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!

Most of the time when something new happens on the internet, I’m hopelessly behind the curve. I only really figured out wikis a few months ago, and I was a bit too young to get blogging out of the gate. And I was late to live journal and even then it took me years to figure out why that was so cool.

But microblogging? I was totally there, I mean I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but from the moment that there was any amount of steam behind twitter, I got it. Which is really cool, at least I think it is. Basically micro-blogging is a short, 140 character, “blog/messaging service” which combines the best parts of group chat and

And as you might know from your own experience or from my previous posts, I’ve tried a lot of services and have a few opinions about what makes a service better or worse. I can hear you saying, “What tycho opinionated?” but suspend your shock, and hang with me.

Twitter

Twitter’s “killer feature” is the fact that there are so many users, and that it focuses on ease of usability, so people “get it” pretty quickly. There’s a lot of power in the size of the community, and the fact that the crowd is no longer “just geeks.” The cons are that they don’t have IM access (which isn’t good) and that it’s all “too simple” so that it can be hard to track conversations and ideas and/or to have enough granular control over conversations.

Jiaku

Jaiku started in Finland, and bought by google, innovated in two big ways. First, it combined the lifestreeming (a la whoisi and friendfeed) with microblogging. Secondly, it has threaded comments, which make a lot of sense, and provide a helpful way to get around the 140 character limit. There are also “channels” which users can join and form to create (almost) ad-hoc groups based on topics and events to keep discussion of events out of “general feed.”

Plurk

I have less experience with plurk than the other services. The features of this one seem to be: an innovative display (which I hate) and a greater focus on conversational threads, but I think the Jaiku solution is better, frankly. Also there’s this “karma” system which I think is clearly a cheap ploy to get people invested in their Plurk activity, but it’s too transparent and makes me feel like I’m in a game theory experiment which isn’t cool at all.

Facebook

Largely irrelevant, to my mind, but facebook has had “status” for a long time, and this is basically a microblogging feature. It now has comments, and isn’t prefixed by “is” (though for a while, there was some humor in how people used or didn’t use the leading to be conjugation.) I think as a serious microblogging competitor, it doesn’t really pan out.

Pownce

Pownce, is nifty, and as of today, has file sharing abilities that other services don’t have. That’s cool. Pownce is also the only one that I know of that has abandoned the 140 character limit, which I’d throw my hat behind. It also has threaded conversations, but I think jaiku’s implementation is a bit better. There’s IM but it’s not incredibly intuitive. It’s been a while, which brings me to the major down side is that despite having a semi-compelling feature set, the community has never been that large or active, or grown beyond the usual core of early adopters (etc.) that I’ve grown used to seeing everywhere. If we’re just talking about features though, I think pownce has a lot going for it, unfortunately this isn’t a features game.

Identi.ca

Clearly this is where I am right now. Fundamentally, I’m not sure if the laconica software solves (m)any of the problems with twitter. For the moment it uses a CMS rather than a messaging model, it doesn’t have threaded conversations (really), the graphic design/theme needs a good once over, and there isn’t that huge community that twitter has going for it. The people who use identi.ca tend to be really into it, and that makes up for the relatively small size. It helps that there’s a real-time push-based IM/xmpp connection, and the scaling problem is solved by making growth a horizontal (federation) rather than a vertical (architecture/infrastructure) problem.

So that’s the major players, at least of the open networks (not counting yammer, say) and of the sites that I’ve had any real interaction with. The most interesting thing about this is that it’s all going to be different in six months or a year, and it’s cool to be here now to watch as things unwind.

I read the following phrase on my travels this past week: “we’ll just have to wait till the SEO does it’s thing.” This is sort of a typical phrase that gets throw around on the “commercial internet,” and it wasn’t out of place. Indeed, I think all the readers of the article probably understood what the author was trying to convey. But it struck me as sort of odd. Here’s why:

It’s a completely empty statement. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the collection of techniques that are used to “raise” a given web page’s ranking in search results. Because there isn’t a hell of a lot of competition in this market, basically this amounts to trying to “game” Google.

Which… is sort of a loosing proposition. Google’s algorithms (or the key components) are top secret, and what we do know about how google arranges searches is that the more pages link to a given page, the more favorably Google’s algorithm’s view that pages, this lets Google’s search results reflect a sort of emergent semantic organization of the world wide web. This means that when we search google, more often than not, we’re mostly searching the most interreferential pages on the internet.

