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Every blog post a “request for comments”

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One of the points I make in Say Everything is that the reverse-chronological format that blogs use is embedded in the DNA of the Web from early high-profile uses in places like Tim Berners-Lee’s first website at info.cern and in Marc Andreessen’s NCSA What’s New page.

Today’s NY Times op-ed page features a great piece by Stephen D. Crocker that explains the history of the Request For Comment or RFC — the format the architects of the Internet used to promote the development of the open, extensible, cross-platform standards on which the Net as we know it today was built. RFCs were pragmatic and humble; the proponent of some new standard for computers to work with one another would put it out in public — at first, before the network itself provided an easier means of circulation, in snail mail — and take in critical comments and suggestions for improvements.

You could see this practice as the genetic foundation for the comments that today are a feature of nearly every kind of page published on the Web. Just as blogging’s reverse-chronological sequencing has its basis in the earliest structures of web pages, Crocker lets us see that the practice of adding a comments thread to blog posts can also be traced back to the early history of the Net.

In this sense, every blog post is, in its way, a “request for comments.”

Milestone accomplished

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On Tuesday I turned in the first draft of my book, the culmination of over a year’s work, with about seven months of nearly straight writing. So I’m relieved and happy.

I’m still doing some research and filling in some blanks, and we’ve got a ton of editing ahead of us over the next couple of months. But the hardest part is done.

Dave Winer compares bootstrapping a software project to the way suspension bridges get built, beginning with one thin cable stretched from dry land at one end to dry land at the other. When you’re writing a book, the equivalent of that first cable is probably creating the first outline — that’s the first time you can see the whole text from its opening to its conclusion, and get an overview of how the pieces fit together.

The first draft is something different: I don’t know if there’s an equivalent in the world of bridges. This is now my second time through it, and all I can say is that its completion brings a feeling of enormous relief, tinged by a little regret. The relief comes from the knowledge that this vague notion you once had in your mind has now become something real that other people can share. There were no disasters along the way. The thing worked! The regret comes from realizing that, of that vague original notion, only some fraction has survived the transfer from brain to page.

The title is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. It is in Crown’s Summer 2009 catalog, with an expected publication date of early July. You will be hearing much more about it here from now on, along with much more of everything, as I return to a more regular posting schedule. To those of you who have stuck with me here through the lean months, I’m grateful for your continued attention.

Reports of blogging’s death are…

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Just in time for me to include somewhere near the end of my book, there’s a little wavelet of argument out there suggesting that blogging is, well, over.

From Paul Boutin in Wired comes the simple form of the argument: Blogging’s no longer hot. The cool kids are all playing with Twitter and Facebook. The blogosphere has been “flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.”

Boutin seals his case by reference to Jason Calacanis’s much-ballyhooed retreat from his blog to a mailing list. Boutin somehow buys Calacanis’s public rationale — “He can talk to his fans directly, without having to suffer idiotic retorts from anonymous Jason-haters” — which sounds great until you think, uh, couldn’t he have just turned off the comments?

Then there’s Robert Scoble, who now reserves his blog for longer essays and can be found in many other spots on the Web distributing links and videos and tweets. Scoble’s choice seems perfectly sensible to me; he is a restless early adopter and experimenter, but he’s not exactly abandoning his popular blog.

Boutin’s piece betrays a nostalgia for what it explicitly refers to as a “golden age” of blogging, which apparently occurred circa 2004 and was led by people like Calacanis and Scoble. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my book research it’s that each of us locates blogging’s “golden age” in whichever era it was that we discovered the phenomenon. For me, it was probably 1998, when I found my job as Salon’s technology editor incomparably enriched (and also assisted) by the first flowering of the tech and web-design weblog movement. For many others, it was the early days of Blogger in 2000-2001, or the explosion of political blogs and “warblogs” post-9/11.

There were, in other words, at least three — and probably several more — waves of bloggers preceding Boutin’s version of a “golden age,” each of which felt they were discovering something new. (See Rebecca Blood’s “law of Weblog history.”) And, inevitably, after our personal “golden age” experiences, whenever they were, we tend to get disillusioned. Some will gravitate entirely away from blogging; others achieve some peace with it despite its limitations and problems. I guess Boutin is somewhere in that cycle now.

I share his distaste for the way that the commercialization of the Technorati Top 100 has turned a certain type of blogging into a rat race, but I don’t see that as having ruined blogging for the rest of us. Nor do I see a phenomenon with tens if not hundreds of millions of participants as dead. Of course the Silicon Valley early-adopter crowd has moved on — that’s what they’re supposed to do, once something they pioneered has gone mainstream. Boutin, meanwhile, is now a full-time blogger at Valleywag. Perhaps that dismal gig is what’s got him so down.

