12July
Still playing catch-up from very old posts; this is from Facebook and Marxism published a month ago. Mr. Pokery comments primarily on the mechanisms of building a better web presence.
This all steps around the question of how sites are financed, especially when the users develop the content. Aside from policy decisions that the site should be an encyclopedia of sorts rather than a repository of knowledge, and what sort of encyclopedia it should be, does the way Wikipedia works financially offer possibilities?
Mr. Pokery is correct to observe that paying the bills is important. From what we can gather, Wikipedia appeals for donations from its users, and accepts corporate sponsorship. It is unclear what proportion of its income comes from each source, and it is not clear what – if any – advantages the corporate sponsors gain from the arrangement. Though this opacity is very poor, the broad structure would not be unreasonable.
Would a putative LJ-codebase site run as a co-operative or on some other slightly more democratic system appeal?
Honesty, transparency, and democracy are the key qualities here. The particular software is relatively unimportant; if the general view is to use the free parts of the Livejournal software, then that would be a logical step, but we would yield to those with greater technical knowledge.
A co-operative society, or a body established in the spirit of a co-operative society, would address the fundamental problem of power abstracting from the people writing the content to the people publishing the content, by making the two groups identical. Whether it would have a place on the heavily decentralised Web 3.0 postulated in the original article is unlikely, but that is a bridge to cross in a number of years.
At the end of the day, things are about community; I've been so annoyed by the developments that I've been seriously tempted to leave – and am very interested in following your move as a model, watching your ability to communicate with people who haven't left – but there are always good reasons to make "just one post more" to "all the people you'd be leaving behind".
The tools of the trade include a good RSS reader – current preference here is RSS Owl, Java-based, includes the ability to use the ?auth=digest flag for password-protected feeds, and aggregates an entire category (or even all the feeds) onto one webpage. (Or PDF file, for print-off-and-read-later goodness.) It's not perfect, it has a love-hate relationship with some feeds (particularly Atom-spec, particularly Blogspot, particularly particularly Diamond Geezer), but it's the least worst we've found so far.
Other tools – a whizzly little HTML editor with customisable macros, an enquiring mind, enough time – are things one either has or doesn't have.
