My story about the local web

I’d like to thank Caleb Clark for recording and posting a video of the talk I gave last month at the Marlboro College Graduate School. I watched it the other night and I think it’s my best explanation of a cluster of things I’ve been thinking about and working toward for a long time. The list includes:

  • the local web
  • LibraryLookup
  • webscale identifiers
  • REST
  • public data
  • loosely-coupled cloud services
  • lightweight service composition
  • structure and transformation of data
  • the elmcity project
  • the pub/sub pattern
  • feed syndication
  • personally authoritative data publishing
  • social and decentralized information management

When I look at that list, and realize that I’m always trying to do (and describe) all of these things at the same time — because they’re all deeply intertwingled — I can see why it’s been so hard to tell the story. Apparently, given an hour, I can now tell it reasonably well. But I’ll rarely get that hour. So I also need to condense it into a five-minute Common Craft-style summary. A hard challenge, but a good one!