The Semiotics of Networked Content

Explore how networked content transcends platforms, focusing on the significance of signs over replication in the evolving digital landscape.

Working on content interop super-ontology in the #mastodon, #micro.blog, #twitter, #feedland, and #wordpress multiverse.

Posts are actual pieces of content. They are mostly made on the platform where you find them.

Timelines are views into (yours and others’) posts. These views are made possible by transmitting information about the post via #RSS (or something else) and aggregating into a timeline. Timelines can include feeds from yours or others’ sources.

What’s interesting is that timelines can also be published and consumed, also via #rss.

This means that, if you consume a feed, you don’t know if the source-content in the feed originates with that feed. Feed elements could “pass through” as signs to their sources. In fact, it doesn’t even matter.

In this sense, we don’t want to replicate content around the networks, we want to replicate signs.

Featured writing

Why customer tools are organized wrong

This article reveals a fundamental flaw in how customer support tools are designed—organizing by interaction type instead of by customer—and explains why this fragmentation wastes time and obscures the full picture you need to help users effectively.

Infrastructure shapes thought

The tools you build determine what kinds of thinking become possible. On infrastructure, friction, and building deliberately for thought rather than just throughput.

Server-Side Dashboard Architecture: Why Moving Data Fetching Off the Browser Changes Everything

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Books

The Work of Being (in progress)

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The Practice of Work (in progress)

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

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