Spatial software is the idea of bringing spatial interfaces into software. So far it’s most commonly been in games, but you can see it spilling out into more things lately, particular social stuff.

Like a remake of AIM, where each user gets a house that friends can stop by to visit.

This is kind of what I was thinking with wikis and collaborative memory palaces.

In fact, you can put a world inside of almost any interface. Even a blog post.

Or a wiki perhaps. What would that look like? Antistatic gardens are maybe a hint at that. A throwback to HyperCard perhaps.

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.

This article argues that the data that we create should be treated as a commons, and that we should tax the firms harvesting it. Especially at a time when the firms are making even bigger profits from it, and we are most likely going to endure more austerity measures as a result of the pandemic.

I agree with the redistribution of the wealth that big tech is hoovering up, but I’d say we should be working against the enclosure of the data commons, not just letting it happen and then taxing it, no? Counter surveillance capitalism through open protocols and supporting the building of an open web.

Surveillance technology such as contact tracing is being rolled out to track coronavirus, by delightful companies such as Palantir.

Rather than contracting profiteering disaster capitalists to roll out technologies of dubious efficacy and inherent racial biases, it would be better to invest in reforms that build social safety nets and reduce structural inequality.

Pouring funding into technology that can detect COVID infection from vocal signatures, doesn’t provide the social safety nets that allow people to take time off from work when they are ill.

Wiki and blogs have two different cultures, two different idioms, two different sets of values.

Interestingly, Mike thinks they should be kept distinct. However, it does feel like his analysis of wikis is not thinking of them as personal wikis. Some of the values Mike mentions for wikis (like minimization of personal voice) maybe applied to the original wiki concept, but do not apply to personal wikis.

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.

Some nice quotes on what the IndieWeb is about, from Desmond’s article Your Website Is Your Castle.

In a nutshell:

At the heart of the IndieWeb is an attempt to unify the ideas behind personal websites, blogs and social networks, but in a manner consistent with how the world wide web operates.

Your website acts much like your wall on Facebook or your timeline on Twitter – it’s your personal soapbox, your castle on the web.

[…]one recreates, in a decentralized manner, the kinds of online interactions one has come to expect from private social networks.