I mentioned in my last post that one of my ongoing interests is topic mapping in weblogs. Topic Exchange and K-Collector are two initiatives that I've hyped a lot over the last year. However the blogosphere still doesn't have a mainstream topic-mapping application - and I mean mainstream as in Technorati or Bloglines, apps that are used by a large percentage of bloggers.
Seb Paquet recently re-opened the conversation on topic-mapping in blogs, and Rogers Cadenhead and Dave Winer have been talking about it, so it's on peoples minds. I'd like to suggest the following...
We need to meld the best features of Topic Exchange and K-Collector.
Topic Exchange and K-Collector each has its strengths. K-Collector has a great add-on for Radio Userland, which allows you to easily select relevant topics and add them to the community server. Topic Exchange requires you to send a trackback ping to its server for each topic, which makes it more open and extensible but also more effort for the blogger. Topic Exchange has a strong user community - it's like an open source project. K-Collector seems to be aiming at a corporate market and so that's where their development focus is I think. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it does mean I'm more emotionally attached to Topic Exchange these days.
So the two development efforts can learn from each other. For example, it'd be great if Topic Exchange can automate its ping process a bit more (I'll try and think more about this, so I can offer some potential solutions), and K-Collector can keep the blogosphere in the loop regarding its continued development (e.g. more updates, especially to the mailing list).
I wonder if it's worthwhile merging Topic Exchange and K-Collector? There is so much talent in each project, but perhaps topic mapping has its best chance of gaining mainstream acceptance if we work under one umbrella "project". What do you reckon, am I getting all hippie about this or is a combined project a viable solution?
Cross-posted to Topic Exchange and K-Collector
In my previous post, I wrote about my early blogging efforts in March 2002 and the birth of Read/Write Web just over 1 year ago. In this post I review the past year and pick out some highlights. I'll finish with some thoughts about what the next year may bring.
Highlights of the past 12 months
April 2003: My inaugural post was titled The Read/Write Web. It outlined the manifesto I've promoted ever since then: the Web should be read/write, not read-only.
My third post, RSS - Subscribing to Topics, began my fascination with topic-mapping in blogging.
May 2003: Web browsers were a hot topic for me during this month - browser/editors (as Tim Berners-Lee originally wanted them to be) and the future of IE.
June 2003: I wrote a series of articles on The Universal Canvas.
July 2003: My first link from an A-List blogger, Clay Shirky, came from this article: Weblogs should be topic-first, not author-first.
Also in July, I coined the phrase Web of Ideas. It conveys a huge part of what the Web means to me - to "discover, create and share ideas". I later used this as the title of, and modus operandi for, my linkblog. I wrote a follow-up piece: Web of Ideas II.
August 2003: Two of my favourite posts from the past year are art/technology mixes: In XML did Kubla Khan - XML as Literature and The Whiteness of the Whale - the Semantic Web. I enjoyed writing these, as they're a blend of my Arty background (I'm an English Lit major) and my techy bent. I must write more like this...
Later in August, I wrote up an idea called Microcontent Wiki. It was about how to track a conversation that occurs in the comments on someone else's weblog.
September 2003: I converted to a CSS-based layout using XHTML.
On 30 September I got my first link from Dave Winer, which was a big deal to me because he's been a big influence on my read/write philosophy.
October 2003: My post titled Select Mode: Publisher best represents this month for me. There was a "broadcasting vs conversation" meme going around at the time and the point I was trying to make was that I use my weblog first and foremost as a publishing medium.
November 2003: Inspired by Erik Benson, I signed up for Nanowrimo - an annual contest where participants have to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. I proceeded to bore my readers witless throughout November with updates from my novel. However, Nanowrimo was a fantastic experience for me. It was bloody hard work, but to actually complete a novel was a big thrill.
December 2003: Apart from recovering from Nanowrimo, I wrote a few posts on weblog ontologies and taxonomies.
January 2004: I came up with a concept called The Fractal Blogosphere. Inspired by Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Fractal Web theory, it was a proposal for an alternative measurement of blogging to the Power Law. It got quite a bit of coverage in the blogosphere.
February 2004: I got all excited by the possibilites of Information Flow as a kind of bottom-up Knowledge Management.
March 2004: My most successful post yet, an interview with Marc Canter. It got Slashdotted, which caused a big spike in hits. But most importantly, it showed I have what it takes to be an 'amateur journalist'. Now I've just got to work out how to get paid for doing it ;-)
The Future
Content-wise, I can't predict what the future of Read/Write Web holds. That's what makes blogging so exciting! But there may be changes in infrastructure. I'm working on a re-design, with a new CSS layout and possibly a new weblog authoring tool (Movable Type). Stay tuned.
