In reply to Introduced to infostrats by Neil Mather
To me blogs and wikis are the original social software. My blog emerged as a personal knowledge management tool (Harold Jarche is the go-to source for PKM). Knowledge management to me has always been a very people centered, social thing. Learning through distributed conversations, networked learning (George Siemens and Stephen Downes‘ connectivism). My friend Lilia Efimova did her PhD on it, with our shared blogger network’s conversations as an empirical case. At some point social software morphed into social media, and its original potential and value as informal learning tools was lost in my eyes.
Blogs and wiki’s, they go well together. Blogs as thinking out loud and conversations (also with oneself). Wiki as its accumulated residue. I had a wiki alongside this blog for a very long time (until it succumbed to spam), both a public external one, and a private one. My friend Peter Rukavina still has his wiki Rukapedia alongside his blog. It serves in part as an explainer to his blog readers (e.g. see his wiki entry on me). Boris Mann, also a long time barcamp/blogging connection, runs a wiki which is editable by the public in part.
A year ago I felt the need to accumulate things in a more permanent way next to the timeline like blog. As I am the only one editing such a ‘wiki’, I opted to use WordPress pages for it (but you could open pages up for wider editing with a separate user-role). I added a few plugins for it, e.g. to add categories to pages so I can build menu structures. Kbase in the top menu leads to this wiki-for-just-me, although it doesn’t show all pages it contains (search will surface them though).
‘Constructing a body of hypertext over time—such as with blogs or wikis—with an emphasis on the strengths of linking (within and without the text) and rich formatting.’
I started the Rukapedia (https://wiki.ruk.ca/wiki/Main_Page) after returning from the Reboot conference for the first time (https://ruk.ca/content/rukapedia).
And originally it was, true to the form, an open wiki that anyone could edit. But it quickly got hijacked by spammers, and so I restricted access to me and a few familiars (https://wiki.ruk.ca/wiki/Special:ListUsers) and it’s only been me who’s been active in the last decade or so.
The Rukapedia isn’t quite dead, and I still find it a useful resource for historical things, like the list of every mobile phone I’ve ever owned (https://wiki.ruk.ca/wiki/Technology#Phones). But I find that moving back and forth between Drupal, where I blog (https://ruk.ca/) and MediaWiki (which I use to maintain the wiki) is just cumbersome enough that I no longer actively maintain it and, like you, I’ve a plan to repatriate the information there into my main CMS, outside of the flow of the day to day blog, as time allows me.
One thing the Rukapedia has allowed me to understand is that the reverse-chronological post form of the blog is lovely for blogging, but doesn’t work well as a reference. Linking to my Letterpress tag page (https://ruk.ca/topics/letterpress) is a poor substitute for giving someone the context of my life as a letterpress printer; a full-text search for “amrusb1” (https://ruk.ca/search/site/amrusb1) doesn’t document well my work with this device. The “blog timeline crystallising into a personal wiki over time” is a perfect metaphor for what I set out to create in the Rukpedia, and I hope to build on this inside Drupal.
Trying to keep my software social (www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/06/the-blog-and-wiki-combo/), so I’ve started tagging articles that I save to Wallabag for reading later with a couple of new tags – ‘wbaf’ and ‘sbaf’ – short for ‘written by a friend’ and ‘shared by a friend’ respectively. (Where ‘friend’ is the A and B channels of my discovery strategy – doubleloop.net/2019/10/05/discovery-strategy/.)
When I have some spare time to read something, I go to wbaf and sbaf first. Should be good for building bonds, and a win against filter failture, possibly a loss against filter bubble, but let’s see how it pans out…
Listened I like the use of the phrase ‘social industry’. I think it’s a good framing to use rather than social media. It brings to the fore the co-optation by industry of what Ton calls social software, turning it into an industry.
In the Novara interview, Seymour talks about how when using social media (controlled by social industry) you are in some ways interacting more with a machine than with other people. Likes, retweets, etc, are part of this machinery. These have become industrial abstractions of actual social relations.
Analagous in some ways I feel to how Taylorism abstracted the movements of skilled labourers into smaller and smaller discrete motions, which could then be mechanised and repeated monotonously without skill or craft.
Digital time-and-motion men have abstracted social interactions into meaningless facsimiles of real interaction, real desire or affection.
Better a social craft than a social industry I think. Small tech and social software can be part of a that I think, but re-repurposing or even breaking some of the frames that industry co-opted and mechanised.
Writing a blog post, or a considered reply to someone else’s, takes more time and emotional craft than a like. But it’s more rewarding overall. It’s hopefully less alienating.