Tag: Social Web

You Can't Start the Revolution from the Web Country Club

You Can't Start the Revolution from the Country Club by Anil Dash

The current fashion amongst alpha geeks is to reinvent many of the building blocks of the social web. Given that I’ve been obsessed with that particular intersection of technology and culture for a dozen years, I should be unequivocal in my excitement. But this time it’s complicated. Because we’re shutting some people out.
There are a few philosophical underpinnings that have informed the development of blogging and social media since their inception. These core values of the social web can be summed up as three simple goals. It’s important to understand them because they are what’s enabled the social web to be so radically transformative of society and culture.

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But I’ve been through this phase in the web’s evolution before, alongside some of the same folks who are building these tools today. The last time, the simple tools we all built exceeded our most outlandish predictions of their social impact in every regard. What matters this time is that we learn from what we got wrong before. And we won’t kick ourselves for having bugs in the software, or for not being compliant enough with the technical preferences of a small, geeky crowd. We will regret if we just give power to ourselves and to the existing institutions again.

I think Anil Dash is prescient. His post is from 2012.

The hyperbole around micro.blog and mastodon etc. bothers me. The cycle continues.

Is Blogging Back?

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I've seen a few older blogs mention this sentiment and for myself, I have been writign on my own domain since 2005. I am excited about all the attention that seems to be focused on owning one's own content and the disatisfaction with social media. My only complaint is that I wish that these older blogs supported IndieWeb technologies like Webmentions. Webmention is a simple way to notify anyother website when you mention it on your site. And for the receiving website's perspective, it's a way to request notifications when other sites mention it.

CJ Chilvers linked to the article referenced above and added a bit about what form of blogging works:

I’ve been thinking about this in my own life and career for the past month and I think I’ve come up with a theory: one is a business model, one is a life model.

I've done both long form and link-style short posts. I enjoy them both.

When I first started this web site I used affiliate links to generate just enough revenue to cover my hosting cost. My posts were not focused on revenue generation. I didn't go out of my way to increase click rates etc. but the blog thrived. For a while. Then traffic declined. It's never returned to it's former. I could blame it on the switch to social media but it could also be that my content is not high quality.

Either way, I am hoping the pendulum swings back toward blogging and the decentralized web.

Photo by Christopher Skor on Unsplash.