I have started a new website, GeorgiaVTrump.com, to cover the Georgia 2020 election interference trial in Fulton County, Georgia. Links to pertinent news coverage will be posted, as well as timeline information and court documents as they are made available. In addition, since the trial proceedings are being made available on YouTube, this site will host a podcast with the audio from those proceedings.#
Comments and suggestions are welcome, they can be added to posts, or emailed to info@georgiavtrump.com.#
Ken Smith writes again on this topic, referring again to the need to organize to be successful in activism or other group projects. I recently finished listening to a podcast called "Panther: Blueprint for Black Power". The podcast tells the story of fighting for voting rights in Lowndes County, Alabama in 1965 and 1966, after passage of the Voting Rights Act. The "blueprint" is not very specific, basically the community organized with the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for voter registration and voting. The community also created a separate political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, to provide an alternate slate of candidates to oppose white supremacy Democratic candidates. Their symbol was the Black Panther, and this was the inspiration for the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.#
Ken Smith also brings up the topic of tools for organizing that were part of the 2008 Barack Obama campaign website. Thanks to Google, I found a site that collects presidential campaign websites, and saw there were several captures of the original Obama website. I looked at a page with the site after the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Reviewing the home page, there were ways for people to register with the site, to sign up for a newsletter, to find a local group where they could get involved, an area to volunteer to help, and (of course) a donation link. The bottom half of the page looked like a news blog where stories of interest could be posted and read. I assume that these "tools" are what Ken Smith is talking about.#
All of these "tools" are pretty standard elements of website design for political websites (link is to collection of 2024 websites). I did a quick review of BuddyPress, a WordPress plugin that "helps you build any kind of community website using WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more." (from the home page). I found an example of a NGO using this application, as well as a collection of 20 other examples. On a broader note, the Action Network provides organizing tools for groups (at some cost). I mention these examples to demonstrate that there are tools and applications available at little to no cost to provide ways for people to organize, read, and write on a topic or issue, so I do not see the "tools" issue as a problem (they exist, but require time and effort to set up and use). The "problem" is that there needs to be a group of people sufficiently interested in an issue to want to organize, and to take the time to use available tools to support that organization. As I have written earlier, the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is a comprehensive set of tools/methods to help communities identify issues and organize to address them. I welcome Ken's input on if the examples in this post meet his expectations of what people need to organize and take action.#
I decided to look at my FeedLand news feed today (was on a tab I had not looked at recently) and saw the newsfeed problem that Dave Winer wrote about today. I am still blocked from commenting on his Github repos, so posting a comment here. I ended up opening a new tab and doing a hard refresh (Ctrl-R), and the page refreshed.#
Yesterday, I was able to use MyStatusTool, my minimal blogging tool, to capture URLs from a set of open tabs on my phone. I structured the posts with the website link, then the title of the post. I was able to post to my instance, all from my phone. The hardest part was selecting the text for the link. I use the Brave web browser, and another menu would pop up before the editor toolbar, so I had to tap several times to get to the link button. I think I will keep trying this as a way to capture links for later use/classification.#
Ken Smith posted recently, continuing to riff on musical performances (here, being on Ed Sullivan) and also remembering his posts on Pete Seeger, and relating them to acts of activism. In the recent post, he notes how people go to concerts and are more disposed to spend money on things related to the concert/group they heard. As consumers, they already know how to spend money on things that they want. For a performance by a musical activist, there should be information/flyers/greeters at the end to communicate about "how to affiliate with others and help move the issue forward in our civic life" (my idea) (quote from Ken's recent post).#
For any issue, there are people for it and against it. Attending a concert where an activist performs could be considered an act of activism, but (as Ken Smith says) if there is no follow-through, the momentum/energy of the event fades away. So - what to do about it? Here, I think some distinction should be drawn between the person who is already an activist and a person who thinks they want to be an activist, but are not sure what to do. If a person is an activist, and is not having much success in promoting an issue or cause, perhaps one of the ideas from my Activism in Atlanta post is appropriate (find the organization that is already working on that problem). Hillary Rettig, in her book "The Lifelong Activist", has an entire section on how to be more successful in pursuing activism ( the full text of the book is available as a free PDF). In a November 2022 post, Ken Smith lists 6 areas of what he calls the "activism toolkit" that could also apply here.#
