Working with Robots
Happy Sunday!
Here are a few things that caught my attention this week. Enjoy.
Repurposing a year of recordings. I went deep into looking at course platforms this week. I want 7.5 months’ worth of daily meditation content to live somewhere and be available to others. Course platforms seem like a good choice. I’ve narrowed it down to Thinkific, Kajabi, and Udemy. If you’ve been down this road and have suggestions, I’m all ears.
Myth and Meditation. Some colleagues and I have an ongoing exploration of the relationship between myth and meditation. In that study, we look at different myths, ancient and emergent, and how they offer inspirations and insights into contemplative practice. This week I was exploring Dune and the Bene Gesserit Prana-Bindu practice. The art form bears such close resemblances to yogic and martial arts practice that the bridge is easy to explore. One person even wrote a whole manual on the subject.
Resurfacing what you’ve read. If you read digital sources and do a lot of highlighting, I highly recommend checking out Readwise.io. It’s an app and website that will pull in all your highlights and conveniently resurface them. My favorite feature uses OCR to convert photos of non-digital text to digital notes. Then you can tag, categorize, and make additional notes.
SEO and the dark arts (text in italics written by an AI). The posts on my site are unsophisticated ramblings about topics I find interesting. That will start changing. Why? Because I’m being schooled in the SEO arts. I find them dark because they are wildly manipulative. That is, I’m being manipulated to be in dialogue with algorithms, not people. I mention it now because I suspect this is the beginning of a transformative process that will change the blog tone, audience, format, and even content. According to Snazzy, another GPT-3 AI writer assistant, (more below), SEO is one of the most important skills you can learn as a blogger. It helps you attract an audience, and then it helps you hold on to them by keeping them engaged. If your blog isn’t getting found by people looking for information on your topic, or if they don’t stay long enough to make it worth their while, then you won’t be able to succeed in this medium.
AI-assisted posts (Snazzy and Grammarly wrote this section). Snazzy is an AI writing assistant that helps me write better content for my Praxis store. It suggests topics and phrases I might want to include in my posts and even recommends different ways to word those phrases. Snazzy can help me find the right ideas to write about, suggest images to use as blog post headers, and even suggest relevant links that I might want to link out to.
Grammarly had some issues with a couple of Snazzy’s suggestions. I made the executive call. I also left some of Snazzy’s more liberal choices, like mentioning Praxis, which doesn’t have a store or website but is my consulting business entity. I included it because I’m curious to see how the AI evolves over the coming years and wanted to record my early explorations in co-authoring.
That’s it for this week!
Warmly,
Jacob