Mediachain as decentralized blogging platform

[denisnazarov]

It would be awesome to use Mediachain as a blog publishing platform.

How it could work:

Publishing the blog:

• Alice writes a blog post in Markdown using an open source Markdown editor.
• Alice publishes blog1.md to IPFS.
• Alice creates a Mediachain record (a new canonical_id) with the title, author, date, and license fields populated with the information about her post. She associates the hash of her blog post with the entry. She publishes it to Mediachain.
• A centralized interface can be used to publish out to Mediachain as well.

Consuming the blog:
This can happen in both centralized ways for convenience or totally decentralized.

Centralized (a gateway for all blogs):

• Create a blog.mediachain.io gateway (or anyone can run their own).
• The gateway becomes an "indexer" node that tails the Mediachain and indexes Mediachain entries that have been tagged "blog"
• Urls are accessible via blog.mediachain.io/alice/blog1
• The gateway can provide fancy themes for the Markdown

Centralized (host your own blog):

• Alice creates an indexer that just filters posts signed by her and exposes an http interface via alicesblog.com

Decentralized:

• A local Electron client can be a UI into blogs discovered in your local Mediachain instance
• Can also be consumed via CLI

Applications
This is where things get fun. Applications can be on top of exist blog entries in Mediachain by simply appending metadata to the canonical_id.

Some ideas that spring to mind are comments and inline annotations.

What's cool is that the poster didn't have to envision this use-case, but it could be layered on top of their content.

Imagine if anyone could implement their own Disqus or Genius on top of your content in a completely decentralized manner.

Some open questions
In the examples above, the burden of building an index of a user's posts is put on the consumer of the data.

• How can users publish an index of their post, so an interested consumer can just follow that and not have to have the entire Mediachain on disk?

---

Feedback appreciated!

[albertwenger]

I like the thinking here. I wouldn't call the "host your own blog" option "centralized" though -- as you control your own index. I have also had a previous related post.