Stanching the Re-CompuServing of the Social Web

At the end of my post last week about weblogs and the GDPR I mentioned that Frank Meeuwsen had recorded a Pecha Kucha talk of mine at the Reboot conference in 2006. This, in turn, prompted a rumination by Frank about Reboot and its role in his life, further spurred on by Ton’s similar look back.

Three years ago, on the 10th anniversary of my first Reboot, I also looked back, and, rereading that post now, I realize that, as Frank and Ton realized, Reboot played an even more significant role in my life than I imagined.

You can’t go home again, and as the shadow of Reboot recedes into the past and the calls to resuscitate it fade, it is a good time to consider the larger legacy of the conference: the connections forged in its furnace, but also the social web that both allowed it to happen, powered it, and from which novel new manifestations thereof spun.

That Ton and Frank and I could consult our own blog posts from a decade or more ago as a resource for this reflection is a testament, if nothing else, to the diarizing utility of the medium.

In this spirit, I am happy to see a tentative rekindling of the social web underway. It’s not in full flower by any means, but people are dusting off old tool-chains and, with the value of distance from earlier, reconsidering how it all connects together.

For the first time in a decade, I feel like the social web might have promise against the onslaught of the re-CompuServing of the web.