I should not have to list out the things that can make one feel weary after a few (hours? minutes?) of opening an internet device. Is anyone else worn out?
Thankfully, enough things happen, without seeing them coming, to- at least for now– counter the flood. And invariably for me, these are at the individual scale. I share these now before I forget them, and the small glow they gave me.
Even two days gone by, they are a challenge to even find in the down flow stream of twitter. Remind me that this is not the blog post where I complain about people pouring their ideas out as twitter threads over a space of their own.
At one time, these little things would have been filed as stories of sharing, but those seem to have petered out too.
The Dean of Quotes
I’ve been jabbering and needling Dean Shareski for so long neither of us remember a first internet crossing. And now that I live nearby, we do get to have lunch (the real kind, not the tweeted “Bring me a Sammy”). Dean’s great at being silly and serious.
Sometimes I cannot resist a twitter jab. So when Dean provocated:
“No way” is pretty rigid. I had no idea myself, so I turned to my most trusty source the Quote Investigator site, which researches in grand detail such things.
Sure enough, QI had a comprehensive entry on this quote. Take that, Dean!
When Dean is not busy jumping or producing Pete videos, he responds in equal zest. Yup.
Now here is the unexpected. This reply came from someone not @ mentioned at all in this exchange.
That’s just brilliant. It has all the elements of what I will not brand as Small Wondrous Stories- it came, unanticipated, from someone prominent, and is just the kind of brilliance an AI algorithm could not do.
I could never have seen any of this coming. Thanks QI!
Got Outliner?
When twitter works well is often when people ask for references, links, suggestions. Well, it works if you get a response. And a good strategy is often to include some people to tag in your tweet, so you are not counting on the tweet being seen.
I got tagged in a question from Sundi Richardson; I always try to respond to a colleague’s question. And it looks like she was asking on behalf of a student. This IMHO is a great means to demonstrate the power of connections.
My first reaction was thinking ow I use OPML, mainly as a means to create collections of RSS Feeds to share. But no, she is asking more about using it for composing outlines.
Gulp. I have no direct experience to offer, but what I can do is suggest the person who has been doing this, creating software for this, from the time when the internet was young, Dave Winer.
I don’t know Dave personally and have had maybe passing blog comments/tweets; I will not even assume he knows me from Adam (there is a pun there).
Yet he not only responded with something useful, it was within minutes.
And Samantha expressed how I felt about this interchange!
So for all the other poop in twitter, online, could this have really been possible before? When we lacked an (theoretically) open global communications network?
Wie gefällt Ihnen ein Metapherngenerator auf Deutsch?
There was enough goodness happening (see the comments) after blogging the Educational Technology Generator for Martin.
I never expected the whole generator to be translated into another language.
The metaphors seen to have more oom-pah in German, eh?
Nele has done this before, she made a German version of pechaflickr. All without any prompting. And this would not have been possible if I kept my code locked up.
Open makes the unexpected possible (I recall David Wiley saying that at one time), but it’s really people that make it happen.
Thanks to all these people for making the internet seem reasonable, at least for one day.
Don’t paint me as one thinking it’s all rainbows and unicorns; I could on @hypervisible to keep me grounded in reality (thanks Chris!). But it’s not all poop either.
Do what you can to operate at the human scale. That’s my miniature bit of wisdom.
Featured Image: Image by Philipp Müller from Pixabay (Google’s poopy algorithm pointed me to a version of this on needpix.com but I like to go upstream in attribution too, so it was maybe one more click to reverse image search and found the source on pixabay).
