Ecological Media

We Need To Rewild The Internet

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

we were online

Turn the internet into a living, shared space with real-time traces of people browsing.

The information flaneur: a fresh look at information seeking

Trails and public spaces — Rafael M. Batista

A reply to Kenny Peng and colleagues on designing social media around trails — and why the campground or the piazza may be the better analogy.

Chatty Community Gardens

Group chat is fertile soil for low-stakes ideation. With tending, seeds of thought can grow into structured, evergreen knowledge.

Holdfast 0: Situating

This post introduces the written version of some optimistic and constructive thinking on knowledge in networks that I’ve been wrestling with since the end of last year.

Open tabs are cognitive spaces

Nobody actually wants to use a web browser. It becomes evident the second you open your browser and notice that you don’t have internet connection. What we like about browsers is what they offer on the other side. What they connect us to. In that sense, browsers are transitory spaces - similar to airports, planes and train stations. Most of us have lost our childish curiosity towards these spaces - we go there because we want to arrive somewhere else. Arriving somewhere else with early browsers was quite one-dimensional - you clicked your way from one website to the next, in the same window. You surfed. You bookmarked the pages that you wanted to return to. Later, as the web became richer, you sometimes had more than one browser window open. I vividly remember having seven Internet Explorer windows open, thinking to myself “this is way too much to keep track of!”. Right now, my Firefox has 477 tabs open. How could this happen? Tabs are externalized cognition

Invention Cards 3.0: Stories

Last month, after a long hiatus, I showed invention.cards to a friend in SF and came away unsatisfied. Indeed, the work was not yet done . Three things drove this revision: It felt incomplete. The experience was built around T-shaped navigation, focusing on a specific card and showing only their ancestors and descendants. It was hard to see where you were in time, hard to feel the shape of history, and ultimately was far removed from the way a tech tree should feel . The connections matter more than the nodes. What's most interesting to me was not

iNaturalist accelerates biodiversity research

Abstract. Participatory citizen science is expanding, with iNaturalist emerging as one of the most widely used platforms globally. However, its application

TrailMarks

Lichen

Build a knowledge base with friends, for your hobbies, activism, or anything else!Each wiki is yours, built on ATProto, data is stored on your personal data server.

Garden and the Stream - thoughts

Revisiting a prescient 2015 keynote called The Garden and the Stream and analyzing where the AT protocol fits in the web

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web