Love the comment on the tiny-handed man! That was an 8:30am laugh 🙂

Russia, what the heck guys?!

What Google and others did is to destroy discoverability. There’s always churn – people stop writing, new people start writing – but without RSS people couldn’t find each other except through social networks.

Also, commenting is/was broken. None of the tools were ever easy. To this day spam filters on Blogger are a joke. Even my own site was mercilessly hammered. Social networks were a nice spam-free place to chat. And it was easy to find people.

I think that if we make these applications easy they solve part of the problem. Then comes the social and cultural part. But we’ll never fix the social/cultural part without fixing the technology first.

I’ve been messing around with Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid initiative for the last few days. It’s basically an outgrowth of a W3C project. I really think this is the way to go, but the code isn’t really there yet. A lot of student work; they code till May and then drop it.

It’s interesting because Solid is what I was trying to build with LPSS (and I wish I had known about it sooner – too much time running a program, not enough time working). It’s doubly disappointing because NRC put LPSS onto a learning analytics track, which is the opposite of where I want to be.

Solid has some worthwhile things:
– it’s all https and certificate based and revives the idea of personal IDs as a website URL – like openID, only called WebID – see https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebID
– you can actually get a webID – at databox.me or rww.io
– your data is stored on a different site – eg http://linkeddata.github.io/warp (enter your webid egh. https://downes.databox.me/profile/card#me to access your storage)
– you can choose the location of your ID and your storage from multiple providers
– third party applications can be used to specialized tasks (eg. Plume enables you to write blog posts)

Now all of this works in theory only, at least for me. Plume, for example, is a web-based blog post authoring tool. But it isn’t authenticating properly (maybe because I’m running it off my desktop in my office?) And the Solid server has issues – it took me a full 8 hours to get it running (lots of issues with certificates – https, remember?) (and I still can’t use it for anything because it rejected my databox.me ID). Again, this may be because I ran it all off my office desktop.

Still – I have the service working – here’s where my blog would be if I had a working Plume tool – https://downes.databox.me/Public/blog/posts/

And I could use a microblogging tool, contacts editor, email system, whatever, iusing tools created by any number of people or organizations. Including my own personal RSS readers, learning content libraries, personal learning records, etc.

I’m wondering whether the Domain of One’s Own people have looked at this – are Jim Groom or Alan Levine reading? It would be a big challenge for one person or even a few people to make this work for an alternative community and learning support – but if we got a bunch of us involved…

Plus, Tim Berners-Lee is still active on this; I saw him in the project chat room yesterday (and yes, it was kind of thrilling). So there’s that.

Thoughts?