I did a search for "activism 101" yesterday, and found an episode of the podcast While Black, recorded in 2019, interviewing an activist called City. City does activism in Atlanta, Georgia, with a current focus on police brutality. I listened to it today, and jotted down some notes when the interviewer asked for three things that someone who wants to get involved in activism should do (35-40 minutes into the podcast):#
Find what problem that you are going to be passionate about#
Half of the people only find problems that everyone is talking about, but are not passionate about it #
Find your organization that is already working on that problem #
You don't have to join them, but you can work along side them#
Put yourself in a position where economically your problem can be fixed #
Ken Smith posted some quotes from Pete Seeger recently, where Seeger states that working within one's home community is the most important work we have to do right now (Ken's post title is "Essential Local Politics"). I feel that there is a great amount of information available online to help/assist/train individuals how to do work/activism within their communities. I have a list of resources available here, but I think the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is an excellent place to find frameworks for identifying an issue or issues to get involved with, and to identify concrete next steps.#
In an earlier post, Ken Smith appears to express the opinion that he would like to see tools that help people get together to do work, to create content, to organize activities, and to have identity to allow them to affiliate with others and have a stronger voice. In a similar way to my first paragraph, I think there are many available online tools to help people with this work. Stephen Downes has created a massive resource called "Creating an Online Community, Class or Conference - Quick Tech Guide". I think the tools identified here could satisfy a lot of what Ken is looking for supporting activism. I welcome Ken's input on this. #
Ken Smith has written a reply to my post on engaging and curation. In the post, he discusses "standing searches" for a topic or phrase, and how (to me) that curating RSS feeds can be a search at a particular level. He also addresses the topic of activism, and how the concept of search might apply there, but that activism needs something more. I would like to explore this more.#
The most common type of "standing search" I am aware of is Google Alerts (see link to this at Google). I am sure there are other services providing this type of functionality. As for curating RSS feeds, this can be done for private consumption using any feed reader (Feedly, River5, The Old Reader, FeedLand, and so on). I like using River5 because it supports display of aggregated feeds (or rivers) easily in a single page application (such as bloggers using the Old School blogging tool in Drummer, bloggers using the 1999.io blogging tool, and writers from Politico following the Ukraine war).#
So, curation can be performed by collecting feeds that generally post on a topic. However, these feeds may benefit from further curation, in that if a user is interested in a subset of stories/posts contained within those feeds, it could be distilled into an even more focused list of stories/posts. The Radio Userland tool supported creating feeds of this kind in an easy manner, displaying items from subscribed feeds and checkboxes next to the items if you wanted to copy those into an editing window and then post them in a particular category on your weblog. I think there is a need for this kind of tool - I am going to try to prototype this in the near future.#
Another level of curation could be to provide additional text/narration/analysis of the stories/posts - to add more value than just a link and the initial paragraph from the post - to tell the reader why they should take a look at this post. Blogger Jason Kottke been practicing this type of blogging for a long time. Currently, several people whose work I follow add this analysis within the context of a newsletter (Stephen Downes' OLDaily, Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from An American, and Joyce Vance's Civil Discourse are excellent examples).#
All of the above examples can feed into groups of people interested in activism related to a particular topic. Jennifer Hofmann runs the Americans of Conscience Checklist. Started as a single person effort, this site has grown into a group of people who review items to include in the checklist, and organize the work of distribution. The checklist itself is a set of concrete actions to protest or support different issues. From past posts to the website, it is apparent that multiple people are monitoring activities of multiple websites/organizations, and the group draws on this information to select issues to push out to subscribers. Ken Smith himself has created lists of things to do in Indianapolis, which is another example of organizing information for use.#
