Nothing like a Slashdotting to bring out the warm fuzzies. Marc and Lucas both have nice things to say about my interviewing style:
Marc: "The process is fascinating - an interview where you get to decide what's talked about, an intelligent discourse happens at your pace and you even get to read it before it's published.
This the way Interviews should be done."
"I think that Richard's style is characteristic of writing that's native to the net. He's a patient and thoughtful guy, and his b.s. meter is pretty sensitive."
They're both right of course ;-) A little background about my interviewing style. I've done about 5 'formal' interviews now (including one yet-to-be-published). For each new one, I start by thoroughly researching the interview subject. Based on that foundation, I devise a set of questions - usually long-winded (oops, I mean in-depth) and on a general theme that I've decided I want to explore. Depending on the circumstances, I'll conduct the interview by email or phone - or both. The interview process is collaborative and, apart from writing the actual questions, I find myself "shaping" the content more so than writing it.
UPDATE 6/11/04: I decided to nominate The Fractal Blogosphere and Evolution of Corporate Web Sites for the Best Software Essays of 2004 book that Joel Spolsky is editing. If you enjoyed either one of those articles, please leave a comment on Joel's discussion board to support my nominations. Click here to second my Fractal nomination, or here to second my Evolution one. Thanks :-) [end of update]
Joel Spolsky is editing a new book of the best software essays of 2004. He's looking for nominations and I commend him for opening it up for anyone to nominate. Of course, I'd love to have some writing of mine published in a book - so I'd like to nominate at least 1 thing I've written this year.
R/WW readers will know that I tend to write long, thoughtful posts - that can easily be defined as "essays". Incidentally the flip side is that, as Lilia pointed out, my posts can be a trade-off between depth and accessibility. So essays are arguably not the optimal format for weblog posts. But as Popeye would say, I yam what I yam and I can't help writing long posts :-).
Here are 10 of my favourite posts from 2004 that could be considered software essays. I'd very much appreciate it if you would let me know in the comments which one(s) you think I should nominate for Joel Spolsky's book.
Individualizing the
Web
The Fractal
Blogosphere
Interview with Marc
Canter
The
Evolution of Corporate Web Sites
Weblogs as Avatars
A Theory of Synchronicity for
the Web
Mama don't let your baby grow
up to be a Generalist
A New Kind of
Literacy
Electracy Comes From Other
Planets [worth considering for the title alone]
Digital Lifestyle Mobile
Jigsaw
P.S. If you haven't already, I encourage you to check out my interview with Lucas Gonze that I published yesterday. It's as long as an essay, but I learned a lot about P2P and decentralization from this collaboration with Lucas.
P.P.S. Wait till you see my next interview, you're going to love it! I did the phone interview this morning and I'll write it up over the next few days.
Update: Cool, the Lucas interview has just been Slashdotted!
Welcome to the first in a very special series of Web 2.0 interviews I'm conducting on Read/Write Web. My goal is to interview at least half a dozen people in the Web community who are building or shaping Web 2.0 - i.e. the Web as Platform.
My first guest is Lucas Gonze, creator of the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) web application Webjay. Lucas was an early developer of P2P applications and back in 2000 he created a peer-to-peer start-up called World OS. Although it subsequently "morphed into a dot-bomb" (in his own words!), it sowed the seeds for his current project Webjay - a P2P music-sharing website that has had plenty of coverage in The New York Times and other media publications.
It was an absolute pleasure to conduct this email interview with Lucas - I learned a lot about P2P and the "decentralization of taste". So in the immortal words of The Velvet Underground: settle back, pull up your cushions (whatever else you have with you). Here we go...
Richard: The World OS website is no longer on the air, but from what I could gather on the Wayback Machine archive of it, you were developing a P2P and decentralized network product called Goa. Can you give me an overview of what you were attempting to build and why - in semi-layman's terms if possible ;-)
Lucas: WorldOS was the company, Goa was the product. WorldOS was similar enough in both goals and technology to Jxta, which it preceded by about a year, that I'd leave the details to documentation on Jxta. In brief this was infrastructure for P2P applications.
Richard: What kind of "P2P applications" was World OS aiming for - music? business files? any and everything? What were the main types of files being distributed (or you wanted to distribute) via World OS and who was your target user?
