Hello First Page
Wow. I just heard about Scalar. I'm excited. I know Scalar's interest is scholarly works, even so, I'm going to use a fairly technical term here, I'm very fucking excited. Scalar seems, like, genius. Yes, I'm a Wordpress fangrrl. Scalar seems CMSey and Composey like WP. But with multiple authors on a single, uh, post? document? "book"? thingy? Authorea seems to rock with the multiple authors. Authorea seems a lot like Scalar. But then Scalar's got this whole "cow pathing" thing. And reader comments become "pages" in their own right. Wow. Mind blown. Like Wordpress suddenly seems so "modern" to Scalar's "postmodern." Scalar could be incredible.
But.
I'm worried.
I'm worried that Scalar will be Alta Vista.
I'm worried that Scalar will be Friendster.
I'm worried that Scalar will be Google Wave.
I don't suppose that Wordpress is going to be the dominant publishing platform that it is today, forever. Will the Wordpress metaphor even hold when we're all jacked in to Google Glass? I hope it's not Google Wave Glass.
Things on the interenet go away all the time. Platforms get millions of users and then suddenly pull the plug. They turn to their draconian TOS to say, well, we never promised you more than 24 hours notice when we decided to dump 2 years of your content and work.
Whether it's Friendster being a powerful idea but being beaten out by MySpace and then Facebook, or Google Wave being a powerful idea but probably too complicated for a lot of users, the scenarios where Scalar is never really adopted or suddenly killed are plenty.
Yes it's open source. Yes you can export your content. But a dead open source project is still mostly dead. And exported content, especially content that's as semantically woven and multipathed as Scalar appears to encourage you to be... well... that needs a platform brain to import to that can make sense of all that.
CONCLUSIONS
1. I am excited about Scalar
2. I am worried about Scalar
3. I probably should not worry about #1 or #2 above, and should just play with Scalar and see how things go.
4. But (even though Scalar's still, or just now, in Beta) would there ever come a point that you'd move a 1,000 post, 36 author, Wordpress "salon" over to Scalar?
5. See #2 above.
6. See #1 above.
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