Another podcast lite — audio recording of Evan Prodromou’s Libre Planet keynote on engineering for free network services based on his years of experience developing free software and in particular the free network service identi.ca, the laconica software that service runs, and the OpenMicroBlogging federation protocol the software implements. Announced after the conference, see Evan’s post on status.net for where he’s taking the service. Very exciting stuff!

To whet your appetite for the podcast I’ll highlight probably the two least obvious or most controversial points Evan made:

• Smart data reduces the need for smart code, thus supports user autonomy. Put another way (from Evan microblogging a later conference rather than this talk, but it fits), metadata democratizes data. On that note watch for more exciting stuff being done with RDFa all the time.
• Build free network services in PHP/MySQL. This is painful for many to hear, but if you want your code to be deployed by people on their own servers (or their own $5/month or less shared hosting account — the key being they control the code running the application in either case), PHP and MySQL are far easier for users to deal with than cooler stacks that require installing additional software in the typical case.

Listen and see notes and slides for more.