61–70 of 162 posts
Looks like the author is wearing rose-tinted glasses to me. While much of the observations may be true, the web is still a far richer and more valuable resource than it was five or ten years ago.
I don't find this to be true, but that's perhaps I'm not far richer than I was 5 or 10 years ago. Somewhere along the way, accessibility to truth was thrown under the bus for clickbait and walled gardens.
I agree with Anil 110% that the Web he's talking about was, in many, many ways, a Better Web than the one we have today. The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had t…
Yes, this is not what the linked article is about. But it is a counter-point to your "it was too hard for random people back then" saying.
I agree with Anil 110% that the Web he's talking about was, in many, many ways, a Better Web than the one we have today. The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had t…
Geocities made it easy for anyone to publish to the web. Probably others too but it is the most prominent example I guess. Yes, this is not what the linked article is about. But it is a counter-point to your "it was too hard for random people back then" saying.
Meh, I disagree with a lot of that. You speak as if the internet ONLY consists of social now. Your points are nostalgic and looking at the past through rose tinted glasses IMO. Five years ago, most social photos were uploaded to Flickr You can still do this. People choose not to. I don't want strangers viewing my social pictures, esp if I had kids. These are private moments to be shared with my friends. Ten years ago…
The point about links is that other people can profit by posting links on your site. Before Ad(Words|Sense), you could freely allow people to post links in comments (without having to worry about nofollow or anything) because people would only profit from those links if what they linked to was relevant/interesting. Now just the act of following a link can mean a few pennies in someone's pocket, so allowing links to b…
If your site is small, then just moderate the comments yourself. If there are not that many then it will not take much time!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't find this to be true, but that's perhaps I'm not far richer than I was 5 or 10 years ago. Somewhere along the way, accessibility to truth was thrown under the bus for clickbait and walled gardens.
Accessibility to truth? Tell me more about how you used to access the truth in 1998.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your broader point, so I don't mean to nitpick but: the majority (maybe all? I'm not sure nowadays) of iTunes track are DRM-free.
I knew someone was going to pick this nit :-D I just feared overloading an already-herniated comment with additional verbiage. Sorry about that. For the record: yes, if you buy a track from the iTunes Music Store today, it is most likely DRM-free. However, people who have been active ITMS customers over the years are likely to have purchased at least some DRM-encumbered tracks before Apple moved away from DRM.
This has been true since 2009 for the record.
Going back to 2002, Microsoft had been working on "Hailstorm", which was a very poorly chosen name for something that people rapidly became afraid of ;P. It was later renamed to "My Services", but it included Microsoft Passport (yes, this is mentioned in the article, but I don't think it is given enough weight), a single sign-on service provider that Microsoft was encouraging other websites to use. It would provide details about you, including your e-mail address, to the sites you connected with.
I had remembered a bunch of people being angry about it, so I did a Google search for "Microsoft Password mark of the beast", and came across an article written at the time in some random magazine called "Microsoft's Passport to Controversy -- Depending on whom you ask, Passport is either a useful consumer convenience or the mark of the beast".
http://business.highbeam.com/787/article-1G1-83378739/micros...
However, it should be noted that one of the fears at the time was not "man, vague centralization is bad", it was "omg, Microsoft doesn't just want this service to take over the web... they want this service to take over the world". Now, of course, you read me saying that, and think "ugh, stop with the rhetoric: that's just an example of people freaking out about something we find common-place; that's what the article is about: did you read it? ;P".
But... it was actually for real. Microsoft was lobbying to make Microsoft Passport be the new US National ID system, and it wasn't just a pie-in-the-sky goal... they were lobbying to make it happen, had the ears of the right people, and were making serious progress on it. For reference, there was an article written about the situation in the Seattle Times with the title "Feds might use Microsoft product for online ID".
> Forget about a national ID card. Instead, the federal government might use Microsoft's Passport technology to verify the online identity of America's citizens, federal employees and businesses, according to the White House technology czar.
> On Sept. 30, the government plans to begin testing Web sites where businesses can pay taxes and citizens can learn about benefits and social services. It's also exploring how to verify the identity of users so the sites can share private information.
http://web-beta.archive.org/web/20020802161525/http://seattl...
I thereby feel the need to note that, even as late as 2005, if you were going to start talking about building the world's next best "single sign-on" provider, this is what you were being mentally compared with: yes, the one service mentioned (TypeKey) ended up having "much more restrictive terms of service about sharing data", but it is looking at the past through rose-colored glasses to think that things have gone downhill.
Let's put it this way: can you seriously imagine Facebook or Twitter ever being considered as the official login system for the IRS? I can't in 2012, but that was the honest-to-goodness reality of "the web we lost" from 10 years ago. At some point, in the last 10 years, it became more, not less, clear to everyone that this kind of service needed limits. There was backlash in 2002; but I believe it was much more fringe-concern than it would be now in 2012.
> Yesterday, appearing at the conference, Gates reiterated the goal, saying he expects governments in many countries will find it difficult getting to "critical mass" with authentication systems they develop on their own. He said some governments may opt to use companies such as Microsoft or America Online as "the bank" that registers people for online usage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Wordpress? (snark about technical messes aside) It's as easy as it can possibly be to get a hosted blog up and running -- even with your own domain -- via their forms. But, unlike Facebook, if you don't like their service, or need more, or don't like some ToS change or version 'update', you can wrap it up with a bow and take it elsewhere. And businesses exist that will even make that as easy as filling out…
WordPress is actually a good example. There's the self-hosted software distributed at WordPress.org, which works in the Web 2000 fashion (here's some software, figure the rest out yourself). And there's the hosted service at WordPress.com, which works in the walled-garden fashion (though with liberal allowances for things like getting at your data, which is nice). Lots of people run their own WordPress installations,…
The real objective, I think, isn't to get everyone hosting their own stuff, but to popularize technologies that both allow data portability (you can move to another service), and are easy to use.
But WordPress has kind of already done this. They have step-by-step directions[1] for moving from a WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted install.
People who prefer Tumblr (an example of a blog host without an export function) to WordPress do so for reasons that seem orthogonal to data portability:
1. simpler, even easier to use,
2. aesthetics (sleeker design),
3. social networking features built in,
4. reach (because of #3, it's a lot easier to accumulate readers and engagement).
In theory, a service with an open-source codebase, or support for a standard export format, could provide all this. In practice, one hasn't.
Edit: icebraining pointed out downthread that you can mostly export a Tumblr blog by adding '/rss' to the URL of each page, a process that is easily automated.
[1] http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/#moving-to-wor...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, Blogger, the service that the link in the paragraph "... publishing tools that epitomized all of these traits..." was referring to. Or, more modernly, Tumblr. These are all sites that give you your own [sub]domain, where you make the rules and you control (almost) all the data, and where, even if there are other mechanisms for connecting things together, you can still just pull an RSS feed of all the relevant c…
I wasn't aware that Tumblr had an export function, and it looks like, officially, it doesn't[1]. There is a third-party migration tool to WordPress[2], but that's about all I can find. So unfortunately, not all is roses. It would be nice if there were a standard format for storing blog posts and their metadata and attachments, so you could move from anything to anything. Perhaps the nascent Tent protocol[3] could do…
I imagine the nerd population has grown, and accelerated over time. It is just that the non-nerds are getting on-line much faster.