New home for the Flosse Posse and me + a story of online kindness

I have been writing a blog since 2005, thanks to Teemu Arina who pulled me to the world of blogs. Before the blogs I used to have a homepage that was updated maybe twice a year. Luckily the Internet Archives have copies (since 1995) of my ancient homes (since 1998) in the web. The first one is already gone and so will be the second, soon. Before the homepage I use to have Gopher-pages (1992-1993) — not for myself but for a radio program I was doing at the university. So I have been now online for 20 years.

Sometime I feel — like many old people, do — that everything use to be better. I am probably not the only one who feels that in the early days of the web you could always rely on kind people willing to help you with all kind of online things.

For eight year my main blog has been the Flosse Posse. The blog was originally set for the Finnish Association of Free, Libre and Open Source Software in Education, an association we found with Teemu Arina and some other people in 2004.  After some years the idea of running an association vanished and the blog end-up to be more my personal semi-professional blog,

The Flosse Posse has been hosted by Teemu Arina’s company. Now they kindly asked me if I could have a site of my own and move the content of the Flosse Posse to there. I replied that of course I can move the blog, but also said that I am not sure if I know how to move the data from one blog to another. Teemu Arina replied: “I’ll take care of it”. I love this kind of people. It really remind me about the kindness you still once in a while experience online.

This simple gesture by Teemu Arina also made me confident enough to try it myself. And hah . . . I did it. It was easy and now I know how to do it. Thank you for challenging me.

The Internet universe have expand from being originally western university network occupied by people with relatively similar kind of world views. Today, Internet is culturally more heterogeneous. Different world views are causing conflicts.

There are good news, too. Kindness is universal. It is not a feature of some culture or world view. Kind people are kind — everywhere.

This site is now my new home online. I even got the domain with my name. I’ll try to post monthly to the blog. The idea is to continue the Flosse Posse -blog. Free, Libre, Open Source and Education are all still central topics in my professional life. Although I may write more general about Internet, the Web, computers, new media, teaching and learning and education, the Flosse topics will stay and be part of them. I simply have never understood how one could arrange education with software and content that is not free / libre.