Why the Open Web Still Matters

Anna: Hi, Aaron. Hi Jonathan. It’s nice to see you here today. We have a very special guest today here with us. His name is Aaron Campbell. Aaron, welcome to our podcast.

Aaron: Thank you.

Anna: Would you like to say a few words about yourself?

Aaron: Yeah, sure. I’m Aaron Campbell. I have been, I don’t know, working on the web for 20 something years now and focused on WordPress for the last… Gosh, I should have prepped with some numbers on that.

Jonathan: It’s been a while.

Aaron: 13 or 14 years at least I’d say.

Anna: Nice.

Aaron: Not quite the entire length of the WordPress project, but I’m now working over at Newfold Digital, focused on kind of our WordPress products that we run in the space.

Anna: That’s beautiful. I saw the hat as part of your personal brand. I think that many people have seen it, but I’m not sure if many people know the story behind. Would you like to share that with us?

The story behind the fedora

Aaron: The story behind the hat is actually really simple and maybe a little funny to tell right now since I am on video to YouTube without the hat.

Anna: That’s okay.

Aaron: I’m wearing headphones and they don’t work well with the fedora. But it was pretty simple. My wife bought me a fedora one time and I wore it to a WordPress event. It was very obvious how many people recognized me at Day 2 of the event instead of the usual me reintroducing myself. I’m one of those people that tends to just blend into the crowd. And so I thought, “Oh, that’s great. I’m just going to do that again.” And you do something like three times and it becomes your thing. And so then it was just my thing. On the upside, I get to wear lots of really fun fedoras and have something to constantly look for at hat shops and stuff. But yeah, there really wasn’t a ton of planning behind it. It just sort of worked out. And sure enough, now it’s my brand.

Anna: That’s beautiful. And I saw that you also use it online. You have your logo with the hat and also your social media pictures and many other spots where you remind people. Yes.

Jonathan: Very consistent.

Aaron: It’s handy. Like I said, it really does make me recognizable to a certain extent. So as long as I have the hat on in all my profile pictures online, then when I show up somewhere with the hat on, people who go, “Oh that’s the Aaron Campbell that I’ve been interacting with online.” Because I do interact with people online a lot. And so being able to find those people when you first meet them in person can be difficult. The hat makes it a little easier. And yeah, at some point along the way, I’ve fully embraced it. I’ve really enjoy collecting the hats and wearing them now and made it my logo, combined it with my favorite color purple. So now I’ve got the purple hat as my logo.

Jonathan: It’s funny what you get used to it as well. Because it’s true. If I see the hat, it’s like, “Oh, that’s Aaron.” Our good friend, Robert Windish, if I see green in his hats, it’s the same thing, “Oh, that’s Robert all the way over there. I can see him.”

Aaron: Yes.

Open source and how that led to the web

Jonathan: That’s awesome. I love it. So one of your favorite topics as best as I can tell is the open web, right? It’s something that you’ve been writing about for a while, you think about, care a lot about. What I love to start with is where did that start for you? What were some of your first exposures? Let’s talk about open source perhaps first and then how did that lead to the web?

Aaron: As a very young kid, I was always interested in tech. My poor parents, to a certain extent… Because I was the kind of person who was fascinated with our television, but also wanted to take it apart and see how it worked, but was kind of young and not necessarily capable of resembling it always. And so I caused some hassle, but was always into tech. And then as computers sort of came out and there was this software side of them, it was open source that let me do the same thing that I essentially did with the TV, which is kind of open something up and see how it worked, very early days when like MS DOS came with the little… What were the games called? Snake was one of them. The monkey game where you throw the exploding banana was one of them, right?

And those came open source. They came with the source code. That’s how I picked up software. And because that was my entry in, that has always been something that I thought was important for everybody’s ability to enter into our field.

Jonathan: In one of your posts you were writing about that. And then you took me way back with a reference to Chip’s challenge.

Aaron: Yes.

Jonathan: And I was like, “I remember this. I remember this.”

Aaron: Oh, that’s funny.

Open source vs. closed source

Jonathan: And it was so interesting because you made a point about like, it’s not open source. Do you want to just touch on that for a moment? The contrast that experience brought?

Aaron: Yeah, that was one of my first attempts to actually dig into, I guess, the code behind something that wasn’t open source. So trying to kind of decompile and get a look at it. And it was terribly frustrating, right?

