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It’s the second day of the IndieWebCamp in San Francisco, where some talented tech folks are discussing, demonstrating and deploying tools designed to keep the Internet as open as possible. I’m learning a ton about things like microformats, webmention, and other useful (if, to relatively non-technical people like me, somewhat arcane) technologies.

Already, using easily deployed tools, I’m using this blog to create posts that show up on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ (I don’t use Facebook much). That’s easy because WordPress has built this kind of functionality straight into the Jetpack plugin.

What I’ve also done, using the IndieWeb plugin — created by a member of the growing community dedicated to making this all work — is to get Twitter replies and retweets to show up as comments on the blog posts. At least that was happening with a different theme; still waiting to see if it works in this one (UPDATE: it does!).

Ryan Barrett‘s work is key to this. He created something called Bridgy, which

sends webmentions for comments, likes, and reshares on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram. Bridgy notices when you post links, watches for activity on those posts, and sends them back to your site as webmentions. It also serves them as microformats2 for webmention targets to read.

As you can see if you look at the comments, it’s working nicely for me on this blog. I’m seriously blown away by what this suggests for the future of an open Internet.

I’ll be writing more about this in an upcoming Guardian column, and in Permission Taken, my new book project that’s dedicated to helping people understand the consequences of centralized technology/communications, and what we can do about it.

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