Replied to a thread by Bill Seitz & Tom Critchlow (Twitter)
@BillSeitz @UseCrowdWise @peterhagen_

I get @TomCritchlow’s sentiment, but… the extra “work” it currently entails for the social part dramatically ups the signal to noise ratio for me compared to Twitter.

You’d definitely want the ability to filter by your social circle, especially on popular sites. In fact this sort of discovery mechanism would be cool if it could be more broadly built into either the web or perhaps into IndieWeb social readers which would know your social graph and could surface related details.

Perhaps expanding a browser extension like Crowdwise to include Twitter support might be a potential solution? I would worry that portions wouldn’t add much other than a lot of likes and bookmark-like data. While some[1], [2] might consider Twitter as an annotation layer (not always directly linked) on the web, the overall quality isn’t necessarily going to be built in there.

It would be cool if Crowdwise also added Hypothes.is’ API to their list of sources.

I’m also reminded of Peter Hagen’s experiments with Hypothes.is seem very similar but with a different UI. His version flips the discovery question on its head.

Read Looking for best practices for using web clipped articles (Obsidian Forum)
Greets, fellow Obs-heads! I store web clippings of articles into an “Articles” directory in Obsidian for reference, editing, and/or notating. I use these articles for business ideas, referencing, and such. But I’m not sure I am doing this in a manner of utilizing my knowledge system in the best way possible. I’m curious as to how some of you file and reference articles in your own systems? Do you keep the articles in an article folder, move them to a relevant folder, or do you not use folder...
Bookmarked MarkDownload by deathaudeathau (GitHub)
A Firefox and Google Chrome extension to clip websites and download them into a readable markdown file. - deathau/markdownload

I had MarkDownload installed in Chrome before and had used it a bit. Spent some time tonight and did some custom configuration in the settings to make it easier to save web pages directly to my Obsidian commonplace book. This can be an interesting method for quickly saving and linking lots of data, though it also means saving a lot more than may be strictly necessary, particularly at scale. I’m still not giving up on my Hypothes.is methods though.

Once configured for Obsidian, MarkDownload can be a very powerful tool.

Bookmarked Hypothesify – Get this Extension for Firefox (en-US) by Jan Odstrcilik (addons.mozilla.org)
Hypothesify is a Firefox extension for the annotation tool Hypothes.is. It can start and close a selected webpage or a PDF document in Hypothes.is, it checks for public annotations and it generates codes in html, markup, :hiccup for Roam etc..
Read Project Naptha (projectnaptha.com)
Project Naptha automatically applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. The result is a seamless and intuitive experience, where you can highlight as well as copy and paste and even edit and translate the text formerly trapped within an image. The Tyger

What the hand dare seize the fire?

I find it so heartening that one can use Project Naptha to highlight, copy and paste, and even edit and translate text formerly trapped within an image.

I’m further impressed that it also works with Hypothes.is!
–December 01, 2019 at 09:40AM

Though upon revisiting, it seems like the text is temporarily highlighted on Hypothesis (which probably only works with Naptha installed), then disappears, and the annotation is shown as an orphan.

Apparently Naptha only acts as a middle layer to allow the OCR of the image and that without it, the fingerprinting process Hypothes.is uses can’t find it after the fact.

Perhaps Hypothes.is could recognize that the highlighted text is being supplied by a third-party layer and instead of orphaning the highlighted text, it could anchor the highlight to the associated image instead?
–December 01, 2019 at 09:44AM

Naptha, its current name, is drawn from an even more tenuous association. See, it comes from the fact that “highlighter” kind of sounds like “lighter”, and that naptha is a type of fuel often used for lighters. It was in fact one of the earliest codenames of the project, and brought rise to a rather fun little easter egg which you can play with by quickly clicking about a dozen times over some block of text inside a picture.

Now if only I could do this with my Hypothes.is annotations! Talk about highlighting!
–December 01, 2019 at 10:06AM

There is a class of algorithms for something called “Inpainting”, which is about reconstructing pictures or videos in spite of missing pieces. This is widely used for film restoration, and commonly found in Adobe Photoshop as the “Content-Aware Fill” feature.

