How WordPress Saved the Web
After reading Tim Berners-Lee’s writings on how Facebook threatens the future of the web it occurred to me just how in the reverse argument is also true, projects like WordPress actually saved the web up until now.
WordPress Saves Intellectual Property of Millions
Millions of websites are self-hosted with WordPress. Along with that hundreds of millions of articles, content and words have been produced on these self-hosted domains on an open source code base. This means that each person owns all of their intellectual property. That was the original purpose of the web, and if it weren’t for a powerful, centralized open community developing on an open source platform than millions of people would have given away their intellectual property to some centralized blogging platform that would have monetized their works and even worse, would have owned (or joint-owned) their works.
Centralization of the Web through Social Networking
As social networks get larger, we forget that we are actually coming into union with them by putting our thoughts, our “intellectual property” into these websites which we don’t own anymore.
“The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.” – Tim Berners-Lee
BY PARTICIPATING IN SOCIAL NETWORKS, WE ARE GIVING AWAY OUR FREEDOM AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS.
Maybe you already knew this…but I’m trying to get you from sitting on the fence to actually caring about this.
How I’ve Responded to Social Networks
I personally deleted my Facebook and created a new one that points out to this website so I can focus on this website instead…why? Because I own all of the content on this website and it is copyrighted…by me. In the past, I would re-post content all over the web, but I realized that a link back to my website suffices and allows me to maintain ownership of the content. At the end of the day, my website is all I own and all of my time spent on other websites is in a large way, donated to them.
I realize I probably use Twitter too much, but that is because their ownership of my intellectual property is shadowed by the open tools they provide to allow you to use your information wherever you want. Maybe the company will change for the worse in the future, or something more decentralized will get popular…which at either time I’ll jump ship.
Decentralized is Power in the Right Hands…YOU
We need a decentralized way to network. We need to keep control of our own connections. Maybe you are thinking of Diaspora. I applaud them but it is not here yet. Until decentralized social networking comes, we need to take steps to use social networks as a pointer back to a source of content that we own. Don’t only use social networks. Please, stop. Use your own blog, put up a WordPress and take back control over your intellectual property.
Keep the power of the internet in your hands by self-publishing and self-hosting. Don’t let social networking become the center of your online presence.
Keep decentralization in mind as you build your software and open source projects. Think of how git has helped developers…both by technically being easier to use but also in ownership of the code. It gave us developers back control over the way both write and publish code to other repositories. The more power you put in peoples’ hands the better. Sometimes that goes against corporate interest but there is certainly ways that corporations can benefit from decentralization as well. Think github.
The entire internet was built on this principle of decentralization…so build on it.
14 comments
Marc,
You make some good points but I would argue that social networks and a blog/full site are actually two very different beasts that serve very different purposes. Social networks connect people in ‘conversations’ while blogs and full sites connect people with content.
I agree 100% with you on being in control of your own content. As a matter of fact that’s why I host all of my own technical content, samples and source code on my own site. Even Word Press or GitHub are prone to going away some day and your content with it so if you really want to be in control of your content self-hosting and managing it on your own servers is the only way to be sure you can fully control your content, IMHO.
Rick, I agree with you that social networks and blogs serve somewhat different purposes, but I don’t agree with how you are positioning them as are very different. Self-publishing tools will add more conversational methods in the future…it is just a matter of time. I’m working on solutions, but the reality is that it can be a fairly difficult challenge to popularize new methods of decentralized conversations.
At the end of the day, all I’m trying to get at here is that people should think about decentralization and self-publishing more.
And on a final note, I wholeheartedly respect what you have done by self-publishing so much of your content — I am a fan! =)
“their ownership of my intellectual property is shadowed by the open tools they provide to allow you to use your information wherever you want.”
what is wrong with Facebook’s graph api? http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api as far as I can see there is far more information available there than on twitter.
If it was not for sites like Facebook and twitter, I would not have been following you. I would not have even known about your blog. I’m pretty sure that holds true for many people following your blog, or any blog for that matter.
Sits like github are great for open source projects to build interest in people that are interested in the same sort of things. Its also a great learning tool. If you hosting an open source project on github its still your code, it can be “stolen” from there exactly the same as if it was hosted on your own site.
For the most part I could not be bothered to set up and maintain something like Diaspora or the self hosted git things, besides having to pay extra for ram / hdd space to host all of this.
I didn’t say anywhere in my article that social networks are bad. Instead I was bringing more awareness to the fact that when you publish content on a social network, you don’t own exclusive rights to that intellectual property like you would if you self-hosted a publishing system like WordPress.
Social networks facilitate social interactions, they provide a free & convenient service. Self-hosting costs money and requires time/effort to setup & maintain, both major factors to the average internet user.
Decentralized information is great, but it can also lead to fragmentation. You’re mother now has to visit 3 websites, each with possibly different user interfaces and navigation systems which need to be mastered, just to keep up to date with her family’s happenings.
Lastly, do we own the rights to our emails? Should we self-host our email and setup complicated email servers?
The point on social networks is about content control, ownership of data and copyright…not ease of use and value-add.