The amount that I wanted to know about this game and how it worked was extremely limited. Now on the plus side of that particular story, that was a popular game in one of the classes that I had at school. It has like a code to prove that you passed a level because you can start there next time. One of the few things that I was able to pull out of the source code was all of those codes. So I could always be ahead of everyone else even though I wasn’t necessarily passing all those levels. But how much it obfuscated my ability to learn from that program was super frustrating. And that really started to crystallized in my mind, the difference between sort of open and closed when it comes to the value that they bring to the learning processes of other people, right? The ability to kind of build on what somebody before you did so that we can keep making progress forward is so much more limited with that closed source software.

The internet is no longer a toy

Anna: In one of your blog posts you say the internet is no longer a toy. It is no longer used for fun or even simply for research. It would be to give a little bit more background to that and connect this idea to the open web in general. What does the open web mean to you and how would you explain it to someone else who’s new to the world from web?

Aaron: So to be clear, you asked for it. I’m not always the… It sometimes takes me a few minutes to get through that explanation to people. But the open web to me, you really have to start with the case for the importance of the web, which is kind of what you were talking about. The one little bit from my blog post where I talk about it’s not just a toy anymore. I do think that the internet is fun. We do enjoy sharing around memes and cat videos and all the fun stuff that we see on the web and the games and whatnot. That’s great. But I think the real value and importance of the web is that it is an amazing information sharing tool, better than we’ve ever had before in the history of humankind.

When we’ve gotten better at sharing information, when we did it through written word and when we got printing press, which ties in pretty good with our Gutenberg stuff that we’re doing now and we were able to distribute it more, all these steps along the way made us better at consuming the information that people before us had learned and building on top of that and moving forward as people. The internet is letting us do that instant across the world. People in other countries could have learned a thing yesterday and I could be building on top of that today. That is how quickly we can share information now.

And that’s huge. We see big steps forward in sciences and in medicines and in technology, in our own field. We look at the improvements in chips and stuff like that. A lot of that is, I think, brought around by this ability to share information to through the internet.

And so it is ridiculously important to people, to all of us. And because it’s that important, I think it’s really important that it be available to everyone. And that’s where the open web part comes in. I think that the open web is key in maintaining the ability for this tool to be used to share information in the long term. In another decade, in two decades, are we still going to have the ability to share all this information to everyone in the world? Or are things going to close down more where you have these different siloed parts of the internet and you have to pay for access to all the different part? That openness is what continues to bring the whole world together on this platform, the internet.

The direction of the web’s future, open or closed

Anna: And what’s your take on this? Is it going to be more open or more close or more diversified? Different?

Aaron: I think that we’re at one of those places in time where it could go either way. It’s one of the reasons that I have continued to be so passionate about working in the WordPress space. Companies and corporations are meant to turn a profit. That is their purpose. And it is easier to turn a profit around a thing that you can sort of control and close down and then and then start monetizing. And so they’re almost always going to tend toward that direction. There’s a lot of power there in the money that’s behind all those companies. WordPress and other open source options play a really important counterbalance to that. It’s kind of the opposite, if you will, of really trying to offer the tooling as just this open, free thing, that’s both opens source where you can learn from it but also free where everyone can access it, right?

And there’s no lock in. You can build on WordPress and move to somewhere else. And so I think that as long as these open source projects continue to be a healthy counterbalance, that we will continue on in a healthy way with the internet, where there will be some closed places, some Facebook type places that are more closed and controlled, but there will be options so people aren’t 100% locked in to only those closed alternatives.

Easy and not so easy, moving between open source and a proprietary platform

Jonathan: One of the things that I’ve come to embrace over the past couple of years is this idea that the internet at its best, the open web in my mind, is a healthy tension between the proprietary platforms and the open source. It’s interesting that at least from my point of view, part of the challenge, especially for those of us in this ecosystem, is that we have to keep it a healthy tension, which at this juncture requires continued investment in progress on the open source side of things, right? The better that WordPress gets, the… I really like this idea of looking at WordPress as an indicator of how healthy is the open web. If WordPress is doing really well… Because people can always leave, right? That’s the thing about WordPress. You can go to proprietary platform anytime that you want. It’s not always as easy going the other way. And that to me is why it’s important to invest in open source, because it gives you those healthy alternatives. What are your thoughts?

