Given that social media is practically a public utility, I think it is worth considering more aggressive strategies, including government subsidies. The government already subsidizes energy exploration, agriculture and other economic activities that the country considers to be a priority, and it is not crazy to imagine that civically responsible social media may be essential to the future of the country. The subsidies might come in the form of research funding, capital for startups, tax breaks and the like.

But could there be a social network that packages these technologies in a friendly, usable way for the non-tech-savvy? One that registers an actual domain name for each user and spins up a base site with all these integrations: micropub for posting, microsub for reading, with webactions and webmentions to glue it all together. I’m not sure. It probably wouldn’t be free.

Posting updates.

In concrete terms, what does it take for a website to become part of the IndieWeb? What does the IndieWeb even look like?

an enthusiastic band of hobbyists with a taste for the retro and a fondness for old-school fan pages.

I mean, what does an alternative to ed-tech as data-extraction, control, surveillance, privatization, and profiteering look like? What does resistance to the buzzwords and the bullshit look like? I don’t have an answer. (There isn’t an answer.) But I think we can see a glimmer of possibility in the Indie Web Movement. It’s enough of a glimmer that I’m calling it a trend.

Here’s what I wrote last year when I chose “the Indie Web” as one of the “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2014”:

The Indie Web posits itself as an alternative to the corporate Web, but it is a powerful alternative to much of ed-tech as well, which as this series has once again highlighted, is quite committed to controlling and monetizing students’ and teachers’ connections, content, and data.

So who’s up for a blogchain, or a hyperconversation?

The concept is to publish first on your own blog and then later republish the same content on Medium.

Shopify-Ex would offer retailers something they don’t get from Amazon: partnership. Newco would provide merchants a lot of the great taste of Amazon (robust e-commerce tools and fulfillment) without the calories (merchants keep their data, control the customer, branding, no private label launches on backs of merchant data).

I guess this brings us to the Indieweb where you can probably still call each other Netizens and bemoan the death of RSS. Even though it’s been around since 2013, I see a spark of hope in this ragtag group of HTMLists. (Why isn’t “ragtag” some kind of microformat for the homeless?)

flair

Professional blogging; whether that be funded by advertisers, subscribers, fans – is a big business. What are your thoughts on how Micro.blog helps or ignores people or businesses that may want to use the platform to share their content and earn a living from it?

And so The Year of Intentional Internet began.

I just wrote a long, considered, friendly, and I hope helpful comment here but -- sorry, I have to see the irony in this once again -- your system wouldn't let me say anything longer tahn 1,500 characters. If you want more intelligent conversations, you might want to expand past soundbite.

But note well, my friend, that all of these people are speaking to you with intelligence, experience, generosity, and civility. You know what’s missing? Two things: First, the sort of nasty comments your own piece decries. And second: You.

Rolin Moe - Pepperdine (@RMoeJo)

Chris Mattia - California State University Channel Islands (@cmmattia)

Heather Staines1 month agoWould you consider metadata to be a form of annotation? Annotation for machines?Remi Kalir1 month agoYes, absolutely, metadata is a form of annotation. The MIT Press EKS volume “Metadata” is included in our Further Readings section. And the relationship between human-machine annotation, as well as automated annotation, is a topic we pick up in Chapter 7. Do you see additional opportunities for us to more explicitly discuss metadata as a form of annotation?

So what do we focus on instead, without that ability to tweak or iterate? Well, some of the messier network effects of social media, I’d argue. Sure, leaving a comment may be more “engaging” than picking a color and setting a design, but those things give us a feeling of ownership that we never really feel like we have when they’re all decided for us.

But as I thought more about what I wanted for my blog, and read more about the IndieWeb movement, I realized my idea of what a blog could be was incredibly limited.

Well, in the past, because I constrained myself to only writing long posts, my blog would only show activity when I was feeling motivated to write something longer. And that motivation definitely ebbs and flows. But now, if I want to just throw up a note or post a quick picture, I can, as easily as I could post a status update to Facebook. And instead of just posting to my blog and hoping someone sees it, I can make that content visible on social networks like Twitter, which leads to engagements that, again, come back to my blog. The end result is that my blog, the space I’ve created for myself on the web, is much more dynamic and alive. And that’s pretty darn exciting!

The first is when you build businesses on platforms your don’t own; and then they change the rules on you.

And guess what an effective barrier to infiltration — or wholesale infiltration, at least — can be? Money. Yes, membership models are about more than just revenue:None of the news organisations studied here began with a membership programme, but in the past year each of them has turned to membership as a way of deepening audience engagement in a ‘safer’ space and monetising the loyalty generated by their independent journalism and their civic activism in reference to attacks on democracy and media freedom.

One of the responses to both forms of platform capture is to create and police your own spaces.

It just makes sense that news outlets and libraries collaborate. That’s something we at the News Co/Lab have believed from the beginning, and it’s something we’ve seen work very well in our partnerships

Screenshots are disposable, but highlights are forever.

“Social” media: This is social interaction that isn’t really social. While Facebook and others frequently claim to offer connection, and do offer the appearance of it, the fact is a lot of social media is a simulation of real connection.

And in the meantime, if less human interaction enables us to forget how to cooperate, then we lose our advantage.

Thought leader and tech executive, John Ryan, provided valuable historical context both onstage and in his recent blog. He compared today’s social media platforms to telephone services in 1900. Back then, a Bell Telephone user couldn’t talk to an AT&T customer; businesses had to have multiple phone lines just to converse with their clients. It’s not that different today, Ryan asserts, when Facebook members can’t share their photos with Renren’s 150 million account holders. All of these walled gardens, he said, need a “trusted intermediary” layer to become fully interconnected.

And through this mechanism, I get to share a forward-linking “related articles” feature on my older posts, at no extra effort.

we are ending the HuffPost contributor platform

With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site. Not just big, marque pieces, but lots of smaller observations, quotes, links, and other posts as well.

Clicking through to the photo, there is no mention of this image appearing on this important announcement. Perhaps the author privately contact the photographer about using his image. Since Ken Doctor is so incredible with his media experience (i’m being serious), I’m fairly certain someone from his team would have contacted the photographer to give him a heads up.

So that’s already a huge advantage over other platforms due the basic design. And in my opinion it’s got advantages over the other extreme, too, a pure peer-to-peer design, where everyone would have to fend for themselves, without the pooled resources.

Perhaps we want to write but we feel comfortable with our phones and so we want to write on our phones. It’s like the best camera being the one you have on you. The best writing implement is the one you have on you. These days, it might be your phone.

What I dwell on the most regarding syndication is the Twitter stuff. I look back at the analytics on this site at the end of every year and look at where the traffic came from — every year, Twitter is a teeny-weeny itty-bitty slice of the pie. Measuring traffic alone, that’s nowhere near the amount of effort we put into making the stuff we’re tweeting there. I always rationalize it to myself in other ways. I feel like Twitter is one of the major ways I stay updated with the industry and it’s a major source of ideas for articles.

If you want to respond, do so on your own website and tell me.

Micro.blog is not an alternative silo: instead, it’s what you build when you believe that the web itself is the great social network.

As someone who writes social media for work, I am deeply rooted in the practice of writing a unique intro when I share a post to Twitter, not directly syndicating it with whatever text I started the article with. For me that feels good enough (not saving that unique share to my site) since including the link means any likes and comments about the article come back to my blog thanks to Bridgy, but maybe someone will convince me otherwise ;)

I haven’t committed to the philosophy of completely owning all the data I post online. I feel like this is something else I can take step by step, getting used to the change as I go.

Comments are enabled via Hypothes.is

I think it is one of those topics with a lot of conjecture John. Apologies if there are too many links.

One way to meet the many needs that most if not all publishers share would be to collaboratively develop their digital products. Specifically, they should build for interoperability. One publisher’s CMS, another’s content APIs, a third company’s data offering — they might one day all work together to allow all ships to rise and to reclaim advertising and subscription revenue from the platforms. This might allow publishers to refocus on differentiating where it truly matters for the user: in the quality of their content.

What am I missing about annotations for the web?

webmentions

However, when groups of readers come together and collectively read and write annotation in response to a shared text, then annotation can - under curated circumstances - spark and sustain conversation.

Personal websites can be so much more than a progression of posts over time, newer posts showing up while everything from the past is neatly tucked on “page 2” and beyond.

I also want them to be able to easily build something like Tom Critchlow’s wikifolder, a digital collection of links, random thoughts, and other resources. More than anything, I want personal websites to be more personal.

I like the idea of webmentions because they let me take complete ownership over my data. I do not need to put my faith into a comments system. There is no way that my comments can be edited other than by me. If I want to delete a webmention, I can, at any time, for any reason. While some of these features may be offered by websites, there’s never any guarantee that they will always offer the ability to modify the data I submit.

my blog posts to be long-lived pieces of my consciousness: something I may want to refer back to, or remember in the future.

Some content “jumped” platforms: eleven posts written for my blog were eventually cross-posted to new and traditional media platforms. It is impossible to track the ways posts became remixed and diffused through sites like Tumblr and Reddit, which are designed specifically for those purposes. But linkbacks from those posts and a general search reveals that it has happened often.

By the end of the course, my professor encouraged me to purchase my own domain. Her concern was for authorial control that would signal to readers that my content should be treated according to the media and academic logics where citations and attributions are normative. I used a pre-paid credit card to purchase my domain and the website followed me to graduate school.

There is a sense that one can cobble together a common public by overlapping various social media platforms and audiences. Many of my colleagues are doing a fine job of problematizing the intersections of private social media and the university. The larger project from which this essay is drawn is part of that emerging conversation.

shifting it to another company which then gets to control (and even monetize) the conversation.

If anyone is aware of people or groups working on the potential integration of the IndieWeb movement (webmentions) and web annotation/highlighting, please include them in the comments below–I’d really appreciate it.

Although I’ve already got a blog (you’re reading it!), I decided not to mirror my book reviews here. I post normal content so infrequently that anyone who wanted to read the blog but wasn’t interested in book reviews would be inundated with content they didn’t want. In the end, I spun up an additional WordPress instance on my web space (something that my host, Krystal Hosting, makes very easy to do) to keep the reviews completely isolated from everything else.

There’s also the fact that wikis are used to store information that can be edited at a later time by a third party, which is something that blogs cannot do.

But how do we make it happen?

I have one system for the stream, and one for the garden. It's a bit 'manual til it hurts' at the moment combining the two - but not a big deal. If I had a choice, I'd go for moving the stream to org-mode too. But WordPress is so full featured for now with IndieWeb stuff, it'd take a long time to recreate all that in org-mode (there is Arcology though if only could get the source…)

In the meantime, stay in touch with Crosscut by: Liking us on Facebook  Following us on Twitter  Following us on Instagram Chatting with us on Reddit Signing up for one (or all) of our newsletters 

Update, 11:22 Eastern: Weiss has posted a letter of resignation addressed to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger on her website. In it, she denounces the Times for fostering an atmosphere of stifling conformity and accuses her now-former colleagues of bullying:

Today’s leading-edge content tools are integrated context, collaboration and insight machines. We’re moving from unidirectional publishing of articles to organizing all our work and closing the feedback loop with our customers. I call this “full-stack publishing”.

A social network that has the users’ interests in mind would look completely different than today’s Twitter and Facebook. It would be designed to help you with your social interactions, quickly and efficiently, not trying to make you spend maximum amount of minutes on the site. Facebook, and increasingly Twitter (as their owners have started demanding profits), are doing the opposite. They . . . steal your time, make you do pointless stuff, filter in advertising in your news feeds, delete pages and users organising protests etc, mine their “big data” to find the best ways to use our weaknesses for pointless click-bait . . .

However, the difference between critiquing ASM and CSM may well be that ASM administrators will listen to critical social media scholars to try to improve their systems, while Facebook, Google, and Twitter will likely only listen to major shareholders and advertising networks.

However, although their approaches are different, one thing ASM have in common is their emphasis on network and code pedagogies: that is, trying to help users become coders and technicians, “sociologists of software,” to draw on Simondon (2010), who are far more able to shape ASM to meet their needs. Thus, developers of ASM do more than just make media systems; they teach others how to use them and modify them. As Matt Lee of GNU social argues,it is vitally important to me that anyone can set up a GNU social server on virtually any web hosting. I also want to make it as easy as possible to set up and install. To that end, I will personally help anyone who wants to get set up.

Previous efforts at decentralisation also foundered because the economics proved wanting, including those of the original internet. Historically, most protocols were developed by researchers and then maintained by non-profit organisations. But when the internet went mainstream and the money poured in, things got more complex. Commercial interests made finding consensus more difficult, and engineers preferred to join fast-growing internet companies building applications. Besides, incentives to adopt new protocols were lacking.

Another good time to slow people down is when they’re about to post something nasty online. Friction-positive design can help here, too. Civil Comments was an app you could apply to your comments section that forced commenters to rate three other comments before posting their own.

Trisha Prabhu was fourteen years old when she was named a Google Science Fair Global Finalist for her ReThink plat-form, which, according to research she presented at the event, reduced teen hate-posting by 93 percent! How did she do it? Very simple. Let’s say you’re on a social media platform using the ReThink technology. You’re about to post a hateful mes-sage. ReThink catches it; when you hit “send,” a screen pops up that says:ReThink has detected that this message may be hurtful to others. Are you sure you want to post this message?93 percent of adolescents who saw that intervention didn’t post.

indieweb movement.

This is the classic cold start problem of social. The answer to the traditional chicken-and-egg question is actually answerable: what comes first is a single chicken, and then another chicken, and then another chicken, and so on. The harder version of the question is why the first chicken came and stayed when no other chickens were around, and why the others followed.

The other two are where the open web is severely lacking: The seamless integration into one user interface of both reading and writing, making it very easy to respond to others that way, or add to the river of content.

I mean, posting constantly online about this cool spectacle thing I’m reading about and don’t understand is probably a good way of being part of the spectacle. (The first rule of Spectacle Club is: you do not talk about Spectacle Club?). But I think IndieWeb, Fediverse, etc, doing it in small, decentralised groupings, you break down the possibility of being in thrall to the spectacle. What’s the biggest blog you know? How do you even know that?

web we lost

First up for me is adding my reading notes to the site.

The barriers to getting this going were hefty, just understanding what all the different parts were and if I needed them was a hell of a task. My brain is fried, and I’m honestly surprised I saw it through, but I’m very happy I did.

For instance, if someone replies to a post on Twitter, the reply gets sent back here as a comment. However if I reply here to that comment, it doesn’t get sent back to Twitter.

There’s a lot of overlap between Micro.blog and IndieWeb (webmentions being the most significant commonality), and IndieWeb isn’t one monolithic thing.

Some of it is visual. Yes, it is true that all my posts on Twitter and Facebook look something similar to a personal blog: They are collected in reverse-chronological order, on a specific webpage, with direct web addresses to each post. But I have very little control over how it looks like; I can’t personalize it much. My page must follow a uniform look which the designers of the social network decide for me.

But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.

However there are going to be lots of scenarios where students are required to use institutional tech. In those cases I still think we need to more willing to delete by default, and not leave the burden on the students. It’s a different mind-set – to purposefully throw away data – but I think it’s becoming a fundamental privacy issue.

they do not avoid corporatesocial media altogether

Rather than avoidingcorporate social media, content from personal Web sites is syndicated to Facebook, Twitter, andother platforms, and then comments, likes, and other responses are retrieved back.

Michael Caulfield, an educator who has written extensively about misinformation, media literacy, and the importance of online “info-environmentalism,”19Michael Caulfield, “Info-Environmentalism: An Introduction,” EDUCAUSEreview (Nov./Dec., 2017): 92-93, https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/10/info-environmentalism-an-introduction. distilled concern with online annotation to a pressing social question:It’s your [web] browser, and you’re allowed to annotate anything you want with it. But the separate question is what should be encouraged by the design of our technology. People want to turn this into a legal debate, but it’s not. It’s a tools debate, and the main product of a builder of social tools is not the tool itself but the culture that it creates. So what sort of society do you want to create?

The real internet is structured by myriad people with different aesthetics and different needs. Online course design decisions should reflect the instructor’s individuality in the same way that everyone else’s webpages do.

If running your own website is like operating a nuclear reactor, then, yes: let’s give up on that. But what if it’s more like cooking dinner at home? That’s an activity that many people find challenging and/or intimidating, one with all sorts of social and economic ~encumbrances~, but even so, who would argue that it’s inappropriate to hope more people might learn to cook for themselves? Maybe, after everything, we’ve actually ended up in a healthy place. Maybe the great gluey Katamari ball of technology has served us well. In 2020, you can, using nothing but the free app provided by Instagram, publish something very close to a multimedia magazine. Or, sitting at your laptop, you can produce a lightning-fast website all by yourself, every line of code calibrated just so, and host its files at a domain of your choosing. Or! You can do something in between, using a service like WordPress or Squarespace. This is not a bad range of options!

The code quality of my site is only visible to me, what matters is the functionality. And I want this private post functionality.

More ways to combat feed overwhelm Before IndieWebCamp, we had a discussion about Readers in a traditional Nürnberger restaurant. Here also, people came up with some ideas to deal with accruing unread-counts. One idea came from how Aperture deletes posts after 7 days. This actually prevents the overload. It would be nice if you can tell your reader that, for example your Twitter feed, is ephemeral and that the posts can be discarded if you did not read them in time. One other idea that came up was to keep track of the average time between posts of a certain feed. This way a Reader could boost posts when they are from a feed that is not regularly updated. These kind of posts are usually lost in piles of more posts from more frequently updates feeds. Yet a last idea was to tell your reader to leave out posts with certain words for a small period of time. This can come in handy when you haven’t watched the newest episode of Game of Thrones yet, but want to stay connected to your feeds without spoilers.

In indieweb we have been saying ‘build things that you want for yourself’, but building things that you want for your friends or organisation is a useful step between generations.

At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

I’ve worked on the web professionally for over a decade and I’ve never managed to put together a proper website that I’ve maintained and not just binned every five minutes. Yes, I’ve been making websites for over a decade and never managed to make one for myself.

Maintaining a website that you regard as your own does require maintenance. Like a garden, you may choose to let a few weeds flourish, for the wildlife, and you may also seek to encourage volunteers, for the aesthetics. A garden without wildlife is dull, a garden without aesthetics is pointless.

The last ETech was held in 2009.

appreciate your help

I imagine that the first part of this project will focus on how it got to be this way, what got missed or ignored in some of the early warnings about what was happening online and how those warnings were swamped by the hype depicting the Internet as a space of radical democratization.

Honestly, if a real platform existed where I could just communicate with my friends, make new friends, and read blogs by real people with no corporations or ads, I would love to be a part of that. I just don't even know if it's possible anymore. I don't know if any centralized platform can do that in 2020. Fortunately, we have our decentralized websites, and we can connect with each other this way.

If you are new to the IndieWeb, let me be clear: you don’t need to build every feature you see on the wiki.

If Medium is elevator music, indie blogging is punk.

I would say that the easiest way to describe the IndieWeb is in relation to ownership. In essence, the IndieWeb is all about ownership of your identity, which is done through the ownership of a personal domain, which likely has a website on it.With this domain, you can point it to Medium, Tumble, or your own site. But the constant there is that it'll sit under your domain and folks can come back and see all your latest content, regardless of what platform it's pointing to.

What we need instead is a spatial meta layer for notes on the OS-level that lives across all apps and workflows. This would allow you to instantly take notes without having to switch context. Even better yet, the notes would automatically resurface whenever you revisit the digital location you left them at.

Today marks the start of a new era, since I now officially joined the IndieWeb movement and migrated my 23-year old personal blog to micro.blog.

In een korte serie blogposts wil ik je uitleggen hoe je met WordPress aan de slag kunt om je eigen blog meer mogelijkheden te geven om de eigen controle te houden. Dat laatste is één van de bouwstenen van de Indieweb gedachte

Doug has a preference for the Fediverse as an approach to an open web, and says the political philosophy of the IndieWeb is a type of right-libertarianism, because it lacks social equality, and without that it is just a focus on individual freedom.

Eating your own dogfood

I’ve found the IndieWeb to be tricky, bits don’t work for me, or need twiddling, or more time and knowledge than I have. I see it as an add on from the activity of blogging, which I’ll do anyway. It is not in opposition to mastodon or federation, but for me is just a few more cogs and pipes. If the IndieWeb breaks or goes away my blog will still be there. If twitter explodes the replies to my blog posts will still be in my database.

Over the past several years I’ve written a broad number of pieces about the IndieWeb. I find that many people are now actively searching for, reading, and implementing various versions of what I’ve done, particularly on the WordPress Platform.

I have two different blogs: my personal blog on my main domain and my work blog on my subdomain.

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Oh IndieWebCamp. You come with a few things you want to for your own website, then you do some completely other things, and after that you leave with an even longer list of things to do for your own website.

there is little power, there is correspondingly little sense of positive responsibility.

educative process is carried on in a predominantly democratic or non-democratic way becomes, therefore, a question of transcendent importance not only for education itself but for its final effect upon all the interests and activities of a society

each individual has something to contribute, whose value can be assessed only as enters into the final pooled intelligence

Even where democracies now exist, men's minds and feelings are still permeated with ideas about leadership imposed from above, ideas that developed in the long early history of mankind.

Marginalia#section5 With Webmention support, one could architect a site to allow inline marginalia and highlighting similar to Medium.com’s relatively well-known functionality. With the clever use of URL fragments, which are well supported in major browsers, there are already examples of people who use Webmentions to display word-, sentence-, or paragraph-level marginalia on their sites. After all, aren’t inline annotations just a more targeted version of comments?

As mentioned earlier, Webmentions allow notifications between web addresses. If both sites are set up to send and receive them, the system works like this: Alice has a website where she writes an article about her rocket engine hobby. Bob has his own website where he writes a reply to Alice’s article. Within his reply, Bob includes the permalink URL of Alice’s article. When Bob publishes his reply, his publishing software automatically notifies Alice’s server that her post has been linked to by the URL of Bob’s reply. Alice’s publishing software verifies that Bob’s post actually contains a link to her post and then (optionally) includes information about Bob’s post on her site; for example, displaying it as a comment. A Webmention is simply an @mention that works from one website to another!

Webmention is a (now) standardized protocol that enables one website address (URL) to notify another website address that the former contains a reference to the latter. It also allows the latter to verify the authenticity of the reference and include its own corresponding reference in a reciprocal way.

The centralisation of the internet and the growing importance of data has given rise to what Frank Pasquale of the University of Maryland, in a recent paper published in American Affairs, calls a “Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian divide” among critics of big tech. One group stands in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s founding fathers, who favoured smaller government and less concentration in business. Its members want to rein in the tech titans through tougher antitrust policies, including break-ups. The other group follows the thinking of Alexander Hamilton, another founding father, who supported strong central institutions, both in politics and in the economy. Its adherents argue that to reap the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) and distribute them fairly, online giants should be treated as utilities.

I really need to hash out my domain situation! IndieWeb encourages its memership to claim a single domain and use it as their personal stamp for everything they do on the internet. I, though, have two domains: my long-held personal catch-all domain of jmac.org, and fogknife.com, which I use exclusively for blogging. My use of both predates my involvement with IndieWeb.

A fullydeveloped version of the proposed intervention(new or modified)

In broadest terms I would define being part of the IndieWeb as owning your own domain name and hosting some sort of website as a means of identifying yourself and attempting to communicate with others on the internet.

life experiences that help them to define themselves