Werd I/O

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.

I've been planning on heading to the Internet Identity Workshop for years; although I did once make it to a one-day London version, I've never managed to get down to Mountain View for the full three-day length.

From the website:

Do you care about privacy in Age of Surveillance? (You should.) Do you want to do something about it? Are you already doing something about it? IIW is where you get to meet and work alongside others tackling the same problem.

Or let's say you care about new forms of money (such as Bitcoin) and what the geeks call distributed hash and crypto ledgers. IIW is for you too.

Next week, I'm planning on being there. I'll be demoing Idno, but also talking all things #indieweb and catching up with developments in the identity community.

Kaliya facilitates great events, and although I'm less personally familiar with the other organizers, I know they are very well-respected in the community. It should be fun. And if you're in the Bay Area on May 6-8 next month, it's not too late to join us!

Right now I don't have comments on my site. Despite this, I think discussion is one of the most important parts of the web. I'm definitely not anti-comment, and I love feedback.

My intention is that you'll write a reply on your own site and link over here. Using a back-end mechanism called webmention, which is supported by a growing number of platforms (there's a WordPress plugin), your comment can show up as if it was posted here, while living on your own site. If everyone starts to do this, we'll start building up distributed discussion threads across the web, that aren't owned by any one person or company. I think that's pretty cool.

But I also recognize that not everyone wants to do this, and not everyone can do this right now. Webmentions are a pretty technical proposition, and lots of people don't even have their own sites right now. If you saw this on Twitter or Facebook, you can comment there and those comments will show up here too, thanks to a back-end piece of glue called brid.gy. (You don't need to do anything for this to happen.)

Sometimes, though, you just want to post a damn comment. With that in mind, I'm curious: if you're reading this, do you prefer threaded comments - like you might find over on Reddit, or implemented over on Livejournal - or the single-track blog comments that you find in most places these days? There's a lot to be said for both. A lot of the supporting technologies around commenting - and regularly-updated content in general - are based around streams rather than threading, but that's not a good reason not to implement threads if they're more useful.

Then you start thinking about the form of comments. They've been text as a convention since forever, but this platform supports multiple kinds of content. I think allowing photo comments is a lovely idea, for example. Gawker's discussion platform Kinja supports this, and allows for some more colorful debate, as well as things like photo competitions. Audio and video comments are a bigger can of worms - Seesmic was a video discussion platform, before pivoting into more traditional media and being acquired by Hootsuite - but shouldn't questions of decorum and sensibility be up to the site owner rather than the platform?

At any rate, let me know what you'd like to see.

(And yes, #indieweb folks, I think displaying webmentions as threads is a very interesting thing to think about. As long as you mention both the base thread and the sub-comment, I think it could work out.)

I'm finding it fascinating to hear about the ways people host their websites. We're living in a world where professional hosting has been eaten by "the cloud": virtualized servers arguably rule, supported by tools like Docker and platforms like Amazon Web Services.

Yet personal hosting has not kept pace. Here, hosts like Dreamhost, Nearly Free Speech and (sigh) GoDaddy maintain a much older style of technology stack: virtual hosts, configured using tools like cPanel, which typically support PHP and MySQL. Geekier site owners might choose to set their site up on GitHub or S3, but these only support static page assets. Generally speaking, if you want to set up an app based on Rails, node.js or even Python, with a Postgres or NoSQL backend, you're kind of screwed if you don't have much technical knowledge, or if you only want to pay the $5 a month you'll lay down at many shared hosts.

One of the things communities like the #indieweb need to support their efforts is much better hosting. Projects like Johannes Ernst's Indie Box solve adjacent problems in innovative ways, but there's certainly a market for easy to use hosts which support a wider array of back-end technologies in a way that allows non-developers to get up and running quickly. Yes, centralized services are an important part of this solution space (if they're built in a way that is respectful to their users), but there's a self-hosted middle ground, too.

I grew up in Oxford: a city where everyone cycles. Its roads predate cars, often by a thousand years, so pedal power is a much more sensible way to get around. I say that because I want you to know that this doesn't come from a place of cycle-hatred. I love bikes much more than cars.

Nonetheless, you people are crazy, and the following apparently needs to be said:

The rules of the road apply to you. Really, they do. You have to stop at lights, signal on turns, and obey the general rules of the road that apply to all vehicles. Having a bicycle is not a magical pass to allow you to do anything all over the road. You are not doing two-wheeled parkour.

Don't ride two abreast on a real road. On a cycle path, this is sometimes acceptable, if you're leaving enough room for other bikes to get past. On an actual road that other people use for other purposes, it is never acceptable. Extra bonus unacceptable points for windy country roads that have a cliff on one side. You know exactly who you are.