To sum up, I think that there are tools that can be used and workflows that can be defined to support curation and engagement. I have tried to collect some resources/food for thought in this post. I welcome Ken's further thoughts on this topic.#
The famous speaker works up the crowd about this or that issue, and then at the end the audience files out and recedes and fragments into their many private lives. It is a parallel case for blogging and other social media, isn't it? We nod at the end of a message that moves us, but the publishing platform is not set up to encourage and simplify further steps: affiliation with others, for one thing, the power move that gives political beliefs a kind of social body moving, speaking, and echoing widely in the world.#
Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren't following, and so your 15 would keep you informed about the best writing each week by 10 x 15=150 people they respected.#
These are important ideas. The first suggested that there should be ways for readers to engage and stay engaged with a subject or topic. The second suggests that there are workflows that could be created to follow posts on a topic and create linkblogs or other collections that could curate the best info out there. For both of these, it sounds like users and developers should start to "party" and work together as mentioned in a number of Dave Winer posts (Dear Doc and Dave, What I Wanted from Blogging, What I Wanted from Blogging Part 2, Scripting News from January 22, 2020). If anyone is interested in working together on these ideas, let me know!#
With all the hoopla about the Threads app from Instagram/Facebook, I was reminded of a post from Tantek Celik (Own Your Notes), bringing out these points (see this comic for context):#
I am once again asking you to own your notes, rather than tweeting them into Big Chad’s garage.#
Maybe you left the big garage and now toot in your neighborhood Chad’s garage. It’s still someone else’s garage.#
I have also written about owning your content (here, here and here). Of course, posting this on my Old School blog goes against this (although I have an OPML backup that I could render somehow), which is why I am also posting this on my main blog (WordPress self-hosted). People may feel that what they post on services like Threads, Twitter, Mastodon, et al, is more like conversations that do not need to be "owned". However, if there is a way to pipe your conversation into a flow where you still own the content (like MyStatusTool), why not do it?#
I already have accounts on Twitter, Mastodon, and Micro.blog - that's enough social networks for me. I have a Drummer Old School blog, my main Wordpress blog, and now my minimal blogging tool MyStatusTool (here is my instance) - that's enough blogging tools for me. Someday I will get my Federated Wiki instance working again (hopefully soon), meanwhile I have my OPML Zettlekasten file to file things. I think that's enough!#
IEEE Spectrum: How the Computer Graphics Industry Got Started at the University of Utah - Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation - I used image generators from Evans and Sutherland earlier in my career, then they were purchased by Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) to be part of their simulation business. Exciting times back then!#
River5 update - the missing feed re-appeared in the Old School Drummers river - go figure! I may still do a fresh install and restart, will continue to monitor this situation.#
It is easy to fall into a "consumption" mode of life, where most if not all free time is spent taking in news and information about things, but not producing anything with that news/information, or not producing anything at all. Similarly, it is easier to comment on the current state of affairs in the world than it is to take action to make something happen. It is easier to complain about your job, or neighbors, or other people or events, than to make some change (get a different job, find new friends, move). #
To me it comes down to three things: (1) what do you want?, (2) what do you need to do to get what you want?, and (3) what are you doing about it? I have problems with the first one, for sure. Trying to make a decision about what to do with my free time, or what thing I want to change in my life, can be a difficult process - there are so many choices, and only so much time. If I do not decide what I want, I can't move on to items 2 and 3.#
Here is an excerpt from a post by Gary North (paywalled), writing on "What Do You Really Want to Achieve?": #
Here are the three inescapable questions: (1)What do I want to achieve? (2) How soon do I want to achieve it? (3) What am I willing to pay (do without)?#
When you have this on paper, you are ready to develop a plan to achieve this. This plan must have time markers: quarterly, yearly, five years. It must have specific intermediate goals that will let you measure your progress.#
This is psychologically difficult to do. Most people will not do it. Those few who do will not follow through with self-evaluations on time, which involve plan revisions. So, time dribbles away. Progress is catch-as-catch-can.#
Finally, this post breaks down this method of making progress (even though it focuses on screenwriting, the advice is sound for any endeavor):#
"A dream written down with a date becomes a GOAL. A goal broken down into steps becomes a PLAN. A plan backed by ACTION makes your dreams come true." #
