225 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
  2. Feb 2024
    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20240208185222/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00349-5

      Paper by author Lizzie Wolkovich refused because of inaccurate suspicion of ChatGPT usage. Another cut to the peer review system? She had her GitHub writing receipts. Intriguing. Makes me think about blogging in Obs while having a private blogging repo that tracks changes. n:: use github while writing for [[Reverse Turing menszijn bewijs vaker nodig 20230505100459]] purposes.

  3. Jan 2024
  4. Dec 2023
    1. Matt GrossMatt Gross (He/Him) • 1st (He/Him) • 1st Vice President, Digital Initiatives at Archetype MediaVice President, Digital Initiatives at Archetype Media 4d • 4d • So, here's an interesting project I launched two weeks ago: The HistoryNet Podcast, a mostly automated transformation of HistoryNet's archive of 25,000+ stories into an AI-driven daily podcast, powered by Instaread and Zapier. The voices are pretty good! The stories are better than pretty good! The implications are... maybe terrifying? Curious to hear what you think. Listen at https://lnkd.in/emUTduyC or, as they always say, "wherever you get your podcasts."

      https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7142905086325780480/

      One can now relatively easily use various tools in combination with artificial intelligence-based voices and reading to convert large corpuses of text into audiobooks, podcasts or other spoken media.

  5. Nov 2023
    1. 使用 Heptabase 管理数字花园

      Wow! Heptabase digital garden is possible with this plugin from Jiang (GitHub) 數位花園 網站 部落格 blog website

      Try using Heptabase; learn of its pros and cons against Obsidian #todo

    2. 这和我运用的卡片笔记法理念一致,通过不断的积累、迭代卡片完成文章的输出,而不是一来就面对一张白纸一步到位完成创作。

      Couldn't agree more! Digital Garden vs Blogging: key difference

    3. 博客 vs 数字花园 数字花园的理念与我正在使用的卡片笔记法、Heptabase 的设计哲学更加贴近,所以放弃了持续 1 年的博客,改用数字花园的方式维护自己的个人站点,下面会详细介绍一下原因。

      I concur!

    4. 尝试过 HUGO 和 Notion 等方式、研究了 obsidian publish,也实践用 Notion 维护了一年的博客,但一直没有找到比较理想的方案。

      想知道這些其他方案的缺點在哪。我自己用的是免費的Obsidian digital garden來Publish部落格。

  6. Oct 2023
  7. Sep 2023
    1. Starting a blog .t3_16v8tfq._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } Hey everyone- I’m still trying to wrap my head on how to organize this.I have my antinet growing and I want to start a blog with the use of one of my notes as a springboard.Do I9 votesWork on the blog and store the index cards after the note that I’m drawing inspiration fromCreate a new blog section in my antinet and place them thereStore them in wherever and create an hub note that points to them

      reply to u/RobThomasBouchard at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/16v8tfq/starting_a_blog/

      The answer is:<br /> D: Start a "blog" where you post your notes as status updates and interlink them a bit. When you've got enough, you organize them into a mini thesis and write a longer article/blog post about it.

      Examples: - https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22thought%20spaces%22 and - https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book#The_IndieWeb_site_as_a_Commonplace_book

      tl;dr: Use your website like a public, online zettelkasten. 🕸️🗃️

  8. Aug 2023
    1. engineering blogs focus on problems where the solution is a necessary but not sufficient part of what they do. And, ideally, they focus on problems that are complementary to scale that only the publisher of that post has.

      Core reason why companies have their engineering blogs

  9. Jun 2023
    1. How do you organize all of the things you read? My system is actually pretty simple, and it relies on organizing my regular reads, quick digesting and sorting one-off articles, and sometimes doing extensive note-taking with online apps.

      I agree that reading is a key part of writing.

    1. The future of blogging in the AI ​​era, how can we unleash the SEO potential? https://en.itpedia.nl/2023/06/11/de-toekomst-van-bloggen-in-het-ai-tijdperk-hoe-kunnen-we-het-seo-potentieel-ontketenen/ Let's take a look at the future of #blogging in the #AI_era. Does a blogging website still have a future now that visitors can find the answer directly in the browser? Or should we use #AI to improve our #weblog. Can AI help us improve our blog's #SEO?

  10. Mar 2023
    1. HIPAA Compliant Email: What You Need to Know Introduction In the healthcare industry, protecting patient information is crucial. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) sets the standards for the confidentiality and security of patient data, including email communication. In this blog post, we will explore the importance of HIPAA compliant email and how encryptedspaces.com provides a solution to ensure secure communication. Benefits of HIPAA Compliant Email HIPAA compliant email provides a secure method of communication between healthcare providers, patients, and other parties involved in the healthcare process. By using encrypted email, healthcare providers can send sensitive patient information without the risk of a breach. This includes personal identification information (PII), protected health information (PHI), and electronic protected health information (ePHI). In addition, HIPAA compliant email can provide an efficient and convenient method of communication that saves time and resources. Encryptedspaces.com: A Solution for Secure Communication Encryptedspaces.com offers a HIPAA compliant email solution that meets the strict standards set by HIPAA. With end-to-end encryption, all emails are protected from interception and hacking attempts. Encryptedspaces.com also offers secure file storage and sharing, as well as a secure messaging system to ensure that all communication stays within the secure platform. In addition, encryptedspaces.com provides a user-friendly interface that makes sending and receiving HIPAA compliant emails easy and convenient. HIPAA Compliance is a Must-Have In today's digital age, protecting sensitive patient information is more important than ever. HIPAA compliant email is a must-have for healthcare providers to ensure that patient data remains confidential and secure. Encryptedspaces.com offers a secure and efficient solution for HIPAA compliant email that meets all the requirements set by HIPAA. Conclusion In conclusion, [HIPAA compliant email](https://encryptedspaces.com) is essential in the healthcare industry to protect sensitive patient information. Encryptedspaces.com provides a HIPAA compliant email solution that ensures secure communication while also offering convenient features such as file storage and sharing. By using encryptedspaces.com, healthcare providers can rest assured that their patient data is protected from breaches and hacking attempts.

