In the year of content I’ve been thinking a lot about how blogs and self publishing have made a comeback in some areas from those that want to take back control of their content. Moves away from Medium for self hosting, moves away from twitter for Micro.blog, and of course the #deletefacebook trends. So how to get the mainstream to move from these centralized, locked in platforms to more open friendly places? I have no idea really, so I’ll list something out more as food for thought.

  1. Easy to engage
  2. Connection with most of the people they know
  3. Easy to share images and re-share
  4. Marketplace, options, the idea of not being locked in. The idea of take your content / timeline with you
  5. RSS is an implementation detail, not a feature.
  6. People understand the idea of subscribe and share.
  7. Public vs Private sharing. The ability to share with select people.
  8. Clean, ad free interface. The tracking and aggregation is needs to curtailed. So what is the business model? Free / Pro / Business tiers ? I dont know. :-/
  9. Cross models Reddit, wordpress, micro.blog ?

So what would a open platform using open internet standards look like ?