One of my goals in 2018 is to own my reading data rather than using Goodreads for all of that information. This will allow me to track information the way I want rather than have to do it like Goodreads wants me to.
Written by Winwood and Will Jennings. It was released on his album Arc of a Diver and peaked at number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1981 and number 68 on the Billboard Top 100 for 1981.
I don’t think I’d used it before or really seen it happening in the wild, but Khurt Williams used his website to reply to one of my posts via Webmention. I was then able to write my reply directly within the comments section of my original post and automatically Webmention his original back in return! Gone are the days of manually cutting and pasting replies so that they appear to thread correctly within WordPress!
Without all the jargon, we’re actually using our own websites to carry on a back and forth threaded conversation in a way that completely makes sense.
In fact, other than that our conversation is way over the 280 character limit imposed by Twitter, the interaction was as easy and simple from a UI perspective as it it is on Twitter or even Facebook. Hallelujah!
This is how the internet was meant to work!
A hearty thanks to those who’ve made this possible! It portends a sea-change in how social media works.
Three cheers for the #IndieWeb!!!
Aaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)I really like Barnes’ intent to share. I just wonder if there is a means of owning these notes. Ideally, taking a POSSE approach, she might live blog and post this to Twitter. I vaguely remember Chris Aldrich sharing something about this recently, but the reference escapes me. This is also limited with her blog being located at WP.com. I therefore wondered about the option of pasting the content of the tweets into a blog as an archive.
The best part is that it not only organically threads your tweets together into one continuing conversation, but it also gives you a modified output including the appropriate HTML and microformats classes so that you can cut and paste the entire thread and simply dump it into your favorite CMS and publish it as a standard blog post. (It also strips out the hashtags and repeated speaker references in a nice way.) With a small modification, you can also get your site to add hovercards to your post as well. I’ll also note in passing that it’s also been recently updated to support the longer 280 characters too.
The canonical version I use as an example of what this all looks like is this post: Notes from Day 1 of Dodging the Memory Hole: Saving Online News | Thursday, October 13, 2016.
Another shorter tweetstorm which also has u-syndication links for all of the individual tweets can be found at Indieweb and Education Tweetstorm. This one has the benefit of pulling in all the resultant conversations around my tweetstorm with backfeed from Brid.gy, though they’re not necessarily threaded properly in the comments the way I would ultimately like. As you mention in the last paragraph that having the links to the syndicated copies would be useful, I’ll note that I’ve already submitted it as an issue to Noter Live’s GitHub repo. In some sense, the entire Twitter thread is connected, so having the original tweet URL gives you most of the context, though it isn’t enough for all of the back feed by common methods (Webmentions+Brid.gy) presently.
I’ll also note that I’ve recently heard from a reputable source about a WordPress specific tool called Publishiza that may be useful in this way, but I’ve not had the chance to play with it yet myself.
Clearly, you can embed Tweets, often by adding the URL. However, there are more and more people deleting their Tweets and if you embed something that is deleted, this content is then lost. (Not sure where this leaves Storify etc.)
It’s interesting that you ask where this leaves Storify, because literally as I was reading your piece, I got a pop-up notification announcing that Storify was going to be shut down altogether!! (It sounds to me like you may have been unaware when you wrote your note. So Storify and those using it are in more dire circumstances than you had imagined.)
Storify announces it will disappear from the web on May 16, 2018. Once a core part of social-focused journalism projects like @acarvin‘s work, it’s larger archives and URLs will be gone. https://t.co/9KhEYCbX2e
— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) December 12, 2017
It’s yet another reason in a very long list why one needs to have and own their own digital presence.
As for people deleting their tweets, I’ll note that by doing a full embed (instead of just using a URL) from Twitter to WordPress (or using Noter Live), that the original text is preserved so that even if the original is deleted, a full archival copy of the original still exists.
Also somewhat related in flavor for the mechanism you’re discussing, I also often use Hypothesis to comment on, highlight, and annotate on web pages for academic/research uses. To save these annotations, I’ll add hashtags to the annotations within Hypothesis and then use Kris Shaffer’s excellent Hypothesis Aggregator plugin to parse the data and pull it in the specific parts I want. Though here again, either Hypothesis as a service or the plugin itself may ultimately fail, so I will copy/paste the raw HTML from its output to post onto my site for future safekeeping. In some sense I’m using the plugin as a simple tool to make the transcription and data transport much easier/quicker.
I hope these tips make it easier for you and others to better collect your content and display it for later consumption and archival use.
A quick, but interesting peek into where he intends to go. He lays out some quick background here in the opening. He’s generally a very lucid writer so far. Can’t wait to get in further.
Some may feel like some of the terminology is a hurdle in the opening, so I hope he circles around to define some of his terms a bit better for the audience I suspect he’s trying to reach.
(Actually ended up buying an ES350. Merry Christmas!)
The creative community is still waiting on Patreon to officially address the new policy of passing transaction fees on to the patrons (backers), but it appears that co-founder and figurehead Jack Conte has been calling some of creators to discuss the situation with them. Jeph Jacques, the cartoonist behind Questionable Content (over 5,300 patrons as of this typing. though the number of patrons as been… fluid… for many Patreon creators in the last few days) tweeted about his conversation with Conte
The premise is that many creators already have their own websites/platforms for promoting or featuring their work. In some sense Patreon is only bringing a payment gateway (and apparently not a great one) as their sole feature. The conversation within the session was geared toward attempting to make it easier and simpler for creators to not only host their own work, but to accept payments and recurring payments directly. Some of the discussion was geared at making the payments systems seamless so that one could move them from one platform to another without losing hard won supporters and needing to start over again.
While we’re still in the very early days for improving the technology for this, hopefully some of the demos coming out of the camp later today will move the ball forward. Those should be posted on the IndieWeb YouTube channel later today as well.
For those looking for alternates (and particularly when they’ve already got their own websites), I suspect it’ll definitely be worth a look. Alternate platforms and methods were certainly discussed. The means of control for creators to inexpensively keep all of their workflow in-house is very near.
This last section got pretty heavy into evolution and touched on ideas of information theory applied to biology and complexity, but didn’t actually mention them. Surprisingly he mentioned Jeremy England by name! He nibbled around the edges of the field to tie up the plot, but there’s some reasonable philosophical questions hiding here in the end of the book that I’ll have to pull into a more lengthy review.
