Own Your Content

“We are in the “Internet Two” phase as Steven Johnson called it. Internet One was an open network, open protocols, open systems. Internet Two is closed platforms that increasingly dominate the market and own and control our content and us. We need to get to Internet Three where we take back control of ourselves. It is high time for that to happen.”
Fred Wilson

I am so happy to see more and more folks are talking about how we need to be more thoughtful about owning our content. I predict blogs/personal sites will have a major comeback in 2018. The fine folks of iA put it like this.

4 Comments leave a comment below

  1. If each creator’s content is hosted on their own site, the convenience of reading it all is greatly diminished compared to going to that one site where everyone is posting their content. I wonder if this will lead to a renaissance in RSS readers.

  2. I love how this links to a tweet!

    Apart from the irony of that, the message is one I’ve tried to convince clients of often.

    They have websites with blog capability but they continue to let them languish and fester with very little new/fresh content because they “don’t have time for all that”.

    Meantime they spend a crazy amount of time on Facebook and Twitter, essentially creating content that could be put to better use on their own site.

    And sure, they could continue to drive traffic to that by using Social Media, but the main focus of their time would be more constructively used building real assets that they have full ownership and control of.

  3. I just restarted my RSS reader after being inactive for 4 years on it. I’m tired of getting all of my information from the same sources on Twitter. It’s boring, and for how “big” it is it’s started to feel really small..

  4. I agree. That really small feeling is a real thing some people call a filter bubble.

    Due to filter bubbles we only hook up with people with the same views as us. As a result the algorithm fills our timelines with more of the same, and the bubble grows