reply | Chris Aldrich

Reply to Andy Gonzalez about NIMBIOS Workshop

Replied to a tweet by

Just discovered this collection of talks curated by @NIMBioS on #information and #entropy in biological systems. Thought I'd share cos this is an important topic. https://t.co/Sjf7LmHjFn
— Andy Gonzalez (@bio_diverse) October 4, 2018

ping @mioconnor @JoeyBernhardt @ty_tuff @norberg_jon @resilienceSci @cboettig @CT_Bergstrom
— Andy Gonzalez (@bio_diverse) October 4, 2018

Andrew Eckford et al. hosted a related conference a few months prior at BIRS which also has some great videos:

Biological and Bio-Inspired Information Theory(14w5170)

Perhaps it’s time for a follow up conference?

Replied to a post by

Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)

Long term I see it as potential revenue stream. I don’t believe in decentralized web. I believe in hyper local web. The newspapers or local libraries can be backbone. Provide dead simple publishing software on subscription, coupon newsletters, take back the marketplace from facebook.

The web is local news. Local news belongs to the people. thanks for what you do.

BTW here is library project I am working on https://checkoutmydomain.glitch.me

Greg, the outlet you’re thinking of is ColoradoBlvd.net, a local paper here in Pasadena, CA, which does support webmentions including backfeed of interactions with Twitter using Brid.gy. (Sadly Facebook’s API turned off their access to this sort of feature on August 1st.)

I’ve documented a piece of it here and there’s some detail on the IndieWeb for Journalism wiki page which I encourage everyone to contribute to as they can.

As for Ben Keith’s concern about spam, yes, Webmention can be a potential vector like trackbacks and pingbacks, but it does learn from their mistakes with better mitigation and verification. Work on the Vouch protocol/extension of Webmention continues to mitigate against these issues. I’ll also note that Akismet for WordPress works relatively well for Webmentions too, though there have still yet to be examples of Webmention spam in the wild.

For publishers using WordPress, there are some excellent plugins including Webmention (which has some experimental Vouch plumbing included already) and Symantic Linkbacks which work with WordPress’s native comments. I’ll note that they’re developed and actively maintained by several, including the core maintainer for pingbacks and trackbacks in WordPress.

I’m happy to help if anyone has questions.

Reply to Geolocating your travel blog posts by Mark Grabe

Replied to Geolocating your travel blog posts by

Mark Grabe (Learning Aloud)

A travel blog by definition describes experiences at many specific places. The location is part of the context for each post. I use Blogger for this particular blog and after several years of writing posts about traveling, I finally noticed that Google allows the author to associate a location with each post. I am guessing few Blogger bloggers use this feature, but I thought it might be worth exploring.

For those using WordPress, there’s a simple plugin called Simple Location that has some similar functionality. It has settings for a number of map providers that can be used to display maps as well as weather conditions.

Many people use it specifically for creating checkins, but it could also be used by travel bloggers. It’s also got a widget to show one’s last known location in a sidebar or footer.

Reply to Dogfood by Rick Wysocki

Replied to Dogfood by

Rick Wysocki (Rick Wysocki)

[...] I’ve been reading a bit about the IndieWeb movement, and am becoming increasingly interested in the possibility of a more decentralized model for distributing web content.

[...]

To make a greater effort to create or at least have some hand in designing digital tools for my own work work. To this end, I’ve begun developing a (very small scale) Jekyll template for creating and disseminating oral history archives (called Oryll Hystory). With my scholarly background in both new media and archival theory, I’m hoping to use this as a prototype for thinking through questions regarding digital archives, circulation, and public humanities work. If that doesn’t work out, it will at least be practice for a bigger and better project. Feel free to follow the Github repository for the project if you’re interested. But don’t judge me–I’m at the early stages of the project and its currently extremely basic (and doesn’t look particularly good yet either).

Welcome to the IndieWeb Rick!

I particularly love your idea of using some of your digital knowledge and tools for research and education related work. In case you haven’t found it yet there are a growing number of educators, researchers, and practitioners applying IndieWeb philosophies and principles to the education space not only for ourselves, but for the benefit of our students and others. I hope you’ll take a moment to add yourself and some of your work to the list. If there’s anything any of us can do to help out, please don’t hesitate to touch base with us via our websites or in chat.

Reply to WordCamp: Publishers

Replied to a tweet by

WordCamp: Publishers (Twitter)

Help us host WordCamp for Publishers 2019. Read more here and apply for your city to host our event! https://t.co/LE2kvlNhpI
— WordCamp: Publishers (@wcpublishers) September 26, 2018

Leo [@postphotos] are you thinking what I’m thinking?
#Route66 #FromChicagotoLA

👓 Tracking my podcast listening | Henrik Carlsson

Replied to Tracking my podcast listening by

Henrik Carlsson (Henrik Carlsson's Blog)

I’m going to try an experiment. From now and some time ahead I’m going to be tracking my podcast listening (scrobbling, if you prefer) on my blog. Every episode of every show that I listen to will be a blog post in my Listen-of category. Some posts will be nothing but the title of the podcast and episodes, others will contain short comments from me and some might even have really long comments.

