Werd I/O

The web is the most powerful platform for learning that human society has ever known. Every time we encounter someone with different skills, contexts and ideas to us, we learn from each other - as long as we share those things.

In many places, children are brought up to think of talking about politics as rude, and these attitudes can sometimes translate to social media. I feel very differently: while it may be rude to talk about differences of opinion at the Thanksgiving table, if only because the social norms have been set differently, I almost think of it as a duty to share our ideas online.

Of course, like any marketplace, a marketplace of ideas needs to have some rules. When I ran a debate forum a decade ago, we had a small number of core ideas:

• No personal attacks (a disagreement doesn't mean that the person you're interacting with is inherently bad)
• Keep an open mind - in other words, stay open to the idea that your deeply-held idea might be wrong
• Understand that everyone has a different context, and what works for you might not work for anyone else
  
• Try and avoid strawman arguments

I think these hold for any online conversation.

Personally? I love it when people talk politics with me, or disagree with the ideas I publish. And more generally, I think the web would be a richer, more valuable place if we all wrote about what we believed. As long as every party in the conversation is able to understand how to debate with each other, and understands that it's okay to be wrong, we all become smarter in the process.

I post about my political beliefs, as well as my other beliefs, according to this thesis. I don't think that people who disagree with me are bad in any way; it's a privilege to be able to have conversations with people all over the world about things that matter. I do think anything that adds to the commons, and the gene pool of ideas, is a good thing.

I'm sometimes asked why my posts here on my Known site don't let people comment on them.

The answer is: actually, they do. And I want to read your comments. Feedback is a gift.

Known, like p3k, Taproot and a number of other platforms, uses an open technology called webmention to power its comments. Plugins are also available to help WordPress use webmention.

What webmention gives us is a truly decentralized conversation: you can make a post on your site, mark it as being in reply to this post, and it'll show up as a comment here - but you also get to keep everything you've written on your own site. That way, even if my site goes away, you have a record of every conversation you've had with me. (If you want it.)

You don't need Known to leave a comment: you can use anything that supports webmention.

Through the power of webmention and Bridgy, you can also reply to this post on Twitter and Facebook (see the links at the bottom of the page for this post), and your response will show up here.

This isn't to say that we're not going to add public comments to Known. We are. But we want to make sure we do it right. Sites like Medium have shown interesting new models for user feedback that we're very interested in (and there are decentralized counterparts like marginalia).

We're definitely inviting feedback on this, and would love to read your thoughts. What kind of comments would you like to see?

Fred Wilson is seeing a swing back towards personal blogging:

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

Which is exactly what I'm doing now, from my Known site.

What's different today is that you have access to networks like Twitter and Facebook, which allow you to more easily spread your message to your network of contacts (and to their networks of contacts). Social media has also given us new forms of content to play with, like the check-in. Known, of course, allows you to post to your own domain using a variety of media and reach audiences all over the web.

Meanwhile, Harold Jarche, a learning consultant who helps create workplace change for large corporations like Domino's, notes that workplaces are missing time for reflection. The same is true of schools, conferences, and other spaces where learning happens.

There's a lot of value in having a place to publish and share extended reflections, which we miss in shorter-form, rapid-fire platforms like Twitter (as much as I love them), and which also aren't served by mass publishing platforms like Medium. A personal space is just that: personal.

As Fred noted, Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor at Gawker, just relaunched her own personal blog:

But now I’m at the opposite end of the continuum; I’m usually working on one or two long-form writing projects, but not very much writing gets done in public otherwise. And there are things about blogging that I miss. I like consistently writing for an audience and getting feedback. It helps me work out my arguments and thoughts about various issues and clarifies muddy thinking.

These are some of the reasons why education is interested in personal publishing at the moment (here are some notes from our pilot at the University of Mary Washington). But it goes much wider. The web is the most effective way there has ever been to connect people with different contexts and skills. Right now, a very small number of platforms control the form (and therefore, at least to an extent, the content) of those conversations. I think the web is richer if we all own our own sites - and Known is a simple, flexible platform to let people do that.

To learn more, click here to add yourself to the beta list, or get in touch.

It's been fun to see Dave Winer's experiments in content syndication with Little Facebook Editor, a proof of concept that allows you to write a post in a minimalist text box (which I love), cross-post to Facebook, and update the Facebook version when updates are made.

We've had content syndication in Known since the beginning. So far we have plugins for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare and SoundCloud in-house, and our open source community has also contributed one for WordPress. I love that Dave's software keeps the post up-to-date as well as cross-posting it. This is something we'll be adding for the platforms that support it (i.e., everything but Twitter).

I completely agree with Dave when he says:

We believe that this should be true for all of our social networking tools. Our sites should hold the primary copy of our content - it's ours, after all. But these networks wield massive reach and power, and we should be able to leverage that to find new audiences and meet new people. We're not trying to replace Facebook; we're trying to use it to its full potential.

I'm really looking forward to more updates on the Little Facebook Editor. To stay up to date with Known developments, click here to add yourself to our beta list.

This is a more technical post than usual, but this has been driving me nuts, and I wanted to document it in case others run into the same issue.

PHP's cURL implementation sends an Expect: 100-continue header when you use it to send a POST call over a certain size.

Squid, ever the diligent proxy, looks for well-formed requests, and will throw an HTTP 417 error if it gets that header but the call is malformed. Edit: it also can't handle the header at all in incoming requests if you're using anything earlier than Squid 3.2.

cURL malforms the call (or extra behavior is required and documented, but I haven't seen anything yet).

The result is that running an API behind Squid that is used by PHP cURL clients may cause unforeseen 417 errors.

How to fix it

A widely accepted fix is to tell cURL to send a blank "Expect:" error. That does solve the issue from one side, but it's half the problem. What happens if you can't control the incoming cURL libraries?

It turns out that Squid has a setting called ignore_expect_100 which is off by default. Add "ignore_expect_100" to your squid.conf file, restart Squid, and you should be good to go.

I've been glued to the Ferguson coverage for the last week. Like many people, I've been wondering how this could be happening in a supposedly democratic, developed nation - and I've been getting all of my news via Twitter. No matter what they try and do, the traditional news media has just been late on this story, in the way that traditional publishers began to seem out of date when blogging picked up steam a decade ago.