Lucas: Business files. The idea was that this was a P2P toolkit in the shape of a J2EE component. It was in Java, the interface was almost exactly like a servlet, there was authentication, things like that.
Richard: There has been a lot of talk recently about the "Internet as Platform", meaning decentralized web services and the "network effects" that come of that. The lock-in strategy to gain users is based on data and content services, rather than software or operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows. Google, Amazon and Flickr are some notable examples of this theory. Was World OS trying to do a similar thing? I'm interested in why you chose the name "WorldOS"...
Lucas: Google, Amazon and Flickr are only elements of a larger thing with a coherent identity if you zoom way out. At that scale, the internet should, assuming the viewpoint is correct, exist within something like the Gaia hypothesis. The internet OS idea is a Gaia hypothesis for the internet.
The world OS idea is a Gaia hypothesis for all information processing entities, not just computers. For example, traffic conditions probably have an impact on internet weather, and so I prefer a view of information ecology that incorporates real world systems like rush hour traffic.
The operating environment at internet scale is a different kind of animal than an operating system. You don't build it, you observe it, and you don't write to an API, you try to take advantage of your observations. So my software was not ever intended to build an internet OS but rather to work well in the context of the existing internet OS.
Richard: How did World OS fit into this Gaia system?
Lucas: Goa was intended to be radically flexible and lightweight, which seemed to me to be the defining characteristics of successful software in that environment.
Richard: Napster was a centralized database P2P service. I admit I have a scratchy knowledge of P2P systems, but didn't decentralized file lists such as Gnutella win out in the end? BitTorrent is the P2P system that I hear most about these days (given I don't specifically follow P2P technologies). Where did World OS fit into all this?
Lucas: WorldOS routed via flooding, which is like Gnutella. However it used preferential flooding, meaning that it used reputation to learn the most likely paths over time.
Richard: Can you give me an example of how this worked in practice?
Lucas: I only have a hypothetical example, since we never managed to sell the software.
Let's say you have a hundred people in an office and one of them, Michael, wants to get a spreadsheet that his group is working on. The first time he does this his query is sent by flooding. He has two co-workers, Jesse and Brian. Jesse's desktop has a lot of spare capacity, Brian's laptop does not, so during the first flood it is Jesse's machine that returns the query. The next time Michael wants to get a file, Jesse's machine will be tried first, so that the extra cost of sending a message to Brian's machine will be saved.
Richard: This question leads on from the previous... You've said on the Webjay website that you don't consider Webjay to be a file sharing network. It seems like a very grey area. I guess I think of it as a link-sharing network that just happens to have media files on the end of each link. But then every time I click on a Webjay link, the media files - mostly songs - are automatically downloaded to my computer (to the 'My Music' folder on my Windows PC). So essentially I'm downloading files, whether I mean to or not. So I'm confused :-) Where does WebJay fit into the 'P2P system ecosystem', in your opinion?
Lucas: Webjay decentralizes taste. This seemed to me to be the next frontier after decentralized network connectivity was fully colonized by the filesharing people, because the decentralization of network connectivity created more centralization of taste, not less.
The first reason is that you traverse filesharing networks by search -- search-driven navigation relies on memorable identifiers to search for, for an identifier to become memorable requires marketing, and marketing is a tool only available to large centralized entities like major labels. The second reason is that, when demand drives supply as it does on filesharing networks, being known is a condition of becoming more known. The expense to break into this system is currently covered by marketing dollars.
To decentralize taste I needed to break that cycle. I chose to stick strictly to above ground networks because unauthorized material is cleaned out by DMCA requests and lack of bandwidth for consumer ISP accounts. The more marketing dollars are going into an artist, the more DMCA takedowns are issued and the more downloads there are to blow through upload bandwidth. If a rights holder has a problem with a URL, I don't want the URL, so it's convenient that such rights holders will knock down those URLs for me. Everything I do is out in the open because open networks are, for now, naturally inhospitable to centralized taste.
Richard: In the Wayback archives, you describe how the World OS project began and how eventually you stopped development on Goa and moved into P2P consulting instead:
"Writing now six months later, while the P2P hype balloon has been growing, the dot-com hype balloon has been shrinking. In that time we grew to eight people, released a steady stream of updates, worked an unbelievable number of hours and talked to more investors than I can count. We had serious deals on the table, but never one with plausible terms.
[...]
