Companies and apps constantly ask for ratings, but all that data may just be noise in the system.
A great framing of a lot of crazy digital exhaust that online services and apps are collecting that don’t do much. I’ve also thought for a while about the idea of signal to noise ratio of these types of data as well as their quantization levels which often don’t make much sense to me. I don’t think that there are any IndieWeb realizations of these sorts of (mostly business) systems in the wild yet, but this is an important area to begin to consider when they do.
For some time, we have been considering how we could open up compatibility between Micro.blog and Mastodon. Any feature that could be disruptive needs to be approached carefully. In this post I want to talk about how Micro.blog supports Mastodon, why I think it’s useful, and anticipate some questi...
There’s some awesome new functionality in micro.blog now. It looks like it’s still got some work to come, but, ideally, this is how most websites will work in the near future.
I remotely attended the Displaying Responses session of IndieWebCamp Berlin 2018. It was very interesting and they made some good progress thinking though how to deal with how and when to display responses received to posts on your website.
They came to the conclusion that there are four groups of people that you want to treat their responses differently: Accepted / Immediate Connections 2nd level connections Everyone Mute or Blocked Accepted / Immediate Connections
These are essentially your friends on Facebook or your follow list on Twitter. These are people that you have chosen to connect with in some way and this logical conclusions can be drawn around the level of interactions you're willing to have.
My plan is to display these responses completely (name, photo and content of response). This list will be generated for me by adding anyone I follow, as well as anyone I have sent a reply to. This will NOT add people to whom I have liked, emoji reacted, quoted, or bookmarked. Those are lower level responses that do not indicate a deeper level of a desire to connect with that person. 2nd Level Connections
These are "friends of friends". You can assume they won't do anything TOO bad, but you might not want them posting all over your site. There is a deeper level of trust here because of mutual connection but still some care should be taken. This can be determined through different ways. One way that has been brainstormed in the IndieWeb is Vouch.
I don't currently track 2nd level connections but I liked how Tantek thought this through, so my plan is for replies to display their photo and name as "other people that have responded to this post", but not display the content of their reply. I also think if they send a like, emoji reaction or quote, I'll display it just like I would an Immediate Connection. Everyone
This is the World Wide Web, and anyone could send anything to my website via webmention. So this is a category you likely want to moderate.
My initial thought is I will accept likes, quotes and emoji reactions from them but I won't list attribution of who did it while moderated, just the reaction itself. For replies I am considering potentially listing the url of the author of the post under "other people who have replied" but no name, photo or content while moderated. Mute or Blocked
These are people who you do not trust for whatever reasons have happened for you. You don't want to associate with them in any way.
Responses are not displayed from these people and they are not listed in the moderation queue. Some thoughts on moderation
This means I'll need a moderation queue. Anything from a 2nd level connection or from the Everyone group will enter the moderation queue. Responses from 2nd level connections should appear higher in the queue than responses from the Everyone group. From there I can choose to: approve a response (display it like an immediate connection) approve response and accept author (makes this author an immediate connection so they aren't moderated anymore) ignore response (this leaves the response as is, it leaves the queue but doesn't display additional details) remove response (this removes the response from my storage) remove response and block author (this both removes the response from my storage and makes sure I don't receive responses from them in the future)
All in all, it was a great session that I really enjoyed and I'm looking forward to actually working on implementing some of these features into my site.
A well laid out synopsis of how this could be done well. Filing for future templating.
Spent a few minutes late this afternoon to update the CSS on my website to hide the automatic titles given to annotation and highlight posts. Also modified these slightly to give the highlighted/quoted portion of other sites a highlighter-yellow color.
An example of the yellow highlight color of highlighted/annotated posts on my website. Previously the quoted portions had been a muted grey like other posts.
This reminds me of these “useless web” sites—this being the primary one—that have managed to stay very popular. (A lot of YouTubers make videos of themselves clicking through this site and I often see kids at school using the site.) And it’s basically a webring. But it’s not a code-based...
Derek Powazek has worked the web since 1995 at pioneering sites like HotWired, Blogger, and Technorati. He is the author of “Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places” (New Riders, 2001). He is the cofounder of JPG, the photography magazine that’s made by its community. He has been Chief of Design for HP’s MagCloud, advisor to a handful of startup companies, and creator of Fray, the magazine of true stories and original art.
I mention it because I was specifically intrigued by a small piece of excellent user interface and social graph data that Reading.am unearths for me. I’m including a quick screen capture to better illustrate the point. While the UI allows me to click yes/no (i.e. did I like it or not) or even share it to other networks, the thing I found most interesting was that it lists the other people using the service who have read the article as well. In this case it told me that my friend Jeremy Cherfas had read the article.1
Reading.am user interface indicating who else on the service has read an article.
The tougher follow up is: how could we create a decentralized method of doing this sort of workflow in a more IndieWeb way? It would be nice if my read posts on my site (and those of others) could be overlain on websites via a bookmarklet or other means as a social layer to create engaged discussion. Better would have been the ability to quickly surface his commentary, if any, on the piece as well–functionality which I think Reading.am also does, though I rarely ever see it. In some sense I would have come across Jeremy’s read post in his feed later this weekend, but it doesn’t provide the immediacy that this method did. I’ll also admit that I prefer having found out about his reading it only after I’d read it myself, but having his and others’ recommendations on a piece (by their explicit read posts) is a useful and worthwhile piece of data, particularly for pieces I might have otherwise passed over.
In some sense, some of this functionality isn’t too different from that provided by Hypothes.is, though that is hidden away within another browser extension layer and requires not only direct examination, but scanning for those whose identities I might recognize because Hypothes.is doesn’t have a specific following/follower social model to make my friends and colleagues a part of my social graph in that instance. The nice part of Hypothes.is’ browser extension is that it does add a small visual indicator to show that others have in fact read/annotated a particular site using the service.
A UI example of Hypothes.is functionality within the Chrome browser. The yellow highlighted browser extension bug indicates that others have annotated a document. Clicking the image will take one to the annotations in situ.
I’ve also previously documented on the IndieWeb wiki how WordPress.com (and WordPress.org with JetPack functionality) facepiles likes on content (typically underneath the content itself). This method doesn’t take things as far as the Reading.am case because it only shows a small fraction of the data, is much less useful, and is far less likely to unearth those in your social graph to make it useful to you, the reader.
WordPress.com facepiles likes on content which could surface some of this social reading data.
I seem to recall that Facebook has some similar functionality that is dependent upon how (and if) the publisher embeds Facebook into their site. I don’t think I’ve seen this sort of interface built into another service this way and certainly not front and center the way that Reading.am does it.
The closest thing I can think of to this type of functionality in the analog world was in my childhood when library card slips in books had the names of prior patrons on them when you signed your own name when checking out a book, though this also had the large world problem that WordPress likes have in that one typically wouldn’t have know many of the names of prior patrons necessarily. I suspect that the Robert Bork privacy incident along with the evolution of library databases and bar codes have caused this older system to disappear.
This general idea might make an interesting topic to explore at an upcoming IndieWebCamp if not before. The question is: how to add in the social graph aspect of reading to uncover this data? I’m also curious how it might or might not be worked into a feed reader or into microsub related technologies as well. Microsub clients or related browser extensions might make a great place to add this functionality as they would have the data about whom you’re already following (aka your social graph data) as well as access to their read/like/favorite posts. I know that some users have reported consuming feeds of friends’ reads, likes, favorites, and bookmarks as potential recommendations of things they might be interested in reading as well, so perhaps this would be an additional extension of that as well?
[1] I’ve certainly seen this functionality before, but most often the other readers are people I don’t know or know that well because the service isn’t huge and I’m not using it to follow a large number of other people.
[2] I knew he was generally interested already as I happen to be following this particular site at his prior recommendation, but the idea still illustrates the broader point.
undo is a common action you can take (often a button or menu item) to reverse the effects of the previous action, as if the action had never occurred; on the indieweb, you may want to undo a post, a deletion, or an update.
TK is an abbreviated editorial mark made when writing, proofreading, or editing to indicate that a portion of the piece is to come some time in the future.
TK is an abbreviated editorial mark made when writing, proofreading, or editing to indicate that a portion of the piece is to come some time in the future.
Writers often use the combination when writing so as not to slow down the flow of their thought when they might otherwise need to look something up or do some research.
Because the letter combination TK is very rare in the English language it is easy to do a search or search/replace for the mark in digital documents.
Examples
Medium
When composing text in Medium if one writes a stand alone TK within the text, the text editor shows a yellow TK within the margin as an indicator to return to that place to finish the thought(s).
Example of a TK editorial mark in the Medium.com user interface.
For the past year, Daniel James has been developing the Dark Mode plugin for WordPress. The plugin is actively installed on more than 1K sites. Dark Mode replaces the white and grey colors in the b…
You don’t see it until you’re right there, and even then, you remain confused. Did you miss a turn in the road, or misread the map? You are now driving through someone’s yard, or maybe even their house. You slow to a stop.
On rural road R575, also known as the Ring of Beara and more recently rebranded as part of the Wild Atlantic Way, you are making your way along the northern coast of the Beara Peninsula in far southwestern Ireland. You are in the hamlet of Gortahig, between Eyeries, a multicolored strip of connected houses on the bay, and Allihies, where the copper mines once flourished. The road, like the landscape, is raw, and it is disconcertingly narrow, often too narrow for two cars to pass one another.
An interesting example of how small local decisions can have complex and interesting ramifications in the future.
So I’m back blogging! And I haven’t used wordpress.com in ages, but I wanted to share my running list of WTF moments over the past week of using the site and service, both at work (we j…
For the most part, the redesigned Gmail that launched in April maintained feature parity with the previous iteration. However, one minor grievance did emerge over the lack of a Google Contacts shortcut. This was an intentional change with Google now removing the Contacts shortcut and experience from legacy Gmail. For several years, Gmail featured a …
Manton Reece (manton.org)
Eddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)
Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)
Jan Cavan Boulas (The WordPress.com Blog)