It’s mad conference activity blog catchup, still lots to cover from last week’s Reclaim Open conference. This is a quick post (hah the previous quick one took like 3 hours) about my session on day 2: Small Pieces Still Loosely Joined, Integrated, Federated.
It hardly needs blogging (hah) as it was a good reason to catch up on a WordPress site in my fleet that is the collection of my talks – Best in Show. The backlog is showing since the previous presentation listed was from July 2022. More on that later. But this talk sites there as:
I cast no slides, only sharing of the living web, and my entire presentation was spread, fragmented, defederated out from my blog, flickr account, pixelfed, Mastodon, YouTube, the internet archive. The “deck” is actually a set of bookmarked web links tagged reclaimopen25 in my Pinboard pile.
If you really want to follow the madness, it’s up on reruns
Having my links in Pinboard meant I could embed the RSS feed for my tag into the WordPress RSS block. I had some wild ideas to set up a Make.com style integrator to post them in near real time to Mastodon, but alas, time got me. Maybe that is too recursive.
Small Pieces Throwback, Throwforward
The title was my homage to the 2002 book by David Weinberger. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. The book is still available, the web site smallpieces.com tosses an Internal Server error, which is a sad irony as some still pays for a domain but its a doorstop. Have no fear, the Internet Archive is here!
This book was a web 2.0 rallying cry for a presentation I vaguely remember doing with Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman (NMC 2004 conference), we had a whole thing with connecting blogs, wikis, and more with RSS. There was something about having 3 groups, the Centralists, the De-centralists, and the Fencesitters, and we were doing wiki stuff in real time. It ran from the good ole CAREO server running at UBC (thanks again Wayback Machine).
What was funny or sad or ironic was that it was only the day before my talk I remembered that Iad the Small Pieces book on my shelf. What an eerie feeling to read this section in the preface:
“By removing the central control points, the Web enabled a self-organizing, self-stimulated growth of contents and links on a scale the world has literally never before experienced. The result is a loose federation of documents-many small pieces loosely joined.”
Emphasis added by me, quote from David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined, 2002
One more time, in 2002, Weinberger described the web as a loose “federation” of documents! The man was prescient.
Anyhow I tried to talk quickly through my usual banging the glory drum for RSS, some examples of using RSS feeds as triggers to integrator services like IFTTT, Make.com, Zapier (and more) to not only push to Mastodon, but really to do that “Small pieces thing”. I also then played up using that approach first for posting from a blog to Mastodon, but then going more federating deep by using on ma WordPress blog the ActivityPub plugin.
All the links for that stuff is in the show notes.
Maybe the whole links things in Pinboard was a gimmick or confusing. It lodged in my brain as a fitting way to organize it, but also, it’s honestly a repeat of something I did long ago for the 2006 K12Online Conference (waving hallo to Darren K wherever you are) called I Didn’t Know You Could Do That with Free Web Tools where each tool I talked about in the tool itself. introducig YouTube of course in a YouTube video, my “slide” for flickr was a link to a flickr photo with embedded notes and links (plus ones others added). I also talked about social bookmarking with del.icio.us in a set of bookmarks in the platform, which is gone, but because I took all my bookmarks with me, its still available in my Pinboard site (and 99% useless as all the links are gone).
But that idea festered with me to Do It Again. So it was a matter of figuring out some different spaces to spread out my topics. I could not link directly to show how I was using Make.com so instead I posted screnshots to pixelfed as but one example.
Did it work? Heck yeah. Did anyone understand the quick talking guy on camera? Unknown. It’s hard to tell because I was screen sharing into Stresmyard, and participants (plural ?) would have been watching in the conference area, maybe adding notes/questions/rotten tomatoes in the chat.
Anyhow, I had fun. That counts for everything.
Featured Image: Small Pieces Loosely Joined (2002 to 2025) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
