Um blog? Isso é coisa de hipster?
Por razões irrelevantes a esse post, desde o início desse ano tenho me virado como freelancer – em publicidade, jornalismo e tradução, se não estou me esquecendo de nada. Entre muitas vantagens e desvantagens, um fato: passei a ter períodos um pouco mais longos para dedicar a projetos e preocupações pessoais.
Entre essas preocupações, algo que cada vez mais me incomodava era a sensação de não ter mais o controle que gostaria sobre minha vida digital. Quantas vezes não me peguei querendo resgatar alguma referência que tinha visto alguém – ou mesmo eu – compartilhar, e tendo que passar horas revirando perfis de amigos ou fazendo malabarismo com o Google até conseguir achar o que queria?
E conforme pensava nisso, o Fenômeno Baader-Meinhof ia se instaurando e eu via que essa irritação geral com o atual cenário do mundo digital não era só minha. Em resumo, descobri que podia deixar outros escreverem esse post por mim.
In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked on to the end of a huge company’s site. This was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists longer than those sites do.
Of course it didn’t work out for AOL. That proposition just didn’t scale, just like Yahoo’s initial model of maintaining a directory of websites just didn’t scale. The web grew so fast (and was so damn interesting) that no single company could possibly hope to compete with it. So companies stopped trying to compete with it. Instead they, quite rightly, saw themselves as being part of the web. That meant that they didn’t try to do everything. Instead, you built a service that did one thing really well—sharing photos, managing links, blogging—and if you needed to provide your users with some extra functionality, you used the best service available for that, usually through someone else’s API …just as you provided your API to them.
Then Facebook began to grow and grow. I remember the first time someone was showing me Facebook—it was Tantek of all people—I remember asking “But what is it for?” After all, Flickr was for photos, Delicious was for links, Dopplr was for travel. Facebook was for …everything …and nothing.
RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.
As long as the URL resolves, a feed can still surprise you. RSS is the true web: a loose net of dark filaments. These faint tendrils of connection are almost invisible when quiescent, but then out of nowhere—hello!—they light up again. I am happy to have them.
We need to keep pushing forward without them, and do what we’ve always done before: route around the obstructions and maintain what’s great about the web. Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability, and web property ownership.
E assim, resolvi passar a tomar conta das minhas senhas, usar um serviço de VPN, atualizar meu site pessoal e voltar a ter um blog. Esse blog. O qual passará a ser minha principal “voz digital”, o lugar onde vou jogar tudo que eu achar interessante, com ou sem comentários e contexto, nem que seja para que consiga saber onde procurar alguma referência no futuro.
No fim das contas, nada mais é do que colocar meu dinheiro onde minha boca está. Fazer com minha presença digital a mesma coisa que há algum tempo venho recomendando que clientes façam: parar de apostar todas suas fichas em um serviço sobre o qual não se tem muito controle e cuja audiência é, no melhor dos casos, efêmera.
Ou seja, puxem uma cadeira e assinem o RSS do blog. Ou não. Nas palavras do Russell Davies, talvez meu planejador preferido no mundo: “I love blogging without tweeting about it. I know who I’m talking to – you lot who still do RSS. You’re my people.”
UPDATE: E comprovando o Fenômeno Baader-Meinhof, acabo de ver esse post sobre por que um cara deixou o Medium. Soa familiar.
(Image: Untitled, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mwichary’s photostream)
posted: 13 August 1
under: Uncategorized