Blogging is a 21st century art form and right now it is the most vibrant creative outlet in society. Ideas flow like water in the blogosphere and Weblogs.com ticks over with updated posts every few seconds. Anyone can publish a weblog and that's partly what makes it so vibrant. But also, there is a pioneering energy about blogging - we're not sure what we're doing but we know it is significant. These thoughts occured to me as I was reading an essay by the Indian writer V.S.Naipaul, called 'Reading And Writing: A Personal Account'. In it Naipaul wrote that the novel as an art form was at its peak in the 19th century, when it was invented:
"For sixty or seventy years in the nineteenth century the novel in Europe, developing very fast in the hands of a relay of masters, became an extraordinary tool. It did what no other literary form - essay, poem, drama, history - could do. It gave industrial or industrializing or modern society a very clear idea of itself. It showed with immediacy what hadn't been shown before; and it altered vision. Certain things in the form could be modified or played with later, but the pattern of the modern novel had been set, and its program laid out.
All of us who have come after have been derivative. We can never be the first again[....]They are the first; they didn't know it when they began, but then they do know, and they are full of excitement at the discovery. That excitement comes over to us, and there is an unrepeatable energy in the writing."
Naipaul went on to say that there is "an air of discovery" about 19th century novel writing, that disappeared when the "originators" burned themselves out. In the 20th century, cinema was the new "universal art" according to Naipaul. I'd like to go a step further and state here that blogging is the 21st century's universal art. From my PC in New Zealand, I feel as if I discover a new idea every day reading weblogs. And, to paraphrase The Carpenters, weblogging has only just begun!
Blogging is on the cusp of becoming mainstream, like the novel did during the 19th century. Witness what is happening within US politics. One of the leading Presidential candidates, Howard Dean, has tapped into blogging as a way to garner votes. Dave Winer and Lawrence Lessig amongst others are exploring this significant new path for blogging.
Yes my fellow bloggers, it's an exciting era to live in. Aren't you glad you're an Originator? ;-)
As per my previous post, I've updated my blogroll to include topics and conversations. I just manually updated my blogroll OPML file, but I envisage a web frontend for this in future - kinda like Phil Pearson's web form for his Feed Combiner.
A bit more about the two new sections in my blogroll. The Topics section is made up of links to K-Collector and Topic Exchange pages. There's potential for some automation here - e.g. the 5 latest posts for each topic could be automatically fetched and added to your blogroll. This is pretty much what Phil's Feed Combiner does.
The Conversations part of the blogroll is the difficult child right now (by conversations, I mean comments on a weblog post). There's currently no easy way to relate comments on a similar theme, but on different blogrolls, together. So we have to rely on popular bloggers to "host" our blogging conversations. For example, suppose Mark Pilgrim and I both write about the same thing on our respective weblogs. Who do you think is going to attract the most comments? Of course it'd be Mark, so naturally the party would be at his place. Now if we can implement Don Park's vision of a Wiki for every conversation, then we'd have independent places to gather for our "conversations". So anyway, currently my blogroll just links to comments attached to weblogs - which looks inelegant when you click on the link, as it opens up in a grey monotone window with little context about the original post. So bring on those Wikis :-)
Final thought for the night (it's nearly midnight now in NZ)...this from Tom Coates. It's a nice summary of the value of weblog conversations:
"And this is the big leap forward - this is where the value of weblogs lies in the newly amateurised world. This flexibility of publishing creates a fluid and living form of self-representation, the 'homepage (as a place)' has become the 'weblog (as a person)' that can articulate a voice. And when there are a multiplicity of voices in space, then the possibility arises of conversations. And where there is conversation there is the sharing of information."
Don also mentioned auto-population of blogrolls, which is something that Phil Pearson has been experimenting with and I've been commenting on. My view is that the "blogroll" can be extended to incorporate not only links to weblogs (people), but links to topics and conversations (weblog comments). Later on you could add other chunks of microcontent too - e.g. reviews, Wiki threads.
Blogrolls are usually files in an opml format and they are made up of links to other weblogs - i.e. links to people. Blogrolls are usually attached to a weblog's menu, along with other links, and they help foster a sense of community amongst bloggers. This is fine and noble, but I also want to link to topics that interest me and I want to track conversations. That's what the Two-Way Web is all about after all - publishing and subscribing. So why not extend the blogroll so that it is not just a compilation of links to people, but links to topics and conversations too.
Phil Pearson got it spot on when he said "a blogroll is a list of lists of links". The easy part is subscribing to people and topics. These are mostly static links, so you could add them manually to your blogroll.opml file. The hard part is adding conversations to your blogroll, because this is dynamic - conversations have a short shelf-life and eventually die out. And new conversations potentially pop up whenever a blogger posts a new weblog entry. Because conversations constantly change, you want to be able to add (and delete) them from your blogroll easily and preferably at the click of a button.
If the conversation is on a Wiki, then it would be good to be able to "subscribe" to that conversation from within the Wiki - and your blogroll automatically updates. Or alternatively, there could be a web frontend for your blogroll that allows you to easily add the Wiki page to your blogroll.
