blogging about blogging about
here’s a picture of the beach in Santa Monica. I am not including a “featured image” for this post, however, because I am curious how this renders on both platforms.
For Bluesky, i am using the Autoblue plugin, and have used the following text in the “optional message for Bluesky” field: Trying a little cross-platform experiment!
For Masto, I am using the built-in support in WordPress for Fediverse integration.
I will include screenshots of how this renders on each in this post as an update.
i just installed the autoblue.co plugin by @danielpost.com and am testing it on my geekblog, Haibane.info
The inline links should work, I am not sure if my user tagging will work however. Plus, I should be over the character limit, so let’s see how that is handled by the plugin. Will it break into threads? Or just link to the post at the blog?
This same post will also be cross-posted to the Fediverse using WordPress’ built in support for Masto.
Autoblue does allow an optional message to be added to the Bluesky post, as metadata – that optional message is “I am trying out Autoblue for Bluesky” – let’s see how that renders.
Finally, I want to test how replies to the post on Bluesky are handled – will they show up here on Haibane?
Follow me on Bluesky at @azizforamerica, and subscribe to my substack at azizforamerica.com!
I joined Bluesky in July 2023 (User #379,669) but wasn’t active until after Trump got re-elected. I have been having a great time, and thinking a lot about the role I want my social media accounts to play. I still identify as a blogger first and foremost, which is why I was highly interested in this comment by Dave Winer:
Two aspects of BlueSky set it apart from other social media clients: a true chronological feed and an open firehose (though, I still maintain that the firehose need not be cleartext, which is a separate topic). These aspects give BlueSky a foundation to make a capable newsreader. What made the old-school RSS newsreaders so great was being able to read the link in-line, without leaving the app. Of course, that was anathema to the ad-driven revenue model of most news sites.
Imagine what a Bsky-driven newsreader interface could look like – a simple flow would be,
The above would require new code to identify the corresponding to the feed, which is easy in WordPress. Most news organizations support #RSS too, though of course the reader would need a subscription to be able to view the whole excerpt. Also, code would be needed to render the text of the RSS feed as an embed, akin to the reviewers for other bluesky links, images, and video.
Thinking beyond newsreading, though, what about blogging? What if we reversed the polarity? Manton Reece has built an amazing cross-blog tool at Micro.blog that sends data TO social media platforms like Bsky, ActivityPub, and WordPress. What if Bsky could do the same?
Imagine using a rich editor interface within Bsky to draft a blog post and publish it. Bsky could generate the post via API, submit it to the blog, and return the embed code all in one step. Longer posts could concatenate a Bsky thread starting from the first post and including any replies from the post author, and even add automatic formatting and cleanup like expanding acronyms or shorthand, removing hashtags, replacing mentions with links to the profile, etc.
This process might be best using an API, but using RSS opens the door to a world where you draft content anywhere and post it to your blog.
Note that there are already WordPress plugins that let you post via RSS. Here’s a free example:
Going meta for a moment, there’s a powerful motivation for making it possible to draft once, publish anywhere. There’s a blogger version of the OODA loop:
By bringing the Draft stage into the same SMP, there’s less friction for writing content & analysis. That created content isn’t just siloed on the SMP, but is also preserved at your own blog.
Today, you have to open a new window to your blog, login, draft the post separately, copy and paste excerpts, manually link to the new post from the SMP, etc. There’s a lot of inefficiency and back-and-forth that sometimes delays or even obstructs the creative process of blogging, especially reactive and analytical blogging.
Bringing the Draft stage of the Blogger’s OODA loop inline to the SMP would make blogging faster, more intuitive, and result in more blog posts overall, which might even help us poor humans stay ahead of the vast volume of AI-generated slop out there.
This is a test post from my blog at http://haibane.info of the #ActivityPub plugin for #wordpress. If you see this, please follow – and follow me at @azizhp
also testing media. Here’s a view of the #Chicago skyline from the #290.
And I am setting a different photo of a blurry Chicago skyline from my #windowseat on #Southwest for the Featured Image, to see which one shows up in #Mastodon.
There’s a lot of criticism and mockery of Facebook’s rebranding to Meta. The timing, coming so soon after revelations that Facebook was profiting off of disinformation and outrage, is certainly suspect. However, there is a key idea here that is lost in the meta-discussion about Facebook itself – the idea of augmented reality, or AR for short, which if is to be brought to reality, deserves genuine admiration.
I have previously written about how I thought Google Glass was the first real effort at AR, despite many skeptics and its eventual failure. The problem with Google Glass was that it was positioned as an interface to search and take photos, i.e., content acquisition rather than an augmentation of reality:
Note that Google describes Glass as having a primarily voice-directed interface, for initiating search queries, taking a picture, or real-time language transcription. The main function of Google Glass is to record video and take pictures (not content creation, but content acquisition), to facilitate access to information, and most importantly to overlay data onto the visual field, such as maps or translations. It’s the latter that is the “augmentation” of reality part, and is very, very crude.
This was eight years ago, well before smart assistants like Alexa and Google Home were mature, and of course, suffering from Moore’s Law limitations. Natural Language Processing has come a long way since then, with graph processing tools and other incredible advancements in neural networks.
Facebook’s Meta has the advantage of building on that foundation and learning from those pioneering failures. The mistake that I think Meta is making now is that it is distracted by visions of the Metaverse from Snowcrash or The Oasis from Ready Player One (the latter probably being more accurate, as an ultimate escapist repository for all our nostalgia and cultural baggage). You can see those influences in how Mark Zuckerberg himself describes it:
The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.
The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That is why we are focused on building this.
Immersive. You’re IN the experience. In ANOTHER place. This language describes an alternate reality, a virtual reality. It does not describe a meta-reality or an augmented reality.
To be fair, in the same letter, Zuckerberg does allude to augmented reality to stay present in the real world while you interact with the virtual. But the framework here is an Otherworld where you can decide on a use-case basis to what degree you are present. Think of it as an opacity, with 0% being fully in the real world and 100% being fully immersed (using, say Oculus).
The difference between this and truly augmented reality is that there is no “other” world. You are always in the present reality – but there are added layers. I’ve evangelized the truly groundbreaking anime, Dennou Coil, as a visionary example of a truly AR future. One screenshot alone is sufficient to convey what the true potential is.
I don’t know if Facebook/Meta will ever be able to be AR, but I do know that succeed or fail, Facebook/Meta will definitely bring us closer.
Check out my earlier posts on Dennou Coil here.
I graduated from high school in 1991* in the BBS era. The Internet didn’t open up to commercial use until 1992, and didn’t really take off until 1994 when Mosaic was released.
Before email on the internet became a thing, most people used email from one of the Online Providers (mainly Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy). Email was like an internal direct message on these systems. I don’t remember what year it was, but eventually, gateway services between the Online Providers were established so a Prodigy user could email someone at AOL, etc. Hotmail was the first real internet email that I remember (named because it was HTML-mail), and Microsoft didn’t buy that until 1997, well after I had graduated from college and was already living in Boston at my first job at MIT.
When Mosaic came out, companies started moving away from internal pages at AOL, etc., and started creating their first websites on the Internet. I assume that was a huge loss of revenue for those Online Services and contributed to their downfall. Eventually, the email standards (X400? X something…) improved to where they all upgraded and we had true interoperability, though I don’t recall what year that was, I think it was 1995 (after Mosaic).
When you watch an episode of Friends – keep in mind that historically all of this was happening in the background. Email just wasn’t a thing in the 90s that people used routinely to keep in touch. Arguably we don’t use it today for that either, since social media has supplanted it**.
The bottom line is that I was in college from 1991 to 1995 at the precise moment in time when we went from BBSes and Online Services ruling the world to the dawn of the true Internet era. I don’t think many of my age-peers remember that this history overlapped with ours in this way.
The Wikipedia entry for Online Service Provider is well worth a read, especially if you are in my age cohort. Gen-X FTFW!
*The senior class of 1990 made fun of my HS class by changing our slogan to “We’re the class of 91. We drink no beer and have no fun.” I remember this slogan better than our actual slogan, maybe because it was rather accurate in my case at the time. (actually, our unofficial slogan for ourselves was “from this prison, we will run, we’re the class of ’91” which resonated more with geeky young me). During high school, for me ’87 to ’91, I spent a lot of time dialing in at 14.4K to BBSes.
**much like social media has supplanted blogs, whose history overlaps my grad school years in exactly the same way that the history of email and the web overlaps my college years. I’m old-fashioned enough to have posted this to my blog here. But I’m modern enough to know that all my friends are here on FB and don’t read my blog, which is why I also cross-posted it to Facebook.
I’m a heavy user of Amazon Prime – just the savings on shipping alone makes it worth it. The original price used to be $75 but Amazon recently raised the price to $99/year – except for today, where it’s discounted to $72
All of tyhis is frankly worth $99/year to me, which is why I renew my subscription every year. If you’re an existing Prime member like me, this deal doesn’t apply – but for anyone interested in trying Prime out, this is the time. Pull the trigger
As per my router troubles earlier, I have finally upgraded to the Asus RT-AC56U. I’ve been using an old Linksys WRT54GL as an access point for legacy 802.11g connections, so here is the baseline for comparison, using a desktop machine located two feet away, using built-in wifi antennas:
Linksys WRT54GL, 802.11g, 2.4 Ghz
here’s the result from using the new router:
ASUS RT-AC56U, 802.11n, 2.4 Ghz
here’s the result from using the new router on my main workstation PC in the basement, using a PCI wifi adapter:
Linksys WRT54GL, 802.11g, 2.4 Ghz
and using the new router, with a USB AC-1200 wifi adapter (ASUS USB-AC56):
ASUS RT-AC56U, 802.11ac, 5.0 Ghz
