Topic: New media

I posted a link to an article about the professionalization of blogging in an earlier link dump post, that I’ve been thinking about rather a lot in recent days, and I wanted to reflect on this.

The argument of the article, which I think is pretty much spot on, discusses how contemporary blogging has become this thing that that isn’t just the sort of thing that “nobodies” can throw up a blog with WordPress and become an Internet sensation in fairly short order. Now setting aside the fact that this might never have been true in the first place, I think there’s some serious merit to this argument: blogs have gone mainstream, lots of people read blogs, and the people who have the resources to write blogs tend to be people groups of people who have a lot of resources, and most of the popular/successful blogs these days require a lot of resources and sustained energies.

This isn’t a bad thing, of course, but I think it forces us to rethink what it means to be a blogger writer “internet content producer” both in the current moment and looking to the future.

There are a number of different factors contributing to this larger moment. Some of the more prevalent ones are:

• There are more blogs now today than there used to be, this means both that the “cost of entry” is higher than it was five years ago or even a year ago. This means new blogs will:
  • Need to focus on more unique subject areas, this is the “long tail” or “embrace your niche” approach. Rather than be the most popular blogger on Technoratti (do people still care about technoratti?) be the most popular blogger in the homemade breakfast cereal niche.
  • Blogging can’t be the casual thing that it was in the beginning, In the early days people started blogs and posted occasionally and it was just this novel little thing, and they were able to be successful as bloggers. Now, blogging is something that one really has to dedicate an embarrassing amount of energy to to be successful.
• The “Blog” as a literary genre, or media forum has become much more cemented, so that rather than be this experimental form that really only describes a website that updates regularly in a serialized format, there are now a whole host of expectations regarding the forum.
  • Blogs that reject the primacy of these forms will tend to be more successful, in that readers will tend to find them more innovative. Forum and approach, as much as a subject area, is one way that small independent content producers will be able to differentiate themselves from “big media blogs.”
  • Blogs can be projects onto themselves. We’ve seen a convention where every site uses a blog as a way of providing more up-to-date content, but independent bloggers are able to create independent blogs which accent other projects, but are nonetheless independent and self contained texts.
• Independent bloggers might not be able start up and field vast readerships on their own any more, but may be able to define their success on their own terms. Old media business models, that rely on advertising revenue and large readership numbers might not be the most stable anyway, and independent bloggers may be able to contemplate success on their own terms. Possible “new media” definitions of success include:
• Using a blog to support and promote a consulting or services based business, by presenting general information to help justify your expertise in a given area. Think RedMonk, Merlin Mann, and in some ways, me.
• Using a blog (and its moderate audience) to support some sort of “rockstar” business model, where you sell something (tickets to shows, dead-tree books, tshirts, etc.) that people mostly want because they know you from something which doesn’t make you much money (ie. record sales, blogging.)

There’s more. And I think that I might be talking about this kind of thing at PodCamp 3 Philly. I’d love to see you there.

“I’m giving up blogging because twitter has more energy and satisfies my online media needs these days.” I here yet another person say, as they give up the blog that they’ve been working on sporadically for the last 4 or five years for a twitter account.

I’m certainly not giving up blogging any time soon, but I hear people say these things. Not always so explicitly, and less often now that twitter has become more established, and less of a novelty. Nevertheless I think its high time to take a step back and take an account of “the state of blogging.”

While I think we need to consider the impact of twitter on the current state of blogging, I think the past five years and maybe the past seven or eight years (most of which have been without twitter) have had an even larger impact on the forum.

I’m not sure, exactly, what the state of things are, but the following are the questions I’m asking myself.

• Are blogs simply the default way of publishing serialized/periodical content and updates to websites?
• Blogging, at least in my mind, grew out of online-journal communities, and while there’s a lot of division between “bloggers” and “journalers” there’s a lot of connection. Blogs can be self-referential, and first-person, and they can drift between multiple threads of the author(s) life. What’s the state of blogging/journaling?
• Are blogs things that people grow, develop, and build over a long time, or are blogs commodities that serve a specific purpose attached to some other purpose. In other words, do people say, I want to create a blog, and they have a blog which meanders and continues for years, or have blogs become something that people start on a whim in response to communities or current events, and then discard when the mood passes?
• Do people read blogs? I have a good excuse for being more than a thousand post behind on my feed reader (moving across the country, starting a new job) but I’m pretty sure that blog reading isn’t exactly flourishing. There are some really well read blogs, of course, but I don’t know if people are really reading.

My answers, if not obvious are: yes, strained and under-appreciated, more commodity and ephemeral than they used to be as a result of software development, and readership hasn’t grown with the growth of the web.

And then we introduce twitter.

