9 reactions on “Bringing Slides Home (Continued)”

1. I much like Laura Kalbag’s “I don’t track you” declaration on her blog. She links to that post in the footer of her webpages.
   As Laura Kalbag says it’s “as much a fact as a mission statement“. I would definitely like to be able to say the same, because it’s important as a signal, as a statement that the web does not need to be what the silos as advert delivery and manipulation vehicles make it to be. But for this blog it isn’t fully a fact.
   I do not track anything anyone does on my site. But others in some instances do. This is the case where I embed material from elsewhere. Although often what I embed is still my own content, such as photos and slides, they are served from the likes of YouTube (Google), Flickr, and Slideshare (LinkedIn). The primary reason for using such services is storage space. Presentations, videos and photo collections tend to be large files, filling up the allocated space in my hosting package quickly. And of course there are occasions where I do want to show content by others (photos and videos). Especially in the case of images, showing other people’s content here is very deliberate, based on an obligation to re-use.
   This means that I am an enabler of the tracking that such services do when you visit my blog. To be certain, you have a personal responsibility here too: your browser is your castle, and that Castle Doctrine of browsers means that you should already actively block tracking in your browser. However, I also have a responsibility to not expose visitors to tracking where that can be avoided.
   So how to avoid tracking? What alternatives are out there? Here’s a list with the services from which this site over the years has embedded material.

   YouTube (Google): I did not know this until I looked for it today, prompted by Laura Kalbag’s blogpost, but Google provides a setting with embedded YT videos that disables tracking and serves the video from a different domain (youtube-nocookies.com). This is what I will do from now on, and I will go through my older postings to change the embed code in the same way. [UPDATE September 2021: I have removed all YouTube embeds and changed them to linked screenshots.]
   Flickr: I use Flickr a lot, it’s both my off-site online photo backup, as well as an easy way to post images here, without taking up hosting space. My tracking detection tool (Ghostery) does not find any trackers of embedded images, provided I strip out some of the scripting that comes with an embed by default. This stripping of superfluous stuff I routinely do, and is in my muscle memory. [UPDATE August 2021: I am replacing all Flickr embeds with locally hosted copies, linking to their Flickr source. Ongoing]
   Slideshare: this I think needs replacing. A Slideshare embed always comes with a Google Analytics tracker and a 3rd party beacon it seems. There is no way I can strip any of that out. It’s a good idea to do without Slideshare anyway, so need to search for an alternative. I might go for my own cloud space, or start making my slides differently, e.g. in HTML5, or find some other tool that I can attach to a private cloud space, and allows easy sharing with others.[UPDATE Oct/Nov 2020: I deleted my Slideshare account and am bringing those presentations to a hosting package and domain I control]
   Scribd: this one definitely needs to go too. Embedding a Scribd document adds Google Analytics and a Facebook tracker, and curiously still a Google+ tracker too, though that service no longer exists. Again, need to search for an alternative. Same as with Slideshare. [UPDATE Oct/Nov 2020: I deleted my company’s Scribd account, and am in the process of bringing those documents to a self-hosted environment]
   Vimeo: this video embedding service does not add trackers as far as I can tell from my Ghostery tracking monitoring plugin. [UPDATE September 2021: removed all Vimeo embeds, replaced with linked screenshots]
   23Video: this platform has pivoted to corporate marketing videos and webinars, and no longer supports casual embeds like in the past. I will need to go through my archive though to clean up the postings where I used 23Video. [UPDATE cleaned up]
   Qik. This was a live streaming video service I used around 2008. The domain is no longer active, and any embeds no longer work. Will need to clean up some old postings. [UPDATE cleaned up]