We are dropping development of the Goa product and moving full time into P2P consulting."
That's from January 2001. Looking at it now, 3.5 years later, is Webjay a natural progression for you from World OS - i.e. is it on the same developmental path you started down with World OS, a path which has thrown up legal and money obstacles for everyone?
Lucas: At the time the legal issues made a big difference because they scared away investors and customers. My colleagues in other companies doing P2P for business will tell you the same thing -- the RIAA successfully irradiated that turf, at least for a few years.
So what's the developmental path from WorldOS to Webjay?
WorldOS' budget was ridiculous. Webjay is ultra lean -- one guy, me, plus a lot of help from my friends. All it takes for Webjay to exist is a server and my rent money.
WorldOS was all vegetables and no dessert. Webjay has very little delayed gratification, it gets straight to dessert without stopping for dinner. The concept is that, where you normally have to download and listen to songs one by one, with Webjay you do it all with one click. It's about saving clicks.
What about the legal issues that Webjay is designed to finesse? Honestly, if I wanted to go for unauthorized music it would be no problem as long as I was willing to live in an underground style. Put the server in Russia, get a PO Box in Jenin, you're all set. But that's not the point -- authorized (but freely downloadable) music has compelling advantages.
Lucas: But let's go back a bit, change the question a little, ask things differently, because I have better stories than these to tell. Specifically I want to say how it is that the idea of decentralization is now so common.
It's New Years, 2000. I'm running a little web consulting company and we're doing well. I've got the money to do something else for a while, so I let the main contract lapse without renewal, let the subcontractors go off to fend for themselves, and sit down to do my thing. I'm just fooling around on the code that's going to be Goa, though it's not that well defined. In early March Gnutella appears. I get interested in it as a solution to the problem of ad-hoc discovery. I start working on a clone, in Java, which gets incorporated into the rest of my code. The Napster/Gnutella/Seti@home thing starts to break big. On June 2 I posted an announcement of a pre-alpha Goa release, along with a tarball of source:
"WorldOS is a framework for distributed applications similar to Freenet or Gnutella. The recent announcement of a portal based on Gnutella, Infrasearch, shows that there are a number of useful tools that can be created using this new technology. This framework enables the creation of many more such tools."
I get invited to talk about my related work at an academic conference called Twist 2000, which is at UC Irvine. The UC Irvine guys are mainly W3C affiliates; WebDAV and REST (the thesis, not necessarily the concept) are from there. This is July 2000. About ten days before the conference the P2P term took off via a column by Lee Gomes in the WSJ, so there is now a word.
There's a colloquium on what this new stuff is about. Now, back in those days we were calling this new stuff distributed computing, not decentralized. The question came up: what's the difference between this new thing and DNS? Somebody, I don't remember who, suggested that this new thing was decentralized.
I came home from the conference. To follow up on the conversations there I founded a mailing list called "decentralization" on eGroups, the topic of which was this new stuff. The list became a community center for people interested in peer to peer. It took off with the punditocracy and pretty soon that word become the conventional wisdom as to the value of P2P:
"All this was envisioned by our common teacher, Tim Berners-Lee, who was willing to design a system built on links that can break. This is the key philosophy to decentralization, a lovely term brought to us by Lucas Gonze. Don't wait for the chaos to end, embrace it, move on and do it again. The world will take care of itself."
Richard: With Webjay (and I think with World OS too?) you've been careful to avoid any of the legal trouble that plagued the likes of Napster and Kazaa. On the Webjay website you say that Webjay is "specifically crafted for both legality and common courtesy in a crazy environment" and you are at pains to encourage your users to "stick to authorized music". Is this strictly a business decision for you, in that you don't want lawyers to come down on you like a ton of bricks. Or were there other factors in the 'play it safe' strategy? e.g. a moral duty??
Lucas: It's true that I can't afford to go to court. Webjay will be history the instant somebody sues, no matter how stupid and wrong the suit is. Obviously.
But it's more important that the music I want to promote is music that I can share (whether through a URL or a direct copy). Webjay is ultimately a promotional tool -- it fills the same kind of role as the radio. I don't want to promote unauthorized music because it forces me to choose between the golden rule and the law. I don't listen to unauthorized music, so I need Webjay to find stuff to listen to.
