I recently downloaded the mIRC client and have been checking out the Freenode IRC network. The few times I've logged in there haven't been many people about - mainly because I live in New Zealand and so my time zone is out of whack with the northern hemisphere. But tonight (Saturday night my time) I had a nice chat with Seb Paquet and Suw Charman on the #kmtalk channel. The other channels I've discovered so far are #joiito and #technorati.
Seb pointed me to a Topic Exchange wiki page for topics as meeting points, which is something I'm interested in exploring further with the community. e.g. Person-centered versus Topic-centered is something I've written about in the past.
Even though my time zone and personal schedule prevent a full-on participation in the IRC world, I hope to pop back into #kmtalk and the other tech channels of freenode in the coming weeks. Maybe I'll see you there!
This is a boring post about fixing a couple of tedious Internet Explorer CSS bugs. But I want to record it for my own records and for future Google searchers.
1) The IE Italics bug - in the past I used italics whenever I quoted somebody. However on certain CSS designs, italics breaks the width settings of my page for IE users (90-95% of the population). In my design, it stuffed up the right-hand vertical line. Looked bad.
I found a comprehensive explanation and fix for this bug. It worked. Incidentally, positioniseverything.net is a fantastic resource for CSS designers. It covers a lot of other bugs and workarounds - and best of all it provides practical examples to back up the theory.
2) The second bug I never discovered a name for. But here's a description of it: my main content text is is in the middle column and aligned to the left. However the alignment got nudged a couple of pixels to the right at the point where the content in the left-hand floating menu column stopped and the main content continued on down the page. So the bug was only noticeable when the menu content was shorter than the middle column content. Anyways I fixed it by giving the body tag and all div tags below it height = 100%. I got this tip from a designer at work, who'd fixed the same bug on a project website. Here's his explanation (much better than I could word it):
"Because there is no initial height measurement for the html page you can't dynamically force divs past their contained content to the bottom. The inclusion of the 'height: 100%;' in the body tag gives the [content] div a measurement to calculate its height from. So if I give the [content] div a height of 100% it will fill to the bottom of the page (or any px measurement I care to have). Then give the sidenav div a height of 100% so it will fill to the bottom of the [content] div."
Note this also seems to have fixed some jerky scrolling issues in the Mozilla browser.
So that's my latest round of CSS bug-swatting. Do let me know if you spot other bugs. I haven't even tested the old browsers (smack on the hand with a ruler!), but frankly because this is a personal website I'm mainly concerned with Web Standards-compliant browsers.
I'm in a stage right now where there are lots of details that I'm juggling in my life, both in the real world and my weblog world. My job is busy, with quite a few relatively exciting projects on the go at the same time. My home life is busy, looking after a highly energetic toddler in the evenings. And I've been busy transitioning my weblog from Radio Userland to Movable Type - I still have a list of things to do on that, including comments system and search functionality. But I've finished the main content migration, new CSS design, topic archives and various other things. And then there's my reading and writing. I have some more articles to write and try to get published in the real world. Plus I've stored up a list of topics I want to explore and write about on my weblog. I recently read Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and I found that very inspirational (expect some posts on that later). In other reading news, I'm on a Hemingway kick currently - I recently re-read A Moveable Feast and now I'm at the Paris 1920's stage of a Hemingway biography. So I'm keeping busy with all that and more.
Why am I telling you all these details? Well this morning I read a post from a fellow who has decided to give up blogging [via Chocolate & Vodka]. His reasoning:
"...my blog self is not my entire self and I must say that I've been cool with that as long as both of those two selves never happen to appear together in the same room. When that happens, it shines a spotlight right on top of that partial disclosure or split identity issue and this is something I'm finding uncomfortable to reconcile."
This got me thinking about how my own blogging and real-life "identities" co-exist and sometimes integrate. It reminded me of the 'weblog as avatar' concept which I and others are interested in. But I have to say I've never really been convinced that my weblog is my avatar (i.e. an online representation of myself). For one thing, I deliberately hardly ever talk about my personal life and family online. I don't write about what music I listen to and I don't usually mention the books I read (although I've made an exception in this post). I also don't talk about my day job here, even though I am a Web Producer by day and my weblog is focused on Web Technology. Well actually what I mean is, I don't talk about specific details of my day job - like the people I work with, the projects I work on, the company I work for. I do write about topics that intersect with my day job, I just don't personalise any of it.
