Category: metablogging

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Bryan Alexander provides an overview and interesting analysis of his current social media presences and what they mean and have meant for him, his work and interaction.
His summing up of the various platforms that used to be and currently are online places he frequents reminded me of how I talked about my online presences around 2007. What they did for me, and what I shared through these platforms.
I called it the Long List of My Distributed Self back then.

It read:

Blog, what I think about
Jaiku, what I am doing
Twitter, what I say I am doing
Plazes, where I am and where I was
Dopplr, where I will be
Flickr, what I see
delicious, what I read
Wakoopa, what software I use
Slideshare, what I talk about
Upcoming, where I will attend
Last.fm, what I listen to
and then there is my LinkedIn, my Facebook, my Xing, my Hyves, my NING, and my collaborative tools MindMeister, Thinkfold, and Googledocs.

That list these days is much shorter.

The utility of social software and web2.0 as we called it then, not social media, is that of leaving longer traces. Traces for others to stumble across, so that interaction can happen. As a way of ‘finding the others’, creating conversations and emergent networks of connections.

Bryan Alexander is the only blogger I never met in person and yet see as part of my inner circle of bloggers I’m in touch with through my feedreader. That interaction goes back 20 years. Talking about leaving longer traces.

All that in a context where the number of users on these platforms was smaller and, most importantly, well before the currently remaining of those platforms turned on them and started manipulating what everyone saw. Which ultimately moved them completely away of enabling longer traces, and made it harder to find the others. That affordance having been replaced by shoving those (and things) that are already highly visible in everyone’s face, without anyone seeking those out intentionally. And now adding the still denser fog of generated slop.

The change in those platforms, replacing lengthened human traces with adtech’s engagement optimising masquerading as such, has shortened that 2007 long list of my distributed self.

A range of services on that list shut down or were acquired and then subsumed, Jaiku, Plazes, Dopplr, delicious, Wakoopa, Hyves, NING, Thinkfold. Some of those in terms of functionality I still miss, especially delicious, Plazes and Dopplr.
Others showed themselves less capable of / suited for the type of longer traces and finding of others I was interested in, such as Upcoming, Last.fm, Xing.
Those that survived became toxic, Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare, Foursquare. My use of collaboration tools moved to less public environments although open source and self-hosted.

The current list of my distributed self is short, much shorter than in 2007.

  • Blog, this place here, still the main element, and across all of these service past and present the most long lived one and the one under my own full control. It generates conversations, although less in the comment section. Regularly though people, also first time commenters, respond using email.
  • Flickr, still in use, for 20 years now too, but it’s not much of a social space these days, more a convenient archive that I automatically add to from my phone. I have removed (almost) all embeddings of Flickr photos in this site and replaced them with a local copy of the image and a link to their location on Flickr, preempting any tracking unless one clicks the link. While I may still decide to do away with Flickr too at some point, currently its utility as a searchable and chronological archive of 43k of my photos is still high for me.
  • Hypothesis, a new entrant in the list, is a very useful annotation tool, that functions somewhat like an alternative for delicious, the bookmarking tool of old. It has a social aspect, centered around the annotated text, and while ‘finding the others’ through it doesn’t happen often it happens often enough to be delightful.
  • Mastodon, which does Twitter like it’s 2006, which I use from a single person instance, avoiding the scaling that led Twitter et al astray. I cut the ‘longer traces’ aspect short on Mastodon, deleting entries after a few days. Born out of practicality (Mastodon bloats the needed database volume at astonishing rates), it is also a recognition of those messages being ephemera, conversations in passing. Finding the others is still very possible through it, and messages I don’t want to treat as transient originate in my blog (which I then automatically cross post to my separate Mastodon profile), and resulting conversation comes back to my blog as well.
  • LinkedIn, which I can barely tolerate these days, since its timeline degenerated substantially early on in the pandemic. Mostly still there because I completely ditched that timeline (by unfollowing all contacts) and am treating LinkedIn as a self-updating rolodex. It means that I don’t regard or experience it as a social software tool for interaction or finding the others any more.

