Re: Finding Blogs in the Future
It’s constant work—finding each other through the noise.
@kicks Interesting. Good discussion on Github.
I think there are some things we can automate better while still having human curation. For example: on a blog, I'd love to have a spider that harvests tags and categories and how many posts for each tag so I can get a sense of what that blogger spenda a lot of time writing about. Because some blogs are so big you really can't poke through it all.
I'm beginning to think single author wiki's are way under utilized. Blogs are cool but relentless about pushing down older posts.
@bradenslen Oh yes—I quite agree! I didn’t when I started this blog—I was pretty burned
out on algorithms. But I’ve calmed down and, yeah, I think your word of
‘automation’ is more friendly to me than ‘algorithm’.
I’m really getting a lot of good stuff out of Pinboard—it is better than
Google, DDG, Million Short or any directory at finding interesting stuff. And it
is due to its balance between machine and human: the humans find the link and
tag it; the machine collates everything for the researcher. You can do pretty
complex queries with it, which I am using every day now. (As an example:
/u:krudd/t:links/t:web shows me all
links tagged ‘web’ and ‘links’ under the user ‘krudd’.)
However, it is still totally underutilized. I would be surprised if there were
five other people on the Earth mining it like I am. (This wasn’t true of the old
Delicious—it was a golden age for this kind of mining of bookmarks.)
One great thing to automate would be Webmentions for Pinboard. Think of it: when
you (Brad) mention me, I put a link to you at the bottom of that page. You are
another writer, so if someone likes your comment, they can visit you to see more
of your writings.
But if I had Webmentions from Pinboard, you could go to the bottom of my page
and see what readers are mentioning my page. And those readers can be
visited—not to see what they are writing, but to see what else they are
reading. There is a temptation to remove the reader’s name and just inline
their relevant links at the bottom of my post. But I think that removing the
human possibly destroys the most valuable piece of information.
I’m beginning to think single author wiki’s are way under utilized. Blogs
are cool but relentless about pushing down older posts.
I’m starting to categorize the ‘blogging’ and ‘wiki-ing’ actions under the
superset called ‘hypertexting’. Both are about simply writing hypertexts, but
blogs arrange those texts in a linear summary and wikis arrange them as a web
which starts from a single entry point. (And a self-contained hypertext book or
directory would be a tree.)
I think that if we could retreat to mere ‘hypertexting’ and then give people a
choice of entry points, we could marry the ephemeral and the permanent and do
exciting things with the entire body of the ‘hypertext’. This is where my blog
is moving toward and it’s obviously inspired by h0p3’s system and the Indieweb
as a whole.
@kicks I like the term "hypertexting" as you define it! More and more I feel the need to try a wiki on something, The linear aspects of blogs are feeling constraining.
I also need to try Pinboard.