Month: January 2003

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…

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?

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.”