From a post by Jamie Todd Rubin, “Going Paper­less: How Penul­ti­mate and Ever­note Have Replaced My Pocket Note­book,” I’ve learned the con­cept of the “Com­mon­place Book,” which he attrib­utes it to Jefferson:

The notion for the “com­mon­place book” comes from Thomas Jef­fer­son, who used just such a book to cap­ture pretty much any­thing: pas­sages from books he was read­ing, notes, sketches, you name it.

Wikipedia takes it fur­ther back in its entry on Com­mon­place books. The name comes from the latin locus com­mu­nis and the form got its start in a new form of fifteen-century bound journal:

Such books were essen­tially scrap­books filled with items of every kind: med­ical recipes, quotes, let­ters, poems, tables of weights and mea­sures, proverbs, prayers, legal for­mu­las. Com­mon­places were used by read­ers, writ­ers, stu­dents, and schol­ars as an aid for remem­ber­ing use­ful con­cepts or facts they had learned. Each com­mon­place book was unique to its creator’s par­tic­u­lar interests.

I really like this idea. I’ve been think­ing a lot about work­flows recently (and lis­ten­ing to way too many geek pod­casts on my com­mute). I’ve been mud­dling my way toward some­thing like this. I’m cur­rently using Ever­note to log a lot of my life but there’s scraps of inter­est­ing tid­bits that have no home. An exam­ple from half an hour ago: I was lis­ten­ing to Pan­dora the train when along came an unfa­mil­iar song I wanted to remem­ber for later. A Com­mon­place book would be a nat­ural place to record this infor­ma­tion (First Aid Kit’s Lion’s Roar if you must know, think Bon­nie Raitt steps out with Townes van Zandt for a secret assig­na­tion at a Stock­holm open mic night.)

Of course, being a twenty-first cen­tury dig­i­tal native, my work­flow would be elec­tronic. What I imag­ine is a sin­gle Ever­note page that holds a month’s worth of the bits that come along. I have some­thing sim­i­lar with a log, a sin­gle file with one line entries (lots of Ifttt automa­tions like logged Foursquare check-ins, along with notes-to-self of mile­stones like issues sent to press, etc.). I’ll start set­ting this up.

Over on Twit­ter feed came a tweet (h/t revrevwine):

Word! SEO gets peo­ple to your site. Usabil­ity keeps peo­ple on your site. @bri­anksul­li­van #dfwwp #uxblog

— Rani Mon­son (@RaniMonson) March 23, 2013

To trans­late, SEO is “search engine opti­miza­tion,” the often-huckersterish art of trick­ing Google to dis­play your web­site higher than your com­peti­tors in search results. “Usabil­ity” is the catch-all term for mak­ing your web­site easy to nav­i­gate and invit­ing to vis­i­tors. Com­pa­nies with deep pock­ets often want to spend a lot of money on SEO, when most of the time the most viable long-term solu­tion to rank­ing high with search engines is to pro­vide vis­i­tors with good rea­sons to visit your site. What if we applied these prin­ci­ples to our churches and meet­ing­houses and swapped the terms?

Out­reach gets peo­ple to your meet­ing­house /
Hos­pi­tal­ity keeps peo­ple returning.

A lot of Quaker meet­ing­houses have pretty good “nat­ural SEO.” Here in the U.S. East Coast, they’re often near a major road in the mid­dle of town. If they’re lucky there are a few his­tor­i­cal mark­ers of notable Quak­ers and if they are really lucky there’s a highly-respected Friends school nearby. All these meet­ings really have to do is put a nice sign out front and table a few town events every year. The rest is cov­ered. Although we do get the occa­sional “aren’t you all Amish?” com­ments, we have a much wider rep­u­ta­tion that our num­bers would nec­es­sar­ily war­rant. We rank pretty high.

But what are the lessons of hos­pi­tal­ity we could work on? Do we pro­vide places where spir­i­tual seek­ers can both grow per­son­ally and engage in the impor­tant ques­tions of the faith in the mod­ern world? Are we invi­ta­tional, bring­ing peo­ple into our homes and into our lives for shared meals and conversations?

In my free­lance days when I was hired to work on SEO I ran through a series of sta­tis­ti­cal reports and redesigned some under­per­form­ing pages, but then turned my atten­tion to the client’s con­tent. It was in this realm that my great­est quan­tifi­able suc­cesses occurred. At the heart of the con­tent work was ask­ing how could the site could more fully engage with first-time vis­i­tors. The “usabil­ity con­sid­er­a­tions” on the Wikipedia page on usabil­ity could be eas­ily adapted as queries:

Who are the users, what do they know, what can they learn? What do users want or need to do? What is the users’ gen­eral back­ground? What is the users’ con­text for work­ing? What must be left to the machine? Can users eas­ily accom­plish intended tasks at their desired speed? How much train­ing do users need? What doc­u­men­ta­tion or other sup­port­ing mate­ri­als are avail­able to help the user?

I’d love to see Friends con­sider this more. FGC’s “New Meet­ings Tool­box” has a sec­tion on wel­com­ing new­com­ers. But I’d love to hear more sto­ries about how we’re work­ing on the “usabil­ity” of our spir­i­tual communities.

When I first started blog­ging fif­teen years ago, the process was sim­ple. I’d open up a file, hand-edit the HTML code and upload it to a webserver–those were the days! Now every social web ser­vice is like a blog unto itself. The way I have them inter­act is occa­sion­ally dizzy­ing even to me. Recently a friend asked on Face­book what peo­ple used Tum­blr for, and I thought it might be a good time to sur­vey my cur­rent web ser­vices. These shift and change con­stantly but per­haps oth­ers will find it an inter­est­ing snap­shot of hooked-together media circa 2012.

The glue ser­vices you don’t see:

• Google Reader. I still try to keep up with about a hun­dred blogs, mostly spir­i­tual in nature. The old tried-and-true Google Reader still orga­nizes it all, though I often read it through the Android app News­Rob.
• Diigo. This took the place of the clas­sic social book­mark­ing site Deli­cious when it had a near-death expe­ri­ence a few years ago (it’s never come back in a form that would make me recon­sider it). When­ever I see some­thing inter­est­ing I want to share, I post it here, where it gets cross-posted to my Twit­ter and Tum­blr sites. I’ve book­marked over 4500 sites over the last seven-plus years. It’s an essen­tial archive that I use for remem­ber­ing sites I’ve liked in the past. Diigo book­marks that are tagged “Quaker” get sucked into an alter­nate route where they become edi­tor fea­tures for Quak​erQuaker​.org.
• Pocket (for­merly Read it Later). I’m in the envi­able posi­tion that many of my per­sonal inter­ests over­lap with my pro­fes­sional work. While work­ing, I’ll often find some inter­est­ing Quaker arti­cle that I want to read later. Hence Pocket, a ser­vice that will instantly book­mark the site and make it avail­able for later reading.
• Flip­board is a great mobile app that lets you read arti­cles on top­ics you like. Com­bine it with Twit­ter lists and you have a per­son­al­ized read­ing list. I use this every day, mostly for blogs and news sites I like to read but don’t con­sider so essen­tial that I need to catch every­thing they publish.
• Ifttt​.com. A handy ser­vice named after the log­i­cal con­struct “IF This, Then That,” Ifttt will take one social feed and cross-post it to another under var­i­ous con­di­tions. For exam­ple, I have Diigo posts cross-post to Twit­ter and Flickr posts cross­post to Face­book. Some of the Ifttt “recip­ies” are behind the scenes, like the one that takes every post on Word­Press and adds it to my pri­vate Ever­note account for archival purposes.

