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98 lines
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98 lines
5.0 KiB
Plaintext
# A DIY Data Manifesto
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## By Scott Gilbertson
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The word “server” is enough to send all but the hardiest nerds
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scurrying for cover.
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The word usually conjures images of vast, complex data farms,
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databases and massive infrastructures. True, servers are all those
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things — but at a more basic level, they’re just like your desktop PC.
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Running a server is no more difficult than starting Windows on your
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desktop. That’s the message Dave Winer, forefather of blogging and
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creator of RSS, is trying to get across with his EC2 for Poets
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project. The name comes from Amazon’s EC2 service and classes common
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in liberal arts colleges, like programming for poets or computer
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science for poets. The theme of such classes is that anyone — even a
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poet — can learn technology.
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Winer wants to demystify the server. “Engineers sometimes mystify what
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they do, as a form of job security,” writes Winer, “I prefer to make
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light of it… it was easy for me, why shouldn’t it be easy for everyone?”
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To show you just how easy it is to set up and run a server, Winer has
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put together an easy-to-follow tutorial so you too can set up a
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Windows-based server running in the cloud. Winer uses Amazon’s EC2
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service. For a few dollars a month, Winer’s tutorial can have just
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about anyone up and running with their own server.
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In that sense Winer’s EC2 for Poets if already a success, but
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education and empowerment aren’t Winer’s only goals. “I think it’s
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important to bust the mystique of servers,” says Winer, “it’s
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essential if we’re going to break free of the ‘corporate blogging
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silos.’”
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The corporate blogging silos Winer is thinking of are services like
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Twitter, Facebook and WordPress. All three have been instrumental in
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the growth of the web, they make it easy for anyone publish. But they
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also suffer denial of service attacks, government shutdowns and
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growing pains, centralized services like Twitter and Facebook are
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vulnerable. Services wrapped up in a single company are also
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vulnerable to market whims, Geocities is gone, FriendFeed languishes
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at Facebook and Yahoo is planning to sell Delicious. A centralized web
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is brittle web, one that can make our data, our communications tools
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disappear tomorrow.
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But the web will likely never be completely free of centralized
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services and Winer recognizes that. Most people will still choose
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convenience over freedom. Twitter’s user interface is simple, easy to
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use and works on half a dozen devices.
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Winer doesn’t believe everyone will want to be part of the distributed
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web, just the dedicated. But he does believe there are more people who
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would choose a DIY path if they realized it wasn’t that difficult.
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Winer isn’t the only one who believes the future of the web will be
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distributed systems that aren’t controlled by any single corporation
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or technology platform. Microformats founder Tantek Çelik is also
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working on a distributed publishing system that seeks to retain all
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the cool features of the social web, but remove the centralized
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bottleneck.
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But to be free of corporate blogging silos and centralized services
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the web will need an army of distributed servers run by hobbyists,
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not just tech-savvy web admins, but ordinary people who love the web
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and want to experiment.
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So while you can get your EC2 server up and running today — and even
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play around with Winer’s River2 news aggregator — the real goal is
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further down the road. Winer’s vision is a distributed web where
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everything is loosely coupled. “For example,” Winer writes, “the roads
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I drive on with my car are loosely-coupled from the car. I might drive
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a SmartCar, a Toyota or a BMW. No matter what car I choose I am free
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to drive on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Sixth Avenue or the Bay Bridge.”
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Winer wants to start by creating a loosely coupled, distributed
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microblogging service like Twitter. “I’m pretty sure we know how to
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create a micro-blogging community with open formats and protocols and
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no central point of failure,” he writes on his blog.
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For Winer that means decoupling the act of writing from the act of
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publishing. The idea isn’t to create an open alternative to Twitter,
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it’s to remove the need to use Twitter for writing on Twitter. Instead
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you write with the tools of your choice and publish to your own server.
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If everyone publishes first to their own server there’s no single
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point of failure. There’s no fail whale, and no company owns your
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data. Once the content is on your server you can then push it on to
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wherever you’d like — Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress of whatever the site
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du jour is ten years from now.
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The glue that holds this vision together is RSS. Winer sees RSS as the
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ideal broadcast mechanism for the distributed web and in fact he’s
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already using it — Winer has an RSS feed of links that are then pushed
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on to Twitter. No matter what tool he uses to publish a link, it’s
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gathered up into a single RSS feed and pushed on to Twitter.
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----
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Source: https://www.mail-archive.com/nettime-l@kein.org/msg02864.html |