Replied to IndieWebCamp: Domain of One’s Own Meetup by Jim GroomJim Groom (bavatuesdays.com)
This past Tuesday I attended the second Indie WebCamp generously hosted by Chris Aldrich focused on Domain of One’s Own. The format is a more focused 10-15 minute talk around a specific technology, in this meeting Tim gave folks a walk-though of Reclaim Cloud, and then opens up to the 21 attendees for anyone to share something they are working on. Tim shared the Cloud, and not only was I thrilled to see Jon Udell in attendance, but it’s always nice when one of your tech heroes tweets some love for your new project. Even better when you know they’re not one to offer empty interest and/or praise. Thanks Jon!

Soon after I finally took the leap and signed up for a mico.blog to explore that platform. 

Be sure to check out how you can post your content to your own website and syndicate your material into micro.blog (maybe via RSS or using plugins). If your site uses the Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins, then any replies to your posts will be automagically ported directly back to the comment section of your post.

In addition to some of the others in education who you’ve mentioned, I’ve got a list with some others (be sure to check the comments too–both for the others you’ll find, but also for the example Webmentions I’ve received from Micro.blog.)
Annotated on September 26, 2020 at 01:57PM

I am going to start getting serious about headless WordPress development for my new website at jimgroom.net, inspired by Tom Woodward’s talk for #HeyPresstoConf20 

A lot of the posts I make to my WordPress site are done in a headless manner using the Micropub spec and the Micropub plugin with a huge wealth of Micropub clients.

I did a presentation on this at a WordCamp a while back: https://wordpress.tv/2019/06/26/chris-aldrich-micropub-and-wordpress-custom-posting-applications/
Annotated on September 26, 2020 at 01:59PM

Chris Aldrich 

By linking my site here, Jim has sent a Webmention notification, so I know he posted about my site: https://telegraph.p3k.io/webmention/14qD8olgI7lyGjRy0q/details
Annotated on September 26, 2020 at 02:27PM

Did you present at #HeyPresstoConf20 yesterday? You can use @ThreadReaderApp to quickly cross-post your entire presentation to your WordPress site with Micropub and a powerful plugin.

ThreadReaderApp now has beta support for the Micropub Spec so you can publish Twitter threads directly to your blog

Fifteen: A Call to Action—Start your Own Digital Commonplace Book Today

Start your own digital commonplace today! There are some platforms mentioned above, but none of them have the flexibility and adaptability that WordPress provides. I’d love to see how others are doing this and what it allows them to create.

#HeyPresstoConf20


Thanks for coming to my presentation!

Feel free to ask questions about any of the notes here on my website or from any of the Tweets. Comments on the Tweets will ping my site (using Brid.gy as mentioned), and I’ll be able to reply directly from my commonplace book. You can also use Webmentions from your website and then our sites/commonplace books can carry on a conversation of ideas.

If you’d like, feel free to explore my commonplace book (or at least the public portions—I post a lot of work privately). You can find today’s presentation and all the other things I collect under the label for the conference at #HeyPresstoConf20.

Did you present today and want to own a copy of your presentation on your own website? Take a look at some notes I made about using ThreadReaderApp to roll up all your tweets and publish them to your site using Micropub, which I mentioned earlier in this presentation.

Thirteen: Backfeeding ideas with Brid.gy

Let’s say I syndicate a thought to Twitter. I can use Bri.gy to backfeed ideas and interactions with my Tweet back to my original in my digital notebook (where it’s most useful).  This helps outside ideas filter into and interact with my own ideas.

#HeyPresstoConf20


You knew ideas can have sex, right?!!

Twelve: Webmention for backlinks

For my backlinks I’m relying on the W3C recommendation Webmention spec which I’m implementing with the WordPress Webmention plugin. This allows me to cross link my own posts to look like “comments” or “replies”, but it allows others to ping me and interact with my public posts and their syndicated copies.

#HeyPresstoConf20


Need a primer on what webmentions are and what they can be used for? I’ve got you covered:

Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet

https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/19/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet-2/

Eleven: Bi-directional links or backlinks

The internet allows multi-directional linking of thoughts and ideas.

Backlinks are the new cause célèbre in the broader learning space that uses the names wiki (a communal shared commonplace), digital gardens (personal wikis), and online notebooks & productivity tools like Zettelkasten and products like Notion, Roam Research, Obsidian, Evernote. These are all just variations of the commonplace in digital settings.

#HeyPresstoConf20

Ten: A not-so “Hypothetical” Example

I use all the data I capture online using Hypothes.is to port my annotations, highlights, and notes I make online into my commonplace book.

#HeyPresstoConf20


More details and a video example:

Hypothes.is annotations to WordPress via RSS 

Nine: Micropub for collecting data

The Micropub plugin helps me by creating an endpoint on my site for quickly and easily capturing lots of data. IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, n8n can all help to aggregate this data too.

#HeyPresstoConf20


Here are some more in-depth details about how I use some of these tools and recipes/walk-throughs so you can too: Using IFTTT to syndicate (PESOS) content from social services to WordPress using Micropub.

 

 

 

Eight: Data types and Structure

There’s lots of data I want in my commonplace: likes, bookmarks, things I read, annotations, notes, quotes, watches, listens, etc. 

I implement them with Post Kinds Plugin to provide both structure, presentation, and context to most of my notes.

#HeyPresstoConf20


Each post can have its own category and tags for a variety of taxonomic and (most importantly) search purposes.

 

Six: Social Media?

Social media provides a bit of a simulacrum of the sort of networked thinking we might like to have, but you need to have dozens of accounts for different pieces of knowledge and collection and have followerships in all for interaction. Here we’re missing the idea of centralization.

#HeyPresstoConf20


It’s also painfully difficult to search for your data across the multiple information silos which often block search engines.

Five: The Memex

This is just what Vannevar Bush suggests in his famous article As We May Think in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic. Here he posits the Memex, and opens up the idea of networked information.

#HeyPresstoConf20


The internet itself could be though of as a massive living and ever-growing commonplace book which can be digitally queried to provide the answers to nearly every conceivable question.

(Some may forget that Bush was the thesis advisor of Claude Shannon, the father of the modern digital age.)

 

Four: Networked Thinking

Handwritten commonplaces could be a person’s own version of “networked thinking” and mode of creation. So why not take the additional step further and have a digital online commonplace?

#HeyPresstoConf20


The ability to tag, hyperlink, and search sites adds to their general usability in a way that traditional handwritten commonplace books lacked.

Three: History & Examples

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century.

#HeyPresstoConf20


The following all had/kept commonplaces:

  • Charles Darwin
  • Francis Bacon
  • Ben Jonson
  • John Milton
  • Mrs Anna Anderson
  • E.M. Forster
  • John Locke
  • W.H. Auden
  • H.P. Lovecraft
  • Virginia Woolf
  • Joseph Conrad
  • Washington Irving
  • Victor Hugo
  • Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton, a mathematician and physicist, used a “Waste Book” to write his initial conceptualization of the calculus. A digitized copy of this commonplace is held at the University of Cambridge and is freely available to view online.