This is because there is a distinct split between my real-world self and my weblog self. That split is inevitable in any professional writing and I'd argue very healthy for a weblog. I wouldn't have it any other way, but maybe that's because I see my weblog as a publishing tool first and foremost. A social publishing tool perhaps, because I do converse with other people via my weblog.
Unless you think of a blog as an online diary, you shouldn't have any reason to fully integrate your real-world self with your weblog persona. Integrate aspects of your personal life, sure. But there's a big difference between infusing your writing with personality (which I try to do) and transcribing your daily life into a weblog (the online journal variety of blog). Some people are doing both - i.e. they have a 'professional' blog and a diary blog. Other people have blogs that mostly focus on their topics of interest, but they also include selected tales from their personal life. It's a fine line - but the more personal your weblog writing is, the more your weblog 'avatar' begins to resemble you. The less personal your weblog is, the more your weblog avatar has its own unique identity - which you can keep at arms length if need be (e.g. if your boss starts reading your blog).
I have to admit I've been thinking of adding a bit more of 'the offline me' into my weblog - e.g. perhaps I will start talking about music more, maybe I'll add some multimedia components to my weblog that highlight my personality some more, maybe I'll start to write some personal essays. But there will always be a line that I don't cross, especially when it comes to people in my private life (e.g. family, work).
Let me return to the 'weblog as avatar' concept, most famously stated by Tom Coates last year:
"This flexibility of publishing [for weblogs] creates a fluid and living form of self-representation, the 'homepage (as a place)' has become the 'weblog (as a person)' that can articulate a voice. And when there are a multiplicity of voices in space, then the possibility arises of conversations. And where there is conversation there is the sharing of information. And conversation about what? Well everything from music and movies and animation and medical information."
I agree with the concept of a weblog as a kind of personalisation of the tradional web homepage. However in the case of a 'professional' weblog, if you're describing it as an avatar then it would be a highly focused one - or extremely limited, depending on your point of view. For example if you were to think of my weblog as my online avatar, then you'd come to know me as a person who witters on about topic-mapping, knowledge management, web design, the universal canvas, and various other esoteric web-ralated topics. You'd completely miss how important my family is to me, my musical tastes, my interest in rugby, the fact that I play squash (including with one of the guys on my blogroll), and a whole lot of other 'personal' details that I don't talk about on my weblog. Did I say "talk about" - I meant "write about"! Heh heh, see what I mean?
You also can't really tell what kind of a person I am from my weblog. In real life am I funny like Chandler? Macho like Joey? Quirky like Ross? Or maybe I'm nothing like a Friends character! :-) You could probably take some educated guesses after perusing my weblog archives. For example I've mentioned before that I'm an INTJ, so that perhaps gives you some indication of my personality. And, as I mentioned above, I try to infuse my writing with my personality.
My point is that one's weblog avatar is limited by the scope of one's weblog content.
So your weblog avatar doesn't have to be "in the same room" as your real-life identity. If that happens too often, your online persona will eventually clash with your real-life identity (most likely, it'll be your online persona that gets your offline one into trouble). Incidentally I'm sure Tom wasn't implying that weblogs are fully representative of a person. His main point I think was that compared to static old-style homepages, weblogs have much more personality. I agree and it's a good thing. It's what makes the Web such a fun place and I get to meet lots of interesting weblogs...er, I mean people!
Now you tell me! There is in fact a way to automatically ping Topic Exchange from within Movable Type. Thanks to an old Ben Hammersley post, I found out that the category attributes page has a box to enter TrackBack URIs to automatically ping.
So after all my work over the last week, I've managed to set up MT so it:
1) adds ENT data automatically to my RSS file, which allows KC to aggregate my posts; and
2) auto-ping TE, which allows it to aggregate my posts. Whew!
Right that really is the end of my topic-mapping shenanigans for a while... I've done my bit for the community. I'm off to read a biography of Hemingway (yes, really).
