social media | Chris Aldrich

👓 Sorry, Sony Music, you don’t own the rights to Bach’s music on Facebook | Ars Technica

Read Sorry, Sony Music, you don’t own the rights to Bach’s music on Facebook (Ars Technica)

Public shaming forces publisher to abandon ridiculous claim to classical music.

When is the industry going to finally fix this issue of false positives like this. Surely in the case of Bach, it should be even easier?

Twitter list for #UnboundEq

Replied to Twitter Scavenger Hunt by

Catherine Cronin (Equity Unbound)

This activity is a great way to jumpstart community and networked learning using Twitter. Anyone interested in #unboundeq is welcome to join in this activity – we encourage educators and students in various classes and open participants take part!

A Twitter List

I started a bit of the Twitter scavenger hunt for Equity Unbound early this morning by creating a Twitter list of people who have been participating thus far with the #unboundeq hashtag.

For those new to the Twitter scene in education, knowing about Twitter lists, how to build them, and how one can use them are an invaluable set of tools and experiences. I highly recommend you spend a few minutes searching the web for these ideas and trying it out for yourself.

For those who are already well-versed in the idea of Twitter lists (no cheating; you’re only cheating yourselves if you’ve never done this before), feel free to subscribe to it or use it to quickly follow your peers. (Teachers are busy people and the 50+ of us don’t need to spend an inordinate amount of time doing the aggregation game, particularly if you’re doing it manually and not somewhat automated the way I’ve done.)

I’m sure the list will grow and I’ll update it over time, so check back if you don’t subscribe or use the list in a tool like TweetDeck. Apologies for those I’ve managed to have missed, please send me a tweet reply, comment below, or just keep using the hashtag and I’ll be more than happy to add you.

Even if you subscribe to the list or quickly follow everyone on it, I’d still highly recommend you spend a few minutes scrolling back into the Twitter timeline for the hashtag for the course and read what is going on. You’ll definitely have a better idea of who your class, teachers, and personal learning network are.

OPML List?

Perhaps I’ll also start a planet or subscribe-able OPML list of RSS feeds for those in the class soon as well for those who want to follow along in their feed readers? If you’ve got a particular tag/category/other that you’re using to aggregate all of your Equity Unbound participation on your own website, let me know in the comments below as well. As an example I’m using the tag UnboundEq, so all the related posts on my site can be seen at https://boffosocko.com/tag/unboundeq/ or subscribed to via https://boffosocko.com/tag/unboundeq/feed/. Let me know what yours are.

If enough people are doing this, I’ll publish a subscribe-able OPML file to make it easier for everyone to use these without us all spending the time to track them all down individually and put them into our feed readers to keep up with each other.

Reply to Equity Unbound Webcomic: Splintered Digital Identities | Kevin Hodgson

Replied to Equity Unbound Webcomic: Splintered Digital Identities by

Kevin Hodgson (dogtrax.edublogs.org)

I am dipping into Equity Unbound, a new online course/collaboration with Mia Zamora, Maha Bali and Catherine Cronin. They will be working with university students as well as opening things up to other spaces where folks, like you and me, can jump in. (The Twitter tag is here: #unboundeq) I am always interested in seeing how new offerings can be riffs off previous open learning networks, such as NetNarr, Rhizo, Digiwrimo, CLMOOC, and others.

Kevin, your comic really resonates, particularly for someone who’s got over 200 social media related accounts and identity presences in various places on the internet.

It reminds me of a line I wrote a few months back in an article about the IndieWeb idea of Webmentions for A List Apart entitled Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet:

Possibly worst of all, your personal identity on the internet can end up fragmented like so many horcruxes across multiple websites over which you have little, if any, control.

Inherent in this idea is that corporate interests and others who run social sites can disappear, delete, or moderate out of existence any of my writing, photos, audio, video, or other content into the memory hole at any time and for almost any reason. And just like a destroyed horcrux, their doing so takes a bit of my soul (identity) with it each time.

A few years back, I decided to take back my own identity on the web and post everything of interest to me on my own website on my own domain first–a digital commonplace book if you will. Only then do I syndicate it into other communities, websites, or areas as needed. (Even this reply is on my own site before I syndicate it to yours.) As a result, I own a tremendously large part of my online identity (though even at that, a lot of it is published privately for myself or select small audiences).

I hope that as Equity Unbound continues and we explore the ideas of identity, public/private, and related topics, people might consider some of these ideas and implications and potentially work on expanding solutions for students, teachers, and the rest of the world.

🔖 ADN Finder

Bookmarked ADN Finder (adnfinder.herokuapp.com)

Looking for someone? Use the search above to find friends on Twitter, Micro.blog, Mastodon, and App.net. Want others to find you? Use the form below to add yourself.

