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.

Benjamin Mako Hill gave a keynote at Libre Planet outlining progress on defining free network services since last year’s FSF member meeting, primarily the launch of Autonomo.us’ Franklin Street Statement, and an update on discussions within the FSF on network services.

See slides and notes from the talk and listen to an audio recording.

Continuing in the tradition of Bradley Kuhn posting a conference keynote in the podcast category of this blog, I’ll post this and perhaps others from Libre Planet one at a time as podcasts (or podcast lites — we’ve had only two fully produced Autonomo.us podcast episodes so far).

This recording is in speex format. Hopefully your podcatcher knows how to deal with that. [Update: works just fine in Rhythmbox.]

• Richard Stallman’s quotes in a recent article in the Guardian
• our efforts to make our own Web site a Free Service
• our interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about Wikia Search, his company’s project to create a Free Network Service for Web search.

• Dropping out of School from the (awesome) album Out of It by Brad Sucks (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0)
• minimal ground by bayboom.
• San Anton from the album Bistro Malaga by Estupendo (ad hoc “free to re-use” license)

Please comment here or on the Podcast wiki page. I’m looking forward to more exciting podcast recordings in the coming months.

Although our conversation was reflective and unstructured, we left the recorder rolling. I’ve gone ahead and put that recording up, essentially unedited, for anyone that anyone who’d like to listen in on what we had to say to each other.

One concerete outcome of our conversation was a decision to do these types of podcasts more in the future. We’ll invite guests who are active and involved in thinking about and taking action on issues related to software freedom and network services, we’ll get hear from them, and we’ll talk to them about the issues as a group.

We hope our next one to be up in less than a month with a guest that’s still to be finalized. You can listen to or download the first podcast in OGG vorbis format now.