(Or predictions that I’m making because I want them to happen.)
Dave Winer has a post on the Wordpress version of Scripting News —sidebar:
(I’ve never figured out how he determines what writing goes where. Some of it makes sense, the RSS stuff on the RSS blog (btw Dave, this is down at the moment, “Can’t call the script because the name “mainResponder” hasn’t been defined.”) the xml-rpc stuff on that site, etc., but how he chooses between Scripting Userland/OPML and Scripting Wordpress has so far eluded me.)
—on the mystique of desktop web servers. I hope for a great deal more development in this area because it goes to one of my chief concerns in the Google powered (not to say dominated) Web 2.0 world. That is, I own my stuff. Stuff here is defined as anything that I’ve created, be they words, pictures, audio, music, video, art (profane and otherwise), architecture, movie scripts, novels, novellae, essays, drawings, characatures, cartoons, readings, spoken word rap (for you Futurama fans out there); to paraphrase Justice Stewart, I know what’s mine. This wouldn’t seem like such an issue, but sitting where I am today I see a lot of companies that would like to own what I’ve created. Perhaps they don’t know it yet, but that’s what they (more specifically, the lawyers they employ) want.
For some they truly want to mine all of our creativity and then sell it to the masses. For others it’s simply a protection against imagined lawsuits. For some others (looking at you SBC/AT&T/at&t) it’s avarice run amok.
One example, don’t you think Flickr’s Interestingness would make a great coffee table book?
This is part of what the publishers are fighting about with Google. Sure Google says they’ll do no evil right now, but it takes one bad year or one hostile takeover to change a company’s philosophy quite quickly. Moreover, Google isn’t the only search engine out there and as far as I know GOOG is the only one with a semi-altruistic mission. And if GOOG can do it, so can MSFT, YHOO and T (or is it now t?). Anyone out there think that MSFT’s lawyers aren’t licking their chops watching GOOG pave new ground in copyright law? Remember that the true spirit of copyright law is to protect not the heirs to Walt Disney’s fortune, but to protect you and me from those same gentlemen.
And that’s what brings me back to the desktop web server. I want it because in the end I need it to prove what’s mine. I love the web and the services that now abound on it, but it’s still early and there are a lot of big cattle rustlers out there.