I ended up participating in:
- a session on POSSE,
- a session on NFC tags,
- a session on writing, and
- a session on testing your website that was hosted by Ros
In that testing session I shared some of the bookmarklets I use regularly.
Tag: Web
Kyle Chayka discusses two new books about the Internet—“Content,” by Kate Eichhorn, and “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is,” by Justin E. H. Smith—which examine how social media traps users in a brutal race to the bottom.
In reviewing Kate Eichhorn’s Content and Justin E. H. Smith’s The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Kyle Chayka explores the way in which the internet has turned up into content machines. These books continue a long tradition of books critiquing the internet and its influence on us, including Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Eichhorn discusses the way in which “content begets content”. This is captured in the term ‘content capital’, referring to a user’s ability to create additional content.
Eichhorn uses the potent term “content capital”—a riff on Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”—to describe the way in which a fluency in posting online can determine the success, or even the existence, of an artist’s work. Where “cultural capital” describes how particular tastes and reference points confer status, “content capital” connotes an aptitude for creating the kind of ancillary content that the Internet feeds upon.
On the flip side, Smith’s portrays the internet as a ‘living system’ that is the product of centuries of work. We cannot just undo all of this, instead what we need to do is better understand ourselves.
To understand the networked self, we must first understand the self, which is a ceaseless endeavor. The ultimate problem of the Internet might stem not from the discrete technology but from the Frankensteinian way in which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities.
In some ways, this reminds me of Ethan Zuckerman’s discussion of the ‘good web‘. I wonder if the solution is in the actual discussion and reflection.
The common ground behind the Good Web is the idea that social media must be taken seriously, not just as a problematic space in need of regulation, but a space that could ultimately help us be better neighbors, voters, and advocates for social change. What we must take from this conversation is the notion that it is not enough to fix existing social media. Instead, we must imagine, experiment with, and build social media that can be good for society.
Ethan Zuckerman discusses different proposals for making the ‘good web’:
- Facebook Knows Best: The Centralized Web
- Put Us in Charge: The Deplatformed Web
- Put Nobody in Charge: Web3
- Think Small: Decentralized Social Networks
Personally, I have sided with the decentralised solution. However, what Zuckerman highlights is the need to be open for alternative options.
Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a “board”, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted. Boards invite publishers to use all the richness of modern HTML and CSS. Plain text and blue links are also enthusiastically supported.
Robin Sloan rejects Twitter, RSS, and email newsletters, instead he argues for a more weird and chaotic web that focuses on HTML and CSS which he calls Spring ’83. This reminds me of the work of Kicks Condor and the small web. For now I am happy with RSS, but will keep on an eye on this as it definitely looks interesting, especially in regards to serendipity.
Have you ever wondered: Where does this link go? The URL redirect checker follows the path of the URL. It will show you the full redirection path of URLs,
Venture capital backed corporate social media has cleverly inserted themselves between us and our interactions with each other. They privilege some voices not only over others, but often at the expense of others and only to their benefit. We have been developing a new vocabulary for these actions with phrases like “surveillance capitalism”, “data mining”, and analogizing human data as the new “oil” of the 21st century. The IndieWeb is attempting to remove these barriers, many of them complicated, but not insurmountable, technical ones, so that we can have a healthier set of direct interactions with one another that more closely mirrors our in person interactions. By having choice and the ability to move between a larger number of service providers there is an increasing pressure to provide service rather than the growing levels of continued abuse and monopoly we’ve become accustomed to.
I got 5000+ links to comb through. But my blog is gonna be cleaner and I will have accomplished myself the wishful dream I tossed out as tweet in the wind.
I can do my part to tend my own garden of links- whether others let their stuff rot is on them.
I too use Broken Link Checker, but must be honest, combing through hundreds of links is a strange labour of love. Like Jim, I too dabbled with Amber a few years ago, but found it chewed up all my memory, so I scrapped it. My current approach is to link to my own bookmarks where possible, this means that if a link disapeears, I still regain some of the context. In addition to this, I found that I was sort of spamming some sites with pingbacks. Although that seems to have been fixed by the fact that pingbacks seem to be broken on my sites.
Colin Walker (colinwalker.blog)I have a saved Twitter search for the hashtag #saintsfc which I use to watch for updates and talk to other fans when Southampton Football Club are playing. The fans join together for a short period due to a shared interest and return to their usual timelines after the match but this type of graph is recreated in a similar form at the next game.
Repeated interactions within implicit graphs can lead to a bleed from the implicit to explicit – once you get to know some of those from the implicit graph they become ‘friends’ and, after a while, can be invited over in to the explicit graph.
Colin, your discussion of ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’ has me thinking about Dron and Anderson’s book Teaching Crowd:
In the book Teaching Crowds, Dron and Anderson unpack the different ways that people gather within online spaces. To do so, they focus on three key modes of learning:
- Groups: Distinct entities independent of membership, groups are structured around formal lines of authority. An example are the various learning management systems. Organised hierarchically, they do not allow for cross-system dissemination.
- Networks: Based on individual connections, networks evolve through interactions. Examples of such spaces are social network platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. These spaces create the means easily sharing and connecting with others.
- Sets: Bound together by a commonality, with sets there are no expectations of personal engagement. Some examples of sets are social interest sites, such as Pinterest. Both of which provide means of easily finding similar ideas.
Surfing the web is becoming increasingly boring.
What used to be a wild trip through stormy waters has now become a journey on a cruise ship where everything is planned and there’s no longer place for craziness.
This site is our attempt try bring some of that unpredictability back.
The next rabbit hole can be just one click away so click that button, go for a walk and enjoy getting lost on the web.
The Forest is a site designed to add back a bit of serendipity to the web. You can either go “for a walk in the forest” or “plant a tree”. This reminds me in part of Dave Winer’s site Podcatch, a summary of current podcasts.
ᔥ in Sharing is caring – Manu ()
Photopea seems like another web alternative to Google Drawings.
ᔥ in Photopea – A free browser-based Photoshop – Colin Devroe ()
Ben Werdmüller (werd.io)All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. Every contact leaves a trace.
This is the promise of the internet: one of community, shared equity, and equality. Through those those things, I still hope we may better understand each other, and through that, find peace.
GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and FTPS, the most widely used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts,
cronjobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc.
A method for retrieving files and backing up the web.
Troy Hunt walks through why HTTPS is important, even for a static website.
The Markup recently launched Blacklight, a free, instant privacy-inspection tool. Enter any website, and it reveals how you may be tracked when you visit the site, names the companies receiving your data, and explains what the trackers are doing—some of them watch your every mouse move and record your every keystroke. Trust us, it’s more than you’re expecting, raising the question: What can you do about it?
Aaron Sankin discusses Backlight, an instant privacy-inspection tool, and what it uncovers in regards to privacy on the web. Much of the focus is around cookies and the role that they serve in regards to tracking.
a cookie is a piece of data saved onto your device identifying you uniquely, which can only be read by whoever set it—whether that’s the site you’re visiting or a third-party marketing company that sets cookies on millions of sites and uses all that information to build profiles about us all. Some cookies can be useful—for instance, remembering you so you don’t have to sign in every time you visit your favorite site.
Some companies use cookies in concert with another tracker called a pixel, which is a small image or bit of code that sends information about your actions to whoever owns that pixel. If the owner of the pixel has also saved a cookie on your device, your actions on that page can be linked to everything in the profile that the company has already built on you—from your previous browsing history to purchases you made offline.
One of the hard things is that although you can clear and/or block cookies, this does not stop fingerprinting and session logging.
This is a topic that Doug Belshaw reflects upon in regards to his use of Firefox.
I’ve learned something that I suspect is true across much of our industry: the list of platforms in the world is iOS, Android, and desktop.
And — this is critical — desktop literally means web.
Brent Simmons suggests that although there are many different platforms, it all comes down to desktop and mobile. The web subsequently sits with the desktop.
the web sort of lost as a software platform on mobile. The web is for Windows, Mac, and Linux machines — it’s the old way of things. For mobile, it’s all about the apps. But maybe the web didn’t totally lose here, because often those apps are cross-platform affairs that run on web technologies.
Parimal Satyal explores the world of the small web. This starts with a history of the web and the creation of spaces using HTML and CSS, where you depended on linking between and to different sites to navigate around. This is in stark contrast to the commercial web that is organised around products and optimised search. For Satyal, the modern web of marketing loses much of the creativity of the early days.
As fun as it is to explore what’s out there, the best part is really to join in and make your own website. Not on closed platforms or on social media mediated by ad companies, but simply in your own little corner of the web. It’s the best way to see how simple and open the web really is.
You could easily put up those drawings you’ve been making, share your thoughts and ideas, or reviews of your favourite whiskys. Make a website to share your writing tips or your best recipes. Or a list of your favourite addresses in your city for travelers who might be visiting.
It is interesting to read this along side Eevee’s dive into the world of CSS, Charlie Owen’s call to return to the beauty and weirdness found in the early web and Kicks Condor’s discussion of what we left in the old web. I was also left thinking again about Tom Critchlow’s discussion of small b blogging. It would seem that Facebook recognises the lack of creativity associated with the modern web with its latest experiment. and creativity
via Alan Levine
From Pointcast to Microsoft to Netscape to the NY Times, there were lots of inspirations behind RSS.
Aaron Davis (Read Write Collect)What if we each had our own treasure trove of ideas that we could easily mine and join the dots?
My intent with these posts is not to suggest that everyone should or must do all or any these things, but instead to stop for a moment and think about the decisions we make about technology and ask ourselves how might we work together to make a better web for all?
#pcPopUp2020 #IndieWeb