Topic navigation is up and running on Read/Write Web, including cross-posting to both K-Collector and Topic Exchange. You'll notice on the main menu, it now lists internal topics (or categories if you prefer - you say tom-ah-to, I say tom-ay-to). And in my RSS file, I've added references to both KC and TE. Here's basically what I added in the MT template:
<ent:cloud ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/topics">
<ent:topic ent:id="<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>" ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/t/<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>/"><$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$></ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>
<ent:cloud ent:href="http://w4.evectors.it/itEntDirectory/topicRoll.opml">
<ent:topic ent:classification="what" ent:href="http://w4.evectors.it/itEntDirectory/topic?topic=
<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>" ent:id="<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>"><$MTEntryCategory$></ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>
The KC and TE references are pretty similar, except that KC doesn't need the dirify="1" bit for the topic name. Dirify in this context just means the topic value is made lower-case and if it's a double word an underscore is added between the two words.
At the end of each individual post, you'll now notice there are 3 links: the first one takes you to the Read/Write Web archive for the topic I've specified for the post. The next two links take you to the respective KC and TE pages for that topic. This is all done automatically using the <MTCategory> tag (oh, did I mention I'm using Category now instead of Keyword?).
There is one downside: sometimes TE and KC won't have the same topic name as me. In the case of this post here, I'm using the topic name "Movable Type" - which is fine because both TE and KC have a topic by that name. But a lot of times the topics don't synch. But that's a whole other issue, which I can't fix by myself.
So that's me done with topics for a little while. I'm going to relax a bit this week and write up some laid-back R/WW posts.
Matt Mower's written a great explanation of how the K-Collector aggregation process works. KC is a very clever system and I'm pleased to hear it doesn't actually require the KC client app on Radio or MT in order for people to participate in the KC community.
What I will do is continue with my own experiments with Movable Type. I already have the TE cloud reference in my RSS template, so I'll add the KC cloud reference too. Then as I write posts I'll add topics using my chosen MT field (at this stage 'Keyword', but I'll probably change to 'Category').
Note that I could download the MT client Matt's created, but I'd actually rather play around myself with MT and see how both KC and TE pick up my posts.
Likewise, I've asked Phil Pearson if Topic Exchange can pick up my ENT data from my RSS feed automatically. If I can get both KC and TE aggregating my ENT data, without me having to ping either one, I'll be a happy man :-)
Also I should perhaps clarify my goals with all this. In the short-term I want to:
1) Set-up MT so that I can add topic data to both KC and TE.
2) Set-up my own internal topic navigation, which ideally I'd like to synch with KC and TE (in terms of topic names).
For now I'll leave the hard part aside - i.e. synching topic data between KC and TE. Matt's done a lot of work on this in the past, using XFML and XTM and so forth, and so he can tell you it's not a trivial task. So let's call that a long-term goal.
I guess my remaining goal for the short-term is to try and convince Phil to get TE to automatically aggregate my ENT data from my RSS feed. But being a humble user, I've no idea how difficult a request this is - i.e. it's easy for me to ask the question, it may be a lot harder for Phil to do the work ;-) So I don't want to press the issue...
Also, I want to investigate Blogdigger some more to see how I can tie in my topic navigation experiments with Bloggdigger's categorisation system. Greg - any ideas for that?
There's already been a great response to my post last night (see the comments to previous entry). Greg suggested his aggregator Blogdigger could be included in this - I agree! Matt and Andrew also posted very thoughtful responses.
Here's some of my feedback (copied from the comments - I must get these enabled inline...):
Overnight while pondering my post (which I regard as just a 'starter for 10' btw, not a final solution by any means), I did conclude that KC essentially already does what I describe - polls registered RSS feeds with ENT in them and aggregates them. It would be great if TE also had that functionality.
It's the client ping that I think is unnecessary and possibly holding back community uptake - with TE the ping is a manual process for the blogger, and with KC you need to install an add-on tool to enable the pinging. Both require too much manual effort for the blogger (IMHO of course). eg Bloglines does all its aggregation automatically (every hour I think), with no pinging required from the blogger.
