discovery | Chris Aldrich

Read What’s next for Listen Notes? (Listen Notes)

The very first official Listen Notes blog post! We used to have a mini-roadmap :)

I don’t want to build yet another Podcast player app. I don’t want to trap listeners to Listen Notes. You come to Listen Notes and find the Podcasts or Podcast Episodes that you want to listen, then you leave Listen Notes to use your favorite Podcast player app to listen.
Under this principle, Listen Notes shows RSS & brings traffic back to official websites of Podcasts. Many Podcast-related sites don’t show RSS, because they want to build a walled garden to make visitors stay there as long as possible. ❧

Annotated on March 12, 2020 at 08:51AM

Read special.fish by Kicks Condor (Kicks Condor)

Let’s see what you think about this big pile of colorful squares.

A quirky new social media platform.

Much like Gemmer.io it looks like you can only like a limited number of others on the service, which is an interesting limitation.

Read Meet Leo, Your AI Research Assistant (blog.feedly.com)

Goodbye Information Overload

Keeping up with topics and trends you care about within a sea of articles can be overwhelming and time-consuming.

Filtering out the noise so you can focus on what really matters is a challenge we are deeply passionate about.

Today, we are delighted to announce Leo, your AI research assistant.

This is kind of cool, but I think I’d want more manual control over what I’m reading and seeing and perhaps a separate discovery mode to do this sort of functionality at times.

Read Dear Bob, by

Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine)

You caused a lot of discussion in your OtM piece about comments — and that discussion itself — in the comments on WNYC’s blog, in the comments on mine, and in blogs elsewhere — is an object lesson in the value of the conversation online.

But note well, my friend, that all of these people are speaking to you with intelligence, experience, generosity, and civility. You know what’s missing? Two things: First, the sort of nasty comments your own piece decries. And second: You. ❧

Important!

Annotated on February 25, 2020 at 10:54AM

The comments on this piece are interesting and illuminating, particularly all these years later. ❧
Annotated on February 25, 2020 at 11:07AM

Why can’t there be more sites with solid commentary like this anymore? Do the existence of Twitter and Facebook mean whe can’t have nice things anymore? ❧
Annotated on February 25, 2020 at 11:11AM

Exploring Pine.blog

I’d noticed Pine.blog before at a previous IndieWebCamp, but not had time to delve into it very deeply. Seeing some of what Brian Schrader has been working on while following IndieWebCamp Austin remotely this weekend has reminded about the project. As a result, I’ve been spending some time tonight to check out some of the functionality that it’s offering. In part, I’m curious how similar, or not, it is to what Micro.blog is offering specifically with respect to the idea of IndieWeb as a Service which I’ve recently begun documenting. It’s always great to see the growing diversity and plurality of solutions in the space.

My brief prior experience with the platform was simply adding my website to their discovery service. Tonight I’ve found that Pine.blog has got a very pretty little feed reader experience with some fun discovery functionality. You can apparently create multiple timelines to follow content, but one needs a paid account for more than one timeline. It allows both following sites as well as recommending them to others. It also appears that Brian is supporting the rel=”payment” microformat as I see at least one feed that has a “$ Support” button in the Pine.blog interface to allow me to go to the site’s payment page to support it. I think this may be one of the first times I’ve seen this functionality in an app in the wild outside of the Overcast podcast app which added it a couple of years ago.

It has webmention support, so I can “like” things within the reader and notify others. Without a paid account I don’t see the ability to reply to or mention other sites though. It also looks like it allows for import/export of OPML too, though I haven’t tried it out yet–I can only test drive so many feed readers at a time and Indigenous is taking up all of my bandwidth at present.

I do wonder a bit about potentially importing/exporting my content if I were to go all-in on Pine.blog. I’d bet the idea is on the product map, but that’s a huge bit of work to build without a paid user base to support it. I’d personally want at least an export function if I were to change over, though I’m more likely to want to dovetail my own site with it much the way I’m currently doing with Micro.blog.

It looks like it should be able to post to my website, but I’m finding the “publish” and “preview” buttons don’t work–perhaps I need a paid account for this functionality? Of course, I only see UI to provide pine.blog with my URL and my account name, but it hasn’t authenticated using a password or other method, so perhaps that portion isn’t finished? I’ll circle back around to it later when I do a free trial. I do notice that Brian, the developer of the project, has an account on pine.blog which is mirrored on one of his subdomains running WordPress. Quirkily I’ve noticed that the header on his main website changes to alternately serve the pine.blog version and the WordPress version!