Sure, maybe the average user who doesn’t care…but there are still tens of millions of self-hosted WordPress blogs out there. Anyone who knows how to use Google.com can learn how to self-host WordPress. And after all, I’m talking to people who might care about owning their own content. Better yet my blog is focused at developers. By completely owning your IP, you have much more power in your hands than if it was submitted solely to a social network.
Decentralized information isn’t just great, it is necessary to the continuity of the freedom of information and the internet itself. Sure, fragmentation is a problem, but it is still important to make an informed decision on where you are posting your content. Decentralization is a fundamental building block of the web that we should be thinking about and building on top of. Even if we don’t use or build 100% decentralized communications…we should be at the very least thinking about it regularly and as we build software think about how to empower our content publishers through some form of data control and retaining rightful IP.
I totally agree. Actually you have outlined what I ’ve been practicing so far: Putting personal content ***solely*** on my own server and serving it thru my own application (whether it be WordPress for quick deployment or any other custom-built app) and using the FaceBook or the Twitter merely as a link to direct to my own space.
Basically, I use FB to make it easier for other people to find me and the Twitter just in order to motivate myself, as a kind of a professional diary open to public.
dogmatic89 said: “If it was not for sites like Facebook and twitter, I would not have been following you.” Phew! I have never needed the FB or the Twitter to find the content I’m interested in anyway, I find them thru the “channels” I follow and I’ve found this content thru Hacker News. You might say “how do you find the person you’re interested in” as opposed to the content. Using FaceBook? No, not really because I don’t like the idea of having to be in the friendlist just to be able to say “Hello” That’s not like me.
In the future when smartphones and light and durable Laptops become commonplace and the distributed social networking platforms like the onesocialweb and diaspora become the standard, I hope I will be able to find and communicate with anyone in the world the way I want to.
Great points you have here. While I still maintain my Facebook account (just to stay connected with most of my friends), my online world still revolves around my WP-based blog. As you’ve mentioned, all the content are mine, to keep posted online for as long as I want to share them to the world.
Some really great points here.
I’ve always been aware of the privacy issues that surround social networks and , personally, I am okay with Facebook selling my information and using it as they please, as long as it is in my best interest. I really enjoy seeing advertisements that interest me as opposed to irrelevant junk. I’ve actually benefitted from Facebook’s commercial use of my information thus far. It’s a free service that I highly value and I pay by letting them see and use my data. Fair enough. That’s not to say that someday Facebook might go down a bad path, against the interest of its users.
I appreciate Facebook because it aggregates my information and my friends’ information in a way no other service or website presently does. Independent content is nowhere near as valuable as linked content. If there were an open-source Facebook, I’d be all over it, but there currently is not. Sometimes it takes a commercial venture to get the ball rolling and connect the dots.
Your post reminds me of this TED video where Tim Berners-Lee shows the power of linked data.
This is one of my favorite TED videos because I think it is a beautiful and simple concept. This is where the web needs to go… and I think social networks are a necessary step in the right direction. Until we all start posting our minute-by-minute lives on some sort of wiki, Facebook will reign.
I think of it this way…
What came before wikis? Encyclopedias, which are commercial ventures. Sure, encyclopedia’s don’t take our data as their own, but they do profit by linking commonly available data. They solved a problem, just like Facebook is currently making sense of the web’s exploding collection of non-linked data. Eventually, I hope, a different solution will arise. Until then, the service social networks provide is far too valuable for me to pass up.
Cory, you make some good points and certainly people stand to benefit from using social networks. Also I agree that commercialization seems to typically happen before open solutions…but one thing I’m trying to emphasize and promote here is that with self publishing you can use social networks to point out to a location where you still retain complete rights to your original works. I just don’t agree that engaging inside one walled garden is a very good long term plan even if you benefit from it heavily now.
Think about Zynga..they are now building games that run outside of the Facebook walled garden on their own website. They used Facebook to gain the traction they needed and then branched outside to a more solid user base that isn’t dependent on Facebook itself.
Okay, I think this approach makes a lot of sense. I totally agree then.
How do you feel about sites such as Cargo Collective? Should designers be posting their work on that site or are they actually giving up their rights? I’ve been debating whether or not to go the Cargo route, but after reading this I think I’ll stick to my own server and own site.
I’ve haven’t looked at Cargo — I’ll check it out.
I happened across your site from a google search relating to jquery datepicker themes. Normally when I come across personal sites for web developers, I scoff and look for ways they may have over hyped themselves or ballooned facts, so to say. Not too long after looking over your site, I decided you actually know what you’re talking about. This article about decentralization sold me.
I have abandoned social networks for a great number of reasons. Some were related to ownership of content, but most had to do with the ironic replacement of actual social interaction through a “social” network. Nice try, I say. I only wish the majority would follow suit.
In some cases you have to play along. Like how you have a twitter link in your header. My site has a facebook like button even though I don’t use any social networks. Sad but true – marketing yourself requires a certain amount of compromise.
Never the less, my purpose for posting is simply to support your statements regarding decentralization. By maintaining your own site, you can control the look and feel of your internet presence. By limiting yourself to a facebook or myspace profile, you adopt their universal theme, or the joke of a theme that is every myspace customized profile. It is sad, in my opinion.
Thank you for posting an opposing article. Too many people cave in and saturate their lives in the social network game. Whatever their excuse is, it is still a poor substitute for actual life.