Category: social networking

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Yesterday I participated in, or more accurately listened in on, a IndieWeb conversation on wikis and their relationship to blogs (session notes).

I didn’t feel like saying much so kept quiet, other than at the start during a (too long) intro round where I described how I’ve looked at and used wiki personally in the past. That past is almost as long as this blog is old. Blogs and wikis were to me the original social software tools.

  • Between 2004 and 2010 I kept a wiki as the main screen on my desktop, sort of like how I used The Brain in years before that. In it I kept conversation notes, kept track of who’s who in the projects I worked on etc. This after a gap in turn got replaced by Evernote in 2012
  • Between 2004 and 2013 I had a public wiki alongside this blog (first WakkaWiki, then WikkaWiki). In those years at one or two points I recreated it from scratch after particular intensive waves of automated spam and vandalism
  • Between 2004 and 2010 I had a wiki covering all the BlogWalk Salons I co-organised from 2004-2008
  • I had a script that let me crosspost from this blog to the wiki alongside it, so I could potentially rework it there. I don’t think that happened much really.
  • At one point I glued blogs, wiki and forum software together as a ‘Patchwork Portal‘ for a group I worked with. Elmine and presented about this together on BlogTalk Reloaded in 2006, showing the co-evolution of a budding community of practice and the patchwork portal as the group’s toolset. Afterwards it was used for a while in a ‘wiki on a stick’ project for education material by one of the group’s members.
  • Two years ago I re-added a wiki style section of sorts to this blog. As I’m the only one editing anyway, I simply use WordPress pages, as when I’m logged in everything has an edit button already. The purpose is to have a place for more static content, so I can refer to notions or overviews more easily, and don’t need to provide people with a range of various blogposts and let them dig out my meaning by themselves. In practice it is a rather empty wiki, consisting mostly of lists of blogposts, much less of content. A plus is that Webmentions work on my pages too, so bidirectional links between my and someone else’s blog and my wiki are easy.
  • With clients and colleagues over the years I’ve used Atlassian as a collaborative tool, and once created a wiki for a client that contained their organisation’s glossary. Current items were not editable, but showed sections directly below that which were. Colleagues could add remarks, examples and propose new terms, and from that periodically the glossary would be changed.

Stock versus flow, gardening and streams
Neil Mather, who has a really intriguing wiki as commonplace book since last fall, mentioned he writes ‘stream first’. This stock (wiki) and flow (blog) perspective is an important one in personal knowledge management. Zettelkasten tools and e.g. Tiddlywiki focus on singular thoughts, crumbs of content as building block, and as such fall somewhere in between that stock and flow notion, as blogging is often a river of these crumbs (bookmarks, likes, an image, a quote etc.) Others mentioned that they blogged as a result of working in their wiki, so the flow originated in the stock. This likely fits when blog posts are articles more than short posts. One of the participants said his blog used to show the things from his wiki he marked as public (which is the flip side of how I used to push blog posts to the wiki if they were marked ‘wikify’).
Another participant mentioned she thinks of blogs as having a ‘first published’ date, and wiki items a ‘last edited’ date. This was a useful remark to me, as that last edited date in combination with e.g. tags or topics, provides a good way to figure out where gardening might be in order.
Ultimately blogs and wikis are not either stock or flow to me but can do both. Wikis also create streams, through recent changes feeds etc. Over the years I had many RSS feeds in my reader alerting me to changes in wikis. I feel both hemmed in by how my blog in its setup puts flow above stock, and how a wiki assumes stock more than flow. But that can all be altered. In the end it’s all just a database, putting different emphasis on different pivots for navigation and exploration.

Capturing crumbs, Zettelkasten
I often struggle with the assumed path of small elements to slightly more reworked content to articles. It smacks of the DIKW pyramid which has no theoretical or practical merit in my eyes. Starting from small crumbs doesn’t work for me as most thoughts are not crumbs but rather like Gestalts. Not that stuff is born from my mind as a fully grown and armed Athena, but notes, ideas and thoughts are mostly not a single thing but a constellation of notions, examples, existing connections and intuited connections. In those constellations, the connections and relations are a key piece for me to express. In wiki those connections are links, but while still key, they are less tangible, not treated as actual content and not annotated. Teasing out the crumbs of such a constellation routinely constitutes a lot of overhead I feel, and to me the primary interest is in those small or big constellations, not the crumbs. The only exception to this is having a way of visualising links between crumbs, based on how wiki pages link to each other, because such visualisations may point to novel constellations for me, emerging from the collection and jumble of stuff in the wiki. That I think is powerful.

