May 16th, 2020

• I think today is going to be a great day. Plan:
  • Buy presents for others.
  • Donate.
  • Continue with my 20% contribution.
  • Write something, no matter how trivial, in Clojure.
  • That's probably enough for a day :) Perhaps for a few. But I'll give it a try.
• Today I met [[EduneV]]
• Today I was in a call with [[Athens]] people.

2020-05-16

Read "[How to take smart notes](https://nesslabs.com/how-to-take-smart-notes"

Nice short article on [[note-taking]], referencing [[Sönke Ahrens]]' book and Dr Niklas [[Luhmann]]'s techniques.

Helpful for a bit more detail on [[fleeting notes]], [[literature notes]], and [[permanent notes]].

My fleeting notes I take with either [[org-capture]] or [[orgzly]], depending where I am. With my literature notes I write in [[org-mode]] and try to do the [[progressive summarisation]] approach. Permanent notes I use [[org-roam]].

Turbines from The Cragg

⥅ [[photos/the-cragg-turbines.jpg]]

A nice view towards the [[wind turbines]] from [[The Cragg]], with the [[Yorkshire Dales]] in the distance.

Middleton turbines

I explored a bit past Heysham and [[Morecambe Bay]] when out cycling last week.

I ended up in a little village called Middleton for the first time. You can get pretty close to the [[wind turbines]] there. On foot I think I could get even closer.

⥅ [[photos/middleton-turbines.jpg]]

I find it relaxing, watching the turbines turning.

[[A web of wikis]]

Stian Håklev posted an interesting question on the Digital Gardeners telegram group:

I'm curious how people feel about comments and interaction? And also interactivity between digital gardens in general (like paths connecting the parks of a city? :)).

[[Chris]] has talked enthusiastically about interlinking wikis before (e.g. during the [[Gardens and Streams IndieWeb session]]), so that's a good indicator that there's something to it. For me, perhaps because my wiki is still fairly new, or maybe because I already get the interactivity goodness on my [[stream]] and my articles, it's something I haven't generally been that interested in for my wiki notes thus far.

Stian has some use cases for which he would like the interactivity, and it feels like [[webmentions]] could go a long way to solving them:

I know comments have gotten a bad rep on the internet, attracting spam or trolls etc, but on the other hand I feel really frustrated when I can't leave comments on Andy Matuschak's notes…

I think Webmentions would work well here. You would write a comment as a post on your own site, and then this will notify Andy. He can choose to do whatever he wants with this comment (display the comment, display it as a backlink, ignore it completely, not display it at all, if he prefers). This way you can write a comment on whatever you want and the receiver chooses what to do with it.

Or another example - I just looked at Salman's site about Deliberate rest (https://notes.salman.io/deliberate-rest), and thought that I just took some notes about attention restoration therapy from Deep Work - https://notes.reganmian.net/deep-work… Of course I could tell him here (I am :)) but that "doesn't scale"…

Webmentions would work for this too - as just a simple 'mention', not necessarily a comment. Salman would be notified automatically that your note references his note. Salman could choose to display it as a backlink, if he liked.

The "doesn't scale" comment is an interesting one, and puts me in mind of some of the discussion from [[Kicks]] around not forgetting the human work of keeping in touch with each other. It's true that it doesn't scale, but how much do we need it to?

Short-term, I am looking at adding at least page-level comments to my blog, using a Gatsby plugin and probably externally hosted comments.

Adding webmention support to receive comments could work here.

Also interested in experimenting with annotations, for example embedding Hypothes.is directly in the pages…

Kartik Prabhu has a nice article about receiving annotations on his posts via webmentions.

Long-term, I'm interesting in thinking about more structured ways of interlinking digital gardens - whether it looks more like interwiki links, blog backlinks, or something else, I'm not sure. I have some notes I'll publish once I organize them a bit more.

I can definitely see the appeal of backlinks between wikis, but only in an abstract sense at the moment.

The utility is in how much it can facilitate [[networked thought]]. I guess for me it comes down to whether I see the utility in all of this connectivity on specifically my [[evergreen notes]], as opposed to my stream posts.

The currency of the spectacle

[[the spectacle]] is the thing that is the mediate currency for our social interactions that allows us to value things across differences

– Episode 170: Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” (Part One) (at 39m10s)

[[Likes]], followers, impressions, 'engagement', seem to be the manifestation of that currency of the spectacle.

The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of [[commodifiable fragments]], while encouraging us to focus on appearances.

– An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'

If you [[appear]], you must be good, so we all try to appear. The more you appear, the more currency you have in the spectacle. In various convoluted ways you can exchange that for actual real-world money.

Gradually, we begin to conflate visibility with value. If something is being talked about and seen, we assume that it must be important in some way.

– An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'

I mean, posting constantly online about this cool spectacle thing I'm reading about and don't understand is probably a good way of being part of the spectacle. ([[The first rule of Spectacle Club]] is: you do not talk about Spectacle Club?).

But I think [[IndieWeb]], [[Fediverse]], etc, doing it in small, decentralised groupings, you break down the possibility of being in thrall to the spectacle. What's the biggest blog you know? How do you even know that?