This reminds me of a tool called asciinema that allows highlighting text within a video.
–December 01, 2019 at 10:13AM

Read E-books at libraries are a huge hit, leading to long waits, reader hacks and worried publishers by Heather Kelly (Washington Post)
While some people are scrambling to collect log-ins for Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu and, now, Disney Plus, Sarah Jacobsson Purewal is working on a different kind of hustle. She signs up for any public library that will have her to find and reserve available e-books.
I’ve always had a dozen or so library cards at any one time, so I guess I’ve never really bothered to go out of my way to collect more for the digital games people are playing here with books. I have however very naturally checked several library systems for books in this way, however I find that many libraries just don’t have the titles I’m looking for anywhere.

I liked the tip about putting one’s e-reader into airplane mode to keep it from updating and removing overdue books. Of course there are some more technical methods of stripping DRM or even pirating books which I was a bit surprised they didn’t delve into, but which are frequently mentioned with respect to college textbook related articles.

Bookmarked Library Extension (for web browsers) (Library Extension)
Library Extension lets you instantly see book and eBook availability from your local library
Definitely going to have to check this out! I can see it coming in very handy on sites like Amazon.com and Goodreads.com.

h/t to E-books at libraries are a huge hit, leading to long waits, reader hacks and worried publishers

👓 Inoreader How-to: Do more with browser extensions | Inoreader blog

Read Inoreader How-to: Do more with browser extensions (Inoreader blog)
When you’re casually browsing the internet, there is nothing better than stumbling across a new source of excellent content – but nowadays you’re rushing so much that you might not put in the extra effort and fire up your Inoreader to add a feed to your subscriptions. Inoreader Companion, our dedicated browser extension, will save …

👓 Extensions in Firefox 59 | Mozilla

Read Extensions in Firefox 59 (Mozilla Add-ons Blog)
Firefox Quantum continues to make news as Mozilla incorporates even more innovative technology into the platform. The development team behind the WebExtensions architecture is no exception, landing a slew of new API and improvements that can now be found in Firefox 59 (just released to the Beta chan...

Owning my Online Reading Status Updates

As of October 30, 2016, I’ve slowly but surely begun posting what I’m actively reading online to my blog.

I’ve refined the process a bit in the last couple of weeks, and am becoming relatively happy with the overall output. For those interested, below is the general process/workflow I’m using:

  1. As I read a website, I use a browser extension (there’s also a bookmarklet available) linked to my Reading.am account to indicate that I’m currently reading a particular article.
  2. I have an IFTTT.com applet that scrapes the RSS feed of my Reading account for new entries (in near real-time) and this creates a new WordPress draft post on my blog. I did have to change my IFTTT.com settings not to use their custom URL shortener to make things easier and to prevent future potential link-rot.
  3. Shortly after I’m done reading, I receive a notification of the creation of the draft post to remind me to (optionally) post my comments/thoughts to the draft post. If necessary, I make any additional modifications or add tags to the post.
  4. I publish the post; and
  5. Optionally, I send POSSE copies to other silos like Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ to engage with other parts of my network.

Status updates of this type also have a pre-included O-embed with a synopsis of the content if the bookmarked site supports it, otherwise, a blockquoted synopsis stripped from the site’s meta-data is included.

Other near-term improvements may include custom coding something via the available Reading.am hooks to directly integrate with the WordPress Post Kinds plugin to use the URL post pattern http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kind=read&kindurl=@url to shorten the workflow even further. Post Kinds automatically handles the wrapping of the post data in the appropriate microformats automatically. I also want to add a tidbit so that when I make my post I ping the Internet archive with the URL of the article I read so that it will be archived for future potential reference (hat tip to Jeremy Kieth for giving me the idea at IndieWebCamp LA a few weeks ago.)

I had originally played around with using the Post Kinds bookmarklet method directly, but this got in the way of the immediacy of reading the particular article for me. Using a PESOS method allows me to read and process the article a bit first before writing commentary or other details. I may also integrate a Hypothes.is based workflow into this process in which I use the hypothes.is browser etension to highlight and annotate the article and then use the Hypothes.is Aggregator Plugin to embed those thoughts into the post via shortcodes. The following post serves as a rough example of this, though the CSS for it could stand a bit of work: Chris Aldrich is reading WordPress Without Shame.

I was a bit surprised that Reading.am didn’t already natively support a WordPress pathway though it has a custom set up for Tumblr as well as a half a dozen other silos. Perhaps they’ll support WordPress in the future?

These new read post types can be found at the following URL: http://boffosocko.com/kind/read/?type=status?type=link.