Lights are nice. You are not a ninja. Ninjas, to the best of my knowledge, do not bicycle while they are ninjaing. Therefore, I recommend wearing lights. These are surprisingly good at helping you not die at night. The red one goes on the back, and the white one faces front. Blinking is probably good, but they don't have to induce some kind of epileptic fit to be effective. You're welcome.

Helmets. Have you heard of them? This doesn't affect me at all. But it might affect you. I know they look sort of lame. But they kind of work when your head smashes against the curb. They've saved the lives of people I know many times. You might want to consider it.

That's it. I don't really understand why Bay Area cyclists are quite so bad. Where I grew up, we had something called a cycling proficiency test - like a driving test for bicycles. It wasn't mandatory, but they did build it into our school curriculum. It might not be a bad idea over here.

Note: I'm currently CTO at latakoo, an enterprise video company that heavily works with broadcast television. This post is my own opinion and nobody else at latakoo was involved in any way.

Last month, Benedict Evans wrote a really interesting post about the future of television which you should read.

This in turn points to another question, and perhaps a slightly subversive one: how do people actually want to watch 'TV' (or whatever we call it)? Hundreds of millions of normal people really do just come home, turn on the TV and watch whatever's on - if you offered something less passive, do we really know how many would do it? That is, the idea that no-one would watch linear broadcast TV if on-demand worked 'properly' (whatever that might mean) is really just an assumption.

The full post is over here.

Over time, TV has transformed into an ad delivery mechanism; the onus has been on producing cheaper content, more fully-laden with commercial sponsorship. Meanwhile, the Internet has turned up on our doorsteps, with far more options for content and entertainment. Entirely new forms are available to us, as well as shows and movies that wouldn't be available over a broadcast signal. Audiences know what they want, and can now grab them quickly using a Bittorrent client if it isn't available legally. I'd go so far as to say that this, right now, is the golden age of television content, even if the broadcast medium is slowly waning.

There's a difference between "television" as a content form, and "television" as a technology involving broadcast towers and cable boxes. As Benedict notes, as entertainment evolves, we'll still be in the market for a "lean-back" experience: there's always going to be demand for a service that lets you turn something on and passively consume content. The question isn't so much the form it'll take - I fully expect to be watching another season of Doctor Who in ten years - as the interface to that content.

I'm confident about the following things:

1. Television will not be broadcast over the air or using traditional cable. (Much of the latter is already sent over IP.)
2. Whereas the channels you could receive used to be limited by physical means - which broadcast signals you were in range of, or which channels were carried by your cable provider - they will, in the future, be limited by artificial scarcity imposed by business considerations, where they are limited at all.
3. Anyone will be able to run their own TV channel.

We've seen glimpses of the future from the services we're already using. Last Olympics, I watched the Paralympics via a live-streaming YouTube channel. Every so often a temporary channel shows up on my Apple TV, for example for music festivals or product announcements. It seems likely to me that we'll be able to treat channels in the same way that we treat apps right now. In fact, the Roku streaming player already does this: its API allows anyone to create a channel and fill it with their own content. I expect Apple and Google to follow suit. (The first Android-powered TVs show up later this year.)

In a lean-back world where anyone can run a channel, you can't expect channels to programme 24 hour days worth of content. That strategy works for major broadcasters, but isn't feasible for smaller companies, startups, or most individuals. So the solution is likely that we'll have a curated mix from content sources that we're interested in. Just as a lot of people follow Andy Baio's linkblog today, we might follow his TV channel in the future, subscribing to content that he thinks is interesting (and in turn is drawn from the channels that he's curated). TV will become more like social media in this way. I would imagine that some sources will come with display advertising from the likes of Adsense, while other content sources - business feeds, for example - will be paid for. They might ask you to pay before you watch an individual segment, or you might have a subscription account. Standard payment options would be available. It might even be something like Paypal, although I hope not.

Imagine a TV that launches into a list of channels, maybe as a grid of icons (a kind of lean-back iPad), or maybe as a TV guide-style menu. In the scenario above, Andy Baio would be a channel, and services would allow me to find new channels based on search terms, content types or similarity to other things I'm interested in. You can imagine Facebook and indieweb integrations: find channels based on the things you typically watch or are interested in.

Oh, and all of this is powered by the web.

It has to be. Television the technology, as it stands today, is not owned by any one entity, just as the web isn't. Companies will certainly try and make land grabs to own the medium, but even if they appear to succeed for a while (eg an Apple offering) they will ultimately be unsuccessful. Market reasons for this include the wide ecosystem of television manufacturers - it's easier for people to integrate with an open standard than a technology that they must license, and as a result, lower-cost, mass-market televisions are more likely to support these. Some TVs directly integrate Netflix and Hulu today, but the behind-closed-doors deals to achieve this are significant. With TV as an open platform that sits on the web, there are no back-end deals. Anyone can make a TV that just works, which is in the interests of manufacturers, content owners and channel curators. Each TV gets to have its own interface, just as they do today, and companies can add value-added services like better search and recording.

How close is this? I think you can almost graph it. The point where bandwidth and server costs have reduced to the point where streaming to each user is cheaper than broadcasting to them. IP multicast is not reliably supported on end-user Internet connections, so I anticipate that Internet broadcasts will remain per-viewer. (By the way, latakoo has some new codecs, developed with the University of Texas, that will make this significantly easier.)

So what about live TV? Up to this point I've been discussing pre-recorded content, but there's certainly a need for live broadcast. In a world where the web powers channels, it's just as easy to programme a live stream as it is to programme a pre-recorded show. (Of course, the technology to live-stream is more complicated, but the actual mechanism is agnostic.) You could even choose to have alerts from, eg, news channels overlaid across your main viewing screen, so that if there was breaking news, you could be alerted and choose to switch. You could choose breaking news providers, of course, just as you could choose every other content source. Television would become a true open market for content.

The other nice thing about the web is that all of your channels and all of your preferences are available on all your devices. The exact same profile can be available on your phone, and you don't have to care about which phone you own, as long as it has a browser that works. You could also choose to have an app on your phone that adheres to the same standards but has a tailored UI and value-added services. You could have browsers that talk to each other and allow you to resume watching a show on a different device, from any content provider. Conversely, providers like Netflix, Hulu, NBC, the BBC and Andy Baio wouldn't need to provide any of that functionality themselves. It would simply be a feature of the platform.

Broadcast channels as we know them would become obsolete, but great content - and content channels - would persist. This future of television would be oriented around viewer preferences and content providers. That's the future television I'd like to be using.

I'm a nervous flyer. I've been trying to get better over the years, and I'd never let it stop me from actually going anywhere, but I jump at turbulence, and I certainly can't ever get relaxed enough to do anything like sleep. I avoid red eye flights if at all possible, and try to sit over the wing.

Something that's helped is the US government's Aviation Weather Center, and sites that use derivative maps, like Turbulence Forecast. When I'm not surprised by turbulence - I know it's going to show up during part of the flight path - I'm much less nervous about it. The same goes for in-flight interactive maps; if I know I'm flying over a mountain range, for example, I know there will be updrafts which might cause some choppiness as the air warms and cools.

Now that so many of us are connected to each other, the web has the potential to do that for our lives. Job applicants can get turbulence reports on sites like Glassdoor. Entrepreneurs can get turbulence reports on sites like Quora and The Funded. Women can avoid predatory men on dating sites using apps like Lulu.

Just as I don't know which pilots for which airlines submitted turbulence reports, the reviews on all of these sites are anonymous. However, airlines have the benefit of being regulated and tracked; we know that each turbulence report is almost certainly real. That's not necessarily true with anonymous feedback sites. The potential for harm on all of the above is greater, although Quora is very well-moderated. Yet at the same time, a "real names" policy is not sensible. Imagine if all whistleblowers had to use their real identity. For lots of reasons, including safety and user comfort, I am very much against "real names" policies in most online spaces.

Correspondingly, the challenge is to establish trustworthiness in anonymous communications, preferably with a cloak of plausible deniability. You should be able to feel free to leave a comment about a person or organization without leaving your identity with anyone, and we (as readers) should be able to trust that information. If someone points a finger at you for making the post, you should be able to plausibly say that it wasn't you, to avoid recriminations. Finally, if I'm the subject of the post and someone is attempting to smear me with false information, I should be able to take action to remove the comment, and have protection against denial of reputation attacks, where distributed mobs of people endlessly post false information. There are, to be sure, ethical problems with many of these services as they stand; effective reliability, anonymity and redress would mitigate them.

These are hard problems to solve. Full transparency does not cover everyone; sometimes deliberate opacity can be protective. This touches identity, network security, trust metrics and social algorithms - and, of course, would need to be wrapped up in an easy-to-use interface to be useful.

All of us are, one way or another, sitting at the gate, wondering if our journey is going to be bumpy. Hopefully, we can help each other out.

I'm trying to decide where I stand on Brendan Eich and Mozilla.

A quick recap: Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla, became CEO of the corporate arm recently. Unfortunately, he also donated $1000 to Proposition 8, the Mormon-sponsored movement against marriage equality. Mitchell Baker remains Chairperson of the non-profit. She is also the former CEO of the Corporation.

Obviously, as both an educated person and a functioning human being, I'm in favor of marriage equality. I'm happy to put it in those terms: I have never seen an intelligent argument against it. I therefore feel very unconflicted about saying that I'm appalled by Eich's donation to the Proposition 8 campaign.

Here's where I'm conflicted. Eich made the donation, not Mozilla. Mozilla has, at least until hiring Eich as its CEO, been very clear about promoting diversity in all kinds of ways. They're good people, fighting for our rights by creating respectful software. I know many people at Mozilla personally, and they're brilliant. People I'm glad are on our side.

