Author: Neil Mather

I started my wiki with pretty long pages, lots of thoughts bunched together. I didn’t think that much about structure, as I just wanted somewhere to chuck my ideas, and it worked great. After building up it up for about a month or so, though, I started feeling the need for something that makes it easier to link concepts together.

That tends to then lead you to towards things like zettelkasten and the philosophy of tiddlers. Breaking everything up into small chunks that can be linked together (‘collecting the dots‘).

I like the way that TiddlyWiki and FedWiki do it. Roam seems to be the latest hot new thing along those lines. And I found org-roam has helped with this for my own setup.

There is much to be said for the zettelkasten / tiddler approach. But – also I think the long player is vital too. The occassional connecting of the dots into longer-forms (AKA articles). It’s a type of path or a thread of your ideas, made sense of and hand-curated at a point in time by yourself, to share with others. Sitting somewhere between the garden and the stream? It’s kind of an entry point into your garden that your share into the stream.

Lately, I’ve been hitting a rich seam of classic articles out there, 5 years old or more, that would have been lost in time if just in a stream, and replanted or paved over by now if just part of the garden.

(And, side note, some of my wiki pages are still pretty long.)

In between the garden and the stream

In a way, in terms of audience, I currently think of my personal wiki as ‘me first’, although not ‘me only’. A personal wiki could be completely private, and that’s a totally legit use case. However for me having it public has a big benefit – sharing my ideas and learning from feedback is a motivator to writing for me. But I think of it as ‘me first’, in that if there was some pressure to make it really polished, I would probably hardly ever write in it.

I think the important thing is whatever motivates you to write, at the same time as removing the friction. That probably changes from person to person.

Who’s the audience of your personal wiki?

Read From Blog to Blocks (CJ Eller)

Crossposting augments my writing to not only exist as something else (blocks) but to interact with more types of media (not just other words but images and video) in a different way (connecting blocks to other blocks).

This is really interesting from CJ Eller on the potential of crossposting. Interesting to think about how it fits in with the IndieWeb ideas of owning your own content and POSSEing (publishing on your own site, syndicating elsewhere).

I’ve thought of POSSE before more as a means of transitioning away from the big platforms (the bit tyrants) while they still have the network effects. But this is more about your stuff existing in various locations as a means to enable new creative uses of it.

Crossposting

Replied to New adventures in memory | 101 by an author (radium-basement.com)

I’m not saying it took sleep deprivation, being away from home and being in grim industrial surroundings to finally ‘get’ the Smiths music but for some unknown reason on the train on the way back home the light bulb went on above my head and they’ve been a firm favourite ever since.

I’m glad something good came out of that industrial estate in Warrington.
Listened to Revolutionary Left Radio: Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley from revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com

Professor of Economics, Rob Larson, returns to Rev Left Radio; this time to discuss his new book “Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley”.

Listened to this interview discussing the book “Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley” with Rob Larson on Rev Left Radio. The bit tyrants here being the 5 big ones, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.

The discussion touches on the “two guys in a garage” origin myth of lots of big tech, and the narrative that these new corporations are somehow better than the oil and steel monopolies of old, that they’re ‘good capitalism‘ with no violence. But there’s plenty of violence and exploitation – just hidden away somewhere in the supply chain.

They also talk about how they got where they were mainly from network effects built off of the back of research from the public sector.

The proposed solution of “online socialism” seemed a bit barebones – just focusing on organising and unionising of tech workers. Probably expanded upon more in the book, but here at least there wasn’t any mention of building or using alternatives.

Also its apparently one chapter at the end of the book. Fair enough, it’s good to have scene-setting and an evidence-base of what the problem is, but I’m more interested these days in ideas for the solution.

Bit Tyrants