During the month of June, I noticed that items from Ken Smith's Old School Drummer blog were not showing up as part of the Old School Bloggers river. I checked the river file generated by the River5 feed reader, and saw that items from Ken Smith stopped after May 31st. I created a duplicate of the Old School Drummers list, but did not see any recent items from Ken Smith's feed after I created the list. I am going to install a fresh copy of River5 today for testing, but thought I would send out this word in case any other River5 users are seeing this issue. The strange thing to me is Ken's feed is the only one affected out of nine feeds. If you have seen this issue, let me know!#
I have captured some images on the Trump federal indictment in this post.#
It’s funny – Dave Winer wants to create a FeedLand river page with people using the Old School blogging tool – when there is a perfectly good page already available! Funny how that works…#
I have migrated the feed reading part of MyStatusTool to use the formatting from Colin Walker's MST-PHP implementation - looks great! Next up will be to add posting capability...#
There have been a number of instances of the majority party in different states taking action against minority party representatives (Montana, Tennessee). In these instances, the minority party representatives tried to voice opinions that were at odds with the majority party, and were silenced for it. In other states, minority party representation is hobbled by gerrymandering and voter suppression. Even with majority rule, there should be minority rights:#
"Minorities -- whether as a result of ethnic background, religious belief, geographic location, income level, or simply as the losers in elections or political debate -- enjoy guaranteed basic human rights that no government, and no majority, elected or not, should remove."#
"Among the basic human rights that any democratic government must protect are freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion and belief; due process and equal protection under the law; and freedom to organize, speak out, dissent, and participate fully in the public life of their society."#
Ken Smith is looking at workflows to help develop a topic over multiple blog posts (at least, that is one part of what he is writing about, I think). I would like to offer some examples. The first is drawn from my zettlekasten experiments last year (link is to my zettlekkasten file). I created a section in my topical outline for the history of podcasting, and was adding posts and articles to it, and arranging them in chronological order. The Politics section was similar, where I was collecting information on the Kari Lake election conflicts in Arizona. Finally, I created a Github repo where I was editing posts by Ken Smith on organizing information for use. I think all of these are possible solutions for what Ken Smith is trying to do.#
Ken Smith posted this morning asking about ways to render an OPML file as a static page. The Awesome Drummer site lists six different methods to do this, I also have a OPML Includes Github repo showing how to include OPML files within an OPML file, and Dave Winer's opmlPackage has a demo of an HTML rendering of a OPML file.#
So - lots of ways to do this task. Ken's second question was "is one of them preferable"? My answer is "it depends on your objectives". If you have an OPML file online, and you want to quickly display it using several of the methods where you can just add the URL in a path to an online tool that will display it, and not have to think about it any more than that, then those type of things can quickly take care of your problem. If you want to have control over the manner the file is displayed, or do not want to depend on another online service/tool to take care of displaying the file, I would suggest using opmlPackage or one of the rendering scripts on the Awesome Drummer list above and hosting it yourself. The "hosting it yourself" option can be a problem for some, but is the best way to make sure your file is displayed the way you want and is available as long as you want.#
In using my Glossary Plugin for Micro.blog, John Philpin has noticed that there are two types of double quotes, and that one of them does not produce a valid JSON file or object. There are double quotation marks (like on the keyboard next to the Enter key on my laptop) and double prime marks (think six minutes and 37 seconds 6'37"). If the wrong type of quotes are used, Micro.blog will not render a post using the plugin. A way to check this is to paste your JSON object into a site like JSONLint, which parses the text and can provide feedback on errors (source code for the app available here). Finally more technical info on JSON is available at JSON.org.#
Via Ben Werdmuller, read this post about "Open Podcast Standards", seems like an effort to promote new "tags" within a feed. I hope that their "new" feeds are still compliant RSS 2.0 feeds...#
More on Twitter API death watch - saw this post by Ryan Barrett (developer of Bridgy federation tool)(check out Bridgy for Mastodon!) where he references a Twitter Community post that April 29th is the final date for original Twitter API support. Oops! Guess I misread that.... my app is still working, even if WordPress.com is not!#
Twitter API death watch - my Portland Protest news river is still flowing, made up mostly of RSS feeds created by a Twitter API app - so much for turning off on March 31...#
