Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Saying everything on KQED Forum

by

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of talking about Say Everything with Michael Krasny on KQED’s Forum. I don’t think I fully infected Michael with my enthusiasm for bloggers and their place in our culture, but I was grateful for the rare opportunity this show (and host) provides to dig really deeply into a subject over the course of an hour.

One of my arguments is that blogs — so long derided as trivial — are actually the format we employ today when we want to go deep into any subject or topic. Forum and blogs: separated at birth?

Here’s the audio from the show:

Hunches — in combat, and on the Web’s wilds

by

A lot of people have flagged Benedict Carey’s piece in yesterday’s Times, “In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable,” and with good reason: it’s a fascinating report on research into the way the brain combines visual data and emotional responses to shape the sort of instant-gut-reaction decisions that soldiers make as they evaluate threats.

The examples the piece draws on are from U.S. soldiers’ experiences in Iraq, where every stray boulder or trashheap by the roadside could be hiding a deadly bomb.

Reading Carey’s story, I thought of parallels in the distinctly less lethal — but still occasionally perilous — informational environment of the Web. What are the little signals that tell us, “You can trust this page”? And what are the red flags that tell us, “Watch out, something’s off here”?

These are important. Of course, they can help us protect ourselves from outright scammers (phishers who build lookalike bank websites to try to steal your passwords, and so on). But they can also help us sift and sort through the news and information that flows through our browsers, focusing on the good and discarding the bad.

Some of these signals are glaringly obvious (no “About” page? come on!). Others are subtler (are the writer’s arguments logical? Are statements of fact documented by links?).

What are some of the tools you use? I’ll be teaching a workshop this coming weekend as part of the Stanford Professional Publishing Course, and would love to hear your suggestions.

Appearances, actual and virtual

by

Tomorrow night (Wednesday, July 29) at 7:30 pm, I’m speaking about Say Everything at the Hillside Club here in Berkeley. The event is sponsored by Berkeley Arts and Letters and also by the Berkeley Cybersalon, a series that I have been attending, in various forms, for 15 years now.

Also, it looks like I’m going to be on KQED Forum this Thursday morning at 10 AM — listen in, call in, ask me interesting questions!

Finally, this week I’m guest-blogging over at the Powell’s Books site. My first post was all about why I wrote Say Everything as a book and not a blog. (I assumed this would be sort of obvious — but as my Powell’s piece was being posted, the Wall Street Journal published a review arguing that my book “would have worked better as a blog.” So go figure.)

In my second Powell’s post, I look at what “master narratives” we can find in the story of the rise of blogging.

Another archival find: Gillmor’s original blog

by

Blog historian Rudolf Ammann has done it again. First he pointed out that my statement in Say Everything that Cameron Barrett’s original blogroll had not been archived was inaccurate. Now he has dug up links to most of the original content in Dan Gillmor’s pioneering EJournal blog for the San Jose Mercury News, beginning in 1999. (Here’s a link to Gillmor’s very first post, in October 1999.) Based on Gillmor’s comments to me in an interview for the book, along with my own failed efforts to find them, I’d concluded that these pages were not available on the Web in any form.

I’m delighted that another little slice of Web history turns out to be available; grateful, once more to the amazing Internet Archive, for saving so much of our collective past and making it available via the “Wayback Machine”; and making a mental note to myself to try many more alternate domains when hitting a wall in archive searches.

I am no slouch in the ways of the Wayback Machine, but I tip my hat to Ammann, who is plainly a more adept archival sleuth than I am!

A.P. goes nuclear on fair use

by

“A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web.” That’s the headline on a New York Times article right now. But if you read the article, you see that the Associated Press’s new campaign isn’t only about “unpaid use of articles,” it’s about any use of headlines as links. In other words, it sounds like A.P. is pulling the pin on a legal Doomsday Machine for news and information on the Web — claiming that there is no fair use right to link to articles using a brief snippet of verbiage from that article, or the original headline on the article.

In other words, if that Times story were by the A.P., I would be breaking the A.P.’s new rules just by using the ten words at the beginning of this post. My new book, which is filled with hundreds of quotes and URLs that (on the book’s website) link to the sources, would be a massive violation of the rules.

The A.P. seems to want to try to squeeze money both from Google and from sites that aggregate headlines. The Times story says: “The goal, [A.P. president Tom Curley] said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.” (Under A.P. rules, could I quote that?)

This move is foolish and self-defeating. If it has to, Google can simply block A.P. stories, and I’m sure it will choose to do that rather than agree to pay A.P.’s new fees. More simply, Google’s lawyers can point to the fact that any publisher can already opt out of Google’s system any time he/she wants to.

The A.P. isn’t going to build the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar business it speaks about based on this effort; the most it can hope for is to sequester its version of the news off in a corner from the rest of the Web, where fewer and fewer will read it.

