I've now officially entered NaNoWriMo, which is an annual challenge to write a 50,000 word novel over 30 days. It kicks off on 1 November, which is one day away for me. I checked into the official NaNoWriMo website tonight and I was surprised to see that 14 other people from Wellington in New Zealand are doing this. I suspect the majority are students, don't ask me why.
As for my novel, I'm narrowing down a list of themes. It's looking like it'll be in the sci-fi genre. One of the themes may be the Two-Way Web, so it's not completely outside the rhelm of what my weblog is about. But writing a novel will give me more scope to explore.
I will use my weblog to track my progress over the month of November. At least one person is wondering whether I can do it (actually make that 2 people, as *I'm* wondering too!). I feel a bit like David Blaine and his "44-day feat of endurance". Blaine recently spent 44 days starving himself in a plexiglass box suspended over the River Thames. Hmmm, check out this quote from Blaine's website on Day 24:
"David Blaine has uttered relatively few words since he entered his Perspex home. But the illusionist has been demonstrating a surprising literary tendency in the things he does say."
Well I hope I don't have to starve myself to get literary inspiration!
I'm one of those people that regularly says: "One day, I'm going to write a novel." Well now may be my chance. NaNoWriMo is a an annual challenge to write a novel in 30 days, over the month of November. The novel must be at least 50,000 words, which is about 175 pages. I discovered this intriguing contest tonight, via Erik Benson. Erik entered last year and ended up publishing the result, a novel called Man Versus Himself, on Amazon.
OK here are my excuses:
1. I only found out about it tonight, after 10pm, which gives me precisely 3 days to prepare and come up with a plot and characters.
2. I have a full-time job and a two-year old daughter to care for in the evenings (and tonight she didn't go to sleep until after 10pm).
3. I have no idea whether I'm capable of writing a novel.
4. 50,000 words is an awful lot of words. That's 1,700 words per day.
5. It sounds slightly less scary to put it into pages: 175 pages in 30 days, or 6 pages per day. Um, no, that's just as scary!
OK, so those are my excuses. What about my motivations? How about:
1. I was an English Lit major. Nuff said.
2. The NaNoWriMo contest values word-count over artistic merit. What matters is quantity (50,000 words of it), not quality. So that takes some of the pressure off.
3. It will be an interesting process to go through and document here on my weblog.
4. I have 3 days to prepare, I have a full-time job and a baby daughter to care for. I don't have time for this. What about my weblog writing and my web developing? What about the garden? Summer is nearly here in New Zealand, it'll be too hot to write. The World Cup rugby finals are on in November!! ...hmm, you know this is crazy enough it might just work.
I posted this on my linkblog, but I feel like publishing it here too. I heard some of Rautavaara's Symphony Number 7 (Angel of Light) a few weeks ago, for the first time, and I was quite taken by the music. It reminded me of The Matrix. So anyway tonight I googled Rautavaara and discovered a) he's a Finnish composer, and b) I like the way he thinks... I must buy a CD of his. I'm also currently enamoured with a British rock band called Muse - their song "Apocalypse Please" blows me away. It's like Bowie's "Man who sold the world" but even more harmonically eerie. Anyway, here's that Rautavaara quote that I like:
"Rautavaara is a mystic who considers that his compositions already exist in 'another reality'. His job is to bring a composition into the world in one piece. "I firmly believe that compositions have a will of their own, though some people smile at the concept," he says."
I judge the quality of a weblog by its IDEAS, but it seems some people equate quality with popularity. Is the 'culture of celebrity' that afflicts Western movies, television and radio creeping in to weblogs as well?
These thoughts were prompted by the recent weblog discussion on power laws and how they relate to weblogs. Actually the topic of discussion was whether your weblog operates in broadcasting mode, or conversation mode. The general consensus is that A-List bloggers (i.e. the most popular bloggers) are broadcasters, while the majority of us are in conversation mode. I accept the reason for this is that A-List bloggers in general are not able to converse with their many readers. And conversely, because C-List bloggers (my term for the rest of us) have relatively few readers, we're much more able to participate in conversations with our readers. Comments by Bill Seitz and Tom Coates helped me to realise that these are trends and not necessarily applicable to every person. I'm a big fan of individualism, but I don't mind tipping my hat to a generalisation every now and then - for the common good ;-)
Nevertheless this whole conversation about 'broadcasting mode vs conversation mode' has made me uncomfortable. The reason is that at a deep level I object to the notion of classifying something based on how popular it is. Which brings me back to the A-List. Power laws as they relate to weblogs are basically a Popularity Index. On the Web, popularity is measured by how many links a website receives. If you are at the head of a weblog power law, it means you have lots of incoming links and are therefore very popular - you're on the A-List. It's just like the movies. Bruce Willis is an A-List actor, because many people buy tickets to his movies (incoming links?) and therefore he is very popular. But consider this: do you think that all Bruce Willis movies are A-grade material? Would you compare Armageddon with Citizen Kane? Now consider this: just because a person is an A-List blogger, does it necessarily mean that person produces A-grade content?