I have started a new website, GeorgiaVTrump.com, to cover the Georgia 2020 election interference trial in Fulton County, Georgia. Links to pertinent news coverage will be posted, as well as timeline information and court documents as they are made available. In addition, since the trial proceedings are being made available on YouTube, this site will host a podcast with the audio from those proceedings.#
Comments and suggestions are welcome, they can be added to posts, or emailed to info@georgiavtrump.com.#
Ken Smith writes again on this topic, referring again to the need to organize to be successful in activism or other group projects. I recently finished listening to a podcast called "Panther: Blueprint for Black Power". The podcast tells the story of fighting for voting rights in Lowndes County, Alabama in 1965 and 1966, after passage of the Voting Rights Act. The "blueprint" is not very specific, basically the community organized with the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for voter registration and voting. The community also created a separate political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, to provide an alternate slate of candidates to oppose white supremacy Democratic candidates. Their symbol was the Black Panther, and this was the inspiration for the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.#
Ken Smith also brings up the topic of tools for organizing that were part of the 2008 Barack Obama campaign website. Thanks to Google, I found a site that collects presidential campaign websites, and saw there were several captures of the original Obama website. I looked at a page with the site after the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Reviewing the home page, there were ways for people to register with the site, to sign up for a newsletter, to find a local group where they could get involved, an area to volunteer to help, and (of course) a donation link. The bottom half of the page looked like a news blog where stories of interest could be posted and read. I assume that these "tools" are what Ken Smith is talking about.#
All of these "tools" are pretty standard elements of website design for political websites (link is to collection of 2024 websites). I did a quick review of BuddyPress, a WordPress plugin that "helps you build any kind of community website using WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more." (from the home page). I found an example of a NGO using this application, as well as a collection of 20 other examples. On a broader note, the Action Network provides organizing tools for groups (at some cost). I mention these examples to demonstrate that there are tools and applications available at little to no cost to provide ways for people to organize, read, and write on a topic or issue, so I do not see the "tools" issue as a problem (they exist, but require time and effort to set up and use). The "problem" is that there needs to be a group of people sufficiently interested in an issue to want to organize, and to take the time to use available tools to support that organization. As I have written earlier, the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is a comprehensive set of tools/methods to help communities identify issues and organize to address them. I welcome Ken's input on if the examples in this post meet his expectations of what people need to organize and take action.#
I decided to look at my FeedLand news feed today (was on a tab I had not looked at recently) and saw the newsfeed problem that Dave Winer wrote about today. I am still blocked from commenting on his Github repos, so posting a comment here. I ended up opening a new tab and doing a hard refresh (Ctrl-R), and the page refreshed.#
Yesterday, I was able to use MyStatusTool, my minimal blogging tool, to capture URLs from a set of open tabs on my phone. I structured the posts with the website link, then the title of the post. I was able to post to my instance, all from my phone. The hardest part was selecting the text for the link. I use the Brave web browser, and another menu would pop up before the editor toolbar, so I had to tap several times to get to the link button. I think I will keep trying this as a way to capture links for later use/classification.#
Ken Smith posted recently, continuing to riff on musical performances (here, being on Ed Sullivan) and also remembering his posts on Pete Seeger, and relating them to acts of activism. In the recent post, he notes how people go to concerts and are more disposed to spend money on things related to the concert/group they heard. As consumers, they already know how to spend money on things that they want. For a performance by a musical activist, there should be information/flyers/greeters at the end to communicate about "how to affiliate with others and help move the issue forward in our civic life" (my idea) (quote from Ken's recent post).#
For any issue, there are people for it and against it. Attending a concert where an activist performs could be considered an act of activism, but (as Ken Smith says) if there is no follow-through, the momentum/energy of the event fades away. So - what to do about it? Here, I think some distinction should be drawn between the person who is already an activist and a person who thinks they want to be an activist, but are not sure what to do. If a person is an activist, and is not having much success in promoting an issue or cause, perhaps one of the ideas from my Activism in Atlanta post is appropriate (find the organization that is already working on that problem). Hillary Rettig, in her book "The Lifelong Activist", has an entire section on how to be more successful in pursuing activism ( the full text of the book is available as a free PDF). In a November 2022 post, Ken Smith lists 6 areas of what he calls the "activism toolkit" that could also apply here.#
