reclaim – Page 3 – D’Arcy Norman dot net

flickring out

My Flickr Pro account expires tomorrow. I will not be renewing it. I now host all of my photos (and other stuff) here on my blog. It’s not the cost of Flickr Pro, but rather the principle. It doesn’t make sense to me, to pay a third party to host photos that I can host myself. I’ve been a Flickr user since August 2004, but it’s time to let it go.

Once the Pro account is deactivated, Flickr only makes the last 200 photos in my photostream available. The other 8,796 items will be taken offline unless I pay to keep my Pro account active. Which I won’t be doing. I’d be more than happy to leave the photos there so people could use them, but since they’re going to be taken offline by Flickr anyway, I’ll be deleting them from the service. I’m not sure why Flickr doesn’t just leave them available, since they make money by placing ads on the pages (for non-Pro members, anyway). Whatever. I could continue to pay the $25/year to keep my photos available for use under Creative Commons, but that seems rather silly.

Thanks for the (almost) 8 years and nearly 2 million views, Flickr. It’s been fun, but it’s time for me to move on.

meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Turns out, it’s not possible to just delete nearly 9,000 photos. Looks like the account has to be deleted to do it properly. So be it…

on reclaiming my instagrams

I’ve loved Instagram since it was first released. Maybe that makes me a faux-retro-hipster. Whatever. It’s a fun app, and I like the aesthetic (how pretentious can this guy get? really?). Annyway… The one thing I didn’t like about Instagram is that it sucks my photos into its vortex of strangely-social-yet-antisocial-and-corporately-managed media hosting. I still posted a few, but kept the versions to also post here. But that’s a pain.

Then, I was reminded about the fantastic intarweb automation tool, ifttt (if this, then that). Like Yahoo! Pipes, with a simpler trigger-and-actions workflow. I used a recipe1 that creates blog posts here on my site every time I post something to Instagram. That’s simple enough, but the media is still stuck in Instagramland.

The other side of the equation is the really cool Add Linked Images to Gallery WordPress plugin. It sniffs around in the HTML of new posts and detects any images that are hosted elsewhere. It then copies the image onto my server, and transmorgrifies the post’s HTML to point to my copy of the image. For bonus marks, it adds an “instagram” tag to the posts, so it’s easy to see all of the photos that get automagically imported.

So, every time I take a photo with Instagram, it gets posted here on my blog, the media gets copied here for non-sharecropped-hosting, and the photos get merged into my ongoing ephemeral media stream. Easy peasy.

I don’t care that copies of the photos are left in Instagram’s quirky little silo. They’re there for anyone who is using it, but also here for my archive. Best of both worlds.

the Instagram-to-WordPress Photo Post worked, but hardcodes an image width of 600px, which is strange. The Instagram-to-WordPress-Post recipe works just fine, though… [↩]

the (anti)social graph

So much goodness in this article, but this kind of jumped out at me…

Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers – that’s the social graph.

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It’s as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends (and staffing it, of course, with that Mormon bartender).

We’re used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it’s worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.

Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?

(emphasis mine)

The whole Reclaim project has been about withdrawing from the hosted social networks in an attempt to control how things are presented while also short-circuiting the tracking and analytics that are sold to marketeers.

Since I’ve been posting all of my stuff here, instead of Out There, it’s definitely felt less social. I can’t see a “social graph” of who reads what I write, or sees what I post, or +1s stuff, etc… And, since I don’t run any web analytics on my site (aside from truly rudimentary apache log crunching), I don’t even have a rough idea of how many people read/see/etc… what I do.

If it’s less “social” (if tapping into a corporately-monotized social graph makes it social), it’s also feeling more… valuable? meaningful? It’s become less about metrics (impact, readers, page views, etc…) and more about… Well, I don’t know, really… I’m seeing my site, and the stuff I do here, more as documentation. A living documentary project, rather than an obsessive collection of synthetic “friendships”. That’s an interesting angle I hadn’t considered when I started my version of the Reclaim project…

(other posts on the same article, by John Gruber and Stephen Downes)

an update on reclaiming ephemeral media

It’s been 5 months since I started reclaiming my online content, after reading Boone’s thoughts and following his lead.

So, what have I learned in those 5 months? First, it’s surprisingly easy to host your own content. WordPress handles the media management. I haven’t FTPd a single file, nor HTMLd a single line of code. Some of the processes are a little less streamlined than the third-party silo tools offer, but even those only require a couple more clicks in an app on my phone (the WordPress app seems to like me to set image dimensions each time, if I want to constrain to 840px wide). Not the end of the world.

I can easily shoot a photo on my phone, process it with an app or two (if I want), and upload it to my blog with just a couple of clicks. The publishing workflow is basically the same as with the hosted silo services.

Ephemeral media page

Looking at the directory on the server, I use nearly 60MB of space per month of media uploads. I’m only posting photos and screenshot images, and most of them are resized to 840xwhatever before uploading. That works out to about 720MB per year of storage. That could add up over a few years. But, hosting packages typically have several gigabytes of storage available. I’m currently hosting my site on mediatemple, and my [gs] grid hosting package comes with 100GB of storage. I can buy more if I need to, but won’t have to think about that for several years. I’m only using just over 6GB at the moment, and much of that is for some BIG videos (that also make up the lion’s share of my bandwidth usage – if I dump them, my storage and bandwidth are pretty trivial).

The hosting of content is easy, and works really well.

What I’m definitely missing out on is the community layer. Things like the “From Your Contacts” page on Flickr. Even though my ephemeral stuff is presented in a similar manner to how it is on Flickr, I have no way of easily following the activities of dozens of people (or more). I can do it through RSS (and I do), but the simple page showing the latest photos posted by everyone I follow? I miss that. That’s the one thing I still use Flickr for – even though I haven’t posted a photo there in 2 months, I still check the From Your Contacts page almost every day.

I’m starting to think about how to replicate that functionality, in a more generalized way. Flickr’s page is handy, but of course it only handles people that post stuff to Flickr. What about people that post to other services, or to their own sites? A more generalized display that is service-agnostic would be great. Since most sites and services already do RSS, it seems likely that something could be built around RSS feeds. I already subscribe to the feeds of many people and follow their activity streams that way, but there isn’t an at-a-glance latest activity view.

This is the kind of thing that is often “solved” by inventing a new tool or app, and just waiting for everyone to adopt it. Because that always works out so well. What’s needed isn’t a single tool, but a way to easily follow activity (not just content) of many people over many sites and services. Feels kind of like RSS, but only geeks seem to do RSS anymore. If there isn’t a simple Like or Follow or +1 button, it’s a non-starter. But then we’re firmly back in third-party silos territory…

The connections between people, outside of the third party silos, is still complicated, messy, and way more difficult than it should be.

ephemeral photostream

I’ve been tweaking how I manage the ephemeral media here on my blog. Today, I added a page that shows the most recent 50 images uploaded to the site, with links to the post about each image. It’s a bit more like a photostream view, and the page includes links to the larger bloggish photostream view, as well as the RSS feed for ephemeral stuff.

To do this, I’m just using the native WordPress media manager to handle the images (which happens automagically), and the YD Recent Images plugin and Widgets on Pages plugin to embed the photo/imagestream on the page. This is pretty close to how I imagined displaying images here. Now, to think more about how to better replace the missing community features from Flickr’s Contacts page…

to facilitate self-hosting

After I wrote my [Reclaim Update](http://www.darcynorman.net/2011/09/10/reclaim-update/) post, [Tony Hirst](http://blog.ouseful.info/) made a comment with tongue firmly planted in cheek:

Screen Shot 2011 09 12 at 8 33 19 AM

I mean, clearly I’m not about to get into the hosting business. I’ve toyed with the idea of a hosting co-operative, I believe after a suggestion planted by [Scott Leslie](http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/). But that doesn’t go far enough. It puts some liability on the co-operative. If stuff goes south, everybody loses everything. That’s not far removed from the current corporate silo model.

But, Tony’s comment got me thinking again. I wrote earlier about a [mythical server appliance](http://www.darcynorman.net/2011/05/27/reclaiming-ephemeral-media/) that people could just slap into the wall at home (or work or wherever) and then light up the services they want, to host their own stuff. But server-grade bandwidth to the home is still not ready for prime time.

What if there was a meta-application, that could be easily installed on a commodity hosting account (Mediatemple, Dreamhost, GoDaddy, etc…), that would then provide a person with list of services that they could activate? This meta-application could then download the software, configure the database, and set it up.

There are existing models for how this could work. WordPress now has a [great plugin installer](http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins_Add_New_Screen) built in. Gallery has a similar one. List the plugins (software), select the ones you want, and let them download. Activate the ones you want when you’re ready, and they Just Work™.

