156 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
  2. Jan 2024
    1. Space rocks that fell to Earth within the last century contain the five bases that store information in DNA and RNA

      I find this truly exhilarating! This speaks of evidence being found for the first time on how our orgins and life itself may have been originated from perhaps the big bang or something we don't yet know yet. Giving us the largest hint we've ever thought possible on soon discovering where the true origins of life originated. Now all we need to do is find the "How" this was possible by this shocking evidence.

    1. https://streetpass.social/

      StreetPass, a browser extension that leverages rel="me" for compiling a list of potential mastodon accounts to follow as you visit websites.

  3. Dec 2023
    1. 4. Cite Card Icon : Hat (something above you)Tag : 5th block Quotation, cooking recipe from book, web, tv, anything about someone else’s idea is classified into this class. Important here is distinguishing “your idea (Discovery Card)” and “someone else’s idea (Cite Card)”. Source of the information must be included in the Cite Card. A book, for example, author, year, page(s) are recorded for later use.

      https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/189972899/in/album-72157594200490122/

      Despite being used primarily as a productivity tool the PoIC system also included some features of personal knowledge management with "discovery cards" and "citation cards". Discovery cards were things which contained one's own ideas while the citation cards were the ideas of others and included bibliographic information. Citation cards were tagged on the 5th block as an indicator within the system.

      Question: How was the information material managed? Was it separate from the date-based system? On first blush it would appear not, nor was there a subject index which would have made it more difficult for one to find data within the system.

    1. Discovery Card Icon : Electric Bulb (lightning)Tag : 3rd block Things from my brain, mind, spirit, anything emerge from inside me, are classified into this class. This is the most important and enjoyable cards among the Four Cards. You will see your discoveries emerges in your mind like a water from spring. In fact, the 80% of index cards in my dock is dominated by this Discovery Card.

      These are more similar to zettelkasten and commonplacing traditions. They comprise the majority of the system.

    1. https://blumm.blog/2022/12/31/dejo-de-recomendarte-cuarenta-y-dos-libros-que-no-has-leido-en-2022-pero-yo-si-una-lista-menos/

      Bernardo Munuera Montero recommends that one never recommend books to others as it's most likely a lost cause. He contends that people are far better of discovering their own reading for their own devices.

  4. Nov 2023
    1. I think the symmetry of the naming between lib and app/lib will lead a fresh Rails developer to seek out the answer to “Why are there two lib directories?", and they will become illuminated. And it will prevent them from seeking the answer to “How do I autoload lib?” which will start them on a rough path that leads to me advising them to undo it.
  5. Sep 2023
    1. 1:18:00 goosebumps, using media as inspiration and self-discovery, using as visualisation

      1:20:00 Goggins listening to one song for 17 hours “going to distance”

    2. 44:00 continuous self-discovery (constant war), “this is life”, “life is not a movie”

    3. 37:00 going to war with self

      • see zk notes on self-discovery & finding meaning in darkness
  6. Aug 2023
    1. Personally I often used #type/sketchnote and #type/question. But I will spend a little time and effort to build up an improved architecture for tagging.

      reply to Edmund at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/18550/#Comment_18550

      @Edmund since I don't do such a thing myself, I'm curious what sort of affordance your #type/NoteName tagging provides you with (especially if you're using more than just those two)? Do you use them regularly for search or filtering, and if so for what reason? How does it help?

      To me it look likes extra metadata/work, but without a lot of direct long term value in exchange. Does doing this for long periods of time provide you with outsized emergent value of some sort that's not easy to see from the start?

    1. For context, I don't use a traditional Zettelkasten system. It's more of a commonplace book/notecard system similar to Ryan HolidayI recently transitioned to a digital system and have been using Logseq, which I enjoy. It's made organizing my notes and ideas much easier, but I've noticed that I spend a lot of time on organizing my notesSince most of my reading is on Kindle, my process involves reading and highlighting as I read, then exporting those highlights to Markdown and making a page in Logseq. Then I tag every individual highlightThis usually isn't too bad if a book/research article has 20-30 highlights, but, for example, I recently had a book with over 150 highlights, and I spent about half an hour tagging each oneI started wondering if it's overkill to tag each highlight since it can be so time consuming. The advantage is that if I'm looking for passages about a certain idea/topic, I can find it specifically rather than having to go through the whole bookI was also thinking I could just have a set of tags for each book/article that capture what contexts I'd want to find the information in. This would save time, but I'd spend a little more time digging through each document looking for specificsCurious to hear your thoughts, appreciate any suggestions

      reply to m_t_rv_s__n/ at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/164n6qg/is_this_overkill/

      First, your system is historically far more traditional than Luhmann's more specific practice. See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/

      If you're taking all the notes/highlights from a particular book and keeping them in a single file, then it may be far quicker and more productive to do some high level tagging on the entire book/file itself and then relying on and using basic text search to find particular passages you might use at a later date.

      Spending time reviewing over all of your notes and tagging/indexing them individually may be beneficial for some basic review work. But this should be balanced out with your long term needs. If your area is "sociology", for example, and you tag every single idea related to the topic of sociology with #sociology, then it will cease to have any value you to you when you search for it and find thousands of disconnected notes you will need to sift through. Compare this with Luhmann's ZK which only had a few index entries under "sociology". A better long term productive practice, and one which Luhmann used, is indexing one or two key words when he started in a new area and then "tagging" each new idea in that branch or train of though with links to other neighboring ideas. If you forget a particular note, you can search your index for a keyword and know you'll find that idea you need somewhere nearby. Scanning through the neighborhood of notes you find will provide a useful reminder of what you'd been working on and allow you to continue your work in that space or link new things as appropriate.

      If it helps to reframe the long term scaling problem of over-tagging, think of a link from one idea to another as the most specific tag you can put on an idea. To put this important idea into context, if you do a Google search for "tagging" you'll find 240,000,000 results! If you do a search for the entirety of the first sentence in this paragraph, you'll likely only find one very good and very specific result, and the things which are linked to it are going to have tremendous specific value to you by comparison.

      Perhaps the better portions of your time while reviewing notes would be taking the 150 highlights and finding the three to five most important, useful, and (importantly) reusable ones to write out in your own words and begin expanding upon and linking? These are the excerpts you'll want to spend more time on and tag/index for future use rather than the other hundreds. Over time, you may eventually realize that the hundreds are far less useful than the handful (in management spaces this philosophy is known as the Pareto principle), so spending a lot of make work time on them is less beneficial for whatever end goals you may have. (The make work portions are often the number one reason I see people abandoning these practices because they feel overwhelmed working on raw administrivia instead of building something useful and interesting to themselves.) Naturally though, you'll still have those hundreds sitting around in a file if you need to search, review, or use them. You won't have lost them by not working on them, but more importantly you'll have gained loads of extra time to work on the more important pieces. You should notice that the time you save and the value you create will compound over time.

      And as ever, play around with these to see if they work for you and your specific needs. Some may be good and others bad—it will depend on your needs and your goals. Practice, experiment, have fun.

      Meme image from Office Space featuring a crowd of office employees standing in front of a banner on the wall that reads: Is this Good for the Zettelkasten?

  7. Jul 2023
    1. Isn’t it too much time and energy consuming? I’m not provoking, I’m genuine.

      reply to IvanCyb at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1587onp/comment/jt8zbu4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 Asking broadly about indexing methods in zettelkasten

      When you begin you'll find yourself creating lots of index entries to start, in part because you have none, but you'll find with time that you need to do less and less because index entries already exist for most of what you would add. More importantly most of the entries you might consider duplicating are likely to be very near cards that already have those index entries.

      As an example if you have twenty cards on cultural anthropology, the first one will be indexed with "cultural anthropology" to give you a pointer of where to start. Then when you need to add a new card to that section, you'll look up "cultural anthropology" and skim through what you've got to find the closest related card and place it. You likely won't need to create a new index entry for it at all.

      But for argument's sake, let's say you intend to do some work at the intersection of "cultural anthropology" and "writing" and this card is also about "writing". Then you might want to add an index entry for "writing" from which you'll branch off in the future. This will tend to keep your index very sparse. As an example you can look at Niklas Luhmann's digitized collection to notice that he spent his career in the area of "sociology" but there are only just a few pointers from his index into his collection under that keyword. If he had tagged every single card related to "sociology" as "sociology" in his index, the index entry for it would have been wholly unusable in just a few months. Broadly speaking his entire zettelkasten is about sociology, so you need to delve a few layers in and see which subtopics, sub-subtopics, sub-sub-subtopics, etc. exist. As you go deeper into specific topics you'll notice that you branch down and out into more specific subareas as you begin to cover all the bases within that topic. If you like, for fun, you can see this happening in my digital zettelkasten on the topic of "zettelkasten" at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22zettelkasten%22. The tool only shows the top 50 tags for that subject in the side bar, but you can slowly dig down into subtopics to see what they look like and a bit of how they begin to overlap.

      Incidentally, this is one of the problems with those who tag everything with top level topic headings in digital contexts—you do a search for something important and find so much that it becomes a useless task to try to sift through it all. As a result, users need better tools to give them the ability to do more fine-grained searching, filtering, and methods of discovery.

    1. Anthony doesn't want to destroy thinking, but, instead, wants to neutralise them. This means that he still has thoughts, like thoughts for intellectual thinking, or thoughts for planning, and so on, but, he wants to neutralise thoughts that seem excessive, not helpful (see questions) - also see comments made on Eckhardt Tolle in previous note - see Shi Heng Yi, and his 4 steps (the fourth one being self-inquiry), and the video on embracing suffering

      • not learning oneself, self-master as self-discovery & self-awareness
      • spirituality as learning of oneself
      • enjoy time doing nothing, also find things you like to do
      • each person find way to climb the mountain (gaining clarity on top of mountain)
      • 5 hindrances as challenges to journey (state of mind, not having/getting clarity)
      • (1) sensual desire
      • 2 ill will (rejection, also see my ideas on madness) "let go"
      • 3 sloth (dullness of mind/body) lack if motivation/energy (see flow)
      • 4 restlessness (not being in present)
      • 5 sceptical doubt (being indecisive, getting lost in thoughts)
      • structure/design life to prevent hindrances from arising (see my way of life as making environments/practices to prevent?) "techniques to remove them"
      • (4 steps to prevent the hindrances)
      • 1 what is your state of mind
      • 2 accept the situation/someone/something to be they way it is/the way they are
      • 3 emotional & mental questioning (why did it come up? understanding it, what will happen if it remains?)
      • 4 non-identification (I am not my mind, my body, or my emotions, it is just that I am there to observe them all)
  8. Jun 2023
    1. Several English renderings have been published over the years. The following excerpt is from “Xunzi: The Complete Text” within chapter 8 titled “The Achievements of the Ru”. The translator was Eric L. Hutton, and the publisher was Princeton University Press in 2014. Emphasis added to excerpts:[1]2014 Copyright, Xunzi: The Complete Text, Translated by Eric L. Hutton, Chapter 8: The Achievements of the Ru, Quote Page 64, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. (Verified with … Continue reading Not having heard of it is not as good as having heard of it. Having heard of it is not as good as having seen it. Having seen it is not as good as knowing it. Knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice. Learning arrives at putting it into practice and then stops . . .

      The frequent educational quote "Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn.", often misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, is most attributable to 3rd century Confucian philosopher Kunzi (Xun Kuang or 荀子) who wrote:

      Not having heard of it is not as good as having heard of it. Having heard of it is not as good as having seen it. Having seen it is not as good as knowing it. Knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice. Learning arrives at putting it into practice and then stops . . .

      The translation of which appears in Xunzi: The Complete Text, Translated by Eric L. Hutton, Chapter 8: The Achievements of the Ru, Quote Page 64, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. 2014.

      Variations of the sentiment and attributions have appeared frequently thereafter.

  9. May 2023
  10. Apr 2023
    1. 44:19 - [Claudia] The classification is anything but indifferent.44:24 The manner of shelving the books44:26 is meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader,44:30 who, looking on the shelves for one book,44:33 is attracted by the kindred ones next to it,44:36 glances at the sections above and below,44:39 and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought44:43 which may lend to additional interests44:46 to the one he was pursuing.

      The classification is anything but indifferent. The manner of shelving the books is meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader, who, looking on the shelves for one book, is attracted by the kindred ones next to it, glances at the sections above and below, and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought which may lend to additional interests to the one he was pursuing.<br /> —Claudia Wedepohl on the design of Warburg's library, [00:44:19] in Aby Warburg: Metamorphosis and Memory

      Provides a similar sort of description of the push towards serendipity and discovery found in one's zettelkasten as well as that in Melvil Dewey's library classification and arrangements.

    1. does my zettelkasten make writing... harder?

      Worried about self-plagiarizing in the future? Others like Hans Blumenberg have struck through used cards with red pencil. This could also be done with metadata or other searchable means in the digital realm as well. (See: https://hypothes.is/a/mT8Twk2cEe2bvj8lq2Lgpw)

      General problems she faces: 1. Notetaking vs. writing voice (shifting between one and another and not just copy/pasting) 2. discovery during writing (put new ideas into ZK as you go or just keep writing on the page when the muse strikes) 3. Linearity of output: books are linear and ZK is not

      Using transclusion may help in the initial draft/zero draft?<br /> ie: ![[example]] (This was mentioned in the comments as well.)

      directional vs. indirectional notes - see Sascha Fast's article


      Borrowing from the telecom/cable industry, one might call this the zettelkasten "last mile problem". I've also referred to it in the past as the zettelkasten output problem. (See also the description and comments at https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/12/call-for-model-examples-of-zettelkasten-output-processes/ as well as some of the examples linked at https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/)

      Many journal articles that review books (written in English) in the last half of the 20th century which include the word zettelkasten have a negative connotation with respect to ZK and frequently mention the problem that researchers/book writers have of "tipping out their ZKs" without the outlining and argument building/editing work to make their texts more comprehensible or understandable.

      Ward Cunningham has spoken in the past about the idea of a Markov Monkey who can traverse one's atomic notes in a variety of paths (like a Choose Your Own Adventure, but the monkey knows all the potential paths). The thesis in some sense is the author choosing a potential "best" path (a form of "travelling salesperson problem), for a specific audience, who presumably may have some context of the general area.

      Many mention Sonke Ahrens' book, but fail to notice Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis (MIT, 2015) and Gerald Weinberg's "The Fieldstone Method (Dorset House, 2005) which touch a bit on these composition problems.

      I'm not exactly sure of the particulars and perhaps there isn't enough historical data to prove one direction or another, but Wittgenstein left behind a zettelkasten which his intellectual heirs published as a book. In it they posit (in the introduction) that rather than it being a notetaking store which he used to compose longer works, that the seeming similarities between the ideas in his zettelkasten and some of his typescripts were the result of him taking his typescripts and cutting them up to put into his zettelkasten. It may be difficult to know which direction was which, but my working hypothesis is that the only way it could have been ideas from typescripts into his zettelkasten would have been if he was a "pantser", to use your terminology, and he was chopping up ideas from his discovery writing to place into contexts within his zettelkasten for later use. Perhaps access to the original physical materials may be helpful in determining which way he was moving. Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/BptoKsRPEe2zuW8MRUY1hw

      Some helpful examples: - academia : Victor Margolin - fiction/screenwriting: - Dustin Lance Black - Vladimir Nabokov - others...

  11. Feb 2023
    1. Part 2: Search & Inspect. Denote as a Zettelkasten, 2023. https://share.tube/w/4ad929jjNYMLc6eRppVQmc.

      His file naming convention and search operation in this is really fantastic:

      20230226155400==51a3b--note-title__tag1_tag2.org

      This allows one to search the file by date/time, signature, title or tags, by using the =, - or _ along with text.

      Beyond this however, there's a fair amount of context to build to use this system including using regex search.

    1. Wer sich also solch einen hölzernen Lebenspartner aufzieht, wird nach einigen Jahren immer interessantere Antworten auf seine Fragen bekommen …

      google translate:

      So if you raise such a wooden life partner, you will get more and more interesting answers to your questions after a few years...

      I love the idea of rearing a zettelkasten as a "wooden life partner".

  12. Jan 2023
    1. Darwin knew nothing of genes. He was unaware of the work of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who worked in his monastery garden and did experiments on the inheritance of pod-color in peas. Mendel discovered that heritable traits such as pod-color are inherited in discrete packages which he called genes. Any act of sexual reproduction of two parents with different genes results in offspring with a random distribution of the parental genes. Heredity in any population is a random process, resulting in a redistribution of genes between parents and offspring. The numbers of genes of various types are maintained on the average from generation to generation, but the numbers in each individual offspring are random. Mendel made this discovery and published it in the journal of the Brünn Natural History Society, only seven years after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Mendel had read Darwin's book, but Darwin never read Mendel's paper. In 1866, the year when Mendel's paper was published, Darwin did a very similar experiment, using snap-dragons instead of peas, and testing the inheritance of flower-shape instead of pod-color. Like Mendel, he bred three generations of plants, and observed the ratio of normal-shaped to star-shaped flowers in the third generation. Unlike Mendel, he had no understanding of the mathematics of statistical variations. He used only 125 third-generation plants and obtained a value of 2.4 for the ratio of normal to star-shaped offspring. This result did not suggest any clear picture of the way flower-shapes are inherited. He stopped the experiment and explored the question no further. Darwin did not understand that he would need a much larger sample to obtain a statistically significant result. Mendel understood statistics. His sample was sixty-four times larger than Darwin's, so that his statistical uncertainty was eight times smaller. He used 8023 plants. Mendel's essential insight was to see that sexual reproduction is a system for introducing randomness into inheritance. In peas as in humans, inheritance is carried by genes that are handed down from parents to offspring. His simple theory of inheritance carried by genes predicted a ratio of three between green and yellow pods in the third generation. He found a ratio of 3.01 with the big sample. This gave him confidence that the theory was correct. His experiment required immense patience, continuing for eight years with meticulous attention to detail. Every plant was carefully isolated to prevent any intruding bee from causing an unintended fertilization. A monastery garden was an ideal place for such experiments. Unfortunately, his experiments ended when his monastic order promoted him to the rank of abbot. Obedient to his vows, he ceased to be an explorer and became an administrator. His life-work lay hidden in an obscure German-language journal in Brünn, the city that later became Brno and is now in the Czech Republic.

      !- history of science : Mendel and Darwin - Mendel’s training in statistics helped Mendel construct his experiment differently from Darwin’s and also to interpret the results differently

  13. Dec 2022
    1. To Zotero or not to Zotero?

      reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalKnowledgeMgmt/comments/zgvbg4/to_zotero_or_not_to_zotero/

      I don't often add in web pages, but for books and journal articles I love Zotero for quickly bookmarking, tagging, and saving material I want to read. It's worth it's weight in gold just for this functionality even if you're not using it for writing citations in publications.

      Beyond this, because of it's openness and ubiquity it's got additional useful plugins for various functions you may want to play around with and a relatively large number of tools are able to dovetail with it to provide additional functionality. As an example, the ability to dump groups of material from Zotero into ResearchRabbit to discover other literature I ought to consider is a fantastically useful feature one is unlikely to find elsewhere (yet).

    1. §5.136            E.  Objecting to ProductionParty deponent. When the description of materials in the deposition notice is not reasonably specified and the deponent cannot identify what should be produced, or if it is otherwise objectionable (e.g., the request is unduly burdensome or seeks documents protected by the attorney-client privilege), counsel for the party or party-related deponent should serve written objections at least 3 days before the deposition as described in §5.135. CCP §§2025.410(a)–(b), 2025.440(a). The client may attend the deposition and refuse to comply with all or some of the requests for production, placing the burden on noticing counsel to move to compel production. CCP §2025.480(a). See chap 15. Or counsel may move beforehand to stay the deposition and quash the notice under CCP §2025.410(a) (see §5.137) or to seek a protective order under CCP §2025.420(a) (see §§5.139–5.141).Nonparty deponent. If the deponent is a nonparty, the procedures to be employed depend on the type of documents sought and who is objecting to production. If the documents sought are certain types of personal records, a nonparty consumer, employee, or custodian (or his or her attorney) may serve written objections without filing a motion to quash. CCP §§1985.3(g), 1985.6(f). See §§5.108–5.130. But when no such objection is made, any other party objecting to the production of records by a nonparty deponent must file a motion to quash the subpoena or a protective order; merely objecting to the production does not prevent a nonparty from producing them. CCP §1987.1.Although a nonparty served with a business records deposition subpoena can seek relief from the trial court before the date set for production, the nonparty is not required to do so and can properly raise objections for the first time at the document production. Unzipped Apparel, LLC v Bader (2007) 156 CA4th 123, 131, citing Monarch Healthcare v Superior Court (2000) 78 CA4th 1282, 1288.

      objecting to request for production included in deposition notice or subpoena

      discovery

    1. https://micro.blog/posts/search?q=indieweb

      an alternate form for micro.blog search functionality

    1. https://micro.blog/discover/search?q=indieweb

      Micro.blog search functionality uses a url query (example https://micro.blog/discover/search?q=indieweb), but it only includes posts which have been added to the "discovery" section and isn't a site wide search

  14. Nov 2022
  15. Oct 2022
    1. Blumenberg quotes GeorgChristoph Lichtenberg’s reaction to William Herschel’s 1781 discovery ofUranus: “Inventing an unfailing means against toothache, curing itinstantly, would be well worth as much and more than discovering anotherplanet.”
  16. Sep 2022
    1. you cannot discover lands already inhabited

      Fatal flaw in the Doctrine of Discovery

      Papal Bulls written from 1450 to 1493 that gave permission to European Christian explorers to claim land that was not already claimed and ruled over by European explorers. It assumes the dehumanization of the existing inhabitants.

  17. Aug 2022
    1. One might want to make a private annotation to something which is visible world-wide but unwritable. The annotation would be invisible to another reader
  18. Jul 2022
    1. An instance may be given of the necessity of the “ separate sheet ” system.Among the many sources of information from which we constructed our bookThe Manor and the Borough were the hundreds of reports on particular boroughsmade by the Municipal Corporation Commissioners in 1835 .These four hugevolumes are well arranged and very fully indexed; they were in our own possession;we had read them through more than once; and we had repeatedly consulted themon particular points. We had, in fact, used them as if they had been our own boundnotebooks, thinking that this would suffice. But, in the end, we found ourselvesquite unable to digest and utilise this material until we had written out every oneof the innumerable facts on a separate sheet of paper, so as to allow of the mechanicalabsorption of these sheets among our other notes; of their complete assortment bysubjects; and of their being shuffled and reshuffled to test hypotheses as to suggestedco-existences and sequences.

      Webb's use case here sounds like she's got the mass data, but that what she really desired was a database which she could more easily query to do her work and research. As a result, she took the flat file data and made it into a manually sortable and searchable database.

    2. For a highly elaborated and skilled processof “ making notes ”, besides its obvious use in recording observationswhich would otherwise be forgotten, is actually an instrument of dis¬covery.

      Beatrice Webb sees the primary uses of notes as a memory device and a discovery device.

    1. https://openmentions.com/

      A community site in the form of HackerNews, Reddit, et al or IndieNews or IndieWeb.xyz that runs on material submitted by webmention.

      I thought I'd bookmarked it earlier this year when it opened up.

      Run by Matt: https://lordmatt.co.uk/

    1. Once a post goes viral on Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, or anywhere else off-platform, it has the potential to form a “Katamari ball” where it gets upvotes because it has upvotes (which means it gets more upvotes, because it has more upvotes, which means…well…you get it). This is also known as "the network effect", but I feel a Katamari ball better illustrates it.

      Network effects can describe a broad variety of phenomenon. Is Katamari ball a better descriptor of this specific phenomenon?

      How does one prioritize the richer quality Lindy library material that may be even more beneficial than things which are simply new?

    2. The most common way is to log the number of upvotes (or likes/downvotes/angry-faces/retweets/poop-emojis/etc) and algorithmically determine the quality of a post by consensus.

      When thinking about algorithmic feeds, one probably ought to not include simple likes/favorites/bookmarks as they're such low hanging fruit. Better indicators are interactions which take time, effort, work to post.

      Using various forms of webmention as indicators could be interesting as one can parse responses and make an actual comment worth more than a dozen "likes", for example.

      Curating people (who respond) as well as curating the responses themselves could be useful.

      Time windowing curation of people and curators could be a useful metric.

      Attempting to be "democratic" in these processes may often lead to the Harry and Mary Beercan effect and gaming issues seen in spaces like Digg or Twitter and have dramatic consequences for the broader readership and community. Democracy in these spaces is more likely to get you cat videos and vitriol with a soupçon of listicles and clickbait.

  19. Jun 2022
    1. You never knowwhen the rejected scraps from one project might become the perfectmissing piece in another. The possibilities are endless.

      He says this, but his advice on how to use them is too scant and/or flawed. Where are they held? How are they indexed? How are they linked so that finding and using them in the future? (especially, other than rote memory or the need to have vague memory and the ability to search for them in the future?)

    1. Chrome extension that adds to your browsing experience by showing you relevant discussions about your current web page from Hacker News and Reddit.

      Similar to the browser extension / "bug" that shows other Hypothes.is conversations and annotations.

      This would be cool if it could be expanded to personal search to show you blog conversations or Twitter conversations of people you follow.

      Link to: - https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/18/wikilinks-and-hashtags-as-a-portal-to-cross-site-search/ - https://boffosocko.com/2019/06/29/social-reading-user-interface-for-discovery/

    1. This podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Anchor. Please subscribe on your favoured podcast provider and leave a review.

      There are actually seven different services that this podcaster has done a huge amount of work to put their content on, ostensibly for the widest discovery, but not a single one of them has a link to the raw audio file to make it easy for one to bookmark and listen to later. Apparently the podcasting silo services have managed to win out over the open web.

      Do we really need to make podcasting this hard on individual publishers? Why can't the publisher just have one location and tell all the aggregators, here's a link to my feed, copy it if you will and want to help distribute my content? In some sense, this is part of what is happening as all seven services are using the same findable source, they're just making it more difficult to jump through all the hoops, which means the small guys end up paying more to do the extra work and potentially lose everything if that one source disappears, closes down, or gets acquired and goes away.

      These sorts of artificial hurdles and problems are what make it so hard to get up and running.

  20. Apr 2022
    1. …and they are typically sorted: chronologically: newest items are displayed firstthrough data: most popular, trending, votesalgorithmically: the system determines what you see through your consumption patterns and what it wants you to seeby curation: humans determine what you seeby taxonomy: content is displayed within buckets of categories, like Wikipedia Most media entities employ a combination of the above.

      For reading richer, denser texts what is the best way of ordering and sorting it?

      Algorithmically sorting with a pseudo-chronological sort is the best method for social media content, but what is the most efficient method for journal articles? for books?

    1. ReconfigBehSci [@SciBeh]. (2021, November 26). RT @PeacockFlu: I should state I catagorically did not “discover” B.1.1.529—The first seqs were uploaded by teams from Botswana and HK, f… [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1464195732110557232

    1. 3. Who are you annotating with? Learning usually needs a certain degree of protection, a safe space. Groups can provide that, but public space often less so. In Hypothes.is who are you annotating with? Everybody? Specific groups of learners? Just yourself and one or two others? All of that, depending on the text you’re annotating? How granular is your control over the sharing with groups, so that you can choose your level of learning safety?

      This is a great question and I ask it frequently with many different answers.

      I've not seen specific numbers, but I suspect that the majority of Hypothes.is users are annotating in small private groups/classes using their learning management system (LMS) integrations through their university. As a result, using it and hoping for a big social experience is going to be discouraging for most.

      Of course this doesn't mean that no one is out there. After all, here you are following my RSS feed of annotations and asking these questions!

      I'd say that 95+% or more of my annotations are ultimately for my own learning and ends. If others stumble upon them and find them interesting, then great! But I'm not really here for them.

      As more people have begun using Hypothes.is over the past few years I have slowly but surely run into people hiding in the margins of texts and quietly interacted with them and begun to know some of them. Often they're also on Twitter or have their own websites too which only adds to the social glue. It has been one of the slowest social media experiences I've ever had (even in comparison to old school blogging where discovery is much higher in general use). There has been a small uptick (anecdotally) in Hypothes.is use by some in the note taking application space (Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq, etc.), so I've seen some of them from time to time.

      I can only think of one time in the last five or so years in which I happened to be "in a text" and a total stranger was coincidentally reading and annotating at the same time. There have been a few times I've specifically been in a shared text with a small group annotating simultaneously. Other than this it's all been asynchronous experiences.

      There are a few people working at some of the social side of Hypothes.is if you're searching for it, though even their Hypothes.is presences may seem as sparse as your own at present @tonz.

      Some examples:

      @peterhagen Has built an alternate interface for the main Hypothes.is feed that adds some additional discovery dimensions you might find interesting. It highlights some frequent annotators and provide a more visual feed of what's happening on the public Hypothes.is timeline as well as data from HackerNews.

      @flancian maintains anagora.org, which is like a planet of wikis and related applications, where he keeps a list of annotations on Hypothes.is by members of the collective at https://anagora.org/latest

      @tomcritchlow has experimented with using Hypothes.is as a "traditional" comments section on his personal website.

      @remikalir has a nice little tool https://crowdlaaers.org/ for looking at documents with lots of annotations.

      Right now, I'm also in an Obsidian-based book club run by Dan Allosso in which some of us are actively annotating the two books using Hypothes.is and dovetailing some of this with activity in a shared Obsidian vault. see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/24/55803196/. While there is a small private group for our annotations a few of us are still annotating the books in public. Perhaps if I had a group of people who were heavily interested in keeping a group going on a regular basis, I might find the value in it, but until then public is better and I'm more likely to come across and see more of what's happening out there.

      I've got a collection of odd Hypothes.is related quirks, off label use cases, and experiments: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/ including a list of those I frequently follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

      Like good annotations and notes, you've got to put some work into finding the social portion what's happening in this fun little space. My best recommendation to find your "tribe" is to do some targeted tag searches in their search box to see who's annotating things in which you're interested.

    1. Yeshiva teaching in the modern period famously relied on memorization of the most important texts, but a few medieval Hebrew manu-scripts from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries include examples of alphabetical lists of words with the biblical phrases in which they occurred, but without pre-cise locations in the Bible—presumably because the learned would know them.

      Prior to concordances of the Christian Bible there are examples of Hebrew manuscripts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that have lists of words and sentences or phrases in which they occurred. They didn't include exact locations with the presumption being that most scholars would know the texts well enough to quickly find them based on the phrases used.


      Early concordances were later made unnecessary as tools as digital search could dramatically decrease the load. However these tools might miss the value found in the serendipity of searching through broad word lists.

      Has anyone made a concordance search and display tool to automatically generate concordances of any particular texts? Do professional indexers use these? What might be the implications of overlapping concordances of seminal texts within the corpus linguistics space?

      Fun tools like the Bible Munger now exist to play around with find and replace functionality. https://biblemunger.micahrl.com/munge

      Online tools also have multi-translation versions that will show translational differences between the seemingly ever-growing number of English translations of the Bible.

    1. between search and discovery (and sometimes browse) is a tension between two desires: speed to information versus exploration of information

      Recently I've been struggling with the fact that I want both physical and digital copies of books. Digital copies let me automatically draw my highlights together for remixing and sharing, but physical copies allow for serendipitous rediscovery. If I know I want to read a book but don't have time right now I often get it off the shelf and leave it somewhere where it will be a visual cue for me later. I have been wondering how I could simulate that electronically (I keep coming back to the idea of a spaced repetition/incremental reading like system at the OS level, to resurface windows/tabs/books/anything at a serendipitous moment. I also consider how those digital photo frames could maybe be used)...

  21. Mar 2022
    1. Project Discovery Phase

      The main software development project phases, such as design, code writing, testing, deployment, and support, are well-liked by most entrepreneurs. But what about the Phase of Project Discovery? The Discovery Phase is the most underappreciated stage, and it may appear to be far more important than the others combined. The discovery phase of a project is frequently associated with unnecessary costs and, on occasion, with saving tens of thousands of dollars. The project discovery phase, on the other hand, is all about cost-effective product development.

    1. These ways of knowinghave inherent value and are leading Western scientists to betterunderstand celestial phenomena and the history and heritage thisconstitutes for all people.

      The phrase "ways of knowing" is fascinating and seems to have a particular meaning across multiple contexts.

      I'd like to collect examples of its use and come up with a more concrete definition for Western audiences.

      How close is it to the idea of ways (or methods) of learning and understanding? How is it bound up in the idea of pedagogy? How does it relate to orality and memory contrasted with literacy? Though it may not subsume the idea of scientific method, the use, evolution, and refinement of these methods over time may generally equate it with the scientific method.

      Could such an oral package be considered a learning management system? How might we compare and contrast these for drawing potential equivalencies of these systems to put them on more equal footing from a variety of cultural perspectives? One is not necessarily better than another, but we should be able to better appreciate what each brings to the table of world knowledge.

    1. Improved search engines will help for devoted searchers, but promoting a new contribution in the marketplace of ideas still takes effort. Improved methods to reach the right audiences will begin with email and newsgroups, but should be extended by nov el group formation methods.

      Search and discovery are hard problems in an ever increasing informational overload riddled society.

  22. Feb 2022
    1. https://dancohen.org/2019/07/23/engagement-is-the-enemy-of-serendipity/

      Dan Cohen talks about a design change in the New York Times app that actively discourages exploration and discovery by serendipity.

      This is similar to pulling out digital copies of books you're looking for instead of going to the library, tracking down the book on the shelf and in the process seeing and experiencing the books on the shelf which are nearby, or even the book that catches your eye across the aisle, wasn't in your sphere of search or interest, but you pick it up anyway.

      How can we bring this sort of design back to digital experiences?

      It's not just the algorithmic feeds which are narrowing our interests and exposure, but the design of our digital spaces as well.

  23. Jan 2022
    1. Jean Paul invented a similar system and called it Witz. Like Tesauro, Jean Paul considered that the matter was to cede a prearranged ge-ography of places where everything had its own seat but was also compelled to remain in its own seat without possible deviation. The dismantlement of this architecture was required to change the rhetorical invention--that is, the retrieval of what is already known but has been forgotten--into an invention in the modern, scientific sense of the term.73 Also similar to Tesauro, accord-ing to Jean Paul, such an invention or discovery could occur only through the jumbled recording of notes taken from readings (or, from personal reflections) and retrievable by means of a subject index. By searching and recombining, the compiler would have put into practice the chance principle on which the whole knowledge storage mechanism was based; he would have likely discov-ered similarities and connections between remote items that he would have otherwise overlooked.

      73 Cf. Götz Müller, Jean Pauls Exzerpte (Würzburg, 1988), 321–22

      I'm not quite sure I understand what the mechanism of this is specifically. Revisit it later. Sounds like it's using the set up the system not only to discover the adjacent possible but the remote improbable.

    1. https://lindylearn.substack.com/p/lindylearn-reflections-roadmap-and

      Some interesting ideas to watch here.

      I remember a Twitter app service that was built around Twitter lists that I was an early user of, but I'm not able to find it now. I'm not sure if it's even still around after Twitter killed off a lot of their API access years ago.

    1. Serious reading will require just as much effort as it has always required.

      Reading is hard to disrupt.

      Speeding up and dramatically improving the reading process is incredibly difficult. No one has yet made really huge strides in this space. Google has made it imminently more accessible to the masses, but it still requires a lot of physical work and processing on our part.

  24. Dec 2021
    1. Similar to the idea of {{ if .Title }}, does Micro.blog (or Hugo) have a way to identify if a post only contains images and capture that to a variable?

      Another potential method (or an additional filter) for finding posts with photos, or more specifically posts whose main purpose is a photo or image is to use use the post type discovery algorithm. Given that Micro.blog is built on a variety of IndieWeb building blocks, most photos could/should have a class of u-photo on their img tags, so you could search for these instead or in addition to. I believe there are a set of parsers and tools out there that do this in a few languages already and someone in the IndieWeb Dev chat can direct you to them if they’re not linked to the page above.

  25. Nov 2021
    1. I also did a bit of web and JSTOR research, and started a new Zotero folder called World History Comparison. Research Rabbit found a bunch of similar titles, but it will be a while before I can get to many of them. I DID, however, ask some people and groups such as the OE Global community on Twitter, and I want to extend that request to anyone who watches this video. I know a number of my subs and viewers are in India and I've noticed on Twitter and on Abhijit Chavda's channel that there's quite a bit of controversy about the way Indian History is taught to Indian students.

      Methods for attacking a research problem about history used here:

      • Web research
      • Journal database research
      • Zotero reference manager stub
      • Research Rabbit (AI search)
      • Reach out on various social media channels

      Not mentioned, but perhaps useful:

      • Standard library search (WorldCat)
      • Internet Archive search (scanned historical textbooks)
      • Off-label and dark web services (Library Genesis, Pirate Bay, etc.)
      • Open access and OER sources (this will probably find newer perspectives and newer texts which sometimes have philosophical outlines of what they're trying to change for the future versus the pedagogies of the past)
      • Current curricula and recommended textbooks at major universities on particular books and potential comparisons to those of the past (perhaps via Internet Archive).
    1. wn written cultures material is typically sorted alphabeticallySor by some other method of linguistic ordering such as the number ofstrokes in qhinese charactersTW or systematicallyW according to various sysXtems that strive to map or hierarchize the relations between the items storedSincluding those of uoogle or ffiahooTW or miscellaneouslyY

      What about the emergence of non-hierarchal methods? (Can these logically be sorted somehow without this structure?)

      With digital commonplacing methods, I find that I can sort and search for things temporally by date and time as well as by tag/heading.

      Cross reference:

  26. Oct 2021
    1. "Vielmehr", so Schmidt et al., "notiert Luhmann in der Regel nur maximal drei Systemstellen, an denen der jeweilige Begriff zu finden ist, da er annimmt, dass man dann über das interne Verweisungsnetz schnell die anderen relevanten Stellen findet."

      machine translation:

      "Rather," says Schmidt et al., "Luhmann usually only notes a maximum of three system points at which the respective term can be found, since he assumes that the other relevant points can then be found quickly via the internal network of references."

      I wonder how many tags one might use in practice to maximize this? Can we determine such a thing mathematically?

    1. We showed that there is a correlation between how long a person stays up and how much he dreams the next night. Roughly speaking, for every ten extra minutes of activity each day, a man gets one extra minute of REM sleep. We also found that the more you dream, the shorter your reaction time during your next phase of wakefulness. After we made this discovery, the French army tried to find drugs that artificially increase the amount of time spent dreaming, with the hope of producing very long days of thirty or more hours for soldiers.

      Càng mơ nhiều thì càng có khả năng thức nhiều!

  27. Sep 2021
    1. You might be looking for a gift for a friend, doing research for a project, trying to learn other perspectives — they filter all data through the lens of capitalism and how they can sell you more things. That’s no replacement for human connection, or expertise a person has that could help you leap to things you didn’t know to look for.
    1. https://tracydurnell.com/2021/09/26/getting-more-women-involved-in-the-indieweb/

      Some great questions here and it's a difficult problem.

      My personal solution is to do my best to provide personal invitations to people I think would enjoy participating and then trying to provide some space and support for them once they've arrived.

      I do remember a self-named DrupalChix group of women around 2008 who banded together and created their own space within the Drupal community. Their leadership from within certainly helped to dramatically move the needle within Southern California. (cross reference: https://groups.drupal.org/women-drupal)

  28. 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. Paper Discovery:

      • Research Rabbit
      • Connected Papers
      • Citation Gecko
      • Papers With Code

      Zotero SciHub - for downloading papers into one's Zotero instance

      Academic Networking

      • lens.org (also good for discovery)
      • OrcID
      • Impact Story

      Ginko App (trees and cards interface) for writing with interesting import and export

      around 2:56: A bit too much Andy Matuschak worship? Pretty sure he didn't invent the so-called Andy Mode. Index cards pre-dated them surely as did Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki. There are many other idex-card UIs prior to Matuschak.

      Map of Content (MOC) apparently comes from How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think by Lion Kimbro.

      • it's a glorified Table of Contents really

      Plugins he's using:

      • 3:22:15 add codemirror matchbrackets js
      • 3:23:31 advanced tables
      • 3:26:09 Better word count
      • 3:26:41 calendar
      • 3:27:32 copy code block
      • 3:28:25 cycle through panes
      • 3:29:55 Dataview
      • 3:30:33 editor syntax highlight
      • 3:30:43 extended mathjax
      • 3:31:08 file explorer note count
      • 3:32:04 full-screen mode
      • 3:32:23 highlgiht public notes
      • 3:33:11 kanban
      • 3:33:35 kindle highlights
      • 3:33:56 metatable
      • 3:34:24 mindmap
      • 3:35:36 NLP dates
      • 3:36:10 pane relief
      • 3:36:42 paste URL
      • 3:37:21 periodic notes
      • 3:37:44 recent files
      • 3:37:59 relevant line number
      • 3:38:33 show current open note
      • 3:38:45 review
      • 3:39:43 sliding panes
      • 3:40:42 super charged links
      • 3:41:11 random note
      • 3:41:39 tag wrangler
      • 3:42:22 templater
      • 3:46:05 zoom

      textsniper for OCR and potentially text-to-speech, apple only, so leark for others.

      MathPix

    1. An interesting directory of personal blogs on software and security.

      While it aggregates from various sources and allows people to submit directly to it, it also calculates a quality score/metric by using a total number of Hacker News points earned by the raw URL

      Apparently uses a query like: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=example.com to view all posts from HN.

    1. He mentions Amazon wishlists that pile up and never get used. Similar to the way people pile up bookmarks and never use or revisit them.

      One of the benefits of commonplace books (and tools like Obsidian, et al.) is that one is forced to re-see or re-discover these over time. This restumbling upon these things can be incredibly valuable.

  29. Jul 2021
    1. A top down view of some learning strategies to begin teasing out which may be better than others.

      Are they broadly applicable or domain specific?

      What learning methods and pedagogy piece are best and for which domains.

      How can we balance learning and doing an overview of theory versus practice?

      Which methods are better for beginners versus domain specific experts?

      Which are better for overview versus creating new knowledge?

      https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2021/07/13/against-the-real-thing/

    2. Pure discovery learning is the idea of not giving instructions at all. Simply present the pupil with the problem situation and let them figure it out for themselves. Unfortunately, the research seems to be against this.1 Discovery learning is a lot less efficient than telling people what they ought to do and then getting them to do it.

      Discovery learning is less efficient that telling people what to do and then getting them to do it.

      Reference: Kirschner, Paul, John Sweller, and Richard E. Clark. “Why unguided learning does not work: An analysis of the failure of discovery learning, problem-based learning, experiential learning and inquiry-based learning.” Educational Psychologist 41, no. 2 (2006): 75-86.

    1. What is Project Discovery Phase in Custom Software DevelopmentDmitry ChekalinChief Executive OfficerDaniil TorkutDeveloper AdvocateCustom SoftwareHomeBlogEntrepreneurshipWhat is Project Discovery Phase in Custom Software DevelopmentMar 30, 202012 min readSo, you came up with a new product idea. What’s next? For sure, you want to get a time and cost estimation from a software agency. However, most likely, they won’t be able to provide an accurate timeline and development costs after your request.The matter is that to provide an estimate, a development team needs more information than you think. Is there any solution in this situation? Sure, it is a project discovery phase.In this article, we will share a brief overview of a project discovery stage, and cover its goals, main tasks, and results for customers.

      So, you came up with a new product idea. What’s next? For sure, you want to get a time and cost estimation from a software agency. However, most likely, they won’t be able to provide an accurate timeline and development costs after your request.

      The matter is that to provide an estimate, a development team needs more information than you think. Is there any solution in this situation? Sure, it is a project discovery phase.

      In this article, we will share a brief overview of a project discovery stage, and cover its goals, main tasks, and results for customers.

    1. Another interpretation of the “Small Web” concept is that it refers to the use of alternative protocols to the dominant HTTP(S), lightweight ones like the older Gopher and newer Gemini. For example, the blog post Introduction to Gemini describes these collectively as “the Small Internet”.

      Maybe the idea of a "personal internet" is what we're all really looking for? Something with some humanity? Something that's fun? Something that has some serendipity?

    2. Finding these kinds of sites can be tough, especially if you’re looking for authentic 1990s sites and not retro callbacks, since Google seems to refuse to show you pages from over 10 years ago.

      I think I've read this bit about Google forgetting from Tim Bray(?) before. Would be useful to have additional back up for it.

      Not being able to rely on Google means that one's on personal repositories of data in their commonplace book becomes far more valuable in the search proposition. This means that Google search is more of a discovery mechanism rather than having the value of the sort of personalized search people may be looking for.

  30. May 2021
    1. I cannot speak for the editor but I don’t see why Searchmysite would not also accept and crawl static HTML websites (ie. Retro or vintage HTML sites) so long as the site has some value and content that it can index, but they might not.

      They certainly could. I've seen the author haunting the IndieWeb chat in the past and they've mentioned that crawling and saving data can tend to be a bit on the expensive side, so they're trying to do more targeted search/save when they can. Perhaps as the project matures, it will add these sorts of functionalities.

    1. Nuzzel has been one of the few apps I've truly loved. It's been great for discovery. It's one of the very few I use every day and it's one of only three apps that I allow to give me notifications on my phone.

      I'm devastated....

  31. Apr 2021
    1. Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/promnesia/

      Promnesia is a browser extension for Chrome/Firefox (including Firefox for Android!) which serves as a web surfing copilot, enhancing your browsing history and web exploration experience.

      TLDR: it lets you explore your browsing history in context: where you encountered it, in chat, on Twitter, on Reddit, or just in one of the text files on your computer. This is unlike most modern browsers, where you can only see when you visited the link.

      I've been doing something a bit like this manually and it looks a lot like the sort of UI examples I've been collecting at https://boffosocko.com/2019/06/29/social-reading-user-interface-for-discovery/

    1. Darius Kazemi randomly tweets out pages from books in the Internet Archive as a means of creating discovery and serendipity.

      Library Futures, Jennie Rose Halperin @Library_futures @little_wow

      Idea of artificial scarcity being imposed on digital objects is a damaging thing for society.

      Ideas to explore:

      Libraries as a free resource could be reframed as a human right within a community.

      Librarians as local community tummelers around information.

      Joanne McNeill

    1. So our blogrolls will automatically show writers you follow, sorted by who has most recently published. This approach makes blogrolls a living, breathing feature that reflects the activity in your network as it grows and changes.

      Blogrolls that update to show content by most recently updated could be an awesome addition to blogroll functionality in general.

  32. Mar 2021
    1. Yes — wariness over the way social networks and the publishing platforms they provide shift and shimmy beneath our feet, how the algorithms now show posts of X quality first, or then Y quality first, or how, for example, Instagram seems to randomly show you the first image of a multi-image sequence or, no wait, the second.

      The structure of these Instagram posts, which isn't always obvious to need to scroll sideways to see the other photos reminds me of some of the UI built into reveal.js as a slideshow feature or that found in Fold.

    1. In an internal presentation from that year, reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, a company researcher, Monica Lee, found that Facebook was not only hosting a large number of extremist groups but also promoting them to its users: “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools,” the presentation said, predominantly thanks to the models behind the “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” features.
    1. Michael Beckwith, this is genius. Long live blogrolls!

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

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

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

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

  33. Feb 2021
  34. Jan 2021
    1. A Substack-based intellectual sphere will be intensely, if unintentionally, hostile towards new blood. Magazines and newspapers solve this problem by packaging new authors that might appeal to their readership in the same issues as big names. The blogosphere solved this problem through comments and trackbacks, which allowed bloggers and their readers to discover other quality writers worth following. There is no mechanism for this sort of thing on Substack.

      I do see people mentioning other people's newsletters, so the discovery is there, but barriers are higher.

  35. Nov 2020
    1. That is a financial take on the problems of a Substack-based epistemic community. But the intellectual problems of such a community may prove just as important. Substack favors those who already have large megaphones. A Substack-based intellectual sphere will be intensely, if unintentionally, hostile towards new blood. Magazines and newspapers solve this problem by packaging new authors that might appeal to their readership in the same issues as big names. The blogosphere solved this problem through comments and trackbacks, which allowed bloggers and their readers to discover other quality writers worth following. There is no mechanism for this sort of thing on Substack. A minor writer on Substack will not grab the attention of a major one; readers will never stumble from the big to the small.

      Mechanisms for discovery of new writers, voices, and content are important parts of any ecosystem. Without them and the system may become useless and die.

    1. While there have always been server listings on joinmastodon.org, this is a break from our previous practice of listing servers. Before the Server Covenant we pulled a list of servers from a 3rd party provider called instances.social. However, instances.social was a 3rd party and automated service. The one thing that it could not do was any kind of quality control as it simply listed every instance submitted–regardless of stability or their code of conduct. As Mastodon has grown it has become increasingly clear that simply listing every possible server was not in our interest as a project, nor was it in the interest in the majority of the communities running Mastodon.

      To some level as an IndieWeb participant I'm doing this more manually by reading and individually adding people and their sites to my personal network one at a time. No one has yet moderated this process and to some extent it's sort of nice to have a more natural discovery process for protecting my own personal network.

  36. Oct 2020
    1. You see this in bookstores: staff recommendations. This is the store’s window into an infinite catalog of books. And it works. The system is: here are our favorites. Then, venturing further into the store: this is what we happen to have.

      I spent some time on Wednesday chatting with the owner of a used bookstore that had a 10x10 foot "kiosk" space in a local mall next to a make up cart. He had one of the single most highly curated collections of used books in about 12 categories that I've ever seen. It was stunningly awesome.

      I would never have expected this as a business to exist, but like itinerant booksellers of the 15th century, he's just doing what they've always done apparently.

    1. What changed Twitter, for me, was the launch of Favstar and Favrd (both now defunct, ruthlessly murdered by Twitter), these global leaderboards that suddenly turned the service into a competition to compose the most globally popular tweets.

      For the social status conscious these two services definitely created a layer of interesting discovery to the service that it hadn't had before.

    2. Instagram, despite not having any official reshare option, allows near unlimited hashtag spamming, and that allows for more deterministic, self-generated distribution. Twitter also isn't as great for spreading visual memes because of its stubborn attachment to cropping photos to maintain a certain level of tweet density per phone screen.

      Some interesting UI clues here that either help or hamper social networks

    1. Podcast listening can be harder to crack. There are so many shows! How do you find the ones you’ll like? And once you’ve found a show, where do you start: with the most recent episode? At the beginning? Some specific gem of an episode buried deep in the back catalog?

      Perhaps start with making the RSS feeds easily discoverable?! I just spent 20 minutes doing some reasonably serious web gymnastics to extract the RSS feed for Caliphate (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/podcasts/caliphate-isis-rukmini-callimachi.html) out of the iTunes feed using a JSON request tactic. Why can't the podcast's main page have or advertise the raw RSS feed?!

    1. Baroque, brutalist, Borgesian — let’s build some blogging megastructures.

      Take a peek at https://indieweb.xyz/ which is a quirky and interesting example of something along the lines of the blogging megastructure you suggest.

    1. Discovery learning can occur whenever the student is not provided with an exact answer but rather the materials in order to find the answer themselves.

      This is a neat definition of discovery learning, emphasising the need for appropriate preparation by the teacher.

  37. Sep 2020
  38. Aug 2020
  39. Jun 2020
  40. Dec 2019
    1. You might connect with someone who regularly used the same tags that you did, but that was because they shared your interests, not because they had X thousand followers.

      An important and sadly underutilized means of discovery.

  41. Aug 2019
    1. tate it.Whenever an annotation was added to a Madison document, a few technical features helped to further facilitate conversation. First, the document’s sponsor was automatically notified of a new annotation. Second, the annotation also appeared in-line as marginalia that could be responded to, liked, or flagged by others. And third, the annotation was displayed as a “comment” along with others at the end of the document. This process was described as “the future of crowdsourced legislation,” and illustrated how social and collaborative annotation could contribute to and improve civic life.Among noTroy Hicks1 week agoIt seems that these technical features were ones that, I am assuming, where only known and used by a very few of the users. Again, speaking to power and access, what does that mean for the kinds of democratized annotation experiences that we aspire to? How is this (entirely) dissimilar from conversations on social media, perhaps even off-putting or inaccessible to average users?

      Or additionally consider the vast amounts of un-curated noise that annotations may make in instances like these when they hit larger scale. How can these systems better delineate the authority of the individual authors?

      As a foil, consider how often people may read the several thousands of comments on a particular New York Times article? How many readers delve into these conversations and interact with them—particularly when they aren’t moderated or are overpopulated by trolls? We need better UI to indicate those annotating with some authority (or provide their background and expertise) or who may even be the original author responding to questions.

  42. Jun 2019
    1. Tip: One of the Discover curation guidelines is the Buddy Bench principle. If you want to find someone who shares a particular interest, write a micropost asking “Hey, are there any fans of ___ out there?” We add posts like that to Discover.

      Another useful tip on this front is to post a micromonday following recommendation aggregating a few people you know are interested in a particular topic. As an example, I posted one about a few educators and researchers I knew on micro.blog in July 2018 and it quickly blew up with lots of additional recommendations from others following me within the community.

      Over time I've kept up with adding to it, and even within the last month that post is still helping to benefit others on the service:

      blair says: "@c this made me very happy, thanks for tagging me, I’ve now got a bunch more interesting folks to follow!"<br/> May 30, 2019 at 4:28 pm

    2. We are not filtering out topics like F1. There just are not any posts to add. For a lively community on that topic or other specialized topics, you probably need to find a forum or follow hashtags on Twitter.

      This is also a potential space that Webmention-based aggregation services like IndieWeb news, or the multi-topic Indieweb.xyz directory could help people aggregate content for easier discovery and community building.

  43. Apr 2019
    1. TikTok is an interesting new player in social media because its default feed, For You, relies on a machine learning algorithm to determine what each user sees; the feed of content from by creators you follow, in contrast, is hidden one pane over. If you are new to TikTok and have just uploaded a great video, the selection algorithm promises to distribute your post much more quickly than if you were on sharing it on a network that relies on the size of your following, which most people have to build up over a long period of time. Conversely, if you come up with one great video but the rest of your work is mediocre, you can't count on continued distribution on TikTok since your followers live mostly in a feed driven by the TikTok algorithm, not their follow graph.
  44. Mar 2019
    1. sentinel

      An agent tracking developments in human-specified, or agent-sensed, topics. Like a watchlist, google search, etc, It would need to be able to do topic mapping and merging.

    2. how the computer can be made to watch for some kinds of plan-change possibilities, and to point them out to the human when they arise.

      Augmenting discoverability of adjacent possibles. A deeper level is that of discovering framing, and opportunities for re-framing & paradigm shifting.

  45. Feb 2019
    1. ou please your selves.

      A phrase that echoes Cavendish, who ponders her inability "Please All" (1), the desire for which kmurphy1 pointed out "hinders the progression of knowledge. Making this realization in the first sentence is remarkably important, for it immediately opens the door to discovery." For Astell and Astell's reader, the focus isn't on pleasing others but the self, and in doing so a woman can see ingeniousness not as an anomaly but as something within her grasp, if she takes the step toward discovery.

    1. I Know not how to Please All, t

      The innate desire to please everyone hinders the progression of knowledge. Making this realization in the first sentence is remarkably important, for it immediately opens the door to discovery.