Don't get me wrong, a lot of times A-List bloggers do produce A-grade content. There was an excellent comment made on David Weinberger's weblog, by Chris (responding to a comment by me):
"You can't always say that the "A-List" isn't quality, often it is. Why? Because they're giving people what they want and have been for a while - they have the experience."
I agree. All I'm saying is that the A-List doesn't necessarily produce quality content. Content should always be judged on its own merits. I strongly believe that ultimately it's ideas you should judge and not the person. This is not a theory I've just suddenly come up with - it's something I've blogged consistently about. For example, Clay Shirky linked to me back in July when I wrote that weblogs should be topic-first, not author-first.
Topics are a good way to classify ideas, which is why I'm a big fan of tools such as k-collector and Topic Exchange. Those tools democratize weblogging - because they give readers the opportunity to discover new voices who have written on topics of interest to them. And they give writers an opportunity to sit right alongside the "A-List", if they happen to have written something on the same topic.
My point is this: don't judge the quality of a weblog on how popular it is. Read deeper and judge the ideas that have been expressed. Do you judge the quality of a movie on whether it has an A-List actor in it? If so, you are not exercising your mind.
Judge the quality of a weblog on the value of its ideas.
The Two-Way Web is a very simple concept. It's all about normal everyday people having a publishing platform on the Web. Sounds reasonable to me, but a thread on Many-to-Many this week has complicated the issue. Here's my summary, based on how I first discovered and then tracked the thread (the process somehow seems important here):
1. In my daily viewing of Scripting News, I came upon Dave Winer's comment on David Weinberger's weblog post about a Clay Shirky PopTech presentation. This is the sentence that I believe started the thread:
"Even though blogs are two-way, the broadcast pattern has re-emerged. "The broadcast pattern arises out of the social wiring of large groups of people." "
The context of this quote is that Shirky believes that A-List bloggers operate in "broadcast" mode, because they cannot interact with their audience. Dave Winer said in response:
"Clay's still giving the power-law rap. His thesis is that weblogs are just like television all over again. That makes Luddites feel comfortable, until you see that's not what's actually going on. My thesis: it doesn't matter if only 25 people read your blog, or even 2.5 people, if they're the right 2.5 people."
I agree with Dave Winer, weblogs are not just a broadcasting medium restricted to a privileged few. That's the whole point of weblogs - they allow anybody to broadcast to the Web. It's the Two-Way Web's defining principle.
The next chapter in this thread was as follows...
2. David Weinberger posted an article saying that the lines between email and weblogs will blur. He also drew a distinction between "big, high-traffic blogs" and the rest of us - implying that this was due to the broadcasting mode that A List bloggers operate in.
3. Liz Lawley posted a response to David's article, saying that "there's a big difference between the blogs at the top of that power law curve, the ones in the middle, and the ones at the tail." In a comment, I asked what exactly this difference was. Liz replied:
"...when you're at the top of the "power law curve," you're in broadcast mode. When you're at the tail end, you're in private diary mode. But in the middle, thatís where the interlinking and dialog and community-forming are happening. Those are very different modes of communication.
4. Clay Shirky then weighed in with a post on Many-to-Many. Once again the distinction between the "head and tail of the power law distribution" was mentioned. I found the following words, from an earlier essay by Shirky, very helpful in understanding the "broadcasting" concept he was pushing:
"At the head will be webloggers who join the mainstream media (a phrase which seems to mean "media we've gotten used to.") The transformation here is simple - as a blogger's audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can't link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can't answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site. The result of these pressures is that she becomes a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it.
Meanwhile, the long tail of weblogs with few readers will become conversational."
