Man it gets quiet in the blogosphere over xmas. I've had to resort to some real work to keep myself occupied. I've been diving into XSLT to try and develop something interesting for my weblog's topic-based navigation. XSLT can be infuriating at times. I got most of what I wanted from my XSLT session today, except for one tiny thing that I spent a lot of time trying to solve (and still haven't). It reminded me of Don Park's post a couple of weeks ago:
"By associating an XSLT stylesheet with the XML file, users can view the file with just a browser (well, IE). It's a nice solution except writing XSLT can be a real pain in the ass. Take one little step outside the simple stuff and you are in a jungle and it doesn't get better over time unless you use it everyday."
I can sympathise. I was in one of those bleary-eyed seething moods by the end of my session. I have to admit I'm not a Natural Born Programmer, so that may explain part of my problems. I'm really a writer who likes to program a bit on the side. Which brings me to my goals for 2004...
In 2004 I hereby resolve to get my hands well and truely dirty with XML technologies. I'll use my weblog to experiment with things, like I'm doing now with creating an XML/XSLT topic navigation. btw I had started with an OPML/XSLT conversion, but I swapped to doing it as an XML file with XSLT tranformation into HTML. Actually what I've ended up doing is similar to what Dave Winer has done with the 'category' tag in RSS2.0, except he's probably using OPML. I'm currently using the Radio Userland opml-html service for my topic nav, while I sort out my xml-html version. Unless Dave Winer releases his Channel Z tool soon, which would save me a lot of hassle, I'll keep at it. But no, I'm enjoying the challenge of XSLT development. I'm lovin' it, as the advert goes.
Programming will always play second fiddle to my writing. I want to write more feature articles in my weblog during 2004. If I may be pompous for a second: I want to be the 'Tom Wolfe of blogging', sans the cream-coloured livery. I want to write colourful, original, fact-based literary journalistic articles anchored in the reality of web development in the 21st century. The keyword for me has always been originality. I'll be mixing articles on Web Development (includes blogging, social software, yada yada) and fictional stories on a tech theme. I expect my Technorati inward links will take a hit, because I won't usually be baiting other bloggers or throwing in my 2 cents on the latest hot topic in the blogosphere. My Game Neverending article from last week may be a good indicator of what's to come - it attracted no comments and some people who read it may've wondered if I'd been chewing peyote when I wrote it. But it's the sort of article that people will more likely stumble upon in a few months time via Google, rather than finding it in a link from Robert Scoble.
Speaking of Google inward links, I'm getting a whole bunch of people coming here via the following search query: "writing a novel". It's because one of my Nanowrimo blog posts started with the words "Writing a novel...". I notice I'm number 5 on the Google search results for that phrase. Incidentally I'm also number 1 for the phrase "whiteness of the whale", due to an earlier post of mine with that title. So I apologize to all those students coming here looking for choice words to nick for their Moby Dick essays - I don't imagine a post about the Semantic Web is what they're after, but that's what they get. Ironic huh.
This post btw is not an example of 'literary journalism', it's just me blathering away late at night like other online diarists! But I'll be a snob and call what I'm doing 'Biographical Non-Fiction' ;-) Speaking of biography, I watched a very interesting tv show tonight on the History Channel (which has recently started in New Zealand). It was Biography of the Millenium and Johan Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, was number 1. Bill Gates came in at number 41, but Tim Berners-Lee didn't make the list. Hmm, Gutenberg got number one for inventing a way to publish information in books, but Berners-Lee didn't make it for inventing a mass-scale information network?
Summary: I analyse Game Neverending, a multi-player social software web application, and compare it to a virtual world that I created in my recent novel.
One of those silly but addictive questionaires is doing the rounds: What kind of Social Software am I? You could be a Wiki, the Blogosphere, FOAF, or other varieties of Social Software. Turns out I'm Game Neverending. To be honest, I'd not heard of Game Neverending before this - so I had to do some Googling on it. I was pleasantly surprised to find out it's a virtual world in which creativity and social interaction are the main drivers. In fact it sounded very similar to the social software virtual world I created for my recent novel, Dirtside to Spaceside. So I was intrigued :-)
The official Game Neverending website seemingly hasn't been updated since October 2003, but from the info I gleaned there I understand the game is at the beta stage (I've now signed up!). The company behind Game Neverending (GNE for short) is Ludicorp, based in Vancouver Canada. An excellent introduction to GNE is this Mindjack article from May 2003, in which Ludicorp CEO Stewart Butterfield is interviewed.