It’s true that there are a lot of sites that don’t have a lot of “juice” in Google, and that’s really frustrating for people who create websites, but Google’s domination of the internet-search marketplace is due largely to the quality of results that this reference-based system plays.

And in light of this, I hope it’s pretty obvious that SEO is mostly a crock of shit. You can’t game Google, and more to the point you don’t want to. Though I think the prevalence of SEO an interesting admission for the “commercial internet” that traditional advertising-based marketing models has utterly failed on the internet.

To my mind the ideological parent of SEO was “search engine submission” services, which would purportedly “submit” your website to search engines so that people could find your site. For a fee, usually. Clearly this didn’t work, because the return was so diffuse, and because no one really wants to use a search tool where the results are based on “submissions” which are paid for by the content producers. There’s a reason why most of us use Google and not AltaVista, AskJeeves, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, and so forth.

Now having said that there are some things that you can do to encourage your site’s ranking in google (ie. get people to link to you on their sites,) I’d call this “good writing,” or “effective communication,” or “best practices,” not “SEO” but you know whatever works. Here’s what I think really works.

1. Be interesting, and have something to say. No one wants to read a website that’s boring. That’s why my readership is so low ;) but if you can’t make the attempt, no amount of good mojo is going to help your site.

2. Post regularly. Really regularly. This resonates with this idea, the way to get good at doing 1., and make sure that people keep reading your site (and linking to you) is to provide dynamic and fresh content.

3. If you’re a company, write not only about what you do and your clients, but also about what your clients are interested in. This might mean talking about and linking to your competitors, don’t worry, rising tides raise all boats.

4. Participate in real life conversations. Most people learn about new websites via word of mouth connections formed in unusual contexts. There’s a reason why most of the leaders of the independent web (bloggers) are either: in New York City, San Francisco, or have been going to SXSWi since the beginning. (There’s also a minority of L.A. based bloggers). Talk to people, talk about your work, and talk to the other people who are creating content.

5. Write emails. This is the second stage of what starts in 4. Digital networking connections rest mostly on one-on-one email correspondences, and listserv conversations, despite all sorts of next wave technology like twitter, facebook, and linked in. Getting really good at writing quick, meaningful emails and staying on top of your correspondence is requisite.

6. Top load your content and titles. This falls under the category of good practice, and it mirrors the way newspaper columns are structured. Give as much information away as soon as possible, put all the details at the end, and write in a style that’s simple and designed to be easily and quickly read. There’s a lot out on the internet, and the the less time you take to make a specific point/joke/insight, the better.

7. Provide full RSS feeds, and don’t put things behind “cut/fold” tags so that people have to click through to “read more.” The former is good sense, and represents reaching out to other content producers (the people who read your site,) and the later is just good sense.¹ Other content producers are the people who have the real power over your search engine ranking, and making your content accessible is the first step in getting the content read.

8. Use a site design which maximizes readability and visibility, so that people can--you know--read your content, rather than marvel at your superior design capabilities.

Basically write a good site, network well, and don’t waste your time on snake oil and chants. /end.

Today was the first day that my regular blog post/essay didn’t get crossposted to my livejournal. This is one of the cool things that I can do now that I’ve redone tychoish.com. So LJ-land if you want to read about a really cool linux/open source thing click the above link.

In other news, I’ve been toying around with identi.ca which is the flagship of an open source federated twitter clone called laconica. (You can join/follow my “dents” here if you use any Laconica site.)

Now I’m a really big fan of the twitter except that my prefered method of interacting with twitter is via the IM/jabber interface, which hasn’t worked for months. While I’d love to jump ships to another platform (like identi.ca or jaiku), twitter has too many people that wouldn’t jump ship with me. So until Laconica can import tweets a little better, I’m going to be in a couple of different worlds for a while. Anyway…

I listened to an interview with the author the other day, and I think I’ll be writing some blog posts on this subject very soon, but its mightily cool, conceptually (because it gives everyone a lot of control over their microblogging life.)

A while back I wrote a post--after identi.ca started up, actually--about how microblogging needed to be thought of as an evolution of IRC and IM rather than an evolution of blogging. Not so much in terms of database structure (though I hear that would help,) but in terms of user interface and interaction.

I still think this is the case. Just FYI. And I still want to use something that really works. And better access control would be good.

Ok, blathering over.

Onward and Upward!