5. It was at this point that I weighed in with my own post, where I wrote that I am also a broadcaster - even though I am not an A List blogger. I disagree with Clay that a weblog, just because it has few readers, is necessarily "conversational".
6. Seb Paquet was the next Many-to-Many author to write on this topic and he seemed to support my viewpoint, drawing a comparison with 19th-century pamphleteers. That turned out to be an interesting link. Lisa L. Spangenberg described 19th-century pamplets like this:
"People, all kinds of people, read and wrote them. Sure, there were "cranks," but the vast majority of authors were quite serious, and were perceived that way."
OK, so maybe I'm a crank :-) But if I'm even a little bit like Milton and Thoreau then I'm not complaining!
7. Liz then posted a follow-up, talking about her "frustration with the sense that on some level, people are equating large audience with quality or success".
Um, that's not what I was saying... my frustration is that people are trying to define different "modes" of weblogging, based on audience alone. Which is missing the whole point IMHO. Weblogging is about dissemination of ideas. Audience, or lack thereof, is irrelevant. It's all about the ideas.
8. Clay Shirky posted another article on this topic today. In it he makes the point again that popular bloggers can't interact with their audience, because there are just too many readers. This I agree with. But then Shirky says:
"Most writers, however, have very few readers, and the pattern of those weblogs is online diary."
He makes a distinction between a "publishing pattern" and a "conversational pattern". He seems to be saying that size of audience has a big effect on which "pattern" bloggers fall into.
So after following this thread through all its twists and turns, I don't think I'm much the wiser. I still think I'm following a broadcasting mode, not an "online diary" one, despite having "few readers". I'm broadcasting my ideas on the Web, right? But my opinion seems to be a minority one...maybe I am a crank :-)
My point in summary: the Two-Way Web is about allowing people to publish on the Web and we can choose to publish any way we want. Most people may well be writing an "online diary". But some of us are using this medium as a broadcasting platform. We're media too, the only difference is we're not mainstream.
David Weinberger recently wrote a weblog post entitled When blogs get really popular. In it he states that the line between blogging and email will become blurred. He says:
"The word "blog" will expand to cover any linkable posting (a place) where a person gets to speak her mind more than once. If it's more permanent than IM, it'll be a blog."
It was when reading Liz Lawley's Many-to-Many post (or rather her reply to my comment) that it suddenly hit me what David Weinberger was getting at: Blogging will become a communication medium, rather than a publishing one. In my comments, I huffed and puffed a bit about this because weblogging to me is primarily a personal publishing medium. Sure the collaboration aspects of blogging appeal to me, but the thing that got me blogging in the first place was a desire to write down and publish my ideas.
The difficulty I had with Liz's argument was that I didn't grok why A-List bloggers are different from the rest of us (who I refer to as C-List bloggers!). But Liz explained that the disparity is due to the different modes of communication:
"The big difference, to me, is that when you're at the top of the "power law curve," you're in broadcast mode. When you're at the tail end, you're in private diary mode. But in the middle, that's where the interlinking and dialog and community-forming are happening. Those are very different modes of communication."
Clay Shirky later posted a response to Liz, further clarifying the different modes of weblogging. He wrote that popular bloggers in affect "join the mainstream media". They become broadcasters of information, because they can't possibly link to or participate in conversations with all of their readers. Meanwhile the vast majority of weblogs, "the long tail of weblogs with few readers", will operate in conversational mode. I largely agree with this 'modality' theory...except one thing still bothers me. I still think of myself as a publisher, albeit an amateur one.
You see, I don't use blogging as a communication tool like email. I use it to publish essays and writing, that otherwise I would not be able to release to the world. OK I am in a minority, because most people have no desire to write or publish in this manner. Most people do want to communicate and collaborate, just like David and Clay's theories say they do. But still, I don't like to have my weblogging experience typecast as "conversational". To me blogging is more than that...
As a way to try and explain this, let me make a connection between blogging and radio broadcasting. The "mainstream" radio stations are the ones that most people listen to and so can be compared to A-List bloggers, whom most people read. I won't get into the argument that most mainstream radio stations are stale and boring, because their music programming panders to advertising. That is, the content (the music) is determined not by artistic merit but by what will appeal to a particular "demographic" audience. No I won't get into that argument - but God help us if A-List bloggers ever get down to that level of broadcasting!
