Hypothes.is doesn’t have a social media-like follow functionality baked into the system, but there are a few methods to follow interesting people. My favorite, and possibly the simplest, is to add https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=abcxyz as a feed into my feed reader where abcxyz is the username of the person I’d like to follow.

So to subscribe to my Hypothes.is feed you’d add https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=chrisaldrich to your reader.

Of course, the catch then is to find/discover interesting people to follow this way. Besides some of the usual interesting subjects like Jon Udell, Jeremy Dean, Remi Kalir, et al. Who else should I be following?

Ideally by following interesting readers, you’ll find not only good things to read for yourself, but you’ll also have a good idea which are the best parts as well as what your friends think of those parts. The fact that someone is bothering to highlight or annotate something is a very strong indicator that they’ve got some skin in the game and the article is likely worth reading.

❤️ Berg Builds Community Portal

Bookmarked Berg Builds Community Portal (community.bergbuilds.domains)
A collection of Domain of One's Own Projects at Muhlenberg College
It would be cool to have a site like this of IndieWeb web sites. This reminds me a bit of Kevin Marks’ Unmung Mastoview tool. Perhaps pulling from IndieMap’s list of sites would make building such a thing easier? Would certainly make an interesting discovery tool–almost like a centralized webring or a directory of sorts.

Hat tip:

👓 Implementing h-feed, and making all site content discoverable | Jamie Tanna

Read Implementing h-feed, and making all site content discoverable by Jamie Tanna (jvt.me)
With this announcement, I have two great pieces of news. The first, is that you'll now be able to follow my website's h-feed, which is a microformats2 structure for a feed of data. This is in addition to my RSS feed (/feed.xml) and my JSON feed (/feed.json), and will allow further interoperability with the IndieWeb.

👓 Are you ready to share your OPML? | Dave Winer

Read Are you ready to share your OPML? by Dave Winer (Scripting News)
Imagine if there were a database of feeds we all subscribed to, and we could get recommendations of new feeds to follow, based on what we already follow.That's the idea behind Share Your OPML, a service I started in 2006. The story of SYO is one of success followed by scaling issues. Now we have better technology so it should scale better.Help us get it started by:1. Export your subscription list in whatever RSS reader or podcast client you use.2. Upload it to the new SYO site. (It's simple, just sign in with Twitter and drag-drop your OPML on the gray box. Takes less than a minute.)If you have questions, post a comment here. Dave

👓 Scoping Out Basics of #IndieWeb Search | Greg McVerry

Read Scoping Out Basics of IndieWeb Search by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)
Over the weekend I met with the CEO of BLUR Search Technologies . Jaime is also my brother-in-Law, and has  sponsored IndieWebCamp NYC in 2018. We mainly gathered for Thanskgiving, the second Thanksgiving, and finally leftovers. As we all played clean the fridge we snuck away to scope out a possibl...

👓 On blog search engines | Colin Devroe

Read On blog search engines by Colin Devroe (cdevroe.com)
Brent Simmons has been reminiscing about blog search engines and writing down some ideas for how one could be made today. Something he wrote sparked a memory.
Instead of having it crawl blogs, I’d have it download and index RSS feeds. This should be cheaper than crawling pages, and it ensures that it skips indexing page junk (navigation and so on).

👓 More Thoughts at Random on Blog Search Engines | Brent Simmons

Read More Thoughts at Random on Blog Search Engines by Brent Simmons (inessential.com)
I can dream about how I’d build one of these. (I’m not going to! This is way outside my expertise, and I have other things to do.)

👓 Wishing for Blog Search Engines | Brent Simmons

Read Wishing for Blog Search Engines by Brent Simmons (inessential.com)
One thing I wish we had that we used to have: blog-only search engines. You could go and search for a hash tag. Or for links to your blog or elsewhere. Or for keywords. Etc. It should have an API that returns RSS, so RSS reader users could set up persistent, updated searches. There used to be a bunch of these, and now there are none that I know of.

Modifying some of the taxonomies on my digital commonplace book

Spent a few minutes today cleaning up the various categories and tags within my digital commonplace book (aka website). Some of the automated methods I use as well as my general carelessness and fat fingers on mobile introduce spelling errors in some of these taxonomies. I also find that sometimes when choosing them from the pre-populated lists my website’s back end makes it more difficult to choose the canonical one when there are several there by error.

These issues tend to flatten these taxonomies out and make them much more difficult to search (or for others to be able to subscribe to reliably).

As an example, having tags “Domain of One’s Own” and “Domain of Ones Own” (with and without the apostrophe) as well as the acronym “DoOO” can be difficult or frustrating to use. Things get even more complicated when I hold the mental model that these concepts are just a sub-set of the broader idea of the “IndieWeb” or what I sometimes tag things as “IndieWeb for Education”. This is all much easier for me, but may be more difficult for newcomers to the site who know what one shorthand means, but are unaware of the others and thus miss details, references, or content that may have a lot of value for them.

I’ve cleaned up and concatenated many of these troublesome tags (roughly A-D alphabetically and other sections at random), but there’s still a lot of distance to go. There are 66 categories–some are hidden or used for programmatic purposes–and nearly 7,000 tags! The top 100 tags are used 30 or more times on the site and the second century of tags are used between 20 and 30 times each. At the long end of the tail there are about 4,000 tags with either 1 or no uses.

I’m promoting the economics tag to that of a category since it’s a topic in which I have a lot of interest and content. I also have a number of other tags related to sub-areas of economics. (If you were subscribed to this individual tag, you may want to fix your feed.) Other potential considerations for promotion included the topics of history, physics, and web development. I also noticed that there’s a tag for mathematics with 70 instances despite the fact that there’s already a category for it with 315 posts already–I’ll have to figure out how that happened and clean it up another day. And look, there’s somehow a tag for “math” too. Ugh!

I also put both the Quotes and Events categories under the parent category of Social Stream, though I plan on leaving them showing in the hierarchy–unlike some post kinds–as there are many legacy posts and likely future posts that aren’t just events I’m hosting, but events that are of interest to me in general. Naturally the more important events (to me) will appear in my RSVP posts. With any good luck courtesy of WordPress, links to the old versions should still work or redirect to the new hierarchy.

The manual or even automated effort of fixing or tweaking some of these things feels problematic, and I’m just looking at just my own website. I’m curious to delve into some research on taxonomies and folksonomies to see how something like this may be better systematized and/or automated. Of course categorizing things is somethings humans really love doing, but I’m not sure how deep down the rabbit hole it’s worth going for my own work. Besides, someone far smarter than I will likely crack the discovery nut from an IndieWeb perspective. Fortunately I can use the site search queries for several search engines to more quickly find the things I’m looking for without needing these taxonomies. So perhaps I’ll put some of the exercise off to another day by filing this in my tag.

Replied to What should the list look like? · Issue #43 · jkup/awesome-personal-blogs by Jon KupermanJon Kuperman (GitHub)

Hey @fjoshuajr @lipis @hugmanrique @aletaschner

All of you submitted awesome ideas for what the list should look like! PRs were coming in so fast yesterday it kind of got lost in the shuffle so I was hoping to move the conversation into a single thread.

My thinking was:

  1. Make it a Markdown table
  2. Maybe a separate table for each letter of the alphabet?
  3. Add at least a field for what subjects the person talks about

How does that sound? Should we do something different? Hope you don't mind but I'm gonna close the other issues in favor of discussing it all in here!

Thanks!

I’ve seen a few somewhat similar directory projects like this that might have some useful ux/ui/design ideas:

For additional metadata, one could run a microformats parser on the homepages of these sites and return social media presences in other locations using XFN’s rel="me" set up. Something like this is done by Jeremy Keith on his Huffduffer.com service where one signs up and inputs one’s website. His service then doesn’t need to ask for Twitter, Facebook, or Github handles explicitly. Instead it relies on the service going to the homepage listed and pulling out the rel="me" values and doing it automatically on their behalf. Since many web platforms have this microformat value it can make the data acquisition easier and less manual in many cases.

👓 An Alternative to the Corporate Web | Cathie LeBlanc

Read An Alternative to the Corporate Web by Cathie LeBlancCathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life: Media, Technology, and Education)
I’ve written about why I think we need the IndieWeb before. I’m going to the Popular Culture Association Conference in April and will present about this there as part of the Internet Culture track. I’ve been talking to friends about what they might want to know about the IndieWeb as a way of getting a sense of what to present about. I realized that I have additional thoughts about the importance of the IndieWeb community so that’s what this post is about. Once the presentation is complete, I’ll make the slide deck available as a supplement to this post.
A great article and good overview, particularly within the broader context of several of her recent pieces on the broader topic.

I have heard some who think that POSSE is difficult and only worthwhile for the additional reach. I hope that one day when we’ve got some better readers and discovery options people will flock to more IndieWeb-centric solutions. If enough eventually do, then the silos may be forced to open up to be able to continue competing.

👓 Scroll is acquiring Nuzzel | Scroll Blog

Read Scroll is acquiring Nuzzel (Scroll Blog)

A note from Tony Haile, CEO of Scroll

TL;DR

  • Scroll is acquiring Nuzzel
  • The core service isn’t going to change beyond removing the ads
  • We’re spinning out the media intelligence business
Nuzzel is one of my favorite things, so I’m glad to hear that it will continue on… I haven’t heard much about Scroll, which appears to be a journalism startup, but hopefully they’ve got enough legs to make it for the long haul.

We need more competition in the space of “discovery” on the web and particularly in the area of allowing users to control the levers that go into some of that discovery. The blackbox algorithms of the social media giants certainly can’t be trusted because of their financial motivations. In some sense, I view Nuzzel as a real-time directory, but one whose cache is flushed at regular intervals instead of saving all the data for a later date and time or other additional searching. I wonder what a engine like Nuzzel would look like if it kept all the data and allowed itself to be searchable in a long-tail way?

🔖 NowNowNow

Bookmarked Now Now Now (nownownow.com)
Websites with a /now page
I hadn’t really thought of it until now (no pun intended), but the set up of this website and how people opt in to creating a Now Page on their own websites, makes it an interesting and unique type of online directory for the discovery of a particular type of online set of links. Certainly an interesting set up and concept for Brad Enslen and Kicks Condor to take a look at in their online explorations of these types of discovery-based websites.

Certainly webmention could be used to collect the data and provide updates for such a directory. (I’ll note that most people who do have Now pages put a small notice at the bottom of their pages with a link back to the directory to reference it–something which I’m sure has helped spread the general idea.) One of the things I haven’t seen directories like this necessarily have is a feed of content that one could subscribe to updates from. While this one doesn’t have this sort of ability built into it (or seemingly any search or sorting functionality by categories or tags), it does have a Twitter feed that pushes out semi-regular updates of people within the directory. This way, if you’re subscribed, you see others’ updates being fed out. Every couple of months it also mentions me directly, which provides me with a regular reminder to update my presence within the directory.

I’m curious how we might expand this sort of concept to other types of online directories? Is there anything else useful about how this is one is set up?

👓 2019.01: Href.Cool Updates | Kicks Condor

Read 2019.01: Href.Cool Updates by Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)

Okay, so I’ve added outgoing Webmentions to Href.cool. This means that sites will be notified if they are linked in any of my category.

Incidentally, the directory itself has also has Webmentions. So, if you have an Indieweb blog and you want to recommend a link to the directory: make a post containing the link you want to submit and a link to the category page you think it belongs on and I will get the message. I may also choose to list submitted links at the bottom of the page. Or, yeah, you tell me if this is useful to you.