Khürt Williams (Island in the Net)Aperture—ƒ/5 Credit—Khürt L. Williams Camera—NIKON D5100 Taken—25 July, 2014 Focal length—85mm ISO—100 Shutter speed—1/400s I have a little over 100 RSS feeds in my Feedbin account. They covers a diverse set of topics around photography, Formula 1 racing, beer, diabetes, philosophy,...
One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.
As I read it, I can’t help but think about how the structure and set up of the IndieWeb community is mirrored in a lot of this advice. The fact that everyone is diligently selfdogfooding the ultimate product that we all love and are designing specifically for people gives me great hope that we’re all onto something that has great potential.
I’m curious how we can take the rest of the playbook and put it into action as well. This is certainly something I’ll have to come back and think about more in the near future.
Big portions of the article also skirt around the idea of tummeling without actually using the term. It such a useful concept, I’m surprised that it’s not more commonly known.
In 2015, a manager discovered a trove of accounts with Russian and Ukrainian IP addresses
Founded by Ramzi Hajj and Nathan Tyler, Storiad technology helps independent authors and publishers manage bookselling campaigns and boost book sales.
My website's content is now populated automatically via Dropbox using Neotoma personal server and publishing software, reducing the friction to publishing, keeping data in sync, and paving the way for content aggregation.
Let this serve as a reminder that you have less control over your stuff online than it often appears.
Peter Molnar (petermolnar.net)I spent a lot of time trying centralising my online activities, including adding bookmarks and imports from social networks. Lately my site looked bloated and unmaintainable. I started questioning what data is my data, what data should or could I own - it was time to rethink some ideas.
Somewhat like him, I’m bookmarking things I’d like to read privately on the back end of my site, and then only selectively posting them as read posts when I’ve done that. Archiving them to the Internet Archive has been useful for cutting down on the data I’m keeping, but saving them does allow me to browse through my commonplace book frequently when I need to find something and couldn’t find it otherwise.
Some of this reminds me of the way I use the “star” functionality on Twitter (I still think of it as a star and not a heart). I don’t typically use it to mean anything in particular on Twitter itself. Instead I’m using that functionality in conjunction with an IFTTT recipe to bookmark things I’d like to read later. So in a larger sense, I’m using Twitter as a headline feed reader and marking all the things I’d like to come back and read at a later time.
Once in a blue moon, during a chat with others on Twitter, I may use the heart as an indicator to the other party that I’ve seen/read their post, particularly when I don’t intend to reply to the last in a chain of conversation. This type of ephemera or digital exhaust generally isn’t something I find useful for keeping in the long term, so like Peter I typically don’t keep/archive them on my site.
For those who haven’t read them yet, Sebastiaan Andewe has a recent article covering similar ground: Thinking about bookmarks and likes on the IndieWeb.
I find these discussions useful for thinking through what I’m doing on my own site and refining how I use it as well.
The Workshop on Applied Category Theory 2018 takes place in May 2018. A principal goal of this workshop is to bring early career researchers into the applied category theory community. Towards this goal, we are organising the Adjoint School. The Adjoint School will run from January to April 2018.
h/t John Carlos Baez
Many people express themselves online through social media, blogs, personal websites, and the like. Using these technologies affects our day-to-day lives, and sense of self. These technologies also change and develop in response to how people use them. Many of the tools we use come with constraints, and people often find ways to work around these constraints to suit their needs. This thesis explores the different ways in which people express their identities using contemporary Web technologies. We conduct several studies, and show that there are many interdependent factors at play when it comes to online self-presentation, and that it is rare that all of these are considered when studying or designing social systems. We present a conceptual framework which will enable cohesive further research in this area, as well as guidance for future system designs. In the second part, we discuss how these technologies are changing. We make contributions to an emerging alternative means of engaging with social media and similar technologies, and examine the implications of these new technologies on self-presentation.
There may possibly be some other much older IndieWeb related doctoral theses out there, but I suspect this may be the first in the new era…
If nothing else, you’ve got to love a thesis that’s got it’s own custom short link-style domain: dr.amy.gy
Makes me think I’m going to have to finish up a new OPML file for folks I’m following who are aware of or using IndieWeb principles in the education space. Aaron, I’m adding you to the list.
A Tufte-inspired LaTeX class for producing handouts, papers, and books
for a book.
Typesetting geekery gets me every time.
Chris Aldrich's recent post outlining a proposal for a book about everything #IndieWeb spurred me to finish collecting together my own experiences.
I have openly shared, published online, gave away the store on just about everything I have created since getting into ed-tech in the early 1990s (c.f. “old dude”). I did this before there was a Creative Commons, I embrace and advocate CC, yet I don’t find all that much interesting in debating the various license flavors. While I understand the reasons for having so many two letter alphabet combos to string along after CC BY, frankly my dear, I think there are way too many of them. I’d rather be making stuff than dissecting licenses.
I could go with this…
I know how to define a package or a class, but how do I make it available (to myself) at all times? Say I have the package file commonstuff.sty (or myprettyclass.cls), that I want to be able to in...
My weekly columns on Stuff, New Zealand's biggest news website, continue to generate interesting comments on the site and good feedback on social media. Last month we had a general election in New Zealand, so a couple of my columns focused on the tech policies of the major parties. Since the result of the election has yet to be finalised, it's unclear yet which direction the country will take with technology. In lieu of a reading recommendation this month, I want to discuss the extraordinary TV series that finished last month: Twin Peaks.