  11. Feb 2023
    1. Autobibliographie annotée (2018-2022) <br /> by Arthur Perret on 2023-02-20 (accessed:: 2023-02-24 11:30:20)

      Perret looks back at several years of blogposts and comments on his growth over the intervening years. This sort of practice and providing indicators of best posts is an interesting means of digital gardening.

    1. One of the benefits of journaling on an index card is that the small space is much less intimidating than a large blank sheet, particularly when one isn't in the mood but feels like they ought to write. This is similar to the idea that many people find that microblogs (Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr) are much easier to maintain than a long form blog.

  12. Jan 2023
    1. one problem was that i had collected too many quotes and excerpts that i wanted to weave into the post and couldn’t find good spots for them, so here they are anyway.

      Relatable

    1. https://cplong.org/2023/01/return-to-blogging/<br /> reply to https://hcommons.social/@sramsay/109660599682539192

      IndieWeb, blogging, fountain pens?!? I almost hate to mention it for the rabbit hole it may become, but: https://micro.blog/discover/pens. Happy New Year!

  13. Dec 2022
  14. Nov 2022
  15. tinysubversions.com tinysubversions.com
    1. A tool that turns Twitter threads into blog posts, by Darius Kazemi.

      https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Darius Kazemi</span> in Darius Kazemi: "thread unroller apps" - Friend Camp (<time class='dt-published'>11/16/2022 08:27:44</time>)</cite></small>

    1. manton Interesting post by @simon@simonwillison.net that Mastodon is just blogs. Except Mastodon’s design runs counter to blog features like domain names and custom designs. I’d say Mastodon is more Twitter-like than blog-like… Which is fine, but not the same as a blog-first platform.

      https://micro.blog/manton/14045523

      @manton When I was looking at Fediverse instances the other day I noticed that one of the biggest platforms within it was Write.as, which are more blog centric. Is there a better/easier way for m.b. to federate/interact or serve as a reader for that part of the ecosystem? Perhaps worth exploring?

    1. Originally blogs were called weblogs: a log of activity that you wrote to the web. Peter Merholz jokingly split the term into two words to make it an activity: we blog. Ev Williams started to use it as a verb and a noun: to blog. And the rest is history.
    2. https://getblogging.org/

      A Ben Werdmuller joint

  16. Oct 2022
    1. often say that my PKM approach is technology-neutral. I do not promote one tool about another. I share my top tools but do not ask others to use them. But it seems I do have a chosen technology — the blog.

      Practice informs tool choice, tools do influence practice in return, and can become 'favourites' temporarily as exploration, but also long term. Here I'd say Harold's blogging is a practice more than a technology.

    1. Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe. So when I write something and it sounds good, I leave it in, usually, to see what it sounds like to someone else. To somebody else it might sound awful or brash, but I want to be able to have the courage of my brashness. I don’t leave things in that I know to be terrible, or that I don’t, as it were, find interesting—I don’t do that—but if there’s a doubt about it and it sounds interesting, I’ll leave it in. And I want to be free to do that, because that’s why I write. When I write, things occur to me. It’s a way of thinking. But you can perform your thinking instead of just thinking it.
    1. The freedom to play with ideas, and to explore new ways of thinking, critiquing, deploying, and analyzing ed tech provided by metaphors, is much needed if we are to develop a better appreciation of its possibilities, implications, and limitations.

      "Playful" activity as inherently "free" and actively necessary - compare to earlier sentence about whether that's "appropriate in the formal requirements" of a job.

  17. Sep 2022
    1. I have found that the "size of a thought" is usually not much larger than 500 words. Nicholson Baker, who has written an essay on "The Size of Thoughts" thinks that "most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product." Mine are a lot smaller. It takes between 50 and 500 words for me to express one thought or one idea (or perhaps better a fragment of a thought or an idea, because thoughts and ideas usually are compounds of such fragments). See also Steven Berlin Johnson on his experiences with an electronic outliner, called Devonthink: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html.

      What is the size of a single thought?

      500 words is about the size of a typical blog post. It's also about the size of a minimum recommended post for SEO purposes.

      Nice to see his link to Steven Johnson here as I think this is where I've seen similar thoughts recently myself.

  18. Aug 2022
  19. Jul 2022
    1. AI text generator, a boon for bloggers? A test report

      While I wanted to investigate AI text generators further, I ended up writing a testreport.. I was quite stunned because the AI ​​text generator turns out to be able to create a fully cohesive and to-the-point article in minutes. Here is the test report.

    1. I knew if I wanted this website – which is an extension of my consciousness – to truly thrive, I needed to work on it in a sustainable manner. Bit by bit I slowly transformed the way I thought about it. Previously I would only work on it if I had the energy to make wholesale, dramatic changes. These days I am glad if I made one small change.

      Winnie later goes on to point out that this is much like gardening: it is a slow process, and the process has its seasons which wax and wane, expanding and contracting. You sow. You seed. You water. You fertilize. You wait. You pick weeds. You water. Pick some more weeds. You might prune. You flick off the japanese beetles. And because of the cyclical nature of the planet we inhabit, we also have periods where nothing grows, and the soil lies dormant. Waiting. Resting. This, too, can be embraced as we carve out our little corners of the web, and really all aspects of our lives. I know I'm nearly as tender to myself as I should be.

    1. At the same time, like Harold, I’ve realised that it is important to do things, to keep blogging and writing in this space. Not because of its sheer brilliance, but because most of it will be crap, and brilliance will only occur once in a while. You need to produce lots of stuff to increase the likelihood of hitting on something worthwile. Of course that very much feeds the imposter cycle, but it’s the only way. Getting back into a more intensive blogging habit 18 months ago, has helped me explore more and better. Because most of what I blog here isn’t very meaningful, but needs to be gotten out of the way, or helps build towards, scaffolding towards something with more meaning.

      Many people treat their blogging practice as an experimental thought space. They try out new ideas, explore a small space, attempt to come to understanding, connect new ideas to their existing ideas.


      Ton Zylstra coins/uses the phrase "metablogging" to think about his blogging practice as an evolving thought space.


      How can we better distill down these sorts of longer ideas and use them to create more collisions between ideas to create new an innovative ideas? What forms might this take?

      The personal zettelkasten is a more concentrated form of this and blogging is certainly within the space as are the somewhat more nascent digital gardens. What would some intermediary "idea crucible" between these forms look like in public that has a simple but compelling interface. How much storytelling and contextualization is needed or not needed to make such points?