I've been watching up-to-the-second updates of a situation that should concern everyone who lives in the US. Meanwhile, conspicuously, the story is virtually nowhere to be found on Facebook.

We're increasingly consuming information in filter bubbles. Much has been said about this over the last few years, but it's harmful: if an idea, or an event, hasn't permeated a social circle, it's less likely to than it ever was. Back in the old days, we'd all crowd around a TV for the evening news, or read a newspaper in the morning. Everyone got the same information. Now we subscribe to individuals and curate our own information streams.

Mostly this is a good thing: it's dangerous for everyone to be getting all their information from a single source. But as circles congeal online, they effectively become the same thing: a unified voice of people who more or less agree with each other. Not only is that democratically dangerous, but for networks like Twitter, there's the possibility of it atrophying the network and impeding growth. Past a certain point, introverted social spheres can't grow any further; it makes sense to add a little something to break the surface tension.

But in the democratic sense, a little more serendipity is also a good thing. I want to discover stories I might not have otherwise seen; ideas I might not otherwise have heard.

If Twitter was just a piece of software running as a service, this would be unthinkable: it's not obeying your subscription preferences! But that's not what it is. With this change, Twitter is cementing itself as a media company, just like the broadcasters of old. In its own way, it's curating an information source for you - one that can continue to scale beyond your friends and networks.

Eran Hammer discusses justifying the return on investment for open source development at Walmart Labs:

If this all sounds very cold and calculated, it’s because it is. Looking for clear ROI isn’t anti-community but pro-sustainability. It’s easy to get your boss to sponsor a community event or a conference, to print shirt and stickers for your open source project, or throw a release party for a new framework. What’s hard is to get the same level of investment a year, two years, or three years later.

If you're creating something that the community relies upon, it's important to also make it sustainable. Open source is a license and a way of thinking about distribution; it is not the opposite of thinking about software in business terms. If you're creating software in the context of a business, you need to tie it to business goals, including the license.

At Known, like Elgg before it, we know that open source distribution acted as a multiplier for the small teams of developers writing the code in-house. We talk about it as a strategy. The effect is the same - anyone can pick up our core code for free - but it's been done for a reason. Eran's metrics seem about right to me:

For example, every five startups using hapi translated to the value of one full time developer, while every ten large companies translated to one full time senior developer.

For us, a "startup" could be a university, a non-profit or a government department. The nice thing about open source is that while all good software is built in collaboration with its users, here the users can literally write some of the code. The result is a startup less constrained by limited resources, and a user-base that gets to use a more useful application. Everybody wins.

Interested in open source businesses? You should check out Known and add yourself to the beta list.

I started my career in education, writing e-learning tools for the University of Edinburgh. It was there that I met my Elgg co-founder, Dave Tosh (because they placed us together in an ex-broom closet with a window that didn't shut; a kind of gallows bonding experience). Elgg was designed as a community platform for education, that took the informal learning that was happening on the nascent social web in 2003 and applied it to the formal education space. It did well, and it's still in wide use in institutions today. Through Elgg, I've written and spoken widely about social learning environments.

The educational technology community has developed the dual concepts of the Personal Learning Environment and the eportfolio. The first is a tool that puts students at the center of their learning; the second is a way for them to represent themselves and their learning, to themselves, to their peers at their institution, and to the outside world once they graduate. In an educational setting, I think Known is very clearly both a PLE and an eportfolio:

• Known profiles allow you to post to a space that represents you, using a variety of media, from any device
• Known's syndication feature lets you post to your own profile, while syndicating to external sites and applications - like your campus's Learning Management System.
  

Educators agree. The Reclaim Your Domain project is a particular evolution of eportfolio thinking, where members of a campus's community own the domains that represent them (just like indieweb!), and we've developed a good relationship with this community. And we're discovering that more and more institutions around the world are coming to us, because they see how Known can help them to empower their students.

Universities have discovered that providing a social space that allows for personal reflection allows for deeper learning than a Learning Management System can provide. Known provides a layer for this that can either work with a campus's LMS or as a stand-alone product. It's easier for teachers to administer, and because it uses the latest modern web technologies, it works with the mobile devices that students are using to access the Internet more than 50% of the time.

Known works well as an educational product. Our experience building awesome social tools for education over the last decade allows us to more quickly understand the challenges involved, and to provide something that fits in with the culture of education. We're also aware that there are startups whose aim is to own a part of the education stack, and our grounding in indieweb and open source means that we reject that entirely. We have an open project that we have designed to empower; the intention is to provide more control, not remove it.

I couldn't be more excited to work deeply with educators to help them make electronic learning a more personal experience - and we want to hear from you. Software is a collaborative experience, and we couldn't think of better collaborators than the people who are helping to make the world a more informed and educated place.

1. Elgg: a social networking engine for education.

In November, 2004, we released the first version of Elgg to the world. We originally called it a learning landscape: an educational software platform that took its cues from the emerging social web rather than rigid classroom structures. In many ways, it was as much a reaction to Blackboard and WebCT as it was to Livejournal and MySpace.

I'd been building web communities since 1995, so when I arrived at the University of Edinburgh to work on elearning software, I was appalled at what I'd found. Every single person who used the dominant learning management systems, from the administrators down to the students, hated them. Students only used them because they were forced to; as it turned out, administrators only used them because they were forced to.

And yet, people were learning from each other on the web all the time. Through platforms like Livejournal and Delicious, people with different skills and contexts were colliding and creating a new kind of culture. The web had made it possible for anyone to publish as long as they bought some web space and learned HTML. Suddenly, anyone could publish, as long as they could connect to the Internet at all.

Elgg took the social web, applied it to education, and wrapped the whole thing in an open source license. It took off like wildfire.

From the beginning, it was important to us that users got to control their own space. They could choose their own theme, and hack it, if they wanted to. Most importantly, they could choose exactly who could see each and every post: long before Mark Zuckerberg declared that the age of privacy was dead, our research indicated that students felt more comfortable with web publishing if they could keep tight reigns over who could see their work.

