Werd I/O

I've been thinking this morning about content types and granular access permissions (which, it turns out, is ground the IndieWeb community has already tread).

Activity Streams is a data syndication format with very granular content types, which is awesome - unless those content types dictate the kinds of content you actually allow people to create with your software.

Why should a content type be strictly a note, or an article, or a place, image, video, application? One of the amazing things about the modern web is that we can combine content types to create experiences that are richer than the sum of their media parts.

At the simplest level, I want to be able to (eg) include a photo with a checkin. But why not construct a post that's a photo followed by some audio followed by some text followed by an interactive widget followed by a non-linear video with an interactive layer on top of it? One of the neat things about the #indieweb is that you control your platform - and that should mean controlling the form of your content too.

Watch this space ...

#indiewebcamp

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

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?