I don't like the idea that my own political beliefs might affect my hiring potential. Freedom of thought is important as a principle. Furthermore, it's not like Brendan was hired off the street: he's been instrumental to Mozilla's progress over the last few decades. He created JavaScript, which helps power the web. I feel like his personal political beliefs, as repugnant as I find them, should not necessarily affect his ability to be professional and run a company.

Where that would be different is if his political beliefs informed his management decisions. That's a tough line to walk; I know my personal beliefs would encourage me to, for example, provide equal benefits for same-sex couples. There are pragmatic, data-driven reasons to take these measures, but it would also be drawn from my own values. Elsewhere, we've seen that the management of Hobby Lobby has made terrible, likely illegal decisions based on their personal beliefs. Mozilla actually has great diversity policies, and is ahead of legislation; there's, so far, no sign of Eich's own beliefs regarding marriage equality showing up in company policy. However, there is obviously a danger that this might occur.

I'm inclined to think that he should be allowed to be CEO of Mozilla and prove his commitment to diversity through his actions.

However. His donation is obviously a terrible signal, and it smacks of blind idealism to suggest that a CEO's personal beliefs don't reflect on the company he or she runs. The reality is that a CEO of a major corporation is scrutinized in all kinds of ways. Mozilla doubtless knew this, and doubtless decided to proceed anyway because of their blind idealism.

I've seen many people say that they'll stop using Mozilla software because of Eich's beliefs. For any corporation, these issues have to be the bottom line. He is actively harming Mozilla by not making a proper statement on these issues and making things right. (I suspect he has non-public reasons for not doing this, which I won't speculate on here.) People are actively choosing to use software that demonstrably spies on you over software created by a company whose CEO has distasteful personal views.

Unfortunately, for a while Firefox was slower and more bloated than other browsers. That's no longer true, but the stigma has remained, and it's been losing out to Chrome in particular for a while. I strongly believe that you should be using Firefox over Chrome, for both ideological and technical standards-based reasons. Firefox does not spy on you, and its complete code can be inspected. Given everything we know about the NSA, GCHQ and corporate surveillance, I think it's a travesty that these issues are playing second fiddle to an idiotic $1000 political donation.

For this reason, I'm also inclined to think that Brendan Eich needs to either step down or step up and make a real apology, both for the good of the organization he represents, and the rights of users on the web.

Like I said, I'm conflicted. Principles vs pragmatism. It's not clear-cut for me.

Update: It's also worth mentioning the Ascend Project, which aims to promote underrepresented populations in open source.

The whole time I've been in the US, I've been using a Google Voice number to communicate.

Here it is: +1 (312) 488-9373.

The reasons are numerous: I can get phone calls on any of my connected devices, even when I'm out of the country. I can change phone service providers at any time. I can make calls in places with wifi but no cellphone reception. I get voicemails as text, so I don't have to listen through an endless series of recorded messages.

Phone numbers themselves are kind of an archaic technology, but it's not feasible to ditch them just yet. So I was disappointed to read that Google Voice is going to be rolled into Hangouts.

That's Google's prerogative. Any silo service provider could make a similar decision at any time. So the question becomes: how can I create my own Google Voice setup on my own infrastructure?

I want four things:

1. Phone calls that come to me wherever I am, on whatever device
2. The ability to change phone provider without hassle
3. Voicemails in my email
4. Cheap international calls

I also don't want to use Skype or another proprietary provider.

I'm really not sure what to look for here. I know about SIP and Asterisk, but setting up and maintaining them sounds like a pain to me. Is there something user-friendly I can use?

I'll be following up in a subsequent post with what I discover.

Here are some independent, non-military projects involving drones. These are projects that aren't selling drones in themselves, but rather are using drones as the backbone of the project. I've listed a single contact person for each one, which is usually the CEO but may also be the lead engineer:

Deliveries & Commerce

Tacocopter (Star Simpson)

QuiQui: Automated Drone Delivery of Pharmacy Items (Joshua Ziering)

Matternet, a kind of drone postal service (Martin Ling)

Flirtey, "the world's first autonomous aerial delivery company" (Francis Vierboom)

Skymail, "shipping things from door to door in 30 minutes or less" (Lukas Wrede)

Space Leap, robotic transportation (Erik Unger)

Personal Drones

Fleye: Your Personal Flying Camera (Laurent Eschenauer)

Lily, "the first personal autonomous camera in history" (Henry Bradlow)

Fotokite, a kind of flying steadicam (Sergei Lupashin)

AirDroids, which carry a GoPro, sold separately (Chance Roth)

Business Drones

Skycatch, programmable private drone surveillance (Christian Sanz)

Ceres Imaging, spectral data to optimize water and nitrogen for agriculture (Roberto Bunge)

Open Source Libraries

NodeCopter, which powers many of the above projects (Felix Geisendörfer)

Have I missed any? Let me know!