We knew Elgg was bigger than education when non-profits in Columbia got in touch to let us know they were using the platform. Soon afterwards, schools in Bangladesh were featured by the BBC for using it. Over time, as more non-education users emerged - more non-profits like Oxfam and Greenpeace, alongside Swatch, BMW, hedge funds, and the rugby star Will Carling - it evolved into a social networking engine that anyone could pick up and use. We started with a very specific use case - reflective learning in higher education - and widened into something much bigger. To date, Elgg users have included Harvard University, NASA, Hill & Knowlton, the federal governments of several nations, and the World Bank.

I made the choice to move on to new pastures a few years ago. Today, Elgg is managed by a non-profit foundation. The current team is doing an amazing job, and, under their stewardship, the platform has transformed again, into a programming toolkit for people who want to build social applications.

2. Known: the easiest way to own your own space on the Internet.

Meanwhile, individuals are in need of spaces that they truly control more than ever before. In the old days, we thought this was important to help them feel more comfortable with posting their personal reflections to a public space (not everything has to be about maintaining your "personal brand", after all). While that's still true, sites like Facebook are pointing to a more imperative need: a place to publish where you won't be experimented on without your permission, where you won't be spied upon, where you can move your content at any time, and where your content and conversations aren't owned by one of a very small number of corporate silos.

Known is a platform for a new kind of social web. You can think of each Known site as being a single social profile, either for an individual or a group. Each one can interact with each other in a decentralized way (using indie web technology), or they can interact with all the other sites they use - including Elgg, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and all the rest of them. Educational institutions are already asking us if we can integrate with learning management systems like Canvas - and the answer is, yes.

We have privacy, too. Known site owners can choose who can see their content, and they can choose the look and feel of their sites, including what kinds of content they want to publish.

We know that over 50% of Internet use happens on a mobile device, and any new platform has to take that into account. We've made Known fully responsive, so it works on any mobile device with a web browser, including your iPhone, Android phone, Windows Phone device, iPad, tablet, and so on. Even your BlackBerry works with Known. Because mobile usage leads to new kinds of content, Known supports location check-ins and posting photos while you're moving around. And, of course, individuals and organizations can roll their own content types using custom plugins.

On any device, ownership of your site and content, combined with an understanding of your community, gives you a new kind of clarity about your online self. You know exactly who can see each item you post. You know who's responding to you on which networks, and you understand which kinds of content your audiences are interested in. Known is both a safe space to reflect, and a singular site that represents you on the web. And more than anything else, it's respectful software that puts you at the center of your online world.

Known is open source. As a company, we're providing software and customization services to make it easier for organizations to administer, as well as support subscriptions for everyone who uses Known. Finally, we're also working on providing managed infrastructure for anyone who wants to run Known, either individually or for their organization, without the hassle of server administration.

I've been privileged to spend over a decade working on open platforms that empower people and organizations to control their own spaces on the Internet. The pendulum is swinging back to a world where users are asking for that control, and I'm looking forward to making Known the definitive way to own your content online.

If you've read this far, you should definitely check us out: at withknown.com, on Twitter, and on AngelList.

Guest-posting on Jason Kottke's blog, Tim Carmody argues that the problems with Facebook and OKCupid's involuntary human testing are problems with the social web at large:

Still, for as long as the web does work this way, we are never only these companies' "products," but their producers, too. And to the extent that these companies show they aren't willing to live up to the basic agreement that we make these things and give them to you so you will show them to other people -- the engine that makes this whole world wide web business go -- I'm not going to have anything to do with them any more. What's more, I'll get mad enough to find a place that will show the things I write to other people and tell them they shouldn't accept it either. Because, ultimately, you ought to be ashamed to treat people and the things they make this way.

It's a great piece, and I agree, with a major caveat: this isn't how the web - or even the social web - works at all.

What Tim is referring to is a silo-centric version of the commercial web that we've come to accept as the new normal. The accepted thinking right now is that of course services and applications are running psychological tests on us without our permission. Of course they're using opaque algorithms to monetize our ability to communicate with our friends and family. Of course they're mining our private communications in order to display advertising.

There's no of course about it. We founded Known because we know that these policies harm independent content creators. We're not alone: projects like Indie Box and Sandstorm, not to mention the entire indie web community, are springing up to provide more empowering, respectful software and services. Before long, taking advantage of your users will be a market disadvantage, and businesses that have built themselves up by disenfranchising the people who use their products will find themselves in a tough spot. Even today, though, the social web doesn't have to mean being taken advantage of, and we're proud to be building a more respectful alternative.

I'm having a good time at the Reclaim Your Domain meetup in Los Angeles this weekend, organized by Jim Groom of University of Mary Washington's Domain of One's Own initiative.

From the initiative's homepage:

A Domain of One's Own provides domain names and Web space to members of the UMW community, encouraging individuals to explore the creation and development of their digital identities.

Reclaim Hosting, which was created by Jim Groom and Tim Owens, supports Known (as well as Elgg). It was set up to provide educators and institutions with an easy way to offer their students domains and web hosting that they own and control.

We're excited to be in the mix, both in terms of the services at UMW and elsewhere, but also in the wider conversation. Schools and universities are in a perfect position to talk about data ownership, so it's inspiring to see them doing just that. While Jim Groom and the other members of the Reclaim Your Domain community are ahead of the curve, I expect many others to follow. Their work provides an obvious benefit to both students and faculty at the institutions that adopt it, in a way that previous eportfolio initiatives didn't necessarily achieve. (Elgg emerged from work Dave Tosh and I were doing on electronic portfolios in education.)

Empowering individuals at institutions to own their online identities makes us very happy. And we're excited to learn from the students and faculty that make their homes on the web using Known.

While Known is an open source application (released under the Apache 2.0 License), institutions that choose to use the software won't be going it alone. They can get full support from us, if they like, as well as software to make it easier to manage Known sites on an organizational basis, and bespoke solutions for their specific use cases. We're keenly aware that one size doesn't fit all, and one institution's (or one school or course's) needs don't necessarily apply generally. Known is a flexible platform that supports a great deal of individual customization.

It's not just for education, of course: anyone can use a Known site, and we're excited to be working in journalism, technology and other verticals. However, edtech is a great example of a community motivated to empower its members to own their data, and we're delighted to help.

