From the Microsoft quarterly earnings conference call:

Satya Nadella (head of Microsoft): In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News^[1], which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress in some sense that at least basically said that we are neck to neck with Amazon when it comes to even lead developers as represented in that community. So we have more work to do, but we are making progress on all dimensions.

Yeah, that’s not mere ‘reading’. There is a sense of a project to make ‘progress’ using this forum to steer people on the network toward Azure. And using their influential employees to influence the discussions.

I get that this is how society works: people influence each other and it behooves an organization to survive—by persuading people through any means it can.

I’ve been both reading Mark Greif’s Against Everything and also just feeling nostalgic for Occupy Wall Street. (People claimed it was muddled, because it didn’t have answers—but I don’t know anyone who thought “We Are the 99%” wasn’t catchy.)

It’s been seven years and I found myself revisiting this day-to-day live blog of the first week, passing the mic between Mark Greif and Astra Taylor. (Here’s a subsequent part that goes into October.)

This author Astra is the wife of Jeff Mangum—and it’s interesting to me that his appearance at Liberty Park later led to a couple rounds of touring after a decade in the shadows. Well, if that was the point, then I’m glad for the times I saw him. Can’t help but wish Zuccotti Park was still a self-organizing commune, though, with its own roving troubadour.

Most of all, I love the description of the orderly congresses:

Noam Chomsky had sent a personal message by email. It was predictably long-winded; I wished people would make the “get to your point” sign. I was sitting close to the aisle of waiting speakers and I was surprised to watch participants whom I assumed knew each other well—since they were working together smoothly—whisper to ask each other’s names. They’re the most easygoing bunch I’ve seen at a protest, and the most calmly confident. Very gentle and not rattled by disruptors. Presumably that’s the confidence of nine days.

Up twinkles, hard block, flat hands—probably too cutesy for most. I dig it. Glad to make a new semaphore any day of the week. Or just fall back on ‘point of personal privilege’. There are rules, but there aren’t.

No idea if this link has already made it around many times over. Seems relevant to the TiddlyWiki crowd. It’s a ‘book’/‘wiki’/‘whatever’.

Couple things;

• Drafts are clearly marked with a nice pickaxe icon. And the whole article is flocked in gray. (See above.)

• Cool hierarchy at the bottom of the page. Explains the book and gets you around. Kind of like this stuff being at the bottom so the article can take up the top.

• Comments on each page are hidden.

Found this by way of the article on the death of subcultures. Don’t know about anyone else here but I’ve wondered about this for the past several years. I still consider myself a ‘mod’. And I mean there are still ‘hipsters’ and insane clown posses around—doesn’t feel the same.

See also: giant chart that explains everything. I’m really starting to collect these. Peace out there, my clan.

What was a very underground tri-dimensional environment for exploring YouTube videos and playing Blackjack(?) together—hell, who knows what you’re SUPPOSED to do here—is now even more underground and abandoned now that it reappeared without any fanfare. I ADORED this place and went looking for it many months ago. Well—it’s back and now seems to have an otherworldly sister site i1os.

Strangely enough, the site was profiled in New York Magazine where the Canadian author (Michael Leonard) says 1080plus is “a project to make a multiplayer theater experience where you could join friends in a virtual world / virtual theater staring at the same virtual silver screen together, and talking about it as it plays.”

Ok, finally, something has survived of the old world.

So this thing starts off as a kind of old-school banner ad but—scroll, scroll—it’s a link directory! Pretty sweet—I like that it’s just a bunch of tiles and you have to wonder what’s behind them. (And wondering about its creator.)

Like here’s a personal homepage that was crammed in there. The counter says only 40 people have been there. And you might say, “What is even there? Why would I even spend time here?” Is bouncy text not enough for you? Is being the 41ST PERSON not enough??

Sending Webmentions to other sites seems like an insane thing to turn down. Your blog software sends a simple message and now that blog can know to link back to you. (And go ahead and send pingbacks, too—way too easy.) But a site like this one, Lobste.rs, where there is a lot of discussion about a given link—seems even better, more advantageous, generally, usually, to bring the author in.

Now imagine if this continued:

• Send a Webmention (u-syndication style) to https://lobste.rs to submit a link.
• Send a Webmention (u-like-of style) to a lobste.rs page to upvote.
• Send a Webmention (u-in-reply-to style) to a lobste.rs page to comment.

