One of the most requested Twitter API features is now available – the ability to get replies to a Tweet as a thread.
Long time readers know that I’ve long been a fan of Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. But up until now you had to use horrible hacks to get the data. As trailed in th...
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
In 2019 I wrote more than the previous 5 years combined, at least publically. There's several places that I write that aren't as obvious. I spend quite a lot of time writing and curating howtoegghead.com . I also write a lot of emails that…
Instead my approach now is to publish my thoughts more freely with less premeditation. Particularly in this space, which is mine, for me, by me. ❧
a good philosophy for a personal website
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 11:21AM
Look, nobody was flipping through pages on your blog to find anything anyway, so it’s fine. ❧
so true…
but I do search on my own site frequently…
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 11:22AM
What is a badass? I love the word itself, because there is practically no way to use it in a negative way. It's a good word. In Kathy Sierra's book, the word badass is used to describe an expert. Somebody that has learned a skill…
As I read this while thinking about the context of the IndieWeb and it’s wiki, I’m thinking two cognitively dissonant thoughts: 1. The current technical uses are creating content more for themselves and their research and use and 2. They’re not creating it to help out the users who may necessarily need a ladder or a bigger platform to get to where they are.
It’s going to take a layer of intermediate users, creators, or builders to help create a better path to bring the neophytes up to a higher level to get more out of the wealth of information that’s hiding in it. Or it’s going to take helpers and mentors to slowly build them up to that point.
How can we more consistently reach a hand down to pull up those coming after us? How can we encourage others to do some of the same?
It’s going to take a layer of intermediate users, creators, or builders to help create a better path to bring the neophytes up to a higher level to get more out of the wealth of information that’s hiding in it. Or it’s going to take helpers and mentors to slowly build them up to that point.
How can we more consistently reach a hand down to pull up those coming after us? How can we encourage others to do some of the same?
I have been thinking a lot about digital gardens this week. A blog post by Tom McFarlin re-introduced me to the term, which led me down a rabbit hole of interesting ideas on creating a digital space…
My blog posts were merely random thoughts — bits and pieces of my life. ❧
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:52AM
Despite having something that worked sort of like a blog, I maintained various resources and links of other neat ideas I found around the web. It was a digital garden that I tended, occasionally plucking weeds and planting new ideas that may someday blossom into something more. ❧
The idea of a thought space hiding in here….
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:53AM
“The idea of a ‘blog’ needs to get over itself,” wrote Joel Hooks in a post titled Stop Giving af and Start Writing More. “Everybody is treating writing as a ‘content marketing strategy’ and using it to ‘build a personal brand’ which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.”
It is almost as if he had reached down into my soul and figured out why I no longer had the vigor I once had for sharing on my personal blog. For far too long, I was trying to brand myself. Posts became few and far between. I still shared a short note, aside, once in a while, but much of what I shared was for others rather than myself. ❧
For many, social media took over their “streams” of thoughts and ideas to the point that they forgot to sit, reflect, and write something longer (polished or not).
Personal websites used for yourself first is a powerful idea for collecting, thinking, and creating.
Getting away from “branding” is a great idea. Too many personal sites are used for this dreadful thing. I’d much rather see the edge ideas and what they flower into.
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:56AM
Personal websites can be so much more than a progression of posts over time, newer posts showing up while everything from the past is neatly tucked on “page 2” and beyond. ❧
This is an interesting idea and too many CMSes are missing this sort of UI baked into them as a core idea. CMSes could do a better job of doing both: the garden AND the stream
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:57AM
While I lament the loss of some of the artistry of the early web and lay much of the blame at the feet of blogging platforms like WordPress, such platforms also opened the web to far more people who would not have otherwise been able to create a website. Democratizing publishing is a far loftier goal than dropping animated GIFs across personal spaces. ❧
WordPress has done a lot to democratize publishing and make portions of it easier, but has it gone too far in crystalizing the form of things by not having more wiki-like or curation-based features?
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:01AM
Throughout the platform’s history, end-users have remained at the mercy of their WordPress theme. Most themes are built around what WordPress allows out of the box. They follow a similar formula. Some may have a fancy homepage or other custom page templates. But, on the whole, themes have been primarily built around the idea of a blog. Such themes do not give the user true control over where to place things on their website. While some developers have attempted solutions to this, most have never met the towering goal of putting the power of HTML and CSS into the hands of users through a visual interface. This lack of tools has given rise to page builders and the block editor. ❧
an apropos criticsm
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:02AM
I also want them to be able to easily build something like Tom Critchlow’s wikifolder, a digital collection of links, random thoughts, and other resources.
