Dave Winer, one of, if not the, earliest bloggers asks what became of the blogosphere? It was a topic of the conversations in Trieste 2 weeks ago at State of the Net, where we both were on the program.
I get what he says about losing the center, and seeing that center as a corporation back then. This much in the way Tantek Celik talked about the silos first being friendly and made by the people we knew, but then got sold, which I wrote about yesterday. Creating a new center, or centers, is worthwile I concur with Dave, and if it can’t be a company at the center, then maybe it should be a network or an organisational manifestation thereof, such as a cooperative. An expression of networked agency.
Because of that I wonder about Dave’s last point “There used to be a communication network among bloggers, but that’s gone now.”
I asked (on Facebook), “What to you was that previous communications network, and what was it built on? What type of communications would you like to see re-emerge?” The answer is about being able to discover other bloggers, like Dave’s Weblogs.com platform used to do (and still does, but most updates are spam).
Blogs to me are distributed conversations. Look at the unbridled enthusiasm I expressed 11 years ago when I wrote about 5 years of blogging in this space, and the list of people I then regarded as my regular group of people I had blogged conversations with. It is currently harder to create those, and it has become harder for me to notice when something I write is reacted to as well. Much of the IndieWeb discussion is about at least being able to discover all online facets of someone from their own domain, and pulling responses to it back there too. Something I need to explore more how to do in a way that fits me.
In terms of communication and connecting, it would be great if I could explore the blogosphere much as in the picture below. Created by Anjo Anjewierden and presented at the AOIR conference in Chicago in 2005 by Lilia Efimova, it shows a representation of my blog network based on text analysis of my and other people’s blogs. It’s a pretty good picture of what my blog ‘neighbourhood’ looked like then.
Or this one also by Anjo Anjewierden from 2008, titled “the big one”. It shows conversations between my and other’s blogs. Grey boxes are conversations across blogs (the bigger the box, the more blogpostings), the other dots are postings that refer to such a conversation but aren’t part of it. Top-left a box is ‘opened up’ to show there are different postings (colored dots) inside it.
Makes me want to have a personal crawler that maps out connections between blogs! Are there any ‘personalised’ crawlers out there?
Peter, like me getting to grips with Webmention, has now used it to send all his own old postings a webmention where he links to them retroactively. So now in his comment database he has a full list of all the links between his own postings.
He says “I wish I had a way of visualizing the interconnections between my posts“.
This type of thing is of interest to me too. In several forms. Like using a network mapping tool for e.g. twitter topics such as NodeXL by Marc Smith/The Social Media Research Foundation. Like having ‘live’ network mappings of how distributed conversations I am part of are shaped, such as the images I recently showed of blog conversations, but then interactively. Like visualising the links between posts as Peter went on to do.
Visualisation of blog conversations (a grey box is a cluster of posts referencing eachother
Peter’s visual of links between blogposts
Anjo Anjewierden’s 2007 visual of Lilia’s blog‘s self references on a time axis
For these types of visualisation Anjo Anjewierden as a researcher did some interesting work 2003-2008, such as building those network maps around my blog. He also looked at visualising self-referencing in blogs. There’s just one dimension there, time, he says. I disagree, as linking to oneself is just as much a distributed conversation as linking between others, and Peter’s experimental visualisation above supports that thought. So I’d be interested to see a network map of self references: which blogposts over time turn out to be more central to our writing/thinking/reflection? Much like citings are a metric in academia, they are of interest in the blogosphere as well. Anjo also released several tools as open source if I remember correctly, so some archive digging is needed.
To do what Peter did, retroactively make all the links between my own blogpostings visible, I would first also need to fix the older links. Those older links are strucured differently than more recent ones and now return 404’s. The corresponding posting still exists but has a different URL now.
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In just over a week I will be joining the Nuremberg IndieWebCamp, together with Frank Meeuwsen. As I said earlier, like Frank, I’m wondering what I could be working on, talking about, or sharing at the event. Especially as the event is set up to not just talk but also build things.
So I went through my blogpostings of the past months that concerned the indie web, and made a list of potential things. They are of varying feasibility and scope, so I can probably strike off quite a few, and should likely go for the most simple one, which could also be re-used as building block for some of the less easy options. The list contains 13 things (
does that have a name, a collection of 13 things, like ‘odd dozen’ or something?Yes it does: a baker’s dozen, see comment by Ric below.). They fall into a few categories: webmention related, rss reader related, more conceptual issues, and hardware/software combinations.Getting WebMention to display the way I want, within the Sempress theme I’m using here. The creator of the theme, Matthias Pfefferle, may be present at the event. Specifically I want to get some proper quotes displayed underneath my postings, and also understand much better what webmention data is stored and where, and how to manipulate it.
Building a growing list of IndieWeb sites by harvesting successful webmentions from my server logs, and publish that in a re-usable (micro-)format (so that you could slowly map the Indieweb over time)
Make it much easier for myself to blog from mobile, or mail to my blog, using the MicroPub protocol, e.g. using the micropublish client.
Dive into the TinyTinyRSS datastructure to better understand. First to be able to add tags to feeds (not articles), as per my wishlist for RSS reader functionality.
Make basic visualisation possible on top of TinyTinyRSS database, as a step to a reading mode based on pattern detection
Allow better search across TinyTinyRSS, full text, to support the reading mode of searching material around specific questions I hold
Adding machine translation to TinyTinyRSS, so I can diversify my reading, and compare original to its translation on a post by post basis
Visualising conversations across blogs, both for understanding the network dynamics involved and for discovery
Digging up my old postings 2003-2005 about my information strategies and re-formulate them for networked agency and 2018
Find a way of displaying content (not just postings, but parts of postings) limited to a specific audience, using IndieAuth.
Formulate my Networked Agency principles, along the lines of the IndieWeb principles, for ‘indietech’ and ‘indiemethods’
Attempt to run FreedomBone on a Raspberry Pi, as it contains a range of tools, including GnuSocial for social networking. (Don’t forget to bring a R Pi for it)
Automatically harvest my Kindle highlights and notes and store them locally in a way I can re-use.
These are the options. Now I need to pick something that is actually doable with my limited coding skills, yet also challenges me to learn/do something new.
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