I did a search for "activism 101" yesterday, and found an episode of the podcast While Black, recorded in 2019, interviewing an activist called City. City does activism in Atlanta, Georgia, with a current focus on police brutality. I listened to it today, and jotted down some notes when the interviewer asked for three things that someone who wants to get involved in activism should do (35-40 minutes into the podcast):#
Find what problem that you are going to be passionate about#
Half of the people only find problems that everyone is talking about, but are not passionate about it #
Find your organization that is already working on that problem #
You don't have to join them, but you can work along side them#
Put yourself in a position where economically your problem can be fixed #
Ken Smith posted some quotes from Pete Seeger recently, where Seeger states that working within one's home community is the most important work we have to do right now (Ken's post title is "Essential Local Politics"). I feel that there is a great amount of information available online to help/assist/train individuals how to do work/activism within their communities. I have a list of resources available here, but I think the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is an excellent place to find frameworks for identifying an issue or issues to get involved with, and to identify concrete next steps.#
In an earlier post, Ken Smith appears to express the opinion that he would like to see tools that help people get together to do work, to create content, to organize activities, and to have identity to allow them to affiliate with others and have a stronger voice. In a similar way to my first paragraph, I think there are many available online tools to help people with this work. Stephen Downes has created a massive resource called "Creating an Online Community, Class or Conference - Quick Tech Guide". I think the tools identified here could satisfy a lot of what Ken is looking for supporting activism. I welcome Ken's input on this. #
Ken Smith has written a reply to my post on engaging and curation. In the post, he discusses "standing searches" for a topic or phrase, and how (to me) that curating RSS feeds can be a search at a particular level. He also addresses the topic of activism, and how the concept of search might apply there, but that activism needs something more. I would like to explore this more.#
The most common type of "standing search" I am aware of is Google Alerts (see link to this at Google). I am sure there are other services providing this type of functionality. As for curating RSS feeds, this can be done for private consumption using any feed reader (Feedly, River5, The Old Reader, FeedLand, and so on). I like using River5 because it supports display of aggregated feeds (or rivers) easily in a single page application (such as bloggers using the Old School blogging tool in Drummer, bloggers using the 1999.io blogging tool, and writers from Politico following the Ukraine war).#
So, curation can be performed by collecting feeds that generally post on a topic. However, these feeds may benefit from further curation, in that if a user is interested in a subset of stories/posts contained within those feeds, it could be distilled into an even more focused list of stories/posts. The Radio Userland tool supported creating feeds of this kind in an easy manner, displaying items from subscribed feeds and checkboxes next to the items if you wanted to copy those into an editing window and then post them in a particular category on your weblog. I think there is a need for this kind of tool - I am going to try to prototype this in the near future.#
Another level of curation could be to provide additional text/narration/analysis of the stories/posts - to add more value than just a link and the initial paragraph from the post - to tell the reader why they should take a look at this post. Blogger Jason Kottke been practicing this type of blogging for a long time. Currently, several people whose work I follow add this analysis within the context of a newsletter (Stephen Downes' OLDaily, Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from An American, and Joyce Vance's Civil Discourse are excellent examples).#
All of the above examples can feed into groups of people interested in activism related to a particular topic. Jennifer Hofmann runs the Americans of Conscience Checklist. Started as a single person effort, this site has grown into a group of people who review items to include in the checklist, and organize the work of distribution. The checklist itself is a set of concrete actions to protest or support different issues. From past posts to the website, it is apparent that multiple people are monitoring activities of multiple websites/organizations, and the group draws on this information to select issues to push out to subscribers. Ken Smith himself has created lists of things to do in Indianapolis, which is another example of organizing information for use.#
