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A new chapter

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We’re back from our travels-with-children — in Monterey, marveling at jellyfish and otters at the aquarium and frolicking at the remarkable “Dennis the Menace” playground (who knew?), and then in Napa, camping at Bothe Napa park.

Now that I’m back at my desk, here’s my news: I’ve left Salon. The day before our vacation was my last day at the company I helped start up back in 1995.

There’s no Big Reason for the move, rather an aggregation of many smaller motivations.

We’d made considerable progress on the project that I was leading for Salon, but we were still a good way from being able to open it up to users, and that was disappointing. Meanwhile, I came up with what I think is an exciting idea for a new book project, and found myself increasingly drawn in that direction.

I still love Salon, and will be cheering it on from the outside. I remain, modestly, a shareholder, and I remain friends with my former colleagues. I hope to continue to write for the site occasionally. But I’ve worked at Salon for over ten years (roughly the length of time I spent at the Examiner). I’ve seen it from a tiny startup through bubble mania and bust woes and into maturity. It’s time for something new. Shaking things up at least once every decade seems like a reasonable schedule!

For you loyal Wordyard readers, I hope to provide a greater volume of posting. My energies are now going to be deployed in three directions:

(1) The new book. I’ll be writing much more here about it as the idea, and work on it, jells.

(2) This blog, which I’ve tended for six years. In addition to a more regular schedule for Code Reads, I’ve also got a couple of other ideas for more in-depth reporting and writing projects here that I expect to be unveiling.

(3) Freelance writing and speaking engagements. (If you’re interested in having me come talk — either about the themes of Dreaming in Code or other trends and issues in Web publishing, drop me a note at speaking /at/ wordyard.com.)

That should keep me plenty busy!

Travel week

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This is family week here — we’re off with the kids for a few days on a couple of short trips. Blogging will be light. Next week I’ll be back with some news about some personal changes and new projects.

Dave Winer: we need an open identity system

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On Sunday at Wordcamp, Dave Winer chatted entertainingly about “The past, present and future of Web publishing,” and pointed toward a handful of areas where the Web needs some hard work.

One is “future-proofing” our blogs and other content. If, as several speakers at Wordcamp argued, the stuff we’re writing today –even the most ephemeral stuff — is going to provide a window onto our era for future generations, what can we do to insure that it will survive, in a world where file formats and physical media have a short shelf-life? No answers here, but it’s a criticial question.

The other need Winer pointed to was an open identity system — a repository for simple account information that different Web services can rely on so you don’t have to leave your identity scattered across a billion different sites. A lot of people are talking about Facebook in these terms, but that seems hugely premature, since today Facebook’s idea of “openness” is strictly one-way (it’s the roach-motel approach — data can check into the Facebook world but it can’t leave very easily). There have been lots of long-simmering discussions and slowly bootstrapping formats in this area, including OpenID, but none has yet achieved critical mass.

Winer suggested that Twitter’s open API offers a potential path toward such a system, one that he’s already experimented with via his Twittergram project. On the one hand, he said, it would help if some company that already had a vast pool of registered users would open up their service; on the other hand, he noted, the big companies — Yahoo, Microsoft, Google — best positioned to do this are the least likely to make such a move.

I wonder, though, whether we might ultimately end up with the long-dreamed-of identity system as a by-product of some company’s loss in the big Web wars of the late 2000s. Think back a decade: the reason we have a great open-source browser platform is that Netscape got trounced in the commercial battle by Microsoft, and, with little left to lose, decided to release its code for free. It took more than half a decade after that for Firefox to emerge in its present form, but now it’s a central piece of any open Web infrastructure.