Aaron: I think you touched on one of the most important parts. I talked about open source being this counterbalance, but it’s only a good counterbalance so long as it actually is a viable alternative, which means being competitive in the space, having the functionality that users need and keeping it simple enough that they can use it. And that’s where I agree that having this, healthy tension I think is how you worded it, right? On the flip side, as much as I do worry about the closed side of some of these solutions, they really drive forward the technology. They force these open source products like WordPress to not stagnate. We can’t. Or we’re no longer in that running. And so it keeps pushing us forward. And that’s good as long as we can keep pace. And that’s a lot to do.

Jonathan: Yeah. There’s always going to be some lag. And it’s hard because you get a project as big as WordPress, the complexity keeps going up. You can’t move as fast by very nature of the responsibility you have to the ecosystem. So it becomes harder and harder to have those bigger gains. But harder doesn’t mean impossible. It’s just requires more focus and effort, huh?

Aaron: And I think it requires a little bit of restructuring and growing up as a project too, right? We’ve been through phases of that along our journey. I think it’s super important. It’s part of what’s gotten us to where we are. And also having decision makers that can help clear the log jams and get things moving forward again. We’re big now.

The importance of the open web with WooCommerce

Jonathan: Let’s bring this over to WooCommerce. It’s been really interesting to watch the growth in WooCommerce over the past couple of years, especially from folks who didn’t know about WordPress before, right?

They’ve come into the ecosystem because of WooCommerce. I’m curious. Just to kind of start, from your perspective and the experience that you’ve had in the commerce realm, why is the open web important? Why should they care? Why should a shop owner care about it?

Aaron: So it used to be. Well, there was a time when you didn’t need the internet to be successful as a company, right?

We’ve come to a time where you definitely needed some sort of online presence to be successful as a company. At least most, right? And then now we’re at a place where really you need to make your offerings available online. Even the small mom and pop restaurant here has the ability to book a table, reserve a table online, whether that’s through like open table or through their website. The ability to take orders online or book appointments online or whatever those things are that your business used to do in person or over the phone, now needs to be able to do online. And so we’re starting to see where WooCommerce is bringing again that open source counterbalance to some of those solutions. Yes. But it’s become table stakes to being a successful small business, even really small businesses.

Thanks to our Pod Friends FooSales and GoDaddy Pro Hub

Ownership, open source vs. proprietary platforms

Jonathan: So a couple months back, we were at a table together with Bob and David from PeachPay. We started talking about this concept of ownership within the context of WooCommerce. Because it’s been interesting to look at, why would people start with WooCommerce. And I’m curious if you want to expand on that. This concept of ownership, of open source versus the proprietary platforms, what have you been seeing? How do you think about that?

Aaron: It’s an interesting one that I’m constantly having to try to take my own, I guess, personal preferences, the thing that I think are important and try to balance them with the reality of people just trying to succeed in their small business. I personally think that owning your own data, owning your own online presence is extremely important. It can be really hard for your average small business owner to really understand that they even need to care about that until they’ve been bitten by it at some point.

You mentioned earlier that you find it easy to move from WordPress to a proprietary solution, partially because WordPress is big enough that almost every proprietary solution has some sort of importer to bring stuff straight in. But the moving back can be hit or miss. Some places can export their data nicely and you can do that easily and you can move elsewhere, but they don’t have to. They own their databases. They don’t have to make something easily exportable for you. And you can get locked in. And because online presence has become table stakes for these small businesses to be successful, I hate to see them reliant on someone else’s platform. Those platforms can be great.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with using any of the Square spaces or whatever that are out there. There’s quite a few. And as long as your business needs and direction line up with the business needs and direction of that platform, it’s probably great. But if they ever diverge and you need something else because they no longer want to allow people to sell 3D prints on their site because they’re selling 3D prints on their site or whatever it is, suddenly you are left without this thing that you built. Whereas in WordPress and WooCommerce on top of it, you have that ownership. People can’t just pull the rug out from under you, because you’re building in your own playground instead of theirs.

But the small business owners, they want to be able to succeed and get online. Like you said, we lag a little. We’re we’re not always the easiest way for them to get online. We have to make it as easy to have your online presence and own your data as it is to have your online presence and not own your data.

