Today I saw a Tweet from Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, whereby he mentioned a mobile app he uses, called Decaf, to manage his EC2 instances.
As one who has an EC2 instance running the OPML Editor as a server full-time, I would find this a handy app. So, I picked it up for my iPod Touch. The first time experience is great and quickly helps you enter your AWS credentials. Once that is done, all your EC2 information is now at your fingertips.
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.
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.
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.
The Read and Trust network of writers comprises a group of indies that are recommended by those we read and trust. I’m not sure who ‘we’ are but the quality of the list is excellent and well worth adding to your feeds.
While visiting their site, I noticed that one can download an OPML file of the entire Read and Trust network, allowing for quick and easy subscription to all the writers in one fell swoop. As a certified OPML nut, of course I grabbed the file. Not only did I add it to my daily feed reading, but I have plans to use the file as my guinea pig.
Allow me to elaborate..
As any reader of mine is aware, I’m an EC2 Poet. In other words, I have my own Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud server (micro instance) running the OPML Editor 24/7. Up until yesterday, my EC2 has dutifully been dishing up my RSS feeds in a river of news format for me.
Now, yesterday, Dave Winer added an important feature to the OMPL Editor. Multi-user support for the River2 news aggregator tool. I’ve been looking forward to this feature because now my EC2 can not only host my RSS feeds, but it can also host another user’s feeds.
The first thing I did was create an imaginary user, ‘readandtrust’ and imported the OPML file I had downloaded earlier. Create a password just for this new user and that’s it. It worked!
Now that my EC2 has two users, I’m going to add a third imaginary user (I’m in full on test mode right now) and then start taking notes. The multi-user implementation has a few kinks to iron out so I hope to help facilitate its progress by putting it through its paces.
The Read and Trust river of news is pass protected so I can’t show it to you. But here’s my river, pushed to my Dropbox, for public consumption, to show you essentially what it looks like. Imagine the Read and Trust network of feeds flowing through instead of my own set of feeds.