This would go a LONG way toward getting people set up to self-host. One thing I’ve learned through my version of [Boone’s Reclaim Project](http://teleogistic.net/2011/05/kicking-the-twitpic-habit-with-wordpress/) is that it’s sometimes non-trivial to fart around with this stuff. You have to grok subdomains, databases, PHP, config files, htaccess, log files, etc…

But if there was an application that could be easily installed that abstracted the complexity away. Something like a CPanel, or MediaTemple’s 1-Click Installer:

Screen Shot 2011 09 12 at 8 42 27 AM

combined with the Gallery module selector:

Screen Shot 2011 09 12 at 8 47 04 AM

or, and this will likely set off some purists, something like the App Store:

Screen Shot 2011 09 12 at 8 51 04 AM

So, some form of meta-app that acts a bit like a web-based front end for an `apt-get` like process, downloading software on demand and installing it in the appropriate location before configuring and activating it for the user. All apps could share a single MySQL database on the server, reducing the headaches there, and use unique table prefixes for each application or service. It could also be set up to add applications as subdomains or directories, depending on how people want things to run (blog.mydomain.net or mydomain.net/blog etc…)

This could make the difference for a whole bunch of people wanting to get into hosting their own stuff, but who are held back by the arcane complexities of hosting software on the web.

reclaim update

Now that I’m all consolidated here on my main blog, I took another look at a list I built back when I started the Reclaim project (after seeing [Boone Gorge’s post](http://teleogistic.net/2011/05/kicking-the-twitpic-habit-with-wordpress/)).

Reclaim update

The Reclaim project really started as a way to reign in ephemeral media. But it changed into something else…

9901548

So, I’m really hosting all of my own stuff now, except for a couple of email address (one for work, the other non-self-hosted accounts are mostly inactive), twitter, and Facebook. So far, it’s working out pretty well. I don’t have to think about what some company’s going to do to a service that I rely on. My stuff is self-contained, and portable. I can move it relatively easily to another server. It takes advantage of a fancy schmancy content delivery network as part of my hosting package. And I’m only using a tiny fraction of the server resources (storage, CPU, bandwidth, etc…) that I have available.

If I’m publishing anything online, it goes to my blog. If I’m using email for non-work purposes, it’s self-hosted. Twitter is kind of like glue. It’s not self-hosted, but it’s also not essential. It’s an interstitial layer that may change. Facebook is mostly ignored, except for occasional peeks to see what non-blog non-twitter people are doing (but most of them I see in real life enough to make Facebook a bit redundant…)

reclaiming ephemeral media

Following Boone’s lead, I’m going to be working to reclaim as much of my online activity as possible. I set up a separate WordPress site to handle ephemeral media that are usually posted to Twitter, so that things like the Twitpic licensing brouhaha don’t apply. Because it’s just a blog, it can handle anything – entire galleries of images, audio, video, or any combination. I can also geotag posts, and add plugins to enable timeline and calendar views.

As far as Reclaiming goes, this was one of the simplest things to do. But the process wasn’t simple at all. It took me about half an hour to get going, from setting up a new subdomain, to installing WordPress (I need to migrate my sites to Multisite, but that’s for another time) and adding a MySQL database for it. Tweaking WordPress settings. Installing Twitter Tools plugin to autobroadcast new posts to my Twitter account (good god is Twitter cumbersome to configure stuff for – auth tokens, secret keys, etc… insanity). Then, realizing I’d forgotten to set the timezone of the new media blog, then adjusting that, and realizing that adjustment threw a wrench into the Twitter autoposting system (hopefully only until the 6-hour delta is caught up).

This is not something that 99.99% of people will do. But, those 99.99% of people need to be able to Reclaim their stuff (including low-value ephemeral media otherwise dumped to Twitpic/YFrog/etc…) This is why services like that are so successful, and why third party hosting is so tempting. It’s several orders of magnitude easier to just use a third party service, rather than rolling up your sleeves and hosting stuff yourself. And that leaves out any social layer (which was implemented via Twitter autoposting here, but that may not be appropriate for other services – and I’m not comfortable with Twitter being even more entrenched as the social glue platform).

One more item for a magical Reclaim server appliance…

Update: I just realized that one of the photos I used to test, posted from the iOS WordPress app, wound up going to my main blog rather than my ephemeral media blog. Totally operator error – I selected the wrong blog as destination – but points out how things get more complicated when doing stuff yourself…