If only there were a way to also add one’s canonical website…

👓 Trying Mastodon | Gary Pendergast

Replied to Trying Mastodon by

Gary Pendergast (Gary Pendergast)

It’s no secret that Twitter is red hot garbage fire, so I’ve signed up for a Mastodon account to give them a try. Because I’m super vain, I decided to create my own Mastodon instance, with a custom domain.

I know of a few folks in the IndieWeb and WordPress communities like Ryan Barrett (with FedBridgy) and Mathias Pfefferle (with OStatus plugin) who are actively working on helping bridge the technology between websites and the Fediverse so that one could use their WordPress install as a stand-alone “instance” of Mastodon.

It already seems somewhat obvious that moving from Twitter to Mastodon is bringing along some of the problems and issues that Twitter users are facing, so being able to use your current WordPress (or other) website to interact with other instances, sounds like a very solid idea. In practice, it’s the way I’ve been using my website with Twitter ¹ ² (as well as Google+, Instagram, Facebook and other social silos) for some time, so I can certainly indicate it’s been a better experience for me. Naturally, both of their efforts fall underneath the broader umbrella of the web standards solutions generally pushed by the IndieWeb community, so I’m also already using my WordPress-based site to communicate back and forth in a social media-like way with others on the web already using Webmention, Micropub, WebSub, and (soon) Microsub.

These federation efforts have got a way to go to offer a clean user experience without a tremendous amount of set up, but for those technically inclined, they are efforts certainly worth looking at so one needn’t manage multiple sites/social media and they can still own all the data for themselves.

References

Aldrich C. @Mentions from Twitter to My Website. BoffoSocko. https://boffosocko.com/2017/04/15/mentions-from-twitter-to-my-website/. Published April 15, 2017. Accessed September 11, 2018.

Aldrich C. Threaded conversations between WordPress and Twitter. BoffoSocko. https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/. Published July 2, 2018. Accessed September 11, 2018.

👓 The way out | Manton Reece

Read The way out by

Manton Reece (manton.org)

There have been many articles written in the last month about the role of social networks. Some even reach the obvious conclusion: that the top social networks are too big. This interview on Slate was fairly representative, covering monopolies and centralized power. But these articles always stop sh...

👓 Identify Reddit deplorables | Nelson’s log

Read Identify Reddit deplorables (Nelson's log)

Interesting new Reddit tool: Masstagger. You install it and it pops up little red warnings next to user’s posts. “the_donald user”, or “kotakuinaction user”, or the li…

👓 Twitter’s redesigning its website, and it’s really, really white | Mashable

Read Twitter's redesigning its website, and it's really, really white (Mashable)

Twitter's new website is on the way.

👓 The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it. | Wil Wheaton

Read The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it. by Wil Wheaton (WIL WHEATON dot NET)

As most of you know, I deactivated my Twitter account earlier this month. It had been a long time coming, for a whole host of reasons, but Twitter’s decision to be the only social network tha…

As I read article this I find myself wondering why Wil Wheaton was looking for a new social media platform? Hasn’t he realized yet that he’s already got one–his very own website?!!

While Wil maintains it more like an old school blog with longer thought pieces and stories, there’s certainly no reason he couldn’t use it to post shorter thoughts, status updates, or notes as he might do on Twitter or Mastodon. It’s also an “instance” which no one is going to kick him off of. He has ultimate control. If people moan and complain, he can moderate their complaints as he sees fit.

This particular post has 410 comments, most of which seem relatively civil and run a paragraph or two–at least enough to convey a complete and coherent thought or two. At some point he decided to cap the commentary for mental health or any other reason he may have, which is certainly his right as well as the right of anyone on their own website. Sadly most social services don’t provide this functionality.

I also notice that instead of trying to rebuild a following on someone else’s platform, he’s already got the benefit of a network of 3,689,638 email subscribers not to mention the thousands more who visit his site regularly or subscribe via RSS. I suspect that those subscribers, who have taken more time and effort to subscribe to his website than they did on any other platform, are likely a much better audience and are far more engaged.

So my short memo to Wil: Quit searching for an alternate when you’ve already got one that obviously seems like a much healthier and happier space.

If you feel like you’re missing some of the other small niceties of other social networks, I’ll happily and freely help you: set up some Micropub apps to make posting to your site easier; add Webmention support so others would need to post to their own websites to @mention you across the web from their service of choice; add a social media-esque Follow buttton; set up Microsub service so you can read what you choose on the web and like/favorite, reply to, bookmark, etc. to your site and send the commentary back to them. Of course anyone can do this on their own with some details and help from the IndieWeb.org community if they wish…