The Data Transfer Project makes it easy for people to transfer their data between online service providers. We are establishing a common framework, including data models and protocols, to enable direct transfer of data both into and out of participating online service providers. http://datatransferproject.dev
The viciousness, toxic partisan anger and intellectual dishonesty are at all-time highs.
There are still some wrinkles to be ironed out in getting the various platforms we use today to play well with Webmentions, but it’s a real step toward the goal of that decentralized, distributed, interconnected future for scholarly communication. ❧
...the upshot is that this relatively new web standard allows for round-tripped connections among discrete domains, enabling the conversation about an individual post to be represented on that post, wherever it might actually take place. ❧
I’ll suspect she’ll be even more impressed when she realizes that there’s a forthcoming wave of feed readers1,2 that will allow her to read others’ content in a reader which has an integrated micropub client in it so that she can reply to posts directly in her feed reader, then the responses get posted directly to her own website which then, in turn, send webmentions to the sites she’s responding to so that the conversational loop can be completely closed.
She and Lee will also be glad to know that work has already started on private posts and conversations and posting to limited audiences as well. Eventually there will be no functionality that a social web site/silo can do that a distributed set of independent sites can’t. There’s certainly work to be done to round off the edges, but we’re getting closer and closer every day.
I know how it all works, but even I’m (still) impressed at the apparent magic that allows round-trip conversations between her website and Twitter and Micro.blog. And she hasn’t really delved into website to website conversations yet. I suppose we’ll have to help IndieWebify some of her colleague’s web presences to make that portion easier. Suddenly “academic Twitter” will be the “academic blogosphere” she misses from not too many years ago. 🙂
If there are academics out thee who are interested in what Kathleen has done, but may need a little technical help, I’m happy to set up some tools for them to get them started. (We’re also hosing occasional Homebrew Website Clubs, including a virtual one this coming week, which people are welcome to join.)
In 2010 my friends Nathan Lustig and Jesse Davis (founders of Entrustet, which was later acquired by SecureSafe) used data from Facebook and the Centers for Disease Control to estimate the number of Facebook users who would pass away in 2010. They updated these numbers in January 2011 and Nathan updated them again in June 2012. I picked up the task in January 2016 upon the request of a major news organization. Another recent media query prompted me to revisit these numbers and provide new ones for 2018.
Venmo transaction data is public by default. But a programmer has taken that data stream and is tweeting the username and photos of users who buy 'drugs'.
Instagram made some very big changes to authentication process. About 70% of our users are affected by them. Before the changes the process was quite simple: Sometimes Instagram decided that login from SNAP is “unusual” and asked for confirmation. You just had to open Instagram on your phone and...
Facebook made changes to it’s API access policy on May 1st, 2018. As the result we introduced our own Premium API for Facebook. We feel that we need to explain how exactly those changes affected SNAP. Since the beginning Facebook native API was unrestricted. Anyone w...
Unix Sys Admin (Twitter)@jgmac1106 Out of interest what are you using to generate 'pingbacks' from Tweets to your website? #seemsneat
— Unix Sys Admin (@UnixSysAdmin) July 17, 2018These are called webmentions they are the glue of the #IndieWeb https://t.co/p3TnFqXuD5 (https://t.co/Iv1xaki5t6)
— Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) July 17, 2018Do you need to manually paste your URL into the tweets or is there a plug-in for browsers?
— Unix Sys Admin (@UnixSysAdmin) July 17, 2018
At this point, there's nothing novel about noticing that social media is often toxic and stressful. But even aside from those concerns, our social networks are not things we generally think of as requiring maintenance or upkeep, even though we routinely do regular updates on all the other aspects of
I did spend some time recently and culled out the corporate feeds from my Facebook and Twitter accounts that I’m already actively following via RSS.
To that point, I've also basically not refollowed any news accounts or "official" corporate accounts. Anything I need to know about major headlines gets surfaced through other channels, or even just other parts of Twitter, so I don't need to see social media updates from media companies whose entire economic model is predicated on causing me enough stress to click through to their sites.
It turns out, I don't mind knowing about current events, but it hurts to see lots of people I care about going through anguish or pain when bad news happens. I want to optimize for being aware, but not emotionally overwhelmed.
