Free, New and Promising “Known” Blogging Platform

Ben Werdmuller and Erin Richey are part of the Indie Web movement, a loose knit group of hackers and designers reclaiming control over their online lives, grabbing them back from the big name web companies. They run a company called Known, and its first product plays right into this ethic. It is an open source publishing tool designed to provide a way of more easily publishing status updates, blog posts, and photos to a wide range of social media services, including Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. However, it comes with a twist: it lets you keep a copy of whatever you publish and post on your own site.

The idea is that you can more easily organize all your digital info in one place, and more easily show it to others.

Known provides what looks like a regular blog, but with a variety of open-source standards and plugins that allows users to cross-post or distribute their status updates, photos, videos and other content to networks like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr with a single click. They can also pull comments or responses from those networks back into their blog, using an open standard called WebMentions.

The Known software is available in two forms:

* A hosted version at withknown where anyone can set up their own Known site for free.

* A standalone version you can install on your own server - with the full source code available on Github as well as themes and plugins.

Main Features:

* Bookmarklet. Easily post to your site, save links, and respond to comments from any page on the web

* #Tags. Use hashtags with any content to categorize and organize what you publish

* Responsive Layout. View, edit, and post to your site from any device

* Unified Comments. View comments in one place, whether the discussion takes place on your website, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

* Email Notifications. Get updated whenever someone responds to a post

* Feeds. Get your latest updates via RSS, XML, JSON, or KML

* Multi-Author. Invite other contributors and create a multi-user site

* HTML & Rich Text Editor. Handcraft your posts in HTML or save time with the WYSIWYG

Website: https://withknown.com/

Sources and Additional Information:

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/known/

https://gigaom.com/2014/09/11/indieweb-advocates-launch-known-so-bloggers-can-be-social-and-still-control-their-content/

http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2014/09/the-importance-of-the-known-publishing-platform-and-the-rise-of-the-indie-web.html