The idea behind this is that I, like many other people, listen to a lot of podcasts. I often find food for thought in these and often find myself wanting to have a way of cataloging what I’ve listened to and what was interesting in the episodes. Up until now I haven’t had a good system for that and now, I have a system. Whether it’s a good one or not, time will tell.

For now I’ll let these posts syndicate to Micro.blog but if I feel like they fill my timeline there with noise I might make some tweaks to the backend on my blog to stop them from syndicating.

It’s interesting to see someone else tracking what they’re listening to. I try to include the .mp3 or other audio files in my post with proper markup to create a faux-cast of sorts that others can subscribe to. Somewhat like reading.am, I find that discovery of podcasts by seeing what others are actually listening to is far more valuable than what they simply say they’re listening to.

I’m hoping that podcast apps like Overcast by @marco might support technology like webmention and micropub in the future to make some of this stuff a bit easier as well as more valuable.

Twitter list for #UnboundEq

Replied to Twitter Scavenger Hunt by

Catherine Cronin (Equity Unbound)

This activity is a great way to jumpstart community and networked learning using Twitter. Anyone interested in #unboundeq is welcome to join in this activity – we encourage educators and students in various classes and open participants take part!

A Twitter List

I started a bit of the Twitter scavenger hunt for Equity Unbound early this morning by creating a Twitter list of people who have been participating thus far with the #unboundeq hashtag.

For those new to the Twitter scene in education, knowing about Twitter lists, how to build them, and how one can use them are an invaluable set of tools and experiences. I highly recommend you spend a few minutes searching the web for these ideas and trying it out for yourself.

For those who are already well-versed in the idea of Twitter lists (no cheating; you’re only cheating yourselves if you’ve never done this before), feel free to subscribe to it or use it to quickly follow your peers. (Teachers are busy people and the 50+ of us don’t need to spend an inordinate amount of time doing the aggregation game, particularly if you’re doing it manually and not somewhat automated the way I’ve done.)

I’m sure the list will grow and I’ll update it over time, so check back if you don’t subscribe or use the list in a tool like TweetDeck. Apologies for those I’ve managed to have missed, please send me a tweet reply, comment below, or just keep using the hashtag and I’ll be more than happy to add you.

Even if you subscribe to the list or quickly follow everyone on it, I’d still highly recommend you spend a few minutes scrolling back into the Twitter timeline for the hashtag for the course and read what is going on. You’ll definitely have a better idea of who your class, teachers, and personal learning network are.

OPML List?

Perhaps I’ll also start a planet or subscribe-able OPML list of RSS feeds for those in the class soon as well for those who want to follow along in their feed readers? If you’ve got a particular tag/category/other that you’re using to aggregate all of your Equity Unbound participation on your own website, let me know in the comments below as well. As an example I’m using the tag UnboundEq, so all the related posts on my site can be seen at https://boffosocko.com/tag/unboundeq/ or subscribed to via https://boffosocko.com/tag/unboundeq/feed/. Let me know what yours are.

If enough people are doing this, I’ll publish a subscribe-able OPML file to make it easier for everyone to use these without us all spending the time to track them all down individually and put them into our feed readers to keep up with each other.

Reply to Equity Unbound Webcomic: Splintered Digital Identities | Kevin Hodgson

Replied to Equity Unbound Webcomic: Splintered Digital Identities by

Kevin Hodgson (dogtrax.edublogs.org)

I am dipping into Equity Unbound, a new online course/collaboration with Mia Zamora, Maha Bali and Catherine Cronin. They will be working with university students as well as opening things up to other spaces where folks, like you and me, can jump in. (The Twitter tag is here: #unboundeq) I am always interested in seeing how new offerings can be riffs off previous open learning networks, such as NetNarr, Rhizo, Digiwrimo, CLMOOC, and others.

Kevin, your comic really resonates, particularly for someone who’s got over 200 social media related accounts and identity presences in various places on the internet.

It reminds me of a line I wrote a few months back in an article about the IndieWeb idea of Webmentions for A List Apart entitled Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet:

Possibly worst of all, your personal identity on the internet can end up fragmented like so many horcruxes across multiple websites over which you have little, if any, control.

Inherent in this idea is that corporate interests and others who run social sites can disappear, delete, or moderate out of existence any of my writing, photos, audio, video, or other content into the memory hole at any time and for almost any reason. And just like a destroyed horcrux, their doing so takes a bit of my soul (identity) with it each time.

A few years back, I decided to take back my own identity on the web and post everything of interest to me on my own website on my own domain first–a digital commonplace book if you will. Only then do I syndicate it into other communities, websites, or areas as needed. (Even this reply is on my own site before I syndicate it to yours.) As a result, I own a tremendously large part of my online identity (though even at that, a lot of it is published privately for myself or select small audiences).

I hope that as Equity Unbound continues and we explore the ideas of identity, public/private, and related topics, people might consider some of these ideas and implications and potentially work on expanding solutions for students, teachers, and the rest of the world.