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You make interesting points, AC. The reason my wife originally chose Google App engine originally (chosen in 2008, when Google has a better reputation) was to make something any community could use for free, and because my wife was comfortable with Python. It is open source, and the code coudl be ported, or the ideas reimplemented. See:
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html
"In my lessons-learned document I said that I'm more interested in the ideas from Rakontu moving on than the actual software surviving as is. Since then a few people have asked me to elaborate on that statement. So I've reviewed and thought, and I've come up with a list of six pieces of advice for anyone who would like to incorporate ideas from Rakontu into their own effort to support online story sharing."

I had suggested using the Pointrel system I was working on, but Google was the bright big-name shiny thing, and I could not guarantee my experimental stuff was production ready. Neither could Google though for App Engine, apparently, at least back then.

She now thinks that App Engine approach was a mistake for several reasons, including that, say, a Drupal add-on would have been a better approach (as much as PHP is a crummy language).

Later work by me toward Rakontu 2.0 has been in other directions, including code you can run locally or on some server of your choice (like with the GitHub stuff). But we ran out of money funding it ourselves, so now I do unrelated stuff, but at least Cynthia still works towards finishing her free book on how communities can collect and organize their own stories in a variety of ways, available as a work-in-progress here
http://www.workingwithstories.org/

Still, if you want to be concerned about privacy, and you assume the NSA monitors all internet traffic, then it really does not matter who hosts your content if you access it through the internet.

The distributed approach I was working towards included the option to exchange info via direct exchange like on flash drives (like is happening now in Cuba).
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/13/03/19/2351234/cubans-evade-censorship-by-exchanging-flash-drives

But even that is not really secure, since any collection of information can be compromised by an informant. So, ultimately, finding an innovative way to work within the system is still probably a safer bet.

This social transition may well all be over in twenty years with the pace of technological and social advancement -- in the sense of our employment-based economy imploding from advanced automation like AI-powered robotics, various group spreading Vinge-like (Deepness in the Sky) networked "smart dust" around the world (probably developed ironically by the NSA or CIA) some of which probably makes it into the NSA and CIA headquarters and all government offices by random chance (making Wikileaks and Snowden revelations seem tame by comparison), and tons of other trends.

Who knows for sure how it will all end? We can just do our best from a hopefully moral-enough strategic foundation and keep updating our tactics as we get new information or the world changes around us as it constantly does. But what that moral foundation should be for the 21st century might make for a good exploratory Slashdot discussion (my sig being a nod in that direction).

By the way, something I wrote about Schmidt and Knol:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2011-February/000401.html
"""
Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against [that]?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a

Highlights from: http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/01/water-water-everywhere-nor-any-drop-to.html
"There were three essential reasons I left Facebook after only a short time. First, the privacy issue was big. To begin with, I set up separate accounts for my work and personal selves, which I've read is something many businesspeople are doing. I managed it, but it was an uneasy start, and later I found myself going back to my privacy settings often to check and recheck that I had things properly set. The kerfuffle that happened a few weeks ago where you couldn't log on without being pestered to reduce your privacy was reminiscent of the guilty-until-proven-innocent feeling of just having bought a Microsoft product. ...
    Nobody has only one face ... The second reason for quitting Facebook was that I didn't want to know everything it told me. (You know that joke, "That was more than I needed to know!") People tell different people different things. They present different faces to different people. Facebook may have started with one face (college classmates), but now it mixes faces together, or at least it does if people are not scrupulous about setting up separate lists (and most aren't). Within minutes of starting to use Facebook I was seeing things relatives and friends said to their friends and relatives, things that I would never have known they said, things I didn't like, things that made me feel sad to find out that we have so little in common and disagree about so much. You could argue that I should revel in the transparency and argue with people and learn about them and wade deep into the mayhem, but hey - this is the real social world we are talking about, not a game. Some arguments can never be won, and the stakes are high, and I have better things to do with my time. ...
    The third thing about Facebook is, it sets you up for an obligatory time drain. It is so easy to "friend" somebody you barely know that you end up with social obligations that don't match the relationships. Putting my father in the same list as a guy I barely remember from high school just doesn't make sense. The obligations I feel towards those two people differ by orders of magnitude, but in Facebook it all looks the same. (No offense to that guy - See? I just felt a social obligation to say that!) I found myself feeling socially obligated to review and comment on things people I've never met have been doing, and I perused picture after picture trying to figure out if I knew any of the people in them. I only got up to 25 "friends" so I can see how this sort of thing could take up huge amounts of time. The social obligation to say something, anything, is overpowering. ..."