Here goes another self-referencing post about blogging. A couple of days ago I clocked up 1 year on this weblog, having started Read/Write Web on 20 April 2003, with an introductory essay called (of course) The Read/Write Web. Looking back on the past 12 months, I have to say that weblogging has done me a world of good. It's been my creative outlet, it woke up my previously-dormant writing genes, I've met a lot of interesting people, my critical thinking has improved and my INTJ imagination has prospered.
Pre-History
Actually my weblogging efforts started more than 2 years ago, in a short-lived weblog called Modern Web. I was just getting into reading blogs at that point - Dave Winer's Scripting News was one of the first weblogs I read on a regular basis, also a New Zealand site called Aardvark. I soon enough discovered that Dave Winer had created a weblogging tool called Radio Userland. So at some stage in March 2002 I downloaded Radio Userland and began to experiment with this new (to me) web publishing form. I should mention that I wasn't a newbie in terms of web publishing, as I'd developed a football picks website in the late-90's. It was a dynamic site too, developed using ASP and an Access database. But after a couple of years I gave up the football picks website, because I wanted to do something involving writing. 21 March 2002 was the day I published my first "post" in my new Radio Userland weblog: click to view screenshot.
In those early days I was experimenting and mostly used Modern Web to store quotes and links. I did the occasional paragraph of original thought, but in retrospect not nearly enough. My About Me page in this first incarnation of my weblog described my blogging as "an informal commentary". That is, I was commenting on other peoples content and not truly creating my own content.
I abandoned this first weblog attempt on 31 May 2002 - a little over two months after I started. Something wasn't clicking.
Read/Write Web is Born
A year later, when my Radio Userland license came up for renewal - I decided to give blogging another go. But this time I was determined to use it to write original content. After a bit of thinking, I eventually decided on "Read/Write Web" as the name for my new weblog. I was influenced by Dave Winer's Two-Way Web theory and accompanying website. Also by Anil Dash's Microcontent Client essay, the Chandler open source PIM (Personal Information Management) project, "next-gen websites" (as I was calling them back then), counterpoint music, XML technologies, and much more. When I was making notes for a domain name to buy, I noted that read/write means:
"capable of being displayed (read) and modified (written to)" - Webopedia
It was perfect. I bought the domain name and then began to write.
Coming up In Part 2: Highlights of the past year; plus plans for the future.
Today I got my first article in print. My interview with Marc Canter made it into Computerworld New Zealand (pg 16, April 19 edition - right over the page from Jon Udell). It was one of my goals at the start of this year to get my writing published in the print world, so I'm chuffed to have achieved it! Here's a screenshot PDF of the article (relatively low-res to save bandwidth).
For those of you who may have arrived at my personal website via Computerworld, you may be interested in reading the extended version of the Marc Canter interview. Or perhaps pay his company website Broadband Mechanics a visit (newly re-designed, with my interview linked on the homepage too. Excellent!). Or you could stick around, make yourself at home, put your feet up and browse through my archive of weblog writings - by date or by topic.
What the heck is Blogging?
Some of you may be wondering what all this "blogging" business is about. The best way I can explain it is invite you to participate in the personal publishing revolution. Firstly, to read and subscribe to weblogs - try out Bloglines as an easy-to-use "newsreader". You can start by subscribing to this weblog ;-) Click here to subscribe to Read/Write Web in Bloglines. Or, see that orange button with "RSS" on it - to your left? RSS means "Really Simple Syndication". Right-click that and copy it directly into Bloglines.
The second part of the blogging equation is the writing and publishing. There are a variety of tools out there, including Radio Userland, Movable Type and TypePad. I currently use Radio Userland to publish this weblog and Movable Type for my linklog (daily list of links).
So am I really a Journalist?
Not really, but my interview with Marc Canter was an example of journalism. The reason I bring this topic up is that there's been a lot of talk lately about whether blogging is journalism. Jay Rosen wrote an excellent essay on this a couple of days ago. His conclusion was that "Blogging is not automatically journalism." There's a lot more to the debate than just this statement, but it's all philosophical. Read Jay's post and all the great comments others made on his weblog, if you want the full picture.
For what it's worth, I think journalism is a craft that must be learnt and practised constantly - much like being a Web Designer or Producer is a craft. I can occasionally practise the craft of journalism, and perhaps I'm even good enough to "turn pro". But the reality is I'm an amateur Journo (sometimes) and a professional Web Craftsman (all the time).
