I read Ben Werdmüller’s post on his Medium experiment and started writing in his comment form, and ended up here¹.

Mean time to comment is an interesting metric to think about for the different channels in which readers read your blog.

I didn’t email you because I am in my RSS reader or in my browser and the effort level of ALL the stuff I have to talk to you about crowds out the brief comment ;)

This is totally not an average user thing, but Medium like “comments that are blog posts” is maybe interesting.

The way I’ve thought about this is, use Micropub! You have a comment form, and people write in there, but you give the option to authenticate to their Micropub blog. I would write a post, but it would end up as a reply on my own blog.

Also: logging in via Twitter and posting to Twitter would work too (or Mastodon). And probably be much more widely used.

Or: check a box and say “email these comments to Ben and don’t publish them” or however to word that.

I currently use Micro.blog. I only get comments via Twitter. I need to wedge Webmentions in there but self hosted that plus Bridgy plus various ways I need to set that up… unlikely to happen. Plus I’ve been thinking about what to use for subscribe to my blog by email, since RSS doesn’t work for everyone.

Reply by email to comment —which Discourse forums do — is another thing.

Also: because you have a form — I wrote a TON and just hit submit! Which will likely lead to an email back and forth!

Can I pay for social comments?

Last idea, because you want to build community, is that Discourse forums can be set up so that every blog post gets a forum thread.

It is relatively easy to setup for someone technical like you or me, costs about $10/month on Digital Ocean.

I saw that Richard Eriksson shared news about the “new Gowalla”.

I replied to Richard’s tweet:

I haven’t delved into it, have you see anything about data licensing?

I’ll just come right out and say that I’d love for the basics of location data to be openly licensed, maybe synced or improved with OpenStreetMap over time. <twitter.com/bmann/sta…>

I then headed over to LinkedIn and posted there to see if I could get some mapping friends to weigh in, tagging Will Cadell of Sparkgeo of and Eric Gunderson of Mapbox:

I am completely uninterested in spending a bunch of time on a platform which doesn’t have AT LEAST non-commercial re-use of data around locations.

Do you all know anything about state of the art location (business, place, etc) licensing?

Are people syncing back to Open Street Map as a shared layer?

Can we include IndieWeb protocols like Micropub “check ins” so we can extend beyond a silo from day one?

Any info, speculation, or hard earned learnings welcome ;)

I’d be happy to participate in Gowalla-like activities – but I don’t want to do it if the links, identifiers, and data are all owned by another locked down platform.

The location of a store, what type of store it is, and user “enrichment” like photos, reviews, etc. shouldn’t be locked in one data silo.

There is more awareness around these issues, so maybe we can raise them early, and get these platforms to address this up front.

The Sunlit 3 beta is available, and now open source.

Is an open source “Instagram” possible?

I had a long discussion with an artist about moving off Instagram and Facebook. I told him he was putting photos up inside a mall, and he didn’t disagree. Because he can sell inside the mall.

He was uncomfortable about it. That I was kind of accusatory, shouldn’t he go first, to walk out of the mall and lure people outside instead.

So how do we encourage people that doing street graffiti is something they might want to do?

Putting my technologist hat back on, an open source mobile app like Sunlit is an interesting starting point.

Supporting Micropub and WordPress are great starting points.

Now what about a SquareSpace interface? Drupal and Joomla? Mastodon?

Tumblr? Flickr?

This mix of open source and protocols and networks gets us to an interesting spot.

Does multiple forks of Sunlit help? That is, say other people use the code and deploy apps to the App Store. Can that be additive to a network of users using open protocols and platforms? I’m sort of asking if we can kickstart a more open and federated network.

What if that app added “Buy Now” buttons? Where users could add their own links to a place where they could buy what is in the photo. Or tip the photographer!

Thanks @manton for open sourcing. That begins to give us the opportunity to contribute and build upon what’s there now.