I am consolidating my digital possessions, partially to keep sane, and partially to move on to other, more interesting projects.
Almost five years ago I registered the domain journalcloud.com. At the time I meant to run a blogging network that was similar to WordPress.com, but that was small enough that I could interact with and assist the people on the network. My dream was to get everyone around me blogging.
Well, that didn’t turn out exactly as I wanted. It was very helpful through the years, of getting people online quickly. We always said that people would graduate from Journal Cloud, and take all their data with them. This worked out better than I imagined, too well to keep the site going.
The reason is, it’s now easier to just get people their own domain and let them run their own WordPress/StatusNet/Drupal/whatever instance. The people who go along with their own domain get into it, and the people who agree to it are the ones who are active, anyhow.
I’ve been keeping the site around for about a year without really using it. Now I am ready to destroy it and build something else.
So I am.
I have the domain for another few months, so I will see if an idea strike me as to using it for something. I got the name because I like the words “journal” and “cloud”, but now it seems like it was on the buzz-term bandwagon. It probably conjures mental models of decentralized storage for content-driven weblogs, instead of the image of yourself, relaxing on a cloud and writing your thoughts into a Moleskin journal.
Well, if you have any ideas, tell me. Otherwise, my work with journals and clouds will be done. 