      Is there a better space for progressive summarization here so that an idea can be more fully laid out and explored? Then once the actual structure is built, the scaffolding can be pulled down and only the idea remains.

      Reminiscences of scaffolding can be helpful for creating context.

      Consider the pyramids of Giza and the need to reverse engineer how they were built. Once the scaffolding has been taken down and history forgets the methods, it's not always obvious what the original context for objects were, how they were made, what they were used for. Progressive summarization may potentially fall prey to these effects as well.

      How might we create a "contextual medium" which is more permanently attached to ideas or objects to help prevent context collapse?

      How would this be applied in reverse to better understand sites like Stonehenge or the hundreds of other stone circles, wood circles, and standing stones we see throughout history.

  20. Jun 2022
    1. Some readers may be solely interested in sharing their knowledge with the world. Writing and expressing thoughts for these kinds of readers is enough reward and motivation to blog on a regular basis. It’s their way of giving back by sharing a part of themselves for the benefit of others.

      This is a good enough reason of any to blog.

    1. If you want to write a book, you could dial down the scope andwrite a series of online articles outlining your main ideas. If youdon’t have time for that, you could dial it down even further andstart with a social media post explaining the essence of yourmessage.

      This does make me wonder again, how much of this particular book might be found in various forms on Forte's website, much of which is behind a paywall at $10 a month or $100 a year?

      It's become more common in the past decades for writers to turn their blogs into books and then use their platform to sell those books.

    1. The summary of Hoy’s post makes a point similar to Caulfield’s piece, but more pronounced: the wide-spread adoption of the blog format killed gardens. The dichotomy is the same; here, we also have a causality of demise.

      The blog killed online gardens in some sense because of it's time-ordered stream of content. While it was generally a slower moving stream than that of social media platforms like Twitter which came later, it was still a stream.

  21. May 2022
    1. https://colinwalker.blog/?date=2022-03-08#p2

      Some interesting looking female bloggers listed here.

  22. Apr 2022
    1. But in thinking about providing a permanent home for my writing on the web, this kind of chronology isn’t very useful. Who cares that I wrote this post in 2015, and this one in 2017? Organizing posts that way is only useful if someone is reading along as the collection is being written. For a permanent writing home, with writing from a year ago as well as writing from ten years ago, chronological order isn’t that useful. Who’s going to sift through a hundred pages of old posts?

      Part of the question about the ordering of posts on a website comes down first to what the actual content is. Is it posts, pages, articles about particular topics, short notes?

      Most blogs typically default to a particular time ordered display, but also provide search and archives for content by topical headings (tags/categories) as well. Digital gardens and wikis are set up with no particular hierarchies and one is encouraged to wander. Most social media notes and photos are created in a time only order.

      There aren't enough online zettelkasten yet to look at what that might entail, though affordances there are likely to be similar to that of digital gardens which let you pick out something via keyword and then follow links from one thing to the next.

      These are interesting questions for publishers as much as they are from anticipating what one's intended or imagined audience might be looking for.

    1. But modern note-taking is more idiosyncratic to each note-taker and no longer follows a set of subject headings that pedagogical practicesand printed reference works helped to standardize.

      Early modern reference works, handbooks, and pedagogical practices created a sort of standardized set of subject headings amongst note takers.

      A similar sort of effort could have been seen in the blogosphere of the early 2000s in which Technorati and their search functionality may have helped to standardize some of these same sorts of taxonomic issues within their product which was widely used at the time.

    2. enable the blogger to share his or her observations from readings or experiencewith others, just as some seventeenth- century pedagogues advocated sharingnotes within a group.

      Blogs

      Blogging is a form of public note sharing that isn't dissimilar to seventeenth-century note sharing practices in group settings.

  23. Mar 2022
    1. And it’s easier to share a personal story when you’re composing it 280 characters at a time and publishing it as you go, without thinking about or knowing where the end may be. It’s at least easier than staring down a blank text editor with no limit and having to decide later how much of a 2,500 word rant is worth sharing, anyway.

      Ideas fill their spaces.

      When writing it can be daunting to see a long blank screen and feel like you've got to fill it up with ideas de novo.

      From the other perspective if you're starting with a smaller space like a Twitter input box or index card you may find that you write too much and require the ability to edit things down to fit the sparse space.


      I do quite like the small space provided by Hypothes.is which has the ability to expand and scroll as you write so that it has the Goldilocks feel of not too small, not too big, but "just right".


      Micro.blog has a feature that starts with a box that can grow with the content. Once going past 280 characters it also adds an optional input box to give the post a title if one wants it to be an article rather than a simple note.


      Link to idea of Occamy from the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them that can grow or shrink to fit the available space: https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Occamy

  24. Jan 2022
    1. https://jon.bo/posts/can-blogging-be-simple/

      Syndicated copy: https://twitter.com/jondotbo/status/1475581785874612234


      Has some hint of the IndieWeb space here. My first thought is of micro.blog---for a reasonable subscription price it's relatively easy for folks to get started and allow customization and flexibility if they want/need it.

      It also tries to meet users where they're at, so if you've already got a site you can still participate and it can provide services one may not want to self-host like a social reader, webmentions, micropub, etc.

      To encourage people to write its UI starts out with short Twitter like notes, and if you keep writing, it provides you with a "title" field to turn a post into an article.

    1. This is a great example of a "Year in Review" post.

    2. All these interests unite around a single initiative: the intersection between online writing, the Liberal Arts, and Judeo-Christian teachings.

      This is exactly the intersection that I have seen and thought about for a long time. If David Perell sees this as a gap that intellectuals can fill, then I am definitely onto something.

  25. Dec 2021
  26. Nov 2021
    1. https://www.amazon.com/Blog-Paper-Advanced-Taking-Technology/dp/1926892100/

      Doing some research for my Paper Website / Blog.

      Similar to some of the pre-printed commonplace books of old particularly with respect to the tag and tag index sections.

      I sort of like that it is done in a way that makes it useful for general life even if one isn't going to use it as a "blog".

      How can I design mine to be easily photographed and transferred to an actual blog, particularly with Micropub in mind?