But I think there is a comparison between some C-List bloggers and student radio stations, or pirate radio stations. We have a limited audience, perhaps even no audience. But we're broadcasting because we believe that our ideas have some inherent value. Blogging doesn't necessarily need to be about communication or collaboration, although those are noble sentiments and they are a corollary of blogging. Blogging to me is about publishing ideas. Never mind if few people read them - my ideas are out there. My ART, released to the ether, each piece a part of me forever allocated to a place on the Web...
Thanks to Peter Lindberg, for pointing me and others to a couple of Marshall McLuhan articles. But before I talk about those, here's an overview of Marshall McLuhan from the Wikipedia:
"Famous for coining the phrases "The medium is the message" and "the global village," McLuhan was one of the early purveyors of the sound bite. He asserted that each different medium affects the individual and society in distinct and pervasive ways, further classifying some media as "hot" - media which engaged one's senses in a high intensity, exclusive way, such as typography, radio, and film - and "cool" - media which were of lower resolution or intensity, and therefore required more interaction from the viewer, such as the telephone and the television. While many of his pronouncements and theories have been considered impenetrable, and by some absurd, McLuhan's central message that to understand today's world, one must actively study the effects of media, remains ever more true in the electronic age."
In the first article Peter linked to, Melanie Goux discovers why Marshall McLuhan's book was entitled The Medium is the Massage (rather than Message):
"Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter, it had on the cover "Massage" as it still does. The title should have read "The Medium is the Message" but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!"
The second article was a McLuhan interview from 1969 by Playboy Magazine, which sheds some light onto why McLuhan was so receptive to the above typo. McLuhan mentions the message/massage thing here:
"...because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage -- that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio."
If it's true that the title was a mistake, then Marshall McLuhan proved he was adept at running with the mistake and massaging it into a new idea. He could pick up words, load them into his 'ideas gun' and blow peoples minds. Further, the memes ricocheted into the lexicon of society.
McLuhan himself describes his thought processes like this:
"I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me. My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks."
This 'mapping of new terrain' is exactly what we're doing in the 21st Century with the Web. Whatever your interests, you can find and explore them on the Web. It literally is a Web of Ideas, which we're creating as we go. This reminds me of David Weinberger's book Small Pieces Loosely Joined, which I've just finished reading. Here is one nice quote from that book (pg 55):
"The Web place is defined by interest the way the real world is defined by the accidents of geography. Interest on the Web is, like the Web space itself, explosive, out-bound, digressive. The Web space is the opposite of a container."
It's a shame McLuhan wasn't around to see the World Wide Web - I wonder what such an original and probing mind would have made of it?
Not all of McLuhan's ideas have proven prescient and he is very hard to read sometimes. I remember trying to read The Medium is the Massage when I was at Varsity in the early 90's. I don't think I finished it then, so I must pick it up again. Not so much for the specifics of his ideas, for they are hit and miss. For example, McLuhan gave great wraps to television as an interactive "cool" medium:
"We could program five hours less of TV in Italy to promote the reading of newspapers during an election, or lay on an additional 25 hours of TV in Venezuela to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio the preceding month. By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate, just as we are beginning to learn how to maintain equilibrium among the world's competing economies."
Of course history had other ideas - television turned out to be a passive one-way entertainment form. Or maybe it did control our emotions like McLuhan predicted, only not in a good way. But either way, it's not McLuhan's specific predictions that will endure. It's his observations about technology being an extension of our bodies that will continue to inspire us. McLuhan died a decade before the birth of the Web in the early 90's, and more than 20 years before the two-way Web emerged in the early 21st century. But his spirit guides us as we, his technological children, explore this exciting new world...
I've been threatening to write an article about XHTML for a while now and so here goes. I'll also talk about CSS and table-less web designs, because in the Web world right now XHTML and CSS are as hot a couple as Ashton and Demi (who may've broken up now, but I couldn't think of another celebrity couple).
Recently I converted my Radio Userland weblog to a CSS table-less design. That is, the design you are looking at right now does not use tables for its layout and all the style is entirely defined using CSS (cascading style sheets). I used a CSS design from the CSS Zen Garden, one by Michael Landis (who kindly gave me permission to use it). I don't have a lot of experience designing CSS, so I thought it would be best to start with an existing design by someone who's already mastered the art of CSS. That way I can learn by doing, which I discovered long ago is the best way to upskill on the Web. At the same time, to give my CSS design the best chance of success, I decided to make my site XHTML compliant.