I'm at Yes and Yes Yes (YxYY) this weekend: a nerd gathering in the desert. A large proportion of the people I look up to and count as friends in the industry are here - but it's not a conference. It's not even an unconference. It's not a networking event. It's an invitation to put a bunch of awesome people in the same place, encourage them all to say "yes" to things, and see what happens.

@benwerd #yxyy is like HTTP: no sessions, just conversations.

— Evan Prodromou (@evanpro) July 11, 2014

So far today I've been to Ben Metcalfe and Krystal Lauk's wedding; I've had an Indie Web Camp in a swimming pool; had epic, serious conversations with our Matter compadre Colin Mutchler while he floated on a giant watermelon; experimented with an Othermill and a Cricut; read an issue of Modern Farmer while sipping a Pimm's under a blue Southern California sky; and knocked around ideas for a hackathon set in a cinema on the Russian River.

And now I'm dressed in a waistcoat, ready to go to my very first prom.

Everything is decentralizing. While traditional conferences still have their place, I find it much more valuable to be in a space that every participant can own equally, where they can propose new activities at any time. Just as unconferences are an order of magnitude better than conferences in terms of the breadth of subjects and the quality of conversations (with an honorable exception to the transformative, festival-style XOXO), there's a lot to be said for bringing people to one spot and just seeing what happens, with no sessions, no speakers, and no agenda except to see what transpires.

My challenge to myself: to treat every day like a YxYY, where every conversation is open, where anything can happen, and life-changing, serendipitous experiences can be around every new corner.

Here's how I post from my Known site.

When I log in, Known gives me the option to post lots of different kinds of things: status updates, photos, streaming media, and so on. Because it's what's called a "responsive interface", it adapts to whichever device you're looking at it on: it works just as well on a phone as on a desktop browser. These buttons work great on a touch-based interface, and I post on my phone at least as often as I post from my computer.

This morning, I decided to write a status update:

I decided to post it to my friends on the traditional social media sites too. Above, I've selected Twitter - after I took the picture, I decided to post to Facebook as well.

Known posts the status update to my own site:

But because I selected Twitter, it posts it there too:

And because I selected Facebook, another copy ends up there:

My friends can interact with me over on those sites:

And those replies - whether they're from Facebook, Twitter, or my friends' own websites (running Known or something else) - will show up on my site too, thanks to great indieweb technologies like brid.gy:

This way, I have all of my interactions around that content in one place.

If I want to reply to my friends on the silos, I can do that too. I can just do that from my site using the bank of buttons you've already seen, but if I'm using Firefox, I can use a direct "reply" button integrated with my browser:

Or there's a "bookmarklet" - a button that I drag to my browser's bookmarks toolbar - that makes it easier, which works with every browser.

Either way, those replies will show up on the site my friends replied from, as well as on my own site.

Because I post everything from my own site, I have an archive of everything I've ever written to social media. That means I can look to see everything I've written about "Wimbledon", for example:

And I can filter my search to particular kinds of content:

Because this archive is hosted on my own site, people are likely to find it when they search for me. That means I have more control over how I'm represented on the web. One of the ways I can customize my appearance online is through themes:

But if I'm a developer (and I am!) I can build my own themes and plugins to integrate Known into my existing site, create new kinds of content or radically change the look and feel. It's a pretty great toolbox.

My archive of everything I've posted and all my replies lets me analyze my data in all kinds of ways, that let me post better and participate more directly with my community. I'll be talking more about that another time.

In the meantime, you should sign up to our beta list.

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 those new uses; we want to encourage them as much as we can.

We're back from IndieWebCamp in Portland - one of my favorite technology events in one of my favorite cities in the world. Technologists and like-minded creators get together in order to help create web platforms that promote ownership, allow people to communicate with each other freely online, and give people full control of the things they create and share.

I'd started building Known before I aligned myself with the indie web community, but it fits so well: Known allows anyone to publish to their own website as easily as Twitter or Facebook, lets them talk to other people all over the Internet (on existing social networks, on other Known sites, and on blogs and journals), and gives them control over their content.

In a world where the platforms we use every day are spying on us, or even performing psychological tests on us without our knowledge, and when platforms shut down all the time, more people are certainly crying out for more ownership and control. We'll be there for them. Our mission is to empower people to publish to their own space on the Internet.

As part of a discussion on indie web businesses, Amber Case said she thought the market for these products is going to emerge organically. I agree, and it's always better for people to tell you what they find you useful for. Twitter is a great example of a service that has developed that way.

Of course, I also have a business need to sell our product, and prove that it will be useful for enough people to support our growth. We've been having some great conversations with people who need Known: people whose reputations and incomes are tied to their identity online, and the things they make and share on the web. But as any scientist will tell you, anecdotes aren't enough.

Over the next two weeks, we'll begin inviting people to use our Known service. Now is a great time to add yourself to our beta list. It's free - we want your feedback and develop our product hand-in-hand with the people who are using it. We think that's the best way to help the street find its own uses for what we're making, and in the process, create something that changes the way people represent themselves on the web.

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 theme. Tweaking the theme can take longer, of course.

Writing a plugin for an open source app

One hour to testing that you're on the right path, two hours to having an initial prototype fully working. This might be generous: it's possible that the bar for the "1 .. 2 .. 3 .. is this on ..?" testing phase is more like 10-15 minutes, and the prototype phase is an hour.

Implementing a web standard or format

One afternoon. RSS succeeded (at least for a while) because you can sit down after lunch to take a look at it blind, and have something working to show someone by mid-afternoon. I'm convinced this is true of HTML, too.

The indieweb technologies all also have this property: pick them up after lunch, do something with them by 3pm, and have something cool working by the time you go home.

Everything happens in a sitting

This also works with proprietary APIs. Twilio was wildly successful because using it was unbelievably straightforward - and it drove a lot of business for them. APIs are interfaces by definition, of course, and so are plugin hooks and format specs. These all have to be as simple and clear as possible.

Making things simple isn't dumbing them down; it's making them more useful. Nobody wants to spend time learning your technology or figuring out your service; they want to spend it on their own goals. The bar has to be that you can get to grips with something very quickly, so people can move onto what they were actually trying to do.