I don't believe there is a moral duty to stick to authorized music. I do believe that politeness is the only path to a political solution. If somebody wants me to stand on my head while listening to their music, I will either stand on my head or find other music. If somebody wants me to listen to their music, they will have to make it available under terms that I can accept.
Politeness is a winner tactic. It forces the crappy businessmen in the recording industry to stop hiding behind piracy. It makes the good guys smell serious. It's a dignified way of living. It helps musicians who respect listeners get popular at the expense of musicians who don't. The sole problem with politeness is that the technology and culture to filter up the best music libre is still immature.
Richard: Lastly, what's the future of Webjay do you think? Given your experience with World OS and the lessons you learned from that, where would you like to go with Webjay in the next 2-3 years?
Lucas: Webjay will probably take on new features via spinoff projects, so that I don't break the existing community. The site does need a major makeover for usability and attractiveness; I don't know yet whether I'll call that new version Webjay or something else.
This web app is a beautiful machine. Over the next 2-3 years I will try to make more beautiful machines. I'd really like to make a better living, but that's secondary.
This is about as political as I'll get here on Read/Write Web, but I couldn't resist posting this cartoon by fellow kiwi Tom Scott. It also reminds me of the Getting paid for blogging controversy that is polarizing bloggers right now. For the record, I think it's a worthy experiment by Marc Canter... why does everything have to be so binary?
This post doubles as an update of my writing goals and a short review of
Michael Lewis' book Moneyball. First, my goals. Lately on Read/Write Web, I've been
exploring options for my future. eBooks and Knowledge Management
storywriting are a couple of things I've been researching. And one thing I passionately wrote about on this
blog was the idea of writing a "biography of Web 2.0" - where I would travel around
the West Coast of America and interview people involved in building Web 2.0. A grand plan
indeed, seeing as I have a young family and currently live on the other side of the world
in New Zealand! My inspirations for writing such a book are Michael Lewis, Tom Wolfe, Po
Bronson and other non-fiction masters (hence the tie-in with the Michael Lewis review in
this post).
Some of you may be wondering where I'm at with the book idea. Well I thought a good way to prove myself capable of such an undertaking would be to conduct a series of interviews by email and/or phone with some of the leading Web 2.0 characters. This would be a base for me to pitch a whole book to a publisher, plus it would be a starting point for the project and I would learn a lot. It's also a chance to get my readers and others in the blogosphere behind my book project - kind of like what Dan Gillmor did with We the Media.
So, coming up soon on Read/Write Web is (what I hope will be) a series of "Web 2.0" interviews. I've nearly completed the first interview, with a P2P pioneer. I'm in the middle of organizing the next one, with a leading Web 2.0 visionary. I hope I can get that finalized, but the fact that I'm on the opposite side of the planet is proving to be a slight hassle.
So my plan is to bring you lots of interesting interviews and Web 2.0 analysis on Read/Write Web, which will help me eventually pitch my Web 2.0 book idea to a publisher. One step at a time...
To the Moneyball book review. I've read all of Michael Lewis' books and this is yet another outstanding example of his work. His writing appeals to me because it's what I aspire to be as a writer - analytical, investigative, informative, compelling, using literary techniques to tell a real-life story. As an example of the latter, take this superb piece of prose that describes the Oakland A's GM Billy Beane (the main character in this book):
"Fuck!" he shouts again. He reaches for his snuff. He hasn't slept in two days. It's a tradition with him: he never sleeps the night before the draft. He's too excited. Draft day, he says, is the one day of the baseball year that gives him the purest pleasure.
Except when it goes wrong. He claws out a finger of snuff and jams it into his lip. His face reddens slightly. The draft room, at that moment, has an all-or-nothing feel to it. [...]
(pg 106-107) Now that is a great piece of narrative!
The part of the book I liked best was when Lewis told the story of Bill James, who pioneered the baseball analytics that is the subject of Moneyball. Lewis describes Bill James thus:
"A number cruncher is precisely what James was not. His work tested many hypotheses about baseball directly against hard data - and sometimes did violence to the laws of statistics. But it also tested, less intentionally, a hypothesis about literature: if you write well enough about a single subject, you needn't write about anything else."
This is a theory I've been interested in for a long time, particularly in regards to music writing. Lester Bangs is a good example of a music writer who managed to write about the important themes of life, just by writing about Lou Reed and all the other 70's rock stars he followed. His description of doomed musician Peter Laughner, who drank himself to death in his early twenties, is particularly memorable (from the book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung).
