👓 Update: Creating and managing a lifestream as an Early Career Academic | Kay Oddone

Read Update: Creating and managing a lifestream as an Early Career Academic by Kay OddoneKay Oddone (Linking Learning)

I began this year with the plan to create a lifestream blog – something that curated observations, discoveries, articles, images, music – in fact any digital artefact – that I encountered or spent time thinking about as I started my role as lecturer at QUT here in Brisbane Australia.

You can read about the reasons for this decision, and what I hoped it might achieve in my earlier post, but I am taking time to say that my plan has taken a left-hand turn, and being the ‘perpetually in beta, flexible, digitally fluent’ (!) person that I am, I am going with this to see where it takes me.

I had spent some time setting up the If This Then That (IFTTT) applets which I hoped would automate the process of recording my lifestream, and in doing so, I have made some discoveries.

Wahoo! Someone else out there in the ether(net) has started a digital commonplace book and she’s documenting how’s she’s doing it. I love that she’s framed doing it as part of her professional growth.

It looks like Kay has run up against some of the same problems I’ve seen in the past (and for which I’ve found some useful solutions). It would appear that she’s at least come across the IndiWeb wiki and knows about Greg (I can tell from her commonplace!) but perhaps she’s not run into examples by Aaron Davis or Ian O’Byrne yet.

I’m going to have to propose a commonplace session at IndieWebCamp Online this weekend (and maybe for PressEd)… who’s game? Kay, if you’d like to join us there (or in chat anytime), we can probably get a group of people to talk about what they’ve built, how they did it, what they want to do, and how to improve on it all.

📑 Building a digital garden | Tom Critchlow

Annotated Building a digital garden by Tom CritchlowTom Critchlow (tomcritchlow.com)

Some other interesting wikis

Credit for inspiration for this whole project comes from a variety of wikis and wiki-like collections on the web:

buster.wiki/ - Strong design and everything has a date by the looks of it which enables an RSS feed. Very polished and thought through.

are.na - A platform that all the cool kids use for building personal knowledge libraries. Lightly social, perhaps the right answer but slightly questionable if they’ll be around for a long time. Ymmv.

Brendan’s /canon - this was part of the original inspiration for me. A curated list of pure stock - things that Brendan returns to again and again. He has a template you can copy too.

Worrydream’s quotes page - just a massive list of interesting quotes collected by Brett Victor. Notice how being one giant page makes it instantly searchable.

daywreckers.com - from Ben Pieratt, not quite a wiki but a very minimal site designed to collect the dots. A daily visit from me.

derek sivers’ daily journal - a post from Derek Sivers on how to keep a text-file long-term store for your ideas and notes.

And there’s lots more too - this twitter thread has a whole bunch of interesting rabbit holes.

And, you can of course find this list of wikis on my wiki :)  

An interesting list here to be sure.

As I’m thinking about it I also have to think about not only my own blog cum commonplace book, but I do also keep a private digital set of structures in OneNote (primarily) as well as some data Evernote which serve a lot of the same functionality.

👓 Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens | Tom Critchlow

Read Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens by Tom CritchlowTom Critchlow (tomcritchlow.com)
Building personal learning environments across the different time horizons of information consumption

📑 Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens | Tom Critchlow

Replied to Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens by Tom CritchlowTom Critchlow (tomcritchlow.com)

How do you manage information flows? If anyone is using a personal wiki-style long term information tool I’d love to hear from you!  

I’ve got a handful of interesting things bookmarked here: https://boffosocko.com/tag/wikis/ which includes a rabbit hole of a request similar to your own.

📑 Building a digital garden | Tom Critchlow

Annotated Building a digital garden by Tom CritchlowTom Critchlow (tomcritchlow.com)
Catch up by reading my last post of digital streams, campfires and gardens.  
I immediately thought of a post from Mike Caulfield (Hapgood). Interesting to see that Tom has already read and referenced it in his prior post.

🔖 Quip

Bookmarked Quip (quip.com)
Quip is a new way of collaborating that fuels a culture of action. Empower your employees to get things done faster with less email, and fewer meetings.
I’d looked at this as they launched, but might be worth revisiting to see it’s current status. It’s a silo service that I’ve noticed Ryan Dawidjan sort of using as a personal commonplace book/journal.

👓 12 days of microblogging: daily log | Manton Reece

Read 12 days of microblogging: daily log by Manton ReeceManton Reece (manton.org)
We’ve seen a lot of people use their microblog as a daily log to track activities, from running or cycling routes, to meditation or posting photos of food. Some apps even make this easier, like indiebookclub.biz for sharing reading progress in a book. In 2016 when I visited a different library in ...

👓 12 days of microblogging: developer journal | Manton Reece

Read 12 days of microblogging: developer journal by Manton ReeceManton Reece (manton.org)
For the 9th day in our 12 days of microblogging series, we want to talk about developer blogs. Most developers on Micro.blog use their blogs like everyone else — posting photos, sharing stories, recording a microcast, or linking to articles they’ve read — but some developers use the microblo...

📑 Bullet Journal: One Book to Rule Them All | Jamie Todd Rubin

Annotated Bullet Journal: One Book to Rule Them All by Jamie Todd Rubin (Jamie Todd Rubin)
Isaacson pointed out that more than 7,000 pages from Da Vinci’s notebooks survived to today–a stretch of 500 years. He asked how many of our tweets and Facebook posts will survive even 50 years. Paper, it turns out, is a durable medium of information storage.  
Of course one also needs to think about reach and distribution as well. His notebooks have much more reach and distribution now than they ever did in his own lifetime. Where’s the balance? Blogging about it, syndicating to social media, and then printing paper copies in annual increments?