XHTML is basically a combination of HTML and XML. It is a bridge between two worlds - the semantic expressiveness of XML and the hypertext standard of HTML. So what are the main differences between XHTML and its predecessor HTML 4? As defined by W3Schools:
- XHTML elements must be properly nested
- XHTML documents must be well-formed
- Tag names must be in lowercase
- All XHTML elements must be closed
In a word, XHTML is a lot fussier than HTML. The reason for this is that XML requires a strict adherance to syntax rules, so that there is no ambiguity for computers. Machines can't handle ambiguity, but humans (and most web browsers) can. The upshot of this is that XHTML, because the syntax requirements are tougher than with HTML, requires a lot more work and effort to write. Even writing this post will be extra work for me, because I'll need to run it through HTML Tidy to fix up all the HTML errors the Radio Userland WYSIWYG editor produces.
So if it's more work, you may be wondering why bother with XHTML? After all, web browsers today still use HTML 4. So it's not as if you have to use XHTML in order to publish on the Web. The answer is all about future compatibility. By using XHTML, you are pretty much assured that your designs will work not just today - but in a few years time too. Why? Crudely put, it's because XML is here to stay whereas HTML 4 is on the way out.
One of the most entertaining arguments for XHTML is this Jeremy Keith essay, which uses The Matrix as its inspiration:
"Web development is a war and we are soldiers, writing hacks and workarounds to make designs look right in buggy older browsers.
What if tomorrow the war could be over? What if we could build sites that won't fall apart in future browser releases? Isn't that worth fighting for? Isn't that worth developing for?"
Ha ha, so you have a choice - the red pill or the blue pill?
Cristian Vidmar ranted recently against table-less CSS designs. He's just released a nice looking table-based theme for Radio Userland. Cristian's point, re-iterated today, is that CSS designs don't necessarily need to exclude tables. If the layout will be complex and/or graphical, then Cristian reckons it's better to style your site using CSS and tables. This is a fair argument - for practical purposes tables are very handy and are less work to implement than CSS positioning. However the main argument against tables for layout is that tables don't convey any semantic information about the structure of the site. Tables are a presentation device, whereas using DIV tags in CSS for layout not only takes care of presentation but additionally conveys information about the structure of the data. A List Apart explains this quite well:
"DIVs imply a logical, or structural grouping. Even when they are nested they remain structural markup...However, TABLEs imply a relationship between column and/or row headers, and the data in the TABLE cells. When we use them for layout, we lose the structural semantics of a TABLE. And we are back to using HTML for layout. Nesting TABLEs only compounds the problem."
I don't deny though that CSS div tags are a lot harder to implement for layout purposes than HTML tables. You'll need to bury your head in a good CSS book by a true master such as Eric Meyer in order to understand CSS positioning. So in terms of simplicity and amount of effort required, table designs still reign supreme. However, that is the short term.
In the medium term, what about maintenance of the design? When you need to update it, you'll need to meddle with tables. I know from experience that having to fuss around with a bunch of table cells in order to re-jig a design layout, is more hassle than simply modifying a couple of lines in a CSS file. Personally I also find CSS div tags a lot easier on the eye than a great jumble of HTML table, TR and TD tags.
And in the long term, CSS table-less designs make sense because they convey semantic information about the structure of your site. I don't think we fully understand yet how important semantics will be in 5-10 years time on the Web. But we do know that our web sites will be deployed on a number of devices or appliances - big and small. Having a semantically-structured design allows your site to be rendered more easily in any type of device, because div tags can convey a logical order that table cells can't.
I don't claim to be an expert on XHTML and CSS - people like Zeldman and Mark Pilgrim know much more than me about these things. But I'm a curious type and I like to experiment with new web technologies. Hence my gung-ho implementation of CSS and XHTML into my Radio Userland weblog. Incidentally, I didn't find many other people who have table-less CSS Radio designs. Joe Gregorio was the only one I found with a CSS design - does anyone know of any others? In my blogging neighbourhood, I noticed Danny Ayers has recently done a CSS design but he doesn't use Radio. I'll gladly write up some notes about my experiences if there's any demand for it from Radio users. My next step will be to design my own original CSS design - and yes I'll be using a table-less design again. I probably won't tackle this for a while, but I'm always looking to the future ;-)
I read with interest Matt Haughey's essay Blogging for Dollars, where he relates his experiences running Google's Adsense adverts on his TiVo-focused weblog, PVRblog. Matt is making a pretty penny running the Google ads on his TiVo blog and one of the main reasons why is that it is focused on a single topic. He advises:
"In order to have any remote chance of success gaining an interested audience and getting good on-topic ads showing up, pick a narrow topic you are passionate about and run with it."