I shift my behavior as a given system changes how it operates, Bryan writes. True.
Those system changes have over time tended to making one’s online traces harder to stumble across (by reducing interoperability, closing off, and eroding the very building block of the web, the link), and making finding the others harder (even the strongly diminishing quality of web search itself is part of that). A likely answer to that is more distributed approaches, with your self at the core, and navigating widening circles of contacts found through other contacts. The triangulation for that still works but it does take more attention and effort. The trouble is that for most of us it’s not within our agency to do that technologically ourselves. A balancing between that and the avoidance of centralised silos (old and new) is to be sought. Here be dragons, not unicorns.

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On this day 23 years ago at 14:07 I posted my first blogpost.

After the very stressful time I (and my team and my family) had until mid-September, I have finally turned to my recovery from burn-out. Still very tired, but as I mentioned earlier my head is becoming somewhat more active. Part of that recovery is rekindling my sense of wonder.

Already last year in conversations with a psychologist I defined for myself three things to help me do that. Building more exploration into my activities again starting from my sense of how things could be, and by engaging more again with my professional peers. Stressful and urgent events intervened for a long time, but now I find myself returning to it.

Two weeks ago when we spent a few days in Antwerp as a family, I came across the essay ‘Ode aan de verwondering‘, an ode to wonder, by the late Belgian scientist Caroline Pauwels, in the Stad Leest bookstore.
A timely find and read now that I have slowly moved a bunch of activities off my plate, and except for a single client stopped working until February or so.

My blog has always been a way of sharing things that stood out for me, responding to what others shared, and especially enjoy the type of conversation that creates (thanks to all of you who engage).

Blogging is a feedback loop on one’s sense of wonder.

Just yesterday I wrote about a notion I had (resulting from reading this book), to find interesting European non-fiction books by authors in languages I cannot read. It resulted in several reactions already, including a kind mail by Sven who mailed me about two books in Swedish he enjoyed, plus some links on how to acquire non-fiction books in Sweden. (Thank you!)
My blog over the years has resulted in many such and much deeper connections, reinforced by meeting people at a variety of conferences, and then interacting through other channels and in person (see the mention of peers above).

I find myself writing more again these days, and some of it ends up here. At the same time I see myself withdrawing from several other platforms. I don’t much like being drawn into my Mastodon timeline currently, nor my feedreader, as I seem to seek them out not out of curiosity but as grazing. I need to do my stuff in my own space for now it seems. I’m taking my blogging as an indicator of how I’m doing for the coming months.

Here’s to another year of blogging and conversation.

(In the years 2015 – 2022 I posted a reflection here on the role of my blog. (15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years of blogging), then I skipped/missed a few ‘anniversaries’.)

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Bookmarked Typepad Blogging Platform Is Shutting Down For Good (by Tech Radar)

The blog hosting platform Typepad is shutting down at the end of September. It was the hosted version of Movable Type back in the day. Like WordPress’s .com to its .org. Another site death underlining the importance of ensuring your own continued access to your creative output. For instance by maintaining your own site. Site deaths are a certainty, just not the time frame.

Checking my site, I linked to Typepad blogs in 48 blogposts, mostly in the early period 2003-2010, and only a few times after. The people I linked to more than once, in other words those I interacted with, almost all have moved on to their own sites a long time ago.

I will switch over the links in those 48 posts to archived versions (with archive.org). I’ve done a few by hand, enough to know I don’t really want to do all of them by hand. However, figuring out how to automate it may be more time consuming. Also because I want to link to an archived version as close as possible to the moment of linking. Archive.org has an API so maybe I’ll give that a try.

