Polite is a part think tank, and part studio focused on the ethical renaissance of the Internet. We have designed the Polite Toolbox.
We advocate for a Slow Web Movement.
We are what we eat, and we are also what we consume online.
Data-driven advertising, BlackBox algorithms, and the competition between Big Tech to keep us “engaged“ has created an addiction to low-value content. It is time to reset our digital consumption and create healthier habits.
Since the last decade, with a set of guidelines, the Slow Web Movement is changing Software to make it care about us again.
Think of it as the equivalent of “Organic” for Technology. ❧
As solid a pitch for the slow web movement as I’ve seen yet from an analogy perspective.
Annotated on February 01, 2020 at 09:13AM
How businesses shift from selling products to building networks.
The IndieWeb isn’t a business like many of the examples mentioned here, but it’s doing doing a lot of the things mentioned in the article and doing them well. It’s definitely one of my favorite communities of builders and collaborators.
In August 2012, I wrote a quick script to stream front-page Hackernews stories to an IRC channel on Freenode (##hackernews in case you're interested) so that I could quickly glance at popular stories there instead of needing to load Hackernews. Since IRC is my feed reader, I've always tried to pipe as much there as possible.
Very smart and reminiscent of some of the stuff Drew McLellan and Jeremy Keith were doing almost a decade before. There is a lot more power in microformats that most web developers give them credit for. Aaron has a great example and use-case.
My favorite part here:
So in 2.5 years of parsing the HTML, I never had any problems. In 2 days of parsing the JSON API, I hit a glitch where all the stories were empty.
Since more people and programs see the HTML than use the API, the HTML ends up being more reliable.
The world's greatest expert on canned TV laugh tracks helps Dr Laurie Santos demonstrate how the emotions of those around us can make us feel happier or more sad. If happiness is so contagious... can we use them to bring joy to ourselves and our loved ones?
Jeff’s research showed that participants pick up other people’s emotions through text— in say, a quick email note or an online comment— just as easily as they do in face-to-face real world interaction.”
This is particularly an interesting listen for web developers and designers who could be thinking about the emotional contagion that their products may have on others.
The original link has some additional references and research, but I’ve excerpted some small portions of the ethically questionable research Facebook allowed on emotional contagion several years back.
We all make thousands of choices each day. But making even trivial decisions can sap our energy and cause anxiety. Dr Laurie Santos examines why our society wrongly prioritises choice over happiness, and meets a woman who junked her wardrobe in a bid to improve her life.
Limiting one’s choice can be an important thing in life.
There’s some discussion of limiting one’s wardrobe choices as a way of freeing one’s life up a bit. They didn’t mention the oft-heard example of Einstein wearing the same thing every day, but did catch the possibly better example of Obama cycling through the small handful of choices in his wardrobe to limit the yet another decision of many he had to make each day.
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? 😉
When I was first developing Micro.blog, I made a choice that quick replies in the timeline should be stored separately from regular blog posts. I thought that most people wouldn’t want replies mixed in with their blog posts at their own domain name. I also liked that replies were simple, usually s...
This year started with a small project I really like: Feeds for Journalists, by Dave Winer. The idea is that RSS is still a valid technology to get an effective and unbiased flow of news.
As he puts it, after reading a tweet by Mathew Ingram:
If you’re a journalist a...
What started out as the most promising development in the history of the Web – the participation of users in the creation of content and online dialogue at scale – has turned into a swamp of sensation, lies, hate speech, harassment, and noise.
I read this a year ago when it first came out and appreciated it then. Fun to revisit it with more experienced eyes.
sealioning is a term for intrusive attempts to engage someone with questions and requests for evidence for their claims; don’t do this, especially on the IndieWeb, and consider how you can design create UX to disincentivize/reduce incentives to do so.
A cool way to extend Trakt.tv’s calendar and user data is through iCal, RSS, and CSV feeds. Trakt VIP members get access to a bunch of feeds throughout the site. Read on for what’s available and for cool things you use the feeds for.
I’m sort of tempted to pay for a membership, but it doesn’t seem like they provide permalinks for watches or ratings, though there are links for comments. Not sure I’d get those, so in the end it becomes another silo, albeit one with more social related data than IMDb or others seem to provide, though not contextual data.
Great article! I have my own website at https://dannysteenman.com/ which is a static website generated using hugo. I wonder how I can add webmentions to it. Tips are more than welcome!
Danny, the IndieWeb page for Hugo has lots of resources for this (and other fun things). You should also check out the static site generator page and links for other examples/documentation which can be roughly similar.
Aaron Parecki
Dr Laurie Santos
Danny