Although Andrew I take your point about bandwidth utilization. But if Bloglines (and Blogdigger) can do it, why not KC and TE?
A few weeks ago I suggested merging Topic Exchange and K-Collector together, or at least bring the two sets of functionality closer together. I figure I'll take a leaf out of Marc Canter's book and try and rally the community together on this project. I'm hoping the respective developers of Topic Exchange and K-Collector can get together and figure out some easy solutions. I'm happy to set up a mailing list or wiki to co-ordinate this?
It has to start somewhere and where better than from a humble user's perspective - i.e. me. So here's what I've done so far to get the ball rolling and I want to challenge others to build on this (or if its wrongheaded, suggest other ways to merge KC and TE's functionality).
When I was using Radio Userland, I had my site hooked up to K-Collector using their add-on tool for Radio Userland. When I moved to Movable Type a couple of weeks ago, I had to cease my connection to K-Collector because as far as I know it's a Radio Userland-only tool (although there was talk of an MT add-on being developed?). So tonight I did some tinkering with my blog, to
1) try and re-enable community topic sharing for my weblog; and
2) to resume my project to get an internal topic navigation system running (I had done some initial work with XSLT at the beginning of the year, but that fell by the wayside...).
Now, there is one major thing that Topic Exchange and K-Collector have in common: they both use ENT (Easy News Topics), which is an extension of RSS. Paulo and Matt created ENT as a simple form of topic mapping - and recently they've been talking of upgrading it. When I used Radio, whenever I published a post I also selected some topics from the K-Collector Radio add-on tool. This added the topics to my RSS feed, like so:
<ent:cloud ent:href="http://w4.evectors.it/itEntDirectory/topicRoll.opml">
<ent:topic ent:classification="what"
ent:href="http://w4.evectors.it/itEntDirectory/topic?topic=strategy"
ent:id="strategy">Strategy</ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>
As I understand it, the K-Collector website then aggregated my post to whatever KC topic was specified in the ENT tags in my RSS file ("Strategy" in the example above).
Because I'm using Movable Type now, I needed to find another way to specify topics. The great thing about MT is that it has spare fields where you can basically add whatever you like. So I decided to use the previously unused "Keyword" field to hold all my Topic data. This will serve two purposes: 1) I can hopefully get Topic Exchange and K-Collector to aggregate my posts based on the topic data I enter using this field (more on that in a minute); and 2) I will use it also for my own internal topic navigation. So this allows me to match my own topic navigation to the community topics (in TE and KC).
The next thing I did was alter my RSS template. Firstly I declared the ENT namespace in the <rss> element, like so:
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:ent="http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/">
Next, I added the ENT tags. Now for this I decided to start off using Topic Exchange, because it happens to be a perfect fit with the <$MTEntryKeywords$> tag which I'm using for my topics. If you look at the Topic Exchange RSS feeds for each channel, it makes it easy to swap in my MTEntryKeyword. e.g. this is from the TE "Technology" topic:
<ent:cloud ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/topics">
<ent:topic ent:id="technology" ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/t/technology/">
technology</ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>
Because all the TE URL's are in the format "http://topicexchange.com/t/" and the id perfectly matches the topic name, it's easy for me to swap in my MTEntryKeyword. Here's what I added to my RSS template in MT:
<ent:cloud ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/topics">
<ent:topic ent:id="<$MTEntryKeywords$>"
ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/t/<$MTEntryKeywords$>/">
<$MTEntryKeywords$></ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>
I added this just above the ending <item> tag.
NB: it may be just as easy to do this with KC, I haven't checked that yet. However KC has the additonal component of the ent:classification tag, so I decided to tackle TE first as it didn't have that extra tag.
So that's my RSS file ENT-enabled. Now whenever I add a new entry to my weblog, I simply enter the Topic Exchange topic name into my "Keywords" field. When published, this adds it to my RSS file in the ENT tags specified above - which at the moment map exactly to Topic Exchange's format. But...I still have to manually send a ping to TE under the current TE system.
