I sat down for a conversation with Ville Vesterinen (@vesterinen) — co-founder and editor of the ArcticStartup blog — last week while he was visiting from Helsinki. Following up on the post that Jyri Engeström and I wrote on the web at a new crossroads, we discussed the need for more open standards to create the underpinnings of a web-wide platform for building more personal social applications.
At one point in our discussion, I suggested that an HTML tag for a person might make sense — with the ability to include a person’s face or list of friends — without the need for services like Facebook or Twitter. This idea was inspired by Mark Pilgrim’s retelling of the origin story of the <img> tag and conversations I’ve had recently with Michael Hanson of Mozilla (who wrote up a concept for supporting WebFinger in the browser after discussions at IIW).
Our conversation goes on around 15 minutes but does a decent job of capturing my current thinking on the social web.
I’d also like to point out that an OpenWebCampHelsinki is happening this weekend, in case anyone happens to be passing through Finland!
2 Comments
Full agreement up to right near the end. After 14:39 seemed a bit of a let-down though.
I expected you were going to say something like “… good ideas can come from Silicon Valley or anywhere else”, but what I think I heard you saying was that any place may apply the good ideas which will come from SV.
Chris, you don’t seem arrogant and decentralisation is your watchword, so I guess I’ll give the benefit of the doubt.
Hey Andrew,
I wasn’t clear.
I said that these ideas need to be localized — but I wasn’t trying to imply that SV export the ideas and then others implement them… though it kind of sounds that way. I don’t think I completed that thought — which is that, as with BarCamp and coworking, there’s a lot of space to explore around all these ideas — ideas which are not unique to Silicon Valley. Perhaps our press is more eager to cover news about these things, so it seems like there’s more of it going on here, but like I said, SV doesn’t have a monopoly on these ideas — and indeed, it’s communities around the world pushing all of this forward.
Sorry if that wasn’t clear or sounded too SV-centric. That really isn’t how I think, nor is it totally consistent with my experience!