There are still some wrinkles to be ironed out in getting the various platforms we use today to play well with Webmentions, but it’s a real step toward the goal of that decentralized, distributed, interconnected future for scholarly communication.

media organizations would do well to incorporate them into their Web sites as an important new addition to the journalistic toolkit.

Public writing became a venue for retaining parts of myself that I would not submit to institutional transformation.

Digital texts embody the intersections between history and biography that Mills (1959) thought inherent to understanding social relations. Content from my blog is a ready example. I have access to the entire data set. I can track its macro discursive moments to action, space, and place. And I can consider it as a reflexive sociological practice. In this way, I have used my digital texts as methodologists use autoethnographies: reflexive, critical practices of social relationship.

Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle. For Facebook it was posting some witty text-based status update. For Instagram, it was posting an interesting square photo. For Vine, an entertaining 6-second video. For Twitter, it was writing an amusing bit of text of 140 characters or fewer. Pinterest? Pinning a compelling photo. You can likely derive the proof of work for other networks like Quora and Reddit and Twitch and so on. Successful social networks don't pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you.

This should be a space where you can create the identity that you want to have. You can write yourself into existence.

If Medium is elevator music, indie blogging is punk.

Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery.

But I actually think stock and flow is a useful metaphor for media in the 21st century. Here’s what I mean: Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

The purpose (for me) in these bookmarks is to identify a space (or process) between Hypothesis and my IndieWeb commonplace site. I want to read, review, and share the link, salient quotes, and perhaps some context for others. The use of Hypothesis helps as I have another series of links behind to “show my work.”

Well, you don’t have to choose another niche. Writing about niche topics is not the only approach. You can write about popular topics and provide value by giving those topics your own unique take. You won’t get exceedingly rich, but you may find more success.

After all, you need to find your niche. So what do you do? You begin by concocting the weirdest flavors:Salmon-flavored ice cream.Trout-flavored ice cream.Sardine-flavored ice cream.Tuna-flavored ice cream.

Medium itself conducted a study on the optimal reading time. They analyzed loads of data and came to the conclusion that 7 minutes is the optimal length for a post. However, the data varies widely and anything from 4–8 minutes performs great.

Using only half the word count then a conventional text, lead to an increase of usability by 58%. So generally, we can conclude that shorter texts are not only easier to read, but also more likely to be remembered

Dr. Jakob Nielsen conducted an interesting study on how the average person reads an online article. The short version is: They don’t. He found out, that the reader scans the page, rather than reading it word for word. Thus, he concluded that it’s not the content length that scares off your reader, but how scannable your text is.

You have 9 seconds to convince9 seconds is the attention span of a goldfish. And your average reader. Within this short period of time, the person clicking on your article will decide if it’s worth reading.

As Austin Kleon notes, blogging is a great way to discover what you have to say. My microblog has given me a chance to have thoughts, and this longer blog has given me a space to figure out what it means–to discover what it is I have to say. In other words, my microblog is where I collect the raw materials; my blog is where I assemble them into questions and, perhaps, answers. It’s a place where I figure out what I really think.

I’ve enjoyed linkblogging. When I read something, I can share the link along with a quote or reflection on how it affected me. It’s a great space to think out loud.

Short bursts of writing that might be interesting when they are read - but quickly age. I find writing too hard to want to spend it on things that disappear.

Whether their scenario is a historical reenactment (albeit with higher-res images) or a seductive counterfactual, I don’t know. Whether it “matters,” I don’t know. I do know that I am enjoying my fraidy-follows, their slow pulse—people really are blogging, doing the dang thing—and the feeling of an old instinct waking up.

But tell them you’re launching a blog and see how that goes: Huh. Really, a blog? In 2020? Wow.

"The easiest way to be discovered right now in technology and perhaps many fields is to create your own independent blog and write. There is a huge dearth in availability of good, current, first party content today.The single most important advice I can give to actually write is to write.The thing that happens which you don’t see until you write is that your content engages some of the smartest people who are lurking around the internet. And they reach out to you."

