Blog is dead, Long live Blog.
Quit making the web. It’s dead.
In the 1990s, websites were called homepages.
Every creative wanted to own and control their own site. Few wanted to be homeless. Live in a hotel? Sleep in a mall? People built homes.
In the pre-video web, animations dominated. The gif was a major contender, until in 1995 Netscape released a plug-in API that allowed optimised graphics in a browser. May 1996: FutureSplash Animator (an animation tool with a web plug-in) shipped; 6 months later it was purchased by Macromedia and renamed Flash. By 2001, Flash had 50 developers, 500,000 users and served to 325 million web-surfers.
Between 1999 and 2011, on my homesite, I posted hundreds of experiments in Flash. Up until 2010, almost every device supported it; it claimed 99% market penetration. Code was freely shared on forums; so a typical user could: borrow and adapt code; insert graphics; and publish. Life was simple.
In April 2010 Steve Jobs crippled the market penetration of Flash by announcing that Apple would no longer support it; he cited technical reasons. Wired magazine interpreted Job’s announcement differently: “Flash would open a new door for application developers to get their software onto the iPhone: Just code them in Flash and put them on a web page. In so doing, Flash would divert business from the App Store, as well as enable publishers to distribute music, videos and movies that could compete with the iTunes Store.”
In this case, self-hosting (ownership! data independent of a corporation!) and flexible interactive control of audio-video (malleable mashups! an animation timeline and a scripting language in a single authoring environment!) became corporate road-kill.
Most major web-devs began moving to HTML5. As of 2014, in spite of the hype, HTML5 utopian ease-of-use has yet to arrive: coding a simple linear-use multimedia website and maintaining it across multiple platforms for diverse devices is now immensely time-consuming, almost impossible.
Consider this 2014 announcement from UbuWeb:
Solution? Platforms: for video, Vimeo (singular, corporate and linear); and for audio, Bandcamp (linear, album centric). Vimeo is wonderful and a great service, but it’s a step backward from self-hosting interactive video. Bandcamp is exemplary but its modeled to replace a small record label not interactive audio.
Next problem? Platforms die.
Here today, clone tmrw. Remember? Friendster, Napster, Orkut, MySpace.
Between 2005–2007, I opened and made 16 blogs on Blogger. In 2007 I stopped using Blogger and shifted my email entirely to Gmail. When Hotmail deleted my dormant account, these blogs all disappeared.
Self-hosting is better then? No. Things decay. ISPs go bankrupt.
Wordpress blogs on self-hosted servers are like patches of land that disintegrate into weedy spam-hacked ruins when neglected. Without updates and php security patches they disintegrate.
Here’s a Wordpress site launched in 2008 (screenshot from 2014):
Stop the data haemorrhage? Relax. The only solution to data is more data.
Hop to the next-best-platform, ephemeral services hoisted temporarily into fame by venture capital and stock options: Twitter, Tumblr, Diigo, Pocket.
So what’s next? DIY data plumbing for dummies. Introduce redundancy; circulate and replicate your data between safe corporate silos. Let your feeds feed each other.
One example: Ifft is a service that runs plumbing between your accounts, post one place and spew it everywhere. The future is sewage. Platforms as pipes. Identity as micro-filament.
Conclusions? Currently, platforms (as in Tumblr, Vimeo, Medium or even Facebook and now the ad-free Ello) represent the only viable model for reliable online distribution of multimedia content to all devices. Let the corporate geeks deal with the day-to-day grunt labor of ensuring readability across operating systems and device formats: widescreens, phablets, phones, and google glass.
Caveats? It’s collective dwelling, mall hive slumming, mercantile-infected on-grid grinding where your most pithy intimate thoughts will co-exist with promoted content. And if that seems a little less than homey, remember network TV when couches became spaces for consumer indoctrination. Every dip in the honey involves a bite of crunchy capitalism.
So…