Job title: WordPress ecosystem

Anna: I’m curious about your job. You currently work at Newfold Digital. According to your LinkedIn profile, your job title is now WordPress ecosystem. So what does that mean and what do you actually do?

Aaron: That’s interesting. I guess my job is transitioning a little bit there so I’ll try to kind of tell both halves, I guess. But the reason that I put my job title as WordPress ecosystem is because a big part of my focus when I first joined Newfold was to help Newfold and the WordPress ecosystem work well together and move in the same direction, right? The WordPress project is moving forward, making progress. One of the things that I love about companies interacting in that space is that they can align what they’re building with what the project is doing. They can then invest in helping move the project forward and also still improve their own development speed and offerings. There is a way to come alongside open source and both empower it and benefit from it. And that is something that I personally love helping companies do. And that was a big part of my focus.

Now I’m doing, I would say more WordPress product there. It’s still pulling together that alignment. It’s a little bit more focused in one section of the company now rather than sort of blanket everywhere. But yes, that’s still very much what I’m doing and why I kind of word it like that. It’s an odd position that most companies don’t really have.

The importance of the open web for Newfold Digitial

Jonathan: For Newfold as an organization… And for those who don’t know, maybe you could just give a brief description. But I’m really curious to hear your perspective on like, I always look at aligned interests. For a company like Newfold, why should they care? Why do they care about the open web? What attracted you to them that lets you see that as a place where you could continue carrying out your values?

Aaron: I think that there are number of things that make a company like Newfold care about the open web. Because Newfold’s not really a go to market name that a lot of people know, I’ll just say that it’s essentially a conglomerate of web hosts, so Bluehost and HostGator and web.com. We also have products like Yoast! And YITH that are in the WordPress space specifically. But we host. We give people an online presence, right?

WordPress is obviously a huge part of that. WordPress is now what? 42, 43% market share? That’s a big thing that if you’re going to be a web host, if you’re going to help people get online, there’s going to be a lot of WordPress folks. So that’s important. But the other thing is, the closed solutions aren’t things that we can host, generally speaking, right?

If a company decides to build their presence on Facebook instead of on their own site, they can’t come host with us. And so the health of the open web also ties in very directly to the health of the hosting ecosystem. And people being able to own their own bit. We give people the ability to own their own piece of the internet rather than build on somebody else’s piece of the internet. And so it’s important to let people know that that’s available.

Jonathan: I think that’s such an important concept too, because it’s sometimes not obvious to folks the difference. But the big difference is you can build something on a host, like any one of Newfolds brands. And if you’re done, you can take it away too. You can move to somewhere else. You could host it locally if you wanted to. That thing is yours. And sometimes it’s just not obvious to folks, that difference that the open source makes.

Aaron: It is something that we see all the time, right? People moving from us to other hosts, or other hosts to us. It should be easy for you to move the thing that you own, that you built, that you have. I want it to be better at this place that I’m working at and trying to improve the experience than it is anywhere else. But I want to keep you in that way, by just being the best option for you, not locking you in.

Trends, eCommerce and small businesses for the future

Jonathan: So for folks investing in the WooCommerce ecosystem, whether they’re a shop owner, whether they’re like a plug-in developer kind of coming into the space, in context of this broader open web discussion we’ve had, what are some of the things that you think folks should be paying attention to? What should they be caring about and watching for within this open web context?

Aaron: As far as small businesses or people that are using WooCommerce to build their online presence?

Jonathan: Yeah. Let’s take the small businesses first. Because there’s trends that are happening, there are changes. Over the next couple of years, what do we want to see them pay more attention into?

Aaron: I mean, as far as the open web bit of it specifically, I think that I would like to see the small business owners’ better understanding sort of the internet and its importance and making those longer term business decisions around it, right.

I think, this is my hypothesis, because so much on the internet is so instantaneous, we have all these social media things that we’re following. Someone tweets, and two seconds later I see the notification on my phone or whatever it is. All those things that are so immediate and ethereal. They don’t necessarily last. A lot of that stuff’s really short term. I think that it has caused a lot of decisions being made around the internet, around people’s online presences to be made very short term, looking only to solve the immediate problem. Whereas other business decisions may have been much more long term decisions. Maybe they bought the equipment that lasts them 10 years instead of two or those kinds of things. I think that’s really important and only comes with a better understanding of the fact that the internet is going to be a long term thing for them.

Jonathan: Ah, it’s such a good point. It’s very easy to take for granted, and even dismiss like, “Oh, the Internet’s just for entertainment” or whatever like, “Oh…”, or to not care about topics like net neutrality and the potential ramifications.

I was just thinking like, Anna and I are business partners and we talk all the time. I’m really grateful for voiceover IP, otherwise… The cost prohibitiveness of standard phone. There’s all this stuff that technology enables across borders that I think it’s pretty easy to take for granted until suddenly it’s not working anymore. And at that point, not to be dramatic, but it might be too late.

Aaron: Yeah. And that’s just something that I think will come with time, right? The need to be on the internet at all, obviously has only existed during our lifetimes, right? I mean, we were born into a world without the internet, and now everyone’s lives are pretty tightly entangled with it.

Jonathan: I remember when I thought that AOL was the internet. The home screen came up and there were games and there were this and that, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s the internet.” And then when I discover, like, “Oh, wow, there’s a browser. I can go other places.”

Aaron: Yeah, and that learning curve has been steep over the last decade. Maybe 15 years, right? To a lot of these companies, that trickled down, right? Enterprises needed to be online. And then the middle size businesses needed to be online. And then some of the small businesses, but only the more techier trendy ones, right? And now it’s kind of like everyone. There’s just not been a lot of history there to help those business owners inform their decision, unless you happen to be one of those techy people like us that has been Watching it. So I hope that that improves.

The next generation and the internet

Jonathan: This is where a community, I think, plays a big role because a lot of what happens, it’s the stories that we tell each other. When you go to a meetup, when you go to places like WordCamps, et cetera, you get this meta in this context that I think really adds to the importance, and curiosity even. Sometimes people just need something that sparks more curiosity about how this stuff works. And yeah. So that’s the optimist in me, where it’s like, if we can just have more of that and people become more curious and aware. I think too, we really need to be thinking about the next generations, because our kids, well, what’s the internet going to be for them? What are they going to think that it is?

A one year gap of blogging

Anna: Aaron, I have one more final personal curiosity and it’s about your blog. I saw you approaching a lot of different topics. And I also saw that you had a one year gap from blogging in 2021. I was wondering. How was that experience for you? What’s your current take on what your future blog will look like?

Aaron: I want to ramp back up in blogging. It is a useful media for sharing information. I do think that’s extremely important. There are things that I have struggled through learning that other people might be able to learn easier through reading my summary of it or however it is.

The big gap that you see and also the slightly smaller but still growing gaps since then, it’s just been a tough time for me personally where a lot of my time has been necessarily dedicated elsewhere. It makes me sad every time I look at my blog and go, “Man, there’s so many things that I really…” You should see the drafts on it. There’s a lot.

Anna: I believe you.

Aaron: But getting them across the finish line has been really difficult lately. But I do. I want to get back to it. And there are these things that it’s not just… Some of it’s about information sharing. I think that’s important. Some of it is just stuff I’m passionate about that I like to talk about. I have that sort of canonical post on the open web that I point people to all the time, but also I’ve got new thoughts on that I would love to put out there and I do in little bits and pieces on things like this, but yeah.

Anna: Well, here’s an idea for you. How about your next blog post would be about the things that you would do in the upcoming time on you would publish on your blog? Just don’t keep us waiting for too long.

Aaron: A blog long post that’s almost like, “Here’s the things in my head that are coming soon.”

Anna: Yes. “Here’s my intentions for the future.”

Jonathan: But don’t give any dates. Don’t put any pressure.

Anna: Yeah, don’t commit.

Aaron: Yeah. Good call. I like it.

Anna: How can people learn more about you and your work, Aaron?

Aaron: I mean, they can go to my outdated blog at aarondcampbell.com. I’m also probably easiest to reach in the Make WordPress Slack as @aaroncampbell. I’m on most of the social medias @aaroncampbell as well.

Anna: With a hat on, always.

Aaron: With the hat on. People see me with the hat on. And that way, if you do see me in person at one of these upcoming events, you’ll be able to recognize me and come up and say hi.

Jonathan: Excellent. Thank you for joining us, Aaron. We appreciate it.

Aaron: Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.