Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of March 24th - 30th, 2018. This Week in the IndieWeb is a weekly digest of activities in the IndieWeb community at indieweb.org. It contains recent and upcoming events, posts from IndieNews, and a summary of website updates. This Week in the IndieWeb is sent out Fridays at 2pm Pacific time, with this audio edition appearing over the weekend. 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 met in Baltimore on March 27th for a make-up meeting after being snowed out last week. You can find a photo and links to notes from the meeting in this week's newsletter. Join us this week in Nuremberg, London, and San Francisco for a very special "404" edition of Homebrew Website Club on April 4th. We'll celebrate and eulogize some of those special sites that are now missing from the web. 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 Dates have been announced for IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, scheduled to take place May 5th and 6th at sipgate in Düsseldorf, Germany, just before the beyond tellerand event. Learn more and register now at indieweb.org/2018/Düsseldorf. Save the dates for the 2018 IndieWeb Summit, which will take place on Tuesday June 26th and Wednesday June 27th in Portland, Oregon. The two-day summit will be a part of the larger week-long Open Source Bridge conference. Organizers and volunteers are invited to contribute at indieweb.org/2018. 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. And, in IndieWeb-related events, VRM Day 2018a will take place on April 2nd at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View, California. VRM day is hosted by ProjectVRM, an R&D project at Harvard to encourage development of tools by which individuals can take control of their relationships with organizations — especially in commercial marketplaces. And the 26th Internet Identity Workshop will take place on April 3rd through 5th, also at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View, California. --- 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. gRegor Morrill published a post at gregorlove.com announcing a new release of "mf2 to iCalendar", a PHP library that converts pages with event details in microformats2 markup into the iCalendar format supported by most calendar management software. gRegor also published a post titled "Check the Contact Information You've Uploaded to Facebook". In it, he notes the recent revelations that the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps for Android were collecting call and text messaging logs. He includes details in the post for how to delete any contact information that Facebook has collected in this way. Aaron Davis published a post at readwriterespond.com titled "Managing Content Through Canonical Links". In it, Davis shares a conversation he had with author Amy Burvall whose recent work is mostly posted on Instagram, but has historically been spread across various social silos with differing tone and audience. Davis advocates for collecting all those posts on a single website, and describes some tools for WordPress that help automate those processes. Peter Molnar published a post at petermolnar.net titled "The internet that took over the Internet". In it, he compares today's web dominated by social silos and trending topics to older, hand-crafted websites designed to be browsed by humans rather than indexed by search engines. Quote: "most people don't seem to relate to their online content. It's expendable. We need to make them care about it, and simpler tooling, on it's own, will not help with the lack of emotional connection." --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. # New Community Members Kaushal Modi joins us from scripter.co. Modi writes content for his site in Emacs using Org mode, and maintains an exporter named ox-hugo which exports that content to be compiled into a static site. 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 "use case" page has been created to serve as a landing page for helping people who have particular use cases or specific functionalities in mind when joining the IndieWeb. Some initial examples, grouped by job function, include educators, students, researchers, journalists, and musicians. A recent thread on comment silo hackernews has revealed some potential areas for improvement on the indieweb.org page for POSSE, or "Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere". Give the page a look if you'd like to help out. Juan Hernando published a Spanish-language post at ciudadanob.com titled "¿Qué es la IndieWeb?", or "What is the IndieWeb?". In it, Hernando introduces the basic principles of the IndieWeb and promises to write more about it in the future. Similarly, Rodney Dyer published a post at rodneydyer.com titled "Content Silos". In it, Dyer describes his reasons for reclaiming his posts from social silos like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram by posting on his own WordPress site before syndicating elsewhere. The PressED Conference, a conference on WordPress and Education, Pedagogy and Research, was held virtually on Twitter on March 29th. You can find links to some of the presentations on the "portfolio" and "IndieWeb for Education" pages. # Services and Organizations The phrase "free as in facebook", may be making a comeback. Coined by Enrico Zini on his blog in 2015 to describe a captive wifi portal that requested personal information before giving access to the internet, it can be generalized to describe any service offered without charge in exchange for behavioral tracking, ongoing surveillance, or other monitoring, along with sale of any such information to third parties. The "algorithmic feed" page was updated with links to portions of a Twitter thread by François Chollet about the dangers of allowing a company like Facebook to shape its users' worldviews by controlling what posts they see. A piece in the Verge a day later questions whether people are as easy to manipulate as Chollet asserts, and points out that Chollet is himself an AI researcher at Google, a company that makes money through surveillance and advertising. Angèle Christin, an assistant professor of communication at Stanford, published a study in The American Journal of Sociology exploring how real-time analytics such as click tracking affected journalists in two newsrooms, one in the U.S. and one in France. Christin explains that focusing on "clicks" certainly leads to clickbait stories about cats and celebrities, but notes that different journalists have different reasons for adapting their writing to increase clicks. # IndieWeb Development Some examples were added to the "GitHub" page of folks using GitHub issues to gather and display public comments for posts on their site. By assigning each post a GitHub issue, comments on that issue can be displayed on the site using the GitHub API. Other new terms on the website this week include: sarcasm, public key certificate, endpoint, syncthing, goo.gl, LibrePlanet, Asocial, VRM, ncdu, and bandsintown. Check out the newsletter if you'd like to learn more about or, add detail to, these terms. --- 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.