Werd I/O

It shouldn't be surprising. I've been on the web and posting on the Internet since 1994, but posting in the usual way scatters my data all over the place. Short status updates end up on Twitter; longer, more personal ones on Facebook; checkins on Foursquare; photos on Flickr; audio on Soundcloud; etc etc etc.

My site here at werd.io is an attempt to change my posting habits from being silo-first to more of a #POSSE approach: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. Now, all my status updates, posts, photos and checkins are here in one place, on a server that I own running code that I write, and copied to all those other sites.

It's made me think about posting much more deliberately.

A friend of mine often says that you shouldn't publish anything on the web that you wouldn't be happy seeing on a billboard. I don't think that's true on the whole web - for example, at latakoo we're building tools to make sending, storing and sharing private media content (video, audio, images, large data files) easier, including a self-hosted enterprise option that federates with our hosted .com site. But for the free, public, social web, it definitely makes sense.

This morning, I checked into my office, and then I checked into a local BBQ joint for lunch. Do I really need to share that? Possibly; possibly not. It's my choice, but at least having all this content front and center allows me to make it in a more informed way. I'll probably check in a little less often, except perhaps to announce my presence at venues for special events (like IndieWebCamp this weekend) or to "tweet" links to resources I think are interesting.

This is all new, and my thoughts on it are still baking. Having one stream has certainly made me think about my identity online in ways that I haven't for years. Maybe I'll maintain several identities? Run an anonymous site for frivolous checkins or photos of my latté? The jury's still out, but because I'm empowered to run my own platform, the choice is all mine.

#indieweb #indiewebcamp

Earlier today, I noted that I didn't get why people would use markdown to blog on their own sites.

That post was syndicated to the social networks I'm active on, and I got lots of very passionate replies across all of them. HTML is too heavy, and the existing rich text editors can't be trusted. #Markdown is easy to write, and its fidelity is easy to maintain when you send it: unlike a rich text editor, it isn't likely to break tags or be displayed wildly differently across systems. Finally, it's pretty close to the kind of hand-made markup you might add if you were writing a text file without knowing you were using a markup language.

Message received - and it was striking to realize how much people cared about it - but I respectfully have to disagree. All of those assumptions are based on the current state of software: you use markdown because you can't trust other editors to not break your stuff, and because most of the editors in use today have heavy, slow UIs that get in your way.

I think we can do better.

One pointer to the future, as Paul Squires pointed out to me, is Medium's editor, which is designed specifically to stay out of your way. I've written a few pieces on Medium, and have to agree: it's well-designed and just works. Of course, one of the reasons it just works is that it just runs on Medium. The portability use case isn't served here at all, either for transferring text content from place to place, or for using the editor on a bunch of different sites.

Nonetheless, I think there might be a future here, which is also pointed to by the likes of products like Aloha Editor. It seems reasonable that a configurable HTML editor could actually become part of the HTML spec. HTML5 does include the contentEditable attribute, which makes any content editable - but it unfortunately doesn't provide a way to submit that content as part of a form, meaning that these updates have to be sent via back-end JavaScript. It also doesn't provide style toolbars in the way that, for example, video tags can display player buttons using the controls attribute. It would be nice to see these things, so that users can begin to trust editors, and we don't have to use shims like Markdown when we don't need to.

In the future, hopefully we'll able to just write.

myDNA
Log into any website with just your DNA. Running your finger along the specially designed reader is enough to locate you in our database. Because your authentication information, payment details, address and identity are now stored with your genetic traits, ancestry, relatives and location, we can provide highly personalized services that make myDNA the best personal assistant you've ever had. Coming in Q3: harness the power of you as a service with the DNAPI.

Gait
Now, the real-world services you use every day can recognize you just by the way you walk! Step onto a bus and sit down: you've bought a ticket automatically. Walking to your favorite restaurant? Our extensive gaitkeeper camera network means that your table will be waiting for you by the time you get there. Keep track of your fitness goals without having to carry a pedometer, and check in just by walking in! Gait changes the world around you as you explore it, every day.

CitiesIn
Finally, a personalized civic crowdfunding platform that takes the friction out of participative democracy and helps make the world you need. Tell CitiesIn about what you would like to see from local, national and international government, top up your CitiesIn account every month, and we'll automatically divert funds to the pressure groups, lobbyist organizations and non-profits that are most likely to achieve your goals. Perhaps you'd like lower taxes, or feel passionately about civil liberties? You're not alone. Leverage the predictive power of the crowd with CitiesIn.

Mune
Airbnb for communes.

Keys.io
We're building an amazing secure communications platform that fits you. Are you worried about your privacy, but finding all that encryption and open source software hard to use? Yeah, us too. That's why we built Keys.io: we manage all that stuff behind the scenes, so all you need to worry about is connecting to your favorite apps, sites, and people. We "store your secure keys" in the cloud using military-grade security, and choose the encryption or security method that makes the most sense for what you're trying to do. You shouldn't need to think about security to be secure. With Keys.io, you don't have to.