👓 How It Works | Solid

Read How It Works | Solid (solid.inrupt.com)

Within the Solid ecosystem, you decide where you store your data. Photos you take, comments you write, contacts in your address book, calendar events, how many miles you run each day from your fitness tracker… they’re all stored in your Solid POD. This Solid POD can be in your house or workplace, or with an online Solid POD provider of your choice. Since you own your data, you’re free to move it at any time, without interruption of service.

You give people and your apps permission to read or write to parts of your Solid POD. So whenever you’re opening up a new app, you don’t have to fill out your details ever again: they are read from your POD with your permission. Things saved through one app are available in another: you never have to sync, because your data stays with you.

This approach protects your privacy and is also great for developers: they can build cool apps without harvesting massive amounts of data first. Anyone can create an app that leverages what is already there.

👓 One Small Step for the Web… | Stephen Downes

Read One Small Step for the Web... by Stephen Downes (downes.ca)
On Saturday Fast Company broke the story that Tim Berners-Lee was launching a startup to develop and distribute his SoLiD application (which stands for Social Linked Data; I've covered it here before). This is a part of his plan to restore the web to its original decentralized vision. His new company is called Inrupt (which will be way easier to search for than 'solid') and is launching this week. "Solid is guided by the principle of 'personal empowerment through data' which we believe is fundamental to the success of the next era of the web. We believe data should empower each of us.... With Solid, you will have far more personal agency over data - you decide which apps can access it."