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  5. “…disruptive technologies don’t start out better than established technologies, as would seem intuitive, they start out worse. But for all their faults in comparison with entrenched, established competitors, there’s something radically different that opens whole new opportunities, and makes them disruptive.”

    — para-meta-quoted from Not Real Programming

    I’m aware the d-word is taboo, but I can’t help but think this perfectly describes and , as well as the reactions many people have to them.

  8. ↪ Ben Werdmuller: Government - the last great gatekeeper - is ripe for disruption.

    The first is to publicly declare the jurisdiction in which you live, and in which your data is hosted. That way, people can make an informed decision about how to communicate with you.

    That’s a really brilliant idea. Maybe link the brand names to their tosdr.org pages too.

  11. ↪ shawfactor: Thoughts on extending webmentions

    Great work getting webmention set up and your content marked up with microformats!

    At the moment of the method is built around a POSSE architecture. This works well for long form articles which can stand alone but address issues or ideas that are posted on an external website.

    The evidence is against you here, as almost all known usage of webmention has been for short replies which don’t make sense without context.

    But if that is all there is to webmentions it is just a nicer implementation of Pingback.

    Pingback succeeded because it was simple. Webmention is even simpler, for good reason.

    However the current workflow is awkward and i doubt it will catch on with the general public. Sophisticated Indieweb users can and will read an article on an external site and then return to their own to post a comment, but that king of behaviour is not intuitive.

    I absolutely agree! I’m trying various different approaches to making this easier (and making web content more actionable in general), currently I’m using web action toolbelt to really quickly reply to content on other sites. There’s been a lot of discussion about this, and it’s something which everyone can work on as more people start implementing indieweb comments.

    I make the comment on the external site and as part of making the comment I add my author url, that being the url of my own site. The external site then sends a webmention of the comment to my site. My own site could then scrapes my comment and saves a copy in my CMS. Otionall  I could republish the comment in my blog or activity feed at my discretion. Thus fully implementing PESOS.

    We actually discussed this exact flow at IWCUK 2012, but no-one ever implemented it because, with browser extensions, there’s no need to log in to other people’s sites (complex to implement) and have those sites post to each other (security hole).

    Thanks for bringing these issues up, it’s great to have new people join the discussion! I’ll start documenting your points on the Indiewebcamp wiki — it’s there and on the IRC room where most discussion takes place.

  14. Went whale watching, saw several dolphins, two minke whales, a load of puffins and several thousand unexpected jellyfish.

    Comic highlight when the announcer tried to give us a sense of just how big blue whales can be…

    “Imagine a basketball court, with a blue whale in. That basketball game… would be over”

  15. I just sent a support email to @github making the following request for better 404 pages:

    Your 404 pages are pretty but useless for actually trying to find stuff which is misspelt, moved or gone. Could you consider implementing some of these improvements?

    • Show the github header on the 404 page for consistency
    • If the path is /real-username/missing-project, show the user’s profile and a list of their repos
    • If the path is /missing-username/*, show a search for “missing-username” or at the very least prefill the search box with that text
    • Keep track of projects which have moved and do HTTP redirects to their new locations

    Thanks for all the great work you’ve done and made possible,
    Barnaby

    Archived here for posterity and public commentary.

  17. “So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.”

    — Walden, Henry David Thoreau

  18. What happened when I started a feminist society at school is a wonderfully written article documenting the troubles encountered by some humans trying to promote their equality with other humans

    One of the worst parts of this is the school blatantly victim-blaming:

    As such, we will take steps to recommend students remove words or images that they place online that could compromise their safety or that of other students at the school.

    Seeing as the activism was happening on the web, I read this as “give up, don’t offend the misogynists, they might hurt you”, which could hardly be called “support”. The pseudo-politicalese “take steps to recommend” is vague and and improvable.

    Clearly such institutions cannot be trusted to support the fight for equality.