And you could verify these Webmentions (and attach them to a user) by verifying that the Webmention source is listed in the user’s ‘about’ section.

I try not to get too wrapped up in mere nostalgia here—I’m more interested in where the Web is going next than where it’s been. But, hell, then I fumble into a site like this one and I just get sucked up into the halcyon GIFs.

This site simply explores the full Geocities torrent, reviewing and screenshotting and digging up history. The archive gets tackled by the writers in thematic bites, such as sites that were last updated right after 9/11, tracking down construction cones, or denizens of the ‘Pentagon’ neighborhood.

Their restoration of the Papercat is really cool. Click on it. Yeah, check that out. Now here’s something. Get your pics scanned and I’ll mail you back? Oh, krikey, Dave (HBboy). What a time to be alive.

There has been a small, barely discernable flurry of activity lately^[1] around the idea of personal knowledge bases—in the same vicinity as personal wikis that I like to read. (I’ve been a fan of personal encyclopedias since discovering Samuel Johnson and, particularly, Thomas Browne, as a child—and am always on a search for the homes of these types of individuals in modernity.)

Nikita’s wiki is the most established of those I’ve seen so far, enhanced by the proximity of Nikita’s Learn Anything, which appears to be a kind of ‘awesome directory’^[2] laid out in a hierarchical map.

Another project that came up was Ceasar Bautista’s Encyclopedia, which I installed to get a feel for. You add text files to this thing and it generates nice pages for them. However, it requires a bunch of supporting software, so most people are probably better served by TiddlyWiki. This encyclopedia’s main page is a simple search box—which would be a novel way of configuring a TiddlyWiki.

I view these kinds of personal directories as the connecting tissue of the Web. They are pure linkage, connecting the valuable parts. And they, in the sense that they curate and edit this material, are valuable and generous works. To be an industrious librarian, journalist or archivist is to enrich the species—to credit one’s sources and to simply pay attention to others.

I will also point you to the Meta Knowledge repo, which lists a number of similar sites out there. I am left wondering: where does this crowd congregate? Who can introduce me to them?

Perhaps Dat simply isn’t designed for privacy—but it’s so close that I think it’s very useful to talk about the gaps. This is a very solid list of how Dat measures up for private groups—compared to an e-mail newsletter.

It seems to me that the main sticking point is that Dat is always accessible to the main network, whereas e-mail is inaccessible to the main network (except through windy routes.)

It occurs to me that maybe this is what Hyperswarm (a project by some of the Dat team) is attempting to add. If you can run a private Dat network, then you could have a shared folder detached from the main network that would be inaccessible. You’d probably need a password on top of that—but that seems analogous to, say, IMAP. You’d still need tools to access it, so it’s all entirely hypothetical, but yeah—cool thoughts, thank you!

What excites me about sphygmus is: first, that she’s confronting this fear and we get to see what happens. (We out on the Old Web all have to confront this: that we might not find anyone here without the self-advertising infrastructure that the big networks have.) It’s uncertain why we are reading each other, why we are writing, who we are—there is a lot of uncertainty that I’m feeling, too, and I have this strange belief that someone else might have the answer. (In a way, OF COURSE SOMEONE ELSE HAS THE ANSWER—you out there are the ones who choose to ‘ignore’ or ‘respect’ or ‘dismiss’. Or to ‘jump right in’.)

Foone’s got a great thing going on Twitter. I can’t quite complain as much about the place when it’s used to this effect.

The script is called ‘SplitBySubs’ and it gives you clips at all the timestamps where subtitles start and stop. And then you do things like… this!

So I generated the Silence Video. It’s 16 minutes long and it’ll get me copyright-striked on youtube, but here’s the first 2 minutes of it, basically everything up to the Intro. pic.twitter.com/mMVuaGCbFH — foone (@Foone) September 21, 2018

Best of all, the script is now out there. Algorithms are well-suited to mischief. Gah, I was going to read this weekend…

This is too good. A directory. By a novelist. Structural collapse, eh? Damn inspiring. (By Dennis Cooper. Discovered by laurex.)

If I’ve left your blog or personal site out of my collection, GET A HOLD OF ME IMMEDIATELY. 😘 Let Me Link to You.

Ran across this interesting directory of a certain fellow’s life—seems like this kind of thing could be applied effectively to the personal wiki crowd (h0p3, sphygmus). Anyway, it’s a starting place for a discussion about the visuals that could go into a self-reflexive directory.

