I’m watching Michael Portillo on This Week today and he makes a really interesting point about turn-out at the election. He suggests that people tend to vote less when they think they know what the outcome is going to be. It’s only when they’re unsure about the outcome that a large proportion are motivated to go out to the ballot box. Which brings up an interesting possibility – that not voting is based on a tacit accord, that it’s a mechanism of not-voting exchange that operates on assumption of balance. Maybe it’s not a cynical move that indicates people’s disillusionment with politics – maybe instead it’s like Arthur Dent in the beginning of The Hitchhiker’s Guide (book not film) who manages to abandon his place in front of a bulldozer to go down the pub. And how? By rationalising that the foreman was resigned to a wasted day anyway and therefore his moist be-mudded presence was really no longer necessary… This has changed my perspective completely from thinking of non-voters as indolent to thinking that they’re tactical, even-handed and pragmatic. The consequence being, of course, that whenever any one party tries to get their followers out to vote, the cosmic balance makes their corresponding numbers nervy enough to go out in response. Ah. The big wheel keeps on turning. On a simple line. Day by day…
A new operating system and a Bank Holiday on the same weekend. It’s like fate. And it means that all around the country there are geeks fiddling and installing and reinstalling and losing serial numbers and going “oooh” pretty much in synchrony. I’ve been playing my role too! Exploring all the little nooks and crannies of my brand new shiny computer.
Some first impressions – Spotlight is pretty awesome and a positive move in desktop search. The fact that it usurps most of the functionality of Launchbar without being quite as focused on launching apps is a bit annoying, but not unpredictable. There’s a lot of the Flickr aesthetic (steal from the best!) in this release.
It took me a while to get my head around the new version of Mail, but I’m getting more and more quietly impressed. The smart folders angle (and the spotlight searching) makes the whole thing much more useful – I love the idea that I can keep all my mail in the same big dustbin and have query-focused folders to find my way through it. My long-standing problem with the app remains though – why the crap isn’t there an option to reply to an e-mail with the e-mail address it was originally sent to? I would have thought that was bloody obvious functionality to have, and yet almost no bloody mail app I’ve used in years has had it. The behaviour of this version appears to be closer to my ideal than the previous version, but not by much… If you’re outside the Inbox, then things start getting screwy…
Elsewhere, there are all kinds of neat things lying around in Quartz Composer, but I’ve not had much time to play with that yet. I have had time to play with Dashboard though and I’ve got a few thoughts. Firstly, it’s obviously kind of fluff, but I don’t care. It’s neat and it’s pretty and I like it. Secondly, there may be lots of little widgets available, but most of them are pretty useless so far. I’ve only found two fun ones (other than the weather and clock things it comes with): a Transmit drop-file widget and the Delicious Library shelf. And they’re kind of bunk. Fun though. Thirdly – and most importantly – building widgets is fun! I’ve been playing around with Mr Biddulph and it’s all been highly enjoyable. I’m fully expecting to be involved in making several of these little things over the next few weeks.
(A quick sideline – the more I’ve been playing with Dashboard the more I’ve started to think of it as an interesting prototyping area for simple network enabled real-world appliances and ambient computing stuff. That may sound over the top, but think about it – each widget is supposed to support simple interactions only, they’re often designed to look and feel like real-world objects and they’re also mostly designed to be useful when you’re online – pulling in information in the background. Those simple ambient pieces of technology – like the orb that reflects the state of the stock market – would feel right at home in this environment. I’ve not been paying much attention to the Konfabulator widget market, but I imagine they’ve been pushing along quite nicely in these directions already.)
Another fun area for me has been Automator. I’ve not got very far with it yet, but it only took me two minutes to knock up a little workflow that downloaded every MP3 linked to from a page, saved it to my desktop and slapped it into my iTunes library. It’s the perfect way to quickly grab fun previews of tracks from the Marseille Figs album.
What else is there? I’ve not really played too much with Safari RSS because I still like NetNewsWire more. The new iChat has a sweet / disturbing little feature that picks up on what iChatStatus did and incorporates it (again) into the OS. So now you can choose to have your latest iTunes track displayed as your status line. But that’s not the good/creepy bit – what’s cool is that other people can not only see what you’re looking at, but can click on the song to look it up on iTunes Music Store. If that was more open – if you could choose where to look up the song – then I’d probably like it more. I’m not thrilled by the idea of my operating system trying to sell me things all the time.
Other than that, everything’s pretty smooth and classy. A few irritants get in the way of a pure fun experience of course – Quicktime 7 no longer remembers that I went pro – apparently the money I spent on that isn’t good enough any more. Thank god for VLC. And there are the things that I’ve done that are dumb – like neglect to note down my serial numbers for Acquisition and BBEdit 8.2. But they’re my own fault, I guess. Otherwise, a pretty entertaining and solid release! Big hugs all round…
This is a slightly rewritten and polished up version of a talk I gave to a Six Apart event (cf. On being on the panel at Blogs in Action) at London’s Polish Club a few weeks ago. It’s kind of a personal history of and exposition around weblogs and webloggery. This version has had some of the more colourful language removed. Warning – it’s quite long and it’s a bit of a mystery to me how I managed to get through it all in ten minutes.
Today I’m going to talk about the horseless carriage. Well. Kind of.
In the middle ages, people walked to places. If they didn’t walk, then they rode horses. Some attached carts to their horses. Some time later, those carts got suspension. That’s when they started to get really popular because people’s arses didn’t hurt so much. In the late eighteenth century – joy – the steam-based self-propelled vehicle was devised. By the way, many of the most notable advances in steam vehicles occurred in England – with the Lunar Society in Birmingham. These devices were known as ‘horseless carriages’. You may be familiar with their descendents. You may have used one of them to get to this event today.
That then, was the history of the horseless carriage – and I’ll come back to that. But now I want to look at a parallel history – that of the weblog. Many histories of webloggia have been written to date. The best is by Rebecca Blood and it’s called Weblogs: A History and Perspective. Reading it, you can get a real sense about all the technologies and analogues and developments that led up to a person pointing at something for the first time and going, “that thing there is a weblog”…
To summarise – some people say the very first site on the web, Tim Berners-Lee’s homepage, was the first weblog. On it he linked to new sites, services and pages as they started to appear. That experience rings nostalgic bells for me. I can remember a community of webloggers that did the same for each new person who joined us in writing rubbish on the internet. Those were the days.
The word itself, though, was a much much later development – and came in two stages. First Jorn Barger coined the term ‘weblog’ to describe his site Robot Wisdom. Subsequently, Peter Merholz shortened the term to the more commonly used ‘blog’. So he’s the person you should be looking to blame for that one…
So we had a name, but not necessarily any sense of what these sites were for? There was enormous debate about their essential character. These first practitioners saw the ‘point’ of a weblog as linking. The core of the enterprise for these people was finding cool sites and referencing them. Although perhaps that’s overstating it a bit, since even then people had a sense of the personal as well. Dave Winer famously said of weblogs that each had a human guide that you got to know. He talked about camaraderie and politics. I think he was right. I’ll get back to that too.
Alongside the people who viewed weblogs as linklogs, another group of sites that viewed themselves as ‘online journals’ were emerging from the more arty side of the internet. I was involved in this arty community and remember seeing sites like Ember.org and flaunt.net explore what it was to self-represent and write online. Glassdog.net was one of the many hubs of this period of artistry and creativity. The whole space was excitingly expressive, but not particularly social. Alongside all this, the LiveJournallers made their moves. All in all these were very similarly structured takes on a completely different direction.
After September 11th, yet another group of people manifested on the internet and chose weblogs as their means of expression. These people talked in terms of punditry and they thought of themselves as following in the footsteps (to praise or bury) of Glenn Reynolds. These people wanted to express opinions, debate and comment on what was going on in the world around them. These ‘warbloggers’ at times have started various snowballing news stories – particularly in the States.
And we’re still not done – linkers, journal-keepers and pundits have most recently been joined by the commercial people. America’s Gawker Media publishes weblogs around a whole range of subjects from politics to sex. Group weblogs like BoingBoing have gone pro as well – and they are, let me tell you, making a decent amount of money out it. Yay Google Ads!
All of this means that when people talk about weblogs they tend to talk about it in terms of other things they knew about beforehand that seem to be good analogies. Which one of these is right?
Well, I’ll leave you with that question for a minute and talk a bit about my experiences online. When I started my site in 1999 it was already a year or two since Jorn Barger had coined the term. I was one of the very first batch of people to start using Blogger in the first months after it opened its doors to the public. When I started there were probably only a few hundred webloggers in the world. I think I started the day after Anil Dash. Each new weblogger who came online was a cause for celebration. We used to link to everyone. We’d redesign every week. Happy times.
Over the years I’ve watched as things that now seem obvious got invented. I’ve seen the concept of the permalink appear – and change everything completely. I’ve watched Movable Type appear, get huge and take over the world – and I’ve watched dozens of people try and create less capable knock-offs. I’ve seen the idea of a single-page archve manifest itself and then take a billion years to get into Blogger. I’ve seen the appearance (and I fear death) of Trackback. And the slow process to get comments on everyone’s sites. All the simple structures we operate with now – all the things we take for granted as being obvious – each was invented. And I’m lucky enough to remember each one turning up.
Alongside all of this, my own use of my site has changed. I started off writing about things I found on the internet. Then I started talking about things I did with my friends and what I thought about work. I explored the freedoms of being anonymous in public. Then my friends found out. Then I had this terrible pseudo abortive relationship and started writing secret stuff in the code of the site and being all melodramatic in public. Then I got excited about some specific subjects. Then it felt like everyone was impinging on my life and that everyone knew I had a weblog. Then I felt like I had no privacy. Then I stopped writing so much about my personal life and concentrated on writing on the things I cared about. Then the things I started writing about started to coincide with the things I was working on. Then I started getting into conversations with people who shared my professional capacity, and it having an impact on my working life. And that’s where you find me today – writin a mixture of personal stuff and ludicrously complicated stuff about social software.
And with all that experience, here’s what I’m here to say. Here are my observations about weblogs and weblogging:
Fundamentally, I think I can bring all of this down to one core statement – that for the vast majority of weblogs in the world the core over-arching principle is that of personhood. The weblog becomes an extension of yourself. A suit you wear, if you will. It’s like you’re controlling a whole prosthetic version of yourself. The tone of voice will be personal. The individual weblog like the individual person will benefit from feeling like they’re a part of a community. A weblogger’s community will work best when it has connections to (and overlaps with) that weblogger’s real-life community. Most importantly, an individual weblog/weblogger will care about what they care about and nothing more.
This means that whatever you’re planning to use weblogs for, then you’ll fid them most naturally useful if you keep the individual at the heart of the enterprise. That means if you’re interested in knowledge management, or in community generation or in using them for publishing or whatever, then you should keep that idea of an individual voice at the centre of your thinking. Even Fleshbot has a sense of an individual behind it – an editorial tone that feels personable. Not that I’ve been. And I’m sure none of you have either. And nor should you.
And if you’re thinking about the future of weblogs then you should think in terms of how to support the individual in their conversations and engagements and social networks. Maybe that means developing Livejournal explicit-relationships functionality. Or maybe it means bits of Flickr. Or maybe it means better conversation-tracking.
But it’s all got to be about the individual. And my preferred way of expressing that is that a weblog is a representation of a person. I think that’s behind all of the definitions that people came up with before. I think that’s the core principle that stands behind the idea that a weblog is a journal, or that they’re collections of links that I’ve seen on the web or that they’re space for an individual to undertake a new form of journalism, etc. etc.
And my contention – to bring us right back to the beginning – is that all of those statements (“A weblog is a kind of diary”) are kind of like saying that “A car is a horseless carriage”. For years we had to descrive cars by reference only to things that had come before, but we don’t need to do that any more. Enough time has passed that we can describe a car without talking about its origins or its analogues – without talking about things that are kind of like it. Now we can start to conceive of a car without thinking of horses and suspension and traps and carriages.
And I think we can now start to do the same thing with weblogs – we can push past describing them as being like empty books that people write in and keep private, we can say that they’re not just records of sites that we’ve visited, we can stop trying to compare what we’re doing with the actions of professional journalists writing for newspapers. I think we’ve got past that now. I think we can call a blog a blog.
I think it’s time we faced the fact that Trackback is dead. We should state up front – the aspirations behind Trackback were admirable. We should reassert that we understand that there is a very real need to find mechanisms to knit together the world of webloggers and to allow conversations across multiple weblogs to operate effectively. We must recognise that Trackback was one of the first and most important attempts to work in that area. But Nevertheless, we have to face the fact – Trackback is dead.
It has been killed by spam and by spammers – by the sheer horror of ping after ping pushing mother/son incest and bestiality links. It has been killed by the exploitation of human beings quite prepared to desecrate the work of tens of thousands of people in order that they should scrabble together a few coins. It has been killed by the experience of an inbox overwhelmed by the automated rape of our creative endeavours.
In a way it should have been predictable from the beginning – we should probably all have spotted that functionality that allows individuals to place links on other people’s sites could be exploited by spammers. Some people did spot these problems, but even they had no sense of the scale. Their responses were – at best – muted. But now I think we have to accept that the evidence is in. The situation is clear and it is not good. We’re engaged in an arms race with the worst kind of people, an arms race that has raged across other communications media and which we show no sign of winning. For me, the negative experience of dealing with trackbacks has long-since overwhelmed the benefits it brings. For these reasons, I’m turning off all incoming Trackbacks on plasticbag.org from this moment on.
Of course the problem isn’t restricted to Trackbacks. The systems we’re using to manage comments on our sites are probably under even more strain from spammers. The only reason I’m prepared to put up with this in the short term is because the comments seem to be more useful to more people at the moment. But I’m clear in my mind – we’re rapidly approaching a crisis here as well, and it is likely to be one that ends in the abandonment of comment systems as well.
And how to solve this problem? I don’t think it’s a matter of iterative improvements. I don’t think this problem can be solved by engaging in the arms race. MTBlacklist has saved my life, but it’s a patch, not a fix. No, any solution for this problem will be conceptually distinct from our current approaches. It could be a centralised approach – letting professionals manage the data that links our communities together. It could be a radically decentralised one beyond what we’re working with at the moment. I don’t know for certain. But I think we should be looking back to the origins of the weblog and seeing how things operated then.
Originally there was no weblog spam and yet conversation and discussion still existed. If an individual posted something and another individual wanted to respond to it, they simply wrote a post on their own site linking to the original. This environment was entirely free of spam. It was completely clean. I can’t help thinking that maybe we need to start thinking in terms of approaches like that – where there is no automated functionality that could be robotically exploited. Or perhaps we should be looking in other directions – how can we abstract out the kind of social networks that lie behind Flickr to structures that we could overlay across the internet as a whole. A question I think we should be asking is how could we build services that let you decide precisely which groups of people should be able to see, link to, ‘trackback’ or comment on the work you do in a decentralised, disaggregated way?
But this is to get ahead of ourselves. Today, we are here to mourn the passing of a great friend and a solution designed for happier and less cynical times. Trackback, I come to praise and bury you. May you rest in peace…