This is probably my dozenth attempt at a “what would it look like to track some notes over the week and schedule it to publish on Friday” post. We’ll see if it works. I even put little separators in between the notes.

Today, my process is enjoyably unsophisticated. When I want to post something, I first write it in a text file, copy my last blog post’s HTML file, paste in my new article, make some slight adjustments, update my list of posts, add it to my RSS file, and that’s basically it. Any page on my website can be anything I want it to be, like how, for example, double clicking on this article leads to a small easter egg.

I still find blogging one of the most professionally satisfying things I do. It is a powerful thing to feel like you have a voice.

By the numbers

Blogging is what I know best, where I feel most comfortable, where I have spent the most time. It is where I am not necessarily punished for having small ideas.

What have you learned from reading or participating?

To make conversations more weblike than linear, more of a garden and less of a stream, to create “a broader web of related ideas”. These sentiments from Chris Aldrich resonate with me. But how do we achieve this?

I tend to think of blogging as “thinking out loud”, a combination of personal essay, journaling, brainstorming and public memo.

A systematic analysis of my public writing makes the case that as academics are increasingly called to “publicly engage,” we have not fully conceptualized or counted the costs of public writing from various social locations.

From the inception of Subtraction, you used it as a place to think out loud.

Campfires - mostly blogging for me, though I know some folks gather around private slack groups too. My blog functions as a digital campfire (or a series of campfires) that are slower burn but fade relatively quickly over the timeframe of years. Connection forming, thinking out loud, self referencing and connection forming. This builds muscle, helps me articulate my thinking and is the connective tissue between ideas, people and more. While I’m not a daily blogger I’ve been blogging on and off for 10+ years.

I blog to share and learn. rarely teach. I think the imposed pressure on the latter keeps a lot of blog posts from great people hidden - lost tweet from spring 2015

This site is where I can riff on ideas, be wrong, and learn from those mistakes. Of course I try to be correct, and I always write what I believe to be true, but the greatest value most often comes from someone messaging me to point out a body of research I missed or angle I misinterpreted. In this vein, please don't hesitate to let me know what you think! The whole point is to share what I know and to learn the rest.

The Weblog community is basically a whole bunch of expert witnesses who increase their expertise constantly through a sort of reputation engine."

I do find that Webmentions are really enhancing linking—by offering a type of bidirectional hyperlink. I think if they could see widespread use, we’d see a Renaissance of blogging on the Web.

With a personal blog, it’s about whatever is on your mind.  Each post is not the definitive answer, rather, it’s you thinking out loud.

This may be a personal itch, but at least for personal archiving needs, I’m sick, sick, sick of the recency bias that’s eaten the internet since the first stirrings of Web 2.0. Wikis are practically the only sites that have escaped chronological organization. It would be cool to have easily-manipulated collections with non-kludgey support for series ordering, order-by-popularity, order-by-popularity with a manual bump for posts you want to highlight, hell even alphabetical ordering. None of these things are remotely unsolved problems, but they’re poorly supported on the social-media silos most people’s content lives on these days.

I've been more or less a nomad since 2008, and was one of the very first to really travel in a minimalist (one small backpack) way. I'm sure others came before me (and my friend Todd), but none I'm aware of who were writing about it.

It's Time for an RSS Revival

<link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/username/xmlrpc" /> <link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/username/webmention" />

Federated blogging application, thanks to ActivityPub

Google Sheets Blogging CMS

In fact blog posts are not the kind of thing one can detail on one’s annual review form, and even a blog in the aggregate doesn’t have a place in which it’s easy to be claimed as a site of ongoing scholarly productivity.

I’ve written up a bunch of details on how and what I did (as well as why), so hopefully it’ll give you a solid start including some custom code snippets and reasonably explicit directions to make some small improvements for those that may be a bit code-averse. Hint: I changed it from being a sidebar widget to making it a full page. Let us know if you need help making some of the small code related changes to get yourself sorted.