Tom Coates wrote an essay last year called (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything... that outlines how weblogs make it easy for "amateurs" to publish. Nowadays anyone can create original content and distribute it to the world. If it gets picked up by a professional publishing outfit, all the better for both writer and readers. It's a win-win two-way web world!
I'm currently reading Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, which is available as a free download under a Creative Commons license. I'm only up to pg 64, but already I've discovered some great new ideas. One of them is "media literacy". This is the best definition I've found so far of media literacy:
"The ability to read, analyze, evaluate and produce communication in a variety of media forms (television, print, radio, computers, etc.)."
Lessig refers to it as "an expanded literacy - one that goes beyond text to include audio and visual elements" (pg 50). He follows this with a paragraph that really made me sit up and take note:
"Read-only." Passive recipients of culture produced elsewhere. Couch potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth century. The twenty-first century could be different. This is the crucial point: It could be both read and write. Or at least reading and better understanding the craft of writing. Or best, reading and understanding the tools that enable the writing to lead or mislead. The aim of any literacy, and this literacy in particular, is to "empower people to choose the appropriate language for what they need to create or express." It is to enable students "to communicate in the language of the twenty-first century."
In a nutshell:
20th Century = Read-Only
21st Century = Read/Write
Now obviously this is exactly what I've been trying to promote on my own weblog over the past year, but it's only been recently (after my interview with Marc Canter in fact) that I've begun to appreciate that "personal publishing" goes far beyond writing. It's whatever form of multimedia is most suited to you, the Reader/Writer.
Writing in Multimedia
Lessig goes on to tell a story about a group of kids from "a very poor inner-city Los Angeles school". They created multimedia projects to express themselves on a subject that was very relevant to them - gun violence. They used a combination of images, sound and text:
The project "gave them a tool and empowered them to be able to both understand it and talk about it," Barish explained. That tool succeeded in creating expression—far more successfully and powerfully than could have been created using only text. "If you had said to these students, ‘you have to do it in text,’ they would’ve just thrown their hands up and gone and done something else," Barish described, in part, no doubt, because expressing themselves in text is not something these students can do well. Yet neither is text a form in which these ideas can be expressed well. The power of this message depended upon its connection to this form of expression.
That last point is worth repeating: the power of a message is intimately linked to the medium it's expressed in. Sounds pretty similar to the famous McLuhan maxim, doesn't it: The Medium is the Message. This is how McLuhan described his famous soundbite in a 1969 interview (which I've written about before):
"...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."
The bit I want to focus on here is where McLuhan says the message isn't the content itself, but the medium. In other words, how the content is expressed. It's the same thing Lessig is talking about when he refers to "the language of the twenty-first century" and it's composed of images, sound, text. In my words: Web technology is increasingly enabling people in the 21st Century to write using multimedia. Nowadays you can express yourself in whatever medium best suits you (nb: the plural of 'medium' in this sense is 'media').
And, as Lessig goes on to say, it's all about constructing meaning for yourself: "Text is one part - and increasingly, not the most powerful part - of constructing meaning." One of his interview subjects explains further:
"[But i]nstead, if you say, "Well, with all these things that you can do, let’s talk about this issue. Play for me music that you think reflects that, or show me images that you think reflect that, or draw for me something that reflects that." Not by giving a kid a video camera and . . . saying, "Let’s go have fun with the video camera and make a little movie." But instead, really help you take these elements that you understand, that are your language, and construct meaning about the topic. . . ."
The Future of Blogging
I've been following the recent activity over at Lucas Gonze's new music-logging website, WebJay. Seb Paquet and Jon Udell have been talking about it and Lucas and Alf Eaton have been developing musiclogging apps. I've played around with Webjay a bit, downloaded a couple of playlists, but I can't say I've fully groked it yet. But then sound isn't my main "language", even though I'm a big music fan in my own way (mention The Velvet Underground to me and you won't shut me up!). WebJay is an example of one new form of media expression that is popping up in the 21st Century. A lot of people potentially will grok it, because sound is their medium, and they'll go on to create playlists and so forth with WebJay.
