Werd I/O

There's been a lot of news stories lately about how technology companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo! may or may not be giving your data to the #NSA as part of a project called #PRISM. They deny it, news outlets confirm it and it's hard to tell what's real and what isn't real.

Whatever your political views, or whether you think government entities should be able to snoop on your phone and electronic communications, it's hard to argue that the sheen hasn't come off the consumer Internet industry. As the economist Umair Haque said earlier today:

15. There is nothing more lethal to an economy than the idea that people have nothing more to contribute than "information".

— umair haque (@umairh) June 7, 2013

The large online services have created a world where, despite the breadth of software's possibilities, the scope of our communications are limited. On Facebook, you can post status updates, links, photos and videos; on Google+, you can post status updates, links, photos and videos. What if you want to post a game, or an interactive multimedia presentation, or a live graph connected to real-time data?

Those things are hard for centralized services, because they've got to concentrate on common denominator forms of content - like status updates and photos - but they're much easier when you control your own site. If you could install your own publishing app as easily as an app on your phone, and then add new ways of posting stuff to that site just as easily, suddenly you would be able to make your presence on the web your own. And you could let other people in - you could create online communities that fit your needs, rather than bending your communities around the limits of a Facebook group or a mailing list.

That's what inspired me to start working on idno, and these are some of the ideas that inspired other people in a community of developers called the #indieweb to build their own sites and platforms. We don't believe in treating people as data points; we believe in user-centered software for individuals. Software that you control.

#idno will be available to install onto your own site later this month; a turnkey hosted version will follow. In the meantime, if you're a developer, you can check out Idno on GitHub, or some of the other IndieWeb projects out there.

Won't you join us?

This was a sad day. Unsurprising, but sad.

The web connects people from different contexts, backgrounds and geographies, with different skills and ideas. Learning happens when different contexts collide. I'm not a technological determinist, but I think the web is a tool that we can use to make a more tolerant, peaceful, progressive world. Yeah, yeah, I know. But I do.

I knew the risks from putting everything online, and from the data mining it enabled, but I saw the benefits, too. I knew that Silicon Valley had a lot in common with the progressive movements in the Bay Area in the sixties and seventies, and I felt like people had their hearts and minds in the right place.

There is nothing less empowering than filing yourself, your friends, your family and your neighbors into a surveillance database. If today's reports are true, every time you attach an email address or a profile page to a phone number and save it to the cloud, that's what you're doing. Every time you tag someone in a photograph. You're communicating with your friends and having fun, but you're also potentially crowdsourcing a surveillance state.

The point isn't that the current government might persecute you. I mean, there's a real chance that they might, if you're a minority or the wrong religion or something else that triggers an algorithm to flag you as being more likely to be harmful to national security. But that's not the crux of it.

The point is that we have created the tools so that we can be surveilled and persecuted. By a future government, by private companies with access to the data, by anyone with the right tools. A government didn't create the data-gathering tools behind #PRISM. We did. We are the computer; we build it every day. All the NSA is doing is taking a peek.

What we do now defines us as a generation and as a society. It's not about whether the NSA is surveilling US citizens on their own soil, although that's certainly a legal point of conflict. It's no more moral to spy on anyone else's citizens on their own soil. No, it's fundamentally about the nature of all this data that we're creating. Who are we creating it for, and why are we creating it? Why does it need to exist at all, in this massively interrogable form?

Everyone talks about big data, but I'm much more interested in how we can keep data small without ruining the connectedness that the web provides. Movements like the IndieWeb and the federated social web are important. So is regaining a sense of community responsibility on the web. We're here to make the world better, after all. We should be fighting for the users from the ground up, not working against them behind their backs.

I come from a culture of skepticism, in the best possible way. I was brought up to, and later sought out friends and acquaintances who would also, question and test the things around me. Leaders? Question them. Institutions? Question them. Traditions? Question them. And then, from what you've learned and been able to intuit, form your own belief system over time.

Part of that is understanding that you might be wrong, and being able to change your mind. I think having a willingness to change your mind is a strength, like skyscrapers built to bend in the wind, or trees that twist and adapt to their environments as they grow. Rigid ideas tend to break.

