IEEE Spectrum has an article on Parakey, recently made public and driven by Blake Ross, one of the key people behind Firefox and, it would seem, on his way to reaching the Geek-Cover-Boy equivalent of Barak Obama.

Parakey would seem to rely on creating a local webserver on the user's machine to help manage their private and public information, all through the user's web browser. Long ago, Dave Winer (sorry to put Blake and Dave together in one article, but, here we go) asked: what happens when you start running the web server locally on the user's machine? What scenarios are opened up?

Userland's Frontier ran a web server on your local machine to help manage your incoming RSS feeds and the blog you where managing. My issue with Frontier is that the data was not roamed and not in the cloud (I really wanted to at least be able to FTP my blog database onto my web server). I use about four or five different computers in one day. I really needed that remoting ability and not have everything bound on one machine.

There is a public-facing component to Parakey. Hopefully it, and the other inspired projects coming after it, do provide a way for me to easily roam and replicate and sychronize my personal data to the other machines I run on.

Blake Ross - Dave Winer - Parakey