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 as a business:

Known is a social media marketing application that allows marketing departments to justify ROI using aggregated data from audiences across multiple platforms

For all kinds of reasons, this isn't what we want to do. There are solid business reasons - social media marketing is a crowded market, for one - but there are deeper reasons, too. It's not why we got into this. It's not, on a fundamental level, what we're trying to do.

After all, this is how you could describe the product:

Known lets you own your own social website without having to give up talking to your friends on the web.

I believe in the indieweb as a movement that will empower people to own their own representations on the web. I know that will have broad implications over time, and that the success of these ideas and technologies will make a profound impact on the way the web works. I also think that running a commercial business based on indie web principles is a great thing.

I also think that certain groups of people are ahead of the curve when it comes to privacy and ownership - and journalists are very much among them.

There is a long-term trend towards greater ownership and privacy. Partially this is due to post-Snowden sentiment, but it's also driven by factors like generational differences, a growing commercial dissatisfaction with Facebook, and security breaches at companies like Target. Providing a service that is as easy to use as Facebook, while being respectful to its users, mindful of privacy, and yours, is a good idea. There will be a tipping point where people will be looking for something new, and we will be there for them, alongside other software in the indieweb ecosystem.

But there's also a growing need for this right now. Edward Snowden's whistleblowing was, of course, an important moment in journalism. We participated in a workshop run by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism on newsgathering in a post-Snowden world this week, and were inspired by the renewed focus on protecting sources and swiftly building stories, while being simultaneously dismayed by the lack of effective software to support them. Journalists value ownership, privacy, control and ease of communication - which, of course, are indieweb fundamentals.

We're investigating how Known, and the indieweb, can be effectively harnessed for journalism. This includes heavy research into the workflows people are using today. My experience with latakoo (which is used by professional newsrooms around the world) has told me that every organization is different - but then, my experience with Elgg tells me that it's possible to build a light-touch tool that allows people to customize it for their own needs. In fact, that's what Known already is, whether you take the open source code and build on top of it, or use the hosted service we'll launch this summer.

Journalism is fundamental to democracy. We need to know what's happening in the world around us to make effective democratic decisions. We're also living in a world where journalism is being pinched by changing models and rapidly evolving audiences. If we can help, we would love to.

If you're a journalist, or if you work in a media or news organization, we would love to talk to you. You can email me at ben@withknown.com.

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 audiences without any development expertise: you could just write, hit "post", and you were done. Publishing had never been as easy in the entire history of the world.

There is some consensus that these platforms were the seed for massive cultural change. We're still feeling the effects. Learning happens when people with different contexts, knowledge and assumptions encounter each other, and this is happening more than it ever has before.

But the social web was a proof of concept.

We needed a space to experiment. There's an old maxim that says perfect is the enemy of the good: it's nearly impossible to create a perfect platform straight out of the gate. You need to figure out what works and what doesn't work, and iterate. That's why developers like to release early and release often. That first release probably isn't great, but the sooner you get your software in front of users, the sooner you can learn from how they use it, and change appropriately.

So it goes with Facebook, Twitter, and the other services that have come and gone over the years. We've learned a lot about social behavior. We understand how to create a great user experience that people find comfortable to use; we understand how to make it easy to share and to publish. Those things didn't come easily, but we have them, and the learning was made easier by creating simpler architectures: centralized systems where user activity could be observed.

It's time for the next step.

Open follows closed.

We know that we need to open our platforms, and that mass surveillance by governments around the world is a problem. It's even fair to say that it's a problem that's been enabled by creating these centralized proofs of concept. Luckily, the next evolution of the web is taking place.

The idea is simple: instead of everyone giving all their information to a site like Facebook, they keep it themselves, but still get to communicate easily using all of the great user experience discoveries we've made. You can still share selfies, make friends, listen to music together and share links, but now you do it in a space that's really yours, and that you get to have more control over.

The result isn't just more privacy. It's better experiences.

You can control how you appear on the web. Not just your profile photo and a background image, but the complete look and feel. You can use designs from people around the world, and mix and match them to create something that's completely unique. If you're a developer (and you don't have to be), you can create something new from the ground up, and share it with the world as well.

(And, hey, we've got more developers than ever before, thanks to great publishers like O'Reilly Media, sharing high-quality tutorials and technical content in an accessible way.)

It's not just about look and feel, though. Developers can create new kinds of content, and new apps, and let anyone else on the web use them. You won't need a Facebook account or a Google account; you'll be able to use them because you're on the web and that's what the web does. Nobody will control the new web, and that's going to allow for unprecedented creativity, and new markets for tools and content. It's going to be beautiful.

Not just that, though. Knowledge is fundamental to democracy. The web is going to continue to be a platform that ushers in new freedoms all around the world. That's already been happening to some extent, but when you connect the ease of use of the "web 2.0" movement with the decentralized, interconnected nature of the web, you empower people at a level never before seen.

I'm grateful for the people who have pioneered web publishing, and who continue to build amazing new experiences. It's fun to see that creativity start to funnel into the indie web, and it's a privilege to be working on some of those tools myself.

It's been a great ten years to write software. I think the next decade on the web is going to be very bright indeed.

If you're interested in these ideas, Indie Web Camp is being held at the end of this month in multiple locations. You should also sign up to learn more about Known, the indie publishing platform I co-founded. We're launching later this summer, and it's going to be great.

By the way, that picture above is the debut of something called the "Open Stack" in Digg's offices in 2008. It included lots of truly open technologies, including ActivityStreams, which is still used today.

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 Vietnam War era, and they imbued their protocols with the principles of emergence in the hope that the network they built would maintain a bias toward decentralization and a force for democratization.

Yet, here we are. Instead of that smooth decentralized landscape, the web has concentrated and congealed into exabyte lumps of Google, Facebook, Amazon — and now we know, the NSA. Utah is set to become the gravity well of the web.

I love how ethics and values shaped the Internet as we know it today. Despite being made of packets, switches, servers and protocols, it's a predominantly human technology.