Personal and public material
During the conversation I realised that I don’t really have a clear mental image of my wiki section. I refer to it as my personal wiki, but my imagined readership does not include me and only consists of ‘others’. I think that is precisely what feels off with it.
I run a webserver on my laptop, and on it I have a locally hosted blog where very infrequently I write some personal stuff (e.g. I kept a log there in the final weeks of my father’s life) or stream of consciousness style stuff. In my still never meaningfully acted upon notion of leaving Evernote a personal blog/wiki combo for note taking, bookmarking etc might be useful. Also for logging things. One of the remarks that got my interest was the notion of starting a daily note in which over the course of the day you log stuff, and that is then available to later mine for additional expansion, linking and branching off more wiki-items.

A question that came up for me, musing about the conversation is what it is I am trying to automate or reduce friction for? If I am trying to automate curation (getting from crumbs to articles automagically) then that would be undesirable. Only I should curate, as it is my learning and agency that is involved. Having sensemaking aids that surface patterns, visualise links etc would be very helpful. Also in terms of timelines, and in terms of shifting vocabulary (tags) for similar content.

First follow-ups

  • I think I need to return to my 2005 thinking about information strategies, specifically at the collecting, filtering stage and the actions that result from it. and look again at how my blog and wiki can play a bigger role for currently underveloped steps.
  • Playing more purposefully with how I tie the local blog on my laptop to the publlic one sounds like a good experiment.
  • Using logging as a starting point for personal notetaking is an easy experiment to start (I see various other obvious starting points, such as bookmarks or conversations that play that role in my Evernotes currently). Logging also is a good notion for things like the garden and other stuff around the home. I remember how my grandmother kept daily notes about various things, groceries bought, deliveries received, harvest brought in. Her cupboard full of notebooks as a corpus likely would have been a socio-economic research treasure

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Since New Year’s day a slow drip of many documents concerning the work of Cambridge Analytica across 68 countries is giving insights in how the combination of consumer tracking and targeted adverts is being used to influence democratic decisions. Not just within a country, but across multiple countries and simultaneously (meaning foreign interests presented as domestic opinions of the electorate in multiple countries). It’s not entirely surprising, these are age old instruments of propaganda, provocation etc, being redeployed in the digital age, which allows an entirely new level of scale and granularity that makes it a much more malicious beast. It’s shocking on two levels. First, it shows there’s a strong need to make radically transparent to people where material they get served in the silos is coming from, why it is being showed to them, whether it’s part of a/b testing or not, and who is paying/taking influence on each item presented to them. Second, even if there should be no effect at all of these type of campaigns (which seems to crop up as a defence here and there), it is revealing that office-seeking clients and political operatives buy into the cynical premise of the entire concept. Which alone should disqualify them from being elected. The clients need to be held more to account, than the service provider, regardless of any illegality on the side of CA.

The HindSightFiles twitter account is releasing a steady stream of Cambridge Analytica files during the first few months of 2020, leaked by former CA employee Brittany Kaiser. Part of these documents were used earlier in the US Mueller investigation into 2016 election influencing by Russia, and released to the UK Parliament after the initial CA scandal broke.

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For years I had been an active user of Delicious, the social bookmarking service. I started using it in 2004, a year after its launch, and stopped using it in 2015. By then the service had been repeatedly sold, and much of its useful social features had been deprecated. It’s one of those great services Yahoo bought and then never did anything with. As I describe in a posting on bookmarking strategies last year, Delicious was useful originally because it showed you who else had bookmarked the same thing as you, and with which tags. It allowed me to find other people with similar interests, and especially if they used very different tags than me for a page they would be outside my own communities and networks (as ‘tribes’ will gravitate to a shared idiom). I’d then start following the blogs of those other people, as a way of widening my ‘very large scale antenna array’ of feed reading. Tags were pivots for triangulation. Delicious is one of those tools that were really social software, as opposed to a social media platform with its now too common self-reinforcing toxicity.

The current owner of Delicious is Pinboard, and according to Wikipedia the Delicious site was officially made inactive last August. That became obvious visiting my Delicious profile in the past weeks (on the original de.licio.us url, not the later delicious.com), as it would regularly result in an internal server error. Today I could access my profile.

My delicious profile

I decided to download my Delicious data, 3851 bookmarks.

After several attempts resulting in internal server errors, I ended up on the export screen which has options to include both notes and tags.

Delicious export screen

The resulting download is a HTML file (delicious.html), which after opening at first glance looked disappointing as it did not show tags, nor the date of bookmarking, just the description. Loosing most context would make the list of bookmarks rather useless.

My delicious html export

However, when I took a look at the source of the HTML file, I found that thankfully tags and dates are included as data attributes of the bookmarks. The HTML is nicely marked up wit DT and DD tags too, so it will be no problem to parse this export automatically.