Writing text will continue to be my main personal publishing medium. Words are my thing and I'm reasonably good at creating them. I can't draw or paint, and I can't make music. I don't know anything about film-making or taking photos. So I'll mainly stick with words...and weblogging the 'text way'. But other people are different. And that's where I think blogs may struggle to accomodate peoples innate creativity. Unless weblogs can morph into sound-visual-text multimedia publishing tools. Which perhaps they will, if Lucas' experimentation with the sound form is any indication of the future of blogging. I'll certainly welcome it, as I want everyone to participate in the Read/Write Web. Not just plain text people like me :-)
In my day job I'm currently working on a Web Strategy for my company. I've created web strategies in the past and I enjoy doing them. At the previous company I worked for, a telecommunications multinational, I wrote a Web Strategy to merge the websites of the New Zealand and Australian offices. Unfortunately for me this was in the middle of a major downsizing, so part of the strategy was to hand over management of the websites to the larger Australian office (most other business units suffered the same fate). So I was in a sense falling on my own sword, along with many other New Zealanders at that company. Such is life in the corporate world! Anyway, this post is the beginning of a series on the subject of Web Strategy.
What better way to begin by asking the question: what does it mean to think strategically? Specifically I'm talking about IT strategy, and even more specifically Web Strategy. First let me give you an example of strategy from the IT arena.
Elephant Strategy
In December 2002, I read an inspiring book by a master strategist in the field of IT - Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM from 1993 to 2002. The book was titled Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? and it's a must-read for anybody who fancies themselves as a strategist. Gerstner was a few levels above what my station is currently - his strategic focus was on the company as a whole, whereas mine is limited to the Web Presence of my company. But you can apply the principles he espouses in his book to any level of strategy.
Here is a summary of the brief notes I made during December 2002:
- Don't spend a lot of time on problem definition - focus on solutions and actions.
- Solve problems laterally.
- He [Gerstner] liked people who had "strong technical underpinnings" combined with an "uncanny ability to translate technical complexities into common language".
- His strategy to keep IBM together: "genuine problem solving, the ability to apply complex technologies to solve business challenges, and integration."
- "Fixing IBM was all about execution...I wanted - IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency."
- IBM's "two forces" circa 1994:
1) "over time the IT industry would be services-led, not technology-led"
2) "networked model of computing that would replace the PC-dominated world of 1994."
- The Stack: (from bottom up) Systems / Middleware Software / Applications Software / Services
- Focus over breadth
- His kind of executive took personal ownership of and responsibility for end results --> they had to be drivers, detail-oriented, leading by example.
- [this is my favourite!] "The first task was to eradicate process itself...few rules, codes, or books of procedures. We started with a statement of principles."
- "I'm looking for people who make things happen, not who watch and debate things happening."
- From Analysis Paralysis to Make Decisions and Move Forward with Urgency (80/20).
- The fundamentals of successful enterprises and executives: focused, superb at execution, abound with personal leadership.
From these selected notes, we can glean that coming up with an IT Strategy involves setting high-level plans and principles to abide by. But let's define what a 'strategy' is more formally.
Defining Strategy
Here's a selection of definitions of the word 'strategy', via Google:
- An elaborate and systematic plan of action
- A framework guiding those choices that determine the nature and direction to attain the objective.
- An agreed-upon course of action and direction that helps manage the relationship between an organization and its environment.
- A general direction set for the organization and its various components to achieve a desired state in the future.
- Noun. Means to achieve an objective.
- A systematic plan of action to reach predefined goals.
- A plan or technique for achieving some end.
- A strategy is a series of planned and sequenced tasks to achieve a goal. Strategies must be clearly stated and be observable.
- A careful plan or method used to reach a goal.
- A long-range plan whose merit cannot be evaluated until sometime after those creating it have left the organization. (that last one from netfunny.com)
Military Strategy
Of course no article on strategy would be complete without a reference to Sun Tze's The Art of War:
"All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved."
...and a reference to Napoleon:
"Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the later than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never."
That's an apt definition for the Age of the Internet! Incidentally, the title of this post, "Napolean's Glance", means the following:
"The term Napolean's glance comes from the early strategy literature. The word strategy entered the English language in 1810, as military scholars rushed to study the battles of Napolean Bonaparte, the most successful general in history. Over the next two centuries, the study of strategy spread to other fields, especially business. The first scholarly study of strategy, On War (1832) by Carl von Clausewitz, showed the key to Napolean's success to be coup d'oeil, which means "glance" in French. Today coup d'oeil is recognized as expert intuition: in a flash of insight, one draws on what worked in the past in a new combination to suit the present situation."
Web Strategy
So with all of this general (ha ha, little joke) knowledge about strategy under your belts, let me now try and define what a Web Strategy is. For a business, a Web Strategy must be closely linked to the overall company strategy. So the first step in creating a Web Strategy is to review the company's overall strategic goals. Then you must determine how web technologies can be used to help achieve the company's goals. For this, you need to understand the Web medium and how to leverage the latest web technologies. (a side note: you will use the word "leverage" a lot when creating a Web Strategy. Also the word "synergy"). The next step is to review your existing website and other online activities, and compare these to competitors and industry benchmarks. Then go ahead and create your Web Strategy.
