Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
A while back I answered a question on Quora: Can people actually keep up with note-taking in Mathematics lectures with LaTeX . There, I explained…
This is awesome though I’ve also heard of cases in which students use shared Google docs to collaboratively take notes like this as well.
Neil Mather (doubleloop)My online social experience is mostly through the indieweb. For following people and blogs, I use Aperture, a Microsub server, to subscribe to various social feeds. And then I read and interact with those feeds in various clients – e.g. Indigenous on Android, and Monocle on the web. Although I don...
I haven’t migrated over to a microsub-based reader yet, but this is an excellent description of some tools for freeing yourself from reading friends and family in Twitter.
Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear.
The app highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow sentence, shorten or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
You can utilize a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over them for hints.
I could see some serious value in this if I could use it as a web app with Micropub support, which would allow it to almost any CMS or platform. It’s a bit reminiscent of Quill, though that doesn’t have the grammar and writing help.
There’s a $20 desktop version that can publish to WordPress and Medium.
Possibly missing for a full editor experience: the ability to add images.
As a sample, I tried putting in some prior writing. Apparently I overuse adverbs. It said I was writing at grade 13 and I should aim for grade 9! (It was something I had already attempted to “dumb down”.)
This year Instapaper celebrated its tenth birthday and, now that we are an independent company, we’ve been thinking a lot about the next ten years of Instapaper and...
Live coding screencasts are way more awesome when the text can be copied. asciinema makes this possible.
The ability to copy and paste from video like this is tremendously awesome! Because it’s text-based, it also looks like I can annotate it with Hypothes.is too. Example: https://hyp.is/-Ay6wD7nEemnq3uyMRrhrA/asciinema.org/a/3uHCusbqQd6KAYNZ15NSv21bQ
This could be an awesome teaching tool, particularly for programming.
Readtrack is an experimental tool built during the 2012 NYT TimesOpen Hack Day. It gives music recommendations based on the content you’re looking at by doing semantic analysis of the current…
This is a killer start for a fun little app.
Tom Critchlow (tomcritchlow.com)There’s also a robust ecosystem of tools to follow users, monitor site annotations etc. ❧
Wait? What!? I’ve been wanting to be able to follow users annotations and I’d love the ability to monitor site annotations!! (I’ve even suggested that they added Webmention before to do direct notifications for site annotations.)
Where have you seen these things hiding Tom?
Tom Critchlow (tomcritchlow.com)Building personal learning environments across the different time horizons of information consumption
Tom Critchlow (tomcritchlow.com)How do you manage information flows? If anyone is using a personal wiki-style long term information tool I’d love to hear from you! ❧
I’ve got a handful of interesting things bookmarked here: https://boffosocko.com/tag/wikis/ which includes a rabbit hole of a request similar to your own.
Quip is a new way of collaborating that fuels a culture of action. Empower your employees to get things done faster with less email, and fewer meetings.
I’d looked at this as they launched, but might be worth revisiting to see it’s current status. It’s a silo service that I’ve noticed Ryan Dawidjan sort of using as a personal commonplace book/journal.
Wenbin Fang (Listen Notes)The most comprehensive podcast database online. Discover best podcasts. Search podcast show notes and audio transcripts by people, places, or topics.
An interesting looking service to be sure. Reminds me a bit of some of the functionality of Jeremy Keith’s Huffduffer, but it’s also a social silo of sorts for listening related content. It allows you to bookmark podcast episodes to listen later and includes an RSS feed for those so you can subscribe directly to your feed in a podcast player. It also does listen clips and comments. Sadly it doesn’t look like its got listen posts to allow you to keep track of what you’ve actually listened to. It does have an API for those who want to play around with it though.
I’m curious what folks like Kim Hansen, Ben Werdmüller, or Erin Jo Richey think of it. Are there better small tools out there?
hat tip: This Week in Google
This looks interesting… Sadly a lot of their options seem to be very ActivityPub-centric, despite the fact that the site itself is run on WordPress (and they neglect to list it as an option as far as I can tell). Admittedly they do seem to be directed toward the non-technical user, but there are lots of options they’re also not listing here too. They’re also not mentioning the potential for abuse that some of these software present, particularly when they’re run by other people, or collectives of other people. While switching from Twitter to Mastodon may be a short term solution, your choice of particular instance could end you right back where you came from if you’re not careful or not running your own personal instance.
Missing from many of these lists are things like micro.blog and a plethora of IndieWeb-related projects.
With that said, it’s at least a start on overcoming some of the hurdles that exist for finding alternatives.
hat tip: Ryan Barrett
Hayley Campbell (Twitter)PSA: with all the websites dying, go save the stuff you wrote as pdfs before they disappear. Otherwise you’ll be trying to get jobs with pocket fluff.
— Hayley Campbell (@hayleycampbell) February 1, 2019
This is an important topic and something which should be tended to on an ongoing basis.
Ben Welsh of the LA Times data desk has built Savemy.News which leverages Twitter in combination with archive.is, webcitation.org, and archive.org to allow journalists to quickly create multiple archives of their work by simply inputting the URLs of their related pages. It’s also got a useful download functionality too.
Richard MacManus, founder of RWW, wrote a worthwhile article on how and why he archived a lot of his past work.
Those with heavier digital journalism backgrounds and portfolios may find some useful information and research coming out of Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Dodging the Memory Hole series of conferences. I can direct those interested to a variety of archivists, librarians, researchers, and technologists should they need heavier lifting that simpler solutions than archive.org, et al.
Additional ideas for archiving and saving online work can be found on the IndieWeb wiki page archival copy. There are some additional useful ideas and articles on the IndieWeb for Journalism page as well. I’d welcome anyone with additional ideas or input to feel free to add to any of these pages for others’ benefit as well. If you’re unfamiliar with wiki notation or editing, feel free to reply to this post; I’m happy to make additions on your behalf or help you log in and navigate the system directly.
If you don’t have a website where you keep your personal archive and/or portfolio online already, now might be a good time to put one together. The IndieWeb page mentioned above has some useful ideas, real world examples, and even links to tutorials.
As an added bonus for those who clicked through, if you’re temporarily unemployed and don’t have your own website/portfolio already, I’m happy to help build an IndieWeb-friendly website (gratis) to make it easier to store and display your past and future articles.
A Wardley map is a map of the structure of a business or service, mapping the components needed to serve the customer or user. Wardley maps are named after Simon Wardley who claims to have created them in 2005.
Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.
As I look at this it makes me wonder when small, single-purpose services might allow themselves to be white listed and/or custom styled to live on a users personal domain, yet still look like they’re part and parcel of that user’s native site.
As an example, Disqus and Webmention.io are interesting examples of how a company could specialize into handling comments for user’s sites. These two are both doing things very differently and at much different price points. Disqus is large and bloated and seems to have quite innovating and iterating. I have to wonder what it would look like with more players and more competition in the space?
In fact, I’m still wondering why hasn’t Disqus picked up and run away with the Webmention spec?
