Social reading and reviewing, decentralized with ActivityPub - mouse-reeve/fedireads
I love seeing more activity in the reading space for IndieWeb!
Social reading and reviewing, decentralized with ActivityPub - mouse-reeve/fedireads
I love seeing more activity in the reading space for IndieWeb!
read-status
values of “to-read”, “reading”, and “finished”. I’ve managed to tweak my with Goodreads.com to also include these experimental pieces using the following additional snippets of code appended to the “Body” fields I’ve described before:
&read-status=to-read
&read-status=reading
&read-status=finished
I’ve added one of the three snippets to the appropriate IFTTT.com recipes for Goodreads feeds to create the appropriate output. Here’s the first post I’ve made using the new recipe for bookmarking a book I’d like to read: https://boffosocko.com/2020/02/15/meditations-marcus-aurelius/.
Previously I’ve been using simple notes to create read posts for books and just adding a “read” category to give me more control over the data in the posts. (I only used read posts previously for online articles.) Now that I’ve got the ability to provide some better differentiation for my progress, I think I’ll switch to using read posts for all my reading (books and articles).
Incidentally following IndieBookClub.biz and Indigenous for Android which added support for these earlier today, my method may be the third to use these microformats in the wild. Thanks to gRegor Morrill, Kristof De Jaeger, David Shanske, Ryan Barrett, and Charlotte Allen for their prior work, experimentation, code, and examples for allowing me to get this working on my website.
I write book reviews on my blog. I also want to syndicate them to Goodreads. Sadly, Goodreads doesn't natively read the Schema.org markup I so carefully craft. So here's the scrap of code I use to syndicate my reviews.Goodreads API Keys Get your Keys from https://www.goodreads.com/api/keys You will ...
https://www.goodreads.com/user_status/list/#######-user-name?format=rss
where #######-user-name
is the typical user number and name combination at one’s profile page.%finished
in the master view for My Books >> Currently Reading
(example URL).
This would let me sort the 30+ books in my currently reading list and figure out which ones I’m furthest through and could potentially finish quickest on my sprint for cleaning out my list for the end of the year.
You’ve got almost every other bit of sortable data in those lists, why not this one? I’ll take a simple numerical view, but if you want to throw in the progress bar, there’s lots of bonus points in your developer Christmas stocking.
One of the things I’d love to see pop up out of the discovery explorations of the IndieWeb or some of the social readers in the space is the ability to uncover some of this social reading information. Toward this end I thought I’d collect some user interface examples of things that border on this sort of data to make the brainstorming and building of such functionality easier in the near future.
If I’m missing useful examples or you’d like to add additional thoughts, please feel free to comment below.
I don’t often search for reading material directly, but Google has a related bit of UI indicating that I’ve visited a website before. I sort of wish it had the ability to surface the fact that I’ve previously read or bookmarked an article or provided data about people in my social network who’ve done similarly within the browser interface for a particular article (without the search.) If a browser could use data from my personal website in the background to indicate that I’ve interacted with it before (and provide those links, notes, etc.), that would be awesome!
I’ll note here that because of the way I bookmark or post reads on my own website, my site often ranks reasonably well for those things.
In some cases, others who are posting about those things (reading, commenting, bookmarking, liking, etc.) in my social network also show up in these sorts of searches. How cool would it be to have a social reader that could display this sort of social data based on people it knows I’m following?
Hypothes.is is a great open source highlighting, annotation, and bookmarking tool with a browser extension that shows an indicator of how many annotations appear on the page. In my experience, higher numbers often indicate some interesting and engaging material. I do wish that it had a follower/following model that could indicate my social sphere has annotated a page. I also wouldn’t mind if their extension “bug” in the browser bar had another indicator in the other corner to indicate that I had previously annotated a page!
It doesn’t do it until after-the-fact, but Reading.am has a pop up overlay through its browser extension. It adds me to the list of people who’ve read an article, but it also indicates others in the network and those I’m following who have also read it (sometimes along with annotations about their thoughts).
What I wouldn’t give to see that pop up in the corner before I’ve read it!
Nuzzel is one of my favorite tools. I input my Twitter account as well as some custom lists and it surfaces articles that people in my Twitter network have been tweeting about. As a result, it’s one of the best discovery tools out there for solid longer form content. Rarely do I read content coming out of Nuzzel and feel robbed. Because of how it works, it’s automatically showing those people in my network and some of what they’ve thought about it. I love this contextualization.
Naturally sites for much longer form content will use social network data about interest, reviews, and interaction to a much greater extent since there is a larger investment of time involved. Thus social signaling can be more valuable in this context. A great example here is of Goodreads which shows me those in my network who are interested in reading a particular book or who have written reviews or given ratings.
Are there other examples I’m missing? Are you aware of similar discovery related tools for reading that leverage social network data?
Here are the steps I took in order to get all of my GoodReads books/reviews over into my IndieWeb-ified Wordpress: Prerequisites: A GoodReads account with a decent amount of books reviewed and/or starred A self-hosted WordPress site Twenty Seventeen theme (could work with others) Advanced Custom Fie...
I’m pleased to announce a new project I have been working on. indiebookclub is an app for keeping track of the books you are reading or want to read. It is primarily intended to help you own your data by posting directly to your own site with Micropub. If your site does not support Micropub yet, y...
Here Goldberg goes into the complexity of potential causes of capitalism. His discussion of The Miracle and what it represents gains a lot more flavor and nuance than the one word construct it’s had up until now in the text.
He discusses Common law as an emergent property of a society. Again here I note some vocabulary stemming from the “Complexity” science movement of the past several decades as well as that of David Christian et al in the Big History conversation. (Speaking of which, I’ve noted he’s got a new book out on the topic.)
I will take some issue with what looks like a logical problem toward the end of the chapter here:
Therefore the demise of our civilization is only inevitable if the people saying and arguing the right things stop talking.
I do take his broader point, but what, praytell, are the right things, particularly when you’ve just made the argument that you’re not exactly sure what complex system caused it all? We really need to know exactly what caused it to be able to fight to maintain the correct parts of the Goldilocks conditions.
In general, I find myself agreeing with the broadest points here and find the arguments and ideas quite intriguing.
I sometimes feel guilty about failing miserably at these based on the way GoodReads counts their books vis-a-vis finishing complete books, particularly when I’m often reading such dense technical books in which reading a page a day is a near Herculean task.
Thus, because I can have finer control of things on my own website, I’ll try to break things out on a more granular level.
I want to read (aka work my way through) 2-3 technical textbooks in 2018.
I want to read 10 non-fiction books in 2018.
I want to read 20 fiction books in 2018.
I want to read 10 juvenal fiction/literature books in 2018.
One of my goals in 2018 is to own my reading data rather than using Goodreads for all of that information. This will allow me to track information the way I want rather than have to do it like Goodreads wants me to. My eventual goal is to have something like what Xavier made, but for now I’m going...
Details on the functionality can be found at Share Your Kindle Notes and Highlights with Your Friends (Beta).