I recently stumbled upon a portfolio-style website that I liked, belonging to Dries Buytaert founder and lead of Drupal. I specifically like the About me section and think I am borrowing a few ideas from how he arranged content about himself. I also seem to agree with many of his principles on open web, although I have never been able to publicly phrase it as eloquently.
Basically, he chose to host his blog posts and content on his personal website instead of through a walled-garden style website like LinkedIn, or Facebook. It sometimes sad to see how few big companies have come to dominate the web. Don’t get me wrong I love and use many of these sites too, but I am now going to make an effort to host more of my original content, posts, photos, on my own personal web site / server.
A facebook post in its core sense is basically a blog post, so why not post it on my own server instead of on a site that has questionable privacy policies and requires people to sign in to see your post. One of my many frustrations when looking up a restaurant or business nowadays is when you search them and the only result is a facebook page. If you aren’t signed in and allowing facebook to track your every move you are often times prompted to login or complete a capcha to see the full page; and don’t get me started on working with their APIs to try and feed various aggregators (which I attempted with limited success for my FeedMasher project).
So for now I am going to continue to populate my site at JPTweb, and will share more of my thoughts on this, and also on iOS and Android apps which also seem to defy the original goals of having an open web!