I've never been into virtual worlds, like The Sims or Everquest. That whole Dungeons & Dragons fantasy world, with wizards and goblins and so forth, just isn't my cup of tea. However I am fascinated with the notion of cyberspace, or virtual reality. I guess you could say I'm more of a Matrix person than a Lord of the Rings person!
In my novel I described a fictitious social software application that enabled people to interact via avatars in a virtual world with other peoples avatars. But rather than being fantasy characters, the avatars in my novel were replicas of their human owners in physical likeness and personality. Here's a description from my novel (pages 44-45):
Today was the day Dave would announce Social-Kinetic's new social software product to the world. The product was simply named after the company - "Social Kinetics" - and it was made up of three main ingredients: firstly it was an online community space on the Web, which was like other online communities. That is, it was a website with a URL (web address) and, in order to use the website, people were required to sign-up and register an account. The second main ingredient was the personality assessment and physical body mapping. Once a person had registered to become a member of the "Social Kinetics" community, that person would fill in a questionnaire to establish the basic parameters of their personality. This was a very superficial personality type, similar to Myers-Briggs. Social Kinetics had 50 initial "types" (eventually the number of types would number in the hundreds). The person would also have a "mapping" done of their face and body, so as to approximate their physical appearance in the avatar. The software and management team had decided on the following policy: people must use mappings of their own person as a base for their avatars. This decision was driven by Dave's philosophy that people should not be able to "hide" behind an avatar. The principle of "What you see is what you get" should apply, so that people learned to trust one another and be honest with their interactions in the community. Dave felt that if people could select a graphical online persona like in previous examples of virtual worlds - a wizard, or a dog, or a green two-headed alien – then that would only encourage other falsities. The purpose of Social Kinetics was to encourage people to extend themselves via their avatars - meet new people, and make new connections. Dave felt that a big determining factor in the success of his software was that the avatar should approximate its human owner as much as possible – not just personality but physical likeness.
The third ingredient was the avatar software itself. Once a personality was assigned and physical characteristics mapped, the customer would be given an avatar. At that point the avatar would join the community and at the same time begin to build up its own identity, by collecting and aggregating data about its owner.
My vision is probably not attainable in reality right now (hence why I wrote it up as a piece of fiction). I describe my virtual world, called "Social Kinetics", in much more detail in my novel if you're interested. Game Neverending can't hope to compete against a fictitious world, but from what I've read it comes very close to attaining a virtual social software world - which is what I want! GNE is building on the MOO worlds popularised in the 80's and 90's, which are a type of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon). The Wikipedia describes MOOs as:
MOO is short for 'MUD object oriented' and is a type of MUD textual virtual reality system.
The key difference between MOOs and MUDs is that MOOs can be programmed using a special object-oriented programming language. Therefore in MOO players can at least partially self-create the virtual world, whereas in MUDs players are simply inserted into a pre-built fantasy world. The Mindjack article has an interesting take on this that touches on weblogging:
EverQuest puts you in someone else's world, but in a MOO, the world was yours to help create. Perhaps for that reason, MOOs tended only to attract the upper echelon of intelligent, technical freaks - the sort of people who have weblogs these days.
Mindjack goes on to explain how GNE is a further evolution of MOOs...
GNE takes the social focus of MOOs and combines them with the Web technologies the MOO tribe has adopted since.
GNE is a sort of MOO for the 21st century. Its virtual world will interoperate with Web technologies outside that world - IM, weblogs, email especially. So participants will not just be immersed in a fantasy world, they will be able to integrate their external lives into the Game Neverending. This enhances the social aspect of GNE, in the following ways:
a) It takes away the whole fantasy "I am a goblin and my quest is to slay dragons" aspect of virtual worlds, which - whether a misconception or not - has always turned off people like me.
b) GNE adopts the same distributed architecture of the Web itself - building hubs and connections between the game and Internet apps like email, blogs and IM. Actions can be asynchronus, so you don't have to be in the virtual world all the time to participate. GNE is also browser-based, which makes it a part of the Web rather than an isolated island.
c) GNE encourages play, which in turn helps creativity flow through the system.
d) GNE has an "ambiguous relationship" between the player (the real person) and the character (game person). I'm not sure if this comes close to what I described in my novel, where the human and avatar were almost identical to each other and thus very closely linked. This incidentally is already mostly true of weblogs, which can be viewed as virtual representations (or avatars) of their owners. I took this concept a few steps further in my novel, where the Social Kinetics avatars became not just avatars but agents too (collecting and acting on information autonomously on behalf of their human owners, a la Chandler). GNE seems to be aiming for the same type of avatar/agent mix.
e) GNE is more about who you are than what you have (or how many dragons you slay). Stewart Butterfield says in the Mindjack interview:
We are trying to design the game so that relationships, reputation, skills and general who you are counts for more than the what stuff you have...
