Replied to a post by Chris Aldrich (stream.boffosocko.com)

@amandalicastro Thanks. Purchased. Even if the answer doesn't lie within, @CathyNDavidson may be one of only a few people one could trust with such a book title. Also picked up Now You See it to compare with Annie Murphy Paul's new text The Extended Mind.

I finished it Saturday evening. Sadly the answer doesn’t lay here. There’s a great history of higher education since the late 1800s specific to Charles Eliot’s ideas and the subsequent fallout. Sadly he was reforming Puritan education based on his then-current circumstances. He apparently didn’t delve back further to reverse the Puritan reforms from almost 300 years earlier. 

The book is great and has some excellent solid examples to act as a guide. Thanks for the recommendation.

I still strongly suspect the pattern goes back to the Puritan educational reforms of the late 1500s with Peter Ramus. I’ll have to delve into some of his writings and perhaps the work of Walter Ong to see the outcome. If others have ideas of where to look specifically, I’d love to hear them.

Replied to a tweet by Annie Murphy Paul (Twitter)

Chris, you may be interested in this review of "Now You See It" that I wrote . . . https://t.co/TnnbQ3NHWf

— Annie Murphy Paul (@anniemurphypaul) September 25, 2021

Thanks for the great cross-reference! It was incredibly prescient writing for 2011. Reminiscent of Audrey Watters work, but from a neuropsychology research angle.
Annotations: /> Can’t wait to delve into your book next. 55797448 https://boffosocko.com/2021/10/15/55797382/ https://boffosocko.com/2021/10/15/55797382/#comments Fri, 15 Oct 2021 20:04:32 +0000 https://boffosocko.com/?p=55797382

Fellow #roamans and users of #obsidian, #logseq, #remnote, #workflowy etc. Do you know some really obscure and unknown #roam-like apps out there? :) E.g., I have found "Note garden" recently. #tftjourney #tft pic.twitter.com/Xzdm3JAWHa

— CatoMinor (@CatoMinor3) October 14, 2021

A few of us have been keeping lists of some of these tools for thought at so one can test, try, or compare user interfaces for building one’s own custom version. Contributions to this public wiki welcome.

Replied to a post by Andrew Doran (https://andrewdoran.uk/blog/)

Are there any paid WordPress themes out there with good implementations of webmentions, or is this not (yet?) mainstream enough?

I’m not sure what you’re asking here?

What functionality are you looking for in a theme beyond what is already set up within the two WordPress webmention plugins (Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks)? Are you asking about Microformats markup in themes?

Great sculpture finds @ChrisAldrich and clever how he attempted to customise preview per site, but hasn’t og:image tags basically solved that particular ‘problem’? — #openweb #tech https://t.co/2NsNgJ8KrL

— Laurence Warner (@vv4rner) August 15, 2021

As Francis Urquhart might say, “You might very well think that…”

The whole point of that post is to show that og hasn’t solved it. There are too many flavors of metacrap and no standards. And worse og is not only not “open” it’s a DRY violation.

If you want to spelunk a bit, Cory Doctorow approached the idea back in 2001: Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia

I SUBMITTED MY BOOK MS THIS WEEK!!!
3 complete rewrites
15 years of research
50+ figures
578 pdf pages
30,000 words of endnotes
Let's hope the press likes it...
Abstract below and front material at:https://t.co/ki2NO2s6yF…/Rewriting_Reason_The_Art_and_Sci… pic.twitter.com/VqAuG0nun1

— MATTHEW DANIEL EDDY (@BookScribbler) October 19, 2019

Don’t think we’re just sitting here holding our breath and waiting…

Sometimes we turn blue and fall off our chair.

Any update on publication?

The very fact that “tools for thought” is a recognizable concept these days only shows how badly current personal computing failed the original vision.

— Tudor Girba (@girba) Aug 3, 2021

Mostly for want of the mention of a single idea in Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think: commonplace books. He got so dewy-eyed about the technology that he forgot about the 2000+ years of prior tradition. Many are now re-discovering what we’ve lost.

Replied to Introducing a Microformats API for Books: books-mf2.herokuapp.com by Jamie Tanna (Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer)

Announcing the Microformats translation layer for book data.

This is awesomeness!

h-book ❧

h-book is an experimental microformat at best.

I might recommend for minimizing the vocabulary that one might use the existing h-product instead and allow parsers to find an ISBN, Library of Congress book number, ASIN, UPC, or other product code to determine “bookness”.
Annotated on August 01, 2021 at 09:13AM

Replied to Jonathan Edwards’ Organizational Genius by Dr. Matthew Everhard (theLAB)

For all the help that Edwards has given scholars and pastors in the areas of theology, philosophy, and missions, it is probably due time that someone devote a doctoral project to Edwards’ organizational genius.

I’m particularly interested here in the idea of interleaved books for additional marginalia. Thanks for the details!

An aspect that’s missing from the overall discussion here is that of the commonplace book. Edwards’ Miscellanies is a classic example of the Western note taking and idea collecting tradition of commonplace books.

While the name for his system is unique, his note taking method was assuredly not. The bigger idea goes back to ancient Greece and Rome with Aristotle and Cicero and continues up to the modern day.

From roughly 900-1300 theologians and preachers also had a sub-genre of this category called florilegia. In the Christian religious tradition Philip Melanchthon has one of the more influential works on the system: De locis communibus ratio (1539).

You might appreciate this article on some of the tradition:

You’ll find Edwards’ and your indexing system bears a striking resemblance to that of philosopher John Locke, (yes that Locke!): ]]> https://boffosocko.com/2021/07/09/55793291/feed/ 2 55793291 https://boffosocko.com/2021/07/06/55793175/ https://boffosocko.com/2021/07/06/55793175/#respond Tue, 06 Jul 2021 17:37:12 +0000 https://boffosocko.com/2021/07/06/55793175/ Continue reading ]]>

Replied to Commonplace Book by Matthias Melcher (x28's new Blog)

Comment on Chris Aldrich’s very comprehensive description of the “new boil” of note-taking.

One thing expected from the note-taking tools, makes me particularly skeptical: their collaborative/ public use. I think the lifecycle of notes cannot be continuous from capturing to communication, unless I forgo the possibility of cryptic, sloppy, abbreviated shorthand meant just for the “me later” that Magdalena Böttger depicted so aptly in 2005. ❧

Some of the value of notes being done and readable in public means that one typically puts a bit more effort into them at the start. This can make them much more useful and valuable later on. It also means that they usually have more substance and context for use by others in collaboration or other reuses.

Short notes are often called fleeting notes which may or may not be processed into something more substantive. The ones that do become more substantive can more easily be reused in other future settings.

Sonke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes is one of the better arguments for the why and how of note taking.
Annotated on July 06, 2021 at 10:24AM

Note that such careful treatment applies only to a certain kind of my notes. While many project-related notes go straight to simple folders of the operating system, the notes that don’t fit in one of the folders, deserve special attention. I don’t know yet where I might deploy them — possibly in multiple places. ❧

I like that you’ve got such a fascinating system. It’s very similar in form and substance to one that I use, but which relies on a wholly different technology stack: /> Annotated on July 06, 2021 at 10:25AM

Which makes them similar to “commonplace”: reusable in many places. But this connotation has led to a pejorative flavor of the German translation “Gemeinplatz” which means platitude. That’s why I prefer to call them ‘evergreen’ notes, although I am not sure if I am using this differentiation correctly. ❧

I’ve only run across the German “Gemeinplatz” a few times with this translation attached. Sad to think that this negative connotation has apparently taken hold. Even in English the word commonplace can have a somewhat negative connotation as well meaning “everyday, ordinary, unexceptional” when the point of commonplacing notes is specifically because they are surprising or extraordinary by definition.

Your phrasing of “evergreen notes” seems close enough. I’ve seen some who might call the shorter notes you’re making either “seedlings” or “budding” notes. Some may wait for bigger expansions of their ideas into 500-2000 word essays before they consider them “evergreen” notes. (Compare: and Of course this does vary quite a bit from person to person in my experience, so your phrasing certainly fits.

I’ve not seen it crop up in the digital gardens or zettelkasten circles specifically but the word “evergreen” is used in the journalism space to describe a fully formed article that can be re-used wholesale on a recurring basis. Usually they’re related to recurring festivals, holidays, or cyclical stories like “How to cook the perfect Turkey” which might get recycled a week before Thanksgiving every year.
Annotated on July 06, 2021 at 10:37AM

Replied to Integrating Webmentions Into NextJS Blog by Julia Tan (Integrating Webmentions Into NextJS Blog)

I've been meaning to check out webmentions for a while now, as I had been debating between installing some kind of comments package for this blog or just using social to interact with visitors and readers. I had a day off on Friday, and so decided to take the plunge and try implementing webmentions as a way to collate all of the Twitter interactions with my blog posts.

It wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be, so I’ve written this blog post for anyone who’s trying to do the same with their NextJS blog. ❧

I recall Monica Powell writing a bit about this with some video a while back.

Perhaps not as useful after-the-fact, but her post is hiding on in the see also section of where I’ve archived a copy of your article as well. Maybe the IndieWeb wiki needs a NextJS page to make this a bit more findable? Where else might you have looked for guidance.

Tell me on Twitter @bionicjulia and have your tweet show up below! ❧

Or alternately write about it on your own site and send a webmention.
Annotated on June 27, 2021 at 08:41PM

Replied to a tweet by Bodong Chen (Twitter)

I quickly sketched a process model to illuminate areas I've been thinking about. W/o getting into details, I believe we need to think more about the social, technical, temporal, spatial configurations of a particular learning #context when analyzing annotation. Thoughts? #iAnno21 pic.twitter.com/uAFnoFEjFs

— Bodong Chen (@bod0ng) June 24, 2021

There’s also the model: skim down the annotations/highlights to evaluate if the piece may be worth reading based on the social signals of the annotators themselves and their annotations. #AnnoConvo #IAnno21

The eighth annual conference dedicated to open annotation practices and technologies: 21–25 Jun 2021 online.

I can’t wait to catch I Annotate 2021 starting tomorrow morning.

Replied to a tweet by Maggie Appleton (Twitter)

Many worlds theory of twitter:
There's another corner of tweetspace, unconnected from ours, where people are talking about the web as topography, personal wikis, learning in public, & platform interoperability.
They use completely different buzzwords and metaphors.
Plausible?

— Maggie Appleton (@Mappletons) June 11, 2021

A great question to be sure.

Define “ours“. “Tweetspace” is only Twitter? Perhaps not all of those at once…

The education space definitely. Many are still in the “old” blogosphere. They use phrases/hashtags like “Domain of One’s Own” (#​DoOO), personal learning networks (#​pln), #​EdTech, #​EthicalEdTech, etc.

Maybe a dash of #OpenScience, along with maybe @LibCarpentry and @theCarpentries?

#​IndieWeb is platform interoperability, along with a smattering of the others but you already knew of that overlap.

Replied to On Privilege & Sharing Power by Maha Bali (Reflecting Allowed)

Because I get there at 8am each morning after dropping her off, I am really privileged. I get to sit wherever I want, most importantly near a power plug that works.

I used to just do that, and charge my phone and headphones on my laptop’s USB. But then one day, I don’t remember what happened. Maybe I saw a power strip in the supermarket or something. But I decided to buy one. That way, I keep my privilege, but I share power. Other people can benefit from the same power plug I’m using.

I love the sentiment you share here including down to finding a warmer and more inviting plug!

Your situation and the connection you have to education reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Thomas Jefferson (pardon the overly masculine pronouns from the unenlightened enlightement):

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

I’m certainly far from even moderately well read on power, but I do recall a short but impactful post a month back by Cat Swentel entitled An Extended Subtweet on Power. (For context, it related to the unfortunate change in Basecamp’s corporate stance which saw a third or more of its employees to leave.) In particular she spoke about Mary Parker Follett‘s three types of power: power-over, power-with, and power-to. Perhaps you might find something interesting in Follett’s work or the others mentioned in the piece? I’ve bookmarked them myself for the summer break.

Replied to a thread by Mike Caulfield (Twitter)

So I am going to watch this but I have some trepidation because this was exactly the thesis I was advancing in 2014/2015 (see for example "The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral") right down to targeting the news feed as the start of it all https://t.co/k75qRUxWN4

— Mike Caulfield (@holden) June 10, 2021

We will remember who did that work Mike. Thank you again for it!

I also remember Anil Dash’s Stop Publishing Web Pages essay in August 2012 and then 4 months later The Web We Lost. Those garden-like pages were definitely something we’ve lost. We need more of them on the higher ground outside of the floodplain of the raging waters of the storming corporate rivers. A few babbling brooks, sympathetic streams, and cordial and comforting creeks would also be most welcome in our landscape.

I’m glad to see that some are pushing back—returning to publish on the web in old, new, and even different ways. Hopefully, as in nature, the gardens and fields flourish after the unrestrained wrath of the storm.

Featured photo by Saikiran Kesari on Unsplash

What are you using for open courses (beyond EdX and Coursera)?#DETAopen #DETAdev

— Tanya Joosten (@tjoosten) June 7, 2021

It looks like we also set up IndieWeb plugins to see who was mentioning us. We also used The Events Calendar, Search Everything (better searches), Really Simple SSL, Easy Fancybox, Google Forms, and Page Links To (as a form of link shortener for external links).

— Matt (Next Level Proctoring CEO Nightmare Fuel)™ (@grandeped) June 7, 2021

Wow. Nice.

— Tanya Joosten (@tjoosten) June 7, 2021

I’m happy to help you try to put together an IndieWeb-friendly version with Webmentions which work with multiple platforms including WordPress, Known, Grav, etc.

You might find some interesting examples and pieces on IndieWeb wiki, particularly their Education page. I’d love to see Matt add his example(s) to that page for others’ future reference.

I did a short demonstration of what the current website-to-website space looks like at the recent OERxDomains21 Conference. You can find the short video here on my site.

If you go the older route one of the best planet-like sites I’ve seen was which if I recall correctly was built by Alan Levine. If you poke around a bit or ask @cogdog on Twitter, I think there are some details or a recipe somewhere of how he put it together.

Chances are reasonably good that people in the #DS106 or #DoOO space have some ideas as well.

What is your favorite charity that has to do with reading, writing, or education?

— Grammar Girl (@GrammarGirl) June 1, 2021

For reading: all of them?!? (Who can really have a favorite?)

I love Little Free Library (@LtlFreeLibrary) and PJ Library (@PJLibrary). My favorite has to be Reading is Fundamental (@RIFWEB)—they gave me books as a child and a wife as an adult.

For education: Johns Hopkins University School of Education (@JHUEducation).

Replied to Bird sound encoding by Douglas Hoff (Art of Memory Forum)

Rey’s star book (already ordered!) is a wonderful way to rekindle my adolescent interest in the stars while learning more about memory methods like pareidolia to finally complete my identification of the skies. I never stored more than three or four constellations permanently. @chrisaldrich, I’ll be intested to see how you help bring together your knowledge to create a more mnemonic way to visualize and remember bird calls and traits. I’ve also added your blog to my news reader with all the goo...

I’ll apologize in advance for the noisy-ness of my website. I use it as a commonplace book and post almost everything I do on the web there first (including social media). If it gets to be too much, you can subscribe to individual topics of interest (like which is sure to include any bird related work) so that you’re just getting what you want instead of the overzealous firehose which can be upwards of 10 to 20,000 posts a year, depending on how much of my stream I make public.

Replied to Peter of Ravenna by ehcolston (Art of Memory Forum)

Thanks for those links! Originally I wanted to translate the original Latin texts, but I felt like that was better put to rest and that I should first try to translate it from the English version since I can actually speak it. Iirc, there was an Italian version of the book as well.

I haven’t searched all the versions of Peter of Ravenna’s name (yet) in all locations, but I recall hearing of an Italian version as well (and it’s likely that there was one given its popularity).

A bit of digging around this morning has uncovered a digital copy of a French translation in the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé (Paris)]:
* 1545: L’art de memoire qui est aultrement inscript le phenix livre treffort utille & profitable a tous professeurs des sciences, grammariens, rheteurs, dialetiques, legistes philosophes & theologiens

Given the date and the scant 16 pages, this is likely to be the edition which was the source of Robert Copland’s English translation. As the edition doesn’t appear to have an author, it’s possible that this was the reason that Copland’s translation didn’t list one either.

The Latin -> French -> middle English -> modern English route seems an awfully muddy way to go, but without anything else, it may have to suffice for some of us for the moment.

Replied to Welcome to IndieForums! by IndieForums (indieforums.net)

IndieForums is a proof-of-concept site built around the IndieWeb. All content on this site (with the exception of /self/ posts) is generated through webmentions.

Congratulations on getting this up! Good to have an IndieWeb friendly forum out in the world.

Replied to The Memex, the Manhatten Project, and the month of July 1945 by Matt Webb (Interconnected)

I wonder about these two legacies, the Memex and the Manhatten Project, and which has had the greater influence on the world.

Some revisionist history here glorifying Bush and the Memex without any mention of the long historical precedent of the commonplace book.

So for Bush’s greatest legacy, my answer would have to be his supervision and support of Claude Shannon’s work at MIT.

TIL about the concept of [[commonplace book]] from @ChrisAldrich:https://t.co/Op4iexyAmm

> Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas.

— Flancia! (@flancian) May 12, 2021

> Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts.

Reminds me a bit of a [[vademecum]]; and, of course, also of our current day wikis, personal knowledge graphs and [[digital gardens]].https://t.co/rqqz0HdoL3

— Flancia! (@flancian) May 12, 2021

The commonplace book is definitely the precursor to Vannevar Bush’s Memex and the idea of a personal wiki/digital garden. See examples at: Do add yours as an example there.

Write in our book.#Annotation with @anterobot from @mitpress is now available. And we'd like you to mark it up. Question. Disagree. Comment. Respond. We want to spark a conversation about #annotation or an #AnnoConvo. As you read, write. As you annotate, take a pic and share pic.twitter.com/zUHPDnEFeq

— Remi Kalir (@remikalir) April 15, 2021

My one hot take: A book about annotation should have had bigger (better) margins. Being part of a pre-existing series understandably made that difficult.

Let’s hear it for the electronic versions, which give us infinite space though!

Thank you @ChrisAldrich for giving these 2 pointers. I am excited to participate in the event; just 1 question though: how to RSVP yes? Checked and clicked a few links but couldn't seem to get it done

— Sholanki Biswas (@BiswasSholanki) April 27, 2021

I’ll put your name on the list, and you can visit that page on the day for the video link to join via Zoom. No need to fuss with a “formal” RSVP unless you want to try it for fun. Incidentally your tweet which mentioned the event post has created an informal RSVP on the page already.

Most are logged into the system with their website which will give you a one-button RSVP link. However, most have actually RSVP’d on their websites and sent a webmention to that page for their avatars and details to show up on the page. (Here’s mine.) If you don’t have your webmention sender live yet, you can do it manually:

If you want to go through the exercise and need some help, pop into the IndieWebCamp chat and we’ll help you get sorted.

Replied to WordPress of One's Own: Or, thinking through creating a not intimidating menu of options for domain installs by AlanaCallan (Reclaim Hosting Community)

Hey there,

New and just wading in here I work at Fleming College in our Learning Design and Support team/department

Our medium sized college has always offered our students and faculty a choice in terms of the platform they choose to use: Wordpress, tumblr, weebly, medium, etc., mostly because we didn’t have anything else to offer them other than the LMS that was supported by the institution.

This past September our communication courses for first year have been using wordpress.com (mostly) as they were encouraged by the teaching faculty who were also using wordpress.com sites for their own writing. The redesigned communication courses have the students learning to write, give and receive feedback, and loop through this cycle several times for an authentic audience. First semester focuses on personal writing, the second focuses on professional writing.

(just wanted to provide some context for my reply - they had to go with wordpress.com as there was no plan or budget to do a local install or have it hosted for the college)

Feedback from the faculty teaching team after teaching for almost 8 weeks is how to template and simplify space for students to use, here is a direct quote: “could we create dedicated blog page for students that would be a pre-made, fool-proof template? When a student’s WordPress blog does not work and we can’t fix the problem, it is very frustrating to be helpless beside an exasperated student.”

