I've been posting my thoughts around the internet for many years. I have used many different platforms, some of which no longer exist. The issues are in getting an audience and keeping them engaged with what you write. Can you do that without depending on a big company? I was inspired to write something by this article by Anil Dash. It reminded me of some of the things I miss about the current web.
Image from Pixabay
Some of us want do more than just post a brief status update and sites like Twitter, Facebook etc are not really designed for that, but that's where most internet users are now. I still follow lots of blogs on Feedly since Google Reader was killed off. I think Bloglines was my first RSS reader. There are also various apps to let you do that. It's pretty easy to use an aggregator to follow content from all sorts of sites, provided those sites support RSS or other protocols. You just copy and past a URL. Then you can read posts at your leisure. Feedly has apps, so that can be on any device. With the main social sites posts tend to disappear once they scroll off the screen and may be hard to find again. I have the various feeds grouped by topic so I can find what I want.
We've seen various sites get killed off, taking content with them. In my case the most recent was Tsu. I only wrote fairly short posts there, so it's not a massive loss. For a short time it is possible to download them, but I'm debating whether I need them. I used Blogger for long posts, but am migrating to Steemit now. Previously I have hosted my own blog, but the overheads of managing that meant changing to a service. That carries some risks, but I'm assuming Google will not kill off blogger in the medium term. I perhaps ought to back them up somewhere. Blogger allows you to export posts. Does Steemit? I understand they are in the blockchain, so I expect people can create tools to do this.
There have been attempts to remove the need for dependence on a service to keep your posts up whilst giving the advantages of being part of a larger network. A fairly recent example is disaspora*. I have tried it, but haven't had time to keep up with it. identi.ca was a Twitter-like service that allowed people to set up their own service. I think it mutated into something else now.
I held out some hope for the semantic web. This involved adding data to web pages that would allow software to know what they were about and add a layer of intelligence. Google and others were making use of this for a while, but seem to have switched to using their own machine learning to derive meaning directly from the text. That is limited by the ambiguities of human language, but then many people will not take the time to tag with metadata. Search has got cleverer, but you may still hit issues searching for something like 'bass' which could mean a fish, a musical instrument or a feature of music. The semantic web would make the meaning clearer.
One of the coolest semantic web projects for me was FOAF (Friend of a Friend) that allowed for building a decentralised social network using data files linked to pages. XFN did it more directly by encoding relationships in links between sites, e.g. 'this site is by a friend'. Tim Berners-Lee is a big fan of the semantic web, but it seems each company wants to do its own thing. They have an interest in keeping people within their sphere of influence. Facebook is now providing news stories so that people don't have to go off-site for that.
So what's the future of the web and blogging? I'm no expert, but it seems to be becoming more cortporate. The old way of independent web sites seems to be the preserve of dedicated geeks. Facebook has grown massive and is used by a large proportion of the world's population. That's a lot of power in one company. Google also have a lot of power, but their efforts at social have not been as popular. Groups like IndieWeb propose that we all have our own domains so we can control our data, but that's more work than many want to take on. I've tried to do it myself, but lack of time forces me to be pragmatic and use services that make my like easier.
Where do you see us in another ten years?