So here's my suggestion (and I apologise if this has been suggested before - I'm sure it has!). What if we, the users, could register our RSS files with Topic Exchange and K-Collector, and both of those services then regularly poll all registered RSS files - say hourly - and pick up any new posts that have ENT tags in them? So in effect Topic Exchange and K-Collector act like RSS Aggregators (e.g. Bloglines) and poll users RSS files, rather than the users having to manually ping the TE and KC websites. It makes more sense for the Aggregator to do the work, rather than the person/blogger.
The beauty of this idea is that we - the users - can use ENT as our 'Topic Central'. That is, we specify our topics in the RSS - and that's the end of our part of the job. It's then up to the TE and KC aggregators to poll registered RSS files and collect all the new ENT tagged data. If e.g. both TE and KC have a topic named "technology", then great they won't have to do any work to add them to their respective clouds. There is a bit of work of course when the topic names and/or ids don't match up - but that's solvable surely? e.g. some form of topic mapping between TE and KC.
So what do you all think? I'd really like to see some action to merge the functionality of TE and KC together - for the good of the community (rah rah!).
This is an article I've submitted to Computerworld NZ. I interviewed Ferry Hendrikx of the NZ E-Government Unit for this. Note that the target audience is mainstream IT people, so as well as writing about Ferry's experiences in E-Government I decided to also explain what RSS is and put it in the context of everyday IT. So here it is:
<start of article>
RSS is an XML-based standard for syndication of news and other regularly-updated content. It is being widely adopted as a form of online publishing - The New York Times and Reuters are just two big-name publishers who now offer RSS "feeds". The New Zealand Government began using RSS feeds in 2003 to publish government news to the public. In July 2003 the New Zealand E-Government Unit released a document entitled "A standard for the publication of government news summaries", which outlined their vision for RSS in the New Zealand public sector. I interviewed the document's author Ferry Hendrikx, from the New Zealand E-Government Unit.
The document by Hendrikx proposed a 3-part RSS "component" for e-government, made up of:
- RSS news feeds - News Aggregation - A Syndication/Subscribe service
This is known as 'publish/subscribe' on the Web and it is one component of the New Zealand E-Government strategy.
The E-Government Strategy document published in 2001 declared that the Internet should be "the dominant means of enabling ready access to government information, services and processes" by June 2004. Hendrikx views the publish/subscribe model as "one of a number of ways of making information available" and confirms it is "one of our key goals". As to whether RSS is being used by the Government to distribute information both to the public and internally, Hendrikx asserts that "this model is equally useful for making information available for both public and internal consumption."
The history of RSS comprises a number of competing and at times conflicting versions. It's also a matter of contention as to who invented RSS. Netscape were the first to release something called RSS - which at that time stood for "RDF Site Summary" and was designed for use in portals. It was labelled RSS 0.9 and came to light in March 1999. Netscape went on to release RSS 0.91 in July that same year, re-christening it "Rich Site Summary". This version included features from Dave Winer's <scriptingNews> format.
In December 2000, RSS 1.0 was released by an independent group of developers - it used RDF (Resource Description Framework) syntax and focused on modularity and extensibility. It had more in common with RSS 0.90 than RSS 0.91, which was one of the reasons the RSS world forked off into two different directions. Soon after Dave Winer released RSS 0.92, which was a simpler version of RSS that built on RSS 0.91. The most popular version of RSS today is RSS 2.0, which was released by Dave Winer's company Userland in September 2002.
When the New Zealand E-Government Unit came around to selecting which RSS format they would use at the end of 2002, they opted for RSS 1.0. Hendrikx explains how they came to that decision:
"We started researching news syndication in late 2002. It was clear to us that we needed an extensible way to add new information to our RSS feeds. The early RSS standards (0.9x) were not extensible. RSS 1.0 was chosen mostly because of its standards based approach and the use of XML namespaces. The fit of RSS 1.0 with DC (Dublin Core) also helped our decision."
In their implementation, the New Zealand E-Government Unit added the Dublin Core-based New Zealand Government Locator Service (NZGLS) metadata component, for government specific information. The NZGLS metadata standard is the official New Zealand Government standard for metadata. For example one of the NZGLS tags, <nzgls:type.agency>, specifies the Government agency for each item in the RSS feed.
