reply | Chris Aldrich

Reply to Ben Werdmuller on social media resharing

Replied to a tweet by

“The single change social networks could make that would have the most positive impact is to remove all kinds of resharing. Force people to speak in their own voices or not at all. Using other peoples' language to express yourself forces you to evaluate the world on their terms.”

I’ve been awaiting the percolation of your prior thoughts. For additional reference Manton Reece may have some thoughts as this lack of repost functionality is relatively central to how micro.blog works.

👓 Civix Releases New Online Media Literacy Videos | Hapgood

Replied to Civix Releases New Online Media Literacy Videos by Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)

I worked with Civix, a Canadian non-profit, to do a series of videos showing students basic web techniques for source verification and contextualization. I had boiled it down to four scripts runnin…

As I read this and tinker around a bit with some of the resources, including one for canadafactcheck.ca mentioned within one of the videos and add the “Wikipedia” to the Omnibar or try the “-site:” trick, the results there aren’t very solid themselves. Similarly a search for NewsWise.ca is rough because there are dozens of similar products with the same name which makes me think about the phrase “Doctor heal thyself.”

On the idea of the “-site:xyz.com” trick, perhaps one could create a browser extension or a bookmarklet that would use javascript to take the URL in the browser bar and massage it to return the requisite string and then execute the appropriate search so that with a simple click of a button, anyone can “remember” how to do it?

Similarly with searching for the root URLs of particular outlets by clipping off the longer paths of URLs one could use a browser bookmarklet to accomplish this with a simple click and save the seconds involved with highlighting and pasting? The more dead simple and quicker it can be, the better off we are. I’ve documented a browser bookmarklet on my site that trims news article URLs down to the base URL: https://boffosocko.com/2017/03/27/to-amp-or-not-to-amp-that-is-the-question/

As an example of this type of functionality, albiet probably with a lot more programming and manual work, Brill’s company NewsGuard has developed a Chrome browser extension that is meant to provide visual indicators on pages and in search for levels of fact checking: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/newsguard/hcgajcpgaalgpeholhdooeddllhedegi?hl=en

👓 Version 2.0 of the Micropub Plugin Released | David Shanske

Replied to Version 2.0 of the Micropub Plugin Released by

David Shanske (David Shanske)

At the Indieweb Summit in June, someone said something to me that made me decide to embark on a major rewrite of the Micropub endpoint for WordPress. For those of you not familiar with it, Micropub is a standard that allows for you to publish to a website. The major work on this actually finished in...

Hooray! And Congratulations!

Replied to Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in 21st Century Education 2018 (youtube.com)

Artificial Intelligence in 21st Century Education
13:00 – 14:15
Probe 3: How might an ethically and morally-informed AI be conceived in a culturally diverse global context? How might we realize a more equitably-designed, developed and deployed AI in light of the rate and range of disruption some have forecast as inevitable?
Panel: Abhishek Gupta, Nevena Francetic, Stephen Downes and video clips of Timnit Gebru & Rediet Abebe
Facilitator: Tylor Burrows

For the #e21sym question about Amazon’s AI discriminating against women, we do have some control. This article about how Sears helped to provide equality in the Jim Crow south is a great historical example of how economics can create equality: https://boffosocko.com/2018/10/18/searss-radical-past-how-mail-order-catalogues-subverted-the-racial-hierarchy-of-jim-crow-washington-post/

Reply to Ben Werdmller on linguistics

Replied to a tweet by

Ben Werdmuller (Twitter)

“Have there been any studies on whether using other peoples’ phraseology rather than your own to describe your opinions changes how you think? I have a really dark theory, but I want to understand if there’s science first.”

Not my direct area of expertise, but I suspect this area was born with the popular Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in linguistics which may give you a place to start. There hasn’t been a lot of hard proof provided for it to my knowledge however.

Reply to Introducing Alhambra Source’s new publisher

Replied to Introducing Alhambra Source’s new publisher by

Staff (Alhambra Source)

Jon Thurber, a veteran journalist whose long career at the Los Angeles Times included serving as managing editor of the print edition, has been named publisher of the Alhambra Source.

Thurber held a number of other management positions at the Times, including news obituary editor and editor of the book review, and he was also a leader of the paper’s reinvention committee as the Times transitioned from a predominantly print product to refocus its efforts on digital publication.

“Jon has the experience and vision to move the Alhambra Source forward to an even more dynamic civic institution in Alhambra and the larger SGV,” said Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Professor of Communication and Sociology Emerita at USC Annenberg School for Communication and one of the founders of the Alhambra Source.

Congratulations both to and on the new publisher!

I’ve recently begun reading a variety of more local news sources, most of which are built on the WordPress CMS, as is your publication. As a digital native, I often prefer reading my news via RSS feeds, but I find it surprising that many local SGV sources have (accidentally?) broken or are mismanaging their feeds.

I notice that the Alhambra Source’s main feed only contains the “News Round up” articles which primarily feature news in other outlets. While this type of advertising for and promotion of others’ work is nice, I’m subscribed to many of them already and would prefer a single feed with all of the Alhambra Source’s own original work instead! In fact, because I automatically subscribed to the AS’s main feed without looking at the site first, I was under the mistaken impression that it only did aggregation rather than original reporting, an impression which is obviously the opposite of reality.