Google Groups solves some of this, but not all.

Disclaimer: She has ideas for something called Rakontu she feels would be better:
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html

Highlights from: http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/01/water-water-everywhere-nor-any-drop-to.html
"There were three essential reasons I left Facebook after only a short time. First, the privacy issue was big. To begin with, I set up separate accounts for my work and personal selves, which I've read is something many businesspeople are doing. I managed it, but it was an uneasy start, and later I found myself going back to my privacy settings often to check and recheck that I had things properly set. The kerfuffle that happened a few weeks ago where you couldn't log on without being pestered to reduce your privacy was reminiscent of the guilty-until-proven-innocent feeling of just having bought a Microsoft product. ...
    Nobody has only one face ... The second reason for quitting Facebook was that I didn't want to know everything it told me. (You know that joke, "That was more than I needed to know!") People tell different people different things. They present different faces to different people. Facebook may have started with one face (college classmates), but now it mixes faces together, or at least it does if people are not scrupulous about setting up separate lists (and most aren't). Within minutes of starting to use Facebook I was seeing things relatives and friends said to their friends and relatives, things that I would never have known they said, things I didn't like, things that made me feel sad to find out that we have so little in common and disagree about so much. You could argue that I should revel in the transparency and argue with people and learn about them and wade deep into the mayhem, but hey - this is the real social world we are talking about, not a game. Some arguments can never be won, and the stakes are high, and I have better things to do with my time. ...
    The third thing about Facebook is, it sets you up for an obligatory time drain. It is so easy to "friend" somebody you barely know that you end up with social obligations that don't match the relationships. Putting my father in the same list as a guy I barely remember from high school just doesn't make sense. The obligations I feel towards those two people differ by orders of magnitude, but in Facebook it all looks the same. (No offense to that guy - See? I just felt a social obligation to say that!) I found myself feeling socially obligated to review and comment on things people I've never met have been doing, and I perused picture after picture trying to figure out if I knew any of the people in them. I only got up to 25 "friends" so I can see how this sort of thing could take up huge amounts of time. The social obligation to say something, anything, is overpowering. ..."

Google Groups solves some of this, but not all.

Disclaimer: She has ideas for something called Rakontu she feels would be better:
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html

http://www.rakontu.org/
"Rakontu is free and open source software that small groups of people can use together to share and work with their stories. It's for people in neighborhoods, families, interest groups, support groups, work groups: any group of people with stories to share. Rakontu members build shared "story museums" that they can draw upon to achieve common goals."

My wife and I have been working on that. The first version was for Google App Engine, but our next version is being built for the deskop in Java using CouchDB for a backend (a backend that can be either server-based or peer-to-peer) that can also provide an RSS feed.

But, after a lot of time spent doing this for free, we need to raise some money to keep it going (like on the order of US$20K - US$40K to finish the next version of the design goals in the documents on that webpage). We've been talking about using Kickstarter. But maybe Diaspora has used up all the mindshare about that?

But in any case, my wife wrote a related blog post called "Steal these ideas":
    http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html
"I spent part of last year building an open-source web application for story sharing and sensemaking in small groups. It's called Rakontu. This was a dream that began in 1999 (when I first started working in organizational and community narrative) and has been growing ever since. I used up years of savings to do it, and I was able to build far less than I would like to build someday, but I had a grand time and I'm glad I did it. I wrapped up the project about a month ago and posted an excerpt from a lessons-learned document for the project.
    In my lessons-learned document I said that I'm more interested in the ideas from Rakontu moving on than the actual software surviving as is. Since then a few people have asked me to elaborate on that statement. So I've reviewed and thought, and I've come up with a list of six pieces of advice for anyone who would like to incorporate ideas from Rakontu into their own effort to support online story sharing."

In any case, some people are trying. Maybe someday our society will have a "basic income" to ensure all people have more time for civic-minded pursuits if they are so inclined.

