Abecedarium (Randy J. Hunt)
Personal canon (Brendan Schlagel)
Category: Websites
Probably the worst aspect of the current state of RSS is that it has been reduced to something whose main practitioners are deeply invested in technology, and specifically web technology.
RSS is very much of the mentality of the time of its invention: the open and free web of decades past.
The systematic suppression of RSS means that the majority of the people utilizing it skew towards the key usage demographic of that era. To say it plainly: that means, wealthy, white, and male.
I do encounter this challenge too. With any type of creative work, it’s easy to fall into reading/ watching/ listening to only the work of privileged people and miss other voices. It takes effort and commitment to read beyond the usual recommendations.
My ‘one weird trick’ for keeping my RSS feed relatively balanced:
Whenever I come across a blogroll of new websites to explore, I only look at the websites by people with female-coded names (or names I can’t guess, which often means another cultural background).
The NDS is a coherent set of standards and principles that combine neurodiversity and user experience design for Learning Management Systems.
See also:
If you had control over Seattle’s dispatch system, when would you send an armed police officer, and when would you prefer another option?
This whole website nicely complements what I was contemplating recently about blogs.
Some relevant pages:
You won’t find an instruction manual for writing a nonlinear essay in any of the pieces in this collection. And you won’t find a full argument for writing differently in any single piece, either. But my hope is that both of those things will arise out of the whole collection.
In other words, the links matter more than the text.
Brown contrasts the glories of the hypertext web with the relative order of the the social media feed. The feed corrals the unkempt wildness of the web and organizes it all into a nice little stream, filtering out all the noise…
New York’s network infrastructure is a lot like the city itself: messy, sprawling, and at times near-incomprehensible. However, the city’s tendency toward flux is a strange blessing for the infrastructure sightseer: markings and remnants of the network are almost everywhere, once you know how to look for them.
And book!
It’s fun to stumble on dedicated little web projects like this. It’s such a niche project that only someone who really cared would bother making it.
Makes me think of a tweet I saw recently that the world is basically made of people’s random passion projects.
Murray Adcock. (theadhocracy.co.uk)I am a big fan of categorisation debates, so the concept of trying to define what a “blog” is (or isn’t) piqued my interest.
Further exploring what makes a blog a blog — which I agree I haven’t quite landed on yet:
The fact that blogs take the form of a building argument, not necessarily voicing their intent or conclusion immediately, but instead guiding the reader through the narrative to naturally arrive at that conclusion. I agree wholeheartedly with this take, but I’m not sure that this is the essence of “blog-ness”. I think that’s just how people actually talk when given a platform.
(Emphasis mine.)
This connects back to the democratization of self-publishing, leading to greater influence of oral culture (as you point out).
The word “given” here got me thinking — like the soapbox example, blogging is when people create and claim a platform for themselves. The work is self-motivated. No one’s telling us what to blog about. It’s not fulfilling an assignment. The things people blog about are the things they care about enough to spend their free time considering.
And because it’s not “for a purpose,” because it’s self-directed, a blog post needn’t fit a formal format. A lot of blogging really is ‘talking through ideas’ in text, in real time — the thinking and writing happen together. (Or at least it is for me, though I’m sure it’s not the universal blogging experience 😉) Even when a post is edited before publishing to center a specific conclusion reached through the drafting, a tenor of curious exploration or earnest passion often carries through.
Categories
Understanding blogs
As we in the IndieWeb promote personal websites and encourage more people to write and publish online, and nostalgia for blogs and RSS is high, it’s useful to hone in on what exactly we’re talking about when we say blog.* Because, despite being a form of writing for more than 20 years, blogging is surprisingly hard to pin down.**
There are just a few truly defining characteristics of a blog:
- Content is published in the form of posts, typically presented in reverse chronological order
- Content is posted on a website, online, with hypertextual capabilities
- Blogs are “self-published,” regardless of hosting platform, in that there is no gatekeeper authorizing publication
And yet, I think what makes a blog a blog is more than these technicalities; what makes a book a book is not merely “prose text, more than 50,000 words in length, on a single thesis or theme, collected in a single volume.” Printing off a long blog and binding it together does not necessarily a book make; for one, books are weighted towards linear reading — start to finish — while blog posts do not have to be read in the order they were originally published.
There are elements of bookness that make us say, this is a book. So what is blogness? From one of the many ‘yay let’s blog again’ posts everyone’s blogging about right now (which I enjoy), I wound up on a 2003 post trying to define what a blog is — but it addresses mainly the technical elements and the structure of the content. Blogging as a medium evolved out of the combination of technology and tools used; here, I’m interested in digging into how the writing and format are different from other mediums.
I’m a fan of graphic novels, and consider them a different medium than prose books; it pisses me off that graphic novels and graphic non-fiction are shelved with the comic strips at my library under 741.5. So I wonder: are blogs a distinct enough format to be their own top-level medium, or are they simply a hypertextual version of essay collections or newspapers?*** Where would you shelve blogs in the library: do they get mixed in with the books by topic, do they get their own call number as graphic novels do, are they thrown in with the periodicals, or do they go in their own section? @DavidShanske I’m sure you have an opinion here 😉
Sidenotes can make a plain text richer. Here’s how you can implement them with HTML and CSS alone.
It was surprisingly difficult to find info about implementing sidenotes rather than endnotes. This page lists a lot more implementation options.
Categories
Pass it on
Tom’s message makes me realize that rewilding attention is an active practice. One must not only pursue those tiny signals but share them as well, whether that means writing about them on your blog or by word of mouth. The only way the tiny signal can keep on resonating throughout the web is if we keep passing it on.
Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network.
— Tom Critchlow, Small b blogging