A broader epitaph not so much for blogging itself but for the promise blogging made of widening our democratic discourse comes from Nick Carr (on his, er, blog, of course). Carr writes about the changes since he started blogging in 2005: apparently in that distant halcyon time, Technorati could be reliably used to track discussions in the blogosphere, but now, Google does a better job. Google Reader, too, has supplanted Bloglines as the RSS reader of choice for many (me, too). Back in 2005 the Web was “centrifugal,” pulling us away from centers of gravity, but today, as Google becomes the center of so many Web services, the medium has once again become “centripetal,” Carr argues. He is smart enough to admit that centrifugal forces remain — enterprising sites and bloggers that still employ “deliberately catholic linking” — but says they’re weaker than the centralizing forces.

“For most of us, most of the time, the World Wide Web has become a small and comfortable place. Indeed, statistics indicate that web traffic is becoming more concentrated at the largest sites,” Carr writes.

I recall reading identical passages a decade ago, when the first flush of Web novelty had worn off and the portals were taking over. Then, as with Carr’s observation today, we were told that the Web’s innovative days were over, its disruptive potential was used up, and the big media conglomerates were back in charge. At that moment, you could still count the number of weblogs on your fingers (and maybe toes); Google hadn’t even been founded yet.

I continue to bet on the flexibility of the Web as a platform for personal expression that will keep mutating and surprising us. Blogging has been a central part of that phenomenon for a decade. Of course it will continue to evolve. But I don’t see it diminishing in importance.

Consider the case of Merlin Mann, whose excellent 43 Folders blog rose to stardom during Boutin’s “golden age.” Mann’s experience made an effective case study for how a blog could grow from a personal obsession to a profitable small business, but over time he grew disenchanted with much of what “pro blogging” had become. As he wrote last month:

the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web’s glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, did these guys love to post and post and post.

Mann didn’t just go off in a corner and sulk; he decided to reinvent his blog, transforming it from “personal productivity” coaching to a broader theme of helping creative people think about how to focus on what’s important to them. Kottke wrote a bit about Mann’s changes here.

I’ve come to enjoy Twitter, and made my peace with Facebook, and I don’t doubt there are plenty of people who will prefer to use these services rather than start a blog. But as long as blogging remains a form that can absorb the energy of people like Merlin Mann and serve as a creative outlet for millions of others, I will treat all reports of its demise as unreliable.

Or maybe, as Matthew Ingram Seamus McCauley suggests, Boutin was just trolling.

UPDATE: Two useful comments (from Twitter):

Paul Kedrosky: current wired piece by paul boutin about death of blogs is silly. only reason 30-author blogs exist is because of ad bubble. that’s over.

Anil Dash: Dear tech blogosphere: Paul Boutin blogs for a living in a competitive market, and just said you should stop blogging. Guess why he said it?

It should be noted that Dash’s “The Blog Cycle” is an authoritative description of the “golden age” phenomenon I described above.

Mediashift’s Simon Owens reports on my blog book

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Earlier this summer, Simon Owens asked me if I’d give him an interview for his blog about the book I’ve been working on. I was happy to oblige. Then it turned out he took the piece to the PBS Media Shift blog, which he contributes to, and there it is, today — a little introduction to the project, a couple of interesting tidbits I’ve dug up, and a little perspective from Rebecca Blood to boot.

Here’s a bit:

Speaking with Rosenberg about his book, I felt like we were discussing evolutionary biology. Rosenberg’s research goes beyond highlighting the earliest blogs, and slowly pieces its way through the primordial ooze of the Internet, tracing a line of websites in the early 1990s that first began taking on blog-like characteristics.

“Most of the people I’ve talked to, I’ve asked who had inspired them,” he said. “Who were you reading when you decided to start blogging? To a certain point that becomes a harder and harder thing the further back you go. For instance, Justin Hall started his site in January 1994, before most of us had heard of the web. I asked him, ‘Well, you’re one of the first bloggers, was there anyone out there who you were getting inspiration from?’ And he pointed me to this other guy named Ranjit Bhatnagar who was keeping a site at moonmilk.com in 1993. And, sure enough, it was a reverse chronological list of stuff he found on the web.”

Thanks to Simon for the piece. I’ve now got rough drafts of more than half of my chapters, and am racing frantically to meet my deadline, which is before the end of the year. If I’m scarce round these parts, you know why.

Oh yeah, I also see that I’d better update my author photo when I get the chance!

In the Web archives

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I’ve spent most of this week deep in the archival attic, researching the new book in old documents, digging through the dull roots of today’s Web, planted back in the 90s. It’s been strange and enlightening; I’ve found much interesting material.

One thing that becomes clear is that what we now think of as “the Bubble” was surprisingly brief. The Web actually experienced something of a downturn beginning in late ’97 and early ’98, and extending through the Long Term Capital meltdown later in ’98. It was only toward the end of ’98 that the bubble really began to inflate in a serious way. The High Bubble lasted till April 2000, when the market suddenly realized, like Wile E. Coyote poised in midair above a canyon, that it was standing on air.

So the era of high dotcom madness was really barely a moment: 18 months or so.

The other thing I’ve learned is how much more extensive the Internet Archive is than I’d realized. I’ve been using the archive heavily for days. I’ve picked up some pointers that, perhaps, others already know; I’ll share them anyway in case they prove helpful.

First of all, ignore all the error messages the Archive itself sends you, like “bad gateway” or “failed connection.” These are indicators of momentary failure; they don’t mean your page isn’t there. Try, try again; reload; eventually, you may get what you’re looking for. (On the other hand, error messages that are stored on target pages that represent the archive’s record of a snapshot of the web page itself — they’re real. They mean that the archive’s bot hit that error message and never recorded the page you’re seeking.)

Also: If the archive tells you that the earliest edition of a particular page it has is from, say, 1997, this doesn’t mean that the site’s content from previous years is gone forever. Iit’s true that you’ll probably never be able to recall, for instance, the Hotwired home page from 1995 — since it was constantly mutating, day by day with new content and year by year with new designs. But the material published on a site that lived at permalinked or semi-permalinked addresses can still often be dug up from Archive.org by poking your way carefully from the present into the past through the site’s own “back issues” or archives or “previously” links.

For instance, Web Review, the early GNN-backed web zine, vanished long before the Web Archive started up, along with most of GNN itself — a crib-death for one of the Web’s earliest original content ventures. Still, I was able to unearth my friend Andrew Leonard’s first piece (from Sept. 1995) for Web Review, all about “clickstream” measurement: Here it is.

We don’t have all of the early Web, but we have more of it than you might think!

My next book: the story of blogs

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I left Salon last summer with the idea of working on a new book. I’m happy to report that the book now has a deal and a publisher — Crown, with whom I had such a happy experience on DREAMING IN CODE — and I’ll be spending the next year or so researching and writing it.

I am, I think the word is, stoked.

The topic will seem obvious to any of you who’ve been reading my stuff over the years: It’s going to be a book about bloggers and blogging. The working title is SAY EVERYTHING, and we’re describing it as the story of how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and what it means for our culture.

Upon delivering this news I typically hear two wildly divergent responses from two different groups of listeners. People in the tech world tend to react like this: “Blogging? Oh, that’s so 2000!” They think blogging is something that happened way back in the early part of this decade, about which everything has already been said. Meanwhile, people outside the tech-industry bubble — who’ve never heard of Techcrunch or Techmeme — respond with variations on “I’d love to read that.”

I should probably point out here that the population of potential readers in the second group outnumbers those in the former. Yet I belong to the first group myself. So I also hope to show the insiders that there is more to be learned and understood about blogging than they perhaps realize.

In other words, I’ll continue to do the sort of writing on technology I’ve always done, since I started back at the old S.F. Examiner: trying to be accurate enough to keep the respect of those immersed in the field, and insightful enough to hold their interest, while doing my best to make sure that everything I’ve written appeals to smart people who know nothing about the subject. It’s a bit of a straddle; some readers thought I pulled it off with DREAMING IN CODE, some thought I fell to one side or the other. I’m going to try it again.

Why blogging? I think I harbor a secret wish to spend the next couple of years explaining that writing a, you know, book about blogging is really okay — and that, no, I don’t think it should have been a blog instead.

Seriously, there’s a great tale that has still not been fully told of how the practice actually evolved — from technical invention to media craze to cultural phenomenon. As the haphazard efforts to mark some sort of 10th-anniversary-of-blogging this year proved, people are still a little fuzzy on the basics of the story. (Rebecca Blood’s account from 2000 remains invaluable, but it’s incomplete and now far out of date.)

When Mike Arrington asked, last summer, “Will Someone Who Actually Cares About Blogging Please Write the History Of It?,” I just smiled. But I wasn’t ready to talk about my plans yet; I remain uncharacteristically superstitious about announcing big projects until their financing is in place. I realize this is terrible un-Web-2.0ish of me, but there it is.

So there’s a story, one about how innovations emerge, how they bubble up from the creativity of geeks and pass into the wider culture. There’s also an argument, one that I’ve been making for ages, in different forms, from my very first column on blogging eight years ago: that blogging is not, despite what you hear from so many different quarters, a trivial phenomenon. And that, despite all the dismissals (most recently by Doris Lessing), blogging — far from contributing to the demise of culture and the end of civilization — actually offers a lifeline in the sea of information overload.

There’s much further to say but that’s enough for now. More as the work progresses!
[tags]books, blogging, say everything[/tags]