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Linked endnotes for Say Everything

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Now live on the Say Everything website: The book’s entire set of endnotes, all properly linked to their mostly URL-based sources.

When I started writing for the Web in 1994 I quickly understood that the ability to link directly to sources was a godsend for demonstrating the quality of your work. So when I returned to print to write Dreaming in Code, I was a little frustrated: endnotes are a valuable tradition, but when the bulk of the sources are on the Web, you wind up with a bunch of lengthy URL codes sitting there dead on the paper. So with that book I duplicated the endnotes on the book’s site. And I’ve now done that again.

I hope this will help those readers of the book who want to dig deeper into the source material. It will also give anyone who is on the fence about whether they’re interested in the book’s topics another way to explore its contents before buying.

Say Everything appearances and events

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Today Say Everything is officially on sale, available from your favorite bookseller.

Here’s some quick info about upcoming appearances in the Bay Area:

On July 16, at 7 p.m., I’ll be speaking at Books Inc., the Opera Plaza bookstore in downtown San Francisco.

On July 29, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, I’ll be speaking at an event cosponsored by Berkeley Arts and Letters and the Berkeley CyberSalon. ($10, $5 students, members, at Brown Paper Tickets or the door if available.)

On Aug. 3, at 7 p.m., I’ll be presenting at Book Passage, Corte Madera, part of the Left Coast Writer’s Salon.

Also, I will be appearing in mediated form:

On July 16, at 7:30 a.m., on the KPFA Morning Show.

Say Everything comes to Second Life on Sunday, July 12, on Mitch Wagner’s Copper Robot show.

It’ll be great to see you at any of these!

Two additional entrypoints to the story of blogging

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When I set out to chronicle the rise of blogging in book form, I knew there was no way my work could hope to be comprehensive. This story simply has too many strands and facets. The ones I chose to focus on are, I believe, among the most significant. But there are many other legitimate and valuable ways to approach the subject. Here are two examples.

(1) A couple days ago I finished reading Eric Boehlert’s new book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. Eric and I were colleagues at Salon for years, but I hadn’t known that he was working on this subject as I worked on Say Everything. When I ordered the book I worried a bit, as authors will, that there might be a lot of overlap between Boehlert’s account of the rise of the political blogosphere and my own.

It turns out the books are highly complementary. Say Everything uses the story of Josh Marshall’s evolution as a blogger-journalist as a thread to follow the larger tale of the rise of the political blogosphere, as blogging leaped from the tech world to the political realm in the aftermath of 9/11. Bloggers on the Bus is more of a group biography of the progressive blogging universe, concentrating on its role in the 2008 election cycle.

Boehlert’s book is full of vivid anecdotes and thoroughly reported portraits of bloggers on the left. I recommend it for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of how blogging and new-media organizing set the stage for Obama’s victory — as well as for readers of Say Everything who want a more detailed account of the people and events that shaped today’s blue-state blogging world.

(2) On Friday, thanks to Dave Winer’s post and tweet about it, I came across a new paper by Rudolf Ammann, a scholar in London who is studying the roots of blogging. Its title is “Jorn Barger, the NewsPage Network, and the Emergence of the Weblog Community,” and it’s an unusually thorough and careful attempt to exhume the details of the process by which the pre-Blogger-era blogosphere (circa first half of 1999) emerged from one of its roots– the users of Dave Winer’s NewsPage Suite software beginning in 1997. Ammann’s thesis is that the NewsPage users never really coalesced into a community until Jorn Barger, of Robot Wisdom WebLog fame, set out to organize them as such.

As befits a work of scholarship as opposed to popular journalism, Ammann’s paper pursues this subject far deeper into the weeds than I do in Say Everything. Where I focused my effort to understand Barger by reading his writing on artificial intelligence, Ammann spent his time digging into the Usenet archive of the alt.hypertext group, and came up with some good stuff.

I have a number of thoughts and comments on the paper that I’m going to reserve till I’ve had a chance to reread it carefully. But my initial take is that, as with Bloggers on the Bus, it provides a valuable complement to my book — filling in some details I left out and offering an alternative angle on some tales I did cover.

The history of blogging turns out to be an even bigger subject than I expected. It’s good to have company here!

Say Everything: some initial coverage

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Say Everything’s official publication/on-sale-in-stores date is July 7, but it’s already received some great coverage I want to acknowledge and tip you off about:

  • While in New York I stopped by BusinessWeek for a chat with Steve Baker (whose book The Numerati is pretty fascinating). Here’s the video.
  • Steven Levy interviewed me in the July Wired:

    Wired: Here’s something I bet a lot of people ask: If blogs are so great, why did you have to write a book?

    Rosenberg: It’s an inevitable question, but it’s illogical. When Greil Marcus writes a book about Bob Dylan, do you say to him, “Why’d you write a book? You should have written a song.”

  • Paul Kedrosky, the super-sharp econoblogger (and an early pioneer of hosted blogging), wrote: “Rosenberg’s book is funny, authoritative, full of great-great stories and anecdotes, and admirably even-handed.”
  • Rafe Colburn, who was blogging before we called it that, wrote two posts (first and second) with his reactions to the book: “It’s pretty clear to me that this book will be seen one day as incredibly important.”
  • And there was a lovely starred review in Kirkus Reviews that concluded: “Rosenberg suggests that blogging’s ‘outpouring of human expression’ should ‘delight us.’ This fair and fascinating account should delight as well.”

Another Say Everything excerpt: Journalists vs. Bloggers

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Today: a second full-chapter excerpt from Say Everything for your consideration. This time, it’s Chapter Nine: Journalists vs. Bloggers. (Previously I’ve posted the introduction and Chapter One, the story of Justin Hall.)

I have been writing about the tormented relationship between journalists and bloggers for a decade. When I reached the part of Say Everything that involved chronicling this long relationship, part of me quailed: Oh, no — not again!

Then I started writing and everything came together: 10,000 words or so of my effort to wrangle this sprawling subject into a single narrative.

A side note: My reflex in naming the chapter was to write, “Bloggers vs. Journalists.” But after finishing it, I realized that over time, the preponderance of the aggression in this relationship has shifted. Once upon a time, certainly, you would find bloggers on the attack more frequently, and journalists simply going about their business. Today, I think, the situation is more frequently reversed. Thus the ordering of the title.

Form and content: not separated at Web’s birth

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Looking for inspiration as I worked on my video for Say Everything, I went back and re-viewed Michael Wesch’s brilliant Web 2.0 video, “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” It’s had something like 10 million views on YouTube, so you probably saw it already, but if not, it really is worth your 4 minutes.

One of Wesch’s basic points is that it was the separation of form from content — of the software layer that presents content from the layer that stores the data — that made the entire boom of the user-contributed Web possible. In many ways this is inarguable. Such separation is a basic principle of good content-management software; the tool that publishes my blog (and millions of others) depends on code that keeps these realms pretty much in their respective corners, allowing us to alter at will how we dress up what we publish, and to flow the same material easily through different digital pipes.

But two things nag at me about this argument.

The first is a historical observation. The code we rely on today to produce Web sites and blogs, with its XML and XHTML and versatile but painfully complex CSS templates, is daunting to the uninitiated. When I built my first website in 1994 you could learn enough HTML to do so in an hour or so. You couldn’t do a fraction of what we can do today; but you could publish. As Justin Hall trumpeted on his how-to pages, “HTML is easy as hell!”

And it was that sort of ease that kickstarted the early Web and inspired the whole long train of development that has led to millions of blogs and Flickr and Facebook and Twitter and whatever’s coming next. It wasn’t essential to separate form and content to get this stuff going. Had HTML been more elegant, it would probably also have been more impenetrable and unforgiving. And we would all be the poorer for it.

Now today, of course, most of us don’t know or care about either HTML or the more complex layers behind it; our tools (mostly) succeed in hiding all that from us. But it’s important to remember that the vision of a fecund, collaborative, populist Web preceded the emergence of the tools that made it a mass reality. And the vision was in turn inspired by the “easy as hell” nature of the Web’s original authoring technology — which didn’t bother to separate form from content.

The second observation is an aesthetic one. Even as Wesch’s video is extolling the cordoning off of form from content, it is giving us a lesson in the intricate interweaving of content and form. Wesch tells his story in images and screen-grabs that embody the points he is making. The video’s own saga — in which a hitherto obscure young anthropology professor in Kansas cobbles together a video and reaches a global audience of millions — further reflects its themes.

This inseparability of form and content has always been a hallmark of artistic achievement. In successful creative work, form infuses content and content informs form and the two are joined at the hip in ways only a fool would ever wish to separate. That is something Wesch obviously understands. It’s important for the rest of us, in this era of streamlined content management and templated presentations, not to forget it.

Say Everything video: Who was the first blogger?

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Today, for your diversion and amusement, I offer you a little home video related to Say Everything, which is now just a bit over a month away from publication: Who was the first blogger?

While I was pondering whether to write a book about the story of blogging in 2007, there was a little flurry of stories claiming that blogging was now ten years old, since Jorn Barger had coined the word “weblog” in 1997. And I thought, hmmm, that’s a pretty debatable proposition. Mike Arrington asked, “Will Someone Who Actually Cares About Blogging Please Write the History Of It?,” I thought, yes: that’s going to be worth doing.

Do you prefer Google Wave’s swirl or a clean river?

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Google Wave interface

Google’s Wave announcement yesterday kicked off an orgy of geek ecstasy yesterday. Why not? A novel new interface combining email, instant-messaging, social networking and sharing/collaboration, all backed by Google’s rock-solid platform, and open-sourced to boot. Who couldn’t get excited?

When I first looked at the screenshots and demo of Wave, I got excited too: It’s a software project with big ambitions in several directions at once, and I have a soft spot in my heart for that. But the longer I looked, the more I began thinking, whoa — that is one complex and potentially confusing interface. Geeks will love it, but is this really the right direction for channeling our interactions into software?

One of the most interesting pieces I read this week was this report on a scholarly study of information design comparing the effectiveness of one-column vs. three-column layouts. The focus was more on social-networking sites (Facebook vs. LinkedIn) than on news and reading, but I think the conclusions still hold: People like single-column lists — the interface that Dave Winer calls “the River of News” and that most of us have become familiar with via the rise of the blog.

In Say Everything I trace the rise of this format in the early years of the Web, when designers still thought people wouldn’t know how to, or wouldn’t want to, scroll down a page longer than their screen. It turns out to be a natural and logical way to organize information in a browser. It is not readily embraced by designers who must balance the needs and demands of different groups in an organization fighting for home-page space; and it is the bane of businesspeople who need to sell ads that, by their nature, aim to seduce readers’ attention down paths they didn’t choose. Nonetheless, this study validates what we know from years of experience: it’s far easier to consume a stream of information and make choices about what to read when there’s a single stream than when you’re having to navigate multiple streams.

Wondering why Twitter moved so quickly from the geek precincts into the mainstream? For most users, tweets flow out in a single stream.

I think about all this when I look at the lively but fundamentally inefficient interfaces some news sites are playing with. Look at the Daily Beast’s unbearably cacophonous home page, with a slideshow centerpiece sitting atop five different columns of headlines. There is no way to even begin to make choices in any systematic way or to scan the entirety of the site’s offering. When everything is distracting, nothing is arresting. You must either attend to the first tabloid-red editorial shout that catches your eye — or, as I do, run away.

I feel almost as put off by the convention — popularized by Huffington Post and now increasingly common — of featuring one huge hed and photo and then a jumble of run-on linked headlines underneath. These headlines always seem like orphan captions to me. The assumption behind this design is that you must use the first screen of content to capture the reader’s attention. That’s only the case if you are waving so many things in front of the readers’ eyes in that one screen that you exhaust them.

Google Wave has an open API that will presumably allow developers to remix it for different kinds of users. So just as Twitter’s open API has allowed independent application providers to reconfigure the simple Twitter interface into something far more complex and geeky for those who like that, perhaps Wave will end up allowing users who like “rivers” to take its information in that fashion. But the default Wave looks like a pretty forbidding thicket to navigate.

ELSEWHERE: Harry McCracken wonders whether Wave is “bloatware.”

Site for “Say Everything” is now live

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Today I humbly offer you the website for my forthcoming book SAY EVERYTHING: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. The book’s publication date is July 7. (But it’s never too early to preorder it.)

Among much else, I’ve posted the full text of the book’s introduction and first chapter — which is all about Justin Hall, the early-Web wunderkind who helped create the original template for websites as mirrors of the self. The evolution of Hall’s site at links.net in its first few years prefigured the future phases of the entire Web: from repository of information to haphazard efflorescence of creativity to structured daily updates.

Like many people caught up in the Web excitement of 1994 and 1995 in the Bay Area, I met Justin, liked him and admired the prodigious energy behind his personal publishing project. But I also found myself wondering, “Why is he posting so much personal information? Isn’t it going to come back and bite him?” My chapter tells the story of Hall’s personal storytelling online from its effusive start in 1994 to its abrupt end in a traumatic video posted in 2005. Hall hasn’t vanished from the Web — today he’s creating online games at the helm of a new company — but he’s using the medium in an entirely different way. His story provides an outline of the allure and the pitfalls of online self-revelation — a tale that is, if anything, even more pertinent today than it was when Hall lived it.

Also on the Say Everything site, you’ll find a full table of contents for the book; a brief FAQ about it; and a page with some of the kind things some early readers of the book have had to say about it (i.e., blurbs).

This site launch marks the start of a number of Say Everything-related projects and posts that I’ll be rolling out here over the next six weeks. Once the book is out, I’ll also be posting the full index of the book with all links fully HTML-ized and wired up to their original sources.

Yesterday, AOL/TimeWarner; today, Twitter and…

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There’s a ridiculous amount of chatter in the tech blogosphere about who’s going to buy Twitter. And if the right offer comes along with enough zeros behind it, I don’t doubt that Twitter will sooner or later sell itself. But I doubt its founders are going to do it any time soon. Industry veterans understand that the day you sell your company is the day that innovation ends and “value extraction” begins.

Evan Williams knows that since he lived it. When Google acquired Blogger it secured the service’s future and insured its growth to the household name it became. (One of the many tales told in Say Everything…) But you didn’t exactly see Blogger pushing the boundaries or adding exciting new wrinkles. The innovation was done.

Google, being Google, didn’t rush to extract value. But that’s what we’re seeing now with MySpace and News Corporation. Having invested in the social network because of its market share and buzz but with little idea how to make money with it, Rupert Murdoch is now impatient to ramp up the revenue. The competition over at Facebook — still independent and still run by founders — is more focused right now on adding features and figuring out what their service is all about than in raking in the dollars. If they sell now, they know they’re likely giving up further explorations of what Facebook is (explorations that today are underwritten, to be sure, by investors who hope someday to cash out).

Meanwhile, the granddaddy of this sort of deal — the great AOL/Time Warner merger of 2000 — is receiving its final interment this week with the announcement that Time intends to fling the old albatross off its neck in a spinoff. When it was first announced, that combination was hailed as “the deal of the millennium,” but none of the people involved really had a clue about the future — not the AOL executives who shrewdly sold off their business at the peak of its market value, and certainly not the Time Warner execs who very quickly realized the two companies had absolutely no business combining forces.

AOL was never a hugely innovative company, but it was good at getting people online quickly and easily in the early days of the Web. Maybe it had a future doing the same thing in the broadband era. But from the moment AOL sold itself to Time, it ceased being a force of any consequence on the Net and began a long, slow downward slide from which it has never recovered, and from which I doubt it ever can — even with ex-Googler Tim Armstrong at the helm.

Reading about the spinoff this week reminded me of one of my most amusing experiences during the dotcom bubble. In January 2000 I was a new dad with three-month-old twins at home; elated but sleepless, I was running on caffeine and adrenaline. When I woke up to news of the AOL deal I rubbed my eyes and banged out a very quick column raising some questions about it.

Later that day I got a call from some producers at CNN asking if I would go on the air to talk about the deal. I thought, yeah, sure, as long as I can keep my eyes open… What I realized once the anchorperson started asking me questions was that I’d been cast as the deal’s Dr. Doom. In retrospect I think I was perhaps the only pundit they could get in front of their cameras who wasn’t convinced that the deal was going to reshape the Web world.

I saved video from the show. Here it is:

“What’s the problem?” indeed! I can’t claim any astute prescience; I couldn’t foresee just how quickly the boom would go bust and the deal would turn sour, and I worried more about big companies trying to strangle the Web than, in retrospect, I needed to. But I knew a fear-driven deal when I saw one and was in no mood to cheer what looked like the blind mating dance of clueless media barons.

It’s good to remember that today as the chorus on the sidelines starts chanting for new matches. They rarely work — and even when they do, they usually mean that the fun is over.