   So, from this list, Slideshare and Scribd stand out as the ones adding tracking features to this site, and will need to go first [UPDATE Oct/Nov 2020: removed]. So I’ll focus there on finding replacements. Flickr and Vimeo are ok for now, and Youtube for as long as they respect their own privacy settings. Flickr and Vimeo of course don’t have your data as their business model, whereas YT does, and it shows. Once I’ve removed the tracking functionality from embedded content, what remains is that any call to an outside source results in your IP being logged in that outside server’s logs, and by extension your user agent etc. This is unavoidable as it comes with connecting to any web server. The only way I can avoid such logging is by ensuring I no longer use anything from any outside source, and hosting it myself. For my own content that is possible, as for images I re-use from e.g. Flickr (by serving the image itself from a server I own, and otherwise just linking to the source and creator. As I did with the image below), but hardest for re-using other people’s videos.
   Tracks of footprints in the snow, image by Roland Tanglao, license CC BY

2. You can export your presentation into JPEG’s (one per slide) directly from Keynote. Can you feed those to Slick Slider?

3. Wednesday it was 18 years ago that I first posted in this space. The pace of writing has varied over the years, obviously intensively at the start, and in the past 3 years I have been blogging much more frequently again (with a correlated drop off in my Facebook activity to 0), more than at the start even.
   This year is of course different, with most of the people I know globally living much more hyper local lives due to pandemic lockdowns. This past year of blogging turned out more introspective as a consequence. In the past few years I took the anniversary of this blog to reflect on how to raise awareness for grasping your own agency and autonomy online, and reading last year‘s it’s so full of activity from our current perspective, organising events, going places. None of that was possible really this year. I returned home from the French Alps late February and since then haven’t seen much more than my work space at home, and the changing of the seasons in the park around the corner, punctuated only with a half dozen brief visits to Amsterdam and two or three to Utrecht in the past 8 months. A habit of travel has morphed into having the world expedited to our doorstep, in cardboard packaging in the back of delivery vans.
   Likewise my ongoing efforts and thinking concerning networked agency, distributed digital transformation and ethics as a practice has had a more inward looking character.
   Early in the year we completed the shift of my company’s internal systems to self-hosted Nextcloud and Rocket.chat. When the pandemic started we added our own Jitsi server for video conferencing, although in practice with larger groups we use Zoom mostly, next to the systems our clients rolled out (MS Teams mostly). Similarly I will soon have completed the move of the Dutch Creative Commons chapter, where I’m a board member, to Nextcloud as well. That way the tools we use align better with our stated mission and values.
   I spent considerable time renovating my PKM system, and the tools supporting it, with Obsidian the biggest change in tooling underneath that system since a decade or so. It means I am now finally getting away from using Evernote. Although I haven’t figured out yet what to do, if anything, with what I stored in Evernote in the 10 years I’ve been using it daily.
   This spring I left Facebook and Whatsapp completely (I’ve never used Instagram), not wanting to have anything to do anymore with the Facebook company. I departed from my original FB account 3 years ago, which led to me blogging much more again, but created a new account after a while to maintain a link to some. That new account slowly but steadily crept back into the ‘dull’ moments of the day, and when the pandemic increased the noise and hysterics levels aided by FB’s algorithmic amplification outrage machine, I decided enough was enough. A 2.5 year process! It more or less shows how high the, mostly misplaced, sense of cost of leaving can be. And it was also surprising how some take such a step as an act of personal rejection.
   I also see my Twitter usage reducing, in favour of interacting more on my personal Mastodon instance, through e-mail (yay for e-mail) and LinkedIn (where your interaction is tied to your professional reputation so much less of a ragefest). Even though I never dip into the actual Twitter stream, as I only check Twitter using Tweetdeck to keep track of specific topics, groups and interests. This summer I from close-up saw how the trolls came for a colleague that moved to a position in national media. Even if the trolling and vitriol was perhaps mild by e.g. US standards, it made me realise again how there was an ocean of toxic interaction just a single click away from where I usually am on Twitter.
   On the IndieWeb side of things, I of course did not get to organise new IndieWebCamps like last year in Amsterdam and Utrecht. I’ve thought about doing some online events, but my energy flowed elsewhere. I’ve looked more inwardly here as well. I’ve been bringing my presentation slides ‘home’, closing my Slideshare account, and removing my company from Scribd as well. This is a still ongoing process. The solution is now clear and functional, but moving over the few hundred documents is something that will take a bit of time. I don’t want to move over the bulk of 14 years of shared slide decks, but want to curate the collection down to those that are relevant still, and those that were published in my blog posts at the time.
   I am tinkering with a version of this site that isn’t ‘stream’ (blogposts in reverse chronological order), and isn’t predominantly ‘garden’ (wiki-style pseudo-static content), but a mix of it. I’ve been treating different types of content here differently for some time already. A lot never is shown on the front page. Some posts are never distributed through RSS, while some others are only distributed through RSS and unlisted on the site (my week notes for instance). Now I am working on removing what is so clearly a weblog interface from the front page. The content will still be there of course, the RSS feeds will keep feeding, all the URLs will keep working, but the front of this site I think should morph into something that is much more a mix of daily changes and highlighted fixtures. Reflecting my current spectrum of interests more broadly, and providing a sense of exploration, as well as the daily observations and occurrences.
   Making such a change to the site is also to introduce a bit of friction, of a need to spend time to be able to get to know the perspectives I share here if you newly arrive here. I think that there should be increased friction with increased social distance. You’ll know me better if you spend time here. The Twitter trolling example above is a case of unwanted assymmetry in my eyes: it’s incredibly easy for total strangers to lob emotion-grenades at someone, low cost for them, potentially high-impact for the receiver. Getting within ‘striking distance’ of someone should carry a cost and risk for the other party as well. A mutuality, to phrase it more constructively.
   Here’s to another year of blogging and such mutuality. My feed reader brings me daily input from so many of you, around the world, and I’m looking forward to many more distributed conversations based on that. Thank you for reading!