Well, it's not quite that straight forward! There are many other things involved in creating a Web Strategy - identifying stakeholders, defining requirements, doing SWOT analysis, drawing lots of Visio diagrams, leveraging IT jargon, etc. I will explore these more specific activities in future articles.
Jason Kottke has summarised Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, in 100 words using Microsoft Word's AutoSummarize feature. Jason's reasoning was that "no one has the time to read books anymore". Sounds about right. So, inspired by this, I decided to do the same with my 50,000-word Nanowrimo 2003 novel Dirtside to Spaceside. The result is hilarious. Also oddly revealing. So if you've been wondering what I'm wittering on about whenever I talk about my novel, here it is condensed to 100 words (technically 98):
Declan awoke suddenly. So Declan did.
"Oh hi Declan mate. Declan couldn't focus. Declan waited.
Declan sighed. Declan squirmed.
"Declan! Declan recoiled. Declan said. "Oh, we're Declan. Said Declan. "Hello Declan Atomz. Declan checked himself. "Hello Declan. Declan grimaced. Declan gulped. Declan nodded. Florrie hugged Declan suddenly.
You're a star Declan!"Declan's shoulder felt tense.
'Declan Atomz, New Zealand. Declan sighed. "Hi, I'm Declan. Declan gasped. How odd, thought Declan.
Declan's mouth fell open. Declan shook his head. "Declan,
Declan said thoughtfully.
Declan suddenly felt energized. Declan Atomz?" Love, Declan."
Declan's heart sank. Declan pleaded.
"Greetings Declan,
"Declan?"
Hands up who wants to get rid of the word "blog"? I'm beginning to wonder whether the word "weblog" has outlived its purpose. But before you call the white coats, let me try and explain.
You see, blogging to me has always meant writing and linking. Seb Paquet has a much more comprehensive definition, but in a nutshell blogging is all about publishing your writing and links. Nowadays we're entering a stage in the Read/Write Web (aka the Two-Way Web) where publishing to the Web is much more than writing and linking. It's about music, photos, videos, audio, situated software applications, editing your Orkut profile, etc.
Not everyone is, or wants to be, a writer. Boy have I found that out, the hard way, in my career so far as a Web Producer/Online Manager. Content Management has always been a big challenge in managing an Intranet or Internet website. The trendy strategy in recent years has been "distributed content management" - whereby you deploy a big 'ol Enterprise CMS, whack up some templates, and hand it over to the business to maintain the content. Well, that's the way it's supposed to work. But in reality, the majority of business people have little motivation to spend their time fiddling around with a website. Even the best Enterprise CMS's have a learning curve and all of them have some technical glitches and gotchas. So content maintenance often falls back on the IT dept or a Web-savvy team that specialises in content maintenance.
Motivation really is the key word - most business people have no desire to write and publish content and it's usually not in their job descriptions. Jeffrey Veen wrote an excellent article recently on why Content Management Systems have failed - websites need Editors, he says. Websites are a publication and so they need specialist publishers to maintain them.
To get back to blogging, there is a correlation with Content Management in the business world. Weblogging tools have undoubtedly made it easier for normal everyday people to publish their content to the Web. Just like Enterprise CMS's make it relatively easy for business folk to create and maintain content on their company's websites. But here's the crux: even though people have the tools nowadays, a large majority of them still don't have motivation to use them.
So far, the blogging world has been mostly all about writing and links. Therefore people who like writing and linking are attracted to blogging. But that's a small percentage of people who use the Web. A lot of the general public, particularly the young and affluent, are already producing things on the Web. Music, photos, code, and so on. All they need is a vehicle to "publish" those things. For example, I know a few programmers who have some fantastic ideas about web development. But writing words isn't their forte - writing code is. So they tinker with code, make some notes, try out a few ideas - but all of this never gets published. Weblogs aren't quite the tool for that.
And here's where I come back to the word "blog" and why I want to kill it off. Because it's so ingrained now as meaning writing and linking, it doesn't express the full variety of things that are beginning to be produced and created on the Web by 'amateurs'. The phrase "personal publishing" does a better job of describing this new range of multimedia production.
In order for the personal publishing revolution to take off, I reckon we've got to break free of "the blogosphere" and propel ourselves into a new Universe of Personal Publishing. Sure, writing is my forte and I use my weblog primarily as a publishing tool. But there's a whole other world out there, ready to explore!
