"On the other hand, I can see how the intent of making the Blog This! button software-agnostic was ahead of its time."
At the risk of putting words in his mouth, I imagine part of his frustration is probably that making it software-dependent was a regression. There was already a budding ecosystem of blog-system-agnostic authoring tools, building off protocols he'd had a significant hand in, and while the protocol as it stood at the time[1] was probably going to require a version 2 at some point, it really wasn't that hard to make things like that very cross-platform. Even now from what I can see, there's a lot of overlap between the various platforms, and with the addition of some ability to upload images and other media into a rich text blog post you could probably catch >99.9% of blog posts made today across all the popular blogging platforms.
I still think the blogging world may yet rise again as the centralization meets the end it always does, but when that happens it will be recapitulating development that has largely already occurred, ten+ years ago. (And if history is any guide, it will be from scratch and with loud acclamations about how innovative it all is.)
I'm not sure how we're currently not in a golden age of self-published content. The idea that we're only there when we have some sort of meta-distributed protocol is a pretty big implicit value judgment.
I didn't say that we're not in a good time. I said centralization will meet its inevitable end. It's inevitable whether it's good or bad. (Usually it's a lot of both.)
They are harder, but they eventually dominate the centralized systems. This is probably due to a combination of the O(n^2) value of the decentralized system dominating even the most valuable centralized system, and also the fact of centralization inevitably produces a whole bunch of people out to get the central player.
But I don't really know. This isn't an normative argument I'm making about what I think should be, it's an observation about history. Centralized email has given way to SMTP, for better and for worse. Centralized document systems gave way to gopher gave way to the web. Centralized newsgroups gave way to distributed forums. Centralized social media will eventually give way to a richer distributed ecosystem. I don't even know exactly how, but it will happen someday. It's just what happens. Eventually, too many people will be gunning for Facebook for them to be the monopoly.
(Probably the best counterexample is IM, which never properly federated. Arguably, this is because IM simply isn't that desirable. It's something people sorta kinda want, but not so much that it's actually monetizable, so possibly it's evidence in favor of the "success produces lots of people gunning for a piece of the pie" being the dominant factor. IM has never had anyone so successful (monetarily) that we had tons of people gunning for that space.)
> They are harder, but they eventually dominate the centralized systems.
Like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. All examples of big decentralized systems. Like the gradual consolidation of telecoms?
This is snarky, but only because I'm feeling sassy. Honest question, "Do decentralized systems actually win?" I hear this a lot as an axiom without any real evidence.
At the risk of putting words in his mouth, I imagine part of his frustration is probably that making it software-dependent was a regression. There was already a budding ecosystem of blog-system-agnostic authoring tools, building off protocols he'd had a significant hand in, and while the protocol as it stood at the time[1] was probably going to require a version 2 at some point, it really wasn't that hard to make things like that very cross-platform. Even now from what I can see, there's a lot of overlap between the various platforms, and with the addition of some ability to upload images and other media into a rich text blog post you could probably catch >99.9% of blog posts made today across all the popular blogging platforms.
I still think the blogging world may yet rise again as the centralization meets the end it always does, but when that happens it will be recapitulating development that has largely already occurred, ten+ years ago. (And if history is any guide, it will be from scratch and with loud acclamations about how innovative it all is.)
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaWeblog