Thanks for all your hard work Meredith! The conference went so well and in large part it's down to your work which hasn't gone unnoticed.

What a fantastic set of accomplishments! Thank you for hosting such a spectacular space for all of us to hang out in.

There may be a bit of a path forward here that some might consider using that has some fantastic flexibility.

There is a WordPress plugin called Micropub (which needs to be used in conjunction with the IndieAuth plugin for authentication to their CMS account) that will allow students to log into various writing/posting applications.

These are usually slimmed down interfaces that don't provide the panoply of editing options that the Gutenberg interface or Classic editor metabox interfaces do. Quill is a good example of this and has a Medium.com like interface. iA Writer is a solid markdown editor that has this functionality as well (though I think it only works on iOS presently).

Students can write and then post from these, but still have the option to revisit within the built in editors to add any additional bells and whistles they might like if they're so inclined.

This system is a bit like SPLOTs, but has a broader surface area and flexibility. I'll also mention that many of the Micropub clients are open source, so if one were inclined they could build their own custom posting interface specific to their exact needs. Even further, other CMSes like Known, Drupal, etc. either support this web specification out of the box or with plugins, so if you built a custom interface it could work just as well with other platforms that aren't just WordPress. This means that in a class where different students have chosen a variety of ways to set up their Domains, they can be exposed to a broader variety of editing tools or if the teacher chooses, they could be given a single editing interface that is exactly the same for everyone despite using different platforms.

For those who'd like to delve further, I did a WordPress-focused crash course session on the idea a while back:

Micropub and WordPress: Custom Posting Applications at WordCamp Santa Clarita 2019 (slides)

Michael Beckwith, this is genius. Long live blogrolls!

But let's be honest, they're a sort of discovery method that is also built into other social platforms: Twitter lists,Twitter follow lists, Facebook lists, etc. Most now have AI using these lists to suggest who you ought to follow next. When will WordPress get that plugin?

My issue is that in a bigger social space, we need full pages for these sorts of data rather than the small sidebar widgets of yore.

This was the last serious conversation I remember seeing about the old Link Manager: https://twitter.com/rboren/status/1019275363522895874

So who besides Michael has a blogroll now? Mine's at https://boffosocko.com/about/following/. Where's yours?!

I'd done that and even did a stand alone view of just that calendar without any luck. I'd even tried deleting and re-adding last night.

I just deleted the calendar and tried it again from scratch. It seems to be working now, so perhaps it was a cache issue somewhere between the site software and Google Calendar? Maybe a glitch on the edge of having no events in the subscribed calendar and several events in there now?

I love this idea. I have a fairly extensive personal commonplace book and collect and archive tons of material, but really should delve more deeply into the topic. I'd be particularly interested in the taxonomies portions you've outlined.

This sounds like a lot of fun and is a bit reminiscent to me to some of the material in the Domain of One’s Own (#DoOO) space. In particular I’m thinking of a Domains Camp from a few years back which may have some related materials: https://extend-bank.ecampusontario.ca/type/domain-camp/.

Based on experience with Pingbacks, the Webmention specification requires the sending site to have a mentioning URL on a publicly available web page. This requirement by itself cuts down significantly on spam as it increases the cost of sending it. (Pingbacks/Trackbacks didn't have this requirement so it was easy to programmatically spew spam in all directions.) In addition to this, there's no requirement to show the received Webmention, so there's less benefit to some spammers in these cases.

Many people who do receive and display them have separate mechanisms to moderate them before display, which also tends to minimize spam. Other sites that support Webmentions also dovetail with anti-spam services like Akismet which can help filter out spam out as well.

And this is all without anyone adding the Vouch extension to the Webmention spec.

Keep in mind that webmention.io is just a third party service to allow sites to use and leverage Webmention notifications without needing to write any code. Many major CMSes like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, et al. either support the spec out of the box or with plugins/modules. Each of these can also leverage anti-spam methods they have available separately. As an example of this, the WordPress plugin has an allow list for automatically approving webmentions from sites one regularly communicates with.

The idea of Webmentions has been around for almost a decade, and the spec has been a W3C recommendation since 2017. Only one suspected case of Webmention spam has been reported in the wild in that time. I'd conservatively estimate that with 10,000+ independent websites sending/receiving over 2 million Webmentions in the past several years, it's not a bad start. For more details, ideas, and brainstorming for your potential use-cases see also: https://indieweb.org/spam

Hypothes.is has both RSS and Atom Feeds. So the IFTTT “if” is a new item in your feed which creates a text post in some appropriate storage account. I use OneDrive as the “that” target, but I’m sure you could potentially use others with some experimentation. If you have something that only saves as .txt files, that’s fine, you can simply rename them as .md files for your vault later.

I’ve described some of this before at https://boffosocko.com/2020/08/29/a-note-taking-problem-and-a-proposed-solution/ for those interested in further details.

Hopefully this helps (until someone has a more automated version).

You may upload and annotate local files using the "docdrop" service, which works for many kinds of files, word docs, exce & epub. They are all converted to PDF or CSV.

These are pieces which the IndieWeb should endeavor to experiment in and attempt to fix. Though I will admit that pieces of the IndieWeb layers on top of platforms like WordPress can help to mitigate some context collapse and aggregate social interactions better. (eg: reply context and POSSE)

My general heirarchy is that bookmarks are things I want to come back to (and usually read) later, reads are things that I've read, like are things I've read and want to send appreciation for, and replies are things that usually are both read, liked, and needed even a bit more.

Here's more on how I've thought about it before: https://boffosocko.com/2018/03/10/thoughts-on-linkblogs-bookmarks-reads-likes-favorites-follows-and-related-links/

Perhaps this is a part of where the definition changes for me to blur the difference between the two modalities (wikis vs. blogs). If a wiki is held as public, yet still personal and any changes to it are done by a fork and edit by a third party with a webmention back to the original, then the barrier can be removed. If one can use a webmention notification from the branch back to the original so that the new knowledge can either be aggregated or not at the first party's discretion. This allows the ideas and potentially growing voice of atomicules of information to grow and spread.

This gives a bit of the best of the both worlds. There can be multiple minds and models working, but the information can still be shared and aggregated over time. This may also expand creativity as there isn't necessarily one canonical source, but many.

Thus a personal wiki and blog combination can use small atoms of information in a wiki-like style to slowly build up a set of facts where a longer blog-like article then becomes a crystallization of a specific voice's synthesis and analysis of those underlying facts.

If the wiki chunks are copyable and sharable then different people may synthesize different ideas. Additionally by reshuffling the various pieces, the author of a particular blog article may rewrite or revise their original thinking with additional smaller wiki-like pieces to come to an alternate or expanded conclusion.

Thinking of a wiki as something that has to be voiceless and communal may be the biggest wall between the two modalities. If there were a larger community of personal wikis that were interlinked then these barriers might be broken down.

Additionally, this is more like what the OER community may be looking for. There are very concrete topics like calculus, as an example, but there can certainly be dozens of approaches to the topic in as many or more voices to suit the needs of particular learners. In fact there are many calculus textbooks geared toward different audiences: biologists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, social sciences, etc. The underlying ideas may all be incredibly similar but could be remixed in different and creative ways.

This has apparently become a relatively popular culture story as I've also heard references to this story on two different radio shows this week.

I agree with Joseph, as this statement follows a clear presentation of a thesis, starting with a qualification, "Although much of...", and continuing with a claim/reason to investigate, "it is possible to identify..."