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The Web We Lost

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Re: The Web We Lost

#141

Post by Wilya »

graue wrote: post #30
derefr wrote: post #21

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…

Tumblr has a JSON API [1] that is fairly usable, and provides access to the essential parts of blogs (and terms of use explicitly allow building data portability applications on it, which is a nice touch). It's not instant-export, and I get the impression nobody uses it so it might not be rock solid, but if you need to export data, it's possible.

This tumblr2wordpress tool is probably built on it. So is Jekyll's tumblr importer. Honestly, the lack of export tools for Tumblr probably comes less from a lack of demand than anything else.

[1] http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api/v2 [2] https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/blob/master/lib/jekyll/mig...

Re: The Web We Lost

#142

Post by PaulHoule »

cletus wrote: post #74

I think this is an example of seeing the past through rose-coloured glasses. Yes there was Flickr but you could discover photos. Thing is, Flickr is still there and you can still use it . What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family. Technorati? Honestly, I think this is an example of living inside a ve…

Technorati always seemed to be a joke to me.

A friend of mine got thousands of splogs indexed in Technorati and got real traffic from it.

On the other hand, whenever I ran a blog that was legit, Technorati always dismissed it out of hand as a splog.

Re: The Web We Lost

#143

Post by regularfry »

locopati wrote: post #140
regularfry wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described email.

Or DNS. Or probably any number of other foundational systems of the internet. At the bottom of it all, the basic concept of communicating data across distributed systems is the internet. This is where the original post is spot on - the new players are not interesting in distributing, they want to collect and retain, but not share, except in their own limited and controlled ways. To break out of that you need to break…

DNS isn't social, though, whereas email is. That's my point. Of your other examples, only NNTP comes close.

Re: The Web We Lost

#144

Post by rythie »

cletus wrote: post #74

I think this is an example of seeing the past through rose-coloured glasses. Yes there was Flickr but you could discover photos. Thing is, Flickr is still there and you can still use it . What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family. Technorati? Honestly, I think this is an example of living inside a ve…

> What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family.

I don't understand this point at all. Flickr has a feature for sharing with friends and family, in fact it has a group for 'friends' and another for 'family' or you can use both. I was doing exactly that in 2005 with Flickr though to 2008 when moved that to Facebook as more friends and family were registered there. What they didn't have was all the other social network stuff like status updates, chat, people tagging etc.

Re: The Web We Lost

#145

Post by papsosouid »

>we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world

No, we didn't. They did. The users of this new non-web never saw the old web, they weren't online then. People seem to forget that the entire internet connected population back then is like 5% of the current internet connected population. Those of us who liked the web are still here, we're just outnumbered.

Re: The Web We Lost

#146

Post by npsimons »

saraid216 wrote: post #126
doctorpangloss wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree that the monetization of the Web has degraded the value (to the user) of links on sites other than links on sites aren't the primary discovery mechanism like they used to be, which is actually a good thing (IMHO). When hypertext was still conceptual and imagined in microfiche, links were still the primary discovery mechanism of new or related content. I think that idea has stuck around for over 50 years…

It's worth noticing that, in Google+, only one link gets a first-class position in any given post. If you want to throw down a fuller list of citations, it's a lot less visible. To me, this says that Google subconsciously understands what they've done and have chosen not to fight it. Or they just don't know how and have given up.

"Not knowing how" and "giving up" seem very un-Google-like to me. Give it time.

Re: The Web We Lost

#147

Post by return0 »

I would advocate it's a good thing that we have closed social platforms. Most of the content they generate does not leak to search engines and that's a good thing, because most of it is trivialities. Imagine a researcher looking for medical information having to filter through all kinds of anecdotal nonsense to find true scientific studies. It's like browsing youtube and expecting to randomly bump on gems. IMHO, most social stuff is of little value. People still publish in traditional platforms the important bits [with the exception of closed scientific journals; but that's a different issue].

Re: The Web We Lost

#148

Post by vog »

mattmanser wrote: post #81

This guy has the most awesome title ever! Director of Public Technology Incubator Expert Labs Listen to him! That's like master of the universe. On steroids. Go Anil, go!

-1 for the ad hominem

Re: The Web We Lost

#150

Post by sellandb »

jasonkester wrote: post #130

Anybody remember meaningful URLs? As in, site.com/view?postid=1234 or site.com/view?userid=1234. Back when "the URL [was] the new command line" and you could easily discover all the content from a site and rework it as you liked. You could tell how many posts a blog had or how many users a site had by pluggin in a few numbers and doing a binary search. No need for an API or a feed. Just look at the URL and you could…

I think that is an interesting point. I have always found "site.com/view?postid=1234" feels lazy vs. the alternative "site.com/posts/article-title". While there is a relatively small group of people who might poke around with the URL parameters regularly, the vast majority of internet users IMHO would prefer to see a URL with some indication about what is on the other side. That's not to say we can't have both either, just that you tend to only need one or the other.
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