I am inclined to suggest freeing up the expectation that the student’s use wordpress and that they instead use a platform that they may already be familiar with (like tumblr etc.,) and create a space AND use categories/titles that are consistent so that the faculty can go in and review, comment, provide feedback etc., easily.

Many students may choose to use wordpress either way but…

One thing that we do here that may help the conversation is that our library holds workshops to assist students in creating their online presence, creative commons, attribution etc.,

I’m interested in any thoughts or feedback on how to approach the our communication faculty request… am I heading in the right direction??

Thanks!!

Alana

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).

Replied to a tweet by Ameya Warde (@ameyawarde) (Twitter)

Do people still use @microformats? There's a blog post from last year but the wiki is full of broken links, and also the hcard generator includes AIM name :D.

(Just poking around the #IndieWeb /wiki for the first time as I'm working on my digital garden..)

— Ameya Warde (@ameyawarde) April 22, 2021

Do share a link to your digital garden if it’s public. I love to see what others are doing with respect to design and use. We need to get around to holding a Gardens & Streams II camp session(s) to keep iterating on the idea. Do add yourself to the interest list if you like.

I know there are many still actively using Microformats. Sometimes the wiki can have older examples and there’s always linkrot. On hCard (microformats v1), you’re probably better off looking at the newer h-card (v2) specification and examples. In skimming it tonight I notice that Mastodon isn’t listed on the page though they support it. My own site parses them to pull in author names, URLs, and avatars in the reply contexts on my posts.

I recently found good in testing and fixing an h-card I set up on one of my wikis/digital gardens.

Replied to a post by Kimberly Hirsh, PhD (kimberlyhirsh.com)

My favorite thing about Labyrinth is that the ending suggests that you can grow up while retaining your attachment to fantasy.

Replied to a tweet by Remi Kalir (Twitter)

It's #PubDay for #Annotation from @mitpress! @anterobot and I are pleased to share our book exploring the scholarly, civic, educational, and everyday significance of notes added to texts. Follow #AnnoConvo for updates and conversation. To order, more info: https://t.co/2f5v9iAJXH

— Remi Kalir (@remikalir) April 6, 2021

Many people made #Annotation possible, including anonymous peer reviewers and those who participated in an open review via @pubpub in the summer of 2019. Thank you @ChrisAldrich @xolotl @Bali_Maha @Jenae_Cohn @dr_jdean @MirandaEgger @jeffwgallant Sara Gonçalves and... #AnnoConvo pic.twitter.com/tMaUjiw7Bj

— Remi Kalir (@remikalir) April 6, 2021

@hickstro @dogtrax @ProfHsieh @budtheteacher @ekapros @taykendesign @wiobyrne @fcpcolo @jpom @alanjreidphd @heatherstaines @SheaSwauger @steelwagstaff @craig_whippo @bnjmn_k_wdcck and @LGZreader for your intellect, time, criticism & care - you made #Annotation better. #AnnoConvo

— Remi Kalir (@remikalir) April 6, 2021

Congratulations Remi and Antero!

It’s very meta, but now we’re going to all start begging you for individual copies with your personal annotations of the title page! If you’re willing, send us your Venmo/Paypal/other payment information so we can reimburse you for copies, postage, and processing time.

Firstly, an entire tribe moving from Wales to the Salisbury Plain took their encyclopaedia with them. This would require the circle to be erected in the same order as in Wales and oriented in the same direction. In effect, these people were taking their database of knowledge with them, the structure in the stones, and the data in their memories.

Secondly, a different tribe conquering those in Wales might identify just how effective this memory technique is and steal only the technology. Essentially, they stole the database structure and filled it with their own data. The bluestones are particularly suited to a mnemonic purpose due to the blotches and blobs in their material makeup.

Perhaps there’s a third possibility not mentioned here?

Perhaps the group at Waun Mawn, traded a portion of their knowledge and database to a more powerful and potentially more central nearby group of people? The evidence indicates that many of the people buried at Stonehenge were originally from the area of Wales where some of the stones originated. The fact that some stones remained behind may mean that some of the needed local encyclopedia stayed behind.