As Lewis says of James (pg 95): "...statistics were beside the point. The point was understanding; the point was to make life on earth just a bit more intelligible."
Which is precisely what I want to achieve as a Writer and Web Technology Analyst.
My Rating of Moneyball: 9/10
It's Friday afternoon where I live, so time for a less serious post. There's an art to creating good weblog post titles and most of the time I craft my post titles after I've written the post. However some post titles are just too good NOT to use, because they're witty or amusingly cliched or just downright memorable! Here's a list of blog post titles I have on hold, each of which I hope to deploy someday. Feel free to add yours in the comments.
Instructions: Where there's a blank (-----), fill it in with your favourite buzzword. e.g. a popular buzzword currently is "Podcast" - try inserting that into the suggestions below (it may need to be pluralised in some cases).
1. Dude, Where's My -----?
2. Is That A ----- In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Pleased To See Me
3. Mo' Better -----
4. ----- Considered Harmful
5. The Great ----- Experiment
6. ----- Is The New Black
7. ----- As A Platform
8. How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The -----
9. -----, It's All Greek To Me **
10. Read/Write Web Acquired By Google For $100 Million
** nb: the second-to-last one was inspired by my favourite newspaper headline of all time. It was by a British tabloid, during the time of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Australian officials had mistakenly issued a coin that depicted a coliseum, symbolic of ancient Rome, instead of a Greek amphitheater. The headline read: Rome or Athens, it's all Greek to the Aussies!
Jason Kottke wrote today that the blogging revolution will be commercialized. He said that "out of Technorati's top 100 most-linked weblogs, only 16 don't feature advertising or are otherwise noncommercial." NB: he had some provisos on who in the top 100 really qualifies as a blog.
There are a lot of issues to consider in Jason's post and the only way for me to come to grips with it is to ask myself: well, how does commercialization of blogging affect me and my blogging community? I'll start with a quote I found over on Douglas Rushkoff's blog (linked to in the comments on Jason's post):
"I don't believe we live in a marketplace. I believe we live in a world that can be understood using many different possible metaphors. The marketplace is one of them. An ecology is another."
Ah, metaphors. That's how I like to relate to things and begin to understand them. Now on my blog, Read/Write Web, I write for a number of reasons but one of them is professional. I'm a Web Technologist and by publishing my thoughts on my chosen field, I like to think I'm enhancing my career prospects. In that sense, I'm participating in a marketplace of content. I'm hoping my content here, and the knowledge I gain from writing it, will eventually lead to a satisfying job or business opportunity. But the market reality is that I'll be competing with other people to get that dream job or succeed in that business venture. This is a strategic view of my blog, similar to Dave Winer's viewpoint.
However, I also think of the blogosphere as an ecology - in much the same way that Dave Snowden thinks of Knowledge Management as an ecology. In that post on Snowden, I wrote:
"I love that term: ecology of knowledge. It emphasizes that knowledge is a fluid, almost living, thing; and that it's closely related to its environment - or put another way, its context (a word which Snowden uses a lot)."
And that's how I feel about blogging. I am participating in a relatively pure (pure as in non-commercial) space where memes and ideas are openly swapped and linked by people all over the world. I love the content that flows in this ecology - and I don't judge it based on commercial or popularity terms. I judge ideas (that may sound pompous, but I'm an INTJ ;-).
Now, regarding adverts on a blog. Personally, I earn pennies from Google ads and zippo from Amazon affiliate links. But for people like Jason Kottke or Dave Winer, they could potentially earn a living off ads on their blogs. That's a fact of life in the blogosphere, circa 2004. But if Kottke or Winer did put ads on their blogs, does that mean they lose their credibility or integrity in the blogging ecology? Not at all - I hate to sound like a broken record, but I subscribe to people based on the quality of their content. If a blogger's content also has a quantitative monetary value, well good for them. But as a reader, it doesn't concern me.
I know, I'm over-simplifying things. It's such a complex issue - and I haven't even regaled you with my Kurt Cobain-fueled theories on Popularity! So let me try and sum up what I'm trying to say in this post. Yes, blogs are being commercialized. Yes, I believe content has commercial value (whether that be strategic or tactical). Yes, I love the non-commercial nature of the blogