In case you don’t know, I believe the future of the web involves moving away from the idea of centralized, authoritative locations and into something I call “connected copies”. The idea is that the current model of the web, which is based on the places where things live instead of the names of things, creates natural choke points Continue reading

Making a quicker pass at the reply to Dave Winer below, I want to call out one radical idea that people don’t get: You should be able to browse the web through your own website. As an example of this, consider my Wikity interface when I’m logged in (if you’re not logged in the interface Continue reading

Dave Winer wrote a recent post on, roughly, how to reboot the Blogosphere with JSON. I read it last night and thought I understood it, then read it again this morning and realized I’d missed the core idea of what he was saying. Here’s the relevant graf: But there is another approach, to have WordPress Continue reading

Update: If you read the comments below you’ll see one of the API developers has responded; there are some issues with private information in short codes being exposed. I still wish all the smart-quotification, m-dashing, and paragraphing could be more easily disabled, but I’m very grateful for the quick and thoughtful response. ——- I wasted Continue reading

I’m excited about Brave, the new browser coming out with privacy and content payment features built into the core browser code. I won’t detail it here, but you need to check it out. The piece that people miss about all these debates about Facebook-ization and evil tracking and big data is that the Web we Continue reading

If you’ve started a new site on Wikity, you’ll notice that it has a new interface. We’ve taken some cues from people who loved the index-cardiness of federated wiki and from others who urged us to embrace the “like Pinterest for text” elevator speech and JUST GO WITH IT. These are your latest posts, with Continue reading

Wikipedia turned 15 today, a day where I happen to have my back against the wall on some deadlines. Turns out faculty want to nail down their edtech plan by week three of the class. Who knew? But in any case, I didn’t want to let the anniversary go by without saying something. The thing Continue reading

A recent-ish study looked at film recommendation systems and found an interesting result: perceived novelty of the recommendations was negatively correlated with user satisfaction, and user satisfaction was correlated adoption. One of the most striking things we found is that the novelty of recommended items has a significant negative impact on users’ perception of a recommender’s ability Continue reading

We got our first piece of spam on Wikity, so we’ve rotated out the join code. It used to be “peloton”. It is now “copies”. If you are reading this post more than a month after it was posted, you probably need to look for a more recent post on Wikity, with a new join Continue reading