At last week’s Crafting {:} a Life unconference on PEI I participated in three conversations on blogging:
- What happened to blogging? Initiated by Steven Garrity
- The future of blogging. Initiated by Peter Rukavina
- Doing Blogging. Initiated by me
Elmine already blogged some of her impressions from these conversations. I’ll add some of my own.
What happened to blogging?
It started with Steven Garrity who asked “What happened to blogging?” in the morning of the first day. Some 20 people wanted to take part in that so we put together a big circle in the main hall. The group had long time bloggers (over 20 years), those whose blogs fell more or less silent, and those who never blogged but are interested in doing so. What followed was a discussion of why we started blogging, and what happened to those initial conditions. I started to think out loud, but kept going because of the wide peer network that emerged because of our distributed conversations across blogs. We suspected started blogging right in the perfect moment: the number of people blogging in your fields of interest was big enough to feel engaged, and small enough to feel like a town you can keep an overview of. We first welcomed the silos like Facebook and Twitter as it made interacting even easier and brought in more people as the required level of tech savvy dropped. What however at first seemed like a source of agency turned into the erosion of it. Long form writing evaporated, more exchanges turned into ’empty calories’. RSS as an easy way of following what was going on eroded the too. Many sites ‘forgot’ what RSS was, and that accelerated when the most visible reader by Google fell by the wayside. Although we also felt that blaming Google Reader solely isn’t right, it was a development that fit in a larger change already underway.
We also discussed how some of that original blog interaction in the early ’00s has been channeled into other modes of communications, like newsletters. Peter Bihr for instance mentioned how it felt like newsletters are a more direct form of communication, with a clear audience in mind, and responses to it are of much higher quality. We missed the kick of the interaction between blogs, as well as having the time and attention to reflect and write more deeply.
Part of the blogging circle
The future of blogging
Having looked back in the morning, some of us felt we wanted to not just be melancholic but also look at what a constructive future of blogging looks like. So Peter suggested to do another conversation in the afternoon. Part of the reason for this was in our immediate circle we saw several people who ‘returned’ to blogging, like myself. Part of it is the appearance of new web standards, the IndieWeb that intends to take the useful traits of social media platforms and apply them to your own websites. Opting to enjoy the weather we had this conversation in Peter’s back yard. We talked about a variety of things connected to blogging. The technology that can assist in getting more interaction between blogs, in helping to make publishing easy. And the behaviours that help to blog more, doing away with expectations of what ‘proper’ blogging is and giving oneself permission to just do what you want.
The future of blogging taking shape in Peter’s back yard
Doing blogging
The second day of the unconference was positioned as a ‘doing’ day. As the ‘future of blogging’ conversation surfaced a lot of ‘how-to’ questions, I suggested we could do a more practice oriented session. On what is currently technically possible, and how that looks in practice for instance in my blog. The weather was great again, so we opted for the back yard like the day before. Bright sunlight and a scarcity of laptops meant we didn’t ‘do’ much. We did talk about the practical steps one can take, and the purpose and working of the various IndieWeb standards. This developed in a wider ranging conversation on our various information routines and the tools we use. Participants were eagerly taking notes to learn from each other’s tool use. From tools and routines we went to life hacks, and a much wider scope of topics. That was a great experience, although it meant that the original topic of conversation moved out of sight. I felt in flow in this conversation, and it went on literally for hours without effort and without energy levels dropping away.
The ‘doing blogging’ circle of participants
Direct consequence is that one of the participants launched her own blog, with IndieWeb support from the start. Another that questions about how I read along lines of ‘social distance’ led to me explaining that in detail today. Important to me is that I also could add a number of bloggers to my ‘global village’ of people whose postings I read, adding more voices to the mix I take in. I also plan to write a number of postings starting from the issues raised in the conversations to introduce and explain the IndieWeb standards. The current documentation mostly starts with tech, and that means a too high threshold for adoption for large groups.
Blog posts about Crafting {:} a Life from people who were there:
Crafting {:} a Life Unconference Day 1
Crafting {:} a Life Unconference Day 2
Crafting {:} a Saga
Leaving PEI
Fantasy Cartography
Crafting {:} a Life
Crafting {:} a Life initial impressions
Press Pound to Publish
Communication does count
Crafting {:} a Blog
Three Conversations about Blogging
Unconference Aftermath / Unconference Forwarding
Connection Problem
Canada — Crafting {:} a Life (Flickr photos)
Crafting {:} a Reflection
If you’ve written something I didn’t catch, please let me know.
Weblogs | Crafting {:} a Life
Het voelt wel goed om te beginnen met een bewaar-issue. Een eerste editie die niet iedereen heeft. Als je over tientallen jaren je email-archief laat scannen door de Your Life Your Memory AI Robots™️ om een accurate autobiografie samen te laten stellen, wie weet komt deze mail nog bovendrijven en ben je een van de weinigen die de originele kopie in handen heeft.
Naast mijn blog nog een nieuwsbrief? Waarom niet. Als zij-die-het-menen-te-weten zeggen dat nieuwsbrieven nog altijd de way to go zijn om contact te hebben met de lezer, dan gaan we dat doen.
Als je mijn blog volgt, dan zul je zo nu en dan een deja vu gevoel hebben met deze nieuwsbrief. Voelt wel lekker toch? Makes you feel ALIVE! Algoritmes hebben geen deja vu, of had ik dat al eens verteld?
Dit ‘zine zal je meevoeren in de wereld van het open en decentrale web. Het Indieweb. Wat gebeurt er in de steegjes achter de wolkenkrabbers van Silicon Valley’s sociale silo’s? Welke Neo’s proberen los te breken van het algoritme en een hernieuwde digitale wereld te scheppen?
