IndieWeb Overview

I wrote last week that I learned a lot about the IndieWeb from @jgmac1106 (Greg McVerry). Because I was just getting started, Greg wanted to interview me about the IndieWeb onboarding process (which you can hear here).

In the interview, I talked about the challenge of developing a mental map of the IndieWeb and all of its pieces and why the pieces are needed and so on. Part of the reason for this difficulty, I think, is that the documentation for IndieWeb is in the form of a wiki which means no one has imposed a structure on the knowledge contained there. There is no linear path through the knowledge. Instead, you follow links and look things up as you need them. This is a good thing in a lot of ways but when you’re getting started in such a technical area with so many pieces, it can be difficult to understand how things fit together.

Chris Aldrich saw Greg’s summary of our interview where he mentioned my comments about the mental map. So Chris created a pencast to explain the hows and whys of the IndieWeb. If, like me, you’ve never heard of a pencast, here’s how Chris describes it: “It’s a technology that has been around for a while courtesy of Livescribe.com digital pens which not only record an audio file of what is being said, but also record penstroke by penstroke what is being written. Even better the audio and the penstrokes are crosslinked, so you can more easily jump around within a lecture or talk.” It’s a really interesting way to present information. I want to investigate it more. And by the way, I’m loving the community of the IndieWeb so far. People are so helpful!

Chris’ explanation helped me to gain a better understanding of how everything fits together and I’ll work on my own explanations as I continue to move forward. In the meantime, Chris taught me about POSSE (Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). I have the JetPack plugin installed which facilitates POSSE. I didn’t realize that before Chris’ explanation. So this is my first post in which I’m not manually copying the URL for the post to Twitter, Facebook, and so on. JetPack will post it to Twitter and Facebook when I publish it on my own site. Very cool!