Replied to a tweet by rachel syme (Twitter)

what is a longform magazine story from before, let's say, 2010, that you still go back and look at for inspiration

— rachel syme (@rachsyme) April 2, 2021

I find myself regularly revisiting Vannevar Bush’s July 1945 essay As We May Think from The Atlantic.

Replied to a tweet by Dr. Valerie Irvine (she/her) (Twitter)

Well THAT was fun!! Thanks to EVERYONE (78!) who joined #edcampuvic! We appreciate your diversity from #uvic to #unbc to districts from across #bced.

Sharing a pic (w/ consent) from our social media photo booth breakout room.#edcamp4life #edcamp #bcedchat #edci336 #uviced pic.twitter.com/X3jI1L6QnN

— Dr. Valerie Irvine (she/her) (@_valeriei) March 31, 2021

Not only FUN, but I managed to learn a lot and walk away with a few months worth of material for my reading list. #EdCamp #bcedChat #edci336 #uviced #BarCamp

A warm welcome to our new Individual Members @FieryRed1 @CosmoCat @ChrisAldrich @C_Stockman @losh99 #altc #ff pic.twitter.com/3EotmwB3W2

— ALT - alt.ac.uk (@A_L_T) March 26, 2021

Thank you. I can’t wait to see everyone at OERxDomains21 coming up:

#altc #OERxDomains #OER21

you don’t miss Google Reader you miss the World Wide Web before 2012

— joanne mcneil (@jomc) March 20, 2021

I do think folks have also conflated the generic ability to read RSS with the specific social networking features of Google Reader, so it’s hard to know which they say they’re missing.

— Anil Dash (@anildash) March 20, 2021

i mostly miss everyone and everything having a blog and the ecosystem of search/discovery/utilities that supported it all

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) March 20, 2021

I used to miss the reading/social aspects of GR until I switched to using my own website in combination with social readers like Aperture and Indigenous. (Aaron Parecki has a good overview of what it looks like; the space has grown quite a bit since his original post in 2018.)

I heartily agree with @waxpancake that the open web needs some better discovery options.

Replied to a post by Taylor Thompson (teukka.tech)

I wonder what a bookclub over micropub/sub might look like, or how xanadu like inclusions could be implemented on the indieweb.

It’s definitely a thing: ]]> https://boffosocko.com/2021/03/13/55788443/feed/ 0 55788443 https://boffosocko.com/2021/03/13/55788431/ https://boffosocko.com/2021/03/13/55788431/#comments Sun, 14 Mar 2021 01:04:24 +0000 https://boffosocko.com/?p=55788431 Continue reading ]]>

why isn't https://t.co/X3v7Fs07E2 more popular?

— Brian LeRoux(@brianleroux) March 12, 2021

IndieWeb IS wonderfully popular!

You’re maybe wondering why more companies haven’t turned IndieWeb building blocks into a product like Micro.blog has?

There are a few others certainly.

For the masses, we’re going to need more providers who are ethically working toward IndieWeb as a Service (IaaS). Companies willing to allow people to be the customer rather than exploiting them as the product.

Of course, if you’re running WithKnown, you’re already there with all the trimmings. If you’re on WordPress or Drupal with your own domain, you’re already there too, but you can add lots of additional interactive functionality with a few plugins. There are dozens of available platforms that will do the job and each one has a multitude of options and configurations.

All that choice comes with a spectacular amount of complexity. Hopefully some clever companies will narrow down some popular options and make them available to large numbers of people for a reasonable price.

(Personally I wonder what things might look like if your online social IndieWeb infrastructure was run by your local public library or your local newspaper?)

The community has and continues to do a lot of incredibly difficult work to make dramatically different websites be able to interoperate and communicate with one another. Many of the roads are well worn now, we need others to come and pave them to be as equitable and easy-to-use for the rest of humankind.

All this said, of course we still also have additional complex problems like privacy, safety, anti-bullying, etc. to conquer so that we don’t end up with a decentralized version of Facebook and continue repeating the same problems of the past.

Many of us are content with small, organic growth. Massive overnight growth is often a myth, and if it does happen, you can have unmanageable and unanticipated problems seen in situations like the “eternal September“.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead