A short piece on setting up an independent website, reasons for doing so, and useful resources.

I agree fully. I think that aspects of the IndieWeb, potentially Webmentions, have great potential and should be used by more sites. But RSS/ATOM feeds are an essential way of consuming content, regardless of whether the reader maintains his or her own site.

Webmentions are the new hotness. I think it should be embraced more. Pingbacks/Webmentions are cool.

Marginalia

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

<figure> <figcaption>An inline annotation on the text “Hey Ev, what about mentions?” in which Medium began to roll out their @mention functionality.</figcaption> </figure>

It is crucial to have an open standard, and I think the people from indieweb already did a lot of the work. Webmentions are just the communication layer, but. microformats may be a great tool to keep in mind.

I think that a major part of improving the issue of abuse and providing consent is building in notifications so that website owners will at least be aware that their site is being marked up, highlighted, annotated, and commented on in other locations or by other platforms. Then the site owner at least has the knowledge of what's happening and can then be potentially provided with information and tools to allow/disallow such interactions, particularly if they can block individual bad actors, but still support positive additions, thought, and communication. Ideally this blocking wouldn't occur site wide, which many may be tempted to do now as a knee-jerk reaction to recent events, but would be fine grained enough to filter out the worst offenders.

Toward the end of notifications to site owners, it would be great if any annotating activity would trigger trackbacks, pingbacks, or the relatively newer and better webmention protocol of the WW3C out of the http://IndieWebCamp.com movement. Then site owners would at least have notifications about what is happening on their site that might otherwise be invisible to them.

Perhaps there's a way to further implement filters or tools (a la Akismet on platforms like WordPress) that allow site users to mark materials as spam, abusive, or other so that they are then potentially moved from "public" facing to "private" so that the original highlighter can still see their notes, but that the platform isn't allowing the person's own website to act as a platform to give reach to bad actors.

Further some site owners might appreciate graded filters (G, PG, PG-13, R, X) so that users or even parents can filter what they're willing to see. Consider also annotations on narrative forms that might be posted as spoilers--how can these be guarded against? (Possibly with CSS and a spoiler tag?) Options can be built into the platform itself as well as allowing server-side options for truly hard cases.

My coding skills are rustier than I wish they were, but I'm available to help/consult if needed.

Of course, how would she know that the annotation exists? Here's another example of where adding webmentions to Hypothesis for notifications could be useful, particularly when they're more widely supported. I've outlined some of the details here in the past: http://boffosocko.com/2016/04/07/webmentions-for-improving-annotation-and-preventing-bullying-on-the-web/

is the tag properly nested in this example?

But why not mix them together the way the IndieWeb has done?! A few people are using the new W3C recommendation spec for Webmention along with fragmentions to send a version of comments/marginalia/annotations to sites that accept them and have the ability to display them!

A good example of this is Kartik Prabhu's website which does this somewhat like Medium does. One can write their response to a sub-section of his post on their own website, and using Webmention (yes, there's a WordPress plugin for that: https://wordpress.org/plugins/webmention/ ) send him the response. It then shows up on his site as a quote bubble next to the appropriate section which can then be opened and viewed by future readers. Example: https://kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia For those interested, he's opensourced the code to help accomplish this: https://github.com/kartikprabhu/marginalia

While annotation systems have the ability to overlay one's site, there's certainly room for serious abuse as a result. (See an example at https://indieweb.org/annotation#Criticism) It would be nice if annotation systems were required to use something like webmentions (or older trackback/pingbacks) to indicate that a site had been mentioned elsewhere, this way, even if the publisher wasn't responsible for the resulting comments, they would be aware of possible attacks on their work/site/page.