Jaiku is a Finnish software that makes conversing with people easy. It’s an advanced form of chatroom and I love it. It works on the same principle as twitter with the added bonus of having feed reading and integration as a bonus.
If I’m going out for the day but I want people to know where I am at any given point in time I can send messages to twitter because it’s the price of a local phone call rather than international, as with Jaiku where the message is sent to Finland.
I added my blog therefore a summary of blog posts will automatically be added to my jaiku feed. I could add flickr, my video feeds and other feeds if I so desire and it should work.
On Jaiku I love how conversations can take place based around posts about what someone is doing. One person talked about only having 5 gigs left on their hard drive and a short conversation followed on from that post. Leo Laporte commented on his twitter identity being ussurped recently and this encouraged a flurry of activity.
It’s like many of the Web forums I’ve visited. People join a community and select their friends so that they get updates whenever someone posts. The difference is that there is a migration away from the desktop and laptop to the mobile phone. It’s becoming an integral part of people’s lives. Of course at the moment it’s for early adopters rather than anyone but over time when it becomes more socialy acceptable we should find a progression whereby information workers are no longer tied to their desks.
I feel absolutely no need for a free SMS application when I have something as powerful as twitter. If more people would use it then I would have a lot more IRL friends following my moves. As things are the idea of sending short messages to just one or two individuals at a time seems and feels so old fashioned to me that when it does occur it’s from another time.
If I’m at the computer I’m not going to waste time sending an SMS: I’m going to write you a message on any of a number of social networking websites and I will understand that a global audience may see that. That’s what I want. I really like twitter and i wish more people would use it. There’s no guarantee I’d follow some of my friends of course, but having two or three more friends use it wouldn’t go amiss.
Today I had the pleasure of meeting Ornit Barkai, a documentary producer working on a documentary about the social media. Her project is one which I am particularly interested in because she is taking an exploratory approach through interviews to see what the social media are,
She told me that she has documentaries with Jeff Pulver and many other interesting social media people. This also includes some friends of mine, Phil Campbell and Chris of Ourmaninside.com. For part of the night I took her camera and was filming footage for her as I knew the people and which were the key moments.
The seesmeetup itself was great in that I was able to meet at least twenty to twenty five seesmicers I already knew and help make these friendships at least a little more passionate if nothing else. In saying passion though I mean that we know each other in the physical world rather than the two dimensional ethereal existence brought on by people behind computers.
You have to realise that the social media are not a nine to five thing. It’s not that you walk away and the social media fade away. The social media, are by definition about friendships, not about platforms, not about products, not about anything else. it’s not something that you should step away from when you walk away from your computer. It’s something that you should experience at all minutes of the day.
You know that I overheard a conversation by some young girls speaking about instant messaging on the mobile phone and one of them was surprised this was possible. She’s younger than me and she’s unfamiliar with this.
You, social media people, should think about this. If you’re working at getting people to listen to your brand and feel more connected you’ve got to take the time to converse with everyone around you. By converse I don’t simply mean answering when they message you. I mean that you have to take an active interest in who they are as individuals. You have to keep an eye on what’s going on at all times of the day. By this I don’t mean that you can’t do anything but social media but you do need to show an active interest. If I write about one topic or another as a tweet I really appreciate seeing people respond and that’s not just my feeling. A lot of people feel that way. I’ve seen it quite a few times.
I really feel the social media need more people to think of them as a lifestyle, communicate all the time, because if you don’t you’ll be flooded. Communicate one or two messages every hour an your audience will not rush to write to you during the ten minutes you’re online. It’ll help you not feel flooded.
I was really enthusiastic about the documentary idea although when thinking about the way the social media and it’s people are at the moment I feel slightly dissapointed. It’s not everyone that dissapoints me, just certain individuals.
James May is interesting. People like me know him from Top Gear and Grand Tour with Clarkson and Hammond but his side projects are interesting. Instead of farming like Clarkson, or driving cars with his daughter Clarkson plays with grown up toys. When I say toys I don’t mean adult cars, planes and more. I mean actual toys. In the video below James May sets himself the project of building a model plane that can fly 22 miles.
The video shows footage of him as a child playing with a model plane, and then as an adult playing with a slightly bigger model plane, then a prototype and then the finished project. In the episode I watched he built and played with a model plane but in others he tries to build other things and succeeds.
What I like about Naked Science, produced by Pioneer TV, is that they produce proper documentaries, rather than breathless crap like so many others do. This is television production quality content, rather than youtube content. I recently noticed that youtube content creactors use the same sound effects, the same music, the same editing, the same chaotic jumble, that makes their content tiring to watch.
In contrast when you watch James May play with model airplanes you get a well produced, well edited, well paced documentary that is interesting to watch. This is a fifty three minute video where you don’t stare at your phone, or get distracted. You watch it from the start to the end without being distracted, or fatigued.
There was a time when I would watch every documentary in the morning, and then do something else on satellite TV. I don’t do this anymore. Too many programs are designed to distract people from adverts so they’re constantly repeating themselves.
I loved watching Mythbusters but that was the decline of Discovery Channel Documentary making.
What makes James May’s Naked Science shows stand out is that they are watchable by a “dinosaur” like me. When a documentary is well paced, and edited to be watched without commercial breaks it becomes engaging. YouTubers should strive to make content that is equal to television rather than scrape the barrel of throwaway culture.
And Finally
The premise of my post is simple. We live under the illusion that content has to be sensationalist to be worth watching, and we live under the illusion that youtube content needs to be sensationalist to stand out but that notion is wrong. Television quality content should be edited and produced to be shared on YouTube. In this day and age the notion that something has to be two minutes is wrong. The notion that something has to be in “YouTube style” to be noticed on YouTube is wrong. In my eyes we should produce long form content that is well produuced, for YouTube and social media.
YouTube is big enough for content that appeals to my generation and others to be produced and thrived. Algorithms should take this onboard. I want YouTube’s algorithms to provide me with content that is relevant to my age group and interests. I want more content recommendations such as the video above.
After a long but great day of work I came home to do The Twitter Vox show with Loudmouthman and two guests. We were joined by Goldie Katsu and Malburns. We discussed what it’s like to reach 3000 tweets and the conversation moved towards the advantages of using twitter when part of global communities like Second Life. We had some interesting insights and the conversation progressed well. It’s a good show and can be found here.
additionaly the show was featured on the front page of operator 11.
Over a period of a few days I have turned my WordPress blog into a fediverse instance. The process took some trial and error. In the end it was quit easy and there are three steps.
Step One: Have a WordPress Instance
The first step is to have a WordPress blog/CMS. You can start with an existing website, that you are willing to have on the fediverse, or you can install the WordPress CMS in another director and use that as a dedicated Fediverse CMS.
Step Two
Go the the plugins tab and add the activityPub plugin. Once this is done your blog will work as a fediverse instance. When someone subscribes to your instance via Calckey they will be able to read entire blog posts within Calckey, as if the blog was written natively. They can also comment but this is one way. You will need to check for comments and replies manually.
Step Three
The third step is to install the webfinger plugin for wordpress. This was the most complicated challenge for me, because webfinger expects to find the .well-known directory in the root of the website rather than the directory where the blog may actually be.
If your blog is in the root then you’re fine, your WordPress blog is now a Fediverse instance.
If you’re like me, and webfinger points to the wrong place then I have a simple solution.
Go to the webfinger lookup url and type your username. It will show you a get https line with where it expects to find your json file. Copy this into the URL bar but type the correct path. You will know you wrote it correctly when you get some JSON data. Copy this data and paste it into a file called webfinger.json.
Create a .well-known directory in the web rooot folder of your site. Add the webfinger.json file to this directory. Go back to the webfinger lookup page and check that your username@domain works correctly. If it returns the right json you’re in. Your blog is now a Fediverse instance
The Complicated Alternative
The advice I give for step three is the advice I would have liked to receive. People suggested that I change the htaccess file, which I tried to do, but without success. If you do attempt to change the htaccess file keep an unmodified backup in case you break something. I wouldn’t recommend experimenting with the htaccess file. The webfinger.json solution is simple and intuitive.
Why Does This Matter
The pre-requisites for installing Mastodon instances require permissions that we might not have on the host we are currently using. This limits what we are able to do. By having WordPress and the ActivityPub plugin and Webfinger we are able to bypass several barriers and get a fediverse instance running within minutes and in theory anyone can do it. Anyone that is familiar with WordPress.
And Finally
On Mastodon blog posts are shown as links to articles. People still have to visit the blog. If and when people comment on the mastodon toot those comments are added to the blog post comments, and vice versa.
With Calckey the blog posts that you write in WordPress display natively in Calckey. It does remove formatting however, so that’s something to work on. People that comment on the calckey post will be visible in the blog posts and vice versa. It’s native integration. It works well.
Now, when we write blog posts, people can see them directly in the fediverse, without having to browse away, especially with Calckey integration. In theory your blog post is not a blog post. It’s a note. This seamless integration should bring new life into blog posts. What I find especially amusing is that my blog already has 2100+ posts, in theory. In practice it has many more. People do not see legacy posts. They only see posts from the moment they start following on Mastodon or Calckey.
I noticed a drop in traffic to the blog which I would attribute to three things. The main reason is that I went from main-vision.com/richard/blog to blog.main-vision.com. This screwed up all the search engine results, despite adding the redirection order in the htaccess file.
As if that wasn’t silly enough I then redirected my blog back to its original place to see if that would revive traffic and of course I can’t tell. I can’t tell because I don’t know whether the posts I am writing now have less relevance or if the posts I am writing now are no longer showing up in results, due to the twice changed URL.
Not Using Hashtags
The other reason is that I stopped using tags in my posts. I noticed that by using tags my WordPress posts appeared on the Fediverse with hashtags which I find hideously ugly. My dislike of hashtags stems from 2007 when I saw people forget the art of conversation, for the art of using a short cut, attention wise. Hashtags.
With Jaiku, Bulletin boards, forums, Facebook and more, we have threads, and groups, and more. This allows us to have conversations that are clean and rational. With twitter it was decided that instead of threading like Jaiku had, back in 2006-2007 and Google + had after this Twitter would use hashtags. Instead of a clean tidy way of having conversations we were given something hideously ugly and inefficient and it has stuck to this day.
It annoys me because instead of having something elegant and efficient we have something that has been obsolete since the iPhone came out, and if we’re really critical, since Jaiku came into being. Jaiku was decades ahead of Twitter, and yet Twitter won. Google+ was the transformation of Jaiku, and I loved Google+, but the crowd didn’t, and neither did Google.
My Frustration
I am frustrated because it would be easy to program the Fediveres, so that hashtags are shown in an elegant and efficient manner. We could get hashtags to show up as keywords at the top or bottom of a post. We could get the Fediverse to thread, using Hashtags. Instead hashtags are just a jumble of words at the bottom of page. I wouldn’t be frustrated if I wasn’t being coerced into using them. I am coerced twice. I am coerced by the Activitypub tool for WordPress screwing up how I use tags, and by the Fediverse not wanting to make keywords more elegant than they are.
And Finally
As much as I hate hashtags I think I should continue to use tags in my wordpress blog. It might be fugly on the Fediverse but my posts are more visible. I come from the olden days, when we called web dev web mastering, and for me, to add hashtags is to spam, like white text on a white background was seen as spam, in the 90s. It goes against my moral code to use hashtags.
It isn’t that I am using them. It’s that the tools we have to share from WordPress to the Fediverse are still mediocre, and the Fediverse is still primitive. One day it will be upgraded, where threads, or key words will appear, rather than hashtags. For now we’re using a technology that should have been dumped when Twitter stopped sending SMS, over a decade ago.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
