It's as easy as it can possibly be to get a hosted blog up and running -- even with your own domain -- via their forms.
But, unlike Facebook, if you don't like their service, or need more, or don't like some ToS change or version 'update', you can wrap it up with a bow and take it elsewhere.
And businesses exist that will even make that as easy as filling out a form.
There's nothing about making the web of 2005 easier that required things be built as monolithic products instead of protocols and platforms.
And it's that distinction, products vs protocols, that's being lamented.
Lots of people run their own WordPress installations, but very, very few of them manage to do it well -- properly locking the software down, keeping the core and plugins up to date with security patches, putting the admin area behind SSL, etc. Which is why there's so many hacked WordPress sites out there.
I liken it to the idea that the Infested Forest should look as dark and imposing as it is dangerous: replacing the craggily trees with candy canes and the wolves with golden retriever puppies (still trained to kill, mind you), and carefully laying a golden brick road through the center for easy access with a new sign at the entrance reading "Welcome to the Friendly Forest (Version 2.0)", makes a very dangerous situation look much less scary than it should... the "looking scary enough--or just being difficult enough to navigate--that you don't go in without an RPG party wearing enchanted armor carrying Ariadne's thread" was actually a feature, not a bug.
The real objective, I think, isn't to get everyone hosting their own stuff, but to popularize technologies that both allow data portability (you can move to another service), and are easy to use.
But WordPress has kind of already done this. They have step-by-step directions[1] for moving from a WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted install.
People who prefer Tumblr (an example of a blog host without an export function) to WordPress do so for reasons that seem orthogonal to data portability:
1. simpler, even easier to use,
2. aesthetics (sleeker design),
3. social networking features built in,
4. reach (because of #3, it's a lot easier to accumulate readers and engagement).
In theory, a service with an open-source codebase, or support for a standard export format, could provide all this. In practice, one hasn't.
Edit: icebraining pointed out downthread that you can mostly export a Tumblr blog by adding '/rss' to the URL of each page, a process that is easily automated.
[1] http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/#moving-to-wor...
This is one of the things the large hosts (Bluehost, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, etc.) are very keen on, and they've been doing lots of work to try and get this to a good level. It's one driving factor behind the push in the WordPress community to get automatic upgrades built in.
> Edit: icebraining pointed out downthread that you can mostly export a Tumblr blog by adding '/rss' to the URL of each page, a process that is easily automated.
In fact, WordPress has a Tumblr importer: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tumblr-importer/
Notably though, it's built on their JSON API, not on the RSS, so it's not really an open standard.
I've thrown up a couple of basic WP installs on there in the past. One-ish click install and it Auto updates.
"And businesses exist that will even make that as easy as filling out a form."
Which businesses? I recently migrated to one of the major dedicated WordPress hosts and it was anything but the trivial experience some make it out to be.
Must have been fairly lucrative at the time, now that I think of it. But it must have made sense for the client, as some of them I see are still hosting their business with that firm; that's a small sample and just a few years down the line, but are you sure you're not looking at the subject from inside your own bubble?
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 that when it's mature.
1. http://smarterware.org/8026/why-not-tumblr
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...
If RSS went all the way back to the beginning, then you'd be right, it would get you 99% of the way there.
It'd be nice if they supported <link rel="next"> tags, but it's still extremely easy to dump the content.
One way or another, services would've arised that would've tied it all together for the non-technical. I don't think we lost anything more than a potential to have a "better web" that never would've been realized anyway. (And many of those things are still possible, just even less worth the effort now that there are entrenched networks.)
In the 90s and early 2000s if you wanted to put something online you had to have at least a moderate level of technical aptitude. Compare that to today's nonstop garbage fountain of ignorance on sites like tumblr, twitter and facebook.
And before that, there were many fountains of ignorance to be found on Usenet (alt.* :), Archie, Gopher...
It was in general a smaller community, and that kept the amount of drivel small, too. But it wasn't all as rosy as you seem to remember.
To a certain degree every generation thinks the Net it grew up with is the Real Net, and the Net that came afterwards is a wasteland.
But this is in regards to specific sites and communities; "The Net" has long since become too large to be considered a single community.
Timecube, dancing babies, blink/marquee tags, MIDI music backgrounds on yet another "hey look at these pictures of the new muffler I put on my car!" site... ah, the good ol' days.
I honestly haven't noticed any increase in drivel, as a proportion of overall content, on the web now compared to when I first got on in 1998.
The takeaway: If the Network Effects aren't harnessed for the cause of freedom and cool, beautiful stuff, then someone else will harness them to make money off of drivel.
You are essentially talking of the same kind of barriers of entry that Anil complains about the Facebook et al put up around data exchange.
That's not true. We've been building OpenPhoto for a year and a half to prove that statement wrong.
You can have the ease of use of signing up for a site without giving up control and ownership of your data. It baffles me why this model isn't more prevalent since we're proving it works and can be made easy enough for non technical users. We need more people building applications this way. Simply put, it's better.
For those unfamiliar with OpenPhoto you can get more information at http://theopenphotoproject.org but the highlights are:
* open source (https://github.com/photo)
* hosted or self installed
* web and mobile apps that work with hosted and self hosted instances (also open source)
* users select where their files are stored (dropbox, box, s3, cx, dreamhost, etc. -- google drive, sky drive coming soon)
* users import photos from 3rd party services
* users are free to migrate from one storage provider to another (we make it a single click)
* urls are properly name spaced so they're true permalinks if you map a TLD to your site
* i could go on forever....but if you're interested head over to https://openphoto.me
This is why a lot of technically superior cool things people invent lose out to corrupted versions.
> to get that accessibility, the hosted services make you give up a lot of things.
I don't see how any of those things are necessary. I can see how the environment incentivizes those things, but none of them are necessary. Maybe there's no practical difference in the end.
Network Effects are just as important as software freedom and technical excellence. By now, the tech world should know this lesson, as should those who would support the cause of software freedom and technical excellence.
To most people, those losses aren't losses. You can't lose what you don't have. I don't think its just about techie vs non-techie people. There are plenty of people who could have posted photos online 15 years ago that didn't until more recently. Accessibility is one thing, a critical component. But, culture is another essential part. It's a component hosted services contributed too.
People didn't tweet before twitter because there was no way of tweeting, but also because there was no such thing as tweeting. The cultural concept didn't exist.
Like privacy, like knowing you're being a product, like helping facebook, google and pals map you, your friends, your friend's dog,...
Seriously...
A smartphone is a tracking device that can make calls. An app is a tracking sotftware that can display pictures.
That's what you lose. Maybe people don't care, but i guess that if they had a chance to understand what's really at stake, they would care and reconsider.
Nothing is free. At least in the earlier days of the web people understood that, because everyone payed some sort of bill. And bills without hidden costs, sortof help people think what it is they are (or are not) paying for.
Yes, this is not what the linked article is about. But it is a counter-point to your "it was too hard for random people back then" saying.
What most people seem to want to do with a personal website is provide some contact information, list some stuff they like, link to their friends and family and occasionally tell the world what they're up to. Personalizing the appearance of one's personal page seemed important, looking at Geocities and Myspace, but Facebook seems to suggest that it might not be necessary. On the other hand, interaction with other users has become more important.
For the record: yes, if you buy a track from the iTunes Music Store today, it is most likely DRM-free. However, people who have been active ITMS customers over the years are likely to have purchased at least some DRM-encumbered tracks before Apple moved away from DRM.
Ironically, it's Apple's dominance in the music distribution market that led to record labels wanting to drop DRM, because they realized it was the only way to loosen the vise grip they'd inadvertently given Apple on their balls. Eventually the same thing will happen with books due to Amazon. Video is going to be the really tough nut to crack, though.
(Incidentally, if you turn on iTunes Match, it will let you replace all your remaining DRM-encumbered tracks with the DRM-free and higher quality ones, even ones that for arcane reasons weren't eligible for the $0.30/track upgrade. That, combined with switching my remaining MP3s to AAC -- yes, I think the quality's a little better -- made it worth the price for me, at least for a year.)
This has been true since 2009 for the record.
I know a little html and css. I learned them to manage my own sites. I have some tech training (Certificate in GIS from a decade ago, never really used). I wish I were more technically savvy. I migrated my sites to Wordpress and found that frustrating and I am still trying to work out how to complete the migration. But it means that when I want to put up new content, I can at least do that much in a fairly brief span of time.
So, agreeing with you that the web we lost was harder and that was a showstopper for many people. Not agreeing that it is terribly relevant if those people know the risks or not up front, because if they want to participate (and this is increasingly not something you can really opt out of) and you can't do the technical piece yourself, well, you suck it up. Too bad, so sad.
The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had to choose a Web host. You had to know how to connect the domain to the Web host. You had to choose the right software to do what you wanted to do. You had to install that software, and configure it properly.
The reason hosted services became popular is because they let you skip all that stuff. You fill out a form and you're up and running. Someone else worries about all that other stuff for you. This makes those services accessible in a way that the Web of 2000 was not.
Of course, to get that accessibility, the hosted services make you give up a lot of things. You lose access to your raw data. You lose your privacy. You lose the ability to change vendors if the one you're on turns evil.
But to non-technical people, those losses aren't obvious. They don't understand what they've lost until losing those things turns around and bites them. It's like DRM: people don't understand why DRM-encumbered music downloads are bad until their iPod dies and they want to move their iTunes-bought music to an Android phone. "What do you mean I can't do that?" is what you hear the moment the penny drops. But before then, they don't understand the risk.
This is what will need to be overcome to make tomorrow's Web like yesterday's was: it'll need to be as easy for people to use as today's is, or you'll need to educate the entire world about why they should put up with it not being that easy. Otherwise people will keep on blindly stumbling into the heavily-advertised walled gardens, not realizing that's what they're doing until the day they decide they want to leave, and can't.