From Barbelith as found by Matt Jones:
“…imagine what would happen to Pulp Fiction if, when the character of Jules looked into the briefcase, he “woke up” in mid-scene and not only realized that he was a character in a movie, but also realized that he “was” also Mace Windu and Shaft and a bunch of other characters in realities he can scarcely comprehend, while also glimpsing an uber-reality where all of those realities are just movies and he’s an actor called Samuel L. Jackson.”
For those of you who don’t know, basically my job at the moment is to be one-half of a rapid-prototyping and R&D unit with Matt Webb over at the part of the BBC that handles the interactive aspects of the BBC’s Radio and Music output. The department makes all the websites for the various Radio Networks as well as interactive TV stuff, stuff for mobile phones and – of course – the Radio Player. It’s a pretty cool place to work and I’m proud of the work that we’ve managed to get done there (more on that in the next few months, hopefully).
So at the moment I’m particularly proud of the work that the department is doing. Basically Radio 4 do a series of programmes each year called The Reith Lectures, in which they get a notable thinker to come in and – over a series of lectures – expound upon a particular scientific, political or social theme. This year Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize-winning poet, is talking about Climate of Fear. Normally – like many BBC radio shows – you can listen to them again via the BBC Radio Player. But this year they’re doing something a bit different and I think pretty significant – they’re releasing all the lectures as DRM-free MP3 files for people to download. There’s more about this over at Dan Hill’s site and Matt Jones has written some commentary on it too (Free as in speech). Hopefully it’s the first open distribution of many programmes of this kind – enlightening, significant and weighty pieces of work that actually have the potential to make the world a better place – available for free from the BBC. Fingers crossed.
So I looked at Kinja and I was pretty impressed. I looked at it and saw something clean and simple that would hopefully appeal to people who find the morass of weblogs out there to be overwhelming. I thought it would appeal to those who didn’t know where to start. It wasn’t perfect, of course – not by any stretch of the imagination. For a start, the first beta didn’t really make a clear distinction between the digests that you could make and the digests that were editorially chosen by the kinja team. It didn’t seem to know what it was there to do for you. But after some fiddling an essence started to emerge and I started to see it for what I thought it was – a nice little simple application that would appeal to the newbies…
So basically, I thought it was polished and useful but I didn’t think it was interesting. But the funny thing is that I think I’ve changed my mind. And the reason I’ve changed my mind is because of the tiniest feature that I didn’t even notice the first few times I used it – it’s not the fact that I can create my own little version of Haddock Blogs that’s interesting, it’s the fact that I can chuck it around to all my friends. I can link to it like this and – if I wanted to – I could stick it at the end of my blogroll so that other people could play with it too. I could e-mail it to someone, or IM it or even just tell someone my user name and have them go and find it.
This is the feature that I think we were supposed to catch on right from the beginning – or was somewhere in people’s minds in the earliest iterations of the concept – but has kind of been hidden by accretion, simplification and implementational problems. The message has become lost – because Kinja’s not about making the collections, it’s about making collections that we can do things with, collections with handles that can be picked up and thrown around and shown to people to explain or illustrate things.
Nearly a year ago I started writing a little post about RSS aggregators that went a little off the rails. It was supposed to be a tiny little post that spiralled and spiralled until it became impossible to finish. It kind of sat in my drafts bin, where it remains, even though I’m basically going to rip it off wholeheartedly for the rest of this enormous rant.
The draft post was written shortly after voidblogs launched – a site kind of based around the Haddock Blogs model of pulling out a time-stamp and a summary each time a post is made and then stringing them together in a webloggish format to generate a perpetually updating metaloggy thing. Around that time the new design of the the UK weblogs aggregator relaunched. I found all of these things really interesting and came to the conclusion that they were interesting not only because people liked the specific weblogs in the list and wanted to keep track of them, but more importantly because they were a way to mirror in nearly-real-time the mental life of a group to members of that group. They could reflect both ways – they revealed the compiler and they could reveal the group to itself as well.
Which made me think. A lot of people were talking then (and are still talking now) about how to use weblogs in business and education. They’ve all been working on the principle that a weblog is first and foremost a piece of social software that allows and facilitates collboration. But while it’s certainly true that weblog culture in the wild has evolved these groups, it’s less obvious that this is necessarily the fundamental structuring principle of what a weblog ‘is’. In fact I’m going to go further and state something that should probably be obvious to everyone by now: Giving a group of people weblogs does not mean that they’ll necessarily start connecting with each other through them.