The danger is that this conflict will make it into the courts and some judge will narrow the fair use principle in ways that hurt both the Web and the free flow of information in our society.

As I wrote last year:

In the meantime, the biggest priority here for those of us who care about the long-term health of the web is that we don’t wind up with a terrible legal precedent that defines fair use in some newly constricted way. The people who are calling the AP out on this aren’t crazed piratical scofflaws; they’re journalists and authors, just as I am, people who pay the rent based on the value of the content they produce. But you need some assurance that you can quote brief excerpts or you can’t write non-fiction at all.

For a primer on this issue, you can see these posts (first, a second, a third, and a wrap) from last year, when A.P. got into a scrap with well-known blogger Rogers Cadenhead by sending him a legal takedown notice.

UPDATE: Zach Seward at Nieman Lab has a post covering some of the legal aspects of this story.

Where’s Twitter’s past, and what’s it’s future?

by

Blogs privilege the “now.” New stuff always goes on top. But they also create a durable record of “then” — as I have learned in spending the last couple of years digging through the back catalog of blogging. One of the great contributions of blogging software is to organize the past for anyone who writes frequently online. Before blogs, with each new addition to a website we had to think, where does this go, and how will I find it later? Blog tools, as personal content management systems, ended that era.

Twitter is great at “now.” But as far as I can tell, it’s lousy at “then.” It offers no interface to the past. You can’t easily navigate your way backwards in time.

Recently, I wanted to figure out the date of my first tweet. It’s still there in the database. But there’s no simple way to locate it. (Folks on Twitter pointed me to services like mytweet16 that dig up your oldest tweets, or tweetbook.in, which puts your whole Twitter history into a PDF, so there’s a way to do it, but not much of a useful interface.)

Each tweet is timestamped and lives at a unique URL. So it should be possible to build the machinery to organize one’s tweets into a more coherent record. (Dave Winer has written about this and done some work to store his Twitter past.) But — again, as far as I’ve been able to determine — we don’t really have a clear sense, or commitment from Twitter the company, of how long these URLs are going to be around.

The other big weakness of Twitter as a sort of universal microblogging platform is that all its interaction is happening on one company’s server, in that company’s database. That poses some fierce technical problems if the Twitterverse keeps scaling up. (See for instance this comment by Chuck Shotton at Scripting News: “IMO, Twitter is a toy to be experimented with until it breaks and is replaced by a properly implemented solution that will persist, scale, and be as open as the protocols above.”)

If Twitter can engineer its way out of the scaling dilemma, we’re still looking at a platform that is owned by one company. One of Dave Winer’s original message as a proto-blogger in the mid-90s was to warn us about such platform ownership and to celebrate the arrival of the Web as the platform that nobody owns. Today Winer is sounding the same alarms about Twitter, and they are worth weighing. While I find Twitter far more open to the Web than, say, Facebook — which really feels like an AOL-style walled garden — it’s still just one company, with one “namespace,” or set of unique names for people to claim (good Twitter IDs will probably run out even faster than domain names).

To date I think Twitter has done a pretty fine job of serving its platform and its users — though I have qualms, as many do, about the way its Suggested User List mixes up editorial and business roles without taking full responsibility for either. But once the company decides it’s time to “monetize” — whether that happens next month or year or decade, and whether it’s handled sensitively or crudely — we are likely to see old-fashioned conflicts between serving users and serving the quarterly revenue targets re-emerge.

Best case: Twitter hits a home-run by finding an innovation that, like Google’s targeted text ads, brings in revenue without degrading the primary service. (There is a subtle argument — espoused by Rich Skrenta and others — that Google, in monetizing its pages, corrupted the link-ranking on which its whole search engine depends. But for most of us, Google managed to make a fortune without noticeably reducing its usefulness — a neat feat.) Worst case: Twitter fails to figure out a business model and its investors grow impatient, forcing the service to overload us with advertising like a tanking dotcom in 2001.

On his blog at BNET, David Weir recently recorded the following comment from an anonymous Silicon Valley insider: “Twitter is exactly what the Internet was around 1996. It represents nothing less than the New Internet. It is the game-changer.”

I share the general enthusiasm for Twitter as a model for real-time interaction. But I don’t fully buy the “New Internet” notion. By 1996, people like me (and David Weir, and Evan Williams, and Dave Winer, and countless others) had flocked to the Internet because it was wide open. In the World of Ends formulation, “No one owns it. Everyone can use it. Anyone can improve it.” Twitter, exciting as it is, falls far short of that kind of game-changing.

[This post follows on from yesterday’s How Twitter Makes Blogs Smarter.]

How Twitter makes blogs smarter

by

Probably the single question I’m most often asked as I talk to people about Say Everything is: How has Twitter changed blogging? Twitter’s rapid growth — along with the preference of some users for sharing on Facebook and the rise of all sorts of other “microblogging” tools, from Tumblr and Posterous to Friendfeed and identi.ca — is altering the landscape. But I think the result is auspicious in the long run, both for Twitter-style communication and for good old traditional blogging. Here’s why.

If you look back to the roots of blogging you find that there has always been a divide between two styles: One is what I’ll call “substantial blogging” — posting longer thoughts, ideas, stories, in texts of at least a few paragraphs; the other is “Twitter-style” — briefer, blurtier posts, typically providing either what we now call “status updates” or recommended links. Some bloggers have always stuck to one form or another: Glenn Reynolds is the classic one-line blogger; Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen are both essay-writers par excellence. Other bloggers have struggled to balance their dedication to both styles: Just look at how Jason Kottke has, over the years, fiddled with how to present his longer posts and his linkblog: Together in parallel, interspersed in one stream, or on separate pages?

A historical footnote: Twitter’s CEO is Evan Williams, who was previously best known as the father of Blogger. You find a style of blogging that’s remarkably Twitter-like on the blogs that became the prototype for Blogger — a private weblog called “stuff” that was shared by Williams and Meg Hourihan at their company, Pyra, and a public blog of Pyra news called Pyralerts (here’s a random page from July 1999). The same style later showed up in many early Blogger blogs: brief posts, no headlines, lots of links — it’s all very familiar. In some ways, with Twitter, Williams has just reinvented the kind of blogging he was doing a decade ago.

Today, the single-line post and the linkblog aren’t dead, but certainly, much of the energy of the people who like to post that way is now going into Twitter. It’s convenient, it’s fun, it has the energy of a shiny novelty, and it has the allure of a social platform.

But there’s a nearly infinite universe of things you might wish to express that simply can’t fit into 140 characters. It’s not that the Twitter form forces triviality upon us; it’s possible to be creative and expressive within Twitter’s narrow constraints. But the form is by definition limited. Haiku is a wonderful poetic form, but most of us wouldn’t choose to adopt it for all of our verse.

From their earliest days, blogs were dismissed as a mundane form in which people told us, pointlessly, what they had for lunch. In fact, of course, as I reported in Say Everything‘s first chapter, the impulse to tell the world what you had for lunch appears to predate blogging, stretching back into the primordial ooze of early Web publishing.

Today, at any rate, those who wish to share quotidian updates have a more efficient channel with which to share them. This clarifies the place of blogs as repositories for our bigger thoughts and ideas and for more lasting records of our own experiences and observations.

There are a couple of serious limitations to Twitter as a blog substitute, beyond the character limit. But this post has gotten long — even for a post-Twitter blog! — so I’m going to address them in my next post, tomorrow.

Nikki Finke, David Carr, invisible rewrites and the Web’s original premise

by

David Carr’s profile of Hollywood gossip blogger Nikki Finke contained two statements that I thought shouldn’t stand without challenge.

She isn’t always right and, as her critics have pointed out, she’s not above using the new-media prerogative of going into her archives and changing the bad call to a good one…

[Patrick Goldstein] hastens to add that Ms. Finke has gone into her own archive to correct errors. Bill Wyman, who blogs at Hitsville.org, documented an instance in which she altered a previous post about a director getting a job, then took credit for a scoop when it turned out to be somebody else.

Ms. Finke said both men were wrong on the specifics and each had a personal vendetta against her, a frequent theme whenever criticism of her work came up. She does say that she considers Web articles to be living things, reflecting “the latest information I have received.”

Yes, Web articles are “living things,” and they can and often are updated and fixed. But no responsible Web journalist makes substantive changes in copy after the fact without leaving a record — a strikeout, a note in the text indicating a change or update was made, or something like that. No one who self-identifies as an online journalist claims the right to make such invisible rewrites as a “new media prerogative.”

To admirers and detractors, she is the perfect expression of the Web’s original premise, which suggested that a lone obsessive could own the conversation.

The “Web’s original premise” was that if you created a simple standard for linked hypertext documents, people and institutions would add content and build a global repository of information. Tim Berners-Lee had no particular interest, as far as I know in empowering “lone obsessives” or helping anyone “own” the “conversation.”

From book cover to pillowcase

by

Designing a good book cover is not easy. I was very pleased with the arresting one we came up with for Say Everything. It takes off from the popular icon for subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed, but turns it into something more evocative of a person’s voice sent out into the ether.

And then there’s that little guy pushing a ball, suggestive of the effort and persistence involved in creating a good blog. It also made me think of the myth of Sisyphus, a central image in my first book, Dreaming in Code.

So I was tickled when I received this “RSS pillow” as a gift recently:

RSS Pillow

The pillow is available from a seller on Etsy who’s got a variety of other “geeky pillows” on offer. It’s not exactly a Say Everything tchotchke but it’ll do! Since I’ve been waking up before 6 AM every day this week to do early-morning radio interviews about the book I am finding the sight of this pillow especially seductive.