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👓 Monthly report: February 2019 | Jeremy Cherfas
It’s the least I could do since I feel like I may be at least partially responsible for starting you down the primrose path of Our Daily Bread… I also suspect that what you’d like to write is going to be far more interesting and nourishing a project.
👓 Peace and love | Ben Werdmüller
And for those interested in delving in further, here’s a very recent and more technically accurate (and reasonably accessible) discussion of 5G and its current state following the recent Mobile World Conference:
It features Stacey Higginbotham a journalist who has covered telecom, the FCC, and technology for the past decade+.
See the
.I’m reminded of chef Alton Brown who regularly gives the cooking advice that one should never buy unitasker kitchen tools, but instead get multi-taskers that can do a variety of jobs. This typically cuts down on a lot of the mess and fuss in one’s kitchen and generally makes it a nicer place to prepare food. Nine times out of ten the unitasker is a much more expensive and infrequently used tool and ultimately gets lost in a junk drawer. More often than not, there are one or multi-taskers that can do a better job for far less.
In some sense social silos like Twitter (with functionality for notes and bookmarks), Instagram (photos), Facebook (notes, photos, links, etc.), Swarm (locations and photos), etc. are just like those unitaskers in the kitchen. They only do one (or sometimes a very few) thing(s) well and generally just make for a messier and more confused social media life. They throw off the mise en place of my life by scattering everything around, making my own content harder to find and use beneficially. On my own website, I have all of the functionalities of these four examples–and lots more–and its such a much better experience for me.
As time goes by and I’m able to post more content types (and cross link them via replies) on my own website and even to others’, I do notice that the increased context on my website actually makes it more interesting and useful. In particular, I can especially see it when using my “On This Day” functionality or various archive views where I can look back at past days/months/years to see what I had previously been up to. This often allows me to look at read posts, bookmark posts, photos, locations to put myself back in the context of those prior days. Since all of the data is there and viewable in a variety of linear and non-linear manners, I can more easily see the flow of the ideas, where they came from and where they may be going. I can also more easily search for and find ideas by a variety of meta data on my site that would probably have never been discoverable on disparate and unrelated social sites. That article I read in July and posted to Twitter could never be grouped again with the related photo on Instagram or the two other bookmarked journal articles I put on Diigo or the annotations I made with Hypothes.is. But put all that on my own website, and what a wonderful exploding world of ideas I can immediately recall and continue exploring at a later date. In fact, it is this additional level of aggregation and search that makes my website that much more of a valuable digital commonplace book.
I’ll note, as a clever bit of of search and serendipity to underscore the discussion of context, it’s nearly trivial for me to notice that exactly two years ago today I was also analogizing social media and food culture. Who knows where those two topics or even related ones from my site will take me next?
While I do like the way that WordPress makes it easy for one to create link previews by simply putting a URL into the editor (as in your example), I’ve generally shied away from it as it relies on oEmbed and doesn’t necessarily put the actual text into your site. (Not all websites will provide this oEmbed functionality either.) I mention this because a lot of the benefit of having a commonplace is the ability to easily search it. If your post only has a title and a URL, without careful tagging it may be much harder to come back and discover what you were searching for later.
I’ve started an article on how I’m using my website as one, but still have a way to go before I finish it. A big portion of my workflow relies on the Post Kinds Plugin and its available bookmarklet functionality. There are also a lot of nice Micropub clients like Omnibear that making bookmarking things quick and easy too.
In the erstwhile, I ‘ll note that on my own site, I tag things relating to my own commonplace (thinking about and building it) as “commonplace book” and for examples of other peoples’ commonplaces, I usually use the plural tag “commonplace books“. These may also give you some ideas.
With respect to the Medium article which you linked, I’ve seen a recurring theme among bloggers (and writers in general) who indicate that they use their websites as “thought spaces”. Others may use similar or related phraseology (like “thinking out loud”) but this seems to be the most common in my experience. Toward that end, I’ve been bookmarking those articles that I’ve read with the tag “thought spaces“. Some of those notes and websites may also give you some ideas related to having and maintaining an online commonplace book.
Hopefully you got things sorted before seeing this. There was a small bump in getting things started because the video server they had planned on using had some last minute problems that prevented recording, so they switched to Google Hangouts at the last minute. Other than that, most of it has gone fairly smoothly. Sorry to hear you had issues.
I’m curious if you could document the exact problems you ran into so that we can fix them in the future. Were there things you couldn’t find on the wiki? Was it bandwidth problems? Others?
Reply to The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic | Nautilus
After all, it had been Wiener who discovered a precise mathematical definition of information: The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content.
In fact, it was Claude E. Shannon, one of Wiener’s colleagues, who wrote the influential A Mathematical Theory of Communication published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948, almost 5 years after the 1943 part of the timeline the article is indicating. Not only did Wiener not write the paper, but it wouldn’t have existed yet to have been a factor in Pitts deciding to choose a school or adviser at the time. While Wiener may have been a tremendous polymath, I suspect that his mathematical area of expertise during those years would have been closer to analysis and not probability theory.
To put Pitts & McCulloch’s work into additional context, Claude Shannon’s stunning MIT master’s thesis A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits in 1940 applied Boolean algebra to electronic circuits for the first time and as a result largely allowed the digital age to blossom. It would be nice to know if Pitts & McCulloch were aware of it when they published their work three years later.
👓 Indie Web Dose / Rainy Day | myravery
It took me a while to puzzle it out when I first ran across it, but the text just underneath your title: <SPAN CLASS='P-AUTHOR H-CARD'>MIRIAM AVERY</SPAN>
is occurring because you’re using the microformats 2 plugin which tries to inject the p-author h-card portion into your page, but it’s having a conflict with your theme which is escaping the output for that author section. (More details on this known issue here.)
Chances are pretty good that you could deactivate the microformats plugin to fix the cosmetic issue without causing other major issues. Depending on your theme’s native microformats markup, you may likely find that you don’t see or experience any other major issues with any of the other technology. The one issue I’ve seen people come across here is if they’re using Brid.gy to syndicate their content via webmention to Twitter, in which case having stronger markup becomes much more important. Hopefully this will at least help you track down and either fix the issue or figure out the best way around it for your particular needs.
The best long term solution would be to add the proper microformats markup directly into the theme itself.
To get started quickly, just to have the notifications, you might try creating an account with Webmentions.io and put the endpoint into the <head>
of your site so you can receive them in the erstwhile on a separate service and worry about direct integration at a later date. As I recall Aaron Gustafson has a Webmention.io Jekyll Plugin for display and some of the outline is covered in this recent article by Max Böck.
If necessary, you can get help in the #Dev channel of the IndieWeb chat.
📑 Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens | Tom Critchlow
Any other ideas #IndieWeb (aka #ActiveWeb)?