I've been getting more and more interested in the concept of a "Citizen Blogger": a person who actively participates in politics via their weblog. For such a person, weblogging becomes a political act - an 'Uncle Sam Needs You' for the 21st Century. The term has been floating around for a few months now, primarily driven by the big gusts of hot air accompanying the Howard Dean Presidential campaign. It came to my attention when Dave Winer and Lawrence Lessig started to write about it and as I've investigated more, I've found Citizen Blogging to be a promising new direction in the Two-Way Web. In fact, it may just be its killer app.
The journalist blogging fraternity is where all the action is regarding analysis of 'citizen blogging'. An article I thoroughly recommend is Jay Rosen's Nine Story Lines in a New Campaign Narrative (and do read the comments too). One of the key points Rosen makes is that political campaigning is now a "two-way and de-centered world where the tools of communication are coming into public hands. And so politics in the open style is here and there being de-controlled." De-controlled, that's a choice phrase and not all the journo bloggers agree on that point. In another Jay Rosen piece, fellow A-list journo Jeff Jarvis comments:
"I'm now questioning that, operational and recruitment issues aside, the Dean campaign is giving up control or can give up control[...]Headquarters is still wherever the candidate is."
The issue there is about power - isn't that what all politics boils down to? Jeff Jarvis says control (which I equate to power) is still centralised, even though Jay Rosen claims it is "de-centered". We don't know who's right yet - it'll all pan out as the Howard Dean campaign rolls out and the other Presidential candidates join in.
On his own weblog, Jeff Jarvis also posted a response to Lawrence Lessig and Dave Winer. He ostensibly disagrees with their use of the term "citizen blogger":
"That's what the [journalism] Reformation is all about: not that citizens blog but that bloggers do what those in power used to do."
Actually I think we're all on the same page, it's just semantics getting in the way again ;-) Jeff Jarvis' "journalism reformation" is saying pretty much the same thing Dave Winer's Two-Way Web manifesto says: consumers are now producers, readers are now writers. One guy who I always trust to bridge the gap between journalism and web technology is Dan Gillmor and he sums it up beautifully in his recent article:
"The broadcast culture assumes that most of us are "consumers" of mass media. We are merely receptacles for what Hollywood, the music industry and even our local daily newspaper decide we should view, hear or read.
The post-broadcast culture is a democratization of media, and it comes at things from the opposite stance. It says that anyone also can be a creator, not just a consumer. There's a world of difference."
Later on in the comments to Dan's article, Tim O'Reilly emphasizes that even though some bloggers are more equal than others (yes, the power law), people do have opportunities to participate/produce that didn't exist even a few years ago:
"...that's the nature of freedom. You don't get it just once and forever. Entrenched interests do try to stay on top, but new tools do create fresh opportunities."
I have some other lines of thought that I want to pursue on this topic, but I'll leave that for my next post. I do want to add that I hope the concept of "Citizen Blogging" is applicable not just to Americans blogging for Howard Dean, or Wesley Clark, or George Bush, or whoever. Sure, the American President campaign in 2004 is where it's all being invented. And I will be watching very closely from my little spot on the other side of the world (New Zealand). But I hope too that I can use the principles in my country too.
Actually the more I think about it, the more I want to initiate political blogging in New Zealand. A personal aside: a couple of years ago I applied for a few jobs at the New Zealand E-Government Unit, something which I've always had an interest in. I didn't get a job there, only because I didn't have government dept experience - catch-22! I was very disappointed at the time, because I knew I had the skills to do a great job. But I still harbour an ambition to contribute something worthwhile in the service of the public, using my skills in web technology. Perhaps Citizen Blogging is my opportunity. I'll explore some more.
This is the last piece of self-promoting babble I'll post for a while - I promise - but I thought I'd mention that I've added a favicon to my weblog. I've been admiring the favicons displayed in my Bloglines aggregator for some time now and a recent post by Makiko Itoh reminded me I should design one of my own. Here's an example of favicons, copied from my Bloglines subscriptions:
Those are just my A-List subs btw (I group the A-Listers together, don't ask me why). Some nice favicons there - I particularly like Mark Pilgrim's yin-yang symbol. My new favicon is this:
You should now see this in your browser address bar and in all good RSS aggregators (mine may take a while to propogate). My design is pretty simple, compared to the ones reviewed by Makiko. It uses my site's colours and fonts, with the r-slash-w standing for Read/Write. As I said, fairly basic, but because it's only 16 x 16 pixels, it was quite fiddly to make. For Windows users, check out Photomatt's excellent overview on how to make a favicon. Once I'd created mine, I used this online service to generate the .ico file. Then simply place it on your web server and add a reference to it in your homepage html (see photomatt for full instructions).
Right, this coming week I'll be getting back to some serious writing...