      Don't forget space for the blog title and tagline. What else might one put on the front page(s) for identity? Name, photo, address, lost/found info, website URL (naturally)...

      Anything else I might want to put in the back besides an category index or a tag index? (Should it have both?)

    1. What if it isn't news, but infotainment. I'll bet that most of these shows are talking heads doing analysis. They're really well paid bloggers talking about the days news.

    1. ut personal notes can also be shared with othersWon a limited scale with family and friends and on a wider scale throughpublicationW notably in genres that compile useful reading notes for othersY

      Written in 2004, this is on the cusp of the growth of blogging and obviously predates the general time frame of social media and the rise of social annotation. Personal notes can now be shared more widely and have much larger publics.

  27. Oct 2021
    1. sometimes you de- yelop a whole passage, not with the intention of completing it, but because it comes of itself and because inspiration is like grace, which passes by and does not come back.

      So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

      I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

      These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

      Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

      Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

      This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

      Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

      I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

      With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

      With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

      I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

      I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

      We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

      How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?

  28. Sep 2021
    1. I want to mix sketch-noting and typing; to insert quick hand-drawn illustrations into my notes such that I can edit those sketches later.

      It dawns on me that in some sense small illustrations and images in a mnemonic like manner are what Dave Winer is doing on his blog.

    1. https://jrdingwall.ca/blogwall/25-years-of-ed-tech-blogs/

      JR writes about some of his journey into blogging.

      I appreciate some of the last part about the 9x9x25 blogs. For JR it seems like some smaller prompts got him into more regular writing.

      He mentions Stephen Downes regular workflow as well. I think mine is fairly similar to Stephen's. To some extent, I write much more on my own website now than I ever had before. This is because I post a lot more frequently to my own site, in part because it's just so easy to do. I'll bookmark things or post about what I've recently read or watched. My short commentary on some of these is just that, short commentary. But occasionally I discover, depending on the subject, that those short notes and bookmark posts will spring into something bigger or larger. Sometimes it's a handful of small posts over a few days or weeks that ultimately inspires the longer thing. The key seems to be to write something.

      Perhaps a snowball analogy will work. I take a tiny snowball and give it a proverbial roll. Sometimes it sits there and other times it rolls down the hill and turns into a much larger snowball. Other times I get a group of them and build a full snowman.

      Of course lately a lot of my writing starts, like this did, as an annotation (using Hypothes.is) to something I was reading. It then posts to my website with some context and we're off to the races.

  29. Aug 2021
    1. Taking turns at hosting shared the administrative load and the benefits that accrued. It was considered good practice to read all the submissions and craft your own post that would link to them, possibly exercising some selection, in a way that might entice readers to see for themselves. In that respect, because they were curated, blog carnivals to me are distinct from planets that merely accrete stuff, admittedly on a topic, without curation.

      This almost sounds like the creation of a wiki page, but in blog format.

    1. If this blog had a tagline it would be "an ongoing conversation with myself."

      Here's an example of a blogger using the idea of writing a blog as being in conversation with himself.

      It obviously doesn't predate Niklas Luhmann's conversation with slip boxes, but the general tenor is certainly similar in form and function.

    1. Want to Write a Book? You Probably Already Have!

      Patrick Rhone

      video

      Paper is the best solution for the long term. If it's not on paper it can be important, if it's not it won't be.

      Our writing is important. It is durable.

      All we know about the past is what survived.

      Analogy: coke:champaign glass::blogger:book

      Converting one's blog into a book.

      "The funny thing about minimalism is that there's only so much you can say."

      Change the frame and suddenly you've changed the experience.

    1. KateEichhorn, “Archival Genres: Gathering Texts and Reading Spaces,”InvisibleCulture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture12(2008), correlates thecommonplace book and the blog as archival genres, transitional collectionsand spaces in which readers interact with texts and straddle public and privatespheres.

      Interesting analogy of the genres of commonplacing and blogging.

      What axes of genre and publication might one consider in creating such a comparison?

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  30. Jul 2021
    1. How can writers bridge the gap between what they want to say and what someone else understands? Eleven months later, a line from Anne Helen Petersen’s announcement of her Substack newsletter haunts me still: Writing a newsletter, Petersen wrote, meant she could publish “pieces that take ten paragraphs to get to the nut graf, if there’s one at all.”

      There's something in this quote that sounds more like old school blogging to me. Putting ideas out there and allowing the community to react and respond as a means of honing an idea can be useful and powerful. However, are writers actually doing this meaningfully over time? Are they objectively doing this and providing thoughtful updates over time?

    2. Early on, circa 2015, there was a while when every first-person writer who might once have written a Tumblr began writing a TinyLetter. At the time, the writer Lyz Lenz observed that newsletters seemed to create a new kind of safe space. A newsletter’s self-selecting audience was part of its appeal, especially for women writers who had experienced harassment elsewhere online.

      What sort of spaces do newsletters create based upon their modes of delivery? What makes them "safer" for marginalized groups? Is there a mitigation of algorithmic speed and reach that helps? Is it a more tacit building of community and conversation? How can these benefits be built into an IndieWeb space?

      How can a platform provide "reach" while simultaneously creating negative feedback for trolls and bad actors?

    3. These are emails composed for an audience not of one friend but of many fans. These emails are newsletters.

      Indication of the morphing of long emails into newsletters.

      How does blogging fit into this space and continuum? Blogging as the expansion of ideas to test them out, garner feedback and evolve ideas over time?

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs</span> in July Check-In · Buttondown (<time class='dt-published'>07/01/2021 09:19:13</time>)</cite></small>

      Idea of John Paul II's encyclical being a form of blogging in a different era. They're all essays in form, it's just about distribution...

    1. Alan Jacobs seems to be delving into the area of thought spaces provided by blogs and blogging.

      In my view, they come out of a cultural tradition of commonplace books becoming digital and more social in the the modern era. Jacobs is obviously aware of the idea of Zettelkasten, but possibly hasn't come across the Sonke Ahrens' book on smart notes or the conceptualization of the "digital garden" stemming from Mike Caulfield's work.

      He's also acquainted with Robin Sloane, though it's unclear if he's aware of the idea of Stock and Flow.

