Your Words are Wasted
hanselman.com
Your Words are Wasted
1–10 of 55 posts
Re: Your Words are Wasted
#2I think this bit from an older article sums it up nicely:
http://www.the-haystack.com/2010/12/17/death-to-web-services...
What if we flipped this all on its head? What if we hosted our own data, and provided APIs for all these webapps so that they can use our data? I can imagine that to be a substantially cool use of RDFa/Microformats and whatever metadata/semantic web technologies you prefer. Isn’t one of the points of the semantic web to make decentralized information meaningful, retrievable and mixable?
So instead of having our own websites aggregate our own data from other people’s websites, we’ll let other people use the data from our own websites. Photos, meaningfully tagged, can be pulled in by Flickr via our own personal API, if you will. We provide the structured data, Flickr provides the functionality. The sharing. The social. Why not?
Personal publishing platforms like WordPress, Drupal, [your favorite here] could be extended to make use of microformatting, RDF, etc. and provide tools for syndication, as we now do with simple blogposts. Services don’t need to host our data. They only need to do cool things with it.
Re: Your Words are Wasted
#3I think this bit from an older article sums it up nicely: http://www.the-haystack.com/2010/12/17/death-to-web-services... What if we flipped this all on its head? What if we hosted our own data, and provided APIs for all these webapps so that they can use our data? I can imagine that to be a substantially cool use of RDFa/Microformats and whatever metadata/semantic web technologies you prefer. Isn’t one of the points…
I love this. Exactly. There's no reason we can't do this other than the will to do it. The social web could be open and distributed and web-like while still looking centralized like twitter.
Re: Your Words are Wasted
#4I really don't get the all or nothing attitude of this article.
I have a blog - and a facebook account and a g+ account. The blog gets my best content. But it's not easy to integrate a standalone blog into an existing social graph (social buttons notwithstanding).
G+ gets my less well thought out rants - short stuff. It allows me to cheaply signal to like minded people and hopefully establish new readers/relationships. I don't care if I offend people on G+ because I'm there to attract the like minded. So I say what I think.
And facebook is just a socialisation wheel greaser for local friendships. Here I'm much more guarded. I use content posted by people as conversation starters for when I see them in real life. I might have to deal with these people - so I keep it light, fluffy and fun. I personally don't care if facebook deletes all that content. (I see it as a medium risk since facebook isn't a particularly diversified business)
I decided a while ago that I need to engage on all these platforms - because concentrating solely on a blog only increases your overall isolation to your local life - cause it takes an enormous amount of time - and even your closest local friends aren't likely to even read it.
It might mean that I'll never put enough time into the blog for it be a standalone success. But the odds of that ever happening were slim to nil anyway - even if it did get 100 percent of my time. And there would have been a very high chance that I would have been miserable because such dedication would have led to a high degree of isolation.
This is the right balance for me. I don't expect everyone to have the same view - but then I'm not claiming it's right for everyone.
Re: Your Words are Wasted
#5I think this bit from an older article sums it up nicely: http://www.the-haystack.com/2010/12/17/death-to-web-services... What if we flipped this all on its head? What if we hosted our own data, and provided APIs for all these webapps so that they can use our data? I can imagine that to be a substantially cool use of RDFa/Microformats and whatever metadata/semantic web technologies you prefer. Isn’t one of the points…
I love this. Exactly. There's no reason we can't do this other than the will to do it. The social web could be open and distributed and web-like while still looking centralized like twitter.
It seems that you are disregarding the vast majority of Facebook/Google+/whatever users -- who still don't know how to, or don't want to setup their own domain and manage blogging software. Yet, they also want to have a place to put their voice out there.
A system like the one that GP proposes, while it could be pretty awesome, would be limited to a very small, extremely homogenous population. It's not hard to see why Facebook beats that.
Re: Your Words are Wasted
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love this. Exactly. There's no reason we can't do this other than the will to do it. The social web could be open and distributed and web-like while still looking centralized like twitter.
It seems that you are disregarding the vast majority of Facebook/Google+/whatever users -- who still don't know how to, or don't want to setup their own domain and manage blogging software. Yet, they also want to have a place to put their voice out there. A system like the one that GP proposes, while it could be pretty awesome, would be limited to a very small, extremely homogenous population. It's not hard to see wh…
I would argue that it could be made possible to allow folks to get domains, hosting and software that they control as easily as buying a toy on Amazon. Domains, DNS and hosting setup doesn't need to be hard - it's hard because no one has tried to change it.
Re: Your Words are Wasted
#7I really don't get the all or nothing attitude of this article. I have a blog - and a facebook account and a g+ account. The blog gets my best content. But it's not easy to integrate a standalone blog into an existing social graph (social buttons notwithstanding). G+ gets my less well thought out rants - short stuff. It allows me to cheaply signal to like minded people and hopefully establish new readers/relationship…
I think we agree with "the blog gets my best content." I'm active (and it works) on all major networks. The tone of the article is intense only because I'll never put my best work on G+ for example, and I was surprised when Yegge did a 6 Yegge long article on G+ rather than his own site, even if he works for Google+.
Re: Your Words are Wasted
#8I really don't get the all or nothing attitude of this article. I have a blog - and a facebook account and a g+ account. The blog gets my best content. But it's not easy to integrate a standalone blog into an existing social graph (social buttons notwithstanding). G+ gets my less well thought out rants - short stuff. It allows me to cheaply signal to like minded people and hopefully establish new readers/relationship…
Yeah, I think there is an all or nothing attitude somewhat. I think the most common pattern i've seen that people maintain a personal blog and use facebook/twitter/google+ as channels for sharing. That being said, this article is a great means of encouragement for the people who only post to one platform. I've definitely read lots of thoughtful posts on Facebook and wondered why friends don't take the extra leap to start a blog. Personally, I think a catalogue of interesting thoughts/conversations from any platforms would be pretty cool and far from a substantial investment of time.
Re: Your Words are Wasted
#9One obstacle, in my eyes, is that some of the best blogging software out there is provided in a Software-as-a-Service model. This is, of course, less of a headache for the original developers—they have a guaranteed long-term income (rather than one-off license fees), and they don’t have to worry about portability or varying server specs. The result is that now, if a person wants to run his/her own blog and have total control over the content, s/he will need to write the software for it. I personally wouldn’t mind paying several hundred dollars for a piece of really good blogging software.
N.B.: I looked into Wordpress et al., but I always avoid using software written in PHP if I can, and theming in Wordpress involves more time than I have to spare.
Re: Your Words are Wasted
#10I could not agree more with Scott. I still have the hardest time trying to convince people to start a blog. "I don't have time to blog" "I don't know what I'd write about".. yet they end up posting lots of content casually on various social networks/forums.
Perhaps blogging tools need to adapt to more short form uses and have posting interfaces that seem more accommodating rather than a massive empty textarea with tons of options from slug to categories and tags.
The WordPress Prologue/P2 themes comes to mind.