I’m not against minimalist blogs or anything—it can just be harder for me to see the uniqueness. But subtlety in color and layout is not lost on me. And a blog like this is very pragmatic. It is written directly to Github Pages. (Source, if you are interested in cribbing from this.)

(I try not to link to any large websites—but I usually give Github a pass because it’s not strictly a corpasa. It feels like linking directly to Windows Explorer for a folder. Wonder if there’s another way…)

I created Caesar Naples so I could have an influence in social media sites. The name is part of my personal brand of writing that only I can write. Over the past 3 years, I’ve been gathering influence on different popular social media sites, and I’m almost to a point where I can give control of the brand over to an organization of writers all aligned to the same purpose. He’s like an action figure, when he is friendly, fun, and inviting. But the information he delivers to people is often very uncomfortable for them to accept.

I think I am prepared for Caesar Naples to have an influence on me. I don’t know if you all will see it, but this ‘wiki’/‘book’/‘presence’ is at the crossroads of a lot of things that seem to be going on around here.

I see faint threads to Lion Kimbro’s serious and informationally whimsical work in Caesar’s Social Media Marketing Book, excerpt:

1. Do you make odd faces when you’re thinking? This is know as tardive diskinesia and is a sign that you’re being controlled by a drug user.

2. Do you make hand gestures at weird times? You’re basically lost at this point; it’s a satanic method of marking their territory.

3. Does your mood shift greatly depending on your behaviors? It’s not that you’re learning how to control your emotions; it’s that an Illuminati controller is.

(From the section titled “Manchurian Candidates: The wild-card in your campaign.”)

There are echoes of zine culture in this—Charlie McAlister would love this, I think. The author is active on /r/conspiracy and seems to be forming a group there to write under this and other personas—though it’s difficult to tell whether it’s all made up—don’t think I care, I think it’s very exciting.

I see h0p3 in there too: in the Caesar Naples Wiki, there is reference to autism as a horcrux—this seems uncanny, given Sphygmus’ recent usage of the horcrux as a metaphor… What is going on??

This is a 100-or-so pages about how to put everything in your head into notebooks—this is an old link I have been searching out for a few years—its link changed and I couldn’t remember the name of it.

Anyway, the author has a very peculiar (remarkable?) system here that requires those four-color ballpoint pens that you can click to get different colors. In fact, he says to buy three of them.

You need one to carry with you, you need one for backup, placed in a trusted place, and you need one to be a backup to the backup. YES, you really need this. If you are wasting time looking for a pen that you lost, you are just wasting time. The pen will come back. In the mean time, you need to write, so you’ve got to fetch your backup. You have a backup to the backup. If you have ready access to a store, you need to buy another pen, should you not find your first pen by then.

It seems like you also don’t want to store the three pens together, because you REALLY cannot lose them all in one go. It seems like you really might need ten—one in your car/bike, one in your desk, no, two in your desk, one under the front mat, one in the junk drawer, one in the pen cup, one on the nightstand for sure, I had eight more places, what were they.

In the 1960s, using the most primitive of tools, an American plant scientist demonstrated that a small family, working not all that hard for about three weeks, could gather enough wild cereal seeds to last them easily for a year or more. Jack Harlan’s experiments on the slopes of the Karacadağ mountains in Turkey offer a perfect gateway to this exploration of the history of bread and wheat.

I’m not a podcast listener—but I think I’m beginning to understand them. At least, the two kinds that are: a conversation or a story. (The recent hypertext conversations on my site can feel stilted and I miss the natural alternate listening cycle of a vocal conversation. And simply just reacting with nods and movements of the eyebrows.) And, strangely, I always did like radio, being a long-time listener of WFMU.

So this podcast about bread is by Jeremy Cherfas—who I see around the Indieweb here and there—and it’s all about bread, which is a favorite topic of mine, having saved my brother-in-law’s sourdough starter after he died and continued its lineage. He did 31 podcasts throughout August.

A modern WWW archiver service—just was overhauled and the bleeding-edge can save the archive to Dat. (Makes me want a ‘record’ ⏺ button in my URL bar that I can just leave on! Any ideas if this exists??)

(INCIDENTALLY discovered this on the Code for Society Agenda notes on Etherpad, which I hadn’t seen in many years—it’s fantastic that it’s still around! This is a tool surely in the vein of what our little internet surf club here has been discussing recently. (Video here, haven’t watched this, so this is also a TODO.)

The iPad mini, which was last upgraded in 2015, and the 9.7-inch iPad, last refreshed in March, won’t be upgraded, a person familiar with the company’s plans said.

Chromebooks are the new fashion in elementary school. They are cheap; they are everywhere. And they are unusable by kids in kindergarten through, in some case, third grade.

Sure, by now children can do some rudimentary typing and mouse flicking. But if you think trackpads are awful for adults, you should observe children using them. Tears, people.

I like this—from an abstract I saw recently:

The choice of the proper device can lead to benefits in terms of user engagement, which often is the prerequisite for learning. There are also additional dimensions to consider, as the usability and the physical fatigue. Their undervaluation, in an educational context, can hamper the successful outcome of the experience.

The iPad Mini was the first device in a very long time that I was truly excited about. In my mind, the most underserved group in our educational system is the pre-reading group from K-2, which cannot be served by the current Internet and which are largely given mobile edutainment apps.

So, this article (and the comments) cleared up a few things for me.

Dat can currently be configured to either track all changes (history) of files in a folder (at the cost of a full duplication of all files and all historical changes), or track only the most recent version of files with no duplication (at the cost of losing all history). There is not (yet?) any fancy dat mode which efficiently tracks only deltas (changes) to files with no other file overhead.

From my examination of the Beaker code yesterday, I noticed that the browser only downloads the specific version of a file that you need—I like this! (Rather than having to download the whole history of a file to put it back together.)

One advantage that Dat has over IPFS is that it doesn’t duplicate the data. When IPFS imports new data, it duplicates the files into ~/.ipfs. For collections of small files like the kernel, this is not a huge problem, but for larger files like videos or music, it’s a significant limitation. IPFS eventually implemented a solution to this problem in the form of the experimental filestore feature, but it’s not enabled by default. Even with that feature enabled, though, changes to data sets are not automatically tracked. In comparison, Dat operation on dynamic data feels much lighter. The downside is that each set needs its own dat share process.

I think this is a great benefit of Dat’s design. Because it basically just boils down to a distributed append-only log—a giant, progressively longer file that many people can share, and which you can build stuff like file folders or a database on top of—it’s incredibly flexible.

It certainly has advantages over IPFS in terms of usability and resource usage, but the lack of packages on most platforms is a big limit to adoption for most people. This means it will be difficult to share content with my friends and family with Dat anytime soon, which would probably be my primary use case for the project.

I totally disagree with this sentiment! Dat has the Beaker Browser—which is an incredible thing for a novice to use. Yes, it would (will?) be even better when it can be found on iOS and Android. But, for now, I’m happy to recommend it to friends and family: “Yeah, you can share your own websites—we can even have our own private Twitter-type-thing together—with this thing.”

I know the Beaker team has said that their goal is to get Dat accepted by the major browsers—but I think Beaker’s ability to customize itself to the decentralized web is an advantage. I could see it finding a lot of users.

I think if you feel nostalgic for something, then it has some seed of intrigue left in it. For guestbooks, I wonder how you might innovate them…

One thought I have is—sometimes I get Webmentions to the root page of my site. I might make a ‘guestbook’ page that list any comments or links sent by Webmention there. (I do think that the Facebook ‘wall’ was a modernization of the guestbook—wasn’t it? Although perhaps that functions more like a public e-mail message.)

Hey this is up my alley: a webring whose aim is to ‘share personal websites such as diaries, wikis & portfolios’. I’m reluctant to add myself—these sites all seem to share a muted minimalist aesthetic. (This is a trove, however.) And it’s odd: I don’t think of webrings as having a sophistication—but here it is, a classy one. Like a precision watch lying on a marble jewelry counter. VERY interesting that this sprung up in the last few months. See, there really are rumblings out there.

It really sucks that Charlie McAlister died last year. I had really hoped to write to him more and maybe talk to him one day! Back in 1998, I found this cassette of his and it’s still out there! But you won’t find lyrics and tabs out there—he was truly underground. (There is a section of my upcoming link directory devoted to the muckpile of this rambling maniac.) In the meantime, please enjoy these wonderful lyrics to the second song.

