Category Posts

Bloggers of the World, Unite and Take Over!

Become the Media has a purpose. To educate bloggers, journo-programmers, poets, in managing and developing his or her own publishing infrastructure.

The reason I can’t sleep tonight, and am writing this post instead, is that the purpose finally coalesced. From the start, I registered Become the Media as a repository of knowledge to help others publish to the web. Originally, I accomplished this through my blog, Radio UserLand: The Missing Manual. Helping others publish with the powerful tool, Radio UserLand, was my way of giving back.

Now, years later, I’m happy to have found new direction. Based on the idea that Dave Winer puts forth in his post about educating the journo-programmer, I see Become the Media’s future. This time around, I won’t focus solely on a blogging tool. I’ll focus on a top down approach to guerilla style digital journalism. A one-stop shop for journo-programmers, bloggers, and poets.

Some of the sections I envision..

* Register a domain name
* Configure DNS
* Setup  a cloud account with Amazon (for now)
* Get up and running with the OPML Editor
* Setup a river of news
* Install a River2 minimal blogging tool
* Attain an Adjix URL shortener account
* Learn how to use your own domain name for short links
* Push your Radio2 minimal blogging posts to Twitter and beyond

These are just some of the topics I envision. Each section will be screenshot-laden with lots of hand-holding.

What’s the point of all this? To teach people how to avoid the hamster cages (silos) that remove control over our content. In other words, if you Become the Media, then silos such as Facebook and Twitter can’t silence you. By taking matters into our own hands, we can reboot the news.

Lots To Focus On

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve had my hands in a number of pots. It feels good. I like experimenting. With the clock running out soon, I’m thinking about heading back to work next week. I’ve got two new clients and some exciting usability projects to focus on which will leave much less time for my personal computer playtime.

The things that have me most interested right now are rivers of news, the radio2 minimal blogging tool, setting up a wiki, tending to my EC2 instance, running an OPML Editor server, blogging, and whipping Become the Media into the shape that it deserves and needs.

That’s a lot to focus on. Thankfully, I’ve been able to get some of those items up to speed in the past few weeks. They are stable enough to run with and possibly share with others. And that is the idea behind Become the Media. It’s always been my platform to share ideas and knowledge with others. I may even request donations for Become the Media should I start hosting rivers of news or providing Radio2 accounts. But any money making ventures will most certainly fall under a different domain. A dot.com existence.

Become the Media = Donation Based/Free.

Dot.Com = Small Business/Not Free.

Once the concepts that I am implementing on Become the Media, such as hosting rivers of news and adding users to the Radio2 server, take hold and prove stable, then I’ll seek ways to turn them into a viable business in some other way.

One step at a time.

Taking Time Off From Work

Part-way through the first of six weeks paid family leave. It’s been great to be home with Michelle and Parker Moon. We’ve been lolly-gagging, chuckling, lounging about, and other nonsensical things.

I play fetch with the dog a lot. He can’t get enough.

Michelle enjoys making Parker crack up. It’s the best part of my day to see Parker laugh and smile.

Good times.

Rivers Pouring Into a Bucket

As of today, the public facing rivers of the Become the Media News Network are being served up by an Amazon S3 bucket. And, they are all using a new, beautiful template. Got to look good, right?

A sampling:

Become the Media News Network (the mouth of the river)

The Read & Trust Network (the awesome writers of the Read & Trust network)

Those links show the public river. Behind each of those public rivers lies a pass protected admin site whereby the owner can add and remove feeds at any time.

Peeking Into the Developer’s Mind

One of the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to is OPML Editor code updates. Since I run the OPML Editor on my laptop as well as my cloud server, I have a keen interest in knowing the status of the software.

On a near daily basis, Dave Winer, the creator of the software, updates the OPML Editor. Sometimes the update is something small and sometimes it is something big. The cool part is that with every update, big or small, Dave releases the code to all OPML users and adds a comment. Here is an example from the last round of updates as it appears in my feed.

Opml editor code updates

It looks like Dave is working on some Amazon S3 integration. Well, since I also subscribe to the OPML Editor email lists, I already know that Dave is working on deeper integration with S3 but the combination of the email list and feed updates is engaging. It’s like piecing together a puzzle.

Of course, I’m only peeking into a very small portion of the developer’s mind in this way. It’s an interesting way to keep tabs on the software that I use.