The piece is an edited version of his Solid conference keynote from last week:

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 announcing, they manage to make tech - sometimes really geeky tech - accessible and desirable to people who wouldn't ordinarily care. Their keynote is kind of the Paris Fashion Week of the personal computing world.

Even if public consensus is starting to be that post-Jobs Apple has lost some of its sheen, they're always an event, and the black-shrouded signs at today's suggest that something new is on the horizon. A watch? A TV? A sports car running iOS? Who knows.

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 Elgg, the open source social networking platform. The second time, I worked for latakoo and was the first Geek in Residence at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab.

I miss The Forest Cafe, which, to me, is a symbol of Edinburgh's artistic cultural anarchy. I love that about the city: clubs and art shows occupy every nook and cranny. Of course, the big kahuna is the Edinburgh Festivals: twelve official festivals (and more unofficial ones) that double the size of the city and turn it into a melting pot of arts and creativity. The excellent social safety net doesn't hurt: healthcare is basically free, and Scottish students can go to Scottish universities without paying a penny. The marvelous Scottish Book Trusts mails childrens books to every new family, promoting an interest in reading. You can experiment without worrying about what's going to happen to you if you get ill. My circle in Scotland very much fit my values: compassionately left-wing, embracing of diverse sexualities and gender identities, secular, and questioning of cultural norms. Exactly how I would prefer the world to be.

On the other hand, money is tight there. It's just the way it is. You can make a good living, and costs are low (particularly when you factor in health insurance, or the fact that you don't need to own a car). But if you want to form a startup, as I did, you're going to have a harder time.

A sample of things we were told when we tried to get Elgg off the ground:

"It won't work."

"What about your pension?"

"That sounds like it's for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms." [Their words, not mine, I promise.]

I lost count of the number of times people who had started successful businesses told us to move to Silicon Valley. While culturally there was a lot of ambition, business ambition was looked upon less kindly. Scotland - like England - is very heavily influenced by the banking sector, and technology businesses were not a part of that mix. Despite having the opportunity to move to Silicon Valley, I chose to move to Oxford instead. "Why," I thought, stubbornly, "should tech startups have to be in California?" More on this in a bit.

I returned in 2010, shortly after I left Elgg. The environment had dramatically improved, as evidenced by the existence of the Geek in Residence position at the Edinburgh Festivals. When I did my computer science degree, our labs were literally in the basement next to the boiler room. The School of Informatics indicates a renewed focus on technology. Meanwhile, events like TechMeetup provide a focal point for the incredibly-talented local tech scene. The Edinburgh Hack Lab ticks the hackerspace box.

One of the clearest signs that Edinburgh is connecting its unique cultural scene with its technologists is Inspace, which is the Scottish counterpart to the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. The space actually sits inside the University's Informatics building, and is the most amazing playground I've ever seen for artistic technologists, led by Mark Daniels, a passionate, smart curator.

Since I left Edinburgh for the second time, TechCube has opened to provide a space for tech startups. I've heard great things.

There's no less creativity in San Francisco. In fact, it being a much larger area, there's a lot more - but it's different. Whereas the safety net (and other cultural reasons) meant there could be unencumbered creative exploration, here even the art is entrepreneurial. Arts organizations are largely funded not by the government, but by patrons: this changes the dynamic entirely. Whereas in Scotland galleries and museums are free to walk into, here you must pay. Culture has a paywall.

At least sometimes. I've been consistently delighted by Oakland, which has the kind of anarchic, widely-embracing spirit I love. Consider Oakland Nights Live, a live theater variety performance / on-stage talk show: the first time I attended, it was in a backyard, and I walked in to see a man in a viking helmet playing a see-saw like a musical instrument with a saw. Another episode was held on BART, which saw passengers become de facto audience members. These days it's at the Sudo Room, the kind of artistic / technical space that we have in spades here. I also regularly go to music events at the Firehouse Arts Collective, which owns an experimental space on the border between Oakland and Berkeley.

Nonetheless, in San Francisco, most of the art I've seen has had a commercial element. The flipside of that is that most commercial business has an artistic element. While the financial district certainly exists, a lot of the startups and tech businesses can also be thought of as art projects, and many of the great ones have been created by people with an artistic, anarchic bent (even if this is ebbing away with ever-rising costs).

There are intense, worsening social problems here, which have been written about at length elsewhere. I find them jarring. It's hard to walk through a BART station filled with homeless people and not feel some kind of intense emotion (for me, sadness and anger). People seem to have become hard to it, though, or worse, blame the homeless people for being homeless. That's foreign to me, and I find it disgusting. These people need help. (It must also be said that they are getting help, and San Francisco remains a very progressive city, by American standards. I don't understand the American resistance to socialized services, but it's less pronounced here than in most places.)

While it's important to recognize the drawbacks, let's be real. The food is incredible, the city is beautiful, and although I have a lot of ambition to travel and live in different places around the world, I would also be happy if I stayed here for the rest of my life. Just the light is incredible: in Scotland the sun rises at 8:45am and sets at 3:50pm in January. Here it's steadily bright all year long. The people are friendly and helpful. It never freezes, but never gets too hot.

It's also the best possible place to start any kind of technology business. That stubborn resistance to starting a company in Silicon Valley? Ridiculous. Don't repeat my mistake. Just about everyone is here, which means - in combination with the general friendliness - that it's easy to meet just about anyone for a coffee. And people will be interested in what you're doing, and try to connect you with people who can help. There's no cynicism towards ambition, and no desire to put you down. The culture is collaborative and open-minded.

Sometimes, I find this open-mindedness challenging: I'm used to a more secular culture, but the US is much more friendly to religion. In other parts of the country that often translates into conservative bigotry, but not here. It's just friendly. Correspondingly, I'm often challenged by my bias against religion; something I want to acknowledge, and be less of a jerk about. Anil Dash wrote a great piece about this.

I'm glad for my years in Scotland, which gave me a perspective I'm proud of. I sometimes struggle with the more individualistic culture here (and the absurdly hoppy beer). Tef's guide to San Francisco for Londoners is completely accurate. But at the same time, I'm so glad that this is where I landed. The tech industry has some well-publicized problems, but this is a place where you feel like you can make a difference, change the culture, and create a better future. While I feel like a fish out of water a lot of the time, I also feel like I belong.

