👓 We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites | Motherboard

Read We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites (Motherboard)
Personal websites and email can replace most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online.
There’s a lot of talk about leaving Facebook again in the last day or two, but very little on where to go other than a few people talking about Twitter or other toxic social media that will just end up starting the same cycle of pain and frustration again. This is at least a start, but it could lean more towards a full IndieWeb approach.

👓 The web finally feels new again. | i.webthings

Read The web finally feels new again. by Joe Jenett (i.webthings)
The web was amazing before Web 2.0 and the advent of so-called social networks. Many people had their own sites and blogs from which they shared ideas and interacted with others in the community at large. It seemed to me like meeting others in their own homes back then and there was a widespread enthusiasm for blogging and personal expression. Then came the big social networks. With time, many personal sites and blogs disappeared from the web as people flocked to the big silos where their content became a heavily monitized commodity. To me, the web had lost much of its soul as people gathered in just a few, huge noise chambers.

👓 The Web Finally Feels New Again | KicksCondor

Read The Web Finally Feels New Again by Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)
(Joe’s full article is here.)
Yes, here we are again—I think what you’re saying is that even a single-line annotation of a link, even just a few words of human curation do wonders when you’re out discovering the world. (Perhaps even more than book recommendations—where we know that at leas...

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

it made me feel like we were trying to send some kind of concentrated transmission to the author—linking as a greeting, links as an invitation.  

I love the idea of this.

December 19, 2018 at 04:14PM

I do find that Webmentions are really enhancing linking—by offering a type of bidirectional hyperlink. I think if they could see widespread use, we’d see a Renaissance of blogging on the Web.  

December 19, 2018 at 04:17PM

I’m really not sure if linking, in general, has changed over the years. I’ve been doing it the same since day one. But that’s just me.  

Only in the last hour I’ve had a thought about a subtle change to one of the ways I link. It’s not a drastic thing, but it is a subtle change to common practices. Also as I think about it, it removes some of the obviousness of links on social platforms like Twitter that add the ugly @ to a username in addition to other visual changes when one mentions someone else.

December 19, 2018 at 04:22PM

👓 Is there a RSS revival going on? | Andy Sylvester

Read Is there a RSS revival going on? by Andy Sylvester (andysylvester.com)
Earlier this week, Taylor Lorenz, staff writer for The Atlantic on Internet culture, posted this on Twitter: Is there any good way to follow writers on a bunch of diff websites, so anytime they post a story I see a link or something in a single feed? This resulted in a series of over 40 replies with...
Interesting that it looks like she subsequently deleted the original post….

👓 On Blogs in the Social Media Age | Cal Newport

Read On Blogs in the Social Media Age by Cal Newport (Study Hacks)

Earlier this week, Glenn Reynolds, known online as Instapundit, published an op-ed inUSA Today about why he recently quit Twitter. He didn’t hold back, writing:

“[I]f you set out to design a platform that would poison America’s discourse and its politics, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more destructive than Twitter.”

What really caught my attention, however, is when Reynolds begins discussing the advantages of the blogosphere as compared to walled garden social media platforms.

He notes that blogs represent a loosely coupled system, where the friction of posting and linking slows down the discourse enough to preserve context and prevent the runaway reactions that are possible in tightly coupled systems like Twitter, where a tweet can be retweeted, then retweeted again and again, forming an exponential explosion of pure reactive id.

As a longtime blogger myself, Reynolds’s op-ed got me thinking about other differences between social media and the blogosphere…

Cal has some interesting thoughts on blogging versus social media which I’ve been seeing more and more about in the past several months. In addition to the major efforts by the people taking up the IndieWeb philosophies (of which I recognize several people in the comments section on the post, though they all appear as pingbacks because Cal apparently doesn’t yet support the prettier webmention specification), I’ve been seeing more people I don’t know directly talking about these ideas in the wild. I’ve only recently begun to tag some of these occurrences on my site with the tags slow social and blogosphere revival though many other examples are assuredly hiding untagged this year and last.

He almost lays out an interesting thesis for the idea of “slow social” which is roughly something I’ve been practicing for nearly 4+ years. While I maintain my personal website mostly for my own benefit as an online commonplace book, I also use it as a place to post first everything I write on the web and only then syndicate it to social media sites. The little extra bit of friction keeps my reposts, likes, and other related micro-posts (or is it micro-aggressions?) to a relative minimum compared to the past.

I’ve also noticed a lot more intentionality and value coming out of people who are writing their own posts and replies on their personal websites first. Because it appears on a site they own and which is part of their online identity, they’re far more careful about what and how they write. Their words are no longer throw-away commentary for the benefit of a relatively unseen audience that comes and goes in a rushing stream of content on someone else’s social site.

I hope this blogging renaissance continues apace. It also doesn’t escape my notice that I’m serendipitously reading this article right after having seen New Clues by David Weinberger and Doc Searls

👓 New Clues by David Weinberger and Doc Searls

Read New Clues by David Weinberger and Doc Searls (newclues.cluetrain.com)

Hear, O Internet.

It has been sixteen years since our previous communication.

In that time the People of the Internet — you and me and all our friends of friends of friends, unto the last Kevin Bacon — have made the Internet an awesome place, filled with wonders and portents.

From the serious to the lolworthy to the wtf, we have up-ended titans, created heroes,  and changed the most basic assumptions about
How Things Work and Who We Are.