And probably letting myself do a bit more thinking-out-loud here.

I also value reading a person’s blog over time to understand better their voice and context. So I’m asking for some advice on how to update my module on finding research. What replaces RSS feeds? What works for you that goes beyond “someone on Twitter/Facebook shared….” to something that is more focused and intentional?

Getting started is pretty easy. It’s like joining a gym. Easy to start, easy to go a time or two. It’s the long run that interests me.

[MN Thanks, Frank! You have a knack for being ahead of the curve :-)]

Blogging begets blogging. I blog because I'm in the business of locating and connecting interesting things. Operating a popular blog gives people an incentive to approach me with interesting things of their own devising or discovery, for inclusion on Boing Boing. The more I blog, the more of these things I get, as other infovores toss choice morsels over my transom. The feedback loop continues on Boing Boing's message boards, where experts and amateurs debate and discuss the stories I've posted, providing depth and context for free, fixing the most interesting aspects of the most interesting subjects even more prominently in my foremind.

When I think about blogging, there is a cross-over between technology and the way it is used. Big B bloggers are those who take each to their extremes. Content is important. But so is process and product. It is something personal, stemming from our changing circumstances and intent.

Scale in many ways became a distraction, one which was magnified to such a degree by the hype around MOOCs in edtech that anything less that 10s of thousands of “users,” “learners,” “participants,” followers,” etc. was tacitly considered somehow less than optimal for effective online learning

And for me that is the kicker, most folks treat their blog as if it were some kind of glossy headshot of their thinking, whereas the beauty and freedom of blogging was that it was by design a networked tool. Blogging provides a space to develop an online voice, connect with a particular network, and build a sense of identity online in conjunction with others working through a similar process.

I had been an early adopter of learning technologies and when I returned to Warwick I was able to complete further learning including an e-learning award and a Masters in Post Compulsory Education which had provided lots of opportunities to reflect through blogging

I believe digital citizenship education is most beneficial when it is ongoing and authentic. A blogging program offers this.

So, R.I.P. The Blog, 1997-2013. But this isn’t cause for lament. The Stream might be on the wane but still it dominates. All media on the web and in mobile apps has blog DNA in it and will continue to for a long while. Over the past 16 years, the blog format has evolved, had social grafted onto it, and mutated into Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and those new species have now taken over. No biggie, that’s how technology and culture work.

After struggling to come up with a new book idea for so long, I could start to see all the connections between posts, the patterns, the idea planets I keep orbiting. Because it’s all in one place, hyperlinked together, I can see my own obsessions in a way that is much harder elsewhere.

he personal sense asso-ciated with diaries also enabled “blogger” to emerge as a category, even a professional identity, letting us think of blogs as character vehicles.

professional outgrowths of that old blogging school

When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion, and Interaction

Blogging in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration of Student Attitudes and Impact on Comprehensio

In private journals, students take personal risks by writing about their own experiences. For example, Mr. Foster said, in a discussion of whether the American dream still exists, a student writing in a private journal might reflect on her family’s socioeconomic class or financial struggles. But she might hesitate to share something so personal in a public setting. On public blogs, where their classmates will see and perhaps even comment on a post, students engage in more intellectual risks, crafting complex arguments on what are often — especially in sociology courses — controversial issues, Mr. Foster said.

Unlike most popularizers (at least of mine), this post didn’t describe a completed piece of research. It just served just an opportunity to riff about an idea I found interesting. But blogging made me realize this idea could be more interesting than I had realized. A “motivated view” of empathy could, for instance, help in understanding illnesses like autism and psychopathy, or thinking up techniques to “grow” empathy. I figured it’d be worth sinking some more effort into it, and wrote a long form academic article on the subject. After much work and a long (but productive) peer review process, that article was published just last week! More importantly, the ideas in that piece—taken over by my students—now drive much new work in my lab that might not have happened otherwise.

The ability to seamlessly insert IPython notebooks into posts was one of the biggest drivers of my switch to Pelican.