The book "The Light of Other Days" is in part about the loss of privacy (though through other means than the internet).
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days

One issue is that once no one has a private life, all the foibles humans have become known and the baseline changes (so, you learn everyone belches, etc.)

I'm not saying that is necessarily good, I'm just saying that at least that is a possibility.

In general I agree with you about the notion of different faces people want to present. My wife wrote an essay about that in relation to Facebook:
    http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/01/water-water-everywhere-nor-any-drop-to.html
   

Good points.

If you look at this evolutionarily, humans are adapted for hundreds of thousands of years to living in small groups or tribes (of mostly family or more distant relatives). Living in cities is only a few thousand years old (and old cities were more like today's towns of 50,000 people). And living on the internet is only a decade or so old for most people. So, we are not adapted to it at all. So, we can either adapt to it or we can adapt it to us. :-) Or we can let things fall apart. Or we can do some mix of all three? :-)

My wife made a related point here about Facebook:
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/01/water-water-everywhere-nor-any-drop-to.html
"I got off Facebook today. I was only on it for about a month, but I learned some interesting things from the experience about the internet and social connections, some of which will help me improve my own social web application (Rakontu), and some of which may be useful to others. ..."

There is yet another trend that I mention here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
"As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

I'm a trustee of a small non-profit organization (a historical society) and I have been talking some with the board about how, like with fire, we can in theory use computers effectively without getting burned by them. But, to get a lot more good than bad out of computers (relative to who we are or who we want to be), we really have to ask first, what are our values, goals, and priorities and how can we create a technical infrastructure out of all the possibilities that reflects those values.

Political scientist Langdon Winner raised this sort of issue in "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought" from 1978. From:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aq/summary/v058/58.3pena.html
"Langdon Winner ends his Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought with a corrective to what he believes is an inaccurate popular understanding of the message in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It is not, he argues, a monster story of the inevitable dangers of technological wizardry. Rather, it is a story of "the plight of things that have been created but not in the context of suffic

I liked your point, and agree with it to the extent. Still, there are other social dynamics at work here moving in a post-scarcity direction towards a fundamental social change where "success" is redefined as it takes fewer people to produce enough for everyone. So, powerful tools can change how we can and should use them if we are to avoid irony (as suggested in my sig line).

And then, there is the issue of what sorts of internet tools groups of various sorts really need to be healthy groups. I'm not sure anyone fully understands that yet. And it may vary based on the group, even with some groups maybe being better off without any internet tools?

From something my wife just wrote:
    "It takes all kinds, even on the internet"
    http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/10/it-takes-all-kinds-even-on-internet.html
"Sadly, the thing Gladwell gets wrong (and lots of people have already pointed this out so I won't elaborate) is that weak and strong ties, and hierarchies and meshworks, are not polar opposites. They intermingle and interpenetrate, and they influence and sometimes become each other. I agree that social media support weak ties more than they support strong ties. But people interact in many ways. The whole thing is not as simple or strong as he makes it out -- and that in itself is telling, as I will explain. ... I still think the internet doesn't work very well for small groups working together towards common goals, and I still want to help it get better at that. But this experience has given me new respect for what extraverted people can do with extraverted tools, and a new interest in supporting interactions among both introverts and extraverts. I'd say the most important thing I have learned in the past week is this. People who care about social activism on the internet need to be more aware of how our own personalities affect what we think everyone needs. And we need to build tools that work with, not just in spite of, our diverse ways of interacting. It's not good enough to say our tools work for some ways of interacting and connecting -- yours or mine. We need to make everyone part of the solution, if we don't want to build more problems."

So, tools can make a big difference to *groups*, in terms of affecting group dynamics. Clay Shirky talks a little about this in "A group is its own worst enemy".
    http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Or Doug Englebart's point on the need for a goupr and its tools to co-evolve.
    http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html

Your point certainly applies to individuals and connects to "a bad crasftsman blames his tools".

But what if you are a tool maker, not just a tool user? What do you learn from all this discussion and experience about how to change the nature of our social tools to promote or sustain key values of democracy/accountability, joy, health, prosperity, community, and intrinsic/mutual security?