Hello world! The path to Blogosphere 2.0

This is my first article on my new website. I plan to write more and thought a lot about where I want to put my writings. There are 100s of platforms and also protocols nowadays that compete for user-generated content. Most of them in order to monetize their operations and ultimately, make their founders and early investors rich. While I do not necessarily think wanting to become rich is bad, the question is more what's in it for me?

My intention is to fully and truly own my content initially and then leverage multiple platforms for distribution. I think this might be a great interests aligned deal: If these platforms are actually able to amplify my content, then I'm happy to let them also monetise it. But if they fail to do so, go out of business or I don't like how they operate anymore, my content is still here.

The crypto readers would probably think to put it on-chain or use some other sort of cryptographic method to proof ownership. This is definitely something I want to explore in the future and also write about. But to start small and simple I though it's the easiest to create my own website or blog. This way, I also have a playground to coding experiments. Let me talk about my goal here first:

Goal: Blogosphere 2.0

I think we can together work on something like a Blogosphere 2.0. I'm not very tied to that term and as of now, this is just a rough idea that hopefully will spark better ideas in you, my valued reader 😊.

In the early days of the internet, before social media, there was a thing called the blogosphere. People participating in that blogosphere usually ran their own blog software, mostly Wordpress. Fun fact: according to may last research, Wordpress still powers ~45% of all websites on the internet 🤯.

Anyways, these blogs were interlinked with so-called linkbacks: Whenever one blog author linked to a blog of another blog author, that blog got notified. More often than not, these links were automatically included into the linked-blog. This created something like a social network. Instead of friends or followers bloggers had, and still have, just peers that link to each other. Very internet native. Unfortunately, this feature was then abused for spam and also the internet community moved over to web 2.0 which had more streamlined user experience thanks to the centralised teams that were able to build the monopolies that are now so often criticised.

So my idea for a blogosphere 2.0 would roughly be:

• Revise the greats from the OG blogosphere and reuse it where appropriate.
• Enhance it with new protocols like Lens, Farcaster, Arweave and more
• Come up with a new specification that enables everybody to participate in the Blogosphere 2.0 and fully control their own content independent of any platform or protocol