Category: Personal Publishing

There’s an article in Internet Magazine this month about weblogs and weblogging which starts with these words…

Weblogging – what’s it all about? A bunch of losers prattling on about what they had for breakfast and pretending they found links that Memepool unearthed eons ago? Or the new hope, coming up from the grassroots, for a Web counterculture that’s finding itself increasingly drowned out by large corporations? Don’t know? Want to find out more? Then read this survey of the blogging world by Kim Gilmour. [Their emphases]

Let’s get the stuff that might undermine my argument out in the open straightaway. Yes – I found this article because someone e-mailed me about it. Yes, there is a screenshot of plasticbag.org in it. And yes, plasticbag.org is listed in the section called Essential Blogs as well, along with Microcontent News, BlackbeltJones.com, Megnut, Scripting News, Swish Cottage, Not.So.Soft and Wil Wheaton Dot Net. I don’t think this is particularly relevant to what I’m going to be talking about – but you may disagree.

Right. Back to the beginning then. Let’s look at that opening paragraph for a moment. Firstly let’s take issue with the site that’s mentioned prominently – in fact let’s point out that Memepool is in fact a weblog. It may be a weblog pioneer that predated blogger, but it remains a weblog. This is just a minor gripe. I have no major issue here.

More interesting is the statement about weblogs as the ‘last, best hope’ against ‘large corporations’. And here’s where the irony of the whole article comes very clearly into focus. Because as you read the article – which (among other things) ostensibly is describing how personal publishing is a work of resistance by the little guy against the homogeneity of mainstream media – it becomes very clear very quickly that the only people that they’ve talked to for this article are representatives of corporations, business and mainstream media. And all of these representatives have some kind of vested interest in weblogs and weblogging. In fact while the emap publication talks a lot about the utility of weblogging, the fun of weblogging, even the egos of webloggers at no point does it believe that webloggers have the intelligence or authority to actually have a legitimate opinion about their medium.

This is probably the right point to drag in our old friend Simon Waldman from the Guardian, who in fact does have a weblog of his own, although it’s hardly what he’s known best for. Simon is very definitely a weblog enthusiast, someone I don’t believe is interested in ‘exploiting’ weblogs, and someone who earnestly believes in the power of the revolution in personal publishing. Interestingly he’s also the man behind the Guardian’s Best British Weblog Award. And he’s also the man that in our recent debate said this:

“This competition is the result of our respect for the movement, not an attempt to appropriate it. We would no more try and appropriate blogging than we’d try to herd cats, juggle jelly and push water uphill at the same time.”

Now I’m more interested in gesturing towards the attitude of the writer of the article than I am at Simon. But nonetheless, for someone who states publically that he doesn’t want to appropriate blogging to be quoted or referenced seven times during the article – talking about everything from the nature of weblogs as democratic publishing through to the ethics of impartiality online – seems more than a little ironic. I don’t want to pick on Simon, because if he’s been asked for his opinion then why on earth shouldn’t he give it, but not once are the questions of integrity, pretensions to journalism, cliquey-ness etc ever addressed to the people who are in the best position to comment – political webloggers, personal webloggers, warbloggers, techbloggers.

In fact if we collate the people who are quoted in the article (in a ‘for this article’ way rather than the scant quarter sentences ripped off from someone’s site) we come up with this:

• Simon Walden Seven mentions
  The director of digital publishing at Guardian Online has his own weblog, certainly. But I don’t think he’d consider it unfair if I said that he was far from an expert on webloggia.

• Evan Williams Seven mentions
  One of the earliest webloggers to use Blogger – but essentially interviewed because he was one of the creators of the software in the early Pyra days.

• Steve Browbrick Two mentions
  Steve is the founder of Another.com, a site which does web-based e-mail. His presence in the article is completely unexplained.

• Rob Taylor Two mentions
  The developer of a weblog comments system.

So here’s my conclusion, and this isn’t true either of all publishers (the Guardian is a welcome exception here) or mainstream media groups, but I think it is true of many. Despite their protestations to the contrary, most mainstream publishers who say that weblogs represent a new democratising of the media still lapse into talking to figures with substantial ‘authority’ in the ‘real world’ rather than webloggers themselves. It seems that even though we represent a ‘counterculture that’s finding itself increasingly drowned out by large corporations’, the mainstream media is still more prepared to go to representatives of these businesses and corporations when they want an opinion about personal publishing. It seems that when talking about personal publishing, mainstream media still doesn’t credit webloggers with the intelligence, integrity or ability to even comment on their own revolution…

What is it?

