Thread by @ChrisAldrich

Good morning #HeyPresstoConf20!

I’ll briefly show how I use my #WordPress website as an evolution of the Renaissance era commonplace book. This now often goes by the other names #wiki, #digitalgarden, #secondbrain, or #zettelkasten.

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Commonplaces are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, proverbs, prayers, formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, & scholars as an aide-mémoire for concepts/facts.
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Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century.
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Handwritten commonplaces could be a person's own version of "networked thinking" and mode of creation. So why not take the additional step further and have a digital online commonplace?
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This is just what Vannevar Bush suggests in the famous article As We May Think in the July 1945 issue of @TheAtlantic. Here he posits the Memex, and opens up the idea of networked information.
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Social media provides a simulacrum of the networked thinking we might like, but you need dozens of accounts for different pieces of knowledge & collection & need followers for interaction. Here we're missing the idea of centralization.
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Why not aggregate all of the data to one central location on a website? This is what I'm doing with my own personal website using WordPress to make my digital commonplace book.
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There's lots of data I want in my commonplace: quotes, bookmarks, things I read, annotations, notes, watches, listens, etc. I implement them with Post Kinds plugin to provide both structure, presentation, and context to most of my notes.
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The Micropub plugin helps me by creating an endpoint on my site for quickly and easily capturing lots of data. IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, n8n can all help to aggregate this data too.
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A not-so "Hypothetical" Example:
I use all the data I capture online using @hypothes_is to port my annotations, highlights, and notes made online into my commonplace.
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Backlinks are the new cause célèbre in the space that goes by various names: wiki, digital gardens, & tools like zettelkasten, @NotionHQ, @RoamResearch, @obsdmd, and @evernote. These are all just variations of digital commonplace books.
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For my backlinks I'm using the W3C Webmention spec which works using the Webmention plugin. This allows me to cross link my own posts to look like comments or replies, and allows others to ping me and interact with my public posts.
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Let's say I syndicate a thought to Twitter. I can use Bridgy to backfeed ideas & interactions w/ my Tweet back to my original in my digital notebook. This helps outside ideas filter into & interact with my own.
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No longer does a thinker have to collect and curate their own material, they can allow others to help them grow and curate it too!
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Start your own digital commonplace today! There are some platforms mentioned above, but none of them have the flexibility and adaptability WordPress provides. I'd love to see how others are doing this & what they create.
Thanks #HeyPresstoConf20! [more..]
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