Anyway, I've thought up a couple of updates/changes/slightly different use cases for Diaspora*, and rather than just whinging online about needing someone to sort it out, I figured that I should probably fork that mother on github, and start contributing something back. Which means learning about Ruby on Rails things. Which is what all the hipster kids are coding in these days I believe. *does some weird snappy thing with fingers while saying something about down the kidz or whatever*.

I've got an email server to fix (my own) so I'm going to drop a pair of links in here, and run.

Firstly, Robert Llewellyn announced that he is going to publish a book through unbound.co.uk, called News from Gardenia. I dare say that it's somewhat less difficult for "names" such as Mr Llewellyn, and Monty Python's Terry Jones (I see him listed on the "books funded and now for sale" section) than it would be for someone like me, but the kickstarter like model for authoring really appeals to me, in a "break the monopoly of the big publishing companies" way. It's the year 2011, and still there are silly rules like country A can't have an ebook version of this book, because the paperback isn't out yet, and country B already has the paperback, but country C can only have the hardback until after christmas, unless it's an airside shop at an airport, where they can sell the paperback, etc. The times they are a-changing, and old business models need to be revisited, updated, and made appropriate for the global economy in which we now live.

Another site beginning with un, I just discovered this evening a site called unhosted. It's an intriguing looking project, which allows you to develop a web app which then gives the user the opportunity to use their own backend storage (where "there own" equals something like google drive, or wordpress, or dropbox). Obviously this is a little bit of out of the frying pan, into the fire, as you're moving your data from the silo owned by the web app developer, to a silo owned by the likes of google, or dropbox, but with dropbox, for example, the data will be automatically synchronised back to your own machine, so it's not entirely locked away.

I have a feeling that the Next Big Thing(tm) to come along, and I'm talking five years or more, is going to be de-centralisation, and the owning of your own data.