2003 has so far been a year of hype for weblogs and k-logs. Blogging is on the cusp of the mainstream. Or is it? A few posts recently have me wondering: why would normal people want to publish to the Web?
Mark Pilgrim: "... itís possible that an unfiltered... unedited... personal publishing system... with instantaneous worldwide distribution... is not for you."
Dan Shafer: "OS integration...isn't the big feature that's going to draw millions of folks to blogging."
Robert Scoble, responding to Dan Shafer: "Personally, no one has found the mother lode of weblogging tools yet: corporate webloggers."
My disclaimer: I believe strongly in the power of the two-way web - where any person can not only read and browse the World Wide Web, but they also have the power to write and publish to the Web. Mainstream publishing mediums today are mostly one-way. Newspapers, television, radio, magazines - these things all dish out content to a largely passive public. And people lap it up. We live in a Remote Control culture. We believe we have control over our ideas and thoughts, simply because we can flip to a different channel. Well the Web has changed all that. Weblogs in particular have shown us that not only can we consume content, we can create it too.
Now that my prejudices are out of the way, let's consider some real life issues. How many people have cottoned onto the read/write revolution? How many people actually have a reason or the inclination to publish their ideas and thoughts to the Web? In my country, New Zealand, I only know of a handful of people who blog. I'm definitely in a minority. And I have to wonder whether it will always be a minority activity. I hope not, but consider this...
I've been working on Intranet development over the past 5 years, in a variety of companies. And you know what the biggest challenge has always been? Getting the "content owners" to write stuff. There are always a few business users who are keen to publish their own content, but these people are the minority. The majority of business users don't want to write and publish content on the Intranet. The excuse I hear most often is that they don't have time and it's not what they're paid to do. Which are perfectly valid reasons. What business people are really saying is: hey, I don't have any interest in writing or publishing - I have my own job to do (be it accounting, legal, corporate, marketing, whatever).
Granted, partly this has been a tools issue. Over the years I've managed my fair share of unnecessarily complex Content Management Systems. But in 2003 we have the option of using weblog authoring systems like Radio Userland and Movable Type. Those tools are proof that publishing can be a 'one-click' experience. And now there are new tools being introduced to the market that make publishing even simpler, by taking the set-up and configuration hassle out of the equation - Typepad and i-book are two examples. So ease of use for publishing to the Web should no longer be an issue. But the question remains - do most people have a reason or inclination to write and publish on the Web? There's an old saying: where there's a will, there's a way. Do people have the will to publish?
One path I see is one which Marc Canter has been pushing:
"Now it's time for Resumes, Reviews, Calendar Events, Recipes, Conversations and People. These data structs are just as important as blog posts. You can call them micro-content, new kinds of blog structs or whatever - but everybody wants to subscribe to them."
...and everybody may want to write them too. The things Marc mentions are all simple, everyday things that people may be willing to contribute content to. Another trend I've noticed that people are doing in droves is taking pictures with their mobile phones. Moblogging is the term for publishing data from a mobile device to a weblog. While moblogging is a minority activity now, the number of people who own a mobile phone capable of taking pictures is growing daily. Which means the potential for moblogging also grows. (me, I'm still waiting for photo-capable mobile phones to reduce in price - in this I'm not an early adopter!).
Back to weblogging and writing. k-logs (which is the fancy term for corporate blogging) are being trumpeted by various people as being the next big thing in Intranet tools. This from John Robb:
"K-Logs radically increase the possibility that meaningful information and knowledge will be captured and archived on the Intranet. There isn't another system that even comes close. K-Logs provide employees with a system that is easy to use (virtually zero training), immediate benefits, and enhanced personal prestige/value."
While I agree wholeheartily with the sentiments expressed by John and others like Phil Wolff, I wonder how practical it is to expect business people to write k-logs. It's all very well having tools like k-collector to aggregate Intranet content, but the real issue is how do we get people to create the content in the first place? Interestingly, this is the exact same problem the Semantic Web has getting off the ground, people currently aren't writing enough metadata to make the Semantic Web happen.
