In honor of Darwin Day: An interior page on natural selection in an unopened original of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society. Note that the octavos in the edition haven’t been cut accounting for the top of the page being curved in the picture (because of the attachment of the adjoining pages). Science changed dramatically that day.
I’m looking to add microblog and webmention support to a Wordpress site. Any plugin recommendations for doing so? I’d rather not build it as it looks like I need a Custom Post Type.
— Joe Buhlig (@JoeBuhlig) February 7, 2020
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...
Quand c’est bien fait, il faut le dire aussi.
You indicate at the bottom of the post (the rough English translation is mine)
Bonus : c’est bien plus facile pour moi d’ajouter un texte à wallabag (au hasard) que de stocker un fichier audio pour une « consommation » facile. L’audio me demande toute une mise en œuvre assez pénible, pas le texte.
Bonus: It is much easier for me to add text to wallabag (at random) than to store an audio file for easy “consumption”. The audio requires quite a painful implementation, but not so for the text.
If you’re a fan of Wallabag for bookmarking text for later, you might appreciate using Huffduffer.com for your audio. It has a simple bookmarklet that will pull audio files, text, and tags from webpages and save them to your account. Your account then has a variety of iTunes audio feeds that you can subscribe to in your podcatcher of choice so that you can listen to the audio at your convenience later. If your podcatcher supports it, you can play it back at speeds that suit you (vite, donc).
David Byrne (MIT Technology Review)We are beset by—and immersed in—apps and devices that are quietly reducing the amount of meaningful interaction we have with each other.
I came to it via an episode of the podcast The Happiness Lab.
The consumer technology I am talking about doesn’t claim or acknowledge that eliminating the need to deal with humans directly is its primary goal, but it is the outcome in a surprising number of cases. I’m sort of thinking maybe it is the primary goal, even if it was not aimed at consciously. ❧
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:35AM
Most of the tech news we get barraged with is about algorithms, AI, robots, and self-driving cars, all of which fit this pattern. I am not saying that such developments are not efficient and convenient; this is not a judgment. I am simply noticing a pattern and wondering if, in recognizing that pattern, we might realize that it is only one trajectory of many. There are other possible roads we could be going down, and the one we’re on is not inevitable or the only one; it has been (possibly unconsciously) chosen. ❧
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:36AM
What I’m seeing here is the consistent “eliminating the human” pattern. ❧
This seems as apt a name as any.
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:39AM
“Social” media: This is social interaction that isn’t really social. While Facebook and others frequently claim to offer connection, and do offer the appearance of it, the fact is a lot of social media is a simulation of real connection. ❧
Perhaps this is one of the things I like most about the older blogosphere and it’s more recent renaissance with the IndieWeb idea of Webmentions, a W3C recommendation spec for online interactions? While many of the interactions I get are small nods in the vein of likes, favorites, or reposts, some of them are longer, more visceral interactions.
My favorite just this past week was a piece that I’d worked on for a few days that elicited a short burst of excitement from someone who just a few minutes later wrote a reply that was almost as long as my piece itself.
To me this was completely worth the effort and the work, not because of the many other smaller interactions, but because of the human interaction that resulted. Not to mention that I’m still thinking out a reply still several days later.
This sort of human social interaction also seems to be at the heart of what Manton Reece is doing with micro.blog. By leaving out things like reposts and traditional “likes”, he’s really creating a human connection network to fix what traditional corporate social media silos have done to us. This past week’s episode of Micro Monday underlines this for us. (#)
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:52AM
Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at USC wrote about a patient he called Elliot, who had damage to his frontal lobe that made him unemotional. In all other respects he was fine—intelligent, healthy—but emotionally he was Spock. Elliot couldn’t make decisions. He’d waffle endlessly over details. Damasio concluded that although we think decision-making is rational and machinelike, it’s our emotions that enable us to actually decide. ❧
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:56AM
And in the meantime, if less human interaction enables us to forget how to cooperate, then we lose our advantage. ❧
It may seem odd, but I think a lot of the success of the IndieWeb movement and community is exactly this: a group of people has come together to work and interact and increase our abilities to cooperate to make something much bigger, more diverse, and more interesting than any of us could have done separately.
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:58AM
Remove humans from the equation, and we are less complete as people and as a society. ❧
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 10:59AM
A version of this piece originally appeared on his website, davidbyrne.com. ❧
This piece seems so philosophical, it seems oddly trivial that I see this note here and can’t help but think about POSSE and syndication.
Annotated on January 22, 2020 at 11:01AM
This week’s guest, Amanda Rush is a web developer and accessibility practitioner who loves to cook and read. She also loves the IndieWeb movement and Micro.blog. Of her own blog, she says:
I want to own all my content and have control over it, and to that end I am constantly updating this site so that it contains as much of my data as possible from any silo I may have an account on. I decided to start doing this when I finally got tired of all the curated timeline nonsense and the social media design element that encourages us to be horrible to each other online for clicks.
We talk about what drew her to IndieWeb practices (spoiler alert: webmentions), and what she recommends to folks without tech experience who want to try out the Indieweb (another spoiler alert: Micro.blog).
I’m thinking about what the domain would be for my photo website. And then an idea struck me. What if someone made an app that looked JUST like Instagram. But all the photos came from RSS feeds from individual photographer websites. You could subscribe to a whole list of photographer websites, and their photos will …
My photos are far from the sort of artistic thing you’re looking for, but it would be nice if one could find a broader section of websites that provided photo-specific feeds like mine.
Micro.blog has a photo specific feed and Pixelfed is in this general wheelhouse, but possibly not quite what you’re talking about.
Services like Micro.blog should spend more time telling everyone about features like “oh, by the way, we have a dedicated discovery page for posts about pizza“. That kind of pitch and I would have signed up for an account 2 years ago. Here I am discovering new things though. I got here beca...
I feel so nostalgic for Posterous after reading this. It was a nice little platform.
Thank you, Jeremy, for helping me along on getting these tools figured out. Very few things about the web have excited me as much as learning about the IndieWeb work that has been ongoing.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a Homebrew Website Club meetup here, and to my knowledge I don’t think anyone has ever done a micro.blog meetup here.
Would you be interested in attending or even helping co-organize one in the next month?
Why bother posting on my own site?
How to follow users on Micro.blog and other networks.
Write on your microblog and send via IFTTT.
Copying posts into a hosted microblog.
A beautiful, lightweight and customisable cross platform app built for Micro.blog
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