IndieWeb | Chris Aldrich

🎧 This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • March 31st – April 6th, 2018 | Marty McGuire

Listened to This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • March 31st - April 6th, 2018 by Marty McGuire from martymcgui.re

IndieWeb for Drupal, IndieWeb for Businesses, and Foodspotting going under. It’s the audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for March 31st - April 6th, 2018.

👓 Podcasts I am listening to | Jeena Paradies

Read Podcasts I am listening to this is my list by

Jeena (jeena.net)

It's interesting to see what others listen to

Reply to Reading Weapons of Math Destruction: the plan by Bryan Alexander

Replied to Reading Weapons of Math Destruction: the plan by Bryan Alexander (BryanAlexander.org)

Our new book club reading is Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction. In this post I’ll lay out a reading agenda, along with ways to participate. The way people read along in this book club is through the web, essentially. It’s a distributed experience.

It occurs to me while reading the set up for this distributed online book club that posting on your own site and syndicating elsewhere (POSSE) while pulling back responses in an IndieWeb fashion is an awesome idea for this type of online activity. Now if only the social silos supported salmention!

I’m definitely in for this general schedule and someone has already gifted me a copy of the book. Given the level of comments I suspect will come about, I’m putting aside the fact that this book wasn’t written for me as an audience and will read along with the crowd. I’m much more curious how Bryan’s audience will see and react to it. But I’m also interested in the functionality and semantics of an online book club run in such a distributed way.

👓 The Next Platform | Pierre Levy

Read The Next Platform by Pierre Levy (Pierre Levy's Blog)

One percent of the human population was connected to the Internet at the end of the 20th century. In 2017, more than 50% is. Most of the users interact in social media, search information, buy products and services online. But despite the ongoing success of digital communication, there is a growing dissatisfaction about the big tech companies (the “Silicon Valley”) who dominate the new communication environment. The big techs are the most valued companies in the world and the massive amount of data that they possess is considered the most precious good of our time. The Silicon Valley owns the big computers: the network of physical centers where our personal and business data are stored and processed. Their income comes from their economic exploitation of our data for marketing purpose and from their sales of hardware, software or services. But they also derive considerable power from the knowledge of markets and public opinions that stems from their information control.

Transparency is the very basis of trust and the precondition of authentic dialogue. Data and people (including the administrators of a platform), should be traceable and audit-able. Transparency should be reciprocal, without distinction between rulers and ruled. Such transparency will ultimately be the basis of reflexive collective intelligence, allowing teams and communities of any size to observe and compare their cognitive activity.

The trouble with some of this is the post-truth political climate in which basic “facts” are under debate. What will the battle between these two groups look like and how can actual facts win out in the end? Will the future Eloi and Morlocks be the descendants of them? I would have presumed that generally logical, intelligent, and educated people would generally come to a broadly general philosophical meeting of the minds as to how to best maximize life, but this seems to obviously not be the case as the result of the poorly educated who will seemingly believe almost anything. And this problem is generally separate from the terrifically selfish people who have differing philosophical stances on how to proceed. How will these differences evolve over time?

This article is sure to be interesting philosophy among some in the IndieWeb movement, but there are some complexities in the system which are sure to muddy the waters. I suspect that many in the Big History school of thought may enjoy the underpinnings of this as well.

I’m going to follow Pierre Levy’s blog to come back and read a bit more about his interesting research programme. There’s certainly a lot to unpack here.

Annotations

The Next Platform

Commonality means that people will not have to pay to get access to the new public sphere: all will be free and public property. Commonality means also transversality: de-silo and cross-pollination.

Openness is on the rise because it maximizes the improvement of goods and services, foster trust and support collaborative engagement.

We need a new kind of public sphere: a platform in the cloud where data and metadata would be our common good, dedicated to the recording and collaborative exploitation of our memory in the service of collective intelligence. According to the current zeitgeist, the core values orienting the construction of this new public sphere should be: openness, transparency and commonality

The practice of writing in ancient palace-temples gave birth to government as a separate entity. Alphabet and paper allowed the emergence of merchant city-states and the expansion of literate empires. The printing press, industrial economy, motorized transportation and electronic media sustained nation-states.

The digital revolution will foster new forms of government. We discuss political problems in a global public space taking advantage of the web and social media. The majority of humans live in interconnected cities and metropoles. Each urban node wants to be an accelerator of collective intelligence, a smart city.

👓 Syndicating Audio Posts with WNYC’s Audiogram Generator

Read Syndicating Audio Posts with WNYC's Audiogram Generator by

Marty McGuire (martymcgui.re)

I publish a few different podcasts and often find myself advertising new episodes by syndicating new posts to various social media silos. Sadly, few social media services consider audio to be "a thing", despite often having robust support for video. I'm certainly not the first person to notice this...

This is awesome!