But now all the good work we’ve done together faces mortal dangers.

When we first came before you, it was to warn of the threat posed by those who did not understand that they did not understand the Internet.

These are The Fools, the businesses that have merely adopted the trappings of the Internet.

Now two more hordes threaten all that we have built for one another.

The Marauders understand the Internet all too well. They view it as theirs to plunder, extracting our data and money from it, thinking that we are the fools.

But most dangerous of all is the third horde: Us.

A horde is an undifferentiated mass of people. But the glory of the Internet is that it lets us connect as diverse and distinct individuals.

We all like mass entertainment. Heck, TV’s gotten pretty great these days, and the Net lets us watch it when we want. Terrific.

But we need to remember that delivering mass media is the least of the Net’s powers.

The Net’s super-power is connection without permission. Its almighty power is that we can make of it whatever we want.

It is therefore not time to lean back and consume the oh-so-tasty junk food created by Fools and Marauders as if our work were done. It is time to breathe in the fire of the Net and transform every institution that would play us for a patsy.

An organ-by-organ body snatch of the Internet is already well underway. Make no mistake: with a stroke of a pen, a covert handshake, or by allowing memes to drown out the cries of the afflicted we can lose the Internet we love.

We come to you from the years of the Web’s beginning. We have grown old together on the Internet. Time is short.

We, the People of the Internet, need to remember the glory of its revelation so that we reclaim it now in the name of what it truly is.

Reply to A small blog neighborhood hiding in plain sight | Jon Udell

Replied to A small blog neighborhood hiding in plain sight by Jon UdellJon Udell (Jon Udell)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve tweeted every blog post. As an experiment, I didn’t do that with this one. As a result, WordPress tells me that relatively few people have read it. But I’m not monetizing pageview counters here, why do I care? The interaction with those who did read that item was pleasant.

So, the experiment continues. Some items here, like this one, can enjoy a more intimate space than others, simply by not announcing themselves on Twitter. A small blog neighborhood hiding in plain sight.

Old school blogs are the new social media. It’s nice to be ahead of the curve, isn’t it?

👓 Can blogs rebuild America? | Parent Hacks | Asha Dornfest

Replied to Can blogs rebuild America? by Asha DornfestAsha Dornfest (Parent Hacks)

Our blogs and the gathering spaces they created changed our world. I think we're in a moment when we can do that again.

Back in the early 2000s, we started blogs, and started talking to each other, and became friends. REAL friends. We had no idea our individual, independent contributions would link up to create a movement that revolutionized media, marketing, and the national conversation (in my case, about parenting, but on other topics, too). [Shoutout to all the conference/summit organizers who created the in-person space to cement these friendships.]

Remember what the media landscape was like back then? Traditional publishing and media was closed to most, so very few people had access to an audience. We were part of changing that. It wasn’t “influence” or “personal branding” back then, it began as community.

I have personally been been doing something similar to this for several years now, so I’m obviously a big fan of this idea. My website is my social media presence and everything I post online starts on my own website first (including this reply).

I’m excited to see so many people in the comments are into the idea as well, but it seems like several are having problems knowing where to get started or where to go. I’d suggest many spend some time to check out IndieWeb.org and the resources not only on their wiki, but within their online chat. There are a lot of us out here who have experience doing just this and can help kickstart the process, not to mention we’ve built up a huge wiki with details, tools, and processes to help others out.

Asha, if you’re game, perhaps we could set up some video chat time to help folks out?

The best part is that the old school blogosphere has been growing again and adding some cool new functionalities that make having and using a personal website a lot more fun, useful, and even simpler. Let me know how I might be of help.

Reply to Weekend Reading – Rediscovering Blogging Edition by Lee Skallerup Bessette

Replied to Weekend Reading – Rediscovering Blogging Edition by Lee Skallerup BessetteLee Skallerup Bessette (ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Blogs are back! At least, they seem to be making a resurgence as we try to disentangle ourselves from the predatory social media platforms that took all the words many of us used to write on blogs. I’ll admit, I started my own tinyletter in part because I wanted to find an audience again that was a little more personal that what gets lost in the algorithmic facebook feed and the firehose that is Twitter. My blog (which is my domain) is kind of an experiment in long-form writing now. I’m working at another Domains school, so we are thinking about how students are using their domains, owning their own data, and writing publicly.
Lee (t), thanks for the mention in Profhacker. I’ve only just seen it thanks to an old Web ~0.4 technology called Refback. You’ve done a great job of calling out the recent blogging renaissance, some of which is being powered by the Domain of One’s Own and the IndieWeb movements.

There are a bunch of us who are happy to help out anyone who’d like to jump in with both feet.

👓 Weekend Reading – Rediscovering Blogging Edition | ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Read Weekend Reading – Rediscovering Blogging Edition by Lee Skallerup Bessette (ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Blogs are back! At least, they seem to be making a resurgence as we try to disentangle ourselves from the predatory social media platforms that took all the words many of us used to write on blogs. I’ll admit, I started my own tinyletter in part because I wanted to find an audience again that was a little more personal that what gets lost in the algorithmic facebook feed and the firehose that is Twitter. My blog (which is my domain) is kind of an experiment in long-form writing now. I’m working at another Domains school, so we are thinking about how students are using their domains, owning their own data, and writing publicly.