👓 Book Notes: ‘Sapiens,’ by Yuval Noah Harari | Newley.com

Read Book Notes: ‘Sapiens,’ by Yuval Noah Harari by Newley PurnellNewley Purnell (newley.com)

A deeply thought-provoking book about how homo sapiens came to dominate the world – and how our advancements have come at a significant cost.

I love big, sprawling books that tackle huge subjects and challenge you to change the way you conceive of the world.

This global bestseller, which has been all the rage among Silicon Valley technologists in recent years, in particular, is one of the best of that sort of title I’ve read.

If Newley likes this and Guns, Germs, and Steel, he’ll likely love David Christian’s Maps of Time.

Unlike typical book blogs, it looks like Newley is posting these types of reviews, quotes, and ideas in a way similar to how I set out my own online commonplace book.

👓 E/N | sawv

Read E/N by jr (sawv)
The website's content means everything to the publisher, but it could mean nothing to the rest of the world. Back in the 1990s and maybe even in the early aughts, some websites were called E/N sites, which meant Everything and Nothing. E/N may have predated the term "weblog", which also began in the...
An interesting differentiation of type for a personal website. I like the ideas here and how they might contrast to both blogging and commonplace books.

👓 The power to publish as an individual | DaveNet

Read The power to publish as an individual by Dave Winer (scripting.com via DaveNet)
Weblogs: A new source of News
An awesome “old” and prescient post about blogging and journalism. It’s interesting to look at this through the modern lens of social media and IndieWeb. Of course this article was written at a time when IndieWeb was the only thing that existed.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

media organizations would do well to incorporate them [blogs] into their Web sites as an important new addition to the journalistic toolkit.  

December 21, 2018 at 08:09PM

Regular readers of Gillmor’s eJournal will recognize his commitment to user participation. “One of the things I’m sure about in journalism right now is that my readers know more than I do,” he says. “To the extent that I can take advantage of that in a way that does something for everyone involved ó that strikes me as pretty cool.”
One fascinating aspect of Gillmor’s Weblog is how he lifts the veil from the workings of the journalism profession. “There have been occasions where I put up a note saying, ‘I’m working on the following and here’s what I think I know,’ and the invitation is for the reader to either tell me I’m on the right track, I’m wrong, or at the very least help me find the missing pieces,” he says. “That’s a pretty interesting thing. Many thousands more people read my column in the newspaper than online, but I do hear back from a fair number of people from the Weblog.”  

Awesomely, this sounds almost exactly like something that David Fahrenthold would tell Jay Rosen about Twitter nearly 16 years later in an interview in The Correspondent.
My listen post

December 21, 2018 at 08:20PM

Anyone who’s dealt with networks knows that the network knows more than the individual.”  

December 22, 2018 at 09:15AM

Man, this is a beast that’s hungry all the time.”  

Mind you he’s saying this in 2001 before the creation of more wide spread social networks.

December 22, 2018 at 09:18AM

While many blogs get dozens or hundreds of visitors, Searls’ site attracts thousands. “I partly don’t want to care what the number is,” he says. “I used to work in broadcasting, where everyone was obsessed by that. I don’t want an audience. I feel I’m writing stuff that’s part of a conversation. Conversations don’t have audiences.”  

Social media has completely ignored this sort of sentiment and gamified and psychoanalyzed its way into the polar opposite direction all for the sake of “engagement”, clicks, data gathering, and advertising.

December 22, 2018 at 09:22AM

“The blog serves as a kind of steam valve for me,” he says. “I put stuff out there that I’m forming an opinion about, and another blogger starts arguing with me and giving me feedback, and I haven’t even finished what I was posting!”  

An early written incarnation of the idea of blogs as “thought spaces”.

December 22, 2018 at 09:24AM

The Weblog community is basically a whole bunch of expert witnesses who increase their expertise constantly through a sort of reputation engine.”  

The trouble is how is this “reputation engine” built? What metrics does it include? Can it be gamed? Social media has gotten lots of this wrong and it has caused problems.

December 22, 2018 at 09:28AM

His dream is to put a live Web server with easy-to-edit pages on every person’s desktop, then connect them all in a robust network that feeds off itself and informs other media.  

An early statement of what would eventually become all of social media.

December 22, 2018 at 09:31AM

He suggests that struggling sites like Salon begin broadening their content offerings by hosting user-created Weblogs, creating a sort of farm system for essayists. “Salon could highlight the best ones on page one and invest time and effort in the ones that are inspiring and exceptional.”  

This is a rough sketch of something I’ve been thinking that newspapers and media outlets should have been doing all along. If they “owned” social media, we might all be in a better place socially and journalistic-ally than if advertising driven social media owned it all.

December 22, 2018 at 09:35AM

Indeed, Winer says his most gratifying moments come when he posts an entry without running the idea by his colleagues first. “It can be a very scary moment when you take a stand on something and you don’t know if your argument holds together and you hit the send button and it’s out there and you can’t take it back. That’s a moment that professional journalists may never experience in their careers, the feeling that it’s just me, exposed to the world. That’s a pretty powerful rush, the power to publish as an individual.”  

December 22, 2018 at 09:36AM

👓 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