4. This morning I gave a guest lecture at the Amsterdam University College as part of a course on Big Data mostly (using Rob Kitchin’s book The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences). I talked about open data, open government data more particularly. How it creates impact, the challenges for government in publishing it, and also quite a bit on the pitfalls connected to using open data for some sort of application. I ended on the note that the ethical issues tied to open data usage are also connected to the notion that data is now a prime geopolitical factor. Any choices you make w.r.t. re-using open data will therefore tell the world a lot about who you are, and to which of the geopolitical data propositions you adhere (e.g. surveillance capitalism, data driven statism, data driven enlightenment)
   The lecturer I’ve known for a decade or so from open data efforts, and he invited me as well as TU Delft’s Frederika Welle Donker. She and I have been speaking together in various settings before. A combination that worked well again this time I think, my own practice based perspectives in combination with the insights that research provides from approaching in a more rigorous manner the same questions I deal with.
   I published the slides and transcript in my new set-up running ‘my own Slideshare‘, and shared the URL at the start of the talk.
   This came in handy as this of course was an online event, and convenient and immediate sharing of content makes more sense in such a setting than when doing a talk in the same room as the students.
   It has been a while I did such a general introduction about open data. So I spent time yesterday evening and early this morning first rewatching a general talk I gave 8 years ago, and one two years ago, thinking about what are the current developments that are relevant, and current things we are actually working on (e.g. data governance and ethical issues).

5. @ton Vielen Dank für den Tipp.Mir ein WordPress dafür aufzusetzen, ist leider keine Option, da ich ein anderes Blogsystem benutze.Das Plugin ist aber sehr cool.Dank u wel.
   
   

6. @ddeimeke Die beiden wichtigsten Bausteine des Plugins sind auch separat und ausserhalb WP benutzbar: https://www.convertapi.com/ um Slidedecks in JPGs zu verwandeln, un der Viewer https://kenwheeler.github.io/slick/ um die JPGs in einem Slider zu zeigen. Und zB Keynote kann JPGS auch direkt exportieren, was ConvertAPI erübrigt.
   