I'm not that concerned with the controversy surrounding the terms and conditions of Google Adsense, as that has been covered by many others. What interests me is blogging on a narrowly-defined topic, which if it's one that attracts plenty of e-commerce action (like TiVo) could even make a buck.
But it's not a case of "there's gold in them thar blogs", like in the Dot Com days. The Google ads won't make you a paper millionaire and they won't lead to an IPO, but if you're fortunate you may get a comfy chair like Matt did. So just to get that straight, I'm not talking about anything that starts with "e-".
One person that has been pushing the envelope with topic-focused blogging is Elwyn Jenkins. In his case, it is also commercial as he runs a business based on his blog Microdoc News. The topic of his blog is nano-publishing:
"Nano Publishing is a tiny web-based operation that publishes online as its primary focus and usually runs a weblog as a core part of its primary income earning activity."
So Elwyn Jenkins is making money by blogging about how to make money by blogging. Niiice! But he succeeds because his content is (usually) interesting and informative. He does however employ some tricks of the trade in order to get people to read his blog, and hence make his money. These could be construed as cynical.
For example I am subscribed to Microdoc News in my RSS Aggregator, but when I see a new article that I want to read I have to click on a link that opens up Microdoc News in my web browser. Most blogs I subscribe to let me read the entire article in my RSS Aggregator, which is how I prefer it. I should add that some other blogs do it too - in fact Movable Type calls it a feature, making you click for the whole story. And there is another reason - web designers like Zeldman and Asterisk actually want people to click out of their RSS Aggregators to view their beautifully designed websites. Which is fine, because I enjoy viewing well-designed websites. But I believe Elwyn Jenkins makes people click out of their RSS Aggregators because it makes people visit his website, which earns him advertising cash.
There are other tricks too. Microdoc News is styled as an "online magazine", but it's just run by one bloke. It's amazing how many times I see people on the Web refer to Microdoc News as a "they" instead of a "he". Microdoc promotes itself as an authority on blogging and it runs a blog portal, under a different domain name. Microdoc is also almost obsessively focused on Google, which allows him to feed off of Google's high profile and success. It reminds me those birds that travel around on the back of large animals like rhinos, on the African plains. Oxpeckers, I think they're called. Google would be the rhino and Microdoc the oxpecker.
Now I don't mean any of this in a rude way, I greatly admire Microdoc News and have had it in my blogroll ever since my own weblog started. Microdoc News is one of the sites that inspires me and its content is always worth a peek. But it's also a good example of how weblog advertising is subtlely affecting the reader's experience, because of all the little tricks that Microdoc employs to entice people to visit it and treat it as an authority on its main topic (nano-publishing).
Finally, today I noticed that Tom Coates has started a new topic-focused blog called Everything in Moderation (the topic is managing online communities and user-generated content). There's no advertising on the site, so I'm not suggesting that there is a monetary incentive to this. But even if there was, I'd still applaud Tom's new site because it's focused on a specific topic and hence it will attract an audience of people who are interested in that topic. And if his readers are as passionate about the topic as Tom is, then it's likely they'll become regular readers. Perhaps even contributers.
In conclusion, I view topic-focused blogs as a further extension of the Two-Way Web rather than just another attempt to milk money out of the Web. Because these blogs are attached to a single topic, it means the content will nearly always be relevant to its audience. This in turn encourages interaction with the reader, maybe even the reader writing back to the blog. Yes I am beginning to like the idea of topic-focused blogs, even discounting the fringe benefit that they may make money. Hmmm, I'll have to think of what narrow topic I can focus on in order to start a new blog. I could use some pocket money too!
I've just finished transferring a bunch of links from Outlook to my linkblog. They are links I've been hoarding over the past few months, as ideas for future weblog articles or just for inspiration. I plan to use my linkblog to store all the ideas I harvest from the Web. Beats emailing myself, plus because my linkblog is Movable Type I am able to use the search functionality to find things easily.
I'm still going to use this weblog, Read/Write Web, as my vehicle for original writing. And I promise my next article won't be about linkblogs! Even I'm getting bored with that topic now ;-)