    2. Blogging, I want to argue, is a seasoned technology that is ripe for lateral thinking.
    3. But you know what? Screw it. I need to take my time and develop the necessary ideas properly. If these thoughts never develop in such a way that I can turn them into a book, so be it. If they do so develop and nobody wants to publish it, so be it. (I’ll just make various digital versions.) The point, at this stage in my career, after fifteen published books, is not the publication, it’s the thinking. So let the thinking, in public, commence.

      Some interesting thoughts about thinking and writing in public.

    4. So after much reflection, I have decided that the way to get there is by planting a new bed in my blog garden.

      A mixture of a blog and a digital garden?

  31. Jun 2021
    1. The Chicago Manual of Style is a quixotic attempt at one-style-fits-all for every house in America-newspapers, magazines, book publishers, blogishers.

      curious to see blogishers, as a portmanteau of blogger and publisher

    Tags

    Annotators

  32. May 2021
    1. In performance-blog-land you do that thinking and researching privately, then shove it out at the final moment. A grand flourish that hides the process.

      This generally doesn't happen with IndieWeb-based sites where one often publishes all the smaller tidbits along the way and intersperses them with the longer articles.

      Of course, not everyone here necessarily publishes everything publicly either.

    2. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.

      Is this also because they have inherently different audiences?

    3. They're not following the conventions of the "personal blog," as we've come to know it.

      There are a number of bloggers who have to some extent, specifically used their blogs for this purpose though. I've documented several at https://boffosocko.com/tag/thought-spaces/

    1. This is the final inversion of blogging: not just publishing before selecting, nor researching before knowing your subject — but producing to attract, rather than serve, an audience.

      This is much better than simply building a brand or a platform.

    2. There’s a version of the “why writers should blog” story that is tawdry and mercenary: “Blog,” the story goes, “and you will build a brand and a platform that you can use to promote your work.”Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.

      "Brand" is bullshit.

    1. Did blogging die off because the tools changed? Everyone had their own space on the internet and the internet itself was the medium which opened up the conversation. I could use WordPress while someone else might have been on Blogger, Moveable Type, Live Journal, TypePad, or something they made in HTML themselves.

      Now it's all siloed off into tinier spaces where content is trapped for eyeballs and engagement and there's not nearly as much space for expression. Some of the conversation is broken up into 280 character expressions on Twitter, some on Instagram, and now people are aggregating content inside Substack. Substack at least has a feed I can subscribe to and a free form box to add a reply.

      I appreciate Jeff's comment about the flywheel of social media. We're definitely going to need something like that to help power the resurgence of the blogosphere. I also like to think of it in the framing of "thought spaces" where the idea of a blog is to give yourself enough space to form a coherent idea and make an actual argument. Doing that is much harder to do on a microblog where the responses are also similarly limited. It just feels so rude to post 250 words in reply to a sentence or two that probably needed more space to express itself too.

      I suspect that if we want a real resurgence of thought and discourse online, we're going to need some new tools to do it. As Friedrich Nietzsche famously conceded to his friend Heinrich Köselitz “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.”

      It would help if we could get back to the bare metal of the internet in which to freely operate again. Substack at least feels close to that, though it could be much better.

      Can we have a conversational medium that isn't constrained by a handful of corporate silos that don't allow conversation across boundaries? Can we improve the problems of context collapse we're seeing in social media?

      I'd like to think that some of the building blocks the IndieWeb movement has built might help guide the way. I love their idea of Webmention notifications that allow one site to mention another regardless of the platforms on which they're built. Their Micropub posting tools abstract away the writing and posting experience to allow you to pick and choose your favorite editor. They've got multiple social reader tools to let you follow the people and content you're interested in and reply to things directly in the reader. I presented a small proof of concept at a recent education conference, for those who'd like to see what that experience looks like today.

      Perhaps if more platforms opened up to these ideas and tools, we might be able to return, but with a lot more freedom and flexibility than we had in the nostalgic blogosphere?

      Yet, we'll still be facing the human work of interacting and working together. There are now several magnitudes of order more people online than there were in the privileged days of the blogosphere. We're still going to need to solve for that. Perhaps if everyone reads and writes from their own home on the web, they're less likely to desecrate their neighbor's blog because it sticks to their own identity?

      There's lots of work to be done certainly, but perhaps we'll get there by expanding things, opening them up, and giving ourselves some more space to communicate?

    2. I miss the thriving blogging culture of circa 1999-2012. People blogged before and after those dates, but that was a period where blogging really had an outsized voice in shaping political and cultural conversation.

      Maybe it's the fact that there's more thoughts, ideas, and actual conversation in longer form media? Too much has moved to social media which really immediately implies small, bite-sized bits of information---a short note, a photo, a star or a heart.

    1. I’m ashamed to admit I’m the only English blogger, and I love the idea of writing in Dutch, but I’ve been there, and it didn’t work. Should I reconsider - again?

      Why not both?

    1. Now this is interesting, and it sort of hits on the difference between a personal blog and a blog that feels more like a personal brand exercise. The best personal blogs I’ve come across feel like a glimpse in to someone’s personal notebook, something filled mostly with notes written with the author in mind first and foremost vs notes that have been written with a wider audience in mind. A good personal blog can (and maybe should) contain a mixture of both, since they both can be absolutely great and useful. But when it is only ever writing for an audience… well that doesn’t feel like a personal blog, to me.

      This is much the way I feel and write. I keep my site more as a personal commonplace book and write primarily for myself. Others read it from time to time and comment, but in the end, it's really all just for me.

  33. Apr 2021
    1. This looks fascinating. I'm not so much interested in the coding/programming part as I am the actual "working in public" portions as they relate to writing, thinking, blogging in the open and sharing that as part of my own learning and growth as well as for sharing that with a broader personal learning network. I'm curious what lessons might be learned within this frame or how educators and journalists might benefit from it.

    1. I hope these articles give a sense of the range of topics we’ll be exploring and also the spirit of curiosity that will govern this experiment in thinking in public.
    2. An essay is, as the literal meaning of the word makes clear, an attempt: a provisional stab at the truth, not a dogmatic assertion but an exploration that seeks to come to terms with the new experiences, new events, new emotions.
    1. We Instead of You. Use the first-person plural when possible. Statements of we and our are more powerful than you and your, especially when talking about negative behaviors or tendencies. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think of it this way: we’re writing peer-to-peer—we are not gods.

      This makes so much sense - colleagues and fellow sojourners instead of a lecture.

    1. What does this have to do with learning? We have always made notes while studying. In the past only for ourselves. Today it is becoming more and more common to share these notes with others, which becomes easy when you take the notes digitally. If many share their thoughts, then I get a lot of suggestions. My development goes faster, see also this blog post about it . "If I want to work on a new topic, I write a blog post about it." I've heard it from quite a few. This public writing forces me to confidently verify what I have said. After all, I don't want to embarrass myself. That means I need three times as much time for the blog post as if I just wrote it down for myself. This extra time spent working on the topic is learning time. And when I publish the post, I give others the chance to benefit from it as well - and the chance to receive feedback that will help me advance on the topic. My contributions can be text contributions, videos, podcasts or slides. I can link to sources. And I can find it again in my domain - even after years. And when I've shared it, others can search for it and use it too.

      Rough translation via Google Translate ^^

      This is a good description about how working in public can be beneficial to oneself, even if no one else is looking.

    1. A lot of this resonates with me. On links, it is often the reason I was interested in it in the first place that's the most important.

      The nostalgia factor is very valuable to me, but it also means you need an easy means for not only looking back, but regular reminders to do so.

      Owning your stuff: hopefully my stance on this is obvious.

      I'm not sure I agree so much with the taxonomy stance. I find it helpful to have it for search and review, the tougher part is doing it consistently with terms that are important to you.

  34. Mar 2021
    1. Folks like Ben Thompson are effectively writing books. Take a year of his essays, edit them for brevity and clarity, and you’d have a brilliant edition of This Year in Tech. And so in a strange way, Stratechery in paid newsletter form is as much a Future Book as a bounded Kindle edition.

      And this isn't a new thing, publishers were mining the blogosphere for books from websites in the early 2000s.

    1. It comprises the collection of "mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions" that is essential for communication between two people.

      I've seen a few people with websites that have a grouping of some of their past posts to help orient new readers into their way of thinking and understanding to help provide common grounding for new readers.

      Colin Walker is an example that has had one in the past, but it looks like the move from WordPress to his new system, the original link to that data is gone now. His page was called "required" and an archived version of his example(s) can be found archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/2020*/https://colinwalker.blog/required/

  35. Feb 2021
    1. And if the world is going to grasp what’s happening then our writing needs to be digestible.

      You need to use different language when writing on your blog, compared to writing papers. You don't need references. You should write in first person. Spell checking is optional.

    2. An academic blogger may feel constrained to topics only related to his or her academic research, whereas a blogger who is also an academic is free to explore wider fields of discussion.

      This idea of "identity" is important. Many academics don't even think of themselves as authors let alone bloggers.

    1. I know there’s lots of advice out there about considering your audience when you write, but when it comes to my personal site, I’d find that crippling. It would be one more admonishment from the inner critic whispering “no one’s interested in that”, “you have nothing new to add to this topic”, and “you’re not quailified to write about this.” If I’m writing for myself, then it’s easier to have fewer inhibitions. By treating everything as a scrappy note-to-self, I can avoid agonising about quality control …although I still spend far too long trying to come up with titles for posts.

      Many people anecdotally have said that they find it difficult to either write on their sites or actually hit publish when they're done. This is great advice for getting over that.

    1. Locke’s method proved so popular that a century later, an enterprising publisher named John Bell printed a notebook entitled: “Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” Put another way, Bell created a commonplace book by commonplacing someone else’s technique for maintaining a commonplace book. The book included eight pages of instructions on Locke’s indexing method, a system which not only made it easier to find passages, but also served the higher purpose of “facilitat[ing] reflexive thought.”

      This concept here is an interesting one of being "meta".

    2. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing.

      Written in 2010, this may be one of the first mentions I've seen that relates blogging and websites to commonplace books.

    1. They also turned their reading into writing, because commonplacing made them into authors. It forced them to write their own books; and by doing so they developed a still sharper sense of themselves as autonomous individuals. The authorial self took shape in the common man’s commonplace book, not merely in the works of great writers. It belonged to the general tendency that Stephen Greenblatt has called “Renaissance self-fashioning.”

      This fits into my broader developing thesis about thinking and writing as a means of evolving thought.

  36. Jan 2021
    1. The great question is whether this new internet will be able to sustain meaningful intellectual exchange. By default, Substack splits intellectual activity into vertical silos, with readers at the bottom and authors at the top but no horizontal connections between them.

      Barriers to discussion are higher, but to what extent this improves quality enough to make it worth it is unclear. I like interlinking, trackbacks, and comments, but maybe annotation is better? I wonder how Hypothesis works on Substack posts?

    1. he suggested that, as a blog, you basically had to focus on one of three things to succeed: being first, being funny, or being insightful.

      An interesting take on professional blogging by Michael Arrington,

    1. The hacks unanimously shared Dr Johnson’s view that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”, while my academic colleagues thought it peculiar to waste one’s energy writing anything that would not figure in scholarly citation indices. The idea that one might maintain a blog simply because one enjoyed doing it never crossed their minds.
  37. Oct 2020
    1. Description: The authors discuss the usage of blogs in political science classrooms at a university level. There are five skills (critical thinking, political awareness, background research, essay writing, and reflection) which are improved through the use of blogging and the article dedicates a segment to each skill. The last section of the article discusses two types of blogging students can attempt: response to news clippings or experiential blogging. The first kind is available to all students and requires learners to find and respond to news articles. The second is more reflective of a current opportunity students might have such as studying abroad or an internship.

      Rating: 7/10

      Reason for the rating: The article gives detailed explanations for the impact blogging has on student achievement. It gives examples of each type of blogging to help the reader fully understand the writers ideas. Yet, the article focuses only on political science students while blogs-- and four out of the five skills mentioned above-- can be applies to the majority of university classes.

    1. This is an interesting concept to be sure. It seems sort of odd that it's an explicitly organized thing though given that there's (used to be?) a less organized, but bigger distributed blogosphere.

      I suppose this version helps to focus multiple people on specific ideas and work that might otherwise occur.