Favorited Genoeg te ontdekken by Frank Meeuwsen

Frank schrijft over de lol en het waarom van bloggen, in referentie aan een posting van Elja en mijzelf langs die lijnen. En demonstreert zo waarom hij al 25 jaar blogt deze zomer (en ik in november 23 jaar). Bloggen gaat niet om anderen iets te zeggen te hebben, maar wel over het achterlaten van langere sporen die anderen tegen kunnen komen. Om zo in gesprek te komen of elkaar te inspireren Omdat je zelf enthousiast bent over wat je deelt, is wat je schrijft altijd goed genoeg. En leidt het tot authentieke interactie, in die gevallen waarin er reacties komen. Want geen reacties maakt ook niet uit. Goed genoeg, het is iets om je elke keer opnieuw weer te realiseren. Dank voor het oppikken van het conversatie- en exploratiedraadje Frank.

Wat ik lees bij Ton resoneert enorm bij mij op dit moment. […] Ik haal enorm veel plezier uit de ontdekkingstochten die ik nu doe. […] lezen over creativiteit, eigen oude interesses opnieuw ontdekken. Het zijn allemaal bezigheden [..] waar ik enorm veel voldoening uit haal. En ik vind het leuk om dat met anderen te delen. Want dat doet er toe.

Frank Meeuwsen

Twenty years ago today E and I visited Reboot 7 in Copenhagen. What I wrote a decade ago at the 10th anniversary of that conference still holds true for me.

Over time Reboot 7 became mythical. A myth that can’t return. But one we were part of, participated in and shaped.
Still got the t-shirt.


The yellow t-shirt with red text from the 2005 Reboot 7 conference, on my blue reading chair in my home office 20 years on.

Seventeen years ago today I blogged about a barcamp style event in Amsterdam I co-hosted, called GovCamp_NL. I struck up a conversation there about open government data after having had a similar conversation the week before in Austria. It marked the beginning of my work in this field. We just welcomed the thirteenth team member in the company that over time grew out of that first conversation. Our work at my company is driven by the same thing as the event, something I’ve come to call constructive activism.

These days, the principles and values that drove those events, and have set the tone for the past two decades of everything I’ve done professionally and socially, seem more important than ever. They are elemental in the current geopolitical landscape around everything digital and data. We can look back on our past selves with 20 years hindsight and smile about our one time optimism, because so much exploitation, abuse and surveillance grew out of the platforms and applications that originate in the early 00’s. But not because that optimism was wrong. Naive yes, in thinking that the tech would all take care of itself, by design and by default, and we just needed to nudge it a bit. That optimism in the potential for (networked) agency, for transparency, for inclusion, for diversity, and for global connectedness is still very much warranted, as a celebration of human creativity, of the sense of wonder that wielding complexity for mutual benefit provides, just not singularly attached to the tech involved.
Anything digital is political. The optimism is highly political too.

The time to shape the open web and digital ethics is now, is every day. Time for a reboot.

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Thanks ChatGPT!
Commenting is open on this website, and that means being engaged in a permanent asymmetric battle against spam. Asymmetric in the sense that like on any social media platform it is multiple orders of magnitude easier to automatically create and send out spam, falsehoods and hate speech in extremely large volumes, than it is for actual people to weed those out of their timelines and websites.
Most of incoming spam filtering is automated away these days, but always some and especially novel types are left for me te moderate myself, as the arms race continues.

A new entrant in the spam battle are AI generated spam comments that have clearly been fed the content of the actual blogpost that is being commented. Like other spam they stand out due to their blandness, what they link to and that the same things get submitted multiple times from different origins, but they are building on the content itself. I guess I should feel flattered.

It is also logical, as both spam and AI generated material are based on the exact same asymmetry. ‘Efficiency’ gains through AI generated text, are at best only that at the generation end of things (now see me generate oodles of text in seconds!), yet increases the effort needed at the receiving end to read it, see through the veil of plausibility, verify it and judge it inadequate.


Two examples of AI generated spam comments using the content of the actual blog posts (here a recent week notes posting, and one about donating money for ebooks rather than spending it at Amazon.) One commenter giving ‘undetectable AI’ as their name is a bit of a give-away though.

Any comments on this site already are subject to a Reverse Turing test, with all received material deemed generated until determined created by a person. Clearly this is no longer just a precaution resulting from tongue-in-cheek cleverness, but a must-have part of my toolkit for online interaction.