s become a bit of a running joke amongst my tech friends. A personal meme that I keep repeating the same sort of phase when questioned about a whole range of topics. Anything from GDPR to Social Media harassment my answer – micro.blog. Many people don’t understand. I’ve tried and failed t...
Micro.blog can certainly be many things to many people–possibly too many. In large part, what it is depends on what tools you’re bringing into it and how you’d like to use it.
It can be:
- a web host
- a Twitter replacement
- a Twitter client that allows you to own your own data
- a Instagram replacement
- a microcasting platform
- a full blogging platform
- a new, well-curated community with a strong code of conduct
- a customized feed reader for a new community
- a syndication platform for one’s personal blog
- a low barrier entryway to having your own IndieWeb-capable blog on your own domain.
- a first class IndieWeb citizen with support for multiple types of posts, IndieAuth, Webmention, Micropub, and Microsub.
Because I already have my own domain, my own hosting, and my own website, I personally use it to syndicate my content into an interesting community of individuals which I’d like to engage. I use the main interface as a feed reader to see what others are up to and to communicate with them directly. My site supports Webmention so comments to my posts on micro.blog come right back to my site and provide me notifications there.
Perhaps micro.blog ought to make a chart for a variety of potential users to indicate what they would potentially be bringing with them and then have an indicator what they might use it for with those particular tools? Because of the arrays of technologies that micro.blog supports, it’s far from a simple marketing problem, particularly to a non-technical crowd. You certainly can’t say it’s “just” a Twitter replacement because Twitter only supports a small fraction of what micro.blog is capable.
👓 What I Want in a Blog | Glenn 2.0
Just throwing out some thoughts on what I really want in a blog: Cross-device accessibility – compose, read, and manage from any device Decentralized – Easy, lightweight setup on my own server, or Raspberry Pi Federated – this provides: Discoverability – my feed shows up elsewhere, others ca...
👓 Giving Up On IndieWeb | Glenn 2.0
Glenn Dixon (glenn.thedixons.net)(Further update: webmentions are working!!!) (UPDATE: It’s now been a year since I first posted this. Just today I discovered a year-old blog post which mentioned this one, and an ensuing discussion. Of course I knew nothing of this because – well, I couldn’t get webmentions to work! I have ...
👓 RDFa vs microformats | Evan Prodromou
I'm fascinated by the idea of including semantic markup in Plain Old XHTML pages, and I'm excited by recent developments in this area. But I'm also concerned about the growing discrepancy between the W3C's initiative, namely RDFa, and the more established but conversely less official microformats effort. I think that having competing standards efforts in this area is going to hurt the advancement of so-called small-s semantic Web technologies, which is going to be bad for everyone.
An interesting bit of web history…
👓 Metadata, Part 2: Microformats | Locked Down SEO
Today, we’ll look at another widely used form of structured data markup, Microformats.
Interesting to see how others see and define these for themselves. This has a heavy bent toward SEO obviously.
👓 Why I Needed to Pull Back From Twitter | Maggie Haberman
The viciousness, toxic partisan anger and intellectual dishonesty are at all-time highs.