The “Not the Best” project is really simple. It’s a tiny piece of code that post or stick in your template that will add the “Not the Best” box onto your site. The box includes a link to every British weblogger who decided not to participate in the Guardian’s Best British Blog competition. If you didn’t enter and you send in your site’s URL, we’ll add it to the box and it’ll be updated on everyone’s sites immediately.

How do I add the box to my site?

Here’s the code you need to cut and paste… You can put it on your site as a normal post in your weblog, or you can add it to your template. Whatever makes you feel most comfortable…

<script language="javascript" src="http://www.plasticbag.org/files/misc/bestbritishblog.js"> </script>

Here’s what it looks like at the moment…

What are the benefits to me?

On one side it gives you a chance to say publically and to the most number of people: ‘Best British Blog – not for me’. But more positively it also means that everyone gets to meet other people who feel the same way as them. And it might introduce new people to your weblog…

Why are you doing it again?

When the Guardian announced that it was going to run the Best British Weblog competition there were a wide variety of reactions. Some people were delighted and entered immediately. Others thought it was a slightly weird idea and entered anyway, others (like myself) thought it hadn’t really been thought through properly and wasn’t necessarily a good thing for webloggers and weblogging in general.

As we approach the announcement of the winner of the award it seems like the perfect time to celebrate some of the curmudgeons and grumps that (for whatever reason) decided not to play… And to waggle a friendly nose-finger at the Guardian in the process as well. Hence the “Not the Best” project…

But before I go any further I think it’s only fair to make it clear that anyone who has entered should feel that they have all of our best wishes. Good luck to you in the competition! And well done in advance if you should win. This isn’t about making other webloggers feel bad in any way.

Everyone who didn’t enter the competition had a different reason for doing so. Some people just thought they didn’t really have a chance of winning. Which is valid! Some just felt uncomfortable competing, others thought it was a popularity contest, some just didn’t understand the criteria that you could use to judge this kind of thing. Whatever your reason for not entering – altruistic, idealistic, jaded, bored or forgetful – you should feel able (welcome even) to participate…

So enjoy the variety of sites that decided fame and fortune were not for them – and if you want to join in the project yourself, remember – just stick this line of code on your site, and then e-mail a link to tom [at] plasticbag.org and I’ll add your site as soon as possible…

<script language=”javascript” src=”http://www.plasticbag.org/files/misc/bestbritishblog.js”> </script>

The glorious Andy Pressman of beautifully designed Oh Messy Life! infamy has posted a picture of a singular poster. The poster reads, “Then it hit me, I’m not going to be famous, I won’t get to be a rock star, I am going to be stuck on the payroll doing work that doesn’t interest me for a very long time”. And it reminded me of something I posted eighteen months ago which read:

“It’s slowly beginning to dawn on me that I’m never going to be famous, I’m never going to be truly exceptional, or lauded over – I’m never going to travel to the moon, I’m never going to kill someone, I’m never going to gazelle on stage. This may be one of the most crushing realisations of my life”

But I was wrong. These are the words of the old world that we all used to live in. The world before the internet, before weblogs, before we realised the truth. In the future we will all be superheroes if we want to be. This is a distributed world – a world in which the barriers to flight have been lifted. You don’t have to be a multi-millionaire to make your mark, you don’t have to have all the luck in the world to rise up from your origins and hold your head up high. This is the post-American Dream – to live in a world in which you can get the respect you deserve simply by posting rubbish to the internet, by talking about your interests, your dreams and your interests. The man who made that poster has already proven himself wrong. His words, his image have been ripped from the streets of New York and broadcast into the ether. Hundreds of people have already seen it across the world and taken his words and thought about their lives. An impact has been made. And, like the impacts that we all make online, it should be celebrated. So this is my clarion call, here is my manifesto. Throw away the doubts that bind you. Shed your bodies and celebrate what makes you unique and important – all the stuff that helps you sleep at night – and take to the net. We need you. We love you. We want you. Nothing else is important.

Addendum: Thanks to Matt Jones for the related conversation over AIM that ended with us agreeing that an ISP with built in weblogging functionality and a low bandwidth limit could do worse than use the slogan: “In the future everyone will be famous for 15Mb”.

Related: Wired On the size of the weblog nation

Ok, before I start this one, you’re going to want to bookmark this entry if you’re even vaguely interested in weblogs, and it’ll be much easier to both bookmark and read if you click through to the archived entry which (through the magic of CSS) is formatted all differently and excitingly for maximum clarity of reading…

If you were interested in reading – but uninterested in paying for – the collection of articles printed in the book We’ve got blog (which includes an introduction by the esteemed Rebecca Blood), you may be surprised to realise that almost all of the pieces within it are freely available on the interweb. And don’t worry – most of them are just as interesting online as they are squirted onto paper. Even Joe Clark’s Deconstructing “You’ve Got Blog” is as irritating online as it is off – perhaps even more so.

Here’s the full run-down for anyone interested…

• Anatomy of a Weblog by Cameron Barrett.
• Been Blogging? Web Discourse Hits Higher Level by Glenn Fleishman.
• Blogged Down in the PR Machine by Jordan Raphael.
• The Blogger Code by Ron Yeany.
• Blogging as a form of Journalism by J.D. Lasica.
• Blogma 2001 by the Blogma2001 Committee.
• Building an Online Community by Matt Haughey.
• Credo of the Web Log Writer.
• Deconstructing “You’ve Got Blog” by Joe Clark.
• The Four Noble Truths of Blogging from fishrush.com.
• Good links vs. Good discussion: A metafilter discussion by the residents of Metafilter.
• Here Come the Weblogs from Slashdot.
• In the trenches with a weblog pioneer by John S Rhodes.
• The Internet is not killing off conversation by Douglas Rushkoff.
• The Kaycee Nicole (Swenson) FAQ.
• Let Slip the Blogs of War by Tim Cavanaugh.
• The Libera Manifesto by Chris Pirillo.
• Linking 1-2-3 by Lawrence Lee.
• More About Weblogs by Cameron Barrett.
• Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man (from Feed Magazine).
• Put The Keyboard Down and Back Away From The Weblog by Neale Talbot.
• Ten Tips for Building a Bionic Weblog.
• The State of the Blog by Giles Turnbull.
• Weblogs: A History and Perspective by Rebecca Blood.
• Weblogs: A New Source of News by J.D. Lasica.
• Weblogs: Lessons Learned by Kulesh Shanmugasundaram.
• Weblogs (Good God Y’all) What Are They Good For (Absolutely Nothing) by Neale Talbot.
• We Didn’t Start The Weblogs by Nikolai Nolan.
• What the Hell is a Weblog and Why Won’t They Leave Me Alone? by Derek Powazek.
• Why I weblog by Brad Graham.
• You’ve Got Blog by Rebecca Mead.

The Situation:
Imagine, if you will, that a prominent web magazine had decided to start hosting Weblogs. Imagine if shortly afterwards another prominent online publisher said they were doing the same. And then imagine if rumours abounded that they weren’t going to be the only ones. And then imagine that you had been talking with a representative of a major UK newspaper who revealed to you that – if only for a short while – they too had been thinking of hosting weblogs on their site. What would you think? Would you think ‘what a wonderful thing for the medium’?

The Problem:
Well of course it’s entirely possible that it would be a wonderful thing for the medium – but it almost certainly wouldn’t be a particularly wonderful thing for the publisher! Think about it for a moment – most people who become committed to weblogging eventually choose to set up a site of their own somewhere – sometimes with a domain name of their own – often with a design that’s resolutely their own. The logical consequence of this (surely) is that after a while any site that offers free weblogging with little flexibility in design or personalisation will eventually be abandoned by the dedicated. And in their wake nothing a but huge wasteland of tumbleweed blogs and – dare I say it – unreadable sites. How does that reflect well on boston.com? Or Salon?

The Reason:
It doesn’t take a genius to gather what is happening in corporate world at the moment – weblogs are ‘in’ – they’ve finally stopped being fashionable, and so are suddenly now becoming acceptable to the mainstream. Your executive at BigPublisher.com suddenly thinks that weblogging is the heart of the internet – the web finally fulfilling its promise. And of course they’re right… But does understanding the importance of weblogs and weblogging correspond to understanding how an information publisher should relate to weblogs and weblogging? I would say no….

The Solution?
I’m not going to claim to have the definitive answer to how (say) the BBC should interact with the ‘revolution in personal publishing’ (which is, I might add, the longest bloody revolution ever, I think) – but I have got a couple of suggestions. And they revolve around not trying to usurp the common space that weblogs exist in, but in developing ways of cementing and building upon the interactions between those two very different beasts – mainstream and personal publishers.

• Provide tools that allow webloggers to hook into your content. At the most trivial, this includes newsfeeds and RSS/RDF feeds. Let people put them on their sites, but also let them play with them – let them develop interesting idiosyncratic ways of looking at the information you create.
• Look at the meta-tools that exist already for webloggers – Blogdex and Daypop for example. Adapt these tools to provide a different insight into the content you produce. For example: Create a “What the web is reading” page on The Guardian – this page being nothing more or less than Blogdex’s recent links thing, but only reflecting Guardian articles. Your visitors get a guide to the best stuff on your site as chosen by the web itself. You get traffic to those articles and demonstrate your respect for the aggregate power and intelligence of the weblogging community as a whole. If you included the ‘sources’ aspect of Blogdex as well – so that everyone who has commented on an article on the Guardian is automatically linked to from the Guardian’s site, then you get a situation where both weblogger, publisher and reader benefit – the weblogger in terms of traffic, the publisher in terms of traffic but more importantly by being able to demonstrate a public, conversational aspect to their sites without any of the cost of development or legal implications. And the reader is directed to the very best content you have to provide as well as to second level commentators who might be able to provide a different perspective…

Conclusion:
So here’s my challenge to large online publishers: rather than admiring the medium and trying to reincorporate it into your traditional models, why not respect what makes it different – the sheer volume of people doing it, the sense of link-filtering, the personal comments and ideas that it generates – and work to make the relationship between mainstream and personal publishers a symbiotic one borne of mutual respect for what makes us so different (and yet complementary) to one another?

Addendum:
I don’t want people to think I’m talking about Blogspot sites here – which fill a valuable niche in providing cheap or free presences for people who wish to be creative without investing large amounts of cash (but which – fundamentally – can be stripped of advertising, corporate branding and completely personalised).

In July 2002, the Guardian announced that it would be running a Best British Blog award with a prize of ≈Ì1000, to be judged by a group of judges ranging from Anita Roddick to Jen Bolton (ex of threadnaught.net). Immediate reactions from around British weblogging were very mixed. Some people thought the competition was an amusing diversion, but quite a sizeable group thought the awards process was a strange and kind of ridiculous idea that would do little for webloggers or weblogging.
I was quite outspoken about my feelings towards the competition – and for this reason (and because I’d been the lucky recipient of the Bloggies‘ “Best European Weblog” award – I was asked to participate in an online debate with Simon Walden, representing the Guardian.
The transcript of this debate is below – or you can view it on guardian.co.uk if you’d prefer…
The transcript:
To: Simon Waldman
Sent by: Tom Coates
When Simon introduced this competition he said that the Guardian had quickly embraced personal publishing. he’s quite right – the Guardian has probably done more to encourage people to start their own weblogs than any other organisation in the UK. But I think it has now moved from supporting a grass-roots movement to attempting to appropriate it.
If weblogs are valuable at all, they are so because they give people a place to talk about whatever they want, however they want. Your weblog could be an intimate, personal space to get advice about your burgeoning sexuality, a frequently updated news feed about software development, or a soapbox to declare your extreme political views. The thing that unites all these people, however, is a certain authenticity of voice – these are real people talking openly about the things that matter to them.
In my opinion, pitting such radically different and very personal sites against one another undermines that authenticity, just as it demeans the motivations of the people who created them. But more importantly, it seems to me impossible to judge and unfair to do so. Is one person’s life trauma a better read than another’s thoughts on contemporary politics? And should we really be delighted that some cod-celebrities and old-tree hacks are setting themselves up to be the judges of our communities? I’ll be voting with my feet and boycotting the contest.
To: Tom Coates
Sent by: Simon Waldman
Tom,
Your description of what makes weblogs so valuable shows the sort of eloquence and intelligence and I would expect from someone who has already won several awards for his weblogging activities (we’ll come to them in a minute). But, I think your reaction against our competition lacks some of your usual clarity of thought.
Yes, “pitting different types of weblog against each other” isn’t easy – any more than comparing comedies and thrillers in the Oscars, or classical music and drum and bass in the Mercury prize – but it isn’t impossible, and it certainly doesn’t undermine blogging. After all, it has been done before – remember?
You are the proud owner of the title “European Blogger of the Year” according to the Bloggies. This award similarly pitted different blogs against each other – right across the continent. So are you saying it is all right to do this all the way across Europe, but not across Britain? Or would you like to hand your awards back as a matter of principle?
This competition is the result of our respect for the movement, not an attempt to appropriate it. We would no more try and appropriate blogging than we’d try to herd cats, juggle jelly and push water uphill at the same time.
We have almost 180 years’ history as a radical newspaper. Representing and promoting diverse and minority voices is something we have done for decades, regardless of the medium. This is why we – including many of those you dismiss as “dead-tree editors” – find weblogging so exciting, and why we are looking and will continue to look for ways to support and promote it.
We’ve had hundreds of entries. Shame you’re not among them, but we’ll survive.
To: Simon Waldman
Sent by: Tom Coates
Of course you’ll survive – a well established newspaper like the Guardian isn’t going to be affected by the groans of motley, partly washed web enthusiasts. Unfortunately, the weblogging world doesn’t have 180 years of history behind it – and as such is much more vulnerable.
Your two points – that prizes like this are common in other media, and that my protests are hypocritical – reflect (I think) a misunderstanding about the nature of personal publishing. The things that make weblogs special and different to other media are exactly the things that make large-scale media awards for them redundant.
Weblogs are not (just) written to entertain audiences, but are also spaces where people can talk openly about their lives. Asking people to compete in self-revelation, to play up to the cameras, seems wrong to me!
Webloggers aren’t prostituting themselves for cash. In fact one important aspect is to have a place for yourself, somewhere personally important. Asking people to expose themselves for cash seems wrong to me!
Most webloggers form friendships with both readers and other webloggers. An external body encouraging competition between friends also seems wrong to me.
And the Bloggies? They’re incomparable. It’s a tiny event that no one takes seriously, with negligable prizes, and which has little interest to anyone outside weblogging. But most importantly, it’s an award in which every participant, every judge and every voter is a weblogger or weblog reader (and an equal) rather than an inexpert “real-life big name”, whose qualifications and ability to judge remain totally suspect.
To: Tom Coates
Sent by: Simon Waldman
Tom,
I’m not going into a judge-by-judge defence of our panel, but we wouldn’t have chosen them if we didn’t think they were perfect for the task. They are all keen webloggers or readers. Most have been involved with the net for the best part of a decade. They are all very able and, thankfully, willing to judge. Your suspicions are ill-founded.
I respect the personal nature of personal publishing. This is why we are not forcing anyone to enter, nor are we allowing people to be nominated against their will. If some people see their weblog as something for themselves, or a small group of friends, they have nothing to fear from this competition.
However, what is wrong with people wanting to raise the profile of their blogs, and have the chance of earning some money at the same time?
We just want to promote and reward the best British bloggers, if, and only if, they want to be promoted and rewarded. And, judging from the number of entries we have had, it seems there are plenty who do.
Moreover, our assessment of “best” includes all the values that you hold dear – particularly authenticity. “Playing up to the camera” will not be appreciated.
This is hardly a large-scale media award. We have put in place a decent (but still reasonably modest) cash prize, not because we want people to prostitute themselves, but because we think anything less would seem mean. We think it is a perfectly fair reward for the amount of effort that anyone has to go into to keep up a decent blog.
I can see what you’re afraid of. I just don’t think that we’re it. When News International discovers weblogs, don’t worry, I’ll be there fighting it with you.
To: Simon Waldman
Sent by: Tom Coates
I think at this point I should make clear that I don’t believe that the Guardian is intentionally exploiting weblogs or that they are consciously aware of the potential damage this could do to a community in its infancy. I have total confidence in Lloyd Shepherd, the Guardian’s chief producer at Guardian Unlimited when he said recently: “It’s all good clean fun. We didn’t do [the competition] to wind anyone up – we were trying to raise the profile of British blogs as well as our site. It’s supposed to be a win-win situation”.
But despite this I think you’re being disingenuous when you say that you want “to promote and reward the best British blogs, if and only if, they want to be promoted and rewarded”. Your prize is called “The Best British Blog” award – and declares itself to be an attempt to find that mythical beast – even though many British weblogs are boycotting it on principle and even though the criterion of “the best” actually means the personal feelings of a very limited and unrepresentative group of people.
Perhaps with a less outrageously presumptuous name – “The Guardian Weblog of the Year” maybe – it would seem less arrogant. Perhaps with prizes that appealed to people who were in love with the medium (creative software or training or even an experience worth writing about) it would seem less out of touch.
Instead, the Guardian has declared itself an arbiter of weblogs – it has moved from being a paper that delights in participation in a community to one that feels it has the right to be the judge of it.
It’s time for the Guardian to stop promoting weblogs from the outside, and instead start actively helping the community from within. There are many ways it could be constructive – from sponsoring a real-life British weblogging event to providing new ways for weblogs to interact with each other or with the Guardian’s site. Can’t we put this ludicrous contest behind us and do something more useful with our time?
To: Tom Coates
Sent by: Simon Waldman
Tom,
One of the prime reasons we embarked on the competition was to help start the debate about how a traditional media owner such as ourselves can engage with a movement that is in many ways the very antithesis of traditional media. So, your suggestions on how we might improve the competition in future years, or get further involved with the weblogging community, are very welcome. The start, I hope, of an ongoing dialogue.
If changing the name from “Best British Blog” to “Guardian Unlimited Weblog of the Year”, or something similar, would help win you and others over, then we’re happy to consider it (it’s not quite as snappy, but it’ll do).
We did consider different prizes, but in the end, we decided to stick with cash as we felt it was better to let people decide what to spend it on themselves, rather than trying to second guess people’s needs and wants. Our favourite idea was a “Supermarket Sweep” at PC World, which we thought would be good fun, but a little pricey – (and yes, we did debate whether webloggers would really want to buy from PC World).
At the end of this flurry of emails, I hope you can see that our intentions were good, even if you disagree with our actions. The cash we have put up, the senior executives we have put forward as judges, the space we have given to it both in print and online are a sign of respect for the weblogging community, not an attempt to lord over it.
I think we both agree on what makes weblogging so wonderful. I like to think that over the next year – long after this competition is over and the winner has blown his or her winnings – we will embark on a number of initiatives that might help it stay that way.
All the best,
Simon

