One of the unintended side effects of joining Quora and spending an inane amount answering there instead of writing here is shown in my server logs. Things aren’t as they used to be ’round these parts, nowadays. It’s cold and a little lonelier in my ${HOME}, what with a semi-abandoned blog and all. Sure, there are still around 400 or so visits to old content any given day, maybe 200 or so to new stuff, but that’s a far cry from the olden days when posting anything pretty much meant to get a few dozen comments and a few thousand views.

I don’t begrudge people this. I’ve left subscriptions to many blogs in the light of Facebook, Google+, Quora, and other hosted data storages becoming the de-facto place to write on. It’s easier to just hop onto Google+ and start scrolling, seeing the pictures, reading the words. Or to pick up one’s Quora notification where one left off the day before, sure to have some bright minds’ opinions and facts on interesting things.

In a sense we are witnessing the urbanization of the Internet. Instead of small villages of active community interaction we find providers in strip malls whose product is actually much less social than its non-social precursors, the village trading post. I still have one in my town, a place to buy chicken feed and a gun, buy books and pick up prescriptions sent down from the big city. My trading post clerk still wears his vest and knows best which kind of nails I need to for my fence because he drives past it every day. Those blogs of old weren’t lonely and disjointed, they were homes, connected by roads everyone traveled freely to seek out each other. Today’s content farms are only in name social, consumption and self-serving proclamations have turned the global village into a global strip mall where no one really knows anyone else and the trading post clerk works as a greeter at Walmart.

No one likes to write for twenty eyeballs. Between Quora’s wide reach and the occasional re-print on sites such as Slate, Forbes, Huffington Post, or others, my reach expanded. 40,000 views on something I’d written wasn’t uncommon, dozens or sometimes even hundreds of replies and comments were neither. Blogging, in contrast, is an almost lonely exercise in the days of Facebooked responses, a small town feel in an Apalachian village everyone has long since left to work in the big city.

I believe we can change this. Embrace the old RSS reader, pingbacks and trackbacks, visits at friends’ homes. We can teach each other to spend time reading Ben Goldacre’s blog and secondary blog[1] instead of mindlessly upvoting and sharing pithy pictures on I Fucking Love Science.

I believe we can finally make the web work for us instead of us working for faceless, emotionless, companies to whom our content is the product, our work the asset, and our future not as important as their present. We can (pardon my French) cloud things in our own clouds, like back in the day when “cloud” was called “server”, and post things without fear that tomorrow Big Corp One buys Little Corp Two and decides to “pivot” (more cursing, sorry) whatever product we provided into the bottomless pits of data purgatory.

To, as they say, buy locally. Write locally. Comment locally. Make blogs and self-hosted things a piece of valuable global village culture again. Maybe I am a dreamer, the techminstrel version of those old guys sitting outside their homes between abandoned stores on Route 66 who hope, against all hope, that one day people will understand the value of villages again, leave Route 40 nearby, and stop in for a drink, a laugh, a loaf of bread, and some gas.

Maybe I am just not seeing it, not understanding how voluntary relinquishing of services in the form of data, to someone who reserves the right to do with it as they please, is a good thing. Maybe I am getting old. But, by Odin, if I have to get old, I’d much rather get old at home.

[1] Ben’s Secondary Blog shows the issues with remote content. Posterous is going away, a host of great data will be lost to a lot of people – even if Ben moves it, the years of Google juice will be gone. For quite some time looking for bad pharmacy trial data stories will just lead into a void.