More to come as I continue exploring… Later on I’ll take a look at some of their paid functionality, but for now, it’s a pretty compelling set of features and some well-laid out user interface to start. I look forward to seeing how it continues to evolve.

Watched IndieTrustWeb from IndieWebCamp Austin 2020 | Internet Archive

Some interesting ideas here, but I don’t feel like there are any that I could run with and want to build some concrete functionality out of. I suppose that more of my interest in this area relates to ideas about aggregation and discovery.

Acquired Breaker – podcast listening & discovery (Breaker)

Listen to the best new podcast episodes with Breaker. Follow your friends to see what they’re listening to, and discover new shows that you’ll love. Like, share, and comment on your favorite episodes. Join the Breaker community and listen to the best stuff!

Downloaded a copy of this to my Android Phone to test out the functionality. Not much hope for using it as a daily driver, but I’m curious how they handle sharing URLs and if it could be used in creating listen posts.

Reminds me that I should throw a few podcast feeds into Indigenous for Android to see how it might work as a podcatcher and whether it would make a good Listen post micropub client.

↬ IndieWeb.org 2020/Austin/fromflowtostock Session (2020-02-22) (#)

Simultaneously saving journalism and social media

As I’m reading the notes from the New Affordability session at IndieWebCamp Austin I can’t help but to think back on my old IndieWeb business hosting idea which I’ve been meaning to flesh out more fully.

What if local newspapers/magazines or other traditional local publishers ran/operated/maintained IndieWeb platforms or hubs (similar to micro.blog, Multi-site WordPress installs, or Mastodon instances) to not only publish, aggregate, curate, and disseminate their local area news, but also provided that social media service for their customers?

Reasonable mass hosting can be done for about $2/month which could be bundled in with regular subscription prices of newspapers. This would solve some of the problems that people face with social media presences on services like Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously solving the problem of newspapers and journalistic enterprises owning and managing their own distribution. It would also give a tighter coupling between journalistic enterprises and the communities they serve.

The decentralization of the process here could also serve to prevent the much larger attack surfaces that global systems like Twitter and Facebook represent from being disinformation targets for hostile governments or hate groups. Tighter community involvement could be a side benefit for local discovery, aggregation, and interaction.

Many journalistic groups are already building and/or maintaining their own websites, why not go a half-step further. Additionally many large newspaper conglomerates have recently been building their own custom CMS platforms not only for their own work, but also to sell to other smaller news organizations that may not have the time or technical expertise to manage them.

A similar idea is that of local government doing this sort of building/hosting and Greg McVerry and I have discussed this being done by local libraries. While this is a laudable idea, I think that the alignment of benefits between customers and newspapers as well as the potential competition put into place could be a bigger beneficial benefit to all sides.

Featured photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

Liked Exploring Feed Discovery and Markup by

David Shanske (david.shanske.com)

The issue of finding feeds to subscribe is a challenge that I have explored in my attempts to implement code in support of the Yarns Microsub Server. I want to publish feeds in a way that others can find them, not just users, but automated systems that present them to users. So, let’s start with t...

Great start on outlining the problem. I’ll need to come back to it again and look at some potential examples to form a better opinion. I’m curious what examples may be unearthed by some of your questions.

Extra Feeds Plugin for WordPress

David Shanske has built a simple new IndieWeb friendly plugin for WordPress.

For individual posts, the Extra Feeds plugin will add code into the <header> of one’s page to provide feed readers that have built-in discovery mechanisms the ability to find the additional feeds provided by WordPress for all the tags, categories, and other custom taxonomies that appear on any given page.

Without the plugin, WordPress core will generally only provide the main feed for your site and that of your comments feed. This is fine for sites that only post a few times a day or even per week. If you’re owning more of the content you post online on your own website as part of the IndieWeb or Domain of One’s Own movements, you’ll likely want more control for the benefit of your readers.

In reality WordPress provides feeds for every tag, category, or custom taxonomy that appears on your site, it just doesn’t advertise them to feed readers or other machines unless you add them manually or via custom code or a plugin. Having this as an option can be helpful when you’re publishing dozens of posts a day and your potential readers may only want a subsection of your posting output.

