This post marks the end of a personal era. Over the last three and a bit years I have religiously written something into Blogger almost each and every day. From late 1999, when I’d been in London less than a year, to getting my job at Time Out, to my disasterous relationships, through my period of limited work, right around to my stuff with EMAP, the BBC and UpMyStreet – Blogger has been with me. It’s been to conferences with me, it’s been to Los Angeles with me (twice) and New York with me (once). It’s seen me make any number of dumb personal websites, been with me when I watched the Twin Towers collapse. It’s sat beside me as I witnessed global news events and dumb websites involving kittens. Blogger has helped me make any number of great new friends (so many in fact that I’m bound to leave some out accidentally).
Today I say goodbye to Blogger and Blogger Pro. I’ve finally come to a decision. I’ve finally made the leap to Movable Type. It’s a strange sensation – knowing that I won’t be seeing that comforting black, blue and red site each and every day. My reasons are probably clear to most people so I won’t go into them – I couldn’t be critical of the service if I tried. It’s done so much for me – and for remarkably little in return. So instead, to say goodbye, I’m going to use one of the new features available to me and ask you all to raise your glasses and answer the question: How has Blogger changed your life?
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I don't really want to talk about it…
I went to a tanning salon. Obviously I’m ashamed of myself, but it was that or fill in my tax return. I thought to myself, “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to go to a tanning salon!” Because that’s the kind of thing you do on a Saturday in January…. Obviously. The salon in question was almost empty – there was just some skinny-looking gay bloke hiding in a booth around the back and the one-hundred-year-old grandfather who minded the counter.
My choice – “Fifteen minutes of irradiated cancer-creation, please!” The crumbly old geeker looked at me like I’d landed from space – as if it was possible that I’d accidentally just asked him for his prostate in a jar without realising it. “I should think ten minutes would be enough for you,” he murmured with eyebrows wiggling. So I grudgingly conceded and stood in my light-giving booth like it was some kind of alien hot-stuff storage-tank on my way to Planet Sex. Afterwards I felt disappointed. I looked in the mirror and thought, “Well that didn’t do any good”.
It wasn’t until later that evening that I was forced to realise that – evidently while I wasn’t looking – someone had decided to colour in all of my body with a pink flourescent highlighter pen. It took another twenty-four hours for the upper layers of my facial epidermis to emigrate in search of more fertile farmlands and less harsh weather conditions… But it doesn’t matter. There’s no need for anyone to ever find out that I secretly look like a cross between The English Patient and a recently broiled lobster underneath my shiny shirts. And if anyone asks I can just say, “I don’t really want to talk about it…”
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What is a Designer?
From What is a Designer? by Norman Potter:
“In the field of product design, the professional extremes might be said to range from studio pottery and textile design at one end of the spectrum to engineering design and computer programming at the other. This is a very broad spectrum and clearly there are serious differences at the extremes. In the communication field, a similar spectrum might range from, say, freehand book illustration, to the very exact disciplines of cartography or the design of instrumentation for aircraft.”
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Final thoughts on the Bloggies…
I think it would be going over the top to say that the web has been rocked by suggestions that a group of Texan webloggers have ‘gamed’ the Bloggies. After all, the awards are very clearly niche-interest and geeky. More than that, even – they are supposed to be trivial – fun. In fact I think the reason they’re not uniformly despised is because of the innocence that surrounds them – an innocence that was the main reason why participating and being nominated was such a pleasure. These are your geeky peers. This is what they think. So you have to ask why on earth would anyone want to game them? It just makes the whole event, which is supposed to be a kind of weird coming-together of webloggers, just feel like every other kind of award ceremony – a scrabbling for adulation with no shame, no solidarity, no sense of community. It’s a shame.
I understand Nikolai‘s resistance to getting involved at this stage, but just for the record this is what I think should happen. Firstly, the people who have block-voted should have their sites removed from the nominations. Secondly, the votes they cast during the judging process should be discounted. Thirdly the list of five best sites that emerges from this filtered judges’ list should be merged with whatever’s left from the current five nominations. And then voting should begin again. It would probably mean a few more people in each category – maybe up to eight in some – but I think it’s the only way to handle it appropriately. Let the community decide.
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Bon mots about Trackback…
A select few AIM bon mots about trackback from the last 24 hours or so that demonstrate that I have absolutely bugger-all idea what I’m doing on the internet and should probably go back to sheep-herding or something like that – something that’s not as intellectually taxing and that I can’t be so resolutely, systematically bad at:
“Question: Is trackback a pile of fucking arse that makes no sense whatsoever and doesn’t do what it says on the tin except in the most circuitous and ludicrously bad way possible?”
“How Trackback works in a nutshell: So linky article links to linked article then the linky thing sends a little note to the linked thing saying I’m trying to link to you and the linked thing goes So the fuck what? and the linky thing asks Didn’t I do this right? and the linked thing goes No, you don’t use the actual URL you use a magic different one that you don’t know and can’t easily find automatically unless you understand weird magic code and the linky thing goes You’re shitting me and the linky thing says No.”
“Trackback isn’t new-fangled, it’s just bad-fangled.”
“Someone said to me that the what of trackback was genius even if the how was terrible. I want to suggest that the same holds true of a brick that you claim can travel faster than light.”
I’ve heard it before and I know it’s not a particularly stunning thing to say, but I still feel a weird rush of pride and enthusiasm when someone says something like this: “Weblogs are arguably the first form that is native to the Web. They emerged from two key elements of the Web: hypertext and the ability for anyone with an Internet connection to create a Web page.” [NY News]
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On Undesign…
Much to my delight, there’s a picture of plasticbag.org in an article on “Undesign” in this week’s copy of Graphics International: Lo-fi Allstars. If you want to see the article in context complete with images, then you have to download the PDF. There’s something really nice about having your design genius recognised in a professional magazine, even if said genius is a tarted up hand-me-down from more serious and well-trained individuals. You know who you are.
Having said all that, there is something that I’d like to take issue with. The article seems to be conflating two completely different concepts of design, and in the process is doing a disservice to both. Firstly there’s the kind of design that is undertaken by someone like Jason in the design of his weblog – a form of design that he’s recently posted about. This kind of design derives from allowing the content to take centre-stage, simplifying the rest, cleaning away anything that isn’t necessary and leaving people with a simple and clearly branded content delivery system. Being flash with design, he suggests, rather misses the point. I totally agree with his strategy here (and so I should – I’ve ripped him off enough). It’s a strategy that reminds me very much of craftsmen, artisans and the like – a respect for your medium, a desire to do something clean and clear and elegant that fulfils its purpose practically and effectively. This is a school of undesign that is dripping in the craft of design. It’s almost ur-design or even deep-design, in the same way that people have searched for years for ‘deep’ grammatical structures in language. What it isn’t is slipshod, dirty or inelegant.
On the other side of the scale is the work done by Rob Manuel of b3ta in the promotion of a do-it-yourself, scrappy, “shit is good” aesthetic. I used to work with Rob and I know he feels very strongly – and again, I think, correctly – that the more polish you put on a visual joke then the more likely it is that the humour is lost. He aims for characterful and exciting pieces of work above all – get it done, get it out, if the joke’s good then it’ll thrive. It’s a design strategy that can only work in terms of content, though – not structure – and if you step back and look at how b3ta as a site is structured – both in terms of Information Architecture (if you can say something like that about b3ta without being slightly ridiculous) and overt navigation – then it’s a supremely elegant interconnected mesh of simple pages. And the design for the pages themselves concentrates – just as much as Jason’s work does – on being clear, non-invasive and well-branded.
So if you’re coming into this field fresh from the outside world, and you want to get involved in the new weblog-chic (yet again) then keep this in mind – a good site must necessarily be well-designed. It’s designed to be a clear and unobtrusive content-delivery mechanism with no sharp-edges and no confusing bits of functionality. It’s designed to clearly communicate the structure of a site and the nature of a brand. This takes work and is simply not the same thing as making something look pretty. It’s only in the content itself that you can play – and even then some content is perfect for ‘born sloppy’ approaches (humour and horror for example), while other content (news content, financial reports) still have to look authoratitative… [If you’re interested in reading still more on this issue, I’ve had another stab at explaining myself over at marketingfix.com].
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Two degrees from Al Gore…
So here’s a conversation that I’d love to have been party to: Douglas Rushkoff spends a couple of hours with Al Gore. And in his post about it, Rushkoff has the charming naive enthusiasm of a teenage crush. And by all accounts with good reason:
But still, I could imagine him back in the dorm room, sitting up all night with the rest of us and dreaming about how things might be – if we were ever in charge. With Gore, much more than Clinton, we almost got one of us in there. This was an inspiring thought to me, until I realized that this might be as close as we ever get
I’ve had a couple of minor collisions with Douglas Rushkoff in my life. I e-mailed him once about our mutual crush Grant Morrison, and managed to keep a conversation going online for a few days about The Bomb and whether or not he was doing a treatment for an Invisibles movie. And then a few years later Davo and I went to see him speaking in a café in Golden Square, where I desperately wanted to speak about a dozen times and finally squeezed out one rather hopeless question before becoming distracted by a cute bloke.