So while I am an avid supporter of the Two-Way Web, I do wonder whether writing to the Web will ever be more than just a minority activity. And if it does become popular, maybe we need to consider Mark Pilgrim's advice that it isn't for everyone. Personally, I hope that weblogging does become mainstream and helps people find their voices (on whatever topics are dear to them).
The current blogging activity amongst American presidential candidates is a fascinating experiment to see if weblogging has the legs to stand up in the mainstream. I actually wish Dave Winer would blog more on this subject - perhaps he will after he's finished with BloggerCon, which is preaching to the converted. What we need to do now is preach to the masses ;-)
CSS and XHTML are still dominating my mind's attention.xml file. As you can see in my menu, they're numbers 1 and 2 in my Weekly Topic Top 10. btw the Topic Top 10 is going to be a weekly record (pardon the pun) of the most popular topics on my mind. I've actually created some XML files to store each week's top 10, so I can track what topics are occupying my mind over time. I'll see if I can implement this into my Radio blog, so the menu automatically extracts the data from the XML files. In fact this feature could be extended across the blogosphere too (but by a better programmer than me!).
Wouldn't it be fun to have a Rick Dees-like weekly countdown of the Top 40 topics in the blogosphere. Popdex has something similar - a popularity index of weblog posts and stories. Technorati comes very close by sorting posts from different weblogs into topics (nice work again Dave Sifry!). But ideally I want something attuned to my interests.
To make the Weekly Top 40 relevant for different groups of people, you'd need to categorize topics...like they do with the Billboard charts - there's a pop chart, an R&B chart, a country chart, etc. Likewise in the blogosphere you could have a Tech Blogs chart, a Political Blogs chart, a Personal Journal chart, etc.
In the meantime, you can tune into my Weekly Top 10 topics chart. CSS is number 1 this week, but there are many topics vying for my attention currently. What will be number 1 next week?
I've been totally absorbed in my CSS re-design this past week. I did some final tinkering tonight, trying to find a solution to the "bottom horizontal bar" issue (outlined in my previous post). But CSS positioning is an abstract thing to get ones head around. It's not like good old fashioned HTML table designs, where you can set the table borders to equal "1" in order to view the layout. I eventually decided to remove the troublesome bottom horizontal bar. It wasn't that functional anyway. Once I've spent some time studying CSS positioning in detail, I may come back to it.
What have I missed in the blogosphere while I've been touring CSS-land (along with its neighbouring country, XHTLM-land)? I see that Paulo and Matt are nearing the release date for k-collector - cool, I believe k-collector will blow some minds when it's released into the wild. Phil Wolff had an interesting comment on k-collector's potential benefit to Intranets (which interests me in my work role). What else has been happening... oh I see the A Listers had a brawl last week - the "you're full of shit" posts, heh heh (Dennis Conner once said that to a New Zealand boat designer in the first America's Cup regatta we entered, back in 1987 - we won the thing in 1995...but, er, lost it recently to a land-locked country, Switzerland - isn't life funny). What else... Marc Canter is pushing hard to get an RSS 2.0 developer to build an events aggregator - good on you Marc, there are lots of exciting developments happening in your neck of the (blogland) woods.
So it's all happening, which is why blogging is so much fun. I'll be back in writing mode this week. I have some thoughts perculating on XHTML, which I'll type up tomorrow.
I've been fixing up some teething problems with my new CSS design and I'm quite pleased to report that my homepage is now 100% valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional! I checked this at the W3C Validator. A couple of days ago I had about 360 errors on my test page, but I whittled it down in two main ways. Firstly, I ran all my homepage posts through a nice online HTML Tidy tool I found. This cleaned up most of the gunk that the Radio Userland WYSIWYG editor produces (the main culprit is upper case HTML tags, which is a no-no in XHTML). Then I had to clean up some other HTML that the W3C Validator objected to, such as ampersands and similar characters. This meant I had to remove all my Amazon links, as they have question marks and so forth in their URLs (due to being database query strings). The Validator didn't like links to comments on the Radio Userland servers either.