Currently the New Zealand E-Government has about 20 agencies generating RSS feeds. These are collected and aggregated into two public RSS feeds, which can be found at http://news.portal.govt.nz/. Hendrikx says that "these two feeds differ only by the geographic cover of the content: one contains only country wide news, the other contains all news including regional."
The document published in July 2003 focused on the first part of the e-government RSS component, RSS feeds. The next parts, aggregation and syndication, are actually in deployment already says Hendrikx.
"An aggregator was successfully prototyped last year. A production version is now running and produces the two RSS feeds mentioned previously. The output from the aggregator also drives the news content on the Govt.NZ portal (http://www.govt.nz/)."
Hendrikx says that details of the aggregation and syndication features will be published on the E-government site "at an appropriate time to link with upgrades to the portal".
In the commercial world, RSS and syndication technologies are familiar to only a small percentage of people. Mainstream IT people have yet to buy into the Publish/Subscribe vision, so there is a need to educate people and evangalise the benefits of publishing in RSS. Hendrikx says that this is true of government agencies too.
"The concept and its benefits are not always immediately obvious and so we've spent time talking to agencies. Some agencies with the in-house technical capability were quick to adopt the system. Other agencies have joined up on a gradual basis as they developed an understanding of the benefits. One agency produced a forms-based client for us to help the smaller agencies generate their RSS content. In the longer term we may roll out a push based technology that allows interested agencies to push their RSS content to our server rather than having to publish RSS on their websites."
The E-Government is one of the early adopters of RSS in New Zealand. Non-government organisations are now starting to consider implementing RSS and syndication technologies too. Hendrikx advises "the advantage of RSS is that it makes content widely available. RSS is fairly easy to implement, as there are plenty of tools available to help you."
Commercial companies might not need the metadata rich feeds that RSS 1.0 enables. It's even easier to use RSS 2.0 to publish news and other regularly updated information. Companies may even want to consider engaging their customers in conversations, by publishing weblogs with RSS feeds. But whichever form of RSS you use, one thing's for sure - the world of RSS and syndication is re-defining how information is published and read on the Web.
All this hullaballoo about Movable Type's new licensing structure is just another example of one of the Web's enduring issues: how to make money on the Web when users are accustomed to free lunches. It's not just an issue for developers either, it's as bad (if not worse) for writers.
But before I address that wider issue, if you were to ask me does Movable Type's announcement make me regret my recent transfer from Radio Userland to Movable Type - the answer's an emphatic no. Admittedly one of my reasons was Radio's US$40 per year fee, but let me re-state the context for that. I've got no problem paying for a publishing system like Radio Userland or Movable Type, but there has to be some forward movement in the product in terms of functionality. And that's where Radio failed me, for there hasn't been a decent upgrade to the product in 2 years (as I explained in full here). Movable Type meets my needs currently and probably for the foreseeable future, even though I'm a bit concerned when someone like Mark Pilgrim makes a good case for switching to an "open source" product like Wordpress because its future is more certain.
For all the griping I've read on the Web about MT's announcement, Jason Kottke summed up my feelings the best. He advocates an MT licensing structure that provides "freewheeling personal use of MT". He rightly points out that this "is an investment that will pay off handsomely in the future." Movable Type's developer community is their most precious asset, so I join Jason in urging Six Apart to look after it. You only need to (sadly) look at Radio Userland's developer community, a shadow of what it was 2 years ago, to see what may happen to MT if they're not vigilant.
(update, the next day: Six Apart have since loosened the restrictions on number of authors/weblogs in the free version of MT, which will help appease the wailing masses. I applaud Six Apart's quick action on this. That's the sign of a company that listens to its users and wants to keep its developer community happy. Good on ya!)
I mentioned in the beginning of this post that writers have it worse than developers. If Web users have a hard time ponying up cash for software, they are even more reluctant to hand over money for content. Just ask all the newspapers and magazines that are trying desperately to adapt to the online publishing model (if you want to know more about that, check out Poynter E-Media Tidbits). How does all this affect me? Because of my goals and aspirations and how I have to balance those with my duty as a breadwinner for my family.