I’ve always seen twitter as an evolution of the “chat room” of “IRC” and phenomena like that, rather than an evolution of the blog, though it makes sense to think about twitter and related formats as being “microbiology.” At the same time, I think microblogging becomes a viable format because it makes it “OK” for folks to post lots of little ephemeral thoughts, which is hard in conventional blogging, both in terms of time/energy, but also in terms of what the software and social convention will allow.

In order for a blog post--just one--to be “successful,” in today’s world, it needs to be clever and well written, and it needs to hang around for long enough for people to notice it. It might also need to provide a useful analysis in combination with some useful information.

In order for a post to twitter to be successful, it needs to be and timely (so that people see it), it probably needs to include some sort of link, and other people need to “Retweet” it a lot (which has got to be the most annoying thing in the short history of the medium).

I don’t think the “short form” is going to kill the long form, or that that has even begun to happen, but might twitter kill off some of the cruft that that’s built up around commodity blogging? Does twitter reintegrate the journal-form with the more-objective form?

Maybe. We’ll see in a little while.

When I started doing this website thing on the eve of the millennium, the burgening buzzword of the time was “web standards.” All of us in the know were working on learning and then writing to web standards like HTML 4.0 and eventually XHTML 1.0 along with CSS 1 and 2. And we were all hankering for browsers that implemented these standards in a consistent way.

Really all we wanted was for our web pages to look the same no matter who was viewing the page.

This pretty much never happened. Web browsers are pretty good these days, or they at least--in many ways--don’t suck as much as they used to, but they’re all a bit quirky and they all render things a bit differently from each other. And on top of that they’ve got poor architectures, so as programs they’re really bloated, and prone to crashing and the like. I’ve written before about being “against” websites, webapps, and the like and I think my disdain for the “web” grows out of the plan and simple fact that:

the web browser is broken, beyond repair.

So where does this put the cause of web standards in web design? Thoughts and questions:

Do we write to standards which aren’t going to get adopted usefully? Is ad hearing to standards a productive use of time?

Do we write to clients (specific browser implementations) that are broken, but at least assure that content looks “right?”

When the previous goals two goals aren’t compatible which wins?

Will HTML 5 and CSS 4 fix these problems, or is it another moving target that browsers won’t adopt for another 10 years, and even then only haphazardly?

Are there other methods of networked content delivery that bypass the browser that might succeed while the browser space (and the content delivered therein) continues to flounder? I’m thinking object/document databases with structured bidirectional, and limited hierarchy (in the system, objects might have internal hierarchy)?

Is the goal/standard of pixel-perfect layout rendering something which the browser is incapable of providing? Might it be the case that CSS is simply too capable of addressing problems which are outside of the ideal scope for defining a consistent style for a page: Let me run with this idea for a moment:

Maybe the problem with XHTML and CSS isn’t that it’s implemented poorly, but rather that we’re trying to use CSS classes and IDs and div tags in an attempt to make pixel-perfect renderings of pages, which is really beyond CSS’s “mission.” What would web standards and the state of the browser look like, if you dropped CSS IDs (eg. #id-name{ }) and made single instance classes (eg. .class-name{}) verboten? Aside from crashing and burning and completely killing off browser-based applications?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the subject.

Several notes to with regards to information fast that I’m undertaking. And because this is the internet and this is my blog… Well here goes:

• I had initially suspected that the cause of my ailment was the special thinkpad-track point driver that deals with scrolling didn’t get updated when I upgraded to jaunty. This turns out to not be the case, as I had a freeze (again in firefox) just moving around with the arrow keys. That theory gone.

• C.K. and I determined that--counter to my supposition--the slight/occasional clunking noise is probably the drive head parking itself, and doesn’t seems to correspond with the problem. So replacing the drive is both awkward (weird form factor) and not likely to fix the problem

• I installed emacs-w3m on both computers. It’s not entirely intuitive. There are debian/ubuntu packages, but if you install the emacs-snapshot package, then the sequence is upgrade to the latest emacs-snapshot, install w3m-el, uninstall emacs22, and then add w3m code to your emacs init file (.emacs).

  It’s, remarkably nice, particularly for looking up links while I’m writing something and reading content-rich pages. The key-bindings are, by default excessively lame and require attention (which I haven’t figured out yet). I always thought that emacs web-browsing was way too dweab-y for me, but learning that it’s actually really cool is a good thing indeed.

• This isn’t a real fast, as I am still using firefox a little bit bit, and I suspect that I’ll always need to have it installed, but I think it’s generally good to not have firefox be the default environment for everything that isn’t emacs or the terminal.

• I’ve basically been avoiding my RSS reader during the course of this experiment. Which I need to spend some time tending to, at least so that I can start using some other reader. This has been an issue since I switched to Linux, and I’ve failed to come to anything that I really like. I’m tempted to use the gnus news reader to read the RSS, but I fear this might be incredibly awkward/complciated for a very small amount of pay off.

• By moving web browsing, insofar as it needs to occur, into emacs, the windows I see are: stuff inside of emacs (mostly org-mode and writing); and stuff inside of terminals (mutt, Micawber, bash, etc.). As a result, I get the feeling that all of my windows look the same. I’m interested how people might solve this problem themselves. How do you make an entirely text-driven, undecorated environment have texture? Have… variety between windows that might provide some context to specific tasks.

  This is an aesthetic/design question more than a programmatic one I guess. I’ve tried playing around, a little with colors in emacs, and still use the default for emacs23 because the others seem difficult to read. I’ve tried different fonts (in both programs) and I’m quite wed to my current font. I’ve tried transparency (which doesn’t run well for emacs on the laptop)… I’m thinking that adding Conky, or more informative widgets might be helpful, but I’d love to get some feedback from you all…

I just wanted to check to see if you all use RSS, and if so I have a few questions:

• Is one of the primary ways you interact with content on the web?
• What software do you use to read feeds? (Google Reader? NetNewsWire? Lifrea? Newsbeuter? FeedGator/FeedDemon? LiveJournal?).
• What’s your biggest pet peeve about the RSS ecosystem? (including feed readers, feed parsers, variations in feed generation/publication, under/over adoption).

Thanks.

(my answers? yes; google reader; non-full text feeds and generally lackluster reading options.)

I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

This isn’t a fully formed thought yet, but I was wondering what the status of discussion and commenting is on the web these days. Clearly microblogging like Twitter and Identi.ca produces a powerful platform for conversations and I think what’s coming with xmpp (innovative interfaces for group chats, etc.) furthers the potential for conversation online. At the same time, I’m wondering what the status of conversations are “older” media like blog comments…

Are people still commenting on blogs? A few of you comment here now and then, and websites like making light have vibrant comments threads (that I don’t have the attention span for or time to read), and the big sites (slashdot, digg, etc.) have active comments as well, but a lot of sites (including those with moderate readership) don’t get many comments, and my sense is that a significant percentage of comments these days are in the “me too” vein, rather than productive themselves (because threads are difficult to read). Here are a few questions:

• Do features (threading? email notification? persistent identities?) make commenting “work better” or flow more productively?
• Are conversations about content moving away from comments into more centralized media like twitter, email lists, and discussion forums?
• Are we more likely to respond to a blog post we read in our own blog, rather than in a comments thread? Has the blogging community reached a saturation point?
• Dose a vibrant community of comment-posers indicate a marker of blog-success, these days? Did it ever? What might replace comments?

I’m pretty convinced that comments are dying, but I’d love to get your feedback. I’m not terribly mournful about this but I’m very interested in thinking about how we (as a community will replace this niche.)

When Jaiku gave microbloggers (ie users of services like identi.ca twitter, etc.) the ability to aggregate their content onto Jaiku from blogs, flickr, delicious, and of course twitter as well, I noted that it wouldn’t take much for the Jaiku to become a ghost town, where no one would have to actually create new content or read in order for new content to filter through the site. While syndication allows people to do some really amazing things with content, without filtering, context, and moderation it’s really easy to become overwhelmed. Frankly Jaiku provide(s/ed) enough filtering ability to make this useful but this “problem” continues:

There are services like ping.fm which let you type once and send widely to a whole host of audiences on a bunch of different websites. Which is great: it lets you be present without taking up all your time, it allows you to reach a very fractured audience. Good stuff. Right?

Except not so much. The thing about “social media” and these new very conversational media is that they’re not so much about sending widely. They’re great for reaching people, in the moment, but they’re really more about having conversations with a community.

So we need something better. Because being shut off from your friends because you use different websites is bad; but what amounts to using AM radio cranked up loud to talk to your friends in a couple of different coffee houses is worse. I think open micro blogging (like identi.ca and laconica) is a step in the right direction, better independent profiles and curatorial tools would be another.

Thoughts?

My grandmother watches the evening news, which isn’t particularly noteworthy except that it’s not something that I do unless I’m near someone who does. I tend to get my news via the radio, and the Internet, and while the visuals are instructive, it’s not something that I’ve had a lot of experience watching in recent years.

Which is why I was surprised by how bad they’ve gotten in the past few years. Not only is the news shorter, but there’s less variation in the coverage (all the networks/shows cover the same half dozen stories, with much the same slant.) And there’s this pervasive inline advertising thing which I swear is a new phenomena. It’s unsettling at the very least.

ps. I also correctly diagnosed a case of spasmodic disphonia in they junior senator from main on the television.

There’s a lot of content on the Internet. This as pretty much always been the case, but it’s especially true these days. There’s so much content that it’s difficult to comprehend the amount of content on this (very small) website, let alone the content of “all the blogs” or other kinds of sites.

In the early days of blogging, the largest archives included a hundred or even two hundred posts, no more than a year or two of archives, and if you read the dozen or two dozen blogs in the general network that you covered, you could be pretty sure that you were reading some significant portion of the “weblog discourse” and all the same blogs that the people writing the blogs were reading. When you found a new blog, the chance is that you could read the entire archive in an hour or two if you were so inclined.

It’s a different world now. Blogs have many years of archives, hundreds upon hundreds of posts, what we read is only a drop in the bucket of whats out there.

Success, (a relative concept indeed) as content creators on the Internet, in this saturated market requires a very different strategy. Pumping out more content, just further saturates our websites, we need some other approach. It doesn’t help that the publication systems we use to power content on the web (wordpress, drupal, blogger) are designed for an earlier era.

I would propose that success in the next era will revolve around, individuals and technological solutions that make “curation” easier and more effective. Curation you ask? In museums we see the display of only a fraction of the material held in the collection. Likely 10% or less. What you do see is selected (regularly) by curators who know and manage the collection, and take those materials and display them in such a way as to convey some sort of broader message about the subject of an exhibit.

The same thing can (and should) happen on the web, with content. We need content producers to go through their writing and say “read this first for an introduction to my work/ideas,” we need to connect content producers with curators who synthesize posts (with links) to great content that’s “out there” (like tumble logs), we to integrate tools and structures that make curation easier in existing content-management software.

The truth is that many of these things are starting to happen: I’ve seen some bloggers who attempt to filter their posts for their readers (and I’m going to be doing more of this,) tumble logs, when well done are curatorial. The software is here in bits and pieces, but the truth is that curation has to be a mostly manual task (which is the source of its value), so I think it’ll be a while before we work out the kinks so that the software facilitates this kind of work. In the mean time…

Work as if you Live in the Early Days of a Better Nation.

I wrote in “The Advertising Bubble” that one of the ways to more effectively monetize content and “do better on the Internet,” was to combine efforts with other content producers. The key thought here is that, people only have so much time, and cooperation can allow you and your fellow content producers to pool resources, readers' attention, and business strategies.

I’ve also thought of this post as the “just because Wordpress, can be installed in a handful of minutes doesn’t mean you should,” post. The tools (and skills) required to build websites are fast, easy, and non-technical (by now) so that anyone can have a blog, or a website, or (hell, with enough time/money) a full fledged social networking site to rival digg or facebook. Just because sites are easy to build, it doesn’t mean that we need to build new sites. Just because independence is possible, it’s not always called for.

There are a lot of readers on the Internet, but there are only so many hours in the day. And having a dynamic site with new content, is something that requires a lot of work. Lots of people can pull it off, but a lot of people (with really good things to say) can’t. This is sort of the dirty underbelly of the fact that the Internet (and open source) is a great democratizing force: because everyone speaks easily and freely, the challenge to being heard isn’t opportunity, it’s shear volume.

I talk with a lot of people about working with the Internet, about using the internet to promote and build various kinds of projects, about blagging, and about strategies for success. There are things that I can help people do better like having good designs, writing top heavy content (I’m bad at this), ideas for more content, strategies for posting regularly, places to network with the communities that you hope to speak to, and among other tactics. All of these things should help lead to success; but beyond persistence, creativity, good timing, and a little entropy I have no good way of beating the “volume problem,” given current conventions.

The solution of encouraging group blogs rather that individual blogs is a good start. Each bloggers’ responsibility to any given site is much lower than a single blogger’s responsibility to their personal site. There would be fewer (new) blogs as a result of the increase in collaboration, and possibly a consolidation of existing blogs. We would also expect to see blogs more tightly focused on niches rather than individuals: niche focuses tend to do really well on the web with regards to targeting audiences, so this is a good thing indeed.

Before anyone cries that I’m trying to suppress individuality (or expression, or identity), this is very much not the case. I think static websites are really important, my suggestion isn’t that people shouldn’t have websites it’s that they shouldn’t blog on them (by default). Given the state of syndication and aggregation content, it’s even possible for folks to have personal websites that aggregate their content from a number of different sources,¹ we get individuality and dynamic content without dividing efforts or audiences.

There are other solutions (curation springs instantly to mind) to the “volume problem,” and I’ll get to those soon. In the mean time, remember: group blogs are the future.

Onward and Outward!