Obviously, the title to this post isn't my opinion. Instead, it's a paraphrase of something from a Dave Winer post today:

I don't know if there's any solution to this. I certainly don't advocate not hiring people Roy's age -- I'm now older than he was then. But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam you.

Dave's assertion is that young males (who are white, he later clarified in the comments) are a safer hiring bet, based in part on an anecdote about a poorly-performing employee he had in 1985. It's also very clearly meant to be analogous to Julie Ann Horvath's experience at GitHub, and not in a positive way.

This is bullshit, and it's important to call it out as such.

1. Whether intentional or not, the timing of this post demeans the experience of a woman reporting harassment in a major tech company. The implication that she might be a scammer is noxious, but also implied rather than clearly stated; if this is the intention of the post, why not clearly state it, and if it isn't, why was this post published now?
2. There is no evidence that young, white males are more productive, more trustworthy (!), or better hires in any way. They certainly dominate the industry, but there are all kinds of unmeritocratic reasons for this. Model View Culture is doing a great job of debunking some of these ideas. The solution is smarter hiring and a better culture, not very unsophisticated demographic judgments.
3. This harms all of us. A monoculture that empowers systemic harassment makes for worse software, a weaker market and a worse experience for our customers. If you're building products for sale, you want to draw on the best possible skills and experience for the job. Why on earth would you limit the kinds of people who can help you based on their gender or ethnicity?

White males like Dave Winer and myself have inherent privilege that must be acknowledged. It's our responsibility (at least partially) to make the tech industry a more welcoming, diverse place. Posts like today's throw all the good, brave work that's being done by vulnerable people directly back in their faces. It's not acceptable, and it must be called out.

The other day I got an email from someone asking about being a founding CTO of a tech startup. I replied with some brief advice, but it got me thinking: I've been doing this for a decade now, and was creating projects on the Internet for a full decade before that. A hallmark of the teams I've been lucky enough to work with has been the ability to punch far above our weight: online magazines edited by 15 year olds that ended up being distributed by the established press; the number one linked-to site on Blogdex (remember that?); a social platform used by the most prominent universities in the world, as well as national governments and Fortune 500 companies; and a video platform used by some of the world's largest broadcasters. These are solid achievements for groups and companies that, for the most part, contained fewer than 10 people.

The web is rife with articles giving universal advice based on subjective experience. For whatever reason, there's a tendency for technical people to think, "this worked for me, so why aren't you doing things the same way?" I don't think that's usually truthful or productive, so take this post with a pinch of salt. These are my opinions, not a manual.

Nonetheless, if you're just starting out, with few resources, what advice can I offer? Here are a few things I hold to be true.

Enjoy yourself.

Few things are as exhilarating as creating your own thing from scratch - making something from nothing - and releasing it into the world. People will notice if you're loving the experience. Don't lose your joy.

Focus on people.

For "people", read: your end-users, your customers (if they're different), your coworkers.

Your satisfaction must come from pushing code to the user and building something that creates value, rather than the act of programming itself. If you don't like people, and you don't want to interact with people, don't found a startup. If you're starting a business, you need to be relentlessly social (in the human sense), communicate well, and love getting feedback. Otherwise, do something else.

This is a refrain I'll repeat many times below: communication, communication, communication. You need to communicate clearly, and you need to listen, both to your customers and your team.

This is, of course, in addition to having great technical skills. These things together will allow you to build great software.

Understand your responsibilities.

As a co-founder, you are jointly responsible for the direction of the company, and creating an awesome, valuable product.

As the technical lead, you have a lot of responsibilities and pressures on your shoulders. You need to make sure your product or service is technically as good as it can be. You need to ensure that the technical side of the operation is able to meet business objectives. You need to be a software architect, and an infrastructure architect, and a technical designer, and a lead developer. As you grow, you need to be a product manager, ensuring that everyone in the engineering team understands the business goals (and hits them), and ensuring that everyone in the business team understands the technical challenges (and has a sense of the technical realities of your projects).

Ultimately, the technical buck stops with you. If the technology doesn't work, it's your fault. That's fine, but it's therefore doubly important that you are candid with everyone in the team about technical challenges that you might face, and the requirements for success.

Pick the right cofounder.

Before you begin working on a startup, it's also important that you check if your business co-founder or co-founders are able to bring something to the table to the same degree. If you're doing all of this and picking up a disproportionate degree of the business side, you will find yourself quickly burning out, serving nobody. Be a cog, not the engine.

One particular danger is that people see you as someone who can make their ideas a reality; that you will, essentially, build what they tell you to. (In one particularly toxic situation I was referred to as "the back-room guy".) This is an employee relationship, not a co-founder one. The company needs to be a true collaboration between founders, and everyone must have the skills and focus to participate more or less equally.

An oft-quoted metric for finding technical cofounders is if they have a past record of building things under their own steam, and an understanding of the intersection between business and technology decisions. Well, guess what? That applies to non-technical co-founders, too. Do they have a past record of starting their own ventures? (They don't have to be businesses, but their own projects, and so on.) Do they have an understanding of the intersection between business and technology, and the kinds of trade-offs you have to make? They do? Great.

Build small pieces, loosely joined.

Don't fall into the trap of building elaborate frameworks or overly elegant technical solutions. Your role as a startup founder is to test and change rapidly. By building too much of a framework around your code, you lose the ability to react to customer feedback. The ideal is that you can learn as much as possible from your users, and then shift your code to take these things into account.

Nonetheless: always, always, always make sure code is commented and well-documented, no matter how little time you have to spend. Comments are part of the code, not an afterthought, and the people who tell you that decent programmers should just be able to read the source are flat-out wrong.

That you should use decent source control, issue management software, etc, is obvious. When you're starting out, a paid GitHub account should work fine. (I've used Beanstalk, Assembla, and a bunch of other things, and GitHub is more stable, is easier to use, and has the best ecosystem.)

Be proud of your system's code, but be proud of how small, nimble and well-documented it is. Don't be afraid to plug in existing, well-tested frameworks and libraries, as long as they're well suited to your goals.

Don't be trapped into caring what the cool kids think about programming languages. The only material way your choice of programming language will affect your software (within certain bounds, of course) is in the choice of people you are able to hire.

Remember design.

User experience, interaction and interface design will probably come under your remit to begin with. They are the first impression that your product makes. Don't make the mistake of thinking of them as an afterthought (or, as more than one developer has expressed to me in the past, "pretty pictures"). Design is equally as important as architecture. You need to make sure every one of your engineers - as well as the business team! - is thinking in terms of the impression the product you're all making is having on its users, rather than a list of features and capabilities. If you can, bring a professional in to help you with design. It'll make a disproportionate amount of difference (see my note about the team, below).

Expect to scale.

If you're building technology, build it with an understanding of how it'll work when it has 10,000x the usage it does now. A few years ago, there were a lot of articles warning about premature scaling, which is a danger: you can easily sink all of your time and resources into building infrastructure that scales beautifully, when your focus needs to be on shipping as early and as often as you can. Nonetheless, not paying enough attention to scalability is dangerous. The old programming maxim - never assume you're going to be able to come back to anything - certainly holds true in a startup. Ask yourself what'll happen when you exceed the capacity of one server, or five, or fifty. When scaling becomes a business need, you'll need to do it very quickly. You'll have to do work in each case, but if you've thought about it and prepared while you were building, you'll be much more agile.

Again: small pieces, loosely joined, with queues and late binding. You'll thank me later.

Don't skimp on tech, but don't waste money, either.

I've written before about my long, slow journey to Mac. I just think they're better computers: more reliable, faster, and, crucially, more compatible with the software you're probably running on your servers. They're not more compatible than Linux laptops, of course, but there you'll still run into a world of hardware incompatibilities and time-wasting fiddling that you really can't afford. Leave the tinkering to your spare time. The last thing you want to be doing is fiddling with drivers or mucking about with wifi settings when you should be working on your product or your next pitch.

Think about what you actually need. My first Mac was a 2011 Macbook Pro that I upgraded to 16GB of RAM; theoretically it's blazing fast. In fact, though, the computer I use the most is my Macbook Air, which is less than half the cost, and theoretically vastly underpowered. It just works, and the battery is impressive enough to last a coast-to-coast flight. These things matter.

On the other hand, don't buy a peripheral, or something like an iPod Touch, unless you absolutely need it to test or run your software. You don't need to be awash in computers and technology. Just buy the things that affect your business directly, at least to start with. Most of us are gadget-heads to some degree; resist the temptation to buy cool stuff because it's cool.

Strong milestones are good - but it's okay to change the plan.

A set of strong milestones, with associated tickets, allows anyone in the team to get a good sense of the roadmap. I like arranging tickets onto a kanban board, so you can see what people are working on right now, as well as the backlog. Standups are great for this, too, as long as you follow the rules and do it standing up, for a short period. Don't be tempted to devolve into a long meeting; that's not going to get you anywhere.

Sometimes, you'll find that you need to change the plan completely, perhaps to take advantage of a sales opportunity, or because you've realized you need to take a change in direction. Early on, that's both okay and sometimes necessary. You need to be okay with not sticking to the plan, and you need to reassure your team that this isn't a terrible thing. As ever, good communication is key, and it's a good idea to go into the "why"s.

Your team is everything.

When I was working on Elgg, we knew we needed a designer to help build better interactions and interfaces, and create the brand identity for the company. When we found the person we wanted, we paid him more than our own salaries; we had equity, after all, and adding him to the team would create a huge amount of value for the company.