My delicious html export source showing data attributes

My original notion was to import all bookmarks with their tags and notes, as back dated blog entries here. But randomly clicking on a range of links tells me that many of those bookmarks no longer resolve to an active web page, or redirect to some domain squatting spam outfit. So bringing the bookmarks ‘home’ into my site isn’t useful.
As the export includes tags, I can mine the list for bits of utility though. The collection contains a wide variety of open data usage examples I collected over the years, and that is of interest as a historical library, that I could try and match against the internet archives, using the bookmarking dates. Most other stuff is no longer of interest, or was ephemeral to begin with, so I won’t bother bringing that ‘home’. I will add the delicious export to the other exports of Twitter and Facebook on my NAS drive and cloud as archive. I have now removed my profile from the Delicious website (after several attempts to overcome internal server errors, and it is now verifiably gone).

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Through a posting of Roel I came across Rick Klau again, someone who like me was blogging about knowledge management in the early ’00s. These days his writing is on Medium it seems.

Browsing through his latest posts, I came across this one about homebrew contact management.

Contact management is one area where until now I mostly stayed away from automating anything.
First and foremost because of the by definition poor initial data quality that you use to set it up (I still have 11 yr old contact info on my phone because it is hard to delete, and then gets put back due to some odd feedback loop in syncing).
Second, because of the risk of instrumentalising the relationships to others, instead of interacting for its own sake.
Third, because most systems I encountered depend on letting all your mail etc flow through it, which is a type of centralisation / single point of failure I want to avoid.

There’s much in Rick’s post to like (even though I doubt I’d want to shell out $1k/yr to do the same), and there are things in there I definitely think useful. He’s right when he says that being able to have a better overview of your network in terms of gender, location, diversity, background etc. is valuable. Not just in terms of contacts, but in terms of information filtering when you follow your contacts in several platforms etc.

Bookmarked to come up with an experiment. Timely also because I just decided to create a simple tool for my company as well, to start mapping stakeholders we encounter. In Copenhagen last September I noticed someone using a 4 question page on her phone to quickly capture she met me, the context and my organisation. When I asked she said it was to have an overview of the types of organisations and roles of people she encountered in her work, building a map as it were of the ecosystem. Definitely something I see the use of.

HandShakeHandshakes and conversations is what I’m interested in, not marketing instruments. Image Handshake by Elisha Project, license CC BY SA

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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:

Last year the anniversary of this blog coincided with leaving Facebook and returning to writing in this space more. That certainly worked out. Maybe I should use this date to yearly reflect on how my online behaviours do or don’t aid my networked agency.

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!

Ja het is inderdaad wat vreemd om van je blog direct naar Twitter of Mastodon te posten.
Ik doe het op 3 manieren:

  • ik gebruik het excerpt veld om naar Twitter of Mastodon te posten bij postings met titel of langere postings. Dit heeft als voordeel dat ik in de posting bij namen van mensen naar hun site kan linken, terwijl ik in de excerpt dan hun @nicks gebruik. Vergelijk bijvoorbeeld deze posting, en de bijbehorende tweet.
  • ik post direct zoals jij hier een note (post zonder titel), die ook op mijn site zichtbaar is, en in mijn rss feed verschijnt. Dat is soms ok. Zoals deze post, en deze tweet
  • ik post soms dingen die ik wel vanuit mijn site naar Twitter of Mastodon stuur, maar die op mijn site verder unlisted zijn, en niet in de rss feed komen. Door er een aparte categorie (micromsg) voor te gebruiken. Dat kan weer in beide bovengenoemde vormen. Bijvoorbeeld zoals deze post, en de bijbehorende tweet. Deze laatste categorie voel ik me prima bij om losse Tweets en Toots te versturen. Je kunt je natuurlijk afvragen in hoeverre je al die kleine berichtjes ook op je site wilt houden, of dat je ze als erg vergankelijk ziet. Maar het haalt natuurlijk wel ook de backfeed op, en die is wellicht interessant om te bewaren op je eigen site dan de oorspronkelijke tweet wellicht was. Bijvoorbeeld als je vragen stelt.

Laatste opmerking: wat me tot nu toe wel te ver ging is mijn hele blog als ActivityPub endpoint in te zetten. En dat heeft vooral te maken met dat je dan niet meer selectief kunt zijn in wat je naar Mastodon stuurt, dan is je blog je AP account. Terwijl ik Mastodon wel als aparte gespreksruimte beleef en dus selectief wil kunnen zijn wat ik er wel en niet naar toe stuur.

Replied to a post by Frank MeeuwsenFrank Meeuwsen

…dat ik mijn blog kan gebruiken als centrale plaats voor Mastodon posts. En tweets. Denk ik. Toch blijft dat vreemd voelen.