[AktiviX-discuss] Blogs - what next?

[mark]

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Last year, a few of us made a start on setting up a blogging platform.
It didn't get finished. You can see how far we got at http://agitblogs.net/

Last weekend, Ana and I (and several others) were at the Hyperactive
summit in London. There were wide-ranging political, theoretical and
technical discussions about how radical tech projects should be shaping
the future of the internet. One of the topics that came up was blogging.

We thought that in many ways, the task facing radical media and tech
projects has changed hugely over the last 10 years. Now lots of people
can publish their stuff easily on the net - people (in rich countries)
are not denied a voice, as before - but this has come at the cost of
what Eben Moglen calls "Spying all the time, for free." We aked
ourselves, how can we help people to get out of these corporate spaces
that are free of charge, but at the cost of total surveillance and
socially harmful advertising?

The reason I'm writing this today is to ask a few questions that could
frame a potential response from Aktivix people; a political response, a
technical response, both or perhaps no response at all.

1/ One of the reasons I lost energy for the agitblogs project was that
when I spoke to the people who I thought should be using it, very few
thought that the advantages of switching to a different platform
outweighed the hassle. Do we need some kind of education campaign to
convince people of the hazards of using Blogger, etc.? If it's wrong to
use fear to change peoples' behaviour, do we need to put some thought
into the positive advantages of using a non-corporate platform, and how
we articulate this?

2/ If we're going to provide a technical solution for people, is a
conventional weblog the right way to go? Blogs solved the problem of
giving a voice to the masses but they've not addressed the issue of
centralisation. Would it be better to put our energy into distributed
solutions, e.g. something like Diaspora?

3/ We had a crack at using wordpress with buddypress, which adds some
social networking features. One thing that's changed a lot since then is
the huge gain in popularity of we.riseup.net which provides a fairly
safe social network and is already popular. One of the things people
don't like about a new social network is that to begin with it's empty -
so maybe we should be telling people to use we.riseup.net, volunteering
to support it and not undermining it with competition? Likewise noblogs.org?

4/ If we do want to provide a blogging platform, what kind of social
contract would we want to have with the users? Would the balance between
freedom of speech Vs. ideological community be different from how it is
with aktivix mail & lists? If we're serious about showing ordinary
people a different way of doing things, maybe we need to lower the
"purity" of the AUP/entry criteria?

Say what you think.
Mark
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