Twitter purged a bunch of robot accounts this week as some sort of effort to clean up their platform. You can see the personal result for you by logging in to you’ll see the falloff. My perso…
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)I am returning, at last, to the thoughts I was exploring in my recent posts on Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community (post 1 | post 2), and I’m starting to wrestle this morning with the big one: obligation. Thinking about community as a strategic rather than an idealized concept, community in its pragmatic coalition-building sense, leads me to consider the work required to create and sustain communities. If the kinds of communities that I am seeking in trying to imagine a more generous relationship not only between the university and the publics that it engages but also, crucially, within the university itself are first and foremost voluntary communities—self-organizing, self-governing collectives based in affiliation and solidarity—what exactly can we be said to owe those communities? Do those communities and our relationships to them impose obligations on us?
I am generous with what I have—I choose to be generous with what I have—precisely because we are no longer committed to one another as members of a shared social structure. Instead, the shift of responsibility for the public welfare toward private entities displaces our obligations to one another in favor of individual liberties and, I think, leaves us queasy about the notion of obligation altogether. ❧
The game theory of things tends to pull the society apart, particularly when it is easier to see who is paying what. If the richer end feels they’re paying more than their fair share, this can tend to break things down.
I suspect that Francis Fukuyama has a bit to say about this in how democratic societies built themselves up over time. Similarly one of his adherents Jonah Goldberg provides some related arguments about tribalism tending to tear democracies down when we revert back to a more primitive viewpoint instead of being able to trust the larger governmental structures of a democracy.
An unlikely couple became unlikely internet celebrities overnight in the #PlaneBae saga, and their experience raises some serious questions about privacy and social media.
A woman gets on a plane. She’s flying from New York to Dallas, where she lives and works as a personal trainer. A couple asks her if she’ll switch seats with one of them so that they can sit together, and she agrees, thinking it’s her good deed for the day. She chats with her new seatmate and ...
To summarize his argument, the media industry wants to broaden our definition of the public so that it will be fair game for discussion and content creation, meaning they can create more articles and videos, meaning they can sell more ads. The tech industry wants everything to be public because coding for privacy is difficult, and because our data, if public, is something they can sell. Our policy makers have failed to define what’s public in this digital age because, well, they don’t understand it and wouldn’t know where to begin. And also, because lobbyists don’t want them to. ❧
We actively create our public selves, every day, one social media post at a time. ❧
Even when the attention is positive, it is overwhelming and frightening. Your mind reels at the possibility of what they could find: your address, if your voting records are logged online; your cellphone number, if you accidentally included it on a form somewhere; your unflattering selfies at the beginning of your Facebook photo archive. There are hundreds of Facebook friend requests, press requests from journalists in your Instagram inbox, even people contacting your employer when they can’t reach you directly. This story you didn’t choose becomes the main story of your life. It replaces who you really are as the narrative someone else has written is tattooed onto your skin. ❧
What Blair did and continues to do as she stokes the flames of this story despite knowing this woman wants no part of it goes beyond intrusive. It is selfish, disrespectful harassment. ❧
Previously this was under the purview of journalists who typically had some ethics as well as editors to prevent this from happening. Now the average citizen has been given these same tools that journalists always had and they just haven’t been trained in their use.
How can we create some feedback mechanism to improve the situation? Should these same things be used against the perpetrators to show them how bad things could be? ❧
A friend of mine asked if I’d thought through the contradiction of criticizing Blair publicly like this, when she’s another not-quite public figure too. ❧
Did this really happen? Or is the author inventing it to diffuse potential criticism as she’s writing about the same story herself and only helping to propagate it?
There’s definitely a need to write about this issue, so kudos for that. Ella also deftly leaves out the name of the mystery woman, I’m sure on purpose. But she does include enough breadcrumbs to make the rest of the story discover-able so that one could jump from here to participate in the piling on. I do appreciate that it doesn’t appear that she’s given Blair any links in the process, which for a story like this is some subtle internet shade.
But Blair is not just posting about her own life; she has taken non-consenting parties along for the ride. ❧
the woman on the plane has deleted her own Instagram account after receiving violent abuse from the army Blair created. ❧
Feature request: the ability to make one’s social media account “disappear” temporarily while a public “attack” like this is happening.
We need a great name for this. Publicity ghosting? Fame cloaking?