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The “invention” of RSS and the snowball effect

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The arguments over the history of RSS are interminable and overheated, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for tuning them out. RSS is the technology (really, that’s a glorified label for what is a relatively simple file-format specification) that lets you subscribe to feeds from blogs and other Web publishers. Early adopters on the Net have embraced RSS whole hog; today it’s how I take in most of the information I read online. Yet much of the general public is still awaiting a basic introduction to this incredibly useful tool. Back in 2003 I wrote that, with RSS, it felt like we were about where we were in 1994 with the Web itself; today we’re maybe in 1996 or 1997.

RSS is important, and so technology industry leaders and pundits have already devoted a remarkable amount of energy toward arguing about its origins — including, most recently, debating a controversial patent filing by Microsoft. (The idea of patenting anything to do with RSS strikes me as ridiculous and counter-productive, but my grasp of patents is limited, and it’s always been hard for me to understand the idea of any kind of software patent.)

Even if you’ve tuned out the RSS debate, though, I’d recommend checking out Dave Winer’s post from today, “RSS Wasn’t Invented.” Dave argues that what matters in the RSS story isn’t the (non-existent) moment that the idea for the technology was conceived, but rather the complex and slowly-unfolding process by which RSS tools came into wide use. Discovery of the value and purpose of RSS, you might say, took place long after the specifics of its technical functionality were first imagined.

The “invention” of RSS, muddied as it was by prior art, wasn’t responsible for its uptake. Rather there were several significant moments along the way: support by individual publications, individual bloggers, then blogging tools, then a small number of aggregators and readers, then a few very large publishers, then a flood of publishing and reading tools, followed by a flood of content.

I can vouch for Winer’s argument because I recall the early adoption of RSS at Salon, in, I believe, late 1999 or early 2000. We needed a simple tool to circulate our daily list of headlines and links to partner sites, and one of our engineers chose an XML file format he was familiar with through its use by Netscape. We didn’t know it by the name “RSS,” and we weren’t adopting it for any purpose relating to blogging. We just grabbed a handy format that looked easy for our partners to receive and put it to use. Later on, the rise of blogs — based on publishing tools that Winer, and the folks at Blogger, and later the folks at Movable Type and others, had produced — created a demand from the general public for subscribable RSS feeds. When I went to our engineering team and said, “We need to provide an RSS feed for Salon,” we realized that we had one already, we just weren’t calling it that.

RSS was simple for developers to produce and gradually got easier for non-technical users to consume. The complex and murky (and contentious) story of how its technical specifics gradually coalesced is far less important than the social process by which a “virtuous circle” or snowball effect spread its adoption. I know I’m striding into choppy waters here, but I can vouch for it, because I witnessed so much of the story: Winer deserves credit for a central role in getting that snowball started.

In any case, what’s more important is his argument today — that the tech industry needs to study and learn from the story of how successes like RSS unfold:

If it had been left at the “invention” stage, it would be where many other XML-related technologies are today, invented, but not much-used. Something new was done with the cloud of content, tools, aggregators, and that allowed a lot more people to use it, or hear about it, or decide it was finally time to support it.

[tags]rss, blogging, dave winer[/tags]

Why this year’s Time “Person of the Year” should be the last

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So Time magazine went and decided that — 2006 being the Year of User-Generated Content ™, aka the Year of YouTube Being Acquired By Google, and also the year that big corporate media companies began to see the rot in their financial foundations — its person of the year is “you.”

Dan Gillmor points out that the very nature of this choice presupposes a rapidly obsolescing notion that the magazine’s own editors are still on the other side of the barricades from the teeming content-generating masses. Jeff Jarvis asks what the fuss is all about, “this is nothing new.” Dave Winer says that Time is still too focused on the value created in the “wisdom of the crowd” aggregation of a multitude of voices, when the really important value lies with each individual voice.

I would add that, if Time’s editors put real stock in their choice and believed in the notion they are now promoting, then, having chosen “You” as the “Person of the Year,” they would announce that this is the very last time they will meet in solemn conclave to anoint a Person of the Year. Gatekeeper, retire thyself! No more bogus end-of-year popularity contests!

Except they do seem very effective at sparking conversations online.
[tags]time magazine, person of the year, youtube, dave winer, jeff jarvis, dan gillmor[/tags]

NewAssignment.Net opens beta site

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Jay Rosen’s open-source journalism project, NewAssignment.net, opens its beta site today. Jay has assembled an impressive staff and the site is already off to the races with some cool experiments, including a Polling Place Photo Project for next week’s election. Jay also has a fascinating discussion with Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler abour organizing volunteer networks.

Here’s the NewAssignment feed.
[tags]journalism, media, open source journalism, newassignment.net, citizens media[/tags]

Rebecca Blood’s “Bloggers on Blogging” interview

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About six months ago, while I was deep in the editing process for my book, Rebecca Blood emailed me and asked if I would be interested in doing an interview for her series “Bloggers on Blogging.”

Rebecca is one of the people who literally wrote the book (well, a book, one of the first and best) on blogging. So I said, sure — as soon as I’m done with Dreaming in Code. We reconnected over the summer and exchanged emails on a wonderfully leisurely schedule that actually gave me time to think about my answers.

Today she posted the result. I’m grateful for the opportunity to spout off at length both about my writing and about the nature of blogging, my ideas about it, how blogging has affected national politics, and more. It’s a great series — and great company to be in.

Here’s a taste:

With regard to blogging, what was your most memorable moment?

I think it would be sitting down at the computer late at night a couple of days before Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. I was heartbroken at the prospect of an unnecessary and ill-advised war. I grew up at the tail end of Vietnam and always assumed that, whatever other mistakes the nation would make in my lifetime, we would never let ourselves make that one again. I put my kids to bed, thought about the world Bush’s mistake was likely to shape for them, and poured out my heart in a post I titled Eve of Destruction (the comments are still at the old location).

When I hear people arguing that we didn’t and couldn’t know before we invaded Iraq what we know now, I recall that moment. It reminds me that many people knew just how deceptive and stupid the Iraq policy was from the start. And it makes me grateful that the Web and our blogs serve as a day-by-day and hour-by-hour collective record of what we knew and when we said it.

[tags]scott rosenberg, rebecca blood, blogging, bloggers on blogging[/tags]

Old-media money for new-media ideas

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Congratulations to Jay Rosen, who today announced a $100,000 grant from Reuters to underwrite hiring a full-time editor at NewAssignment.net, Jay’s nascent experiment in networked “smart-mob”-style journalism (which I earlier discussed here).

That’s a significant sum from an old-school media outfit that is putting its cash where its talk is. (Full disclosure: Rosen asked me this summer to join an informal advisory board for his undertaking, which I’ve been happy to do.)

Size of the blogosphere: 50 million or bust

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Kevin Burton questioned the logic behind Dave Sifry’s latest report on the size of the blogosphere based on Technorati’s feed index, and now there’s a fascinating discussion going on based on his post. Burton questions Sifry’s claim that there are 50 million blogs. But look over at Sifry’s report and you see that he’s careful enough to write, “On July 31, 2006, Technorati tracked its 50 millionth blog.”

So we’re back in 1997 or so when search sites would report on the exploding number of Web sites they had in their indexes and those of us in the industry actually building large sites would think, hmmm, things are growing like gangbusters, but are we really going to count every abandoned Geocities page as a bona fide Web site?

There’s no right or wrong here. What you count depends on why you’re counting it. As Kevin Marks points out to Burton, an “abandoned blog” — one that’s no longer being updated — isn’t necessarily a worthless blog. Sometimes, for instance, people post for a discrete period of time to record an event, then move on. On the other hand, that 50 million number probably includes the test blog I set up one day over on Blogger just to learn how the system works, and, you know, there’s nothing to see there. I assume that despite Technorati’s best efforts some significant portion of that 50 million number also includes spamblogs (“splogs”) and the like. Sifry discusses this at length (he says that over 70% of the pings his service receives are from “known spam sources” — sheesh!).

What I find interesting is the sense I get that people are crestfallen at the notion that, gee, there might be only, say, a couple million really active bloggers, and maybe twice that number of occasional active bloggers. In the history of media and human expression, a couple million people regularly and actively publishing their writing to a globally accessible network is extraordinary, unprecedented and likely to have vast consequences we can’t foresee.

In other words, if Burton is right and the growth in the actual, active, committed blogosphere is linear rather than exponential, it doesn’t really matter. There’s still a revolution going on.

Lanny Davis, bile, and the distinction between “blog” and “comments”

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As I write this, I don’t know whether Ned Lamont has beaten Joe Lieberman. From where I sit, Lieberman let down his party on the most important issue of our time and behaved as though voters owed him his office. He deserves to lose. I’d like to see him replaced by a Democrat who won’t hedge his bets and who will send a message to the Bush administration that its days are numbered.

But if he does lose — and whether he then petulantly runs as an independent, courts a Bush administration appointment of some kind, or graciously retires — you can bet we’re going to hear all about the bloggers. You know, those nasty ultraliberal disrespectful divisive bloggers who failed to let Lieberman’s support for the president’s miserable war pass, and who churned up anger and fanned Lamont’s primary challenge in its earliest and most fragile stages. We’ll hear about them from entrenched powerbrokers of all stripes, Democratic and Republican — about how they are a dark and dangerous force that can only bring us to woe. The outcry will be far louder than today’s tempest-in-a-server-room about whether Lieberman’s Web site was actually hacked or he just had a lousy hosting plan.

This incumbents’ backlash has in fact already begun. On today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page comes Bill Clinton’s old lawyer, Lanny Davis, complaining about how those bloggers have treated Lieberman, for whom Davis campaigned in recent months. Conservatives aren’t the only hotheads out there, Davis discovered in his forays on Lieberman’s behalf; liberals, he is horrified to learn, can also be nasty. “The far right,” he says, “does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony.”

Davis has apparently been living offline for the last decade. So when he pokes his head out from hiding and scans the Internet’s tubes for political discourse, he discovers that many people on liberal sites are saying intemperate, even hateful things.

It may be regrettable that the leftward side of the spectrum has its own share of creeps, but, given the distribution of human traits across the political spectrum, it seems inevitable. Still, there’s a bigger problem with Davis’s argument: he cites a list of five examples of “the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman” — “emotional outbursts by these usually anonymous bloggers.”

However, every single one of his examples is actually a comment on someone’s blog (in fact, they’re all comments posted either on Huffington Post or Daily Kos). They’re not “things” the “liberal blog sites” have been “posting”; they’re things various random passersby have posted.

The simple distinction between the proprietor of a site — the “blogger” — and the poster of comments is being forgotten or deliberately ignored here to score a political point. It’s a low blow, similar to what happened in 2004 when conservative critics of MoveOn behaved as though the organization was responsible for the content of every single submission to a “make your own ad” contest.

In open online environments, it simply makes no sense to hold the publisher/blogger/site owner responsible for every opinion, attitude and flame that visitors post. If that’s where we’re headed, we might as well just shut down the Net and go home.

In tarring the bloggers with the sins of their commenters, Davis is doing what I worried would happen, way back during the Dean campaign days: political campaigns that embrace openness online might find themselves bludgeoned by opponents who’d turn dumb comments posted by random jerks into lethal soundbites. It’s sad to see that happen anywhere, sadder to see one Democrat doing it to another.
[tags]Joe Lieberman, politics, blogging[/tags]

The Technorati dance

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I have been using Technorati since it was running on servers powered by Dave Sifry’s hamsters, and it remains an essential part of my blogging existence. The company recently rolled out a spiffy new design for its service. Hooray.

But: Why are the results still so…unstable? Since I am the perpetrator of a recent blog-address move I’ve been trying to keep an eye on how many, and which, other bloggers have updated the address that they link to me with. (I know it’s a pain; I’ve been guilty of plenty of blogroll-rot myself, though it’s an easier job keeping it up to date now that I’ve outsourced it to Bloglines’ widget.)

What I’m finding is that, depending on the hour of the day, sometimes I will get a list of results from T-rati that’s reasonably up to date and trustworthy, and sometimes I will get a list that’s just wacky — full of results that just don’t seem to have anything to do with my blog, no links evident, no overlapping subject matter, nothing. Furthermore, the results that I get from the T-rati site sometimes differ significantly from those that turn up in the RSS feed that represents that search.

Is this fallout from the monumental war I know Technorati must be waging on the depredations of blog-spammers and spam-blogs? Is it a symptom of some general structural problem with the service’s design, or just side-effects of the company’s constant scaling-up efforts to keep pace with the blogosphere’s exponential growth?

Or is there some deeper logical pattern hidden within the seemingly irrelevant pages T-rati is claiming point to my blog — some guy’s Nirvana playlist; A non-English-language page with a photo of Andrea Bocelli singing “Besame Mucho”; Debby’s World’s list of “34 things worth knowing” — and if only I could decipher that pattern, I could achieve perfect bliss, or at least a more rarefied Technorati ranking?
[tags]technorati, blogging[/tags]

Rosen on NewAssignment.net: It’s made of editors

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In his second Q&A about his new venture in collaborative journalism online, Jay Rosen responds cogently to my suggestion here that when readers become sponsors of investigative journalism they sometimes end up unhappy with the outcome:

Guidelines at New Assignment will make it clear what is and is not kosher in accepting donations. But mostly it would be common sense. If you take money from someone who knows what the story is—before the reporting—and who only wants validation… expect problems….

For New Assignment to work, donors can’t have an editorial say greater than anyone else’s. They explicitly sign it away as a condition of giving the money. Those who expect outsized influence will be disappointed after one experience. Would they return for more? Besides, management has a policy: no refunds.

I think Jay has a pretty good grasp of what he’s after here when he talks about “good editors” being the heart of the answer to the problem. And I agree. But note that in this new world being a “good editor” involves some significantly greater political leadership, by which I don’t mean “involvement in parties and elections” but the more generic, abstract kind of politics — the mustering and deployment of power through the creation of consensus among competing interests and diverse people. Jay quotes one of his correspondents, Daniel Conover:

In a system like what Jay proposes, a NewAssignment editor would be in constant communication with the participants. Rather than being neutered by an opaque hierarchy, this editor would be empowered by the broad base of integrity-seeking NewAssignment participants. How are those participants going to react if the editor reports a pressuring phone call from a wealthy donor?

The trick is, for the editor to draw power from that base, the editor has to stay in constant contact with its interests. Assuming that the larger NewAssignment community will often be in various levels of conflict and competition, we’re talking about some very heady relationships, being acted out in the Great Wide Open.

In other words, the editor’s job at NewAssignment is going to be as much about managing online community as about assigning stories, editing copy and mentoring reporters. That’s a demanding, but certainly not impossible, pile of responsibilities. Rosen cites the formidable example of Josh Marshall’s work at Talking Points Memo as a sign that it can indeed be done.

Newassignment.net: new-model journalism

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Jay Rosen has posted a detailed sketch of a new, non-profit venture in the “citizens’ media” (or “networked media”) realm that he is calling NewAssignment.Net. The idea is to create an institution online where people can contribute dollars to fund reporting projects they’re interested in. These projects will in turn be pursued by paid reporters and editors working creatively with information and contributions flowing back to them from the Net. Foundation seed money gets the thing off the ground; money from the crowd keeps it going. Old-fashioned editorial processes mesh with newfangled feedback loops and reputation systems to produce something new and unique.

Jay is one of the bright lights in this area, and I’m looking forward to what he comes up with — especially since some of the issues and problems he’s exploring are similar to the ones I’m working on at Salon these days.

Rosen’s description makes it clear that he’s seeking to create an institution where many traditional journalistic values persist and shape the work being done in a novel mode. In particular, there’s the idea that the reporters are going to go out and ask questions and consider all the information flooding back to them from the Net and determine the truth as best as they can — even if that truth is not what the people ponying up the cash wanted to hear.

This, to me, is likely to be a major friction point for NewAssignment — which will doubtless be avowedly nonpartisan but which will not be able to insulate itself from the fierce political divisions that shape so much online discourse today.

At Salon, we don’t make any claims to nonpartisanship but do maintain our own tradition of journalistic pride, and a commitment to fairness and giving the “other side” a say, and a belief in telling the story as you find it, not as your political preferences might dictate it. This has regularly placed us at odds with at least some of the readers who are funding our stories with their subscription dollars. (The relationship is not quite the direct quid pro quo that Rosen envisions, where individual site visitors put their chips on specific stories, but emotionally it seems similar.)

So, for instance, in the wake of stolen-election charges in Ohio in 2004 we had Farhad Manjoo — one of the most talented, hardest-working and open-minded reporters I’ve ever worked with — devote a lot of time to exploring the story. He’d done significant reporting on the topic in the past. His conclusion — as our headline put it, “The system is clearly broken. But there is no evidence that Bush won because of voter fraud” — was well-documented and carefully delineated. But it wasn’t what many of our readers wanted to hear.

Ever since, Salon has had a steady trickle of disgruntled subscribers cancel on us, citing these stories as a factor. It’s never been enough to make any difference to our business, and it certainly won’t stop us from doing further reporting on the subject, and presenting our findings accurately. But it’s disheartening. And I think that NewAssignment may face some similar tensions if it ends up reporting on topics that people have strong feelings about, which it must if it is to matter.

The sample story Rosen walks us through to explain his new idea is one about wild variations in drug prices from one place to another. The assumption is that some people who are upset by what they perceive as unfair, rigged drug pricing might be willing to help fund such an investigation. But what happens if the reporters come back and say, gee, it turns out that the drug companies are innocent here, the fluctuations are actually the result of [some other factor]? (I’m not saying I love drug companies. This is just an example.) Will these citizen-journalism sponsors want their cash back?

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis’s post about NewAssignment provides some tidbits of interest about the new media venture he’s been dropping hints about for a while, named Daylife. But I wonder about his comment: “We must explore new business models to support coverage of news and this is one of them.” It strikes me that the not-for-profit, institutionally-supported model Rosen has picked — perfectly reasonably — is good for many things, but maybe not so good for exploring new business models. Yes, there are sustainable nonprofit models, and maybe NewAssignment will turn out to be one of them; but it seems to me that Rosen’s plan is more about delivering a proof-of-concept for important new ideas about networked journalism than it is about building a business. If I’m wrong, I’m sure he’ll let me know!

[tags]Jay Rosen, citizens media, newassignment.net, Salon.com[/tags]