Do your best to hire well, and never hire someone because they're cheap. Sometimes they won't know their own value and it'll work out, and sometimes you'll find someone who is genuinely under-skilled. Either way, by paying them far below market rate, you're screwing them, and that's a lousy footing to start off a relationship on. It's certainly true that you'll have to pay less than many companies, but you can offset that with the freedom that a startup can offer. (Equity and the promise of value later on isn't enough; at this stage, most potential engineers are wise enough to know that share options are a lottery ticket.) If you're creating a corporate, hierarchical environment with all the resource constraints of a startup, and not offering anything tangible in return as people, you're creating a poor working environment. Freedom, trust, and a creative environment are all motivators. It doesn't have to all be about money, although money really does help; salary should be one of the first things you bring up when you can. Employees who are worrying about making ends meet are needlessly distracted.

It's okay to let go of someone if they're underperforming. You should do it early, both for your and their sakes. Sometimes, it's just not a good fit. Nobody likes working somewhere where they're doing badly, and there's no need to be nasty about it; if it isn't working, it isn't working. It's better to end an unproductive relationship quickly than let it limp on. This is, for me, a very hard thing to do. Nonetheless, it's sometimes necessary.

Be nice, by the way. Steve Jobs was famous for yelling at people, and he wasn't alone. It's completely unnecessary, and creates a poor environment. You and your team are allies, and if something's going wrong, remember where the buck stops?

By the same token, your team has to know that if you're asking them to do something, it's for a reason. While you should always be open to the idea that you could be wrong, and interested in listening to opinions from your whole team, everyone does need to know that you have the final say, and that they need to be adhering to the milestones you've set down. (If those milestones are realistic, of course; you need to be receptive to the idea that they might not be.)

Hire well. Get people excited. Be a steward of their well-being, and give them the space to build amazing things. Don't dictate tasks; your team are your collaborators. Talk them through what needs to be done, and why. Smart people question things, so give them reasons.

One last thing: part of communicating clearly is making sure people feel like they can approach you to talk about anything. Your workplace has to be a safe place. If someone is being harassed, or feels put upon for any reason, or they have any concerns at all, they need to be able to talk to you about it without fear of reprisals. Similarly, they need to feel comfortable. If someone's making sexist jokes, or otherwise making anyone feel uncomfortable, it's down to you to stop it.

Everyone should do support.

By which I mean, everyone in the company. It's important to understand the problems your customers are experiencing, and this is a great way for everyone to get a good handle on that. But it's also important for everyone in the company to understand how the product works - something that non-technical members of the team might have less of an understanding of, as they're not in its guts day in and day out. By ensuring that everyone takes support phone calls (if you take calls) and emails, you ensure good product & customer knowledge throughout the team.

It all comes down to empathy.

Good communication is empathic. You need to be able to understand your customers, your team, and your co-founders, and react when you sense that any of them are unhappy. Tech startups may have technology running through their veins, but more than anything else, they still have people at their core. A little love goes a long way.

Good luck!

My love is like base64 encoding. Lossless and incomprehensible.

My love is like an alphanumeric URL variable. Easily escaped.

My love is like JPEG. It looks good at first but it's full of distortions.

My love is like GIF. Surprisingly hard to say out loud.

My love is like Prolog. Backwards.

My love is like git. My pull requests are often denied and rebasing is a mystery to me.

My love is like an unfixed bug. It just keeps escalating.

My love is like emacs. It's been around a long time and I guess I understand the attraction but, honestly, I think you should be looking elsewhere.

My love is like IPv4. Full.

My love is like TLS. A brief handshake and we're set.

My love is like an HTML document. Marked down.

My love is like XMPP. Noisy.

My love is like a legacy PHP function. It's hard to predict the parameters and it might yell some Hebrew at you for no reason.

My love is like an RSS reader. You've got to keep feeding it.

My love is like the web. This is for everyone.

1. Elgg

I've written before about how Elgg got its name. I had just recently graduated, and due to an unwise predisposition for flippant humor, I didn't have a single serious email address to my name. I needed one in order to apply for jobs. My full last name is Werdmüller von Elgg, and a brief search revealed that elgg.net was available. I used ben@elgg.net as my email address for years, without any web presence - so when I wrote a prototype social networking platform for education, it made sense to put it there.

Nobody was very comfortable with the name. Alternatives that were suggested over the years included Learning Landscaper, but none of them stuck. Past a certain point, the project was well-known enough that changing its name would have been silly; and anyway, it was a short, easily-memorized domain name.

Imagine, though, if we'd decided to call it Learning Landscaper. While that fit our original idea, Elgg morphed quickly from a social eportfolio engine for capturing informal learning into a multi-purpose engine that anyone could harness in order to create a social networking site. Had we picked a more domain-specific name, we would have limited our scope automatically, and possibly even unconsciously. Had we picked a more rational name (Engine, for example), we would have possibly isolated Elgg's large non-English-speaking userbase, and cut out a huge number of opportunities to talk about it. I lost count of the number of times someone asked us "what does Elgg stand for?" - it was unusual, and people were curious about it.