You see, it's my goal to be a writer. Writing is in my blood and I love doing it. It's every person's dream to earn a living doing something they love, right? Well it's my dream to earn a living as a writer. So how can I do that? This weblog is a start. It's a space for me to experiment and practice my writing. It's my own personal publishing house. It's a lot of other things too (a way of meeting and interacting with like minds, etc), but in terms of my writing dreams it's the center of my universe.
You may've noticed I've signed up for Google Ads and they are placed fairly prominently in my new weblog design (on the right, on individual entry pages). But I have to tell you that I don't expect to make any real money from those ads. Actually I just now checked my click-through rates, for the first time, and I see that I earned $5.12 in the first month (see what I mean!). The Google Ads are an experiment and I'd be grateful if they ended up paying my annual web hosting costs - but I don't expect any more from them.
So weblogging for me isn't about making money. Hmmm, how else then can I earn a crust as a writer? How about writing a novel and trying to get it published, I hear someone shout from the wings. OK, good suggestion. I've written a novel already...but I haven't attempted to get it published. Firstly, because I'm not sure it's any good. Secondly, even if it was good it's not mainstream enough. Thirdly, only Stephen King makes any money writing novels right? Well OK, lots of other "mainstream" novelists earn a living writing novels. But you have to admit the mainstream isn't what it used to be. Our culture doesn't value novels much anymore. Television, movies, and now personal computers have all eclipsed the humble novel in entertainment value. What room there is for novels in the mainstream is taken up by formulaic and unoriginal legal thrillers and novels about serial killers.
The other issue is that the opportunity costs for writing a novel are high - I'd have to forgo my career as a Web professional and the steady (if unspectacular) income that goes with it. When you have a family to support, the risks are pretty high. So trying to write fiction for a living isn't really an option for me.
How about making money writing articles and such for paper publications, I hear some wag suggesting from the back row. Yeah I'm onto it. Well, I've made a start. I've got my second Computerworld article coming up, about RSS in E-Government. But I'm not getting paid for this, just as I didn't get paid for the Marc Canter interview in Computerworld.
I didn't really expect to get paid for the first couple of articles I submitted to Computerworld. My initial aim is to make a name for myself, get my writing out into the wider world. But eventually I have to consider: well I'm putting in all this effort, staying up late to do research and write these articles, spending lots of time on the computer when I should be spending it with my family. So I must be doing all this for a reason, right? What's the reason: recognition for my writing? A bit. Creative satisfaction? A bit. Learning new things to enhance my career as a Web professional? A bit. Money to help pay the mortgage? That would be nice, eventually...
To clarify, I only want to be paid (eventually) for the "professional" writing I do. This doesn't apply to articles I write for non-profit publications such as Digital Web Magazine, which I will gladly contribute to for free because they are run by and for the community that I belong to.
So non-fiction writing is a goer. If I'm to ever earn a living as a writer, it will probably be writing non-fiction. Unless I strike it lucky and one of my novels gets made into a Peter Jackson movie ;-)
Whuffie was the term coined by Cory Doctorow in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It means reputation. This weblog is enhancing my reputation (I hope) as a writer, and likewise any articles I write for Computerworld or Digital Web Magazine or any other publication will enhance my reputation too. If they're good articles. One day I might've accumulated enough whuffie to actually begin to make some money. If enough people read what I write and like it, then I may become marketable as an author/writer. That's pretty much what happened to Cory Doctorow himself. He has a hugely successful blog, Boing Boing, and that together with his earlier short stories and novels gained him enough whuffie to help him make it big with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
It's the same with web development. Ben and Mena Trott, and now Anil Dash, have put in 2-3 years of hard yakka to get Movable Type to the position it holds now: number 1 weblog system in the world. Movable Type has enormous whuffie. Now they want to get paid for it, which is totally understandable from the point of view I've laid out in this post. I'm sure people like Mark Fletcher of Bloglines (currently free) and Dave Sifry of Technorati (currently free) are thinking along the same lines. Both of those products have huge whuffie with the Web community. Sooner or later they will reach for the golden ring. Just as I will with my writing.