   
   High Performance File Conversion REST API for Web or Desktop App – ConvertAPI

7. I find I enjoy the process of self hosting my old presentations much more than I had expected. I expected the transition being a chore, but it turns out it is not.
   Last September I quit using Slideshare and created a way to host my own slidedecks myself. I had 132 presentations in my personal slideshare account, and a similiar number in my company’s account. Migrating them into my own set-up seemed like a daunting chore. I resolved to take my time for it, to spread out the work load.
   I first created a list of presentations that I embedded in this website at the time, containing 55 slide decks. In that list I marked those that I currently think are still relevant, or that I regard as important to me at the time, or that in hindsight turned out to contain something that gained more significance in my work afterwards. Then I started to manually add those prioritised slide decks to my self hosted collection (tonz.nl for Dutch slides, tonz.eu for non-Dutch slides), at most one per day.
   Unexpectedly this is fun to do. Because I do not just upload slides, but add links to my blogposts about the talk at the time, a video etc, I sort-of revisit the conference in question. Sometimes rewatching my own talk, sometimes going through the slides of other presenters at the same event or watching their videos. It resurfaces old ideas I forgot about but still find useful, and it results in new associations and thoughts about the topics I discussed in those talks. Leading to new notes and ideas now. It also shows me there is a consistency in my work that isn’t always obvious to me, and it surfaces the evolutionary path of some of my ideas and activities. That makes it worthwile to bring these slides home. Like reassembling an old photo album whose pictures slipped out because the glue became too old.

8. I started self-hosting my presentation slides in september 2020. The immediate trigger was the sale by LinkedIn of Slideshare to Scribd, and the resulting changes in access and tracking.
   I set up two separate WordPress sites to host my slide decks.
   tonz.nl which hosts my Dutch language slides
   tonz.eu which hosts my English and German language slides.
   With my hosting provider I checked if it was ok to host a site whose only purpose is to provide downloads, as nominally it would be against their ToS to provide a download website. My purpose, sharing my own slides was no problem, as the expected traffic is light anyway.
   The short domain names, and my ability to create URLs on those domains as I want, allow me to create short easily sharable URLs for my presentations. I announce the URL on my slides during delivery, enabling participants in the audience to immediately access and reshare my presentation file and/or notes, and embed the slide in their own sites.
   I use the Speakerstack WP plugin to manage my slides. The workflow is uploading the PDF to my WP media library. The plugin then uses ConvertAPI to convert my slides PDF to a series of images and adds them in an embeddable slider. That slider can be seen full screen.
   Next to that I create a page, with the short URL mentioned, in which I embed the slides, add a transcript, links to blog posts and PDF download.
   I am now in the process of uploading presentations to the two sites, creating the pages and replacing the original Slideshare embeds with the new self-hosted embeds. It is a pleasing experience to bring slides home.

9. Vandaag vond FOSS4G-NL plaats, de eerste grote bijeenkomst waar ik weer heen ging.
   Ik gaf een presentatie over de aankomende EU wetgeving t.a.v. digitalisering en data, en de kansen die daarin liggen voor de free and open source software for geo community (FOSS4G). Drie jaar geleden sprak ik tijdens de opening van FOSS4G-NL over de geopolitieke rol van data, dat Europa daar een andere koers ging kiezen dan bijvoorbeeld de VS (maximale winst-extractie) en China (maximale staatscontrole), namelijk een waar maatschappelijke waarde in lijn wordt gebracht met het versterken en beschermen van burgerrechten, en dat iedere lokale geodata-adviseur een geopolitieke actor daarbinnen is.
   Dit jaar kon ik daar concreet over verder praten omdat de Europese Commissie een reeks wetgeving heeft voorgesteld die invulling geeft aan die geopolitieke propositie t.a.v. data. In die praktische invulling, die vooral nog moet gaan gebeuren, liggen kansen voor de FOSS community en FOSS4G community omdat juist hun kennis t.a.v. federatie, standaarden, en het accomoderen van heel verschillende belangen en perspectieven de dagelijkse gang van zaken is.
   Mijn slides vind je hieronder (gepubliceerd op mijn persoonlijke slideshare). De korte makkelijk deelbare link is tonz.nl/foss4g21.

   Dank aan de organisatoren om weer een FOSS4GNL te organiseren, en fijn om weer in Enschede en bij het ITC te zijn.

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