I don’t hold Neil McIntosh fully accountable for the concept I’m only prepared to refer to as ‘a bloody stupid idea‘ (and I advise you to do the same). Neil suggested on a publically available mailing-list that when I suggested that the Guardian’s motivations for a weblogging award might not be entirely altruistic that they were much more likely to generate traffic for webloggers than the other way. He also thinks (as I do not) that webloggers won’t prostitute themselves for attention and that the event is rather like the Guardian’s first book award. I have replied as follows:

“Thanks for replying so thoughtfully Neil.”

“Before I start, I’m going to state right off that when I talk about
weblogging, I’m generally talking about the most common kind of weblog –
there’s a bit of their life in there, a bit of their interests, a few
links, some thoughts or monologues etc. I think most of it applies to
varying extents to the other things that people do as well, but maybe
not all…”

“Taking your last post first, I think there is a sizable difference
between the first books prize and this – in that the authors in the
first books prize are professional writers who write both for art’s sake
and for money. They are, in a sense, already prostitutes, already ‘in it
for the money’. That’s fine, we all have to make a living!”

“But this simply isn’t the case for the vast majority of webloggers, who
are doing it out of love, out of having a space to express themselves –
and often a place to put their lives out in the open. In the process
these people are often exposing themselves in quite significant ways.
There seems to me something profoundly wrong with asking people to
compete in such an environment. At some level it’s inevitably a
competition of self-exposure – it’s asking people to take the space that
they’ve used to talk openly and honestly about their thoughts and their
interests and often their lives not because it’s a valuable and profound
space for them to communicate, but to compete against their friends for
money!”

“Obviously there’s also an aspect which is about popularity, and being
read and your opinions listened to as well. But if you look at the
opinions that matter to people, it’s mostly not celebrities or media
figures. In many ways, for a large number of people, they’re almost the
enemy! They’re relics from the past where for the most part we are kind
of the future – the future where everybody is a superhero! Where we all
get a slice of the cake, a bite of the cherry. And more importantly,
there’s a real feeling that these people most often don’t understand
what we’re doing anyway! We’ve seen people like this for years – it’s
all PR blurb and airbrushed skin. I don’t think that’s what the
weblogging publishing revolution is about! Make them start their own
weblogs! (Jen excepted, she’s so blog)”

“I suppose what it comes down to is this sense of WHAT IS A WEBLOG FOR?
When you talk about book prizes – then you’re really talking about a
product that is made for the consumption of audiences – press is
important because you sell more copies, good reviews are fundamental
because you sell more copies, prizes are good because they allow you to
make a living. The book itself is something created for the people who
are going to buy it. But significantly at least one aspect of running a
weblog is to have a place for yourself, that means something to you.
It’s a place that’s not supposed to be for sale.”

“If you asked people “How do you feel when you lie about your life on
your weblog”, you’ll probably some really mixed answers, but a decent
number of them will express that this is something that makes people
feel really uncomfortable and untrue to themselves. There’s a bit of a
confessional in it, there’s a bit of a the personal diary in it, there’s
a bit which is about having an artifact of your life and thoughts which
you can keep with you.”

“This feels to me too much like selling out, too much like old trees. You say it’s
the choice of the blogger themselves, but is it really? Who can turn
down the possibility of winning £1000 for what they do everyday anyway?
And of course that’s going to affect how people post. Did you not watch
the Bloggies at all? Everyone played up to their audiences. It was
almost the point!”

“Anyway – I’m getting a bit heated now, and I have so much work to do
that I’m going to back off now. But I would like to say that I’ve
already had conversations with people yesterday and today who 1) don’t
understand how something like this can even be judged, 2) don’t find the
idea of the competition particularly palatable or in the spirit of why
they took up – or continue to do – weblogging but 3) feel rather
disgusted with themselves that they probably will enter, because the
potential exposure is too irresistible and the potential financial
reward vaguely intoxicating. It’s also already drawn out the competitive
instincts in a few people too – seriously – you may not believe it, but
it’s evident behind the scenes.”

“I hope that’s all vaguely clear and not too lunatic or nuts. Obviously
I’m not talking for anyone but myself and everything I’m describing
could just be my interpretation of the conversations I’ve been having.
Everyone else may very well disagree with every single thing I’ve said.”

“PS. You’re absolutely right – the Guardian has done lots to promote
weblogs, which I think we’re all – or at least those of us who’ve been
mentioned in them :o) – are profoundly grateful. And clearly no
individual weblog is going to double the traffic to the Guardian’s
weblog or to that part of the site. But I think you’re being overly
demure when you say that this will send substantially more traffic to
the weblogs concerned than it’ll receive itself. I think we can expect
this to be metafiltered, probably slashdotted, potentially b3ta‘d (which
I believe to my horror has tens of thousands of e-mail subscribers and
is one of the most highly trafficed websites in the country now) – quite
apart from the sheer number of links it’ll get on weblogs.”

“For good or ill – intentionally or unintentionally – this will generate
a substantial amount of traffic for the Guardian’s site… It may not
have been a motive, but I think I could pretty much guarantee that you
couldn’t buy the number of page impressions you’ll get out of this by
paying for ¬£2000 of banner ads!”

Another Thinkblank conception (this time co-created by Cal and I) was thought of yesterday and launches in a very beta version today. It’s called Metalinker (because now it’s retro cool to use the prefix meta) and if you’re reading this on the front page of my site, you should be seeing its effect all over the place.

Simply speaking, Metalinker is a way of connecting weblog posts about a similar subject together. With the simple addition of a small amount of javascript to your page, your completely normal weblog posts are suddenly annotated – each link has placed after it a simple link to Blogdex’s list of other people who have referenced the same link.

It’s not a complex idea, but it’s quite an elegant one and one we think that gestures towards some of the functionality that a future web might include as standard – a kind of self-referential, reciprocally-linking semantic model that our little toy only skirts around (with all the glamour of an almighty hack). We hope you enjoy it!