There's a lot more to Game Neverending. I feel like I've just scratched the surface and I can't wait to become involved in the beta test. Meanwhile I'm going to further explore MOOs and MUDs and virtual worlds in general. I have a feeling they are going to play an important part in the future Two-Way Web. Maybe the social software virtual world I described in my novel will one day become reality?
I'm doing some incremental changes to the site. First up, I added my linkblog to the sidebar. I use my linkblog to save links, ideas and memes that interest me. Hence its name: Web of Ideas. It's a Movable Type site and the search functionality in particular makes it very worthwhile. Often when I'm thinking about a topic, I'll search my linkblog and look back at the links I've stashed there.
Because it's frequently updated, Web of Ideas is a good guide to what I'm thinking about at any one time. So I figured it belonged in my main weblog as well. Radio users may be interested to know I used the xml.rss.renderWithTemplate verb to achieve this (found via Radio Keola).
I'm in the middle of categorizing my main weblog content. I'm doing it in an OPML file and I plan to use XSLT to transform it into a topic navigation section. Right, off I go to do some categorizing...
I've just finished reading my Nanowrimo novel as a whole piece for the first time. I'm pretty pleased with the story, apart from one thing right at the end (which I'll address at the end of this post). The whole point of Nanowrimo for me, as a first-time novelist, was to gain confidence in my writing and discover if I could write a novel. A big part of that was finding out whether I can tell a decent yarn or not. I think I proved to myself that yes I can. Still, there are parts of the novel that need tidying up. In particular my description of the cyber world of Social-Kinetics Ltd needs some fleshing out. Some other small chunks of writing need to be polished, but really all of this is to be expected in a first draft. The most important thing to me is that the plot largely sticks together and I developed the characters in interesting ways.
Over the holidays I will read Erik's Nanowrimo entry, plus any other ones I can find. If anyone reading this has posted their Nanowrimo entry online, let me know as I'd love to read it. As 2004 approaches, I'm thinking about how to further develop my writing...and, not unrelated, develop my career in web technology. It's my goal now to get something published in paper form, perhaps even earn some money from writing. That would be the ultimate goal for me, to earn my living and support my family from writing. But one step at a time, I have a lot of work to do.
Now back to the one thing at the end of my novel that needed fixing. I realised a day or two after I'd finished that I'd left Declan typing at his computer while his partner Florrie was getting ready for their date. It didn't seem quite right, but at the time I was too tired to fix it. However Andrew reminded me of it the other day, pointing out that Florrie was being treated unfairly again. This is a very valid point and one which I have fixed up tonight, simply by adding a few more sentences. I will re-post the PDF tomorrow, but here's the amended ending which places the final emphasis back on Declan and Flo's relationship - where it belongs:
Declan read the email from the alien a couple more times. He pondered it for a few minutes, his brow furrowed in serious thought. Then Declan's eyes relaxed and he smiled. He hit the "Reply" button and started writing.
"Declan?" Florrie was standing at the door. Declan turned around and smiled at her. "Flo, you look beautiful", he said and Florrie blushed. Her brown eyes glistened with a mix of tiredness and happiness.
Declan saved his email and then switched the computer off. He got up and took Florrie's hand.
"Shall we?" he said.
Two recent memes from the blogosphere seem to me to be ripe for mixing:
Meme 1) The current trend for tech blog re-designs to have a minimalist, lotsa-white-space look that places emphasis on the content. Dave Winer probably started this trend with his re-design, but I've seen it elsewhere before him (e.g. Peter Lindberg and Erik Benson). And now Robert Scoble and Marc Canter. Mark Pilgrim's site is also bathed in white space nowadays. Hey I guess my site is pretty minimalist too. Maybe it's just a tech blog thing?
Meme 2) Jason Kottke's comment today: "Nothing takes the fun and personality out of writing like metadata." Jason points out that blogs have lots of extra design bits in them to help people organise and link together information, but it distracts from the main content.
What's the connection? Maybe it's that some of us bloggers are trying to push extraneous pieces of visual design out of our weblogs. And what's this a trend towards? The usurpation of websites by RSS perhaps. I'm beginning to sound like Steve Gillmor or Dave Winer. What I mean is: does web design, in the visual / graphical sense of the phrase, really matter anymore? Does ontology / taxonomy of a physical website mean much nowadays? If the majority of people read a weblog via an RSS Aggregator - and that's not the case yet, but it's heading that way - then does Web Design or Taxonomy matter a hill of beans? Why bother putting in all these design flourishes and metadata if our readers don't see/use it?
I'll give you an example. I use k-collector to categorise each weblog post I write into topics. But those topics can't be seen via RSS Aggregators (at least not in the one I use - let me know if you do see them). Another example: trackbacks aren't visible in the RSS Aggregator. A link to comments is available in my Aggregator, but there is no context - ie I don't know how many people have commented on a post, I have to click the link to open it up in my web browser.
And some people still don't provide the whole of their text in their RSS feeds. Movable Type people are the biggest offenders (if that's the right word), but only because it is the default behavior to include only excerpts in their RSS feeds. Doing this may be The Last Bastion of Web Design, because it's forcing us readers to go out of our RSS Aggregators and visit their websites. It's noticeable that most of the people who I've categorised as "Designers" in my Bloglines RSS Aggregator exhibit this "click to see" behavior. Can't blame them, they've got nice pretty sites and they want people to view them.
Mind you I've noticed in my own referrer logs that about half of my visitors (to my actual site) get here via a search engine. So that alone is probably a good case for me to continue to provide a nice design and a helpful taxonomy. Plus of course you want to make a good impression generally speaking with your web presense. It's like you don't want people to see your house when it's messy and has things strewn all around the lounge. You want to vacuum the place and have your furniture arranged in an orderly fashion before visitors call. So design and taxonomy has its place, even in our increasingly RSS-ified world.
But RSS (and/or Atom) is the Future. How long before we can represent our content's taxonomy/ontology in our RSS feeds? I mentioned this in a previous post and Dave Winer commented: "I plan to make my aggregator work with categories." That's definitely a good start. What are other aggregator developers planning to do in this regard?
And how long before we can cram all those bits of metadata that Jason mentions into our RSS feeds? That wasn't Jason's point of course, he was saying all that metadata necessarily de-emphasizes the main content. I agree with that sentiment, but I have to admit also that I'm addicted to those little bits of metadata. I like reading comments, clicking on the trackbacks, seeing the referrers, etc. It all adds to the community aspect of weblogs. And if we can cram all that community into our RSS or Atom feeds, then all the better.
As I was browsing my local bookstore, ostensibly looking for a Christmas present for my Grandma, I came across a book called all hail the new puritans. It was a collection of short stories from young British writers circa 2000. So it was a few years old and probably collecting dust on the shelf. But the book intrigued me. It seemed to be promoting a manifesto and further it looked like it was relevant to something I blogged about last week: moral aesthetics. And when I saw the word "puritan", I thought of Glenn Gould - who used to refer to himself playfully as "the last puritan". So I bought the book and tonight I have been perusing websites about it.
The New Puritan Manifesto caused a fuss in literary circles during 2000/2001, and a good thing too because all good manifestos must stir the pot. Manifestos were all the rage in the first few decades of the 20th century. I remember reading and getting all excited about the Surrealist and Dada manifestos while I was at Varsity...as you do. Admittedly I'm very late to the party in respect of the New Puritan Manifesto. But I think that's a good thing, because now I can explore it without all the hype fogging my view.
So what is the manifesto about? The only place I could find a soft copy of the New Puritan Manifesto was at the bottom of this page:
The New Puritan Manifesto. 1. Primarily story-tellers, we are dedicated to the narrative form. 2. We are prose writers and recognise that prose is the dominant form of expression. For this reason we shun poetry and poetic licence in all its forms. 3. While acknowledging the value of genre fiction, whether classical or modern, we will always move towards new openings, rupturing existing genre expectations. 4. We believe in textual simplicity and vow to avoid all devices of voice: rhetoric, authorial asides. 5. In the name of clarity, we recognise the importance of temporal linearity and eschew flashbacks, dual temporal narratives and foreshadowing. 6. We believe in grammatical purity and avoid any elaborate punctuation. 7. We recognise that published works are also historical documents. As fragments of our time, all our texts are dated and set in the present day. All products, places, artists and objects named are real. 8. As faithful representations of the present, our texts will avoid all improbable og unknowable speculation about the past or the future. 9. We are moralists, so all texts feature a recognisable ethical reality. 10. Nevertheless, our aim is integrity of expression, above and beoynd any commitment to form. (Nicholas Blincoe & Matt Thorne (eds): All Hail The New Puritans, Fourth Estate, London 2000).
Number 9 appeals to me, given my current interests. Some of the other rules sound a bit restrictive and even nonsensical - e.g. what's their beef with poetry? But taken as a whole (and with a grain of salt) they are very sound principles. Novelist Zadie Smith took some potshots at it, but to me this only proves what a good manifesto it is because it is rarking people up. And look at it from the perspective of who ruled the literary roost at that time - Phillip Roth, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and others of that ilk. They are all celebrated writers, but personally I don't enjoy their writing. I find their books to be pompous, self-absorbed, overly elaborate and not grounded in any reality I'm familiar with. The New Puritans are in some ways a reaction to this. They celebrate contemporary culture - movies, technology, music, real life in the 21st century. In other ways, the New Puritans are simply trying to promote things like narrative story-telling and Hemingway-like textual simplicity.
Sounds pretty similar to one of my favourite authors, Tom Wolfe, who could perhaps be given the moniker Godfather of the New Puritans - at least in terms of his novels. Wolfe coined the term new journalism back in the 70's. He wrote about real life using narrative techniques usually associated with novel-writing. In 1987 he released the supurb and very New Puritan-like novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. The story was very much of its time - some say it defines the 80's - and it's written with a simple yet also lyrical narrative. I studied this novel at Varsity and it was one of my favourites at the time. In spirit Tom Wolfe is a New Puritan, even though he doesn't follow all the rules of the manifesto.
p.s. you may be wondering where the name "New Puritans" comes from. It's from a song by British band The Fall (who as far as I know were one of those 80's leftie english bands that went on about Thatcherism most of the time). The lyrics are fascinating reading. They even mention BigCo's (hee hee)! Here's the start of it:
(New Puritan. Uncommon eyes.)
The grotesque peasants stalk the land
And deep down inside you know
Everybody wants to like big companies.Bands send tapes to famous apes
Male slags, male slates, famous apes.
K Walter Keaton, now grey thoughts.
The whole country is post-grammeHail the new puritan!
Righteous maelstrom
Crock one
How's that for nice poetry ;-) I'll continue to explore 'morality in art' and the New Puritan manifesto in future articles. In the meantime, here are some nice links for you:
- World Wide Words: Definition of New Puritans
- Salon / CNN: Man, oh manifesto! Brash band of young writers calls for a return to storytelling
- Guardian newspaper: Matt Thorne's favourite New Puritan novels
- East of the Web: The New Puritans Interview
Couple of bits of feedback from last night's post on weblog ontologies. Bill Seitz points out that his Wikilog does in fact have a hierarchical view, the user has to enable it though (via their user settings when they visit Bill's site). For example the post of his I used as an example yesterday has this hierarchy:
Front Page > Personal Network Architecture > Group Ware > Collaboration Ware > Wiki For Collaboration Ware > Summarizing Is Necessary
I don't think it is a hierarchy of categories. Bill explains it as "the chain of generations of pages whose creation led to the current page."
Secondly Bill notes that a key question to building an ontology is asking yourself: what's the point? This is something I was pondering last night when I went to sleep (dreams being one way I think through technical things...sad as that makes me sound!). I was also thinking about why we put so much effort into organising our weblog sites, when the majority of our readers read our content via an RSS Aggregator - which doesn't care about the content structure. How long before some bright spark creates an RSS Aggregator that does take into account each publisher's content ontology? Or maybe the question should be asked the other way round: how long before site developers figure out how to create an RSS feed(s) that represents its home site's ontology?
Andrew also makes a good point: "The ontologies are nice, but they shouldnÃt require oodles of work to set up, maintain, and categorize things into."
Amen to that. This is the drawback to using XTM topic maps - it's going to require a lot of work to set it up. Same could be said of RDF. Hmm, thinking more...
I've been jotting down re-design ideas in my trusty paper notebook. On the Web there is an unwritten maxim: learn (steal?) from the best. So I decided to review some of the weblog ontologies/taxonomies on the Web that I admire. My method of review is informal and non-judgmental. I try to illustrate my findings with a test drive of each site. In no particular order...
1. FTrain - Paul Ford: Trust me to start with the most complex ;-) Paul Ford's site is graphically striking and he's one of the few bloggers to have implemented a Semantic Web-like structure. Not to mention his writing is mind-blowing. But to the design. I don't claim to fully understand it yet, but basically it seems every piece of content is connected to other content according to various types of relationships. Here's how Paul describes it:
"Ftrain is a hierarchy. Any given page has one or more of parent, children, and sibling pages, and every page lives somewhere in the hierarchy."
Further down that page, he states:
"Ftrain is this complicated because it has over 1000 separate nodes, all of them connected to one another in some way, with something like 700,000 words between them, and all extensible."
I decided to start at a recent Ftrain article, A Response to Clay Shirky's "The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview", and browse from there. If you scroll down to the end of the article, you'll find some navigation and external links. First there is a "Links Related To" table, which has 1 external link. Below that there is a statement of the hierarchy:
"This is A Response to Clay Shirky's "The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview", a technical essay by Paul Ford, published Monday, November 10, 2003. It is part of Theory, which is part of Ftrain.com."
By this I understood I am at the third level down from the homepage. Breadcrumb-like: Home > Theory > A Response to Clay etc. But the "technical essay" bit threw me. I clicked on that and discovered this article had been cross-posted to another category: Home > Taxanomy > Things > Ways of Communicating > Forms of Expression > Essays > Technical Essays.
So I back-button back to the Clay essay. The next thing after the hierarchy statement is a list of 6 links under the heading 'Related'. 3 of these links are also attached to 'Technical Essays'. The other 3 aren't immediately obvious relations.
Below this is a group of links called "Navigate by Hierarchy", which is two other links from the category 'Theory'. Finally there is a "Navigate by Time" option.
So all up, a pretty complex navigational structure and who knows how it is done under the hood. The Ftrain Sitekit provides some clues - we find out the site is built using XML technologies and XSLT.
2. Erik Benson: Erik bases his site around the concept of nodes, which are grouped into categories, which are placed in a section. So it is a hierarchy, like Paul Ford's site. Hmm, already I'm sensing a pattern in the ontologies I admire - they're hierarchies. To be honest, I hadn't clicked that Ftrain and Erik Benson's sites were hierarchical (grouped by categories) until now.
I took Erik's most recent article, The future has already happened, as my starting point to check out the ontology. Under the title, the following breadcrumb displays:
I clicked on "idea" and it took me to that category page, which displayed an alphabetical list of all the other nodes in the "idea" category. There's also a chronological navigation, under Weblog Archive. The article above is listed as:
Another feature is the "Related Nodes" functionality. I'm not quite sure how this works yet, I'll have to come back to it.
3. Dave Winer's Scripting News. As most people are aware, Dave has recently switched to a category-based design. Right at the top of his homepage is the following breadcrumb:
"Top > Dave's World > Weblog Archive > 2003 > December > 12"
This is chronological, but Dave is also categorising each of his weblog entries. To find the category listing, you have to go to the search drop-down box and click "All Cats". Then you will see a long list of all Dave's categories. For my research purposes I clicked on "Politics / Money" and got a page which displayed all the posts in that category.
4. Bill Seitz's Wikilog. Bill's site is a cross between a Wiki and a weblog. When I first saw it a few months ago I was blown away by it. As I've been following it I've gotten to like the way all content on one topic is grouped together on a single topic page. So no matter if two entries on the same topic were written a year apart, both entries end up on the same page. This has huge benefits in terms of linking and relating ideas together. Bill calls it his "thinking space".
Usually with Bill's site, I track his RSS feed of headings in my RSS Aggregator (Bloglines). When I see a heading that looks interesting, I click on it. For example, a recent one was SummarizingIsNecessary. If you scroll to the bottom of this page, you'll see a list of "Backlinks". According to Bill, backlinks are:
"...a list of all pages referring to the current page. This is useful for finding "related" information. (This is the Two Way Links feature available in pre-World Wide Web Hyper Text environments, that people like Ted Nelson have been complaining about since the Web came about.)"
Summary of Part 1:
I'm sure I haven't done justice to the sites I've analysed so far. They are all pretty complex and very well-developed. But there are some patterns emerging for my purposes: they all in some way use the concept of "nodes", 3 of the 4 use hierarchical categories, all but Dave's have a "related links" feature.
This is just a start. There are other sites whose ontology/taxonomy I admire. Andrew Chen, Mark Pilgrim, Phil Pearson - to name just a few. But I'll be here all night if I write about them now. Maybe tomorrow. For now, I'll think more about the "category vs topics" dilemma that I'm stuck on currently. I'm very keen on having a topic-based navigation, which has the benefit of a bottom-up "flat" structure of content - and I was thinking of using XTM topic mapping to achieve "related link" functionality. However given that hierarchical categories are being used to great affect by 3 of the 4 people listed above, maybe I'll change tack. Hmm.
Morality in art has always been a fascination of mine. And by art I mean literature, music, movies - the works. Some weblogs even. A favourite artist of mine is the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. One of Gould's theories was that music should be judged on moral considerations rather than aesthetic ones. In an interview with himself, he told the hypothetical story of a town in which all of the houses were painted in battleship grey (Gould's favourite colour). But one day an individual decides to paint his house a "fire-engine red" colour...
"g.g.: -- thereby challenging the symmetry of the town planning.
G.G.: Yes, it would probably do that too, but you're approaching the question from an aesthetic point of view. The real consequence of his action would be to foreshadow an outbreak of manic activity in the town and almost inevitably -- since other houses would be painted in similarly garish hues -- to encourage a climate of competition and, as a corollary, of violence."
In the weblog world, I equate morality with a sense of community and the ideas that emanate from it. The blogosphere fosters a willingness amongst people to share ideas, innovations and stories. Andrew Chen wrote a nice piece today on a similar theme:
"But to me, the knitting together of the tapestry of ideas from the threads that I pick up from both my own life as well as the lives/blogs of others - this knitting is how I build both crazy ideas as well as attempt to build community. It's not "all about" ideas or community or love or communication or being true to yourself or anything - it's about all of those all together and more."
The weblog world is very young and for me it still has a sense of purity about it, unlike a lot of other forms of self-expression and art in the Western world. However there are signs the blogosphere is beginning to be painted fire-engine red: comment spam, people who game the system to increase their Google rank, bloggers who write defamatory or negative things about other people, petty competitions and name-calling between supporters of RSS and Atom. These kinds of things are a concern. But it's not (yet) as bad as other forms of art and media.
Television is probably the worst, which is ironic in a way because Marshall McLuhan held such high hopes for it. But here in the 21st century there is precious little thoughtful or innovative television. Even the news and current affairs shows have been overun by a culture of celebrity. The most popular type of tv show in 2003 is so-called "reality tv". Normal everyday people take part in these shows, but their motivations are shallow - fame and money. Invariably only one person can be "the winner" - the rest will be branded as "losers". This causes participants to employ morally dubious tactics in order to out-compete their fellows and win the dosh.
Movies are little better, but at least there are some gems like The Matrix. A lot of people didn't like how the 3rd movie in The Matrix trilogy ended, but for me it provided a morally uplifting ending and that's much more than most Hollywood bunk provides these days. And no it's not morally uplifting when Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator character refuses to kill people and shoots them in the knees instead. There has to be some redeeming social or moral aspect to the story, which I felt The Matrix provided - even if some people thought it was hokey.
Music is possibly the most consistently controversial in the aesthetic morality stakes. Needless to say, I am not a fan of Marilyn Manson. But having a moral sensibility doesn't mean I just listen to classical music. In the 90's I was a big fan of Nirvana (still am), but I'd always felt their music was negative and pessimistic. There is no denying the originality and sheer genius of the music itself, but on the other hand it was depressing to listen to. It reflected the mind of Kurt Cobain, who killed himself in 1994. I was pretty depressed myself at the state of popular music after that. But then in 1995 an album was released that was a revelation for me: Foo Fighters debut album, written and performed entirely by the drummer of Nirvana Dave Grohl. Why was it a revelation to me? These are the primary reasons:
1) The music sounded positive - it was upbeat and the lyrics (when they could be understood) were generally of a positive vein. The titles of the opening songs are a good indication: 'This is a call', 'I'll stick around', 'Big me'. It was good positive life-affirming music, especially in the context of the depressive grunge era of rock music at that time. And open up the album sleeve, my God the band members are actually smiling! (Dave Grohl created the band after he recorded the album).
2) The fact that Dave Grohl did it all himself and nobody expected it. Who would've thought a drummer could write an entire album - lyrics and music - then perform all the instruments including lead & rhythm guitars, bass, drums, vocals? At the time there were plenty of comparisons to Ringo Starr, but Dave Grohl blew peoples' preconceptions out of the water with his achievement.
3) Lastly, the Foo Fighters debut album lifted the pall that hung over a generation following Cobain's death. At least it lifted it for me. Whenever I listened to the Fooeys debut album in the following years, I always got energized. To this day, it remains one of my favourite albums. Interestingly most people think their second album is better, but for me the second album is very loud and almost vitriolic. The third album gets back to a positive groove and that too is a fave of mine.
I have more to say in upcoming posts on the topic of morality in literature and writing. Tom Wolfe's 'Bonfire of the Vanities' was perhaps the most influential novel of the 80's in this regard and it's interesting to compare it to the extraordinarily well-written but morally dodgy Brett Easten Ellis novel 'American Psycho'. And I want to explore 18th century literature in the context of today's publish/subscribe technologies - Pope, Swift, Samuel Johnson. btw if anyone knows where I can pick up a cheap copy of The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century by Robert Edward Norton, please let me know. It sounds like the kind of thing I want to read ;-) Also I should explore some of the philosophy around aesthetics and morality.
I had written a long post describing my motivations for writing my novel, but on reflection I won't publish it because it belongs more to my personal journal than on a public website. That is to say, it's probably only relevant to me. But to sum up in a sentence: my main reasons for writing a novel were 1) to prove myself as a writer; and 2) simply because I enjoy reading and writing. Hmm, OK the long version is more interesting ;-)
Another motivating factor, which I will blog about, was that I had something to say and I wanted to say it in a novel. So I'll explore a bit here how writing in a weblog compares to writing a novel.
I said at the beginning of November that I needed a bigger canvas than a weblog. As I mentioned in my previous post, a week before I discovered Nanowrimo I participated in the "broadcasting vs conversational modes of blogging" discussion that was started by Clay Shirky. The pieces I wrote in my weblog on that topic left me cold. The one bright point was that I got a mention on David Weinberger's weblog. Mr Weinberger is the author of a hugely influential web technology book called Small Pieces Loosely Joined, so it was a thrill to be linked to by him. It was right up there with being linked to by Marc Canter, Dave Winer and Clay Shirky (other A-Listers who have linked to me before). So what's my problem, my message got some mass coverage so I should've been happy right? Well I was in that regard, but in terms of the actual content that I wrote - I wasn't satisfied.
To me, that whole conversation boiled down to one subject, which has as many threads as the Web itself: two-way communication. On this subject, I didn't think I'd gotten my points across to other people and I hadn't even convinced myself. I couldn't seem to compress what I wanted to say about two-way communication into a single weblog post. Some of the problem was that my conscious mind didn't know how to express itself on the subject. I felt I needed a bigger canvas, something that would allow my subconscious mind to do some of the talking. A novel seemed like a good solution for me. In a novel I could pour out my thoughts, consciously and subconsciously. My thoughts and ideas would be wrapped up in a plot, sub-plots, characters, descriptive passages, the works.
And that's pretty much how it worked out. One of the themes of my novel was two-way communication and I had a lot of fun pushing the boundaries of this in my book. So yes, the novel form was the "bigger canvas" that I needed. Bigger in terms of exploring themes in a deeper manner than the weblog format allows, but also bigger in terms of the number of topics I could cover. btw Lilia Efimova picked up on the "bigger canvas" topic and wrote on it too - with a slightly different take to mine.
The other thing that concerned me about my blogging prior to Nanowrimo was a feeling that my weblog writing was, subtly and in some small ways, motivated by getting attention. On the Web, Attention = Inward Links. I'm not saying I wrote blog posts that were motivated purely by wanting to get linked to. My motivation for writing is never that shallow. I as a human being am not that shallow. But perhaps my blogging, in some subtle way, had become a little too focused on improving my Google Page Rank. For example, I think I was a wee bit shrill in my protestations that I am a broadcaster blogger not a conversationalist blogger. I raised my voice a bit too much. I waved my (metaphorical) blogging hands in the air: look at me, my posts were saying. Hey, Clay, give me some link-love baby! ...well, perhaps I am exaggerating. But my point is, when I spent all of November absorbed in writing a novel a funny thing happened. I found I was concentrating on writing about topics and themes and characters and plot-points etc. I focused on the story. The story was all-important.
To translate this realization to the blogging arena, the story in a novel equates to ideas and topics within a blog. Ideas and topics are what hold the real value in blogging, just as the story holds together a novel. Sometimes one needs to go back to the classic forms of writing to realize the simple truths.
It's still nice when A-List bloggers link to you though. The importance of this aspect of the Two-Way Web should never be underestimated. When A-List bloggers link to the rest of us, it gives us a chance to be read by the large audience that A-List bloggers (by definition) have. It turns the "on the Web everyone will be famous to 15 people" maxim on its head. The ideas take centre stage, where they belong. Further, it's good for the blogosphere if A-Listers link to the masses. Similar to the genetic variation theory of Darwinism, the more people that can contribute ideas to the blogosphere and have those ideas read by other people...the more chance of successful innovation within the blogosphere. There is an oft-quoted saying among bloggers: the best ideas come from left field.
But we, the weblog masses, must be careful not to let our need for attention affect our writing. Remember kids, it's the ideas that are central. If your ideas are good and you express them well, the attention will necessarily come. If the attention doesn't come to you, then there really is a problem with celebrity culture in the blogosphere. But I'd like to think the Two-Way Web does have one up on novel-writing in that regard. Thanks to the magic of hyperlinks, anyone can be read and therefore new ideas are constantly being picked up and distributed to the masses.
