Category: Random

In March 2000, I’d been a weblogger for about four months. Blogger itself wasn’t much older. The directory pages which tracked the start of each new public weblog are still up online and you can see new weblogs starting at the rate of one or two a day. The very first page on that directory contains the names that still conjure up the early weblogging experience to me – Evhead, Megnut and Onfocus, of course. But also Anil Dash, Saturn.org, Ethel the Blog, prolific.org, Prehensile Tales, WrongWayGoBack, etc. etc. If you dig around a bit, I’m in that list too somewhere – the past subtly retroactively edited by me changing the name of my site from Barbelith to plasticbag.org at a much later date…

This nascent community was in some ways not nascent at all – many of the people in that early weblogging space were just looking for a platform in which they could do something creative. In fact, I think maybe one aspect of Blogger’s initial success was how connected the initial webloggers were with earlier creative communities and individuals like Derek Powazek‘s fray and – in particular – Lance Arthur‘s epic Glassdog.net – back at the time when you could make great things online even if you couldn’t program for shit. Glassdog.net’s collection of wonderful web projects is completely lost now, unfortunately, but it was a space for many people eager to do something wonderful online. In a way, the early weblogging community was an extension – almost a sideline – of this community – a sideline that grew and grew to occupy not only much of our time, but also the time of many hundreds of thousands of other people… And in return, the communicative aspects of weblogging galvanised that community – exposing the people behind the projects, creating stated connections and creating genuine friendships, partnerships (and occasionally animosities).

A couple of days ago Meg linked through to a site which featured a quicktime movie of an amateur interview with the early Blogger crew. And all I kept thinking about when I watched it was how much I wanted to go to SXSW to meet them all back in March 2000, and how I couldn’t, and how much I wish I’d been able to. It was a fun time…

If all I cared about was traffic, then of course I’d write more about politics. Or religion. I wrote about religion a while back, and – yeah, I got lots of traffic. And I also had to spend about two weeks fielding e-mail from people, explaining my position again and again, taking issue with people who mischaracterised my position, trying to remain at all times relatively cool headed, relatively reasonable. I wish I could say that I succeeded all fo the time.

Of course if all I cared about was traffic, then I wouldn’t have bothered. I would have let my rhetoric fly free and wild. Facts? What facts! Logic? Who cares! I’d have stripped myself of the constraints of society (Arguing fairly – pah! Accepting when you’re wrong – how retro! Looking to learn through debate rather than win through debate – ludicrous!) like I was shedding clothing, and I’d have run naked screaming through the fields of cheap attack, jingoism and name-calling! Who cares what I’m saying as long as it has the effect I desire? Who cares what tactics I use to get my point across? A win by a technicality – or a win by cheating – is still a win godammit…

If all I cared about was traffic, I’d write like James Lileks. I’d talk to people’s guts, I’d talk to their pain. I’d do whatever I could to avoid their ears and their minds. Because otherwise how would I be able to argue that being the victim of a terrorist atrocity automatically made every decision of a country – past, present and future – purer than the driven snow…? How else would I be able to argue that the only response that would be unreasonable would be atomic war…? How else would I be able to argue that anyone who even questioned this position hated humanity and was insulting the families of victims?

I’m sure James gets a lot of traffic, and I’m sure that a lot of people feel that he speaks for them and says things that they feel to be true. There are a lot of people who feel vulnerable in the world at the moment, and there are a lot of people who feel that something must be done. They’re right to feel vulnerable – we all feel vulnerable. They’re right to want to do something to make the world a better place – there’s no doubt that it could do with the help. But selling arguments on the basis of fear and bile and name-calling isn’t the way to go. If I was James I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. And I don’t think the traffic would help…

Addendum: I’d like to apologise for the tone of this post, which was written in anger and ironically suffers from some of the same rhetorical excesses that I was taking James Lileks to task for. I do – however – still stand by the content.

Well then, one way or another – at least for the foreseeable future – it looks like we have confirmation that we won’t all be using Flash as our dominant way of designing for the web. Via 2lmc, I’ve been directed to Zeldman’s commentary on the Eolas vs. Microsoft patent battle over web plugins. In a nutshell, Microsoft has lost their first attempt to challenge the ruling, and are starting work on removing certain plug-in-related functionality from Internet Explorer. As a result every site using Flash or Java plug-ins across the web is likely to have to rebuild aspects of their site.

So what about all of those companies that have built sites using Flash in good faith? Who do they get to take to court? Could they sue Microsoft? I’m imagining they won’t have that opportunity. It seems to me that means thousands of companies spending millions of dollars in rebuilding and future-proofing and an internet that’s less accessible and useful than it was before. I just wish I had a better sense of whose fault it was? Is it Microsoft for breaking the rules, Eolas for pushing their patent or the patent system itself?

So here’s a thought – the Apple Music Store has sold 10,000,000 songs. And the new iPod now has space for 10,000 songs. So if you needed a place to put all those 10,000,000 songs, you would only need 1,000 iPods. I wonder to myself – could you work out how many ‘spaces for songs’ that Apple have sold based upon their sales of the various sizes of iPods. You could then work out the average number of spaces for songs per iPod. An interesting figure would be the percentage of songs that are on an average iPod that were bought from the Apple Music Store… As Matt Jones said when I IM’d him about this – “Infographic ahoy!”

Microdoc News has responded to my piece on Mass Amateurisation with a corresponding piece taking me to task on using the word ‘amateurisation’ when I should use the word ’empowerment’ (Mass Amateurisation, Blogging and Google):

Mr Coates has done it again – created a wide sweeping panorama of ideas which seem to work but then once the euphoria of the idea has swept by, one realises that Tom has just kicked me and all the other webloggers in the guts. The concept of mass amateurisation is that kick in the guts — amateurisation is a pejorative term, belittling the efforts of thousands of webloggers.

I think it’s a shame that my piece has been read in this way. As I think should be obvious to pretty much everyone, I’m interested in weblogs and weblog culture and I’m proud to belong to that community of people. When I used the word ‘amateur’ I wasn’t intending to make any kind of value judgement – I was just describing a type of activity that was open to many people who were undertaking it not because they had to – and not for money – but because they enjoyed doing it and derived other benefits from it. There are clearly many extremely good weblogs with expert (or popular) appeal and there are also a great many weblogs that neither have – nor particularly look for – any relevance outside a small group of family or friends. I’m not sure I believe that whether they are ‘amateur’ or not necessarily has much bearing on that distinction. The web is full of sites by creative people who don’t get paid for their efforts. Many of these sites are dramatically more interesting and creative than commercial sites. They’re still amateur… And why can’t an amateur writer be at the very top of their field? After all only amateur sports men and women can compete in the Olympics…

I’m doing a bit of work around recommendations and recommendations engines at the moment, and I’m finding it really illuminating. The thing I think I’m most surprised by is how unclear the boundaries that surround the whole concept actually are – how everything seems to bleed into surrounding areas – where structure and categorisation bleeds into navigation bleeds into contextualisation bleeds into associations between things which bleeds into tracked user-behaviour in aggregate which bleeds into individual user behaviour patterns. It’s all very… bleedy…

Anyway, so I’m thinking about all this stuff and I start looking at Amazon – and I know I shouldn’t really be surprised but I suddenly get slightly overwhelmed by it. It’s basically just loads of recommendations engines joined together with a tiny fragment of ‘buy a product’ goo. There’s the page that greets you when you arrive (assuming you’re logged in), above which you can click on a page to get specialised recommendations based upon purchases. On every single item you go to there’s a recommendations aspect (people who bought this also bought…) – and then if you add it to your basket, then you get a recommendations page that shows you other things you might like to buy. The same thing happens when you add it to your wishlist. And then there’s the recommendations engine that tracks you around the site, keeps track of every item you’ve looked at and works out descriptions based upon those – that’s called “The Page You Made”. And then there’s the “New for You” page – a set of (you guessed it) recommendations based upon what’s recently been published or released.Then there’s the button that you click to “See more items like the ones in your wishlist”. And then there’s “Your Store”… I wouldn’t be surprised if they tweaked your recommendations depending on where you lived as well.

All of which only makes it worse that seem to think they think I’m obsessed with low-grade sk8ter rawk…

So there’s an article over at the BBC at the moment about Google celebrating its fifth birthday. As part of this article there’s this paragraph:

Web logs, or blogs, pose a particular problem for Google as one of their defining features is the links they have to other blogs. As the numbers of blogs has grown the influence they have over rankings has increased. In some cases blogs referring to a webpage on a particular subject are ranked higher than the page itself. To combat this Google has considered creating an index just for the web journals.

My question is quite simple, really. The possibility that weblogs might be skewing the Google’s results has been mentioned several times before, but as far as I know Google have never come out and confirmed these stories – and they have actively denied that a potential ‘separate index’ would involve removing weblog from their main index. So my concern is not what Google may or may not be doing, but whether the BBC has just based that part of its article on the article written by Andrew Orlowski on this issue, which conjured a fair amount of spurious fantasy and assertion out of surprisingly limited evidence. If they have, I have to confess I’d be disappointed…

So like a great great many people in the UK who can’t get easy access to cable, I get my ADSL from BTOpenworld. BTOpenworld is the online part of that-which-used-to-be-called-British-Telecom before it was privatised twenty or so years ago. Now the thing about this ex-monopoly is that it really doesn’t have the slightest idea what it’s doing most of the time. I’ve had ¬£250 phone bills for internet access and then been told I’d get unlimited usage only for it never to work (an offer they actually physically rescinded because they couldn’t handle the strain), I’ve had ADSL packaged with the world’s least practical and useful modem and I’ve recurrently had them say that they don’t support Macs even when – let’s be honest – what’s to support? The biggest problem with them is that they keep thinking “ooh – let’s add more shitty services and fluff on our service” while resolutely not doing anything even vaguely useful like:

1. Have vaguely easy to search help files
2. Provide a simple service that actually works
3. Not be dick-heads

My favourite bit always used to be the phone help-lines that they charge 50p a minute for. You ring up and they say things like “Have you got the phone cable plugged in?” and “Is your computer turned on?” before confessing that they actually dont’ know what’s wrong at all, and – by the way – thanks for the tenner you’ve just spent on the conversation…

But I have a new favourite bit. They send out these e-mails every so often, telling you how they’re changing the terms and conditions and giving you brilliant new services like new dumb-shit-enabled browsers and “Photo and briefcase storage and sharing” whatever the hell that might be. The latest big deal that no one gives a crap about? BTOpenworld is ‘fusing’ with Yahoo in some totally tedious way. So they send out an e-mail explaining how ace this new service is and it’s all HTML enabled and full of crappy images. And at the bottom it has this thing about what to do if you’re on a Mac, and – of course – the bloody link doesn’t even work if you’re using a Mac.

Gah, the sooner there’s some decent, practical simple mac-friendly competition the better…

From Dear Raed a couple of days ago:

While my family is waiting outside something strange happens, one of the soldiers comes out, empties his flask in the garden and start telling the medic to give him his, the medic shoos him away. They all think that the soldier is filling his flask with cold water from the cooler. Later it turns out that he emptied my fatherís bottle of Johnny Walkerís into his flask and was probably trying to convince the medic to give him his to empty another bottle. Weird shit.

I have managed to get my hands on an advance copy of Salam Pax, The Baghdad Blog, which is coming out in paperback on September 5th. During the war, I have to confess that I found Dear Raed essentially unreadable. The weight of irrational rhetoric from all directions around the blogosphere had become totally overwhelming – the whipping up of fervent belief (on all sides) was creating this weird hybrid mood of blood-lust, puritanism, evangelism and nationalism. The weblog world was full of hyperbole to the extent that it seemed to me quite plausible that any opinion could have been espoused by someone, and seized upon and used as some kind of flag to stand behind – although, to be fair, it was no more full than the opinion columns of the national and international press. At the time the thought of reading another opinion on the war – and trying to scrabble the truth from the mix of prejudice, vested interest, nationalism, accidental misinformation and context – was a far from compelling proposition…

With the benefit of hindsight, of course, things start to look a little clearer. When the red tide started to recede, the shapes of opinions and reportage of intelligence and integrity seemed to me gradually to emerge. And I think, now the initial hysteria has passed it’s become clear that Dear Raed constitutes an abiding – albeit small – artefact of life on the ground during the second war in Iraq.

I have one caveat. I think it’s important to remember that – as human beings – we have a tendency to group people into those who are similar to us and those who are not. We find it much easier to identify with people who share some of our cultural baggage, values and preoccupations. Our sensitivity towards Salam’s words and our sense of identification when we read his experiences – whether we agree with his politics or not – are as a direct result of the fact that he speaks with a vocabulary and in a sensibility that are immediately comprehensible to Westerners. It’s important to remember both that there are many other voices – more representative voices – that perhaps we’re either not so willing to hear or comprehend. Perhaps Salam’s most important achievement, then, should be that he simply started giving us the tools to help us listen…