Because a “main” feed is not available, I’m forced to subscribe to 8 separate feeds to attempt to get all of the great work coming out of AS. This feels like a bit much and could be easily fixed on your back end. A better solution would be to have your main feed include all of your articles (perhaps including the News Roundup), and then still provide the separate category-based feeds for those who are only interested in the subsections of news. (This would typically be the default for an out of the box WordPress installation.)

Finally, I’ve noticed that your feeds don’t include any of the photos featured in the articles, which is a shame since the site has some generally nice photography (particularly in comparison to competitors) to go along with the stories.

If you need any technical help, I’m happy to assist as I’d love to see better local news and events coverage in the Pasadena/SGV areas.

Congratulations again!

Reply to Pasadena Busing Controversy: Sept. 14, 1970 by Roxanne Elhachem

Replied to Pasadena Busing Controversy: Sept. 14, 1970 by

Roxanne Elhachem (ColoradoBoulevard.net)

The busing proposition in Pasadena brought mixed emotions for its citizens. Although many were happy about the social progression that was occurring in this town, it may have indirectly kept, if not increased, some of the segregation within the city. Private schools were not included in this new plan, and because of that, people who didn’t agree with the plan — and could afford it — sent their kids to affluent private schools. This lead to around 30 private schools (currently 53) being present in the city of Pasadena.Students arriving by school bus in early 70s (Photo – The U.S. National Archives).In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In the 1970s and...

Thanks for highlighting this archival news footage. I’ve always wondered why it seemed like Pasadena had so many private schools given its relative size, though I do wonder how it compares to the rest of southern California on a private school per capita basis. I’d never considered that this may be one of the largest driving factors.

I’m curious what the numbers for the city’s public and private schools are? Perhaps a follow up with some graphs, charts, and further analysis would be worthwhile? I’m definitely curious.

In the meanwhile, the topic reminded me of this relatively recent segment of Jon Oliver’s show which focused on school segregation and which also featured Ronald Reagan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8yiYCHMAlM

👓 Welcome to Hotel Alhambra! | ColoradoBoulevard.net

Replied to Welcome to Hotel Alhambra! by Melissa Michelson (ColoradoBoulevard.net)

Let’s face it — Alhambra is a nice place to live, but it hasn’t proven itself a coveted tourist or business destination for overnight stays, and if another hotel is to be built, or if the hotel-idea is even to remain in the Draft-Environmental Impact Report (D-EIR), the rationale for doing so needs to be reliably supported by current and accurate data.

While some of this analysis is interesting, it seems like a bit of sound and fury. I’d have to think that any reasonable corporation considering coming into the community is even better aware of the implications and current/future market. Unless the city is going to do the financing of any new hotels, I suspect that the market forces will take care of the issue going forward and there isn’t much to worry about.

👓 Some IndieWeb WordPress tuning | EdTech Factotum

Replied to Some IndieWeb WordPress tuning by

Clint Lalonde (EdTech Factotum)

Been spending a bit of time in the past 2 days adding some new functionality to the blog. I am making more of an effort to write more, thanks in no small part to the 9x9x25 blog challenge I am doin…

Right now, I just want to write. ❧

You might find that the micropub plugin is a worthwhile piece for this. It will give your site an endpoint you can use to post to your site with a variety of third party applications including Quill or Micropublish.net.
October 14, 2018 at 01:01AM

My hope is that it will somehow bring comments on Facebook back to the blog and display them as comments here. ❧

Sadly, Aaron Davis is right that Facebook turned off their API access for this on August 1st, so there currently aren’t any services, including Brid.gy, anywhere that allow this. Even WordPress and JetPack got cut off from posting from WordPress to Facebook, much less the larger challenge of pulling responses back.
October 14, 2018 at 01:03AM

Grant Potter ❧

Seeing the commentary from Greg McVerry and Aaron Davis, it’s probably worthwhile to point you to the IndieWeb for Education wiki page which has some useful resources, pointers, and references. As you have time, feel free to add yourself to the list along with any brainstorming ideas you might have for using some of this technology within your work realm. Many hands make light work. Welcome to the new revolution!
October 14, 2018 at 01:08AM

the autoposts from Twitter to Facebook were ❧

a hanging thought? I feel like I do this on my site all too often…
October 14, 2018 at 01:09AM

I am giving this one a go as it seems to be the most widely used. ❧

It is widely used, and I had it for a while myself. I will note that the developer said he was going to deprecate it in favor of some work he’d been doing with another Mastodon/WordPress developer though.
October 14, 2018 at 01:19AM

Reply to Doug Beal about WordCamp Los Angeles 2018

Replied to WordCamp Los Angeles 2018 #WCLAX by

Douglas Beal (dougbeal.com)

I’ve been eyeing WordCamp Seattle. What was the most interesting presentation?

Sorry Doug, somehow you’d gotten buried in my mentions.

I’m probably not the best person to ask since I think most Camps don’t get as technical as I sometimes wish they’d be. These days there are always a session or two on Gutenberg, which is interesting, but I find myself not caring as much about. Otherwise pieces on things like phpunit or unit testing are intriguing, but I’m unlikely to actually use on a regular basis myself. I find that I know too much about the areas of marking and biz dev or social media related talks that have popped up in years past to gain much from them anymore.

For the past several years, the most interesting parts of these camps for me are about the general tenor of the overall web space. I find more value in the “hallway” track chatting with the other folks who are so inclined. Most often, I’ll also check the speakers to catch people who have traveled from distant cities–I find that if they’re developers, they’re usually offering something intriguing. As a result of these strategies I often get more out of camps than just the scheduled talks.

Your mileage may vary.