I think it’s possible that, over the next few years, if we end up with a social-web business battle that, say, Yahoo or even Microsoft feels that they can’t win under current rules, a big company might decide to make its identity system truly open — or somehow merge it with an already-evolving open-source approach to the problem. As Winer said, that could be a game-changing move — one, I’d argue, as significant as the release of the Netscape code. It won’t change things overnight, but in 5 or 10 years we might end up with the useful system Winer outlined.
[tags]dave winer, open identity, wordcamp, wordcamp 2007[/tags]

Wordcamping

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I spent much of this past beautiful weekend at Wordcamp, an informal, vibrant conclave of WordPress users and developers held in the funky wood-panelled confines of the Swedish American Hall on Upper Market in San Francisco.

One of the highlights of the program was John Dvorak and Om Malik bantering on Saturday morning about the weblogs/journalism conundrum — about as well as one could, given how many times this block has been circled. It’s hard to believe that it was 2002 when I wrote the following, and I thought the discussion was old and tired then:

Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.

Jay Rosen tried to end the debate in 2005. In 2006, Steven Johnson wrote a definitive argument-closer. But this is one of the great undead Internet debates; it simply won’t die, and we will probably still be hearing it long after both blogging and journalism have been superseded by Vulcan mind-melds via Bluetooth cerebral implant.

Malik suggested that professional media companies would have a difficult time competing with super-specialized blogs powered by passionate proprietors willing to post around the clock on their niche topic. Dvorak argued that bloggers looking to be taken seriously by readers should design sites that don’t look like standard blogs: “You lose credibility when people hit the blog and say, ‘Oh, it’s a blog.’ ”

I argued that, in fact — for some significant and perhaps growing portion of the public who feel their newspapers and broadcasters failed them in the leadup to the Iraq war — the inverse is true: The formal look-and-feel of “pro” media is a turn-off, it screams “this is the official story,” whereas the rough-hewn blog format holds forth at least the possibility (though no guarantee) of unfiltered authenticity. Dvorak responded by saying this argument only reinforced his point that there really is a difference in how people perceive the “newspaper or magazine” site format and the blog format.

Lorelle VanFossen, proprietor of the phenomenally popular Lorelle on WordPress blog, wandered the auditorium like some sassy cross between a talk-show host and a revival preacher, offering tips on how to create good blog content. When she declared that, if you want to get people’s attention, you should “show them something they’ve never seen before, or show them something in a way they’ve never seen before,” my first reaction was, “Well, duh.” Then I realized that I’ve been a journalist all my life and this principle is etched into my brainpan (“burned into ROM,” as they say in the Valley), but might actually bear repeating for the new hordes of self-publishers that blogging has created. So if this stuff is new to you, I imagine VanFossen’s book “Blogging Tips” would be a pretty good investment. (Haven’t seen it — there were supposed to be copies at the conference, but the shipment got derailed, perhaps by the global Harry Potter delivery madness.)

What made Wordcamp fun was the sense of a dynamic, two-way exchange between the active, committed users of a piece of software and the developers who created it. It was closer in spirit to the user-group meetings that propelled the personal-computing revolution than to the dollar-fixated industry conferences of more recent vintage. The Wordcamp Report blog offered good summaries of the sessions. (At some point in future I think there may be audio or video of the proceedings, too.)

In my next post: Dave Winer’s talk on blogging, and a discussion of open-identity systems.
[tags]blogging, wordpress, wordcamp, wordcamp 2007[/tags]

Notes from Mashup Camp

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I spent a few hours on Wednesday at Mashup Camp — I think this was the 4th event, the second I’ve attended. As previously I found most value in the “speed geeking” portion: an hour or two spent moving from table to table in a big room hearing a succession of five-minute demos by developers showing off some cool trick or application mashup. Last year I wrote about what it all means:

…you got a window onto a simpler, faster, and perhaps smarter approach to software product development — one that trades in the virtue of from-the-ground-up consistency and thoroughness for the even more compelling virtue of “getting something working fast.” It’s software development as a Darwinian ocean in which large numbers of small projects are launched into the water. Only a handful will make it to land. But most of them required so little investment that the casualty rate is nothing to lose sleep over.