      I recognized most of the bookmarked material and writers mentioned here. One or two may be worth revisiting.

    1. teachers hid their Facebook accounts for fear of being fired.

      The sound of this to me know reminds me of the type of suppression of thought that might have occurred in the middle ages.

      Of course open thought and discussion is important for teachers the same way it is for every other person. However there are a few potential counterexamples where open discussion of truly abhorrent ideas can run afoul of community mores.

      Case in point:


      [also on boffosocko.com]

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

      I like this sentiment. Had René Descartes been born a bit later might he have said "Blogeō, ergo sum"?


      [also on boffosocko.com]

    1. the role of the blog is different than it was even just a couple of years ago. It’s not the sole outpost of an online life, although it can be an anchor, holding it in place.
    1. So who’s up for a blogchain, or a hyperconversation?

      I'm definitely up for it.

      The idea of blogchains is an interesting one and actually seems to be the meta-subject of an ever-growing and rhizomatic one amongst about a dozen locations. The web of it has grown so large that it's hard to see and conglomerate the entire discussion among Tom Critchlow, Kicks Condor, CJ Ellers, Brendan Schlagel, Venkatesh Rao, and many, many others.

      It's been interesting to see it growing slowly but surely.

      Next we'll need some additional organization support on some new topics to see where the next iteration of it might go.

      I do quite like the idea of the version at https://blog.cjeller.site/blogging-futures, though I suspect that having a stub on something like IndieWeb.xyz might be helpful/useful as well.

      In addition to the original discussions of hyperchat and blogchains, many of us have also been having a distributed conversation about the overlap of blogging and wikis for a bit. That conversation has been even less centralized than some of the first and the two have even crossed in places.

      What's next?

    1. Blogs tend towards conversational and quotative reuse, which is great for some subject areas, but not so great for others. Wiki feeds forward into a consensus process that provides a high level of remix and reuse, but at the expense of personal control and the preservation of divergent goals.

      And here it is, the key to the universe!

      We need something that is a meld between the wiki and the blog. Something that will let learners aggregate, ponder, and then synthesize into their own voice. A place where they can create their own goals and directions.

    1. I decided I wanted something that was a cross between a wiki and a blog - which Ward Cunningham immediately dubbed a bliki.
    1. Is there a particular project you want to pursue?

      Though I joined late, the course has spurred me to think about the concepts of mixing blogchains with webmentions, and resparked my interest in getting wikis to accept webmentions as well for building and cross-linking information.

    1. Sure we have hyperlinks, and even some esoteric magic with the likes of webmentions. But I want big, simple, legible ways to link blog discussions together. I want: blogging megastructures!

      In practice, building massive infrastructure is not only very difficult, but incredibly hard to maintain (and also thus generally expensive). Who exactly is going to maintain such structures?

      I would argue that Webmentions aren't esoteric, particularly since they're a W3C recommendation with several dozens of server implementations including support for WordPress, Drupal, and half a dozen other CMSes.

      Even if your particular website doesn't support them yet, you can create an account on webmention.io to receive/save notifications as well as to send them manually.

    1. A blog without a publish button I’m stealing this quote from my modern friend Ryan also has a nice little idea for modern friends as being something between internet stranger and ‘actual friend’. That’s me and Ryan Ryan Dawidjan who has been pioneering this concept of open-access writing and blogging without a publish button. For a long time he has maintained a quip file called high cadence thoughts that is open access and serves as a long-running note of his thinking and ideas. It’s a less-performative version of blogging - more of a captain’s log than a broadcast blog. The distinction will come down to how you blog - some people blog in much the same way. For me however blogging is mostly performative thinking and less captain’s log. So I am looking for a space to nurture, edit in real time and evolve my thinking.

      I like the idea of a blog without a publish button. I do roughly the same thing with lots of drafts unpublished that I let aggregate content over time. The difference is that mine aren't immediately out in public for other's benefit. Though I do wonder how many might read them, comment on them, or potentially come back to read them later in a more finished form.

    1. We’ve played with this concept of front-end blogging for a while now. Alan Levine has built an open sourced tool called TRU Writer that even provides this type of front end interface on a WordPress site.
    1. 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.

      The fun, secret part is that Kathleen hasn't (yet?) discovered IndieAuth so that she can authenticate/authorize micropub clients like Quill to publish content to her own site from various clients by means of a potential micropub endpoint.

      I'll suspect she'll be even more impressed when she realizes that there's a forthcoming wave of feed readers [1] [2] that will allow her to read others' content in a reader which has an integrated micropub client in it so that she can reply to posts directly in her feed reader, then the responses get posted directly to her own website which then, in turn, send webmentions to the site's she's responding to so that the conversational loop can be completely closed.

      She and Lee will also be glad to know that work has already started on private posts and conversations and posting to limited audiences as well. Eventually there will be no functionality that a social web site/silo can do that a distributed set of independent sites can't. There's certainly work to be done to round off the edges, but we're getting closer and closer every day.

      I know how it all works, but even I'm impressed at the apparent magic that allows round-trip conversations between her website and Twitter and Micro.blog. And she hasn't really delved into website to website conversations yet. I suppose we'll have to help IndieWebify some of her colleague's web presences to make that portion easier. Suddenly "academic Twitter" will be the "academic blogosphere" she misses from not too many years ago. :)

      If there are academics out thee who are interested in what Kathleen has done, but may need a little technical help, I'm happy to set up some tools for them to get them started.

    1. media organizations would do well to incorporate them into their Web sites as an important new addition to the journalistic toolkit.
    1. Public writing became a venue for retaining parts of myself that I would not submit to institutional transformation.
    2. 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.

      I wonder a bit about applying behavioral economics or areas like System 1/System 2 of D. Kahneman and A. Tversky to social media as well. Some (a majority?) use Twitter as an immediate knee-jerk reaction to content they're reading and interacting with in a very System 1 sense while others use longer form writing and analysis seen in the blogosphere to create System 2 sort of social thinking.

      This naturally needs to be cross referenced in peoples' time and abilities to consume these things and the reactions and dopamine responses they provoke. Most people are apt to read the shorter form writing because it's easier and takes less time and effort compared with longer form writing which requires far more cognitive load and time expenditure.