Another part is not believing something because you're told to. I always find it a bit alienating when people don't, for example, like me criticizing the President (or the Prime Minister), as if it's somehow wrong or disrespectful to point out his shortcomings. I tend to disagree: I think that's what democracy requires us to do. My opinions don't put me in a pigeonhole box, and I don't think, really, anyone's do. We're all demographics of one.

I don't like ideological (or theological) tribes. I don't think they're useful for their participants, although I think they're very useful for people who are in positions of power within them. We can agree on things and disagree on other things, and we're all part of a larger tribe. If the Internet has shown us anything, it's that we are all connected, we are all different and we all the same - and all of us contribute to a much larger whole. We should celebrate diversity in ideas, goals, opinions, knowledge and skills, just as much as we should celebrate diversity in our physical traits, personalities, sexualities and backgrounds. Values are ideas; rigid values are fragile ones. They're narrow gene pools. I think we should question ourselves, and each other, often.

I've been loving coding with MongoDB since I picked it up; I know there are worries, and I come into it with two eyes open, but so far it's been far more useful for my needs than MySQL.

Part of the reason for this is that applications I work on tend to be very document-centric, and where they're relational, they're relational in a way that lends itself very well to NoSQL (membership lists, etc). It's probably not an exaggeration to say that I'm querying the database 10x less than I would be with an Elgg-style entity-metadata-relationships table.

idno is MongoDB-based, including heavy use of GridFS, whereas the latakoo stack is not (I don't think this is the right place to write about latakoo's tech, but I may do on the official blog at some point). However, if my experiences continue to be great, I'll think about doing some more formal testing with the team. With the likes of IBM throwing their weight behind MongoDB (given their recent acquisition of SoftLayer, could 10gen be a target too?), this might be the right time to begin taking it more seriously.

#mongodb #databases #mysql #10gen #ibm

I've been self-publishing my photos and status updates for less than a week, but I already wouldn't do it another way. Idno lets me post easily from my phone or laptop, and the updates show up on the sites I'm connected to. Right now, that means Twitter and Facebook, but sites like Flickr and LinkedIn are coming. (This is all available as open source code, by the way.)

Technical aside: when I post something new, it gets an Activity Streams object type and verb. Status updates are notes, blog posts are articles, and photos are images. Plugins then listen for when new, public content is created with those object types (and, right now, the "post" verb) , and syncs them to third-party sites as appropriate. That way someone else could write a better status update plugin than mine, and nobody would have to rewrite the plugins that synchronize content.

The other silo that I use all the time is Foursquare. Theoretically, taking the user's location isn't hard - did I mention I'd written a book on Javascript Geolocation? - but in reality, this is harder than just grabbing the user's current latitude and longitude and saving it to an Activity Streams place object. Foursquare maintains an extensive database of venues, that's so good that a bunch of third party services use it as well. I don't really want to have to duplicate that.

There are alternatives: OpenStreetMap has a downloadable free software database of locations. The downside is that you need to extract points of interest yourself - and the database, perhaps predictably, is over 28 gigabytes. That's far too much data for most individual #indieweb sites to be handling themselves. It's certainly not something I'd like to deal with on my personal server.

For me, the perfect use case is this: I click "check in" in idno, the browser grabs my location, I'm presented with a list of nearby points of interest and I select one. The content is saved locally and then synchronized to location-centric services like Foursquare and Facebook Places.

Now, I could use Foursquare's database to populate that list of locations, but somehow that feels unclean. The purpose of me self-hosting is to own my own data, and using that database would make me dependent on Foursquare's service. Also, the flip-side of that also makes me uncomfortable: if my purpose is to put less value into Foursquare's service instead of my own site, I probably shouldn't be using the database they put so much investment into.

I'm not sure anyone else is syndicating their location to sites like Foursquare from their own sites, but if they are, I'd love to hear from them. Until then, I'm considering writing the simplest possible shim: a geolocation plugin that takes my physical location and lets me save a "hint" along with it, that will act as a way to gently nudge the third party synchronization plugins to pick the best venue. The hint wouldn't be publicly displayed, but for example, I could type "amendment" when checking into one of my favorite brewpubs in San Francisco, and that'd be enough for me to be checked into 21st Amendment on Foursquare.

Speaking of which, time to head over the bay and grab a pint ... Sadly, I won't be checking in just yet.

#indieweb #geolocation #posse