This time I’ll just mention a few demos that I thought stood out:

  • Chime.tv: This is essentially a kind of Del.icio.us for videos, with a smart built-in video player and some basic tools for building and sharing channels. Nothing revolutionary here, except that (a) it lets you aggregate videos you find all over the Web (not just one provider like YouTube) into your own playlist/channel; and (b) it happens to be remarkably well-designed. I expect to be using it for a while as a video-viewing manager. We’ll see how it holds up.
  • Myk O’Leary’s twitterlicious serves as a simple hookup between Twitter and Del.icio.us (or Ma.gnolia.com). In other words: If you’re reading Twitter messages (“Tweets”) on a mobile device and they contain URLs that are inconvenient to save and that you can’t properly visit at the moment, Twitterlicious sends the “tweet” to your Del.icio.us account as a private bookmark with a special tag. You can review these at your desktop leisure.
  • Lignup showed a cool little application that lets you use your cellphone as a mobile input device to add voice annotation to a Web page or object (like, for instance, a Flickr photo). (This press release tells a little more.)

This Mashup Camp was a little less mobbed than the last one I went to, but there still seemed to be plenty of good ideas. And I even bumped into a few people who’d read Dreaming in Code, which always puts me in a good mood.

This weekend I’m going to try to go to at least some of WordPress Camp. Then next week my family will be doing some actual camping — like, in a tent. I think we’ll call it Camp Camp.
[tags]mashup camp, mashup camp 4, mashups[/tags]

What to expect when you’re retreating

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The Washington Post finally broaches a subject that’s been a worry of mine for some time now (I raised it at the start of this year). Once we finally decide, as is inevitable, that it’s time to leave Iraq, our problem becomes: how, exactly?

Amid political arguments in Washington over troop departures, U.S. military commanders on the ground stress the importance of developing a careful and thorough withdrawal plan. Whatever the politicians decide, “it needs to be well-thought-out and it cannot be a strategy that is based on ‘Well, we need to leave,’ ” Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, a top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Friday from his base near Tikrit.

The Post story reminds us that “history is replete with bad withdrawal outcomes.” “Withdrawal” is a mealy-mouthed synonym for a much less palatable word: retreat. Retreat is the most difficult maneuver for an army to manage. Retreats — even by troops with good morale and superior arms — have a way of turning into routs. We’ve got 150,000 troops and a huge amount of equipment in Iraq. It took ages to deploy them there and they’re not going to be able to leave all at once even if our leaders wanted them to.

Once it’s understood that an army is moving out, all sorts of new risks arise. The smartest military organizations do everything they can to foresee those risks and plan around them.

When I bring up these concerns, I sometimes get an “Are you crazy?” look. What can happen? We’re the United States! The sole hyperpower! Which is of course the logic that mired us in Iraq in the first place.

“We’ve got to be very modest about our predictive capabilities,” a “senior Administration official” tells the Post. Such modesty would have paid infinitely greater dividends before the invasion.

The Post article suggests that the U.S. is spending lots of time wargaming what happens in Iraq after we’re gone. Maybe the Pentagon is also preparing a variety of operational options for getting American forces safely out of Iraq. Let’s cross our fingers. The Bush administration has an almost perfect record of failing to plan for the worst cases.

I’m sure the geniuses in Dick Cheney’s office are thinking, “We’d better not make detailed plans for speedy withdrawal — the worse the plans are, the less chance anyone will use them.” Then, in the awful event that we do face a messy, bloody retreat, you know exactly what the administration line will be, echoing down seven years’ worth of responsibility-shirking: the cry of “no one expected it.”

Josh Marshall writes:

To me this is an argument not to remain in denial for so long that we literally have no choice but to get out quickly. We still have time to manage a phased withdrawal which is integrated with a political plan. Not clear whether that will be the case in a year when we will no longer be able to sustain our current deployment.

[tags]iraq withdrawal, military planning, iraq war[/tags]

There is no “first blogger”

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“It’s been 10 years since the blog was born,” said a Wall Street Journal headline on Saturday. The article that followed declared, “We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links…”

The article admits that “The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises” — but it barely lifts a finger to try to sort out the truth. Writer Tunku Varadarajan really wouldn’t have had to look very far: Declan McCullagh’s CNET piece earlier this year was not perfect, but it got a lot more of the story right than Varadarajan did.

Who be these “many” who regard Barger as the first blogger? Can Varadarajan name a single one? Barger’s Robot Wisdom was indeed the first site to call itself a “Weblog.” (“Blog” came later, via Peter Merholz.) But Barger was nowhere near the first person to create a Web page with frequent updates sorted in reverse chronological order — if you wish to define “blog” on the basis of that key design feature. Dave Winer’s Scripting News was going full bore well before Barger’s site started up; Winer, in turn was preceded by semi-bloggish sites like Ric Ford’s Macintouch.

Others choose to define blogging more in terms of content. (None of them names Barger as the first blogger, either.) The problem is that, from this angle, too, there are multiple roots: blogs are commonly vehicles for self-revelation — so maybe Justin Hall, the inspiring pioneer of link-filled Web diaries, was the ur-blogger. But others see the heart of blogging as being the assembly of a list of annotated links — in which case the first blog might well be, as Dave Winer has said, Tim Berners-Lee’s very first web page at CERN. (Similarly, Marc Andreessen jokes that the original NCSA “What’s New” page from 1993 was his first blog.) Then there are those who see blogs primarily as fast-moving sources for news and rumors; these people (I tend to disagree with them, but they’re out there) will typically point to Matt Drudge as a blogging progenitor.

Since the Journal article came out, the blogosphere’s self-correction mechanism has been going at full tilt. As happens in this medium, lots of good suggestions are coming to light.

Still, I think there’s a lot of needless effort being dedicated toward a pointless goal — the identification of a “first” that is really only of use to old-fashioned editors eager to fill slow-news days with anniversary features.

The hunt for “the first blog” or “the day blogging started” will be in vain. Like many significant phenomena in our world, blogging does not have a single point of origin. Blogging as we know it today slowly accreted from multiple input streams. It’s a set of practices built around a set of tools, and the practices and tools co-evolved. There are a handful of central figures in the story. They’re all important. Why argue about “firsts” when the thing whose first instance you are hunting down is impossible to strictly define?

The Journal piece, which included brief essays by a dozen celebrities and high-profile bloggers, tilts heavily toward the political wing of the blogosphere, which is only one galaxy in this continuously expanding multiple universe. That distortion is perhaps understandable from a newspaper that lies at the nexus of conservative American power and money. But, sheesh, ye Journal-ites, you ought to get your facts right.

Ironically, the Journal’s biggest-name essayist, Tom Wolfe, arrogantly dismisses the blogosphere for its “narcissistic shrieks and baseless ‘information.'” His chief complaint, oddly, is aimed not at blogs at all but at Wikipedia, which apparently contains an anecdote about him that he says is false (I should say “contained” — the page has of course been updated based on his complaint).

Blogs, Wikipedia, what’s the difference? To Tom, it’s all that crazy stuff on the Internet, and to hell with it. Plainly, we should forget about what we read online and trust titans like the Journal — they’re so rock-solid reliable on the facts!
[tags]blogs, blogging, web history[/tags]

Slaves to the inbox

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My latest Salon article is “Empty thine inbox” — a piece about e-mail overload hitched to reviews of three current books: “Send,” an e-mail etiquette guide by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe; Mark Hurst’s “Bit Literacy,” which outlines a methodology for personal-information management; and Mark Frauenfelder’s “Rule the Web,” a treasury of tips and tricks for taking control of, and enjoying, one’s online life.

The piece takes a brave stand against the injunction to maintain strict inbox hygiene:

My inbox is not a desk that must be cleared. It is a river from which I can always easily fish whatever needs my attention. Why try to push the river? Computer storage is cheaper than my time; archiving is easier than deleting… Do we really want the job of in-box attendant and e-mail folder file clerk? The mess is Augean scale, the job Sisyphean futile.

