Tag: socialsoftware

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I’ve reached 2000 bookmarks and annotations in Hypothes.is. A large chunk of those 2000 bookmarks came this month, some 20% of them. Because, mostly I think, I’ve hit on the right mindset that makes bookmarking/annotating in hypothes.is a habit. Next to having a bit more energy and mental space in general than I had for a long time, that really helps too.

Exactly four years ago today I created my Hypothes.is account. I made my first annotation there only in April 2022, and started using it regularly in late August 2022.

Two thousand isn’t a whole lot of course. Annotation is not just bookmarking, and a single page can have many annotations. Still it is relatively more than the 3200 bookmarks I collected in Delicious over the span of eleven years, from summer 2004 to summer 2015, and the hundreds I saved to Evernote between 2016 and 2020. And it makes Hypothes.is the only new addition to my otherwise shrinking distributed online presence in the past years.


The graph of my annotations, a start in the fall of 2022, then a steady linear path for two years, followed by a little jump and a much flatter usage for a year, ending in a strong jump.

I noticed early this month that something seemed to be shifting in my annotations.
Three elements are part of that shift, and they combine to make a more active habit

  • I made it easier to bookmark and annotate, by reducing the friction to annotate from right inside my feedreader.
  • I let go of the internal voice that any annotation should be a ‘proper and serious’ annotation, a result of thinking. Annotation is an every day activity, creating the breadcrumbs that may result in deeper thinking later on in my notes. All annotations flow automatically into my local notes, where I can work with them and re-use them.
  • I start with a question or topic and wander where hyperlinks take me for 15 minutes or so. This is the type of browsing like it’s 1993, when that was the only way you could take in the world wide web (and actually for a short while: take in the entire web). It feels natural, and it feeds actual current interests, work-related, side interests and every day things. It makes annotation an every day activity for real.

The first two changes make it easier to start annotating. The last change makes the biggest difference, as it results in short bursts of new annotations in a steady rhythm.

Hypothes.is isn’t a widely used tool out on the open web. It is mostly used in educational settings, for classes and groups, and integrated into learning systems. It does have a few social features though, like the ability to not just follow (through RSS e.g.) but also respond to other people’s annotations. Like in the old days of Del.icio.us that is a way to find others interested in the same thing as you but from a different perspective and using different language to describe it. I have a small roll of Hypothes.is users. You can also check out who is annotating using similar tags to yours to find new people.

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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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Twitter’s new management seems to want to limit the use of Tweetdeck to paying users only.

For many years, at least since the algorithm decided the timeline, I’ve used Tweetdeck as circumvention and as my interface to Twitter. It’s how I search for specific topics, follow some accounts, lists, tags etc. I had until recently some 70 columns in my Tweetdeck. Last year Tweetdeck became web only, and I suspected it wouldn’t be a net positive for my Twitter usage. It wasn’t. Mostly because it split up my different Twitter accounts over multiple tweetdeck set-ups where there used to be 1, and then made it harder to easily switch between accounts for posting and interacting. This last week it became mostly impossible to see any tweets when not logged in (which I never do on mobile).

All in all it looks like it’s time to discard Twitter fully. I haven’t posted in my accounts the last months, but kept the accounts if for nothing else than place holders. If even accessing Twitter is hobbled, then it’s finally time to let it go. One more platform that lives shorter than my own site.

Back in 2008 in presentations I used to share this list of what I shared online in which channel. Almost all of that is gone or disfunctional, where it used to be an integral part of my online interactions with my network.


A 2008 overview of social tools I used at that time. Slide from my 2008 talk at Politcamp Graz on networked life and work. Most of those tools no longer exist or I no longer use. Except for this blog.

I see lots of potential for social software still, and even again, just not social media.

[Update 2023/07/05: I have deleted all my topic oriented Twitter accounts and a few legacy ones, as well as my public main account (ton_zylstra). My private one (tonzylstra), I may keep for a while longer, unused though it is.]

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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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Even though quite a number of companies regard social media as dangerous, I think companies have in fact a lot going for them as a suitable environment for social software.

Because social software tools all work from the same principles:
1 they thrive on large volumes of data and information (Flickr and delicious e.g. only come into their own when the volume involved is big enough)
2 they thrive when existing social networks adopt the same tool (your fraternity in Facebook, Wikipedians doing wiki maintenance, your blog roll)

Social software works well given these conditions because these tools are the internet’s response to the enormous volume of information the internet helped create. Social software is the answer to the internet by the internet.
The quantitative change in information availability (going from scarcity to abundance) leads to qualitative changes in our information strategies. Social filtering is one of those changed information strategies. Social software caters to social filtering.

Companies are excellent environments for social filtering.
Because they sit on large volumes of data and information, going largely unused.
Because organisations are a group of people with shared goals and tasks.

In short, companies are their own objects of sociality as well as their own user group.

An information manager of a large internationally operating Dutch company told me the other day that they had given a number of their professionals access to their business intelligence data. Because they were gathering so much data nobody really looked at for lack of good questions to ask of the dataset. The professionals put the data to good use, because they could formulate the right questions. They were adding social structures and context to the data. Basically adding social software design principles to a large volume of data.

The information manager was surprised by this, saying something like “and I have these BI specialists who never came up with this kind of use for the data”.
I wasn’t surprised. Throwing social relationships at large volumes of data works. We see it in our feed-readers, presence streams, yasn’s, wiki’s, and tag-clouds every day.

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Dreaming of Tags
Shortly before waking up one morning, while camping in the Austrian Alps in the past weeks (as seen above) I had a dream about tags. Or rather I dreamt that my brother in law had created a database in which each data item was treated and useable as a tag as well. In my dream I was very enthusiastic about this idea. When I woke up Elmine asked me ‘what does that mean, that everything is a tag?’. We kept coming back to the topic, and at the end of the day had a conversation around it over a couple of Weizen beers.

Tags do Double Duty
Tags serve two functions. First they are descriptors, and in that sense subservient to the piece of data they describe. But they are also pivots, i.e. turning points in your path through data. A pivot allows you to see the same set of data, or a different set of data which overlaps the current one, in a different view.

If you go to the picture above and follow the tag ‘huben’ on the right, you are presented with a number of pictures that are also tagged ‘huben’, so you can navigate to a different photo within the context of ‘huben’ and so on. Pivots are the forks in the road of your surfing.
When everything is a tag as in my dream, then everything is a pivot as well. This reminds me of the view on data-items the people of Mediamatic have: everything is a thing. So a thing can be a tag, but also a list of tags, or the entire Flickr-database, or any part thereof. In my dream everything was a tag, a pivot.

Pivots in Social Software Triangles
My description of social software as triangles, which got quite a good response at the time, put tags as pivots in the center view: social applications allow you to navigate from one app to another through their tags as pivot points.

From a Flickr photo to a point on a Yahoo or Google map, to a location in Plazes, or to photo’s taken geographically nearby. The thing is, I cannot directly jump from a Flickr photo to the corresponding location in Plazes. I could if the Plaze itself was the tag. In my 2006 posting I already indicated that where now usually a tag is in the triangle, there basically could be anything. As long as the other two points are a person and a object of sociality. So you could theoretically jump directly from a picture to an event to a place to a review to the author back to the picture again. If tags could be more than just a descriptive word they would be better pivots.


(image from the triangle posting last year)

Need More Pivots!
Hence I concluded that my dream was basically a call for more pivot points in social media. So that we can navigate our web apps better, and build better personal information strategies.
Question remains who has the rights to the concept of a database where everything is tags: me because it was my dream, or my brother in law as he came up with it in my dream and showed me a working prototype 🙂