Blogging tool gives you ownership of Facebook messages

Ariel Zambelich

All these things you post on Facebook and Twitter and many other social media sites? Ben and Erin Richey Werdmuller want to challenge your hands.

Werdmuller and are part of the Web Richey indie movement, a loose group of hackers and designers Checkpoint feedback online about their lives, to achieve web business big names. You have known a company called its first product and plays right into this ethic. This is a publishing tool open source designed to provide a means, status updates, blog entries and photos is easier to publish on a variety of social media services like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. But it comes with a twist: it can be a copy of what you write and post to keep on your own site.

The idea is that you can more easily organize all your digital information in one place, and just show it to others.

Ben and Erin Richey Werdmuller

Known

Is well known, can be used with almost any kind of website, the company intends tools offered by higher education - at least initially. The tool integrates with learning management systems "" used by many universities -. Tools such as Blackboard or Moodle can So students to appear the tasks, questions and ideas on their own sites. But as is known, in accordance with popular social networking services, it can act as a central hub where students can manage all their content online last night to trade allocations to the pictures of the party.

Part of the land is that the tool offers privacy controls, fine-grained, so that you can recover stolen a little more privacy from the giants of the web. And once the graduates, known to act as a portfolio of their work and life, do not work to maintain than a possibility, status updates and photos on social networks.

The road to better blogging
Richey said the team is also known target, a blogging service that much easier to use than other typical open source tools. Part of this involved design tool for mobile devices and web, but also the team built from scratch to work with social networks. Most other tools to deal with cross-posting third-party plugins may break at any time.

At least is the tool used is an improvement over the of most universities learning management systems. This is a nightmare, says Jim Groom, Director of Learning Technology at the University of Mary Washington, Virginia, who runs one of the first known drivers. "No one really wants to use Blackboard," he said. "It is known, is an elegant solution."

But building a smooth surface is known only half the battle. A major problem with the movement of the indie band, which usually produces tools for the less technically minded hard to install and configure. It's easy to sign up for a Twitter account, but always an open-source alternative that runs on your own server, and register your own domain name, is more work required. This is one of the most famous in cooperation with universities reasons.

The brutal history of the Digital Natives
Somehow married man and his assistant, Timothy Owens, then they can help known to the world push. You run the digital literacy initiative developed to better understand student life of Mary Washington on the web. "It was a brutal history of digital native," says Owens. "People think that have already resulted know these things, but they do not do it." But known and other tools can change that.

In addition to providing a website where students automatically install open source software such as WordPress, MediaWiki and known code school, each student is assigned its own Internet domain name. The school even has an official reseller of domain names to the process will be easier. It is an idea that the groom is so passionate, he co-founded Reclaim promote your domain at the idea of the school.

Give students their own field, Owens married and hope to help students keep their web presence upon graduation. Or services known accommodation - - where the content was all the students were migrated from the school servers to a new hosting service need to do is point your domains to the new position.

It is all the months or even years down the road. University of Mary Washington is just beginning its experienced pilots. Owens is as part of a class that teaches digital storytelling be used, and some students have already started to play with him. But it could be another small step forward for the web indie.

This article appeared on Wired.com