We have a William Gibson quote above our desk here at Known HQ:
"The street finds its own uses for things."
It's from Burning Chrome, and serves as a reminder that users will find uses for technologies that its creators were not necessarily expecting. We don't just want to remain open to ...
June 30, 2014
Signing up for a service
30 seconds. And that 30 seconds includes initial customization: confirming your name and so on.
Installing something on a server
10 minutes. Ideally 5. Once again, that includes the initial customization: setting your site name in a Known instance, for example, uploading your profile photo, and choosing the ...
June 21, 2014
Journalism and the indieweb were made for each other.
Because of the way we've been describing Known - particularly focusing on our ability to syndicate content to third-party social networks and important social interactions using brid.gy - we've received a lot of feedback that this is how we should describe ourselves ...
June 20, 2014
Web 2.0 was only the beginning.
Ten years ago, the read/write web was picking up steam. Services like Blogger, Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming and the nascent Facebook were doing something amazing: building publishing platforms that anyone could contribute to. You could share resources, build professional networks, publish to the world and gain ...
June 3, 2014
Jim Stogdill's piece Welcome back, Weblandians is wonderful:
In the late 1960s, Vint Cerf and his colleagues thought they were building a packet-switched network. With (I’m sure) more meta-awareness than Watt, they brought the ethos of the counter culture to their work. They were suspicious of the top-down technocracy of the ...
June 2, 2014
I haven't been an iPhone user since late 2010, but I'm writing this on a MacBook Air and I'll be watching the WWDC keynote that starts in 45 minutes or so.
There's something about Apple's showmanship that inspires. Even if I'm not going to buy the bulk of the things they're ...
June 2, 2014
Today, my epicenter is the San Francisco Bay Area, but it wasn't always so: in 1997 I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, to do my bachelors degree in Computer Science. In the end, I lived there twice: from 1997-2004, and again for a year in 2010. The first time, I started ...
June 1, 2014