Topic: New media

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!

I read something a few weeks ago (the problem with being slow to process things from blogs that post regularly), about digital ebook readers and the future of digital books.

I guess my thoughts are best summed up in a couple of points, basically that electronic texts will succeed as they: develop unique and presentation methods (hardware and software), and as the commerce/distribution models become more transparent.

1. Words on screens don’t work like words on paper. They just don’t, and we need to develop new ways of reading/writing that engage the medium better. We got prose out of the transition to bound-books, novels out of printing press (loosely;) the success of ebooks, I think will require some sort of new way of writing/reading/interacting with text, and no ebook implementation has gone there.

2. The potential for profit of digital goods is immense: distribution/production costs are much lower than their material counterparts, because printing, delivery, etc. aren’t factors for digital things. There is, however, value and work that goes into publishing texts, and we need some way of supporting creators. I’m not sure that the existing publishing/content industry’s models make a good example to follow, and “micropayments” (the stock alternate response) don’t seem to really work. I tend to think that fellowships funded by a subscription model/tax on connectivity is more the way to go. But that’s me.

Before I started to write this article I heard two pieces of news. First, that the economy of Latvia had failed as part of the ongoing depression. Second, that the American Government was going to provide subsidies to hedge funds (!) to promote a revival of the financial services industry. The mind boggles, to very different degrees at both of these stories. Like this whole depression, it seems clear that the core issue is that economies based on inauthentic exchange of value are prone to failure: the act of moving money from hither to thither doesn’t create value, even though paper values rise. That’s a bubble.

There are a lot of these, of course, the bubble under my lens today is the advertising bubble.

It seems to me that advertising, is really minimally effective, or accidentally effective at any rate. Our world is submerged in advertising, and yet we spend a great deal of time ignoring it: we use DVRs to skip commercials, we install ad-blocking plug-ins on our web-browsers, we instinctively tune out advertisements and have grown so acclimated to the presence of advertising that we ignore ads. If advertising is effective it is only effective incidentally.

And yet, we’ve built (albeit faltering) economies around advertising. The first dot-com burst was due largely to the fact that advertising revenue couldn’t support dot-com business model. The Web-2.0 bubble hasn’t been entirely advertising driven, but that’s a huge part of the equation (eg. google), and particularly for content (rather than service) driven websites.

The thing is that advertising seems like a great way to support the content industry (such as it is): we have practices to separate it from editorial content, it provides a revenue stream, it’s easily integrated into our designs, we know how to buy and sell it. But because it doesn’t really work (at anything beyond generally raising the profile of a logo, possibly), and advertising money dries up when the economy dries up: so it’s not exactly a robust business model.

The problem, is that there’s not a lot of good models for content-based services to operate under. Subscriptions don’t often work because the threshold to commitment is high, and unless you already have an audience, it’s hard to convince people to pay subscription fees. Micropayments, and tip jars where you expect a lot of people to give a very little in support of your site, often suffer from the same problems as subscription models in practice.

The solution?

Well there isn’t one, exactly, so I’m really excited to see what happens in the next couple of years. My gut instinct is that the following two factors are important:

1. Content on the Internet should be a hook into some other revenue generating scheme. Consult, coach, be an academic, publish books, sell relevant stuff, and so forth. This works, it can certainly be overdone, or done poorly, but blogging is a great way to prove to the world (and yourself) that you know what you’re talking about, and that you’re an interesting, creative, and committed thinker and worker, worthy of their investment in other contexts.

2. There should be less content on the Internet. Part of the problem is that since everyone can have their own website, in most cases everyone does, and while this is great for the democracy of the web, it means that there’s way more competition (for eyeballs, for advertising money) than there needs to be. The end result is that audience is way too divided. The solution: group blogs and more curated content. It’s still possible for people to present individual streams of content, and use personal sites for profiles, but in the age of the niche and the post-advertising age, working in groups is the way. I’m convinced.

More thoughts on this, particularly the second point to follow, of course.

Onward and Outward!

I recently read the anti-web manifesto, which I found refreshing. If you haven’t read it, go do so. If your too lazy to read it, the gist is that we’re trying to get the web to do too much (ie. run applications, pixel-perfect layouts) and that quality browsers can’t exist, because what we use the web for these days is beyond the scope of what the web was intended to do. The document is also refreshingly snarky, in the long tradition of both hacker writing and the genre of manifestos in general, but don’t let that offend.

I’ve been known to say, “I hate the web,” which is an ironic thing to say given my line of work, but I think it’s mostly true. To be fair, I don’t hate the web, I just hate what it’s become: the only way to access what happens on the Internet. It’s great for publishing and accessing content, but for applications? Somewhat less great.

The Manifesto centers on the notion that the perfect web-browser is impossible to implement: Browsers have to implement inefficient scripting languages, and multiple implementations of the various web standards (because you have to implements both “how it should be done,” and “how the old, broken implementations that everyone wrote pages to, did it,” with the end result being that browsers themselves suck. And it’s not a case of just writing the perfect browser because, current expectations of the technology is flawed.

The course of action (theses?) are to:

• Eliminate CSS; use a little basic HTML formatting instead. Let the text stay in its natural format.
• Only basic font faces ([sans]serif, monospace), relative sizes to be supported.
• Eliminate scripting.
• Separate information from empty multimedia content: use Flash for the latter.

I’m not sure that I agree with this solution. I think HTML 5 will take care of the multimedia content, and I think flash should be avoided. I think scripting should be the first causality of the post-web Internet. I don’t see CSS as a problem, (the author sees it as a symptom of design orientation in website creation), though I’d concede that it’s used improperly most of the time.

Given this, I think four bullet points from tycho regarding “The ‘Post-Web’ Web” are in order:

• Eliminate JavaScript and all scripting in web-environments. JavaScript is the table of the ‘aughts and ‘teens.
• Develop/concentrate efforts on alternate (ie. non HTTP) protocols to facilitate the movement of dynamic information across the Internet, including well implemented clients.
• Develop robust/lightweight cross platform frameworks for developing applications on the desktop. Where’s GTK-on-Rails?
• Write a HTTP server that provides navigational meta-data automatically with pages, and a browser with the ability to construct site navigation based on this information. This way the architecture of the site depends on the file layout and a configured file, but is generated locally. Basically gopher, except designed in the casual manner of the ‘aughts.

Any takers?

Wordpress is great software, and I’ve been a user for many years. Many years. It used to be called “b2” and I used it then as well. There are a lot of more powerful content management systems, a lot of systems that are much more flexible than wordpress these days, and often I get the feeling that other platforms attempt to define themselves in contrast to wordpress. In the larger sense, this post is an attempt to resist this temptation while also exploring the limitations of wordpress.

Wordpress is a pure blogging engine: it provides interfaces for writers to publish weblogs (blogs), manage content (to some degree) and generate pages based on templates. Before wordpress, blogging was done either by hand edited text files, or by systems that complied static HTML from some sort of database.¹ Wordpress is an improvement because it’s easy to install, it’s reliable, and pages generate dynamically on viewing, rather than just when the site owner hits “save” or “rebuild.” In the end, we discovered that systems where managing “websites” was divorced from (even simple) server management had a great democratizing effect on content, and that’s sort of the core of wordpress.

Because wordpress is designed to be a blogging platform, it doesn’t need to be as flexible as other generalized content management systems. Flexibility comes at the cost of complexity, and developers decided that in some cases, less was, in fact, more. There are a lot of things that you could do with b2 (albeit with some hacking) because the site generation/templating system was much less rigid, at the same time, it was much easier to get sites with broken links, and bad pages, particularly as you changed from theme to theme. That’s bad, and it seems pretty reasonable to me to want to avoid that.

The end result is a program that does almost everything you could want it to do as long as you only want a blog, if you try and stretch it too far it simply won’t work. Well it will work, but the advantage of using Wordpress to manage a website that isn’t a blog (or very similar to one) disappears quickly when you have to impose informal limitations on how you enter content in the system to generate well formated pages. It’s a slippery slope, and you’d be surprised how quickly a site goes from being a standard Wordpress site, to requiring customized themes, specialized content entry patterns. And pretty soon, a lot of the things that make Wordpress “simple” and “essay,” aren’t really available to your new site. That’s the limitation of Wordpress.

Knowing where the line is, is often the largest challenge in Wordpress development, and being able to say, “you know, this is the kind of site that you really want to be building with Django, or Drupal, or Rails, or Expression Engine,” Or even saying “you know this is the kind of site that we could probably do more effectively using flat files and PHP includes. Wordpress is great, and in the cases where it’s well suited to the task at hand, it’s the ideal solution. In other situations? Less so.

Onward and Upward!