Twitter | Chris Aldrich

👓 poniewozik tweetstorm: Response to Axios op ed

BE SMART: This is dumb and treats Axios readers as if they're dumb. 1/ https://t.co/usibB2G952 pic.twitter.com/WbCYkXc12e
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) October 21, 2018

Does Axios believe that, as long as their staff never share opinions, its readers will assume they have none? 2/
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) October 21, 2018

Of course not! So this sort of policy says: Yes, we have opinions and attitudes and sensibilities, like any intelligent person, but we will *conceal them from you.* And therefore you should trust us more! 3/
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) October 21, 2018

What idiot would believe that? In what other aspect of journalism do we believe that hiding information from the public serves the public? 4/
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) October 21, 2018

People don’t want you to be a robot. They want you to be FAIR. That applies to straight news and opinion alike. If you show that you are a human being, capable of feeling and analysis, and yet you will pursue a story where it goes regardless, that makes you more trustworthy. 5/
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) October 21, 2018

If you covered the tech industry and you never formed an opinion, based on your years of research, on the issues facing that field, you would be a got-damn idiot I would not want to get my news from. Same with politics. Same with ANYTHING. 6/
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) October 21, 2018

If I could change one thing in media, it would be: no news outlet, ever again, would base its policy on perception and “How will this make us look?” It serves no one, we get too cute by half, we look phony—because it IS phony—and bad-faith critics will attack us regardless. 7/7
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) October 21, 2018

A human take on the Twitter portion of the Axios’ 4 ways we all can work to fix “fake news”

👓 Welcome to Voldemorting, the Ultimate SEO Dis | Wired

Read Welcome to Voldemorting, the Ultimate SEO Dis by Gretchen McCulloch (WIRED)

When writers swap Trump for Cheeto and 45, it's not just a put-down. Removing a keyword is the anti-SEO—transforming your subject into a slippery, ungraspable, swarm.

Surprised she didn’t mention the phenomena of subtweeting, snitch tagging, or dunking which are also closely related to voldemorting.

To my experience, the phrase “bird site” was generally used as a derogatory phrase on Mastodon (represented by a Mastodon character instead of a bird), by people who were fed up by Twitter and the interactions they found there. I recall instances of it as early as April 2017.

In addition to potential SEO implications, this phenomenon is also interesting for its information theoretic implications.

I particularly like the reference in the van der Nagle paper

[…] screenshotting, or making content visible without sending its website traffic – to demonstrate users’ understandings of the algorithms that seek to connect individuals to other people, platforms, content and advertisers, and their efforts to wrest back control.

This seems like an awesome way to skirt around algorithms in social sites as well as not rewarding negative sites with clicks.

👓 Wil Wheaton Has a Listening Problem | Amber Enderton

Read Wil Wheaton Has a Listening Problem by Amber Enderton (Amber Enderton – Medium)

Wil Wheaton has left Mastodon after facing pressure and hostility from both the community and the staff. Yesterday, Wheaton got bofa’d. A…

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.

🔖 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.

👓 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…