👓 What the IndieWeb on WordPress needs | Brad Enslen

Read What the IndieWeb on WordPress needs by Brad Brad (Brad Enslen)
What the IndieWeb on WordPress needs is to be much more robust.  Or it just needs to be more robust in general even without WordPress.  When it works its glorious. When it doesn’t then you get that free falling and forgot your parachute feeling. Just before you slam into the ground. It also need...

👓 Three examples of annotations, bookmarking, & sharing in my digital commonplace book | W. Ian O’Byrne

Read Three examples of annotations, bookmarking, & sharing in my digital commonplace book by W. Ian O'Byrne (W. Ian O'Byrne)
I’ve been experimenting with some IndieWeb philosophies and tools on this site, but more importantly on my breadcrumbs website. My breadcrumbs website is my digital commonplace book. This is inspired by the website philosophy & structure developed by Chris Aldrich. My purpose is to switch up my relationship with others and social media networks while doing more to own my content online. To that end, one major purpose (for now) on my breadcrumbs site is to be more intentional in the materials that I share with others as I read and explore online.
Some interesting and useful UI examples here. May have to iterate on some of my own design now.

Following Kicks Condor

Followed Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)

Microchips and mods gratify me greatly

I first discovered the Techs-Mechs who are a clan of South of the border Gundam breaking own immagration fences with their impressive manos mecanicas

A short time later, I made the indieweb.xyz.

The creator of indieweb.xyz.

👓 ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans | Washington Post

Read ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans (Washington Post)
As treasury secretary, Tim Geithner criticized predatory lenders. Now the private equity firm he leads runs a company that mails high-rate loans to risky customers.

📑 ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans | Washington Post

Annotated ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans (Washington Post)
Despite the risks, however, Mariner Finance is eager to gain new customers. The company declined to say how many unsolicited checks it mails out, but because only about 1 percent of recipients cash them, the number is probably in the millions. The “loans-by-mail” program accounted for 28 percent of Mariner’s loans issued in the third quarter of 2017, according to Kroll. Mariner’s two largest competitors, by contrast, rarely use the tactic.
Incidentally 1% is the response rate necessary to make spam email and fax financially viable. Coincidence?

Do businesses that rely on a low response rate of 1-2% and succeed have something in common? Could they all be considered predatory?

🔖 dshanske/wordpress-refback: Refbacks for WordPress (Experimental)

Bookmarked Refbacks for WordPress (Experimental) by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (GitHub)
Refback is a linkback method that works using the standard HTTP Referer header. Like pingbacks, trackbacks, and webmentions, it attempts to present links of other sites that have linked to you. Unlike other methods, the other site requires no additional support. The implementation works exactly as the other linkbacks do in WordPress.

👓 Brainstorming on Implementing Vouch, Following and Blogrolls | David Shanske

Read Brainstorming on Implementing Vouch, Following and Blogrolls by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (David Shanske)
Vouch is an extension to the webmention protocol. Webmentions usually have two parameters…source and target. Target is the URL on your website  that the Source URL is linking to. The vouch parameter is a third URL to help the target determine whether or not they should accept the webmention. This...
I like the sound of where this is going already! All these small little pieces loosely joined to build a much larger edifice is certainly interesting.

I’ve got a somewhat reasonable bookmarklet for quickly following people, though it’s not marked up with XFN data (yet) — perhaps another data field for Post Kinds? I do wish that there was either a mechanism for adding those to my Following page via the WordPress Link Manager or someone had a means of parsing lots of follow posts so I could quickly have data for both Vouch as well as for microsub readers either via my follow feed list or via OPML export and/or OPML subscription. WordPress obviously has some of the infrastructure built already, but there’s certainly a more IndieWeb way of doing it that wouldn’t require side-files like OPML.

👓 IndieBookClub | Manton Reece

Read IndieBookClub by Manton Reece (manton.org)
As I mentioned in my IndieWeb Summit wrap-up, I added support for IndieBookClub while in Portland. IndieBookClub is a little like Goodreads, but built on standards like Microformats and Micropub so that you can post what you’re reading to your own blog. Now that I’m back in Austin, I’ve tweake...

