Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of January 27th - February 2nd, 2018. This Week in the IndieWeb is a weekly digest of activities of the IndieWeb community at indieweb.org. It contains recent and upcoming events, posts from IndieNews, and a summary of wiki edits. This Week in the IndieWeb is sent out Fridays at 2pm Pacific time, with this audio edition appearing the following day. You can find the web edition of This Week in the IndieWeb, including all links and an archive of all past editions at indieweb.org/this-week --- Events Homebrew Website Club is a bi-weekly meetup of people passionate about or interested in creating, improving, building, and designing their own website. Most meetings take place every other Wednesday, from 6:30pm to 7:30pm. Homebrew Website Club will next meet in Baltimore on February 6th, and the next regularly scheduled Homebrew Website Club meeting is February 7th, with London and San Francisco confirmed so far. If you're an organizer, please remember to update the wiki with information about your venue, times, and how to RSVP. And remember you can always find info about the next upcoming Homebrew Website Club meetups at indieweb.org/next-hwc Interested in starting a Homebrew Website Club in your city? It can be as simple as grabbing a friend and heading to your favorite coffee shop, bar, living room, or any other meeting place. You can find plenty of information about Homebrew Website Club, including tips for how to organize your own, at indieweb.org/hwc All IndieWeb events follow the IndieWeb Code of Conduct, which can be found at indieweb.org/coc. And, all IndieWeb events are volunteer-run, so if you are interested in helping organize, getting the word out, finding sponsors, and more let us know in the chat at chat.indieweb.org. In IndieWeb-related events, FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting, will take place this weekend on February 3rd and 4th in Brussels, Belgium. --- Here is a brief summary of posts collected this week by IndieNews, a community-curated list of articles relevant to the IndieWeb. You can read more, or submit posts of your own, at news.indieweb.org. Keith J. Grant published a new release of Omnibear, a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox which allows users to create responses such as likes, repost, replies, bookmarks, and more directly from the browser to your personal site via micropub. New features for this 1.0 release include saving drafts, customizable emoji reactions, and syndication targets. gRegor Morrill, at gregorlove.com, published a post titled "IndieWeb WordPress Feedback". In it, Morrill catalogs some notes taken while upgrading a friend's WordPress website and adding IndieWeb functionality. The post contains several recommendations for wording and advice changes on the IndieWeb wiki. The creators of iA Writer published a post to their blog at ia.net titled "WEB TREND MAP 2018". In it, they describe hypothetical maps of today's web versus the web of 10 years ago. As they put it, the web of 2008 might have looked like a Beijing subway map from today, a tangle of many lines, stations, and interconnections. Conversely, the silo-heavy web of today might look more like a Beijing subway map from more than 50 years ago, with only a few lines, mostly isolated from one another. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from the IndieWeb wiki at indieweb.org. # New Community Members A new user page was created for Hans Gerwitz, at hans.gerwitz.com. Hans identifies as, quote, "an old geek who has long been a curmudgeon about the control big brands have over my identity." A new user page was created for John Jonhston, at johnjohnston.info. John identifies as a primary school teacher from Scotland who has been blogging on his own domain since 2008, mostly about using technology in class. If you haven't already, now is a good time to create your own user page. It's a great way to introduce yourself to the IndieWeb community, and to collect the things that you are working on, or want to work on, for your personal website. For more details, visit indieweb.org/wikifying. # Community and Concepts A new page was created for "presentation" - also known as a slide deck - an online version of the visual portion of a demonstration typically presented in person at a conference, workshop, or other event. While silos such as SlideShare allow hosting of presentation documents from software like PowerPoint or Keynote, some content management systems on the web allow the creation of presentations that are also web content. Among these, is the IndieWeb wiki itself. # Services and Organizations A new page was created for "notist", a forthcoming silo for hosting speaking event calendars and slides as well as collated feedback, tweets, photos, sketchnotes and more. Expected to launch sometime this year, notist has announced IndieWeb-friendly features such as ensuring all data is exportable and shareable, as well as allowing hosting listings on your own site. The "IndieWeb for Education" page was updated with info and links related to using WordPress in education. First up, the WPCampus conference happened on January 30th of this year, and videos should be up soon at wpcampus.org. Next, info was added about MLA Commons, a hosted network of WordPress blogs for paying members of the Modern Language Association. The "Posts about the IndieWeb" page was updated with a link to a post by Julien Genestoux at ouvre-boite.com titled "The 'Indie' Fallacy". In it, the author offers a counter-argument to IndieWeb claims that your data is safer on your own domain rather than in large silos. As the founder and head of Superfeedr, a subsidiary of Medium.com which crawls the web, Genestoux claims that far more content disappears when small, medium, and individual sites go down, which happens more regularly and with less fanfare than with large silos. The "Medium" page was updated with a link to a post by Josh Pigford at baremetrics.com titled "Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog". In it, the author details the journey of hosting his company's blog posts first on their own site, then on Medium.com, and eventually back again. The "Twitter" page was updated with links to two posts from the New York Times Interactive. The first, titled "The Follower Factory", was published on January 27th and is a fascinating deep dive into the world of fake followers, likes, and retweets on Twitter which investigates who buys them, who makes them, how to spot them, and more. A follow-up post on January 31st, titled "Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries Into Fake Accounts", reports that Twitter is deleting fake accounts by the millions in the wake of increased scrutiny, including a request to the Federal Trade Commission from the US Senate to investigate the “deceptive and unfair marketing practices” of follower-selling companies. # IndieWeb Development Eddie Hinkle's iOS app Indigenous, which allows users to share pages and other content as likes, reposts, replies, and more via micropub, recently received some updates. Among the new features is early support for following other IndieWeb sites via Microsub. Indigenous is still in beta, so if you would like to try it out, give Eddie a shout in the IndieWeb chat. --- That's going to do it for this week. Thank you for listening! This English version of This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition was read and produced by Marty McGuire. If you have suggestions for improving this audio edition of the newsletter, please feel free to contact Marty in the IndieWeb chat This Week in the IndieWeb and the IndieNews services are provided by Aaron Parecki. Music for this episode comes from Aaron Parecki's 100 Days of Music project. Find out more at 100.aaronparecki.com. Learn more about the IndieWeb at indieweb.org, and join the discussion via Slack, IRC, or the web at chat.indieweb.org.