    1. 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.

      And this is likely the reason that the longer form blogs never went out of style in areas of higher education where people are still posting long form content. This "proof of work" is something they ultimately end up using in other areas.

      Jessifer example of three part post written for a journal that was later put back into long form for publication.

  38. Sep 2020
    1. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery.

      This is good point about blogging, however it's also a different way of thinking about writing than using e.g. Zettelkasten, where the thinking process is within the boundary of slip-box, but the outcome is composed from the notes you have.

    1. 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.

      Een interessant inzicht van Robin Sloan (via) wat mij doet denken aan zowel de Zettelkasten methode van Niklas Luhman maar ook aan de opkomst van nieuwsbrieven de laatste maanden. Online publiceren begon met het maken en distribueren van "stock" sites. Semi-statische sites die soms nog terug zijn te vinden. De laatste 20 jaar zijn de flow feeds daar bij gekomen. Met name de social sites. Email en nieuwsbrieven lijken die sweet spot er tussen hebben gevonden. Enerzijds flow omdat ze periodiek verschijnen. Anderzijds stock omdat ze blijven bestaan in een online archief en in het mailarchief van de ontvanger. Een zoektocht in mijn mailbox brengt soms het antwoord boven in de vorm van een nieuwsbrief bericht van jaren geleden.

    1. 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.”

      Bookmarks op je site zijn één van de meest traditionele vormen van bloggen en je eigen website vorm geven. Inderdaad kan Hypothesis helpen in het proces om de links van context te voorzien, ze bij elkaar te houden én via de Hypothesis API ze op allerlei manieren in je eigen systeem te krijgen. In welke vorm ze uiteindelijk in je eigen commonplace site/digital garden terecht komen, dat is aan je eigen creativiteit. Wat ik erg hoopgevend vind, is dat Hypothesis best wat metadata opslaat van de annotatie, wat weer mogelijkheden geeft voor andere dwarsverbanden, backlinks en digitaal "tuinieren".

  39. Aug 2020
    1. 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.

      You don't have to differentiate yourself by WHAT you write (niche topics) but you can do so by HOW you write (writing style.

      • Write about popular topics with you own spin
      • May not become rich but you will get somewhere
      • Popular topics are popular for a reason. They will bring you decent success.
    2. 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.

      Finding is a Niche is always necessary.

      Its like Vanilla vs. Fish Flavored Ice Cream

      There are plenty of people selling Vanilla, Chocolate, and strawberry and making money. They might not get all the market share but they will sell far more and be liked than any fish flavored ice cream.

    1. 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.

      Medium conducted a study and found that optimal reading time is 7 minutes.

      Anything from 4-8 minutes performs great.

    2. 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

      Shorter the word count/article size will increase retention.

      700 to 1000 words is good. Just keep it concise.

      Shorter articles are more attractive

    3. 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.

      Study shows that the scannability of an article is more important for retention than the length.

      Key factors that are responsible for retaining readers is:

      1.Highlighted keywords- Bold to express important information.

      2.Meaningful subtitles - Someone reading only the subtitles must have a good idea of what the article is about

      3.Variety - Bullet points, different sized sentences and paragraphs, pictures/graphics, and so on.

      4.Credibility - Gotta look like you know what you're talking about.

    4. 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.

      Attention span for articles is around 9 seconds.

      9 Seconds is the window to convince someone to keep reading.

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
  40. May 2020
    1. 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.

      Yes!

  41. Apr 2020
    1. I have been considering blogging platforms long time ago. My criteria was different, but I care, as you do, about underlying tech stack, programming language and autonomy.

      I have blogged about my blogging and these days I just use Markdeep with Fossil and Hypothesis for comments and annotations (as I'm doing here). I think this combination is working pretty fine for now and maybe I just automate the process here and there as needed.

      By the way, I also like the self contained tech (I call them "pocket infrastructures": simple, self-contained, local first and extensible), but my exploration goes into dynamic languages and environments with Pharo (a Squeak fork) and I'm just putting Nim in my radar recently. I may try LittleStore. soon, as I see really aligned to my interests.

  42. Mar 2020
    1. 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.
  43. Jan 2020
    1. But tell them you’re launching a blog and see how that goes: Huh. Really, a blog? In 2020? Wow.
    1. "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."

      Totally agree with this ;)

  44. Dec 2019
    1. 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.

      This is an interesting format. Reminds me a bit of the way Dave Winer blogs, though he posts his notes contemporaneously. It's also not too dissimilar to how Colin Walker posts where his website shows the last day on the front page with a list of all his posts (or the last three, if there's nothing posted yet for today).

    1. 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.

      Interesting approach on ignoring any type of site generators

    1. 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.
    2. By the numbers

      I'm curious what things would look like if you similarly did an analysis of Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Where are you putting more time? What's giving you the most benefit? Where are you getting value and how are you giving it back?

    1. 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.

      One might even say that some of your small ideas in blogging have, in aggregate, transformed into larger ideas. Perhaps in being so close to them, you haven't noticed the transition?

  45. Nov 2019
    1. What have you learned from reading or participating?

      Primarily I've been heartened to have meet a group of people who are still interested in and curious about exploring new methods of communication on the web!

    1. 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?

      He doesn't link directly to it, but this post directly follows one of mine within the blogchain. Here's the original: https://boffosocko.com/2019/11/15/on-blogging-infrastructure/

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

      Another example in the wild of someone using a version of "thinking out loud" or "thought spaces" to describe blogging.

  46. Jul 2019
    1. 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.
  47. Jun 2019
  48. Feb 2019
    1. 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.
    1. 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
  49. Jan 2019
    1. 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.
  50. Dec 2018
    1. The Weblog community is basically a whole bunch of expert witnesses who increase their expertise constantly through a sort of reputation engine."

      The trouble is how is this "reputation engine" built? What metrics does it include? Can it be gamed? Social media has gotten lots of this wrong and it has caused problems.

    1. 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.
    1. 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.
    1. 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.
  51. Nov 2018
  52. Oct 2018
    1. 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.

      first nomad, yeah!

  53. Sep 2018
    1. <link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/username/xmlrpc" /> <link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/username/webmention" />
  54. Aug 2018
  55. Jul 2018
    1. 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.