The Validator is a tough task master, but I did as it bid me. The end result is I am now XHTML validated. I feel both cleansed and exhausted. As for the reasons why I felt I had to validate, it's partly because I want to give my tableless CSS the best chance of success (fly little bird, fly!). It's also partly because I am trying to ingratiate myself into the world of Web Standards - and why I am doing this is something I will write about soon. Lastly, I am interested in the Semantic Blog concept that Jon Udell is currently experimenting with. That is, doing XML analysis with an XHTML-enhanced weblog.
There are now only two remaining CSS issues that I need to sort out:
1. The formatting of the bottom horizontal bar goes out of whack when the menu list is longer than the main text. This is why I've temporarily taken off my blogroll and topicroll - but they'll return once I figure out how to fix this issue. I haven't fully got my head around CSS positioning yet, which judging from this article may take some time to sink in.
2. The second issue relates to the bottom vertical bar, which has a little glitch (at least in my IE6 browser). This seems to be related to some Radio Userland code, which I'll need to look more closely at.
There may be one or two other issues, depending on what browser you are using. I'd be grateful if readers would let me know of any problems, via the comments or by email.
I've done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it's now a tableless design. I'm doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven't yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis, who kindly gave me permission to use it. I figured the best way to get into CSS design is to learn from the masters, then later when I have more confidence I'll attempt an original design. This re-design exercise has been an excellent lesson for me on CSS and XHTML. You can't beat the motto 'learn by doing' in the Web world!
The hardest thing about the re-design was integrating the tableless CSS design into Radio Userland. I had to do some jiggery-pokery with the Radio Userland templates and macros, and the CSS implementation is not yet complete. I've had to temporarily remove my blogroll and topicroll, along with some other links, due to a kink in the design. Also my permalink icons aren't working properly. So there are a few little things to iron out yet. Bear with me and please let me know, either in comments or by email, if you spot anything that needs fixing. I'll write some more notes on my CSS/XHTML transformation over the next few days.
All in all, I don't think my CSS efforts will make Zeldman's hit parade - but at least I've made my debut in the CSS charts ;-)
Andrew Chen wrote a response to my previous post about Syncato. He thinks I want to create something called a "distributed conversation protocol" and then take over the world. Actually creating a protocol would be the difficult part, given what is happening with Atom :-) So no, I'm not advocating a new protocol. All I want is a new tool (a new school tool) to enhance tracking of conversations. We already have RSS, XML, XPath, etc - these are all protocols or standards. What we need now are tools, not more protocols. And this is what attracted me to Syncato. It's a new weblog tool that may be the holy grail of structured writing ;-)
But Andrew worries about the "depersonalization of the web". He reckons that a plague of protocols has been visited upon the blogosphere - RSS, Trackback, Pingback. Andrew goes on to say:
"People are objects that emit content. There are repositories of the emitted content. Content is sometimes emitted in response to other content. Because content is emitted at a specific point in time, the content emission patterns, when seen in relation to what they were emitted in response to, form what is often known as a "discussion thread".
OK, I have no problem with the phrase "discussion thread" (or, luckily, the word "emit"). I admit it, I am interested in following discussion threads on the blogosphere. So what's the problem? Andrew goes on to say:
"Various protocols in the past have supported the viewing of content as a "discussion thread". The "revolution" (NOT!) that the RSS/TrackBack/PingBack and other technologies associated with the "blogosphere" advocate is that the content can "stay" in it's original place and not need to go to some other (and implicitly that "otherness" is bad ask yourself why!) central server (such as an NNTP or SMTP server) before being viewed. That's it! That's all there is to the "revolution"."
Ahh, I'm beginning to see where Andrew and I differ. I'm interested in tracking topics and ideas that interest me. Often those things are "distributed" over the Web. e.g. various people may blog about the same topic, but they do so on their own blogs or in a comments thread attached to a blog post. Tools such as k-collector and Topic Exchange aggregate these things into topic threads, which interestingly is done via a central server. But the "revolution" which I'm interested in is one where I'm able to aggregate topics and conversations on my terms. Syncato has promise in this regard (bearing in mind I haven't yet implemented the product, I'm just going by what I read on Kimbro Staken and Jon Udell's blogs). Syncato is a system which allows a reader to perform XPath queries on an XML weblog, in order to aggregate information which the reader is interested in.
I don't see why XPath is any different to performing other kinds of searches on weblog data. XPath is "a language that allows you to easily perform searches against XML documents using a path-like string". If Syncato, the weblog authoring tool, produces XML data as its output - then what is the issue with searching on that data? Andrew suggests it will chew up valuable bandwidth or cpu cycles. That may be so - I'm not qualified to challenge that. But what I do know is that I want to have tools to search for and aggregate content that I'm interested in, damn the bandwidth. I want the power to aggregate content on my own terms. I don't just want to subscribe to content, I want to interrogate it too. Savvy?
And now, to end this post on a lighthearted note (and explain the silly title), here's my favourite quote from a fantastic movie I saw yesterday - Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl:
Mr. Gibbs: Then, on the fourth day, he roped himself a couple of sea turtles and made a raft.
Will Turner: He roped himself a couple of sea turtles.
Mr. Gibbs: Aye. Sea turtles.
Will Turner: What did he use for rope?
Jack Sparrow: [from beside them] Human hair.
[pause]
Jack Sparrow: From my back.
Jon Udell is getting very excited about a new weblog product called Syncato, which is described here:
"Syncato is a weblog system designed to extract the maximum potential from the content of your posts. All posts in Syncato are stored as XML within a native XML database and are searchable using XPath queries. This includes the ability to execute XPath via a URL from within your browser."
Its developer, Kimbro Staken, describes Syncato as an "XML fragment management system". Syncato could be the first microcontent weblog system, in that each item or chunk of content is described in XML - right down to the comments. Kimbro writes:
"Like everything in Syncato comments are stored as XML and are thus searchable via XPath. Each comment is stored in a separate file with a root tag of comment."
So I wonder then if Syncato could be the enabling technology for Microcontent Wiki, which I described previously like this:
"...one part of the Writeable Web is often overlooked: weblog comments. Often some of the best nuggets of content can be found buried in a comment attached to a weblog post. I've even coined a phrase for this: Microcontent Wiki, which is defined as: Weblog Post + Comments. It's microcontent because it's usually content based around a single theme or topic (defined by the weblog post). And it's like a Wiki because anyone can write a comment on a weblog, so it has a similar collaborative feel to a Wiki."
I went on to say that currently there are no suitable tools for tracking comments, or "conversations" as I've called them on my blogroll. Don Park suggested that we could use actual Wikis to aggregate conversations. That is a wonderful idea, but it will require a lot of development effort to set up. The latest posts by Jon Udell and Kimbro have me wondering whether Syncato can solve the problem of tracking conversations - as easily as we can track weblogs with RSS.
Syncato can aggregate "XML fragments", which includes comments on a weblog. So could I include in my blogroll several XPath queries to aggregate conversations I'm interested in? Instead of making an RSS feed out of a comments thread, which is what I originally suggested and which some people have already implemented on their blogs, I could run an XPath query from within my blogroll which would aggregate comments from that same thread. This process has the advantage of being driven by the weblog reader, rather than the writer. i.e. it's not up to the weblog writer to produce an RSS feed, the reader can simply run some XPath queries to effectively create their own feed. The power to aggregate shifts to the subscriber rather than the producer, which is where it should be in the Two-Way Web. Of course this means that producers have to write their posts in valid XML, but that is where Syncato comes in - it's a weblog authoring product that produces valid XML.
Further, because each comment is a unique chunk of XML, you could aggregate more than just a single conversation thread (that is attached to a single weblog post). Using XPath and associated XML technologies, you could pick up comments on a particular theme or topic from the whole weblog - or extended further, the whole blogosphere. How rich would conversations be then!
I'll be following Kimbro's new product and Jon's experiments with much interest. It's an exciting time for microcontent!
Forgive me, it's the end of the day and I don't want to write my usual lengthy blog post. So I thought I'd do the blogging equivalent of "piano pieces", which in this case is a collection of various links and quotes that have caught my eye recently:
Prelude No. 15 in D flat Op. 28 "Prior Art" (Ray Ozzie): "In 1993 or thereabouts, we saw the emergence of TCP/IP, HTML, HTTP, Mosaic and the Web. From our perspective, all of these were simplistic emulations of a tiny subset of what we'd been doing in Notes for years."
Etude No. 1 in A major op. 25 "Corporate Blogging" (Bill Seitz): "Focus on tools that maximize benefit to the team (not fuzzy enterprise Knowledge Management - the ConText is often too loose for [ReUse])"
Waltz No. 1 in A flat Op. 34 "I Keep Six Honest..." (Rudyard Kipling):
"I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who."
Mazurka No. 1 in E minor op. 41 "Email's special power" (Jon Udell): "Software that requires people to explicitly declare the formation of these groups, and to acknowledge their dissolution, is too blunt an instrument for such ephemeral social interaction."
Nocturne No. 2 in E flat op. 9 "Patterns and Sonnets" (Peter Lindberg): "We humans are built to create constrained universes for us to express ourselves within."
Impromptu No. 4 in C sharp op. 66 "Processing" (Paul Ford): "I wish that people would take a step back and look at everything we've done and "elegantize" the Web as a construct, define a set of core goals that web developers want to solve and create as small as possible a language, based on the smallest possible set of principles, that will help them meet those goals."
Mazurka No. 1 in B flat op. 7 "Weblog Design" ( Tom Coates): "...I spent an idle couple of hours thinking about what it meant to design a site for the weblog format - which was concentrated around putting long tracts of readable content on a page with almost no navigation at all, but instead quite a lot of ambient persistently useful peripheral information."
Fantasia in D minor op.119 "History" (Neal Stephenson): "When engineering types speak highly of some science fiction writer, usually it's not because that person predicted the future. Rather, it's because he or she put together disparate ideas into a coherent vision that could be used as a road map by the people who are actually deploying such a technology."
Etude No. 5 in B major op. 54 "Plug-ins" (Marc Canter): "It's 2003 for Christ Sakes! I like the CSS stuff I see, but there still is a real limit to the types of interactive interfaces available today on the web. So if we have to rely upon plug-ins - so be it. Let's just make sure (ar least) that what we do with it - rocks the house."
Waltz No. 10 in C Sharp Op. 67 "Destinations" (Don Park - in Seb's Comments): "To support topics, I think the concept of 'Destinations' should be introduced to blog tools. Wikis and multi-author sites can then be destinations. Ping sites could also become a destination of sort although only the 'ping' will arrive instead of the whole post."
Etude No. 12 in C minor op. 10 "Film" (Ingmar Bergman, pg 51 - Images): "I am in the grip of an uncontrollable curiosity. I note, I observe, I look everywhere; everything is unreal, fantastic, frightening, or ridiculous. I catch a speck of dust floating in the air; maybe it's the germ of a film - what does it matter? It doesn't matter, but I find it interesting, therefore I insist that it is a film."
ps this actually took more time to do than an original weblog post :-0 I guess there's a lesson in there somewhere...
Matt Webb blogged the Hypertext03 conference and the resulting notes are a good scan. Thank goodness for people like Matt who blog conferences, because those of us who live on the other side of the world don't get to go to these flash harry conferences *sulk*. Matt's notes on Ted Nelson's speech were especially interesting. Ted Nelson is a legend in the Web world - he invented hypertext in the 1960's and his Xanadu project was an inspiration for the World Wide Web. But Ted Nelson is, and always has been, waaay ahead of his time. His ideas and concepts are mind-blowing. This is from Ted Nelson's website:
"Today's one-way hypertext - the World Wide Web - is far too shallow. The Xanadu project foresaw world-wide hypertext and has always endeavored to create a much deeper system. The Web, however, took over with a very shallow structure. Our simple, but very different structure - for details see "The Xanadu Model" - allows -
- UNBREAKABLE LINKS.
- COPYRIGHT SIMPLIFICATION AND SOFTENING.
- ORIGIN CONNECTION.
- TWO-WAY LINKS.
- SIDE-SIDE INTERCOMPARISON.
- DEEP VERSION MANAGEMENT.
- INCREMENTAL PUBLISHING.
How can this be? Very simple, but very different."
If this is "simple", then it's a definition of "simple" from a parallel universe :-) But on the other hand some of these concepts have been kicking around the blogosphere recently. For example, two-way links... this from Matt's notes:
"the web lacks:
- 2 way links
- link overlays that anyone can create
the web is just the file system online. directories with one-way jumplinks"
Two-way links in the blog world means comments, trackback, referrers, Technorati - all the things that provide information on who is linking to you or commenting on you. Nelson defines two-way links as: "anyone may publish connected comments to any page". So it's about connections, not just one-way via an HTML a href, but back and forth across the Web. Two-way links are about tracking conversations, following trails of information (to paraphrase Vannevar Bush). The Disenchanted website has an interesting article on this, called Ghosts of Xanadu:
"Cheap and democratic as it was, Berners-Lee's Web didn't have half the features Xanadu promised to, and two-way linking was one of them. Without a central server it couldn't be enforced, and to make authorship of pages as simple as possible - given the state of the art at the time - it had to be left out along with automatic attribution, micropayments, copyright management, unbreakable links, and most of Nelson's other ideas. But ten years later, a ghost of Xanadu is being recreated in the same style as the Web itself: quick, dirty, and cheap. Like Xanadu, it could have interesting implications for the way we structure knowledge."
By "quick, dirty, and cheap" Disenchanted may be referring to the weblog phenomonem, where tools such as Trackback, Technorati and Topic Exchange (amongst many others) are being bootstrapped into existence. All these tools, in the sum of the parts, are fulfilling Ted Nelson's vision of two-way links. Of course there's much more to Xanadu than two-way links. But by bootstrapping the current Web piece-by-piece, instead of trying to develop a grand mind-blowing concept like Xanadu, maybe that's the way to fulfil Ted Nelson's vision - even if it's not the exact system he has in mind.
On a less serious note than my previous post, it also occured to me that bloggers are like rock n roll bands. The best bands explore a different theme each album, just like the best bloggers (imho) write on an ever-changing series of themes. My favourite band The Velvet Underground released 4 studio albums that were each different in style and themes. Likewise in the tech blogging world, Don Park has recently written an album full of posts about Wikis, Dave Winer is in the midst of recording his thoughts on political blogs, Jon Udell has written a variety of classics on topics such as Universal Canvas. There are even the blogging equivalent of Unplugged albums - check out Mark Pilgrim's These Days.
Currently I'm writing on topics such as microcontent and the two-way web. Perhaps I'll start writing weblog "albums" - there'll be about 10 posts per album and each album will have a different unifying theme. For example: literary blogging is a theme I'm keen to explore. Or I could write a series of posts on the Semantic Web. I've already written a single post (a "song") about the SemWeb, so I could extend that into a whole RDF phase.
Now I just need to get my album covers sorted. Unfortunately with blogging that means getting stuck into CSS and XHTML :-)
ps this post was partly inspired by a radio interview I heard recently on Radio Active, a Wellington student radio station. The interview was with New Zealand musician Scott Mannion, who goes by the recording name The Tokey Tones. Scott said that he likes to come up with an idea for an album theme first, then record it using whatever musicians best fit the theme, and lastly get a band together to promote the album on tour. So he doesn't have a band in the traditional sense, he is part of a 'community of musicians'. For example members of The Brunettes helped him record his latest albums. The Brunettes, fyi, are another New Zealand band and they sound like a cross between The Velvet Underground and bubblegum pop (literally, the lead male singer has got the Lou Reed thing going on in both voice and guitar). They're fantastic and unique...if you're looking for some original kiwi music to listen to, check it out.