👓 Sending your First Webmention from Scratch | Aaron Parecki

Read Sending your First Webmention from Scratch by Aaron PareckiAaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)
Webmention is one of the fundamental indieweb building blocks. It enables rich interactions between websites, like posting a comment or favorite on one site from another site. This post will walk you through the simplest way to get started sending webmentions to other sites so that you can use your ...
A stupendous article, I just wish I’d had it all those many years ago. Thanks Aaron!

One useful thing for beginners that I don’t think got mentioned (pun intended!) in the article is that for receiving websites which don’t have a built in webmention form you can use a service like http://mention-tech.appspot.com/ which will allow you to manually put in the sending site and the receiving site and it will act as a bridge to send the webmention for you.

👓 IndieWeb Summit 2018 wrap-up | Manton Reece

Read IndieWeb Summit 2018 wrap-up by Manton Reece (manton.org)
Last week I was in Portland for IndieWeb Summit. This was only my second IndieWeb conference (the first was IndieWebCamp in Austin). I had a great time in Portland and got even more than I expected out of IndieWeb Summit. The first day was short keynotes and sessions led by attendees on a range of t...

👓 Why 2016 Was the Year of the Algorithmic Timeline | Motherboard

Read Why 2016 Was the Year of the Algorithmic Timeline (Motherboard)
2016 was the year that the likes of Instagram and Twitter decided they knew better than you what content you wanted to see in your feeds.

use algorithms to decide on what individual users most wanted to see. Depending on our friendships and actions, the system might deliver old news, biased news, or news which had already been disproven.


2016 was the year of politicians telling us what we should believe, but it was also the year of machines telling us what we should want.


The only way to insure your posts gain notice is to bombard the feed and hope that some stick, which risks comprising on quality and annoying people.


Sreekumar added: “Interestingly enough, the change was made after Instagram opened the doors to brands to run ads.” But even once they pay for visibility, a brand under pressure to remain engaging: “Playing devil’s advocate for a second here: All the money in the world cannot transform shitty content into good content.”

Artificially limiting reach of large accounts to then turn around and demand extortion money? It’s the social media mafia!


It disorients the reader, and distracts them with endless, timeless content.

👓 A Close Look at How Facebook’s Retreat From the News Has Hurt One Particular Website—Ours | Slate

Read A Close Look at How Facebook’s Retreat From the News Has Hurt One Particular Website—Ours by Will Oremus (Slate Magazine)
New data shows the impact of Facebook’s pullback from an industry it had dominated (and distorted).

(Roose, who has since deleted his tweet as part of a routine purge of tweets older than 30 days, told me it was intended simply as an observation, not a full analysis of the trends.)

Another example of someone regularly deleting their tweets at regular intervals. I’ve seem a few examples of this in academia.


It’s worth noting that there’s a difference between NewsWhip’s engagement stats, which are public, and referrals—that is, people actually clicking on stories and visiting publishers’ sites. The two have generally correlated, historically, and Facebook told me that its own data suggests that continues to be the case. But two social media professionals interviewed for this story, including one who consults for a number of different publications, told me that the engagement on Facebook posts has led to less relative traffic. This means publications could theoretically be seeing less ad revenue from Facebook even if their public engagement stats are holding steady.


From Slate’s perspective, a comment on a Slate story you see on Facebook is great, but it does nothing for the site’s bottom line.


(Remember when every news site published the piece, “What Time Is the Super Bowl?”)

This is a great instance for Google’s box that simply provides the factual answer instead of requiring a click through.


fickle audiences available on social platforms.

Here’s where feed readers without algorithms could provide more stability for news.

👓 How Facebook Punked and then Gut Punched the News Biz | TPM

Read How Facebook Punked and then Gut Punched the News Biz by Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo)
In the digital publishing world, there’s been a buzz about this article in Slate in which slate staffer Will Oremus detailed the impact on the publication of Facebook’s dramatic retreat from the news business. The numbers are stark but not surprising for people in the industry. Indeed, Oremus makes the point that most news organizations are not willing to release these numbers. (We’ll come back to that point in a moment.) In January 2017 Slate had 28.33 million referrals from Facebook to Slate. By last month that number had dropped to 3.63 million. In other words, a near total collapse.