Reliable old blogging

So here I am on a street in Saverne, France, getting on the Net over a rare open wi-fi hot spot. I was going to tweet something about it, but Twitter is down. So here we are.

There’s one Net, one Web and one Twitter. Many paths through the formers and but one through the latter. Note the preposition. I said through. Twitter’s API allows much, but you still have to go through one company’s proprietary system. Not so with the Net, the Web — or blogging. As with the Net and the Web, blogging is NEA. Nobody owns it, Everybody can use (or do) it, and Anybody can improve it.

Somebody owns Twitter, and only they can improve it.

Twitter is a brilliant creation that has done much to expand uses of the Net, the Web, SMS and other good stuff. But we need what it does to be Net-native and it ain’t yet.

Okay, now I’ll go back off-grid to explore France. Au revoir … from my phone to your whatever.



7 responses to “Reliable old blogging”

  1. Hey, you’re less than an hour away from me! Any plans to come visit Strasbourg while you’re here?

  2. […] Doc Searls Weblog · Reliable old blogging: “There’s one Net, one Web and one Twitter. Many paths through the formers and but one […]

  3. Aaah, France this time of the year is great!

  4. Doc, we’re just back from a two-week vacation to Ireland, where wi-fi was available in all our hotels, although they seemed to think it was “only in the bar,” as though it didn’t extend to our rooms above. (Of course it did.)

    Using a lightweight netbook, I could easily connect everywhere. Even our cottage on remote Inis Meain in the Aran Islands in Galway Bay had wi-fi.

    Hope your France is as great as our Ireland.

  5. Steve Conklin Avatar
    Steve Conklin

    Doc,

    There are alternatives to twitter. Check out identi.ca and status.net

  6. Steve, I’m familiar with Identi.ca and status.net. Both are far more net-native than Twitter.

    The problem, however, is not that Twitter has no alternatives, but that we think microblogging has to be done through a choice of single sites. Microblogging should be something anybody can do through their own sites. Identi.ca and Status.net do that in different ways, but neither has caught fire.

    It will take a few more years before this stuff sorts out. When it does, services like Twitter will be substitutable. Until then, we’ll need more effeorts like Identi.ca and Status.net to provide alternatives, even if only relatively small minorities adopt them.

    If I hadn’t been writing on a phone at a busy intersection I would have added something about it.

  7. Therein lies the beauty of the Internet —no one owns it.

    Twitter on the other hand, as mentioned is a proprietary system —and one full of rules it seems.
    Case in point: this week Twitter will not allow me to follow more than 2000 people (well, 2001 to be exact) because my ratio of followers is too low in their opinion.
    So, while I would highly enjoy following your Tweets at @dsearls it looks like I’ll have to wait temporarily until Twitter says it’s ok.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *