Having your own website doesn't mean you are cut off from social websites. You can comment on your own site and have replies show up on other people's sites, and on silos like twitter and facebook, using Micropub and Webmention.
Reading your thoughts, as long as you write them down first
Soi-disant Genius is a magnet for condescension
1 min read
If you were designing a site to attract condescending mansplainers, you couldn't do better than News Genius, which encourages people to annotate things they read online, displays these annotations on top of the original and awards you "IQ points" for doing so.
Over the weekend, the site was used to harass Ella Dawson but their response has been to deny the problem (and to scribble condescendingly all over her post).
I made a small script to redirect people using the genius.it prefix to the original, if you have the ability to embed javascript on your site.
Also Vijith Assar came up with an approach that mangles your webpage to be full of invisible unicode separators so Genius can't parse it. I really don't recommend installing that, as it is burning down your own site for every other viewer and crawler.
The real answer is for Genius, Inc to respect robots.txt and to use an honest referer when proxying your site so that it can be blocked by the author.
Well done!
1 min read
Twitter's Tragedy of the Comments
2 min read
A response to Abi's post
The characterisations of 'echo chamber' or 'filter bubble' as opposed to 'public discourse' miss the point. There is no one public- there never was. Literary theory talks about each work having a 'public', and reactions to the work having 'counterpublics'.
Thinking about the web as set of partially overlapping publics makes a lot of sense, and one of the great things that twitter did originally was accommodate that well. We followed people we were interested in, read some of their tweets, responded to some, retweeted some to our own public and so on. There was a place on the side of the stream where you could look a replies to your tweets, from those you didn't follow, but it was very much secondary
However, Twitter misunderstood the strengths of this, and in their urge to drive engagement, packed the app with notifications. The most egregious of these was making @ replies the primary notification, and the Big Red Number on the app on iOS. Suddenly, it was another email inbox where others' priorities were ranked above your own choices.
Chasing engagement, they listed all the replies under the posts, whether you followed the people concerned or not. They had reinvented unmoderated blog comments too.
Then of course, the Tragedy of the Comments occurred, just as it has done from the dawn of time. The power to force people to see your reactions to their comments is very hard to resist, and it changes the tone of the discourse.
Now Twitter is trying to mitigate this, but blocking and muting only affects what you see, not what others see in response to your posts. So you may have a trail of abuse attached to your posts that is visible to everyone but you.
Twitter doesn't realise it needs to cherish its tummlers.
Translating what you write to other sites
1 min read
Content creators need their stuff to be everywhere today, but moving it around is work. It's easy to do for snippets, but hard for longer form work to translate. Here is Known's UI for a snippet.
Ideally it will post the long-form where you host it, but make sense of translating it into the right format for different sites.
It needs to be smart about how it maps to the places it is posting
One solution: a plug-in for wordpress that focuses on long-form posts - something that works for that
Unfair advantage: we are content creators with years of experience of this
Ed Bice: focus on the amount of time saved - key innovation is awareness that circles back from those networks. Big win is if those interactions are served under the article. I think it's an important idea and matter should fund it. Open development ecosystem
Alexei: Chrome plugin - ditch the dashboard; make it easy to use everywhere.
Kevin: this is exactly what we have with indieweb: micropub enables this, and we have bridges for silos.
Rather than having 10,000 character tweets, I expect twitter is adding structure
1 min read
There is a tripartite structure to shared text that we have seen re-emerge over and over - name, summary and content.
The first generation of blogs were just brief time stamped notes on a page, but they soon got titles and then summaries. Now the summary, in deference to more visual UI in silos often contains a featured image too. That's what we see in our feeds daily - links presented as name, summary and featured image.
There's a way to do this that doesn't break the mental model of readers or writers, by smartly deciding on presentation based on post type heuristically. We have a draft spec for this in the Social Web working group.
We'd love for twitter to join in this work.
Fly-eye phones are coming
2 min read
This week we’ll be swamped with speculative products from CES as every manufacturer tries to show off their supposed next big thing; here’s some directional guidance on what to look for.
We have already long passed the good-enough point for displays in phones, and headed into absurd pixel densities, that you can only distinguish if your phone is a few inches from your eyes with magnifying lenses inbetween. No wonder Google Cardboard is popular with manufacturers.
Similarly, the cameras built into phones have reached the limits of useful resolution, and the differences in responsiveness have been competed away too. The next step will be multiple cameras on each side of the phone. I expect we'll first see 2 cameras at opposite ends of the phone, so you can take stereoscopic images and videos with natural eye spacing.
However, having simultaneous spaced images means you can extract 3d information from the photo - Google’s camera app has done this for a while but you need to pan up and down. This means you can change depth of field synthetically to give nicer images by blurring unwanted foreground or background details out. This also means you can more easily compensate for lens distortion, making faces less spherical looking in close-ups.You can even reconstruct 3d objects, scanning smaller ones, or panning around a room to derive a more accurate 3d model.
Once you have an accurate 3d model of the room, doing Augmented Reality becomes much more practical - you can place elements on the walls or floors, and have them pass behind and in front of object in a more realistic fashion. Think of the gratuitous effects Snapchat can do with that - 3d halos, birds flying around your head.
Doing the same with microphones also makes sense - with multiple microphones you can effectively create direction and distance sensitive recordings - removing background noise, or separating multiple people or instruments in the scene. In effect we’re substituting processing power and more memory bandwidth for expensive optics and acoustics. We’ll be able to record 3d video and audio for VR remote viewing, or further AR processing for ourselves.
As ever, these features will show up on the flagship high end devices first, but given the relative costs of CPU vs precision optics, we can expect to see them be more widespread over time.
replacing comments with external posts
1 min read
Regarding http:/
We have an answer to this, in the shape of the
http:/
This makes it possible for posts on other sites to notify you when they have commented on an article of yours, through a simple protocol.
I know this sounds like development work, but there are a couple of services that implement this with small changes to your site's markup.
http:/
In addition, there is a service brid.gy that will map twitter, facebook, g+, instagram posts into webmentions so you see those too, if you want.
For an example post with a lot of comments received this way, see
http:/
I'd be happy to chat more - come on over to
http:/