The Public-Facing Me:

• Word­Press (Quak​er​ran​ter​.org). The blog you’re read­ing. It orig­i­nally started as a Move­able Type-powered blog when that was the hip blog­ging plat­form (I’m old). A few years ago I went through a painstak­ing process to bring it over to Word­Press in such a way that its Disqus-powered com­ments would be preserved.
• Twit­ter. I’ve long loved Twit­ter, though like many techies I’m wor­ried about the direc­tion it’s headed. They’ve recently locked most of the ser­vices that read Twit­ter feeds and reprocess it. If this weren’t hap­pen­ing, I’d use it as a default chan­nel for just about every­thing. In the mean­time, only about half of my tweets are direct from the service–the remain­der are auto-imports from Diigo, Insta­gram, etc.
• Tum­blr (Quack​Quack​.org). I like Tum­blr although my site there (quack​quack​.org) gets very few direct vis­its. I mostly use it as a “links blog” of inter­est­ing things I find in my inter­net wan­der­ings. Most items come in via Diigo, though if I have time I’ll sup­ple­ment things with my own thoughts or pic­tures. Most peo­ple prob­a­bly see this via the side­bar of the Quak­er­Ran­ter site.
• Face­book. It may seem I post a lot on Face­book, but 95 per­cent of what goes up there is imported from some other ser­vice. But, because more peo­ple are on Face­book than any­where else, it’s the place I get the most com­ments. I gen­er­ally use it to reply to com­ments and see what friends are up to. I don’t like Face­book per se because of its pater­nal­ist con­trols on what can be seen and its recent moves to force con­tent providers to pay for vis­i­bil­ity for their own fan pages.
• Flickr. Once the dar­ling of photo sites, Flickr’s been the heart­break of the hip­ster set more times than I can remem­ber. It has a ter­ri­ble mobile app and always lags behind every other ser­vice but I have over 4000 pic­tures going back to 2005. This is my photo archive (much more so than the fail­ing disk dri­ves on a suc­ces­sion of laptops).

Hon­or­able Mentions

The first photo on the web photo turns 20 next Wednes­day and its story is more inter­est­ing that you’d think:

The first pho­to­graphic image ever uploaded to the Web was a Pho­to­shop dis­as­ter. It was cre­ated to sell some­thing, and fea­tured attrac­tive women in a come-hither pose. In short, photo-uploading was born with some orig­i­nal sins that have never quite washed away.

Bonus Youtube: Les Hor­ri­bles Cer­nettes perform “Collider”

“I’m par­tial to short sto­ries that gal­lop through time. They’re like nov­els for very busy people.”

–Malle Maloy, in a New Yorker Q&A accom­pa­ny­ing her short story, “The Mar­riage Proxy.”

Great quote, but I’m just as impressed about the ways in which the New Yorker is cre­at­ing sup­ple­men­tary online mate­r­ial to go with their print arti­cles. More mag­a­zines should do that.

Maile Meloy Inter­view
Your story in this week’s issue, “The Proxy Mar­riage,” hinges on a legal tech­ni­cal­ity. Where did you find out about double-proxy wed­dings? And did you imme­di­ately know this would be a good hook for a…

Google+: View post on Google+

This is just so depress­ing: the Face­book gorilla has bought its sec­ond mobile photo shar­ing app in recent weeks. Lightbox was a great app. It auto-posted to every­thing I cared about (Twit­ter, Face­book, Tum­blr, Foursquare, Flickr) but also had its own beau­ti­ful web­site that kept it above the fray. Light­box (my account is/was at http://​mar​tinkel​ley​.light​box​.com/) was what Flickr should have and could have become and it let me enjoy the fan­tasy while also dual-posting to Flickr (http://​www​.flickr​.com/​p​h​o​t​o​s​/​m​a​r​t​i​n​_​k​e​l​ley), which has stored my pho­tos since Mark Zucker­berg was in train­ing dia­pers. For more on the Flickr that never was, see today’s piece in Giz­modo, “How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Inter­net.”

Light­box is join­ing Face­book!
We started Light­box because we were excited about cre­at­ing new ser­vices built pri­mar­ily for mobile, espe­cially for the Android and HTML5 plat­forms, and we’re hon­ored that mil­lions of you have…

View post on Google+

A must-read piece from Cory Doc­torow for those inter­ested in the changes in pub­lish­ing, Why the death of DRM would be good news for read­ers, writ­ers and pub­lish­ers.  He’s pre­dict­ing the end of DRM (dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment) and look­ing for­ward to a day when for­mats and read­ers are interchangable:

The cheap-and-cheerful man­u­fac­tur­ers at the low end don’t have a sec­ondary mar­ket they’re try­ing to pro­tect, no app store or cru­cial ven­dor rela­tion­ship with a big dis­trib­u­tor or pub­lisher. They just want a prod­uct that ticks the box for every pos­si­ble cus­tomer. Since mul­ti­for­mat sup­port is just a mat­ter of get­ting the soft­ware right, what tends to hap­pen is that a stan­dard, com­mod­ity firmware emerges for these devices that just works for just about every­thing, and the for­mats van­ish into the background.

Many read­ers and pub­lish­ers have been upset at the recent Depart­ment of Jus­tice accu­sa­tions of price-fixing by major pub­lish­ers. The real bad guy, we’re reminded over and over, is Ama­zon. The pub­lish­ers are so scared of Ama­zon that they devel­oped a pric­ing scheme (the “agency model”) that often nets them less money than they get from Ama­zon. But for all it’s mar­ket share, most of Amazon’s advan­tages come from smart sales­man­ship and a big-picture view that helps it develop an ecosys­tem that “locks in” cus­tomers (e.g., I use Ama­zon video on demand to watch TV, which means I get free ship­ping when I pur­chase from them, I get to “bor­row” an elec­tronic book a month, etc., which means when I wanted to buy an e-reader, it was really only a mat­ter of which model of Kin­dle I would choose). As Doc­torow points out, the most ubiqutious e-reader is the cell­phone and most of us get a new one every two years–Amazon’s dom­i­nance could end rel­a­tively quickly with the right com­pe­ti­tion. Get­ting rid of DRM con­tent lev­els the play­ing field.

I’m not sure I’m as opti­mistic as Doc­torow that DRM is about to sim­ply dis­ap­pear. But I agree it’s what needs to hap­pen. It would make Ama­zon just another seller. Pub­lish­ers could stop focus­ing on it and start tak­ing tak­ing more respons­bil­ity for shap­ing the future of pub­lish­ing. (Where might that be going? Five Rea­sons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S. is a highly enter­tain­ing read and more cor­rect than incor­rect.) But gloom is not the forecast. A recent arti­cle in The Atlantic (chart right) per­sua­sively argues that we are in a Golden Age of read­er­ship:

Our col­lec­tive mem­ory of past is astound­ingly inac­cu­rate. Not only has the num­ber of peo­ple read­ing not declined pre­cip­i­tously, it’s actu­ally gone up since the per­ceived golden age of Amer­i­can letters. So, then why is there this wide­spread per­cep­tion that we are a fallen lit­er­ary peo­ple? I think, as Mar­shall Kirk­patrick says, that social media acts as a kind of truth serum. Before, only the lit­er­ary peo­ple had plat­forms. Now, all the peo­ple have platforms.

The other thread that’s been run­ning through my head these past few weeks is a G+ post from Tim O’Reilly that pulls a quote from ter­rific quote from Hem­ing­way (“How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Grad­u­ally, then suddenly.”):

I love lines from lit­er­a­ture that crys­tal­lize a notion, and then become tools in your men­tal tool­box. This is one of those. Keep it handy, because you’re going to see “grad­u­ally, then sud­denly” processes hap­pen increas­ingly in the next few decades, not just in tech­nol­ogy and in indus­tries trans­formed by tech­nol­ogy, but in global issues like cli­mate change, and in politics.

65% of Hol­ly­wood rev­enue comes from tech­nolo­gies the indus­try said would kill them.

Reshared post from +Brian Fitz­patrick

MPAA and the film indus­try are “really about fight­ing innovation”

This info­graphic tells the tale pretty clearly.

http://​mata​dor​net​work​.com/​c​h​a​n​g​e​/​i​n​f​o​g​r​a​p​h​i​c​-​w​h​y​-​t​h​e​-​m​o​v​i​e​-​i​n​d​u​s​t​r​y​-​i​s​-​s​o​-​w​r​o​n​g​-​a​b​o​u​t​-​s​o​pa/

#sopa

Embed­ded Link

Info­graphic: Why the movie indus­try is so wrong about SOPA | Mata­dor Net­work
It’s not the first time the MPAA has fought new technology.