In my case I have a handful of taxonomies that post hundreds to thousands of items per year, so it’s more likely someone may want a subsection of my content rather than my firehose. In fact, I just ran across a statistician yesterday who was following just my math and information theory/biology related posts. With over 7,000 individual taxonomy entries on my site you’ve got a lot of choice, so happy hunting and reading!

This plugin also includes feeds for Post Formats, Post Kinds (if you have that plugin installed), and the author feed for sites with one or more different authors.

This is useful in that now while you’re on any particular page and want to subscribe to something on that specific page, it will be much easier to find those feeds, which have always been there, but are just not easily uncovered by many feed reader work flows because they weren’t explicitly declared.

Some examples from a recent listen post on my site now let you more easily find and subscribe to:

my faux-cast:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » listen Kind Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/rss/" />
the feed of items tagged with Econ Extra Credit, which I’m using to track my progress in Marketplace’s virtual book club:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » Econ Extra Credit Tag Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/tag/econ-extra-credit/feed/rss/" />
the feed for all posts by an author:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » Posts by Chris Aldrich Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/author/chrisaldrich/feed/rss/" />

Read Feed readers/content aggregators by Dan MacKinlay (danmackinlay.name)

Upon the efficient consumption and summarizing of news from around the world.

Facebook is informative in the same way that thumb sucking is nourishing. ❧

Annotated on February 09, 2020 at 10:28AM

Upon the efficient consumption and summarizing of news from around the world.
Remember? from when we though the internet would provide us timely, pertinent information from around the world?
How do we find internet information in a timely fashion?
I have been told to do this through Twitter or Facebook, but, seriously… no. Those are systems designed to waste time with stupid distractions in order to benefit someone else. Facebook is informative in the same way that thumb sucking is nourishing. Telling me to use someone’s social website to gain information is like telling me to play poker machines to fix my financial troubles. Stop that. ❧

Annotated on February 09, 2020 at 10:40AM

Logged an itch Taxonomy feed discovery per post

On individual posts I’d love to add the feeds for the categories/tags that appear on that page to the header so that following me from that URL would allow feed readers to discover those particular feeds.

Read The discovery metadata field by Matt Maldre (Matt Maldre)

The internet would be a really interesting place if every article that was shared automatically had a “via link.” Ok, so the internet is already interesting. But what makes the internet such a great place is its connectivity. Everything is linked together. We can easily share a link to an article. So many links all … The discovery metadata field Read More »

I’ve been fascinated with this idea of vias, hat tips, and linking credit (a la the defunct Curator’s Code) just like Jeremy Cherfas. I have a custom field in my site for collecting these details sometimes, but I should get around to automating it and showing it on my pages rather than doing it manually.

Links like these seem like throwaways, but they can have a huge amount of value in aggregate. As an example, if I provided the source of how I found this article, then it’s likely that my friend Matt would then be able to see a potential treasure trove of information about the exact same topic which he’s sure to have a lot of interest in as well.

One of the things I love about webmentions is that these sorts of links to give credit could be used to create bi-directional links between sites as well. I’m half-tempted to start using custom experimental microformats classes on these links so that when the idea takes off that people could potentially display them in their comments sections as such instead of just vanilla “mentions”. This could be useful for sites that serve as inspiration in much the same way that journalistic outlets might display reads (versus bookmarks, likes, or reposts) or podcasts could display listens. Just imagine the power that displaying webmentions on wikis could have for their editors to later update pages or readers might have to delve into further resources that mention and link to those pages, especially when the content on those linked pages extends the ideas?

Tim Berners-Lee’s original proposal for hypertext was rejected because it didn’t bake bi-directional links into the web (c.f. Webstock ‘18: Jeremy Keith – Taking Back The Web at 13:39 into the video). Webmentions seems to be a simple way of ensconcing them after-the-fact, but in a way that makes them more resilient as well as update-able and even delete-able by either side.

Of course now I come to wonder just how it was that Jeremy Cherfas finds such a deep link on Matt’s site from over a year ago? 😉

↬ Jeremy Cherfas‘ update on the IndieWeb wiki ᔥ the IndieWeb-meta chat (2020-01-29)