    2. speak to Illustrate my Own VVorks, and to Detract from the VVorks of Others, for upon my Conscience I Speak and VVrite as I Believe, and if I Commit an Error in this Belief, I ask your Pardon

      We write and speak in only the ways we know how -- as ourselves. The fear of error should not prevent the process of discovery from unfolding.

  46. Jan 2019
  47. Dec 2018
    1. it made me feel like we were trying to send some kind of concentrated transmission to the author—linking as a greeting, links as an invitation.

      I love the idea of this.

  48. Nov 2018
    1. We need to learn to see the cumulative impact of a multitude of efforts, while simultaneously keeping all those efforts visible on their own. There exist so many initiatives I think that are great examples of how distributed digitalisation leads to transformation, but they are largely invisible outside their own context, and also not widely networked and connected enough to reach their own full potential. They are valuable on their own, but would be even more valuable to themselves and others when federated, but the federation part is mostly missing. We need to find a better way to see the big picture, while also seeing all pixels it consists of. A macroscope, a distributed digital transformation macroscope.

      This seems to be a related problem to the discovery questions that Kicks Condor and Brad Enslen have been thing about.

  49. Oct 2018
    1. Except that the aggregate selfish behavior of millions of people tagging billions of photos means that the public tag pages make entertaining surfing for everyone.

      Reading this reminds me of some of Brad Enslen and Kicks Condor's conversations about discovery on the net.

      How can one leverage selfish behaviour to the benefit of all?

  50. Jul 2018
    1. Likes, upvotes, replies, friending. What if it’s all just linking? In fact, what if linking is actually more meaningful!

      This is sort of the fun, I think, in maintaining things like listen and read posts on my site. While they're a useful archive for me, in some part I hope they might speed some discovery for folks who find them or search them by category/tag as well.

      I could post somewhere, "Hey I listen to this podcast," or retweet a headline, but invariably in the morass of content out there, there isn't actually an indication that I invested my finite amount of time actually listening to or reading that thing. Perhaps I was just doing some social signaling to make myself seem more interesting or worldly? To me this is a lot of the value of these types of posts.

  51. Mar 2018
    1. Excessive mutation will often stop a gene from working, yet somehow the sand rat’s genes manage to still fulfil their roles despite radical change to the DNA sequence. This is a very difficult task for genes. It’s like winning Countdown using only vowels.

      This will change everything.

    1. This could help explain where so much of our body’s fluid goes. While our cells contain most of the fluid, and the circulatory system carries a whole load more, over a third went unaccounted for and was simply said to be “interstitial”, or just floating around between organs and cells. The researchers claim, in a paper published in Scientific Advances, that the “interstitium” should be defined as an organ in its own right.

      The interstitium, a new organ, accounts for the body's "black matter" (unaccounted for fluids).

  52. Nov 2017
    1. traditional Klingon armor has been jettisoned in favor of elaborate, colorful clothing that looks like it would be much more at home in a Star Wars movie than a Star Trek television show.

      Or a Shakespearean drama or on a Christmas Tree...

  53. Sep 2017
  54. Aug 2017
    1. In fact, academics now regularly tap into the reservoir of digitized material that Google helped create, using it as a dataset they can query, even if they can’t consume full texts.

      It's good to understand that exploring a corpus for "brainstorming" or discovering heretofore seen connections is different than a discovery query that is meant to give access to an entire text.

  55. Apr 2017
    1. On board the ship was a small library containing published accounts of previous voyages through the Pacific, and in these accounts were short lists of words from islands scattered from Southeast Asia eastwards into the Pacific as far as the the western edge of Polynesia. By comparing the list of Tahitian words he compiled with these other vocabularies, Banks was able to show how Tahitian was directly related to languages spread across the Pacific to the Southeast Asian islands of the "East Indias."
    2. Accordingly, they dreamed up elaborate theories that explained the presence of the Polynesians in the middle of the Pacific, while denying to them the ability of having reached there through their own sailing abilities.
    3. Whereas explorers of the previous European age of exploration were primarily searching for new routes to the riches of Asia, those of this second age sailed the seas primarily, in Braudel's words, "to obtain new information about geography, the natural world, and the mores of different peoples."
    4. while on his first voyage into the Pacific, Cook stopped four months in Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun as part of an international effort to determine the distance between the Earth and Sun.
  56. Feb 2017
    1. Discovery is based on experience (observation, experiment, and tes· timony);

      So true. Our experience dictates what we see, do, and say. It's the same experience we all have with our classes. We need prerequisites in order to take certain classes. Why? So, we discover the "right" aspects of the class.

  57. Dec 2016
  58. Jul 2016
    1. You might even notice that your confidence isn’t the only thing that goes up, this was my first step in growing internally, and you’ll find that in the end Social Development isn’t just about learning to talk to other people, it’s a deep discovery about who you truly are.
  59. Jun 2016
    1. . It follows then that the machinery of the institution does not grow up to accommodate needs that are independently perceived but that, rather, the institutional machinery comes first and the needs then follow, as do the ways of meeting them. In short, the work to be done is not what the institution responds to but what it create

      On the creative nature of literary criticism

  60. Nov 2014
    1. There is also no easy way of informing an author that someone has commented on his or her work, especially if he or she is not a Hypothes.is user.

      Yeah...tricky part is finding the author of a web page in the first place.

      Pondering

  61. Feb 2014
    1. API Services During my monitoring of the API space, I came across a new API monitoring service called AutoDevBot, which monitors all your API endpoints, and notifies you when something goes wrong. Pretty standard feature in a new wave of API integration tools and services I’m seeing emerge, but what is interesting is they use Github as a central place to store the settings for the API monitoring service. AutoDevBot has you clone their settings template, make changes you need to monitor your APIs, register and fire up AutoDevBot to monitor. Seems like a pretty simple way for API service providers to engage with API providers, allowing them to manage all the configuration for API services alongside their own internal API operations.
    1. On one hand, there are infinite ideas, and so the taking of one idea as private property clearly leaves “enough,” and debatably “as good” for others (Locke, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: POLICY FOR INNOVATION 8   1690, Chap. V, Sect. 27).

      This statement seems to me a stretch-- a very far stretch.

      What does it mean to have "infinite ideas"? And how do you arrive at the judgments "enough" and "as good" here?

      Ideas don't exist in isolation; they are not individual fruits to be plucked from the world of thought. Ideas are built upon other ideas. They are embedded within each other, juxtaposed one next to the other, stacked, remixed; varied one from the other, sometimes as a derivation, sometimes an inspiration.

      And in the face of this, what is the notion of "creation"? Given a certain base of knowledge, there are some natural next steps that can be built from those basic building blocks.

      Here we have to disentangle the notion of discovery from creation. I think maybe that, in part, is the notion of patents vs copyright, but in the land of software we seem to have a tangled mess.

    1. I t i s t h i s b e d r o c k p r i n c i p l e o f c o p y r i g h t t h a t m a n d a t e s t h e l a w ' s s e e m i n g l y d i s p a r a t e t r e a t m e n t o f f a c t s a n d f a c t u a l c o m p i l a t i o n s . " N o o n e m a y c l a i m o r i g i n a l i t y a s t o f a c t s . " I d . , § 2 . 1 1 [ A ] , p . 2 - 1 5 7 . T h i s i s b e c a u s e f a c t s d o n o t o w e t h e i r o r i g i n t o a n a c t o f a u t h o r s h i p . T h e d i s t i n c t i o n i s o n e b e t w e e n c r e a t i o n a n d d i s c o v e r y : T h e f i r s t p e r s o n t o f i n d a n d r e p o r t a p a r t i c u l a r f a c t h a s n o t c r e a t e d t h e f a c t ; h e o r s h e h a s m e r e l y d i s c o v e r e d i t s e x i s t e n c e . T o b o r r o w f r o m B u r r o w - G i l e s , o n e w h o d i s c o v e r s a f a c t i s n o t i t s " m a k e r " o r " o r i g i n a t o r . " 1 1 1 U . S . , a t 5 8 . " T h e d i s c o v e r e r m e r e l y f i n d s a n d r e c o r d s . " N i m m e r § 2 . 0 3 [ E ] .

      No one may claim originality to facts because facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship. The distinction is one between creation vs discovery.