Who Stores all the Lovebombs of the Writable Web?

I've been thinking a lot recently about Mozilla's mission to promote the open web. Part of that mission, a part I'd like to be involved in, has been described as "educating the next generation of web makers" and as "creating a web-literate planet". And an important part of web literacy (and web making, of course) is the realization that the internet is not just for consumption of information, but that it is writable.

Do you remember what the web was like before blogs and wikis? The web was only writable if you were a "webmaster". (Does anyone even use that term anymore?) This meant, at a minimum that you could edit HTML and understood how to use ftp. (And a working knowledge of <frameset> and <marquee> was nice, too. :-)

Blogs changed this by making it radically simpler to publish content to the web. You didn't have to be a webmaster anymore, you could just be a blogger. It made a huge difference at the time. In this age of Twitter, though, blogging feels like a chore. My blogging software runs sluggishly on my webhost, there's always comment spam to deal with, RSS feeds are always a mystery, and my templates are out-of-date (I've been meaning to take the ads off the site, but haven't made the time.)

I don't use Facebook, but I gather that publishing content in Facebook is much easier than blogging. But (and this is a really important point to understand) Facebook isn't the open web, so it doesn't count.

It seems to me if the web is going to be truely writable, we need a paradigm shift that makes it even easier to create and publish content than blogging software does.

Atul Varma and Jess Klein have taken a step in this direction with lovebomb.me and the related Webpage Maker and webpad.hackasaurus.org. Their goal is to teach kids how to write HTML and CSS. But they don't want to send the kids off on a quest to register a domain, purchase a hosting plan and learn how to use scp for uploading pages. If kids are going to learn to create and edit web pages, they need a way to publish their work and immediately show it to friends, parents and teachers. So what each of these sites does is host the user's content for them at a short random URL, in the same way that sites like pastebin.com and jsbin do.

This is a great solution for lovebomb.me, hackasaurus, and jsbin: those sites have a relatively small community of users and are used for relatively specific purposes. But it doesn't scale to make the whole web writable (maybe it could scale if Google hosted it, and the "writable web" was just a collection of Google Docs documents :-). In addition to the issue of not having unlimited storage space, there is also the administrative and legal issues of how to deal with the inevitable problems of spam, malware, pornography, and hate speech that will come to infest anonymously writeable sites like these.

Many of us are already publishing our content all over the web, with the help of commercial or ad-supported services:

• blog posts at blogger.com, etc.
• photos at flickr.com, etc.
• source code at github.com, etc.
• music at mp3locker.com, etc.
• documents and spreadsheets at docs.google.com

So that brings me, finally, to the point of this post: who stores the writable web? Publishing content to the web ought to be as easy as File -> Save As. But where does that content go? Do I have to own a domain and pay for webhosting to be a web maker, or can I use a service to handle the storage details for me? And can I publish all my content in once place, or do I have to rely on different storage services for different types of content?

I don't have any answers, or even any proposals, really. Only questions:

• Can we decouple the way we refer to web content from the details of where that content is hosted?
• Do we need some higher-level URI scheme that allows web makers to store all their content in a single hierarchical namespace that is independent of domain names of the services that actually store that content?
• Can identity service providers (like BrowserId) tackle this problem by defining a namespace that refers to all the content defined by or owned by each identity?
• Can storage service providers define a working "Save As" feature for the writable web?