One other angle on this subject that I did not work into the article comes from Ducky Sherwood, who wrote books on how to handle e-mail burdens some years ago (and who also has a great resource page on all things email):

I’m a bit bothered by an implicit characterization that “email is the problem.” This isn’t fair to the medium. Your problem is that lots of people give you stuff to do. (“Read my message” falls into the category of “stuff to do”.) People have been overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that other people give them to do since long before email.

[tags]productivity, email, gtd, pims, personal information management[/tags]

Nielsen vs. Andreessen on blogging

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Over here, first, in this corner, we’ve got usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen is telling us that smart people will forget about blogging and write articles. Blogs, says Nielsen, are a dime a dozen. If you want to “demonstrate world-class expertise,” write long, in-depth articles that you can get people to pay for.

“Blog postings,” says Nielsen, “will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s comments.” Note how the definition has shifted without notice: all blog posts have somehow become “short comments on somebody else’s comments.”

As the article continues, Nielsen explains that his advice is aimed at the person who wants to establish that he is the number-one expert among the thousand bloggers in a field. This quantitative focus is awfully crude: among 1000 specialists, who’s to say there is a “number one”? By what measure? You’re going to find a whole range of sub-specialists and eccentrics, deep-niche experts and synthesizing generalists. But Nielsen’s analysis is built around this sort of comparative ranking. He maintains that, since blog posts are so variable in quality, a blog will never do a good job of showcasing your expertise. If you want to be top dog, make sure your barks are long and full of detailed research.

But Nielsen’s tract isn’t actually about how to become a “world-class expert” or even how to broadcast one’s world-class-expert-hood. It’s about the most efficient way to get people to pay for your content. Nielsen starts from the assumption that your goal isn’t self-expression or persuasion or enjoyment or anything besides customer acquisition. People won’t pay for blogs; therefore, blogging is a waste of time.

But no blogger I’ve ever heard of has actually tried to charge for content (tip jars are the closest anyone’s come). No one seems to want to do so; it runs counter to blogging’s DNA. Long, in-depth articles are a wonderful thing; who would dismiss their value? But Nielsen blithely dismisses the value in 999 out of a thousand blogs. He doesn’t seem to understand that, most of the time, that value is created not in hope of finding paying customers but, simply, for love.

Now then: here, in the other corner, we have Marc Andreessen. He’s the guy who whipped up the first popular Web browser for personal computers. In 2003 he rashly dissed the need for blogging, saying, “I have a day job. I don’t have the time or ego need.”

But he’s come around, and in the past few weeks he’s poured a huge amount of thought and energy into an impressive new blog. Yesterday, in a post titled “Eleven lessons learned about blogging, so far,” Andreessen wrote, “It is crystal clear to me now that at least in industries where lots of people are online, blogging is the single best way to communicate and interact”:

Writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits.

I think it’s an application of the 80/20 rule — for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly).

Arguably blogging is better because the distribution of a blog can be even broader than a magazine article, a published paper, or a book, at least in cases where the article/paper/book is restricted by a publisher to a limited readership base.

Andreessen obviously isn’t writing his blog with any intent to try to charge people for it (as one of the founders of Netscape he presumably doesn’t need that kind of change). I doubt, either, that he is blogging in order to be known as the one-in-a-thousand expert on anything. So Nielsen would tell him, don’t bother — don’t waste your time.

Andreessen doesn’t look likely to heed such counsel. Certainly, as a tech-industry celebrity, he’s had it relatively easy in attracting attention and readers. But he’s hardly coasting. His posts, in fact, look suspiciously like the long, in-depth articles Nielsen advocates; they just happen to be posted in blog form.

From what I can tell, Andreessen is blogging because he finds it fun. Because it connects him to a wider group of people who share his interests. Because it gives him a chance to think out loud and tell war stories and give advice. And because, having started, he can’t stop writing (long, in-depth) posts.

It looks a lot like love.
[tags]jakob nielsen, marc andreessen, blogging[/tags]