I've been meaning to add the orange RSS button back to my menu for a while. However I've been reluctant to upset my finely-tuned but fragile CSS/Radio Userland code synchronisation, by throwing a gauche graphic into the mix. But today I discovered a nice CSS method which solved the problem neatly - the sort of CSS you could take home to meet mother, very civilized and well-behaved. This was thanks to Don Park. Actually I used Richard Soderberg's code fragment, but I found it in Don's comments.
It's brilliant, now I have the familiar (to geeks anyway) orange RSS button - but there is no graphic! It's pure CSS baby.
Note to self: don't bother with any more surveys, because I'm not popular enough. As Homer Simpson might say, Stupid A-List... :-) But seriously, I was a little disappointed more people didn't respond to my survey: what do I look like in real life. Particularly as the responses I did get were brilliant. I enjoyed the detail of Cristian and Andrew's guesses. They were both about half right. Greg had an interesting take on it, choosing to see me as an avatar/icon. But in the end, Rogers got closest - ironically with his description of what an average tech blogger would look like. Maybe all geeks do look alike! Which is all the more reason why blogging needs to become more mainstream this year, as King of the Geeks (I mean that in a respectful way) Jon Udell has been pointing out recently.
But the point of my little survey was really to find out what kind of image people have of bloggers that they read, but never see in real life. Cristian and Andrew's replies came closest to the type of data I hoped to gather. I still think such a survey would provide very useful data for the social software wonks out there. Oh well.
In case you're interested in seeing what I look like, check it out. You'll just find an average-looking geek, but hey - doesn't that describe 95% of the blogosphere? :-) This is still the early adopter phase after all. Let's hope that what Jon and Dave Winer et al have been pushing for comes true: weblog tools begin to be used by normal people to write about their world, as well as just us geeks writing about our little group (to quote Nirvana and thereby increase my Cool Quotient).
OK, so I'm not Kottke and my surveys don't attract hundreds of punters :-( But thank-you Rogers for linking to my survey. I'll keep the survey going till tonight NZ time, when I'll post my updated 'About Me' (with photo).
Until then, click here to participate in the survey.
So far I've gotten two very interesting responses to my informal survey: what do I look like? This is a fascinating experiment, because even from just two responses I can see that people form a definite image in their mind's eye of what a blogger looks like.
What I'd really like is for an A-List blogger to give my little experiment some coverage, so I can get more data. Come on Marc Canter, this is right up your alley - People Aggregator and all. Or Seb Paquet from Many-to-Many fame - this is a social experiment. How about Joi Ito?
If you haven't commented yet and you read my site even a little bit regularly, please take a minute to comment by clicking here. I won't be offended if your image of me is unflattering. Obviously, no family members or real life acquaintances please :-)
I'm currently updating my 'About Me' page, so that it reflects my 2004 goals and themes that I'll be exploring this year. I've got the draft sitting on my brand new Palm Tungsten T2, which Father Christmas bought me. Now I'm wondering whether to publish a photo of myself...if I can even find a decent one. I think it does help to put a face to bloggers we read on a regular basis. For me it's not for social Friendster-like reasons (although those are valid reasons for lots of people), but to build trust in someone's writing by humanizing it. Like how computer magazines have pictures of their columnists - e.g. Jon Udell and Steve Gillmor - in order to put a human face to the technical content.
The other day I saw a picture of a techy blogger who I've been reading for a few months now, but up till then I'd never seen what he looked like. His picture was totally different to what I had perceived him to look like in my mind's eye. Actually he looked a lot cooler than what I thought he would :-)
So with all this talk of social software going round, I'm curious what the differences are between one's weblog interface (a virtual avatar if you like) and one's human 'real life' interface?
Let's start with an informal survey. What do you think I look like in real life? If you were to construct a human avatar of my weblog, what would he look like to you? Please don't be shy, click the Comment button right below this sentence and don't hold back ;-)
Summary: I analyse a 1994 Personal Information Management program and compare its goals to what we want in in a similar tool in 2004. I discover the requirements are basically the same.
The blogosphere is mostly a synchronous give-and-take of content. People largely comment on and link to things that other people are commenting on and linking to. It's a circular flow of information, with a particular point in time always at the epicentre. It's why 99% of weblogs are primarily ordered chronologically - with the most recent post at the top of the page.
When I'm looking for information to quench my insatiable thirst for knowledge, I often use the Web in an asynchronous manner. That is, I like to read historical web documents and compare them to current blogosphere memes. The Wayback Machine is my friend in this regard. Why, just last week I discovered a gem of historical Web documentation: the Electronic Proceedings of the Second World Wide Web Conference '94: Mosaic and the Web. This is a record of all the presentations made to the 2nd annual WWW conference back in 1994. I intend to browse through most of the presentations in due course, but for now I want to tell you about the first one that tickled my Interest gland.