In fact, my only real regret is that I no longer have use of my ben@elgg.net address.

2. Latakoo

A latakoo is a kind of African lark: a bird that flies high and fast. For a service that allows people to send media footage quicky from and to anywhere in the world, that makes some thematic sense. But there's a good chance you might have never heard of a latakoo before.

When we were brainstorming names, a close contender was Cloud Compressor. The "cloud" was a big innovation back then, and latakoo achieves the bulk of its speed improvements through data compression. On face value, it makes sense. But not only is it a lifeless set of words, like Learning Landscaper, it thematically contrains what the company does.

Today, compression is just one part of the Latakoo service. It's still core to what we do, but we use it hand-in-hand with advanced routing, access permissions, and both service and datacenter integrations. We take media footage via any Internet connection, and deliver it anywhere, in the format it needs to be, securely. That's in no way covered by Cloud Compressor.

Our customers use us as a verb: "latakoo it". That's both a wonderful endorsement of our service and something that would only be possible with the right kind of name. What do you think YouSendIt were after when they changed their name to Hightail? Try to construct an elegant sentence involving sending something with YouSendIt. Now, switch it out to Hightail. "Hightail it". The kind of word you choose matters, because the sentences people use to describe you affect the way they think about you.

3. Idno

Lately, I've been spending some time with Idno, which I started in order to explore what a social publishing engine might look like on today's web.

It's another weird name, whose origins lie in the very unlively term ID node. I lopped off the de, because I wanted the word to phonetically end in a vowel. The idea was to create something that was at once friendly (I think ending in a vowel makes it feel like a nickname), reminiscent of terms like "ID", "id", "know" and "number", and weird. (It's also sometimes used as an acronym for in desperate need of, and a shortened form of I don't know; neither are bad connotations.) My idea is that people would remember idno in a way that they might not remember a more normal name.

We'll see what happens. I've been talking about perhaps changing its name while I can, but part of me likes having a name that's a little unexpected. Maybe that's because I have a bit of a weird name, too, but I genuinely think that standing out and being a bit skew-whiff to everyone else is a positive trait. There are situations where choosing a very conservative name is appropriate - for example, when your customers are, themselves, very conservative - but typically in technology you want to be seen as innovative.

And the way you are perceived starts with what you choose to call yourself.

From Amber Case's wonderful talk on the Rise of the IndieWeb:

When the storytelling is told by people, not by traction or real implementation, then whoever tells the best story wins.

- Blaine Cook

Her slides are over here.

It strikes me that this quote is a Rorschach test. People like me are likely to have a visceral reaction to this: of course the winner should be dictated by traction and active implementation. Whatever solution to a problem ends up being used is the winner. It makes sense.

But there's going to be a whole other set of people who see this and think, yes! Of course the winner should be the best, most persuasive storyteller.

In technology, I'm pretty adamant that the winner should very rarely be the best storyteller. Of course, in the real world, it's the people who can spin a story (or have some other advantageous property) who often win.

What this really means is that implementers - the people who do the real work - need to learn to tell better stories, as a group. That's why I very much appreciate people like Amber, who are not just deep thinkers and implementers, but also great storytellers. It's an important skill, and being able to convey as well as build multiplies your ability to effect change.

I've just come back from the Day We Fight Back protest, which was held outside the AT&T office where Mark Klein revealed a secret room where the NSA was intercepting communications. Mark himself came out to speak, and it was wonderful to see so many people coming out on the streets of San Francisco to protest against unconstitutional surveillance.

There was one thing that I thought was a bit of a sour note. This protest, fundamentally, is about privacy. While I can understand the importance of photodocumenting the event in order to raise awareness and demonstrate support - I took quite a few myself - there was a point where, I think, this crossed the line into unnecessary intrusion. Unfortunately, it was done in the name of Aaron Swartz.

We were encouraged to all stand in a circle, so we could observe a minute's silence in his name. That's great. I was less impressed that we were expressly instructed to form the circle so that nobody was overlapping anybody else. And then horrified when two sets of cameramen went around the circle and filmed every single one of our faces.

This was a brilliant event, created for an important purpose. Surveillance and civil liberties are the key issue of our age, and we must fight to create the society we want to live in. But, while nobody has any legal expectation of privacy in a public space, and while documenting these protests is important, I feel like this kind of recording sends the wrong message.

For transparency's sake, I'd like to know who the cameramen were. But more to the point, I'd urge anyone holding a protest against rampant surveillance to think twice about engaging in this sort of activity themselves.

Nonetheless, this was an important event. At the time of writing, 82,448 calls have been made to congressional representatives supporting legislation that will severely limit surveillance powers in a meaningful way. There's a long way to go, and we need to keep fighting for what is right - while questioning everything that is happening around us.

#thedaywefightback