More than anything, I want personal websites to be more personal. ❧
Those in the IndieWeb want this too!! I definitely do.
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:03AM
How might one escape a book’s shackled sense of time, extending the authored experience over weeks and months?
It looks to me like Andy and Michael are grasping at recreating with modern technology and tools what many (most? all?) indigenous cultures around the world used to ritually learn and memorize their culture’s knowledge. Mnemonics, spaced repetition, graded initiation, orality, dance, and song were all used as a cohesive whole to do this.
The best introduction to many of these methods and their pedagogic uses is best described by Lynne Kelly‘s book Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
If they take her ideas as a basis and then layer on their own thinking, I think they’ll get much further much quicker. Based on my reading of their work thus far, they’re limiting themselves solely with western and modern cultures or at least those of a post-Peter Ramus world.
As an example, I’ve recently been passively watching the Netflix series The Who Was? Show which is geared toward children, but it does a phenomenal job of creating entertaining visuals, costumes, jokes, songs, dances, over-the-top theatricality, and small mnemonic snippets to teach children about famous people in our culture. Naturally this is geared toward neophytes, but it’s memorable, especially when watched with some spaced repetition. To follow it up properly it needs the next 10 layers of content and information to provide the additional depth to move it from children’s knowledge to adult and more sophisticated knowledge. Naturally this should be done at a level appropriate to the learner and their age and sophistication and include relevant related associative memory techniques, but it’s a start.
I’ll note that our educational system’s inability to connect (or associate) new knowledge with previous knowledge is a major drawback.
We humans are messy, illogical creatures who like to imagine we’re in control—but we blithely let our biases lead us astray. In Design for Cognitive Bias, David Dylan Thomas lays bare the irrational forces that shape our everyday decisions and, inevitably, inform the experiences we craft. Once we grasp the logic powering these forces, we stand a fighting chance of confronting them, tempering them, and even harnessing them for good. Come along on a whirlwind tour of the cognitive biases that encroach on our lives and our work, and learn to start designing more consciously.
Law enforcement, marketers, hospitals and other bodies apply artificial intelligence (AI) to decide on matters such as who is profiled as a criminal, who is likely to buy what product at what price, who gets medical treatment and who gets hired.
Read through part of chapter 4 and the section on Method of Loci on/around 8/7/20.
Some pretty big new features added. First, in Authl:
Private post — please log in to read
It pains me to read this. I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with all this… I can’t imagine having to live it.
(I’m also sort of curious about webmentions to protected posts, but I’m reasonably sure they should work, right?!)
Airlines are fine-tuning their cleaning procedures — where they clean, how frequently and with which tools. This is what the new processes look like.
A new feature that will allow automatic updating of plugins and themes will be available in WordPress version 5.5, which is scheduled to be released on August 11, 2020. In this core release of the world’s most popular content management system, site owners will have the option to turn auto-updates on for individual plugins and ...Read More
This should be an interesting update because of this. I’m probably going to generally ignore the functionality since I prefer closer control over my site and spend so much time in it on a daily basis.
An alarming photo of a hallway crowded by mostly maskless students in a Georgia high school raises issues with reopening schools all around the country.
This depresses me to read. It’s even worse when I think that this high school is just 36 miles South of the high school I attended. The local schools’ and government’s lack of care for the students under their supervision is appalling. It’s even worse when I think of the people who were sent home or punished for what I would consider minor dress code “violations” when I attended and yet now they’re saying they can’t manage to make mask wearing mandatory.
A strange sea monster appears on the lake ...a fortune is unearthed from an old cannon ...a valuable dinosaur egg is stolen. Watch out as the Mad Scientists turn Mammoth Falls upside down!
20% done
Read two chapters: The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake and The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls
Cory Doctorow (well.com)Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard -- a Document Type Definition or scheme -- for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine he's seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his criteria.
Doctorow apparently drew out the roadmap for Twitter, democracy, and the future of society in 2001.
If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It’s also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. ❧
Apparently this also now applies to politics and democracy too.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:12AM
When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order. ❧
If we look at Twitter as a worldwide annotation tool which is generating metadata on a much tinier subset of primary documents (some of which are not truthful themselves), this seems to bear out in that setting as well.
ref: Kalir & Garcia in Annotation
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:17AM
Schemas aren’t neutral ❧
This section highlights why relying on algorithmic feeds in social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be toxic. Your feed is full of what they think you’ll like and click on instead of giving you the choice.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:23AM
It’s wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable. ❧
The fate of true democracies.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:33AM