reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to Thinking about Planets and Challenges by

David Shanske (david.shanske.com)

Earlier today, at the special Transatlantic Bonus Homebrew Website Club, we continued a discussion on trying a community challenge to create content, similar to some of what micro.blog does with their photo challenges. ❧ One of the stumbling blocks was discovery on this, being distributed, how you can...

GWG, Some random thoughts:
Your challenge question is tough, not just for the mere discovery portion, but for the multiple other functions involved, particularly a “submit/reply” portion and a separate “I want to subscribe to something for future updates”.
I can’t think of any sites that do both of these functionalities at the same time. They’re almost always a two step process, and quite often, after the submission part, few people ever revisit the original challenge to see further updates and follow along. The lack of an easy subscribe function is the downfall of the second part. A system that allowed one to do both a cross-site submit/subscribe simultaneously would be ideal UI, but that seems a harder problem, especially as subscribe isn’t well implemented in IndieWeb spaces with a one click and done set up.
Silo based spaces where you’re subscribed to the people who might also participate might drip feed you some responses, but I don’t think that even micro.blog has something that you could use to follow the daily photo challenges by does it?

Other examples

https://daily.ds106.us/ is a good example of a sort of /planet that does regular challenges and has a back end that aggregates responses (usually from Twitter). I imagine that people are subscribed to the main feed of the daily challenges, but I don’t imagine that many are subscribed to the comments feed (is there even one?)
Maxwell’s Sith Lord Challenge is one of the few I’ve seen in the personal site space that has aggregated responses. I don’t think it has an easy way to subscribe to the responses though an h-feed of responses on the page might work in a reader? Maybe he’s got some thoughts about how this worked out?
Ongoing challenges, like a 30 day photography challenge for example, are even harder because they’re an ongoing one that either requires a central repository to collect, curate, and display them (indieweb.xyz, or a similar planet) or require something that can collect one or more of a variety of submitted feeds and then display them or allow a feed(s) of them. I’ve seen something like this before with http://connectedcourses.net/ in the education space using RSS, but it took some time to not only set it up but to get people’s sites to work with it. (It was manual and it definitely hurt as I recall.)
I don’t think of it as a challenge, but I often submit to the IndieWeb sub on indieweb.xyz and I’m also subscribed to its output as well. In this case it works as an example since this is one of its primary functions. It’s not framed as a challenge, though it certainly could be. Here one could suggest that participants tag their posts with a particular hashtag for tracking, but in IndieWeb space they’d be “tagging” their posts with the planet’s particular post URL and either manually or automatically pinging the Webmention endpoint.
Another option that could help implement some fun in the system is to salmention all the prior submissions on each submission as an update mechanism, but one would need to have a way to unsubscribe to this as it could be(come) a spam vector.

Replied to a thread by Mia (not her best work) and Zach Leatherman (Twitter)

Personal sites are wonderful. But they can be a lot of work to set up & maintain. Also: personal solutions don't solve the problem of building networks & public digital spaces.

If we want 'personal sites' to be an answer to social platforms, we have a lot of work to do.
— Mia (not her best work) (@TerribleMia) April 27, 2022

Yes. I wonder how much RSS can fill the “networks” space and what else is missing? How can it be better?

Not asking you for answers, but I’m definitely thinking about this
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) April 27, 2022

I think RSS could be part of it. I keep circling back to: a browser could helps provide interface around RSS, webmentions, whatever - and even help you start your own simple site from a template?
— Mia (not her best work) (@TerribleMia) April 27, 2022

I always circle back to the Lost Infrastructure chart here https://indieweb.org/lost_infrastructure and wonder:

in which boxes can the technology requirements be simplified for publishers and maintainers of individual websites but still allow for the broadest inter-operation?
which axes are missing?
which boxes need to be expanded with technology for better plurality?

Replied to As I continue reading and sometimes re-posting ... by

Jeremy Cherfas (Jeremy Cherfas)

As I continue reading and sometimes re-posting things written on this day, I've decided to do one more thing at the end of a session: go to a random site in the IndieWeb WebRing. Today, I found something that resonates down the years: how to organise the content of a weblog.

These are fascinating questions, though looking at them from various perspectives and imagined audiences over time scales makes them more intriguing.

Most often we privilege the chronological time order because that’s how we ourselves live them, write them, and how much of our audience experiences them.

But consider looking at someone’s note collections or zettelkasten after they’re gone? One wouldn’t necessarily read them in physical order or even attempt to recreate them into time-based order. Instead they’d find an interesting topical heading, delve in and start following links around.

I’ve been thinking about this idea of “card index (or zettelkasten) as autobiography” for a bit now, though I’m yet to come to any final conclusions. (References and examples see also: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=%22card+index+as+autobiography%22).

I’ve also been looking at Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project which is based on a chunk of his (unfinished) zettelkasten notes which editors have gone through and published as books. There were many paths an editor could have taken to write such a book, and many of them that Benjamin himself may not have taken, but there it is at the end of the day, a book ostensibly similar to what Benjamin would have written because there it is in his own writing in his card index.

After his death, editors excerpted 330 index cards of Roland Barthes’ collection of 12,000+ about his reactions to the passing of his mother and published them in book form as a perceived “diary”. What if someone were to do this with your Tweets or status updates after your death?

Does this perspective change your ideas on time ordering, taxonomies, etc. and how people will think about what we wrote?

I’ll come back perhaps after I’ve read Barthes’ The Death of the Author…

Also in reply to:

Replied to a tweet by Codex Editor (Twitter)

What are the ideal features you'd look for in a tool-for-thought that ... didn't use **any text whatsoever**?

What could you capture and express that would still enable you to preserve & augment meaning?
— Codex OS (@codexeditor) April 2, 2022

To break your literacy boundaries, try taking a look at Lynne Kelly‘s work on orality and memory (Knowledge and Power, Songlines, et al.). Duane Hamacher, et al. have a great new book out as well. And try Ong’s work on orality too. There are lots of non-literate tools for thought hiding out there.

Replied to Note-taking: A Research Roundup by

Jennifer Gonzalez (Cult of Pedagogy)

A summary of 8 best practices in note-taking, straight from the research.

It’s been a few years since this was originally posted and there have been some interesting developments in note taking apps and software which have been shifting some of the focus in the space. The primary change is the popularization of the German idea of the Zettelkasten which grew out of the commonplace book tradition from antiquity and the early Renaissance.

The most detailed form of the idea can be found in Sönke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes, which also looks closely at much of the note taking and psychology related research over the past several decades. While he frames the method in terms of writing and creation as the end goal, much of the method dovetails with Bloom’s Taxonomy as I’ve outlined. It could also be framed as Cornell Notes with a greater focus on atomic notes that are highly linked and thereby integrating a student’s new knowledge with their prior knowledge.

I’d love to see more educators scaffolding the use of this note taking tool in their classes, especially in high school and undergraduate education.

Cross reference: https://boffosocko.com/tag/note-taking/