Nevertheless, I consider this to be one degree of association between us – the same solid degree of separation that would exist if we had shagged like bunnies or grown-up together in Arkansas. Diseases I had that day may have infected him. It’s possible. Which means that Al Gore could have been en-common-colded by me once-removed. If the disease lay dormant for just over twelve months and only sprang into action at the hint of uncharismatic but otherwise cool presidential candidates. We’re practically brothers.
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On the strange priorities of 8 mile…
There’s no denying that 8 mile is a perfectly serviceable bit of cinema. And there’s no denying that it packs a few punches and that Eminem himself pulls off a perfectly adequate performance. And the world that is represented is compelling and mostly realistic. But I have to confess, as I looked at the seriousness with which they approached the combative rap scenes, I found myself unable to fully grasp why these were quite such big deals. It’s two grown men calling each other names in rhyme, surely? It’s artful and creative – gutsy even – but at no point did you get the feeling that these were battles of life and death. And weirdly, in the background, the threat of eviction and homelessness with a small child to look after seems almost trivial… Strange priorities…
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Link-dump in extremis…
According to Mr Webb and Mr Gyford (with whom I work), it is inappropriate web behaviour to have four full lines of bookmarks in your Mozilla toolbar, all waiting to be properly written-up and posted to your site. Probably less appropriate still are the eleven tabbed browser windows I have open as well, each containing something I’d like to talk about in more detail. So – because it remains vaguely fashionable, and because I’d much rather go and play Black and White – I’m going to do yet another link-dump. Don’t hate me. I’ll come up with some proper content one day. I promise…
- Wireless Cultures at the Tate Modern
“Driven by a Brechtian ideal to ‘mobilise the user and redraft him/her as a producer’, small grassroots groups are connecting neighbourhoods into local area internet networks. How can these spark new areas of creative practice, and what precedents were set by the historical radio pioneers? This half-day seminar explores the use of wireless communication in artistic and social contexts…” - Butterfly etymology
In what must be one of the most deliciously wonderful pieces of etymology ever, I discovered today that the word psyche – which I knew came from the Ancient Greek word for ‘soul’ or ‘wind’ or ‘spirit’ also meant butterfly. The word today – of course – generally refers to a quasi-scientific concept of ‘mind’ that is heavily implicated in Platonic divisions between mind and body… - People react to the Bloggies
Despite the fact that the nomination and judging process of The Bloggies is open and well-known the first round nominations seem to have surprised quite a few warbloggers and celebrity bloggers. There are a number of possible reasons for this, of course. One reason is that right-wing warbloggers are self-selecting to be less community-spirited and engaged in ‘society’ (these being the realms of wooly liberals) and so may simply not have bothered to volunteer to be first round judges. Or of course it could be that warblogging and the associated celebrity figures are much more widely read by members of the public than they are by other webloggers. Admittedly some of the nominees are a little weird and there are some very notable absences, but it hardly seems fair to lambast the nomination process for their own inability to motivate their colleagues to take part… (The nomination process is as follows: members of the public nominate and some volunteer to be first-round judges. Then a percentage of the volunteers are randomly chosen to become second round judges who visit a substantial block of the nominated sites and then vote on their favourites, whittling them down to a manageable five per category. These five are presented to the public to vote upon.) And anyway – it’s supposed to be a fun content to take part in – a way for a community to get together and chat about stuff. Like a village fete or something. It’s not particularly serious… - 10 ways to tell if your co-worker is an extra-terrestrial
“Many top scientists believe that aliens live secretly among us. The sneaky intergalactic travelers often pose as our friends, neighbors and co-workers while they learn the ways of Earth. But how can you tell invading aliens from real humans?” - Joe Clark talks balls
One of the most interesting things about Joe Clark’s site is how often his arguments hinge upon how everyone has a vile self-serving secret agenda, or how they’re nasty manipulative people that want to squish the common {gay cinema/web usability/accessibility expert} man or that they occasionally make typos (and are therefore clearly incompetent and unpleasant). - They don’t get blog
Found while wandering through the Bloggies nominations for best article, this piece on how people like Andrew Sullivan miss the point with weblogging (spitting on community, talking about publishing) really hit home for me and reminded me a lot of a piece I wrote a while ago for a talk at the BBC. In it I argued that mainstream publishers had – to date – only interacted with weblogs on the most superficial level, as something to write about or as a territory to claim. Journalists often take the second approach when they go online. I also wrote about this in my debate with Simon Waldman about the Guardian’s Best British Blog prize. There is something very profoundly different about the polyphony of voices interacting and arguing one another. It’s not just a way to shout your opinions as loudly as possible in as flat and featureless a way as possible. Engaging in that community – not of webloggers, but of citizens who happen to be empowered to respond and engage with you – is the whole point as far as I’m concerned.