To sum up, I think that there are tools that can be used and workflows that can be defined to support curation and engagement. I have tried to collect some resources/food for thought in this post. I welcome Ken's further thoughts on this topic.#
The famous speaker works up the crowd about this or that issue, and then at the end the audience files out and recedes and fragments into their many private lives. It is a parallel case for blogging and other social media, isn't it? We nod at the end of a message that moves us, but the publishing platform is not set up to encourage and simplify further steps: affiliation with others, for one thing, the power move that gives political beliefs a kind of social body moving, speaking, and echoing widely in the world.#
Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren't following, and so your 15 would keep you informed about the best writing each week by 10 x 15=150 people they respected.#
These are important ideas. The first suggested that there should be ways for readers to engage and stay engaged with a subject or topic. The second suggests that there are workflows that could be created to follow posts on a topic and create linkblogs or other collections that could curate the best info out there. For both of these, it sounds like users and developers should start to "party" and work together as mentioned in a number of Dave Winer posts (Dear Doc and Dave, What I Wanted from Blogging, What I Wanted from Blogging Part 2, Scripting News from January 22, 2020). If anyone is interested in working together on these ideas, let me know!#
With all the hoopla about the Threads app from Instagram/Facebook, I was reminded of a post from Tantek Celik (Own Your Notes), bringing out these points (see this comic for context):#
I am once again asking you to own your notes, rather than tweeting them into Big Chad’s garage.#
Maybe you left the big garage and now toot in your neighborhood Chad’s garage. It’s still someone else’s garage.#
I have also written about owning your content (here, here and here). Of course, posting this on my Old School blog goes against this (although I have an OPML backup that I could render somehow), which is why I am also posting this on my main blog (WordPress self-hosted). People may feel that what they post on services like Threads, Twitter, Mastodon, et al, is more like conversations that do not need to be "owned". However, if there is a way to pipe your conversation into a flow where you still own the content (like MyStatusTool), why not do it?#
I already have accounts on Twitter, Mastodon, and Micro.blog - that's enough social networks for me. I have a Drummer Old School blog, my main Wordpress blog, and now my minimal blogging tool MyStatusTool (here is my instance) - that's enough blogging tools for me. Someday I will get my Federated Wiki instance working again (hopefully soon), meanwhile I have my OPML Zettlekasten file to file things. I think that's enough!#
IEEE Spectrum: How the Computer Graphics Industry Got Started at the University of Utah - Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation - I used image generators from Evans and Sutherland earlier in my career, then they were purchased by Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) to be part of their simulation business. Exciting times back then!#
River5 update - the missing feed re-appeared in the Old School Drummers river - go figure! I may still do a fresh install and restart, will continue to monitor this situation.#
It is easy to fall into a "consumption" mode of life, where most if not all free time is spent taking in news and information about things, but not producing anything with that news/information, or not producing anything at all. Similarly, it is easier to comment on the current state of affairs in the world than it is to take action to make something happen. It is easier to complain about your job, or neighbors, or other people or events, than to make some change (get a different job, find new friends, move). #
To me it comes down to three things: (1) what do you want?, (2) what do you need to do to get what you want?, and (3) what are you doing about it? I have problems with the first one, for sure. Trying to make a decision about what to do with my free time, or what thing I want to change in my life, can be a difficult process - there are so many choices, and only so much time. If I do not decide what I want, I can't move on to items 2 and 3.#
Here is an excerpt from a post by Gary North (paywalled), writing on "What Do You Really Want to Achieve?": #
Here are the three inescapable questions: (1)What do I want to achieve? (2) How soon do I want to achieve it? (3) What am I willing to pay (do without)?#
When you have this on paper, you are ready to develop a plan to achieve this. This plan must have time markers: quarterly, yearly, five years. It must have specific intermediate goals that will let you measure your progress.#
This is psychologically difficult to do. Most people will not do it. Those few who do will not follow through with self-evaluations on time, which involve plan revisions. So, time dribbles away. Progress is catch-as-catch-can.#
Finally, this post breaks down this method of making progress (even though it focuses on screenwriting, the advice is sound for any endeavor):#
"A dream written down with a date becomes a GOAL. A goal broken down into steps becomes a PLAN. A plan backed by ACTION makes your dreams come true." #
During the month of June, I noticed that items from Ken Smith's Old School Drummer blog were not showing up as part of the Old School Bloggers river. I checked the river file generated by the River5 feed reader, and saw that items from Ken Smith stopped after May 31st. I created a duplicate of the Old School Drummers list, but did not see any recent items from Ken Smith's feed after I created the list. I am going to install a fresh copy of River5 today for testing, but thought I would send out this word in case any other River5 users are seeing this issue. The strange thing to me is Ken's feed is the only one affected out of nine feeds. If you have seen this issue, let me know!#
I have captured some images on the Trump federal indictment in this post.#
It’s funny – Dave Winer wants to create a FeedLand river page with people using the Old School blogging tool – when there is a perfectly good page already available! Funny how that works…#
I have migrated the feed reading part of MyStatusTool to use the formatting from Colin Walker's MST-PHP implementation - looks great! Next up will be to add posting capability...#
There have been a number of instances of the majority party in different states taking action against minority party representatives (Montana, Tennessee). In these instances, the minority party representatives tried to voice opinions that were at odds with the majority party, and were silenced for it. In other states, minority party representation is hobbled by gerrymandering and voter suppression. Even with majority rule, there should be minority rights:#
"Minorities -- whether as a result of ethnic background, religious belief, geographic location, income level, or simply as the losers in elections or political debate -- enjoy guaranteed basic human rights that no government, and no majority, elected or not, should remove."#
"Among the basic human rights that any democratic government must protect are freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion and belief; due process and equal protection under the law; and freedom to organize, speak out, dissent, and participate fully in the public life of their society."#
Ken Smith is looking at workflows to help develop a topic over multiple blog posts (at least, that is one part of what he is writing about, I think). I would like to offer some examples. The first is drawn from my zettlekasten experiments last year (link is to my zettlekkasten file). I created a section in my topical outline for the history of podcasting, and was adding posts and articles to it, and arranging them in chronological order. The Politics section was similar, where I was collecting information on the Kari Lake election conflicts in Arizona. Finally, I created a Github repo where I was editing posts by Ken Smith on organizing information for use. I think all of these are possible solutions for what Ken Smith is trying to do.#
Ken Smith posted this morning asking about ways to render an OPML file as a static page. The Awesome Drummer site lists six different methods to do this, I also have a OPML Includes Github repo showing how to include OPML files within an OPML file, and Dave Winer's opmlPackage has a demo of an HTML rendering of a OPML file.#
So - lots of ways to do this task. Ken's second question was "is one of them preferable"? My answer is "it depends on your objectives". If you have an OPML file online, and you want to quickly display it using several of the methods where you can just add the URL in a path to an online tool that will display it, and not have to think about it any more than that, then those type of things can quickly take care of your problem. If you want to have control over the manner the file is displayed, or do not want to depend on another online service/tool to take care of displaying the file, I would suggest using opmlPackage or one of the rendering scripts on the Awesome Drummer list above and hosting it yourself. The "hosting it yourself" option can be a problem for some, but is the best way to make sure your file is displayed the way you want and is available as long as you want.#
In using my Glossary Plugin for Micro.blog, John Philpin has noticed that there are two types of double quotes, and that one of them does not produce a valid JSON file or object. There are double quotation marks (like on the keyboard next to the Enter key on my laptop) and double prime marks (think six minutes and 37 seconds 6'37"). If the wrong type of quotes are used, Micro.blog will not render a post using the plugin. A way to check this is to paste your JSON object into a site like JSONLint, which parses the text and can provide feedback on errors (source code for the app available here). Finally more technical info on JSON is available at JSON.org.#
Via Ben Werdmuller, read this post about "Open Podcast Standards", seems like an effort to promote new "tags" within a feed. I hope that their "new" feeds are still compliant RSS 2.0 feeds...#
More on Twitter API death watch - saw this post by Ryan Barrett (developer of Bridgy federation tool)(check out Bridgy for Mastodon!) where he references a Twitter Community post that April 29th is the final date for original Twitter API support. Oops! Guess I misread that.... my app is still working, even if WordPress.com is not!#
Twitter API death watch - my Portland Protest news river is still flowing, made up mostly of RSS feeds created by a Twitter API app - so much for turning off on March 31...#
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Last update: Sunday September 17, 2023; 5:56 PM EDT.