I remember people used to proclaim “Content is King!” When did the king die to be replaced by a boy king?
Apparently our evil King Regent is named “Engagement”.
Tag: social media
I have been thinking a lot about digital gardens this week. A blog post by Tom McFarlin re-introduced me to the term, which led me down a rabbit hole of interesting ideas on creating a digital space…
My blog posts were merely random thoughts — bits and pieces of my life. ❧
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:52AM
Despite having something that worked sort of like a blog, I maintained various resources and links of other neat ideas I found around the web. It was a digital garden that I tended, occasionally plucking weeds and planting new ideas that may someday blossom into something more. ❧
The idea of a thought space hiding in here….
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:53AM
“The idea of a ‘blog’ needs to get over itself,” wrote Joel Hooks in a post titled Stop Giving af and Start Writing More. “Everybody is treating writing as a ‘content marketing strategy’ and using it to ‘build a personal brand’ which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.”
It is almost as if he had reached down into my soul and figured out why I no longer had the vigor I once had for sharing on my personal blog. For far too long, I was trying to brand myself. Posts became few and far between. I still shared a short note, aside, once in a while, but much of what I shared was for others rather than myself. ❧
For many, social media took over their “streams” of thoughts and ideas to the point that they forgot to sit, reflect, and write something longer (polished or not).
Personal websites used for yourself first is a powerful idea for collecting, thinking, and creating.
Getting away from “branding” is a great idea. Too many personal sites are used for this dreadful thing. I’d much rather see the edge ideas and what they flower into.
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:56AM
Personal websites can be so much more than a progression of posts over time, newer posts showing up while everything from the past is neatly tucked on “page 2” and beyond. ❧
This is an interesting idea and too many CMSes are missing this sort of UI baked into them as a core idea. CMSes could do a better job of doing both: the garden AND the stream
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:57AM
While I lament the loss of some of the artistry of the early web and lay much of the blame at the feet of blogging platforms like WordPress, such platforms also opened the web to far more people who would not have otherwise been able to create a website. Democratizing publishing is a far loftier goal than dropping animated GIFs across personal spaces. ❧
WordPress has done a lot to democratize publishing and make portions of it easier, but has it gone too far in crystalizing the form of things by not having more wiki-like or curation-based features?
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:01AM
Throughout the platform’s history, end-users have remained at the mercy of their WordPress theme. Most themes are built around what WordPress allows out of the box. They follow a similar formula. Some may have a fancy homepage or other custom page templates. But, on the whole, themes have been primarily built around the idea of a blog. Such themes do not give the user true control over where to place things on their website. While some developers have attempted solutions to this, most have never met the towering goal of putting the power of HTML and CSS into the hands of users through a visual interface. This lack of tools has given rise to page builders and the block editor. ❧
an apropos criticsm
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:02AM
I also want them to be able to easily build something like Tom Critchlow’s wikifolder, a digital collection of links, random thoughts, and other resources.
More than anything, I want personal websites to be more personal. ❧
Those in the IndieWeb want this too!! I definitely do.
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:03AM
Cory Doctorow (well.com)Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard -- a Document Type Definition or scheme -- for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine he's seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his criteria.
Doctorow apparently drew out the roadmap for Twitter, democracy, and the future of society in 2001.
If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It’s also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. ❧
Apparently this also now applies to politics and democracy too.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:12AM
When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order. ❧
If we look at Twitter as a worldwide annotation tool which is generating metadata on a much tinier subset of primary documents (some of which are not truthful themselves), this seems to bear out in that setting as well.
ref: Kalir & Garcia in Annotation
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:17AM
Schemas aren’t neutral ❧
This section highlights why relying on algorithmic feeds in social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be toxic. Your feed is full of what they think you’ll like and click on instead of giving you the choice.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:23AM
It’s wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable. ❧
The fate of true democracies.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:33AM
The long read: As social media has become more inhospitable, the appeal of private online groups has grown. But they hold their own dangers – to those both inside and out.
Joe Johnston (taskboy.com)Slow thinking. I am deracinating myself from Twitter to regain my slow thinking. Slow thinking is that activity of cognition which strives toward a goal, but indulges in seeming off-ramps and non-sequiturs. It is a desultory journey that stubbornly refuses to be rushed. Yet, patiently following one ...
Well said!
The Covid-19 infodemic taught social media giants like YouTube and Reddit an important lesson: They can—and must—take action to control the content on their sites.
Parler is a United States-based microblogging and social networking service launched in August 2018, promoted as an alternative to Twitter and particularly marketed to political conservatives in the United States.
Ugh… another “free speech” social media platform of the worst kind.
Readup tracks your reading progress. In our community, you can’t comment on articles you haven’t really read.
An interesting little tool for comment posts. Gameable?
LikeWar – The Weaponization of Social Media
Two defense experts explore the collision of war, politics, and social media, where the most important battles are now only a click away. Through the weaponization of social media, the internet is changing war and politics, just as war and politics are changing the internet. Terrorists livestream th...
An interesting looking book, but I’m worried that it’s the sort of thing I’d start reading only to realize I’ve read all the component pieces of it in other places.
Looking back at the decade of 2010 and developments in the internet, in Social Media, and inside alternative Social Media projects.
It feels a lot like the reason we are unable to offer real alternative social networks is not that we cannot do so. It is because most people with the abilities to do so spend their time working on things that only work for the tiny audience that is the tech sector, while happily ignoring the needs of all those billions of non-technical humans out there. This is something that frustrates me more than I want to admit. ❧
Annotated on May 06, 2020 at 08:17AM
He’s definitely got some interesting and insightful ideas here on why alternative social media efforts may not have the desired effect. I’ve also heard some of his technical issues with Activity Pub by other developers (and implementers). Many find it not only difficult to implement, but find it difficult to actually federate properly.
The WELL is a cherished destination for conversation and discussion. It is widely known as the primordial ooze where the online community movement was born — where Howard Rheingold first coined the term “virtual community.” Since long before the public Internet was unleashed, it has quietly captivated some accomplished and imaginative people. Over the last three decades, it’s been described as “the world’s most influential online community” in a Wired Magazine cover story, and ” the Park Place of email addresses” by John Perry Barlow. It’s won Dvorak and Webby Awards, inspired songs and novels, and almost invisibly influences modern culture.
I suppose that any social media network where people need to pay $15 a month would probably be pretty interesting if for nothing than it would require a reasonably high hurdle for joining and make people want to participate at a higher level than the free they get on most platforms.
Mashable beats a lawsuit by convincing a New York judge that it legitimately used an image on social media.
V0.1 for an experimental open bookshelf spec
TWELVE
By taking the content AND the conversation around it out of the hands of “big social media” and their constant tracking and leaving it with the active participants, we can effect far more ethical EdTech.
TWO
For a variety of reasons (including lack of budget, time, support, and other resources) many educators have been using corporate tools from Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others for their ease-of-use as well as for a range of functionality that hadn’t previously existed in the blogosphere or open source software that many educators use or prefer.
This leaves us and our students open to the vagaries and abuses that those platforms continually allow including an unhealthy dose of surveillance capitalism.