Disclaimer: Deze nieuwsbrief is gegarandeerd blockchain-vrij tot er een echt nuttige en dagelijks bruikbare toepassing voor is gevonden.
Belangrijk leesmoment om de tijd voor te nemen
On Dat:// — http://www.kickscondor.com
Weet je nog dat je in de jaren ’90 aan je ouders moest uitleggen wat het internet was? Dit is DAT. Iets wat je kinderen over een paar jaar aan jou moeten uitleggen als je niet oplet. Ben ze voor en hou je cool. Lees dit.
Niet geheel onbelangrijk om te weten tijdens de lunch
Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need competition instead – Open Voices — http://www.economist.com
Cory Doctorow legt het weer duidelijk uit: interoperabiliteit tussen tech platformen is uiteindelijk veel gezonder dan het opbreken van de bekende namen. Meer competitie is goed!
Weg met de nieuwsbrieven? – Digging the Digital — diggingthedigital.com
Dit is dan wel een nieuwsbrief, dat wil niet zeggen dat je hem in je mailprogramma hoeft te lezen. Omkatvrijdag-plan: Abonneer je op deze nieuwsbrief via RSS. Ik geef je een eenvoudige uitleg.
Parate kennis in wording
Om Malik – Don’t worry, blog happy
Three conversations about blogging – Ton Zijlstra maakt een fraai overzicht en brengt hoop voor de bloggers van de toekomst.
IndieWeb Summit Portland – 29 en 30 juni. Ver weg maar live te volgen op de internets!
Blog on!
Read Three Conversations About Blogging by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)
This unconference account is really interesting, will need to blog further about it…
★ Liked https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/06/three-conversations-about-blogging/
@ton Looks like a fascinating conference! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and how it went.
Today 17 years ago, at 14:07, I published my first blog post, and some 2000 followed since then. Previously I kept a website that archive.org traces back to early 1998, which was the second incarnation of a static website from 1997 (Demon Internet, my first ISP other than my university, entered the Dutch market in November 1996, and I became their customer at the earliest opportunity. From the start they gave their customers a fixed IP address, allowing me to run my own server, next to the virtual server space they provided with a whopping 5MB of storage .) Maintaining a web presence for over 22 years is I think the longest continuous thing I’ve done during my life.
Last year I suggested to myself on my 16th bloggiversary to use this date yearly to reflect:
In the past 12 months I’ve certainly started to evangelise technology more again. ‘Again’ as I did that in the ’00s as well when I was promoting the use of social software (before it’s transformation into, todays mostly toxic, social media), for informal learning networks, knowledge management and professional development. My manifesto on Networked Agency from 2016, as presented at last year’s State of the Net, is the basis for that renewed effort. It’s not a promotion of tech for tech’s sake, as networked agency comes part and parcel with ethics by design, a perception of digital transformation as distributed digital transformation, and attention in general for how our digital tools are a reflection and extension of our human networks and human nature (when ‘smaller‘ and optionally networked for richer results).
Looking back 12 months I think I’ve succeeded in doing a few things on the level of my own behaviour, my company, my clients, and general communities and society. It’s all early beginnings, but a consistent effort of small things builds up over time steadily I suppose.
On a personal level I kept up the pace of my return to more intensive blogging two years ago, and did more to make my blog not only the nexus but also the starting point for most of my online material. (E.g. I now mostly send out Tweets and Toots from my blog directly). I also am slowly re-adopting and rebuilding my information strategies of old. More importantly I’m practicing more show and tell, of how I work with information. At the Crafting {a} Life unconference that Peter organised on Prince Edward Island in June I participated in three conversations on blogging that way. Peter’s obligation to explain is good guidance in general here.
For my company it means we’ve embarked on a path to more information security awareness, starting with information hygiene mostly. This includes avoiding silos where possible, and beginning the move to a self-hosted Slack-like environment and our own cloud. This is a reflection of my own path in this field since the spring of 2014, then inspired by Brenno de Winter and Arjen Kamphuis, whose disappearance a year ago made me more strongly realise the importance of paying lessons learned forward.
With clients I’ve put the ethics of working with data front and center, which includes earlier topics like privacy law, data sovereignty and procurement, but also builds on my company’s principle of always ensuring the involvement of all external stakeholders when it comes to figuring out the use and value of open government and open data. Some of that is awareness raising, some of that is ensuring small practical steps are taken. Our company is now building up a ‘holistic’ data governance program for clients that includes all this, not just the technical side of data governance.
On the community side several things I got myself involved in are tied to this.
As a board member of Open Nederland I help spread the word about how to allow others to make use of your work with Creative Commons licenses, such as at the recent Open Access Week organised by the Leeuwarden library. Agency and making, and especially the joy of finding (networked) agency through making, made possible by considered sharing, was also my message at the CoderDojo Conference Netherlands last weekend.
Here in the Netherlands I co-hosted two IndieWebCamps in Utrecht in April, and in Amsterdam in September (triggered by a visit to an IndieWebCamp in Germany a year ago). With my co-organiser Frank we’ve also launched a Meet-up around IndieWeb in the hope of more continuously engaging a more local group of participants.
I’ve also contributed to the Copenhagen 150 this year at Techfestival, which resulted in the TechPledge. Specifically I worked to get some version of being responsible for creating ongoing public debate around any tech you create in there, to make reflection integral to tech development. I took the TechPledge, and I ask you to do the same.
Another take-away from my participation in the Copenhagen 150, is to treat my involvement in the use and development of technology more deliberately as a political act in its own right. This allows me to feel a deeper connection I think between tech as extension of human reach and global topics that require a sense of urgency of humanity.
Here’s to another year of blogging, and, more importantly, reading your blog!