Bog Man
He never knew he was sick
And he died in the arms of a gal!
Who threw his body into the bog
Next to the rice canal.
Next to the rice canal.
And ten-thousand years later they found
His body buried in the moss--
And his skin and eyes had turned to leather
And his bones had turned to rock.
His bones had turned to rock.
So then they took him to a museum
And put his body in a case.
And people came from miles around
To see the bog man's face.
To see the bog man's face.
But late one night after the museum had closed,
The bog man came back to life--
And he went out into the streets in a rage
And strangled the mayor's wife.
And strangled the mayor's wife.
So the next villager to die only had one leg
And couldn't run to escape.
And the bog man hit him with a cinder block
And a pointed rake.
And a pointed rake.
So the next villager to die was blind in one eye
And didn't see it coming.
And the bog man hit him with the pointed rake
Till the blood started flowing.
Bog man, bog man, you are an evil man.
Bog man, bog man, you are an evil man.
Bog man, bog man, you are an evil man.

While surfing today, I ran across this article—The Ballad of Jaime Levy—that goes over the history of an old 90s e-zine called Word.com. Man, had I forgotten. Boring name, yeah—but they were doing some really sweet stuff back then. This archive doesn’t do the zine justice; many of the best years were done in embedded Shockwave and Quicktime, but it sounds like they’re working on restoring those issues. I vividly remember the screenshot above—there was a kind of parallax scrolling going on in the banner.

Ok, a new list of personal home pages, blogs and such. My point in doing this exercise is to explore sites that aren’t linked to, that failed to launch, that Google won’t take me to. It’s very easy to attempt to advertise your site and have it disappear into the stream. Each time I do this, I discover new, unknown links that are amazing. Keep in mind that this is a raw dump, which I offer up to practice my directory-building skills and to give you a chance to peek as well.

Alexander Cobleigh’s directory to jacking into the decentralized web (dweb?)—no dat:// urls it seems, but useful discussions and howtos. (Appears Alexander also has a directory of links to an assortment of other things.)

Consider submitting your blog to this, if you are out there reading and have let me link to you before. I like that it’s focused on blogs—the directory I’m building is more general than that. His guidelines are very similar to mine: a few-hundred links with longer descriptions than you’d see on other directories.

Oh, and if you look at this and think: “I want to make my own directory!” Please keep me posted. I’m tracking the rise of these new directories closely.

Don’t know what’s going on here, but this reminds me of an old school web page done up in IG. I wonder what other subversions are out there on the big silos.

The whole Truttle1 channel is full of videos about esoteric programming languages—but I also find its homemade computer animations to be terribly charming. There seem to be just a few productive kids behind these videos.

I ran across this site while out link hunting. Since I’m not planning to include software-related links in my directory—since business and software already have many directories—I will post it here. There is a discussion of this site on a blog called esoteric.codes, which has been a second fascinating discovery!

A charming and campy kind of directory. The shifting popups draw you in. You want to click before they disappear.

This is a tremendous talk, given so casually! I previously thought Dat was the exciting part of this story—but Beaker is incredibly elegant, now that I step back and survey the scene. At this point, I don’t care what kind of traction Beaker gains, I just want to use it for the sheer fun. (In olden times, the phrase was “get my jollies,” but I don’t know if that expression has taken a turn for the perverse.)

I’ve also been thinking lately that linkrot is such a good thing for this reason. It’s very “human” for The Web to evolve, forget, to shed.

Here’s a web directory I stumbled onto—all the links you could want related to the “surf clubs” of the mid-2000s. I like the tight structure and the histories woven in. I’m beginning to think that the failure of early directories was that they were just piles of links with no sense of an editor or curator. (Oh and I had also long forgotten about Google Directory, which was shuttered in 2011.)

Mostly I’m posting this to test emoji in posts to Indieweb.xyz. But I also am interested in using hyperdb (or perhaps just discovery-swarm) to further decentralize the previously mentioned Indieweb.xyz.

Stay with me here. I realize that’s quite a pile of buzzwords. But this is good stuff! This is a wiki that runs totally in your browser. You edit it in your browser. But it gets saved to a peer-to-peer network. You can also authorize someone else (!) to edit it! I’m really impressed by Dat and HyperDB.

You can’t revoke permissions or restrict permissions. But still.

In my Href Hunt, I mentioned this intriguing article. Now it has appeared, a beckoning ghost single as it were. (via Peter.)

Ok, a few folks out there let me link to them! Oh, I’m so excited! It’s strange how hard it is to ask a question out on the open Web and to get a reply. If you have any idea how I can find new, unusual personal home pages and blogs—please clue me in.

His name is Mike. He’s a skier.