Category: Personal Publishing

1) Key Problems with Movable Type. If you’re a Movable Type user then you probably share a few key experiences with me. To start off with, you’ve probably mis-spelt it Moveable Type more than a few times. You’ve probably chortled to yourself as you realised your mistake. How foolish you’ve been. Ha! The other thing you’ve probably done at some point is scratch your head to the point of bleeding about this whole “Trackback” malarky. I know I have. I know because my outboard brain tells me so.

2) Solve the Trackback confusion by turning on ‘Autodiscovery’. One of the most confusing aspects of the whole Trackback debacle is this idea that a different URL is used to ping for trackback than the URL that you use to visit the post itself. This aspect of the relationship is essentially very simple, but it’s quite hard to explain and so remains essentially incomprehensible to many web-users. So it’s important wherever possible to not draw attention to this process – in fact to conceal its workings as much as possible. The best way to do that is by encouraging the use of autodiscovery. Autodiscovery works like this – when you post something that includes a link to a trackback-enabled weblog, your version of Movable Type goes and has a look at the trackback-enabled weblog’s page and tries to find the trackback URL associated with the thing you’re linking to. Then it pings it. Nice and easy. You don’t have to know the trackback URL (which means they don’t have to display the trackback URL anywhere as well). It also means that there’s no clunky manual pinging process. It’s all nice and neat and self-contained and (more importantly) easy to explain to punters. So why don’t you go anc check that autodiscovery is turned on right now…

3) Trackback manners. In fact, I think there’s probably only one set of circumstances where it’s not a good idea to use auto-discovery, and that’s the same set of circumstances when it’s not appropriate to use Trackback at all. As far as I’m concerned there are at least two of these. Firstly, there’s when you don’t accept trackback pings yourself. Frankly, if you’re not prepared to maintain your place in the embedded conversation, then you don’t deserve to participate at all. The other circumstance when you shouldn’t enable Trackback at all is when you’re maintaining a pure and commentary-less link-log – like the side-panels on kottke.org or anil dash. I think it’s important to try and remember what Trackback is for and what it’s not for – it’s not supposed to be simply a way for you to get a link to your site on highly-trafficked weblogs (although clearly that’s what some people use it for). It’s supposed to be a way of maintaining the links between posts in such a way that the thread of a conversation can be maintained. If you’re not contributing to the conversation in any way, then there’s no need for you to use Trackback. In fact every time you do so, you slightly diminish the utility of Trackback and the likelihood of people following the links therein…

Update: Wednesday March 5 – The text of this post has been slightly edited and adjusted in an attempt to tighten up and clarify my argument. I believe that my position is essentially the same, but you are advised that some of the comments that follow this post were responses to an earlier version.

With Blogger’s acquisition by Google, the weblog space has changed more fundamentally than I think any of us had previously realised. The main impact of that acquisition is not faster servers or a better weblog infrastructure, it’s that marketing and public relations firms – always more brand-conscious than perhaps they should be – have noticed Google turn our way, and (carefully following the integrity-based brand’s line-of-sight) have finally noticed us… “What is this new grassroots phenomena?” they seem to be asking – as if the press hadn’t written about almost nothing else on the web for the last three years, “… and how can we get it promoting Dr Pepper?”

First things first – why should they care? They should care because there are hundreds of thousands of weblogs out there – and they’re all connected to each another, spreading information and ideas around the web at tremendous speeds. The bums-on-seats factor is huge – get something on Metafilter and you can guarantee thousands of views. Get it on b3ta, tens of thousands. Get it on Slashdot, hundreds of thousands. And that’s not including the impact of the thousands of personal sites. Nor does it include the people who read those sites, pick up links and e-mail them to their friends, to their bosses, girlfriends and mums. Weblogs are becoming the natural meme ecology – almost as good at spreading ideas as e-mail but with one particular advantage for marketeers – their sole raison d’etre is to point people at other web pages. They are almost inherently a tool for rating and promotion. They are public opinion made manifest. In fact the only mystery is that marketers haven’t been trying to exploit them before…

Doc Searls has argued that this incursion by marketeers will be routed around – like so much censorship or damage – by the distributed nature of weblogging. I’m less convinced, and the reason I’m not convinced is that to a lesser – and mostly unacknowledged – extent, weblogs have already had their integrity ‘corrupted’ – we’re already advertising things for companies in return for money. The most common and widespread form of integrity-reducing advertising we are undertaking are Amazon referrals. I’m not taking a high-ground here – I often place them on my site when I’ve bought something that I thought was particularly good, or wanted to reward an artist I like. We don’t tend to think of them as interfering with our credibility or compromising our integrity – but we make more money if we write in a way that puts more Amazon links into our sites, and we make money if those links are recommendations….

The ‘Project Blogger’ approach is a simple and effective one – you make webloggers (members of the public) feel important and special as ‘in the know’ opinion formers. You ask for nothing in return because that could be perceived as pressure. Inevitably this will be something that people sign up to believing that there’s no price to pay. Except they’ve been given expensive and cool things by a marketing organisation – so there’s always the pressure of a threatened withdrawal. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and you pay with the soul of your site – the place you’ve carved out as a place of personal expression becomes yet another platform to sell rich teenagers Nike shoes…

There’s a really good article about weblogs as marketing devices over at chronotope at the moment which I think drags a lot of the issues into the light of day. There does seem to be a perceptual difference between the analysis of weblogs from outside and attempts to manipulate them or direct them through advertising or promotional approaches. The people behind this campaigning strategy honestly cannot seem to see how their work might deform or debase the integrity of individual sites, and I suppose we couldn’t expect them too. But this does seem to me to be the crux of the issue – that as soon as advertising enters the space of personal publishing, integrity becomes questionable – the particular authenticity of weblogs and diarist content becomes under threat.

So now that the marketeers and public relations people have turned towards us – what are we to do about it? The idea that weblogging would need any kind of united sense of ethics hasn’t previously been very palatable to people, but I think that’s changing – Nick Denton has made some very sensible comments on Blogger Freebies that try to clarify what an individual’s responsibilities might be considered to be and he in turn links to Mitch Ratcliffe’s Ethics and Blogging and Rebecca Blood’s piece on Weblog ethics. In turn Rebecca mentions Dave Winer’s position from quite a while ago. There’s a resurgence of interest in the rights and responsibilities of the ‘good’ weblogger, which I think should now probably be opened up for debate and discussed at greater length.

So what do you think? What are the particular ethics of writing a weblog? Is it possible to preserve your integrity while taking advertising?

Addendum added August 2006: For more on this issue you should read my later post On Ethical Weblogging (Part Two).

Keen-eyed new media news spotters will have seen the article this morning, Google takes the plunge (by Bobbie Johnson) about the search engine company buying Blogger. Bobbie got some comments off me, a couple of which made it into the piece. Here are the rest of my comments, should you be interested:

(1) What do you think has made Blogger so successful: why did you choose to use it?

Blogger was a sideline for Pyra originally – they made it for themselves to play with and I think that shows in the first product. It was really basic but it was extremely easy to use, incredibly practical and – most importantly – it allowed you to publish your weblog through to your own personal web-space on the web, wherever that might be. There were web professionals who had written their own little content management systems, of course. And there were these centralised journalling and weblogging sites for people who just wanted to write stuff, but there was nothing that really catered for that sudden influx of new web-obsessed netizens, eager to find things online, keen to build things and desperate to play with the new medium. Plus this was the time that everyone was starting to buy domain names that they didn’t have anything to do with.

(2) How do you think it contributed to the growth of weblogging in general?

Of course it’s impossible to say in retrospect, but I think it was Blogger’s feature set, simplicity and general amenability (combined with the spirit of the time) that really got people playing with these tools in the first place. I’m not sure it would ever have sparked off to the degree that it has without their involvement. It’s no accident that Blogger is still the largest weblogging concern running – even though it doesn’t have anywhere near the features of many other systems it’s still one of the most self-explanatory, simple and bluntly effective tools out there. Without it I would be surprised if the community would have developed to be even a tenth of the size…

(3) Do you think there are any surprises in store for Blogger users?

Terrifyingly, I don’t think there will be any surprises at all. And that’s not because they won’t do anything, but because thousands of webloggers all started talking about the stuff they could do at once – sorting wheat from chaff, thinking up applications, new toys, horror stories, business plans – basically just fun things to do with weblogs and Google working together. I’d be surprised if there were any thoughts about the future of Blogger that hadn’t travelled several times around the hundreds of thousands of weblogs that are out there. But that’s ok! Because some of those ideas were pretty damn cool…

Definition of Microcontent Voting: A recent trend in weblog circles, the “microcontent vote” has emerged from several historical contingencies. In particular, the increasing use of tools like Movable Type has encouraged the posting of longer, more involved pieces of writing – writing fit to occupy a fully independent web document in and of itself. Due to a scarcity of time, this excess of wordy posting necessarily leaves the weblogger enervated and recumbant – in turn leaving a considerable number of interesting links uncommented upon – uninvestigated. The most logical band-aid to this increasing problem of weblog exhaustion? ‘Remaindered links sections’ (unordered lists of links with little or no commentary) and even ‘linklogs’ have emerged – secondary weblogs attached like small cleaning fish to the huge gills and gnashing teeth of weblog monsters like kottke.org, Anil Dash and interconnected.

The value of these dedicated linklogs or multi-link posts is debatable. It seems that it would be relatively rare for any individual to follow these lists with the same interest and joie de vivre with which they might follow the ‘main’ site. It would not be beyond the bounds of reason – in fact – to argue that no one actually clicks on the links contained within them at all. But perhaps their utility isn’t based around their presence on the site in question… And maybe that utility isn’t for the readers of that site at all…

One of the most obvious reasons for their use is that they represent relatively cheap content for weblog authors. Other than the intellectual labour in finding the material in the first place, little effort is required to post it to the weblog in question. Commentary (if any) can be sparse and pithy. The second obvious (and connected) reason for their use is that they represent a quick way of getting interesting links published upon one’s site. They are a speedy enterprise. Both of these depend on the crucial final point – that they represent links that the author believes should be seen but has not the time or the inclination to write about further.

As such – the ‘linklog’ or the ‘remaindered links’ post represents nothing more clearly than a simple statement on the quality (or the newsworthiness) of the links in question. It is nothing more or less than a vote that “this is worth reading”. And these votes are increasingly being collated by sites such as Popdex, Blogdex and Daypop – transforming the mindless daily drudge work of weblog-worker-bees into a neatly ranked link-honey of utility and joy to all…

The novelty of the link upon your site is no longer the issue – the issue is merely is it good? If you answer honestly, then the community itself can decide what’s worth reading. Every citizen of weblogland has the right to the microcontent vote. They have the right to use them and the power to do so. And the power carries right through the weblog indices into Google’s indexing and from there into the browsing experiences of everyone throughout the world. Use your votes wisely. For Microcontent Votes are Power.

I posted a while back about the artificiality of treating Trackbacks as something distinct when we were developing the design of our weblog pages. I wrote at the time:

” …the only reason we’re segregating [Trackback] from the body of our posts is because it’s got a different name. Most of my site is comprised of ‘includes’ of one kind or another, but I never feel the need to draw attention to that fact. And I don’t think one should do that with trackback either.”

My assumption was that Trackback should be incorporated into the bodies of one’s posts. They should appear in context on the front page of your site as if they were always part of the post they were attached to. In this way, I felt, they could be elegantly assimilated into the flow of formless and unstructured content that constitutes a ‘post’ rather than being assigned or allocated a piece of typological real estate to sit within.

Another particular anxiety of mine was the way that one structured the link-text when one had so many specific types of information and functionality to hang off the link. Assuming that (in defiance of Movable Type‘s standard templates) you’re not prepared to commit the sin of navigational pop-up windows, then link-text becomes a significant problem. One inevitably seems to end up with the unstructured (overstructured?) permalinks of the kind that can be seen at benhammersley.com. Because all the information pertaining to a post is to contained on the same individual archive page, each link to that page has to carry the date of that post, a link to its permanent URL, it has to gesture to the existence of comments functionality, and separately to Trackback functionality. It also has to make it clear that you can see these comments and Trackbacks and that you can add to them. And it has to tell you the number of Trackbacks and comments as well. Link-text overload.

The metaphor of the link is of a connection between a word/phrase and a document – the word simultaneously acting as the link origin and a description of the destination. This relationship often gets stretched under the weight of weblogging, but shouldn’t have to bear the burden of so many ostensible destinations… By pulling the trackbacks into the body of the post itself, I hoped to be able to strip that element from the links – there would no longer be trackbacks / permalink (entry) / comments, but just the more manageable and self-explanatory entry (mine) and occasionally comments (everyones).

Recently I came across Simple Comments – which is a Movable Type plugin that clearly responds to the same anxieties of UI, but which attempts to solve them by moving in the other direction. Rather than incorporating the trackbacks into the body of the post, Simple Comments attaches them to the comments facility. It’s a very neat solution to the issue, but I think it’s misguided. My main reason for concern? Rather than ending up with a discrete post followed by a readable interchange between interested parties (an asynchronous conversation through time, all contained on one page and with a clear means of response – much like you’d get in a thread on a discussion board like Barbelith), you end up with a set of responses interspersed by decontextualised and truncated posts from other sites. As a result, I think the tendency is to encourage a form of interaction where the visitor responds to the initial post itself, rather than participating in an ongoing conversation or debate.

Your visitors will learn nothing – because nothing emerges – from the simple ability to express their opinion about your initial post. An actual community though – whatever content it may hang off – is another matter entirely. Active and significant discussion can emerge – people can express their opinions about one another’s arguments, finding interesting ideas and running with them, developing them further. It might not be the kind of interaction you might expect on a site designed to help you express yourself, but while it might cause problems of its own, it’s a good deal more satisfying and constructive an interaction than simply soliciting (positive or negative) criticism…

Once more into the breach. We’re riding back into familiar territory, only this time we’re doing it with a different purpose – to provide a different perspective on One Pot Meal’s piece on A-listers and the rest of us.
First the figures. Yes it’s true – some webloggers get more traffic than others. In fact I think it’s quite likely that the popularity of weblogs will follow some kind of weird Power Law – as (it seems) does everything else these days. By this I mean for every weblogger there is who gets a thousand page views a day, there are probably a thousand who get one. With thousands of weblogs being created each and every day (and most of us not reading thousands of new weblogs a day), it seems clear that something is happening along the way… Is it a function of the medium that means that some will be well read and some will be invisible? And did you have to be there at the start to be one of the ‘elite’? Is it a fact of life that some sites will be “popular” while most languish. Have we recreated yet another celebrity subculture?
But what does it actually mean to be popular in blogspace? There are hundreds of thousands of active webloggers across the world. If you cut off the hundred with the most traffic then the rest of us probably get between ten page-views and a thousand page-views a day. It may seem like a radical difference, but what is it compared to the hundreds of thousands that many medium content sites get each day? Or the millions that the world’s most popular sites get? It’s worth reminding ourselves that individually pretty much every single weblogger is effectively invisible to anyone outside our community. Bluntly although I may get a hundred times the traffic that you do, that still might only constitute an extra 990 pages served. That’s a number that would barely register as of interest to any commercial operation. If BBC News lost that many readers tomorrow, it would probably never notice.
So what’s my point? Individually most webloggers are as nothing to the world at large. With the exception of reputation-building experts, weblogs are powerful only in aggregation. But we are powerful, we are impactful, we are important when those clumps emerge – where people agree with one another – when concepts, thoughts, missions, campaigns, disputes, ideas bubble up to the collective frontal lobes of the hundreds of overlapping communities that webloggery constitutes. This is not a medium that’s been built to make some famous and keep others down. The technology defies that kind of elitism by dint of its very existence. And the people who seem within the community to be our ‘heroes’, our aspirational ‘greats’ – well mostly they’re nothing but visible citizens of blogspace – like the people who sit on parish councils, or the people on the PTA or the people who go to book groups. Celebrities? I don’t think so.

A few days ago I wrote a post on trackback and how incomprehensible it was. And then I got two or three more people to explain it to me and it turns out I understood it all along. The reason I was so dumbfounded was that it seemed like such an unlikely and ungainly solution. It was almost as if someone had written documentation for the process of ‘Opening a can of beans with a banana’. You understand the objective (you must open the can of beans), you understand what a banana is (yellow, pointy, looks a bit like a winkie) and you understand what a can is (tuna and beans come in them). And yet when you try to bring all three elements together, fundamental connections just don’t seem to be being made…

Anyway – the concept is now firmly embedded in my psyche. And just like everyone else with trackback enabled, I have been thinking about how to show off my new functionality and how proud of it I am. So where to start? As with any other design process you try to work out what the thing that you’re trying to design actually is. And that’s when the shock bit happens – you realise that trackback is an automation of the process of saying, “So and so is talking about this post!”. That’s all. Nothing more. And you realise that when you write those words on your site, you never consider it to be something that consitutes a discrete kind of technology at all. In fact, it’s not anything different from the stuff you normally post…

This interests me a lot. It seems like the way we’ve come to build trackback into the our sites works on the principle – first and foremost – that for the purposes of the weblog reader it does constitute something additional – value- / functionality-added. But it’s not! In fact the only reason we’re segregating it from the body of our posts is because it’s got a different name. Most of my site is comprised of ‘includes’ of one kind or another, but I never feel the need to draw attention to that fact. And I don’t think one should do that with trackback either.

So here’s how it’s going to work. This site is totally Trackback enabled (or at least I hope it is – I haven’t tested it very much yet). But you won’t see a trackback URL for hand-pinging anywhere – if you can see it operating – if you can see the gears spinning – then as far as I’m concerned, the design has failed. Every trackback ping will be presented as if it were part of the post it’s linking to rather than an appended piece of information. And that’s not just on the individual post’s page, but also on the index page of plasticbag.org itself. Obviously this places restrictions on the amount of information that I can display wiithout de-emphasising the rest of the content too heavily, but I think its the best approach.

And the best thing? Hopefully you’ll never see the word ‘trackback’ on this site again…