While there are lots of anecdotal stories about the #indieweb, lately I've found myself wanting to back them up with hard, quantifiable data. For some people, the underlying principles of ownership, control and reach resonate and make sense; others need further persuasion that the movement is gaining momentum.

I think this kind of evidence-gathering is a good exercise. And of course, it has a selfish purpose too: backing up the need for Known.

The ideological case

Dan Gillmor made the broader case most clearly over on Slate:

We're in danger of losing what's made the Internet the most important medium in history: a decentralized platform where the people at the edges of the networks—that would be you and me—don't need permission to communicate, create, and innovate.

Privacy

Nonetheless, the statistics suggest that the most readily-apparent value of the #indieweb revolves around privacy. Last September, the PewResearch Internet Project found that:

[..] growing numbers of internet users (50%) say they are worried about the amount of personal information about them that is online - a figure that has jumped from 33% who expressed such worry in 2009.

People would like control over their information, saying in many cases it is very important to them that only they or the people they authorize should be given access to such things as the content of their emails, the people to whom they are sending emails, the place where they are when they are online, and the content of the files they download.

Meanwhile, Forrester Research suggests that the cloud isn't eating all software:

According to research outfit Forrester, businesses are moving to public cloud services in big numbers. By 2020, the firm says, cloud computing will account for about 15 percent of the IT market, which spans all the hardware and software and services that companies use to run their operations. But many analysts and other industry watchers believe that certain companies — especially those bound by government regulations, including financial and healthcare companies — will keep certain applications running in their own data centers. “It’s not about having everything running externally or everything running internally,” says David Cearley, a vice president at Gartner Research. “It’s about both.”

Privacy continues to be a driver for ownership, helped by the fact that 2013 was the worst-ever year for data breaches:

Working on data from the Open Security Foundation and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the OTA estimated that over 740 million online records were exposed in 2013, the worst year for data breaches in history.

Placing personal data in a central location creates a giant honeypot for such breaches.

Commerce

Not owning the site you use to communicate with your customers can hurt your ability to actually reach them. AdAge reported that the number of users seeing Facebook posts from brand pages they'd engaged with was dropping:

Research conducted by Group M Next (a unit devoted to sourcing new technologies) into pages operated by 25 brands finds that the share of Facebook users seeing organic posts from a brand they "like" was down 38% in the five weeks after Sept. 20, from 15.56% (consistent with the average 16% Facebook has often reported) to 9.62%.

This trend has continued. AdWeek reported that Facebook referrals to sites like Upworthy, the New York Times and Business Insider had dropped by up to 50% since November 2013. AdAge noted that Facebook in the past had "particularly objected to the inference that [..] changes had been made to spur marketers to spend more on ads to make up for lost reach":

But now Facebook is making the case for marketers to do just that. In the document, titled "Generating business results on Facebook," the paragraph in which the impending drop-off in organic reach is revealed concludes with an ad pitch; marketers are told they should consider paid distribution "to maximize delivery of your message in news feed."

Valleywag alleged some very drastic numbers associated with this strategy:

A source professionally familiar with Facebook's marketing strategy, who requested to remain anonymous, tells Valleywag that the social network is "in the process of" slashing "organic page reach" down to 1 or 2 percent.

In other words, now they've convinced everyone to sign up to their network, Facebook is charging people to get their messages through - something that would be free if this communication happened over a decentralized web.

Growth

Each of these trends is growing. More people are thinking about owning their own platform overall; people are more concerned about privacy online than ever before; the social networks we've all been taken for granted have been taking more liberties with the form, reach and content of our communications.

More data is needed, and I'll be posting regularly with new facts and statistics. If anyone has anything you'd like to add, or if you'd like to get in touch for any other reason, feel free to email me: ben@withknown.com

Friday marked the end of my first full-time week at Known, the new startup I've founded with Erin Jo Richey. We're lucky enough to be part of Matter's third class of startups aiming to change media for good. (Its founding partners are KQED, PRX and the Knight Foundation: great people to be involved with.)

Known is a publishing platform for everyone. You can share your story using a variety of media, publish from any device, and share it with your audiences wherever they are on the web. You'll be able to get your own site that you control in under 30 seconds with our service, or run it on your own servers. Either way, you should join our mailing list.

One of the jobs of a startup is to look at where the world is going, extrapolating from current trends and domain knowledge, and meet a future need with a product at exactly the right time. We think the time is right for an independent web that is owned by content creators and readers alike.

For the last few years, discourse on the web has been dominated by a few key platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and a handful of others. As the media analyst Dan Gillmor wrote in April:

[...] When we use centralized services like social media sites, however helpful and convenient they may be, we are handing over ultimate control to third parties that profit from our work, material that exists on their sites only as long as they allow.

We believe that, for the people whose livelihoods depend on content and data, ownership is going to become steadily more important. We want to be the best way to tell your story on the web whether you care about ownership or not, but if you do, we'll be there for you. We'll let you take full control; decide on the look and feel; export your data at any time; host with your own domain on your own server. That's a very different approach to Facebook, or Twitter, or a site like Medium.

An important facet of ownership is privacy. Last year, the Pew Research Center discovered that 68% of Internet users believe the law doesn't do enough to protect their privacy online; a full 50% worry about the amount of information they've shared. With a site that you control, you know exactly how much you're sharing, and with whom. By syndicating your content to third-party silos like Facebook, you can still share with your readers wherever they happen to be on the web - but in such a way that you understand exactly what you're sharing.

Statistics are one thing, but movements like the Indie Web, as well as events like Aral Balkan's Indie Tech Summit, books like Doc Searls's The Intention Economy and startups like ThinkUp draw a very clear line to a new kind of post-cloud software, where the customer is once again in control. Interest from the media, from the investment community, and from users, is growing.

There's no reason in the world why this kind of empowering, design-led, user-focused software should be any harder to use than Twitter or Facebook. In fact, it can be more feature-rich, more personalized, and more tailored to the way you work and think. That's the kind of platform we're building - one that respects its users, and that sits at the center of a successful business.

Sign up to join our mailing list, or follow our updates on the Known stream (which is, of course, itself powered by Known). It's going to be a great summer.

In his excellent newsletter Things That Have Caught My Attention, Dan Hon writes:

So my thing is this: not an indie web, but a sustainable one. One that is kind of adjacent to the indie web, but that builds long-lasting, reliable services, not ones that disappear. This adjacency comes from the answers to the question of: what kind of attributes are required for a sustainable web? Do you need easily exportable data? Sure. Do you need some element of user control? Sure. Are those the *defining* characteristics? Not really. But I think we might be verging on a sort of turning point where applications and services can, at the outset, say: "you know what, here's our plan for being around for a while so you can *trust* us and invest time in us". [...] A web where we build for the long-term, and perhaps pulling back from explosive, burn bright and short products and services.

You should read the whole newsletter here, and subscribe over here.

I buy into this completely.

I also believe, strongly, that sustainability is a kind of independence, and therefore something that should go hand-in-hand with the #indieweb. If you're going to own your site and your own presence, you should be able to do so in a way that you're going to keep up: if you're writing your own platform or handcoding your own site (as a small minority will), you've got to make sure you'll keep writing your own platform or site, because otherwise what's the point? If you're building a startup that aims to solve a problem for real people, shouldn't you ensure that the product or service you're building can continue to exist? Otherwise the point is simply to make a lot of money. I'm not knocking that as a goal in itself - I am very interested in making my project a financial success - but if you're not continuing to solve the problem for your users, or if you're simply taking away a tool they have come to depend on, you're treating them as collateral damage. I don't believe that's an ethical way to build software.

If you're not building in sustainability, you're naturally going to be beholden to outside entities: either to acquire what you've built (if you're building a startup), which may result in your project shutting down, or to use someone else's service. As in life, you lose independence by not planning for the future.

All of this came about because Andy Baio is resurrecting Upcoming.org, which I'm delighted by - at least until there's a viable, mass-market indieweb event tool.

PHP gets a lot of flak, deservedly. It's not necessarily always been the world's most elegant language, and because it's incredibly permissive, it makes it much easier to write code atrocities than many others. It's not the coolest language out there, but if you're picking languages for your project based on how cool they are, you've got bigger problems.

It's also among the most popular programming languages on the planet, is compatible with virtually every web server out there, and has an extremely wide body of support. There are many very good reasons for picking PHP as your engine of choice. Consider why WordPress runs 10% of the web and 22% of the top 10 million sites.

I find myself in the position of hiring PHP developers on a regular basis. Here's some things to consider if you're looking for work:

PHP is not (just) a bash scripting language
A lot of people who hack in PHP do so as a series of bash scripts. That's fine, if it suits your purpose, but it's also capable of running fully-fledged applications. WordPress runs on PHP. Drupal runs on PHP. Facebook, at least to some extent, runs on PHP. You're going to need to understand how application development works, and how that applies to development in PHP. Which brings me to:

PHP is not what it was
A lot of people's understanding of PHP is rooted in PHP 4, which was a largely-procedural language. Even up through PHP 5.2, the object-orientated functionality wasn't strong, which is why frameworks like WordPress can sometimes seem like an endless sea of isolated functions. It's these versions of PHP that are infamous for having functions with seemingly-random parameter orders, or error messages that would unexpectedly scream at you in Hebrew. The modern PHP is an object-orientated language that is fast and up-to-date. Namespaces, solid OO, reflection, anonymous functions, excellent testing and dependency management, with things like native JSON support at a deep level: all at your disposal. You need to understand them.

PHP is rapidly evolving
The single best resource for keeping on top of best practices is PHP: The Right Way, which is open source and available in 18 languages. As it takes care to state at the beginning, there is no canonical way to use PHP - but the methodologies it lays out offer a robust standard that will mean your code runs well, is easy to read, is safe, and is compatible with the widest possible body of work. I expect all the PHP developers I work with to at least understand what's contained in the book.

It's not enough to write code
This isn't about PHP, but pertains to all developers in a startup environment. You've got to communicate, both with your team-members, and with your users. I mean that in two ways: the first is by actually talking to both sets of people on a regular basis. Both feedback loops are incredibly important, and you need to find a way to get solid feedback from users and potential users in particular that's right for your startup. But the second meaning is that your product - the thing you're building - is a form of communication in itself. You are communicating with people by making something for them. It's never enough to simply satisfy a list of feature requirements: every developer needs to have a solid understanding of why they're building those features, for whom, and how they're going to know if they've built something that solves the problem for those people. Elegant solutions are useless unless they ship.

Haters gonna hate
I'm certain I'll get replies to this post mocking me for advocating PHP. That's fine. What you should be measured by is the end-result: the product you've made for real people. I don't care if you're using .NET or Perl or FORTRAN: create something that is useful, can be sustainably maintained, and solves real problems for real people. In a lot of cases, PHP is the best fit for getting you there.

Over on Medium, Quinn Norton has a great history of May Day:

Today the vast majority of the world celebrates May Day as Labor Day, or International Workers’ Day. Americans won’t celebrate Labor Day, despite the fact that it all started here, in bombs and blood and hangman’s nooses. By the official fiat, history is remade for Americans: May First is Loyalty Day.

Loyalty Day?! What an insult to the people who struggled, and in many cases lost their lives, for the labor movement.

As Quinn notes:

On May 1st, 1886, labor unions all over America held rallies and strikes in support of legislation for an eight-hour workday, with the slogan “Eight-hour day with no cut in pay.” [...] This was the setting of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a place where people, including children, were often worked to death.

You should read her whole piece.

The idea that workers owe some kind of oath of loyalty to their company is incorrect. Employment is a business relationship, like any other business relationship. That's why one of your goals as a founder has to be to create a mutually beneficial culture.

I'm unashamedly pro-union (as a concept; I do understand that in practice not all union activity is positive, just as not all corporate activity is positive). The labor movement, in common with many progressive movements, has given us lots of things that we take for granted. Stuff like the weekend, and the 8-hour working day. I think American culture has slid back on some of these things, but not in a way that benefits productivity or working culture. The good news is that there's plenty of opportunity to innovate in the structure of companies, as well as the structure of organized labor, and find the right balance.