Chris Aldrich | Chris Aldrich

Made some significant progress today on an approximately 2,800 word feature article on the W3C Micropub spec with some motivation, examples, use cases, etc. Needs some editing, a bit of artwork, and some screenshots, but we’re nearly there.

Have a few ideas about placement already…

Replied to Indie Communities and Making Your Audience Known by

Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)

It sounds ludicrous now, but back in 2014, when I cofounded Known as a startup, a lot of people were questioning whether a business even needed a website. Pockets of people - for example in the indieweb community, which I enthusiastically joined - were pointing out how short-sighted this was, but it was a minority opinion. There was Facebook and Twitter! Why would you want to have any kind of property that you fully controlled on the internet?

Fast forward to today, and...

As I read this, there are some underlying ideas that again make me think that newspapers, magazines, and other journalistic outlets should pick up the mantle of social media and help their readers (aka community) by providing them with websites that they can control and use to interact. Many newspapers and other outlets are already building their own CMSes and even licensening them out to other papers, why not take the next step and build a platform that can host and manage websites for individual users? They’ve got most of the infrastructure there already? Why not tack on a few simple things that allow their users to better interact with them on the open web. It solves their ownership issues as well as their reliance on social media silos and could even provide a nice, modest income stream (or even a bonus that comes along with one’s subscription?)

Perhaps Kinja wasn’t a bad idea for a CMS cum commenting system, it just wasn’t open web enough?

👓 Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just a Harmless Meme—Right? | Wired

Read Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just a Harmless Meme—Right? (WIRED)

Opinion: The 2009 vs. 2019 profile picture trend may or may not have been a data collection ruse to train its facial recognition algorithm. But we can't afford to blithely play along.

👓 In the Shadow of the CMS | The Nation

Read In the Shadow of the CMS by

Kyle Chayka (The Nation)

How content-management systems will shape the future of media businesses big and small.

With all these self-made CMSes for distributing journalism, why not go a half step further and create a full-on network of hosted and managed IndieWeb websites? These could be for both their journalists to use (the way many do with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) in their research as well as for their own users which could also incidentally use them to interact with the paper itself as well as their surrounding communities?

For a low cost per month, it could be an interesting side business, or even be bundled with paid subscriptions?