Don Park has come up with some promising ideas on how to link weblogs with wikis. One of his ideas is for weblog comments to be cross-posted to Wiki pages, via some scripting that "can create or find" a matching Wiki page for each comment. For this to work, comments on a weblog post will need to be assigned a theme or topic identifier - then matched up with an existing Wiki page, or if no such page exists then one will be created on-the-fly. I especially like this comment from Don, as it resonates with my own Microcontent Wiki article:
"One great benefit is that comments are no longer second class information: isolated, unindexed, and often overlooked."
My article stated that comments on a weblog post are like a "Microcontent Wiki": it's essentially a conversation based on the topic of the weblog post and anyone can participate. Don's idea is to actually use Wiki technology to track weblog comments - that is, to track weblog conversations. If it can be done, it's a revolutionary idea. The strengths of wikis are that there is one page per conversation (usually on one theme or topic), anyone can publish to them, and conversations can cross-link each other. The strengths of weblogs are that they allow people to own their own publishing space, entries are generally organised chronologically, and they are more flexible - you can expand on topics and organise them how you like. With weblogs, you're master of your domain. However weblogs so far have not been good at organising content by topic, or tracking conversations. Which is of course where Wikis excel. So why not use the strengths of Wikis to enhance the weblogging experience! I think Don is onto something here.
I've been wondering whether to get myself a FOAF file. FOAF stands for "friend of a friend" and it is a method of publishing personal information about yourself in a machine-readable format. Or as the FOAF Wiki puts it:
"If you're familiar with 'blogging and providing RSS syndication of the content of your 'blog, then one way to view FOAF is as syndicating yourself."
I have to admit I'm still not sure about publishing personal stuff on the Web. I think this is partly a kiwi thing. Generally speaking New Zealanders are more reserved than, say, Americans. But I'm also concerned about the future potential of FOAF being hit on by marketeers and spammers, in the way that email is now. On the other hand I don't want to be an "anonymous coward", this weblog is my vehicle for publishing to the world so the world needs to know a little bit about me. Hmmm, still thinking about this one...
Dave Winer links to an essay he wrote 4 years ago about decentralized syndication:
"In our [UserLand's] system, each story has a *single* location, the site where it originated. We think this is the way the web was meant to work. Stories can live and grow while new information is obtained. Comments from readers can add new facts and ideas and link to other related stories."
(nb: emphasis mine)
Stories can live and grow...that is a wonderful image. I experienced this first hand over the past few days with my Microcontent Wiki story. First Don Park linked to it, then Marc Canter picked it up. Before I knew it the story was being linked to and commented on by others. Surprising discoveries came of this. For example when I read SÈbastien Paquet's post, I discovered in his comments that Andrew Chen has already developed a "Subscribe to these Comments" feature using RSS. Then I read Phil Pearson's post, which expands on the technical issues of notification and polling (Georg Bauer and Marc joined the party in the comments). Then I found a link from BlogStreet creator Rajesh Jain. Then I read Bill Seitz's post and noticed for the first time his amazing weblog/wiki system (half weblog, half wiki - it's like the blogging equivalent of the movie classic The Fly!).
So my story Microcontent Wiki did indeed grow and the idea of it is still floating around in cyberspace. It's almost organic and the beautiful thing (to me) is that everyone who linked to or commented on my story brought something new to the idea. Plus, even better, it led me to discover some interesting new people to add to my RSS Aggregator and blogroll! So by writing something and being lucky enough to be read by a small part of the blogosphere, I ended up reading stuff by people I hadn't come across before, who will further stimulate me to write more stuff. Now that's the Read/Write Web folks!
But back to Dave's 4-year old essay. Most of it is about generating "micro-payments" (btw whatever happened to that idea? Maybe it's hibernating...). An interesting point in Dave's essay, especially in the context of 2003 and the resurgence of microcontent, is the notion that "stories" have a single location. This is an important facet of the Microcontent Wiki concept, which bears repeating: content is always going to be tightly coupled to location and so the key is to make it easy to subscribe to the locations that interest you. It's the combining and inter-linking of all these 'location points' that makes up the Web. To paraphrase what Dave said 4 years ago, we have to "embrace the distributed nature of the web".
On the subject of the distributed Web, Phil Wolff has a nice post today about Usenet being a precursor to weblogs:
"Bloggers have conversations too. I post on my blog, you post on yours, and so on. Trackback helps follow these since they are in multiple places. Sometimes a post is followed in a comment thread."
I have to say that trackback is an incomplete solution right now, as not all links to your posts will show up. For example only 3 trackbacks were recorded in my previous post, but I discovered many more via Technorati, referral logs and (best of all) serendipity.
However you discover links and comments on your weblog posts, it is thrilling to be involved in Web conversations. An idea is organic and once the initial seed is sown - on a weblog, a Wiki, a comment, etc - it gets blown into the wind and out into the ether... An idea takes on a life of its own, in this interconnected organism we call the Web.
p.s. no ideas were harmed in the creation of this weblog post (possibly some metaphors were bruised).
