It's gonna be a while before AI takes all our jobs though.
Or maybe not, since it speaks with the confidence of a mediocre white man while gaslighting me throughout this whole reply.
Of course Santa Claus would have the most spectacular zettelkasten in the world!
He’s got billions of people and gifts for them to keep track of, so naturally he’s got a stupendous card index filing system to back it up! Usually Santa’s “List” gets the hero’s credit for his operation along with elves, reindeer, and a sleigh, but let’s be honest: he’s got a massive filing system that he uses to compile that naughty and nice list!
I appreciate that the movie The Christmas Chronicles (Netflix, 2018) features Santa’s main office in an extended sequence and shows off the backbone of his office operation. With centuries in operation and millions of moving parts, he’s obviously solved the logistics problem the way many before him have. His filing system seems to consist of alphabetically ordered names and letter correspondence he maintains with his juvenal suppliants. This system along with magic (presumably) allows him to make his famous list.
Throughout the movie Santa demonstrates his encyclopedic knowledge of people, their names, and long histories of what they’ve wanted for Christmas. Surely it was long and concerted work with his filing system which has made his work almost second nature, right?!?
The boxes pictured are definitely not standard library card catalog 3 x 5 inch size but are closer to a more classical 4 x 6 inch, or if you presume he’s using the DIN standard, which may be more likely, then A6 slips. If the shelves are roughly as deep as my own filing cabinet, then this room could easily contain roughly 13,925,000 slips. In comparison to Niklas Luhmann’s lifetime output of notes, this would represent roughly 155 Niklas Luhmanns—it’s no wonder that we call him Saint Niklas.
Seen in this office photo are approximately 4,000 drawers of files! I totally want this office aesthetic.I suspect I would have the same awestruck look on my face when exposed to such a massive office infrastructure.
Join Mark as he turns back the clock to examine some early Tools For Thought, and the people who created them. There’s quite a lot to learn from both, as well as a research literature that repays study.
The infinite canvas as a thinking space now has a long history, but few of the early systems are well known. I think some of them might be worth a brief look, in terms of the ideas they brought forward and in terms of the tasks they sought to address. For example:
Sketchpad: Ivan Sutherland’s system from the 1960 kicked off interactive computer graphics AND object-oriented programming.
NLS/Augment: Doug Engelbart’s original outliner, the first system that explicitly sought to be a tool for thought.
Xanadu: Ted Nelson’s early proposal for a hypertext docuverse.
Storyspace: the first system intended for non-sequential narrative. Introduced in 1987 and still in use today.
Intermedia: a platform for digital pedagogy, developed at Brown and BBN.
KMS: a hypertext system for technical documentation, the source of Akscyn’s Law
Microcosm: A hypertext system based chiefly on contextual links, the ancestor of all sculptural hypertext.
Aquanet: the 1990 system from Halasz, Trigg, and Marshall at Xerox PARC, described as a tool to hold your knowledge in place.
VIKI: the first spatial hypertext system, designed by Cathy Marshall as a reaction to Aquanet and the start of an enormously influential line of research
@chrisaldrich Another #IndieWeb question for you! I'm syndicating blog posts from kfitz.info to Mastodon, where they appear from @kfitz@kfitz.info, and then I boost from this account. Replies to @kfitz@kfitz.info appear as comments to the blog post, as desired. But if I reply to the comment on the blog, that reply doesn't syndicate here, so the commenter doesn't know. And if I reply to the comment here, the reply comes from this account (and I'm not yet sure whether it appears as a reply on the blog or not). How do you manage this?
@kfitz I’m not sure that the straightforward functionality you’re looking for exists within the ActivityPub plugin (yet), but it’s certainly something you could potentially file as a feature request.
Generally, you’d post on your site where it’s seen in the Fediverse via the ActivityPub plugin and/or optionally boosted by your native Mastodon account. Replies to your post (on Mastodon) show up on your site as comments and you reply to them there in your site’s comments section. Then you manually copy/paste the text of your reply from your website into your native Mastodon account and include the comment/reply permalink in that reply. If you’ve got Webmention set up with Brid.gy for Mastodon, replies to your replies on Mastodon should then make their way back to the proper threaded spot in your website’s comments section.
An example of this at work can be seen on my earlier mistake:
A like of that Mastodon reply shows up on my site (also courtesy of Brid.gy via Webmention).
Related, I’ve been playing around with mirroring my WP site as an instance with the ActivityPub plugin and have boosted posts with my more broadly followed mastodon.social account the same way you mentioned that you were doing with yours. Somehow I’m anecdotally finding that I get more responses/reactions with native posts that with these boosts. I’m curious what your experience has been with this strategy so far? I’m still just starting my experimentation here, but I do like the fact that I’m able to include richer presentation of wrapped links in my WordPress native posts which are seen in the Fediverse while Mastodon seems to strip them out or not allow them (see an example of this in the post above this reply).
One of these days, I'd like to find a way to post my archive from the other place in some space that I control. I've now got it in a couple of different formats, and some day when I get time. I'll look forward to playing with the possibilities.
@kfitz It looks like you’ve found at least one option for archiving your Tweets on your own site, but do watch out for the archived t.co shortlinks which may not survive if Twitter were to disappear altogether.
For #FeedReaderFriday this week, I’m recommending a feed reader—a different sort of feed reader: https://fraidyc.at/. Kicks Condor has designed an interface that you can sort by frequency/time as well as tag. It also encourages you to read content on the person’s site directly, so you get the web experience they chose rather than a more vanilla interface.
Wishing everyone a Happy #NewwwYear. Seems like 2023 may be a good time to make a fresh start and explore setting up your own website to own & control your online identity & content.
I’ve got lots of friends in a supportive online community who can help: https://indieweb.org
One might think that instead of using Hugo (or previously Medium) that Mastodon’s blog would be on an ActivityPub-based platform likeWriteFreely. This seems like a missed opportunity for ActivityPub, but a bigger win for the (more) open web.
In addition to following people on Mastodon in your feed reader via #RSS, you can also follow hashtags which appear there. For example, to follow #IndieWeb try: https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb.rss. #FeedReaderFriday
Keep in mind that the output of these feeds will be instance specific, and the tag feed will only get mentions from your instance and instances yours can “see” (or gets by follows with federation). So if you use a different instance, you may see more or less in your feeds. Because of its size and depth of federation, this makes mastodon.social a good bet for these sorts of subscriptions, but your experience may vary depending on your needs.
What is the most simple and cheapest way to #selfhost your own #blog or #microblog? I’d really like something that fits in with the protocols used by the #IndieWeb massive. Also, something that is simple to post from a smartphone. Pleeeease
The Quick Start page at https://indieweb.org/Quick_Start has some inexpensive and user friendly options as well as some indication of their levels of IndieWeb friendliness. Beyond this, WordPress has a reasonably low self-host bar with lots of options depending on how much time you want to spend on the hosting/maintenance.
Thinking of changing up my strategy for syndicating content from my website into Mastodon. How can my posts integrate better with ActivityPub?
Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (hcommons.social)
Dr Hitchcock (@drh@hackers.town) (hackers.town)