It's funny how a tool developed 10 years ago can still accurately describe the requirements of the 2004-era Web. That's exactly the case with PAINT, a "tool for individualizing the Web". Here's the executive summary:
The increasing complexity of navigating the Internet is becoming one of the fundamental obstacles to its effective use. This is due to the nature of the Internet, principally, a disorganized collection of both sites and site documents whose exponential growth rate rapidly is outstripping any user's ability to master it. There are two ways to deal with this complexity: reorganize the structure of the Internet or give each user the ability to organize an individual perspective of the Internet. Although the former would produce more global benefit, the latter is both easier to accomplish and potentially more beneficial to any individual or group of users.
Our approach, therefore, is to create a navigation tool which copes with Internet complexity at the individual, rather than the organizational, level. This tool, PAINT (Personalized, Adaptive Internet Navigation Tool), allows the user to impose a hierarchical organization on Internet sites and documents of interest by creating categories under which to group sites. Such categorization can be used not only by an individual user, but also can be shared among groups of users with similar interests. PAINT will also provide local automatic classification based on user parameters and user behavior. That is, PAINT will record visited locations and categorize them according to past use. The user is then free to examine the automated organization, modify it, and make it a personalized view of the Internet. In our report, we will describe the PAINT tool, its use, and some preliminary investigations of local, automatic categorization.
This webpage, even though nearly 10 years old, still in a nutshell describes what we're looking for in a PIM (Personal Information Management) appliance circa 2004. You can get all fancy and talk about wanting agents to gather data automatically, or using Bayesian filters, or latent semantic indexing. But really it still boils down to this: we want a tool that (in the words of Paint) individualizes the Web.
Take the following sentence from the first paragraph in that 1994 webpage. It outlines the central problem - complexity - and the two general solutions. In red type, I've added how these two solutions are (generally speaking) being approached now:
There are two ways to deal with this complexity: reorganize the structure of the Internet (2004 = the Semantic Web) or give each user the ability to organize an individual perspective of the Internet (2004 = bootstrapping; eg what tech bloggers are now trying to do with their weblog taxonomies).
The program PAINT was designed to take the second approach. Paint wanted to put the user at the centre of their own personal Web:
This tool, PAINT (Personalized, Adaptive Internet Navigation Tool), allows the user to impose a hierarchical organization on Internet sites and documents of interest by creating categories under which to group sites.
The key things to note: PAINT enables people to create a hierarchical organization for their information, by grouping items into categories. Hmm, sound familiar?
PAINT circa 1994 was first of all an extension of the Mosaic web browser's hotlist facility. Hotlists were the equivalent of Favourites in the modern IE browser, or Bookmarks in Netscape. But at the time, hotlists could not be organized into folders. You just had the one list of documents and websites. So it could be argued that PAINT was simply a description of what IE Favorites or Netscape Bookmarks became a couple of years later - a hierarchical set of folders with which to store website URLs.
But I think PAINT's goals were deeper than that. Look at your usage of Favorites or Bookmarks today - do you use them as a way to categorize information you find on the Web? Do you organize your information into a hierarchy using the folders available to you? If you're like me, once upon a time you made an effort to do all this, but it long ago fell by the wayside. With the advent of RSS and Google I hardly ever use my IE Favorites anymore! And yet we still have this over-riding need to organize our information on the Web...
But obviously I can only take a comparison of PIM requirements then (1994) and now (2004) so far. What's different now? For a start we've had an exponential increase in the amount of data and information on the Web, thanks in part to having weblog tools that allow anyone (technical or no) to publish on the Web. But perhaps more fundamentally, information on the Web is now published as "microcontent". Information exists in "chunks", and each chunk of information is defined with a permalink. True, we haven't yet reached the stage where individual paragraphs or even sentences are given permalinks - but maybe that world of data isn't too far off.
So, could PAINT - or more likely a PAINT boosted with 2004-era technologies - be used to help us build weblog taxonomies based on categorizing our content hierachically? Well yes, but we're already building such tools. Dave Winer has developed a product called Channel Z which categorizes weblog posts into categories created by the author. k-collector allows bloggers to create and post to categories in a shared directory. And some clever bloggers (eg Paul Ford, Erik Benson, Bill Seitz) have created their own automated back-linking categorizing extravaganzas. So we're moving towards the goals that PAINT (and others I'm sure) defined back in 1994, and that visionaries such as Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush defined decades before that. We haven't got there yet though. Most of us still muddle our way manually organizing our Web content. PIM Nirvana hasn't yet been developed. But with initiatives such as Chandler taking over the mantle from PAINT as the next big thing of PIMs, the circle of Web innovation continues and the dream lives on. Everybody wants to control and be at the centre of their information environment - will we ever succeed?