First and foremost, at the smallest possible scale, a weblog is not social software. Instead it is a point in cyberspace from which to speak – it’s a representation of our very self – our voice. At the most very basic of levels, a weblog isn’t just part of a commmunity that shares and interacts, it’s an individual voice as yet unconnected. It takes time for the second-order properties to emerge – and when they do so it’s not as a rapid consolidation or phase-shift between stable states of ‘singular publishing’ and ‘many-to-many communication’. Instead familiarity is gradually gained, recurrently interesting and communicative webloggers become friends, people gradually find their communicative voices.
So the question becomes – when we talk about weblogging around educational projects or work-related schemes – given that a weblog won’t automatically make them part of a creative collaborative community – how do we get people to think in terms of their engagement with others. And how do we get them to that stage quickly? How do we help them use the weblog to express themeselves and create notes and write thoughts while simultaneously ramping up the speed at which they start interacting with each other around these issues.
Which brings us right back to where we started. In my opinion – rather than setting up a central weblog for a course or a project in which people can post their thoughts only as comments, the simplest and most effective way would be to have something like haddock blogs or the uk weblog aggregator or a kinja group digest sitting in the middle in between all the participants. Let that be the one stop shop for zeitgeist measuring and interest following and in-public annotation or discussion. Let that be the place for representing the community at a glance, to see the range of interests people have (even serendipitously the interests they have outside the specifics of the course / working environment that you’re trying to represent). Let that be the place to see what they’re getting excited by…
And hence to kinja… Please, please, please Mr Denton – don’t try and sell me weblog-management. Don’t try to make it easy to replicate the functionality of my RSS aggregator. No – your killer app is this sharing of digests, this creation of really user-friendly throw-aroundable clumps of groupness. That’s the the core of the enterprise. That’s where the fun is, that’s the playlist-making, that’s the mix-tape, that’s the place where self-defining groups can make their home and that’s where I think the future development should move (and the marketing effort). Let people make more than one digest – let them make dozens – let it represent their church group or their anthropology class or their social software circle. Let them share them – even badge them prominently so that they seem co-owned. If you do all that, then Kinja might not just be a simple app for the newbies in the audience but a project with surprising and long-lasting power. There could be something really interesting here after all, just in a slightly unexpected direction…
New concept – don’t clean until your house is clean, instead merely allocate time to the cleaning process and clean until that time is over whether you finish or not. Also if you finish before the time is up (unlikely) then clean something better than you would normally. I started this insane cleaning regimen yesterday with a statement that I would clean in a high-impact fashion for no more and no less than precisely one hour. I created an iTunes playlist full of motivational music with the sole intention of keeping me psyched about the whole horrors of cleaning my flat. It is precisely one hour long and is called Precisely One Hour of House-Cleaning Music. It contains a fair amount of cheese, for the specific reason that it’s designed to get the heart-pounding and the mind focused on doing things (rather than being subtle or nuanced in any way) so don’t get on my case about how lame it is. The first tune is designed to set the scene and the final one to get the pace back down to useful human-levels. List follows:
Length of playlist 1 hour and zero minutes and zero seconds. Your time may vary based upon whether or not you cross-fade your songs or have inserted seconds of blank-space at the beginnings of your tracks.
Right. That’s it. Enough already! I’m just going to go and launch the damn thing and let everyone else find all the bugs and the crappy bits of code and the hacked together bits of shit and I’ll fix em all later when I’ve had a bit of a break. Otherwise it’s going to suck up every last bit of my life forever as I fiddle and fuss around some of the obscurer areas when I should be throwing enough people at it and see how many land on something spiky.
So with that in mind, I’m here to announce the 87% complete new version of Barbelith – the online community that actually doesn’t just talk shit all day (although it does that too). As ever with a redesign it’s got a good few rough edges that will get worn into shape over time. Unlike most redesigns that I’ve been involved with it’s also full of really bad code and there are places where the new lick of paint could do with a couple of more coats. But then again, unlike most commercial redesigns of any scale, this one took four weekends from start to finish. I am sooo looking forward to going outside again. Anyway – have a poke around – be nice to the locals and feel free to leave your thoughts:
And projects just go on and on and there’s no resolution to them whatsoever and it’s quite normal for them to take every working hour of the day and it’s just as normal for you to have no real sense of what you’ve accomplished at the end of the day. I’m in a bit of a funk at the moment – trying to get some sense of what I’m accomplishing and how to accomplish it better – how to make something truly worthwhile and valuable. A lot is going out the window while I try to make better sense of everything. Back shortly…
Another friend asked me what Trackback was today and I showed them my old guide to it and to be honest it wasn’t very helpful for them. But I found a way to say it more simply even than that. Here is trackback in a nutshell: If someone links to one of my posts, my post will link back to them.
Dear Mr Winer,
I should add that I don’t really have much of an opinion about the whole Typekey thing at the moment. Certainly we need something to deal with comment-spam, certainly a centralised service will help with that and make things easier, yes I’d rather have an open standard or set of protocols that allow completely decentralised system if I could think of any way it could be done (but offhand I can’t).
Addendum: I have to confess that I’m not terribly interested in this stuff – I was making a fairly light-hearted and facetious point that really wasn’t particularly well-expressed. I was clumsy in a variety of places, and for that I apologise. All I was saying, I guess, is that Dave’s questions made it sound like Six Apart had a reputation for proprietorial formats and patenting stuff and not opening up APIs – and that I don’t really see any evidence of that. And – realistically – Dave is still associated with Userland and Userland is still a competitor of SixApart – so I can’t really see why they should feel any particular obligation to answer those questions. (Particularly given that Userland attempted to trademark RSS a few years ago – a move that could be seen to be directly against the kind of openness that Dave’s interrogating Six Apart about.)
Anyway, I certainly don’t feel qualified enough to comment in any depth about the business practices of either Six Apart or Userland in this context and these are not positions that I’d be prepared to battle to my last breath to protect. So I’m going to back down gracefully, only saying that I hope that it’s clear why I had the impression that I had, however inaccurate it may or may not have been. I also apologise to anyone who was offended or feels mischaracterised and I hope we can put this all behind us.
I know I’m being obtuse, but I’m really not getting the whole Belle De Jour obsessiveness that’s spiralling its way across the web and into the print media. The latest incarnation of this particular ludicrousness comes from the Independent newspaper (Who is the real Belle de Jour, the internet’s best-read whore?), in which the woman in question is variously identified as Sarah Champion, Michel Faber or – of all people – long-time plasticbag.org favourite Andrew Orlowski. The latter has certain perverse logic to it – his journalism has a tendency to roam near the outer edges of the barely-plausible and uses such blatantly evocative rabble-rousing language and vitriol that you can’t help but view everything he says as being heavily coloured by his own spitting phobias and/or desire for attention. Certainly I wouldn’t put it past him to take that final leap into fantasy in order to make a point. Assuming of course it would be fantasy and that The Register haven’t just run out of money…
But who cares?! I know I’m missing something here, but how can we really be so shocked and startled by the idea that one of the enormous number of prostitutes in the world has decided to write a weblog? Certainly it’s worth a read. She seems like a nice, sorted, intelligent person. And yes – she can write reasonably compelling posts in good quality English. Certainly it’ll get more people going to it than some site about a granny and her cats. But realistically, does it warrant this level of media attention? It’s not like sex is something that only the terribly rich and the morally repugnant can get away with! It’s not like she’s in the middle of Iraq having sex on top of Saddam Hussein’s palace! It’s not like she’s fellating moon-chimps on CNN or inventing orgasm-generating laser beams! So she reads a few books! What’s the big deal? My theory: England has too many sexually-frustrated journalists without book deals. If we want a better press, getting them laid would be a really good start.
I don’t know whether it’s articles like these (on why people give up weblogs) that I get annoyed by or responses like this from 2lmc, but either way I’m pissed. I don’t know how obvious it has to be before people get it – lots of people have weblogs and find value in them, and – yes – lots of people don’t! This is a shock to precisely no one! Moreover, there has never been anything on the web that some people have liked and some haven’t. Every single online community, bulletin board, mailing-list, online social-networking tool, web-application or published site ever made has had people who start using them and then stop. There’s even an industry word for it: “churn”.
Getting three people’s comments on why they don’t read BBC News might be an interesting read but it wouldn’t be a story. It wouldn’t reveal anything particularly good or ill about BBC News. And anyone who was seriously using such a piece to illustrate their own counter-factual hobby-horse would just look highly selective in their source material, slightly duplicitous in their arguments or basically a bit stupid. Why is this any different?