[p2p-research] Fwd: on the importance of personal servers for the new multi-literate society

[M. Fioretti]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 14:03:36 PM +0700, Michel Bauwens (michelsub2004 at gmail.com) wrote:
> Dear Sepp,
>
> this quote by stephen downes seems important, and it's something I
> not fully understand, I think our readers would benefit if you could
> explain the benefitss of this strategy to them,
>
> see http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2010/02/pew-report-interview.html
>
> "I choose to see personal web‐server technology (Opera Unite,
> Firefox POW, etc) as a breakthrough technology, so people can put
> their own data into the cloud without paying Flickr or whomever. It
> is this sort of 'personal technology' I believe will characterize
> (what we now call) web 3.0 (and not 3D, or semantic web, etc.). So
> my dilemma is that, while these technologies are pretty evident
> today, it is not clear that the people I suspect Pew counts as “the
> savviest innovators” are looking at them. So I pick “out of the
> blue” even though (I think) I can see them coming from a mile away.”
> – Stephen Downes, National Research Council, Canada

What Downes says above is the same thing I explained here last year in
the whole "p2p email" thread which starts here:

http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-May/002609.html

but you should read it all. Anyway, here's a summary:

- cloud services as offered today (including Gmail, Google Wave/buzz,
  Twitter, Facebook, YouTube...) are bad (engineering-wise) and the
  opposite of P2P/empowerment/democracy... because they (re)introduce
  and make even look trendy and cool centralized points of technical
  failure and political/economical control. See gmail outages, Google
  shutting down musical blogs some days ago, Berlusconi's Mediaset
  demanding that YouTube removes all clips of their reality shows,
  Iran tracking or blocking dissidents via Twitter...

- what Downes calls "personal technology" is already here TODAY. You
  could either invent futuristic solutions and try to make the huge
  effort they need to happen asap (which is where I and M. Fawzi
  diverged in that thread), OR get today 99% of that, ie solve almost
  completely the problem described in my paragraph above if you have:

  	    1) a few euros per month
	    2) some ICT skills, OR somebody creating easy interfaces
	       to self-manage all the software pieces that ALREADY
	       exist
	    3) interest in doing this, that is studying software or
	    alternatively creating enough demand for the interfaces of
	    #2

	    Marco
-- 
Ninux Day, or why you too may need your "neighborhood Internet":
http://stop.zona-m.net/node/47