I have long been an advocate of maintaining a personal presence on the Internet. Expressing your own perspective is a great way to learn. I also harbor the idealistic view that our collective comments are a way to counter the influence of those able to pay for amplifiers of their own views by way of television and radio. The potential of this approach seems to be slipping a bit as the more traditional information sources are moving online.
The “indieweb” movement is an attempt to keep this idealistic perspective alive. It proposes that we all should have an online presence that we control. The hard core among them do not accept Facebook, Twitter, etc. as a way to do this and argue each of us should have control at the server level. You may believe this is taking things too far, but controlling your own area of the web is not that difficult and informative.
Here are some resources:
A recent podcast from TWIG (this week in Google) contains an extended discussion of the philosophy and implementation opportunities for the indie web.
The software featured in the TWIG podcast is called Known.
Known and the idie web is discussed on GigaOm
I can’t say I have explored Known. As interesting as I find these ideas I already have a 12 year investment in blogging from my own server space and even longer offering what I now now is considered serving indie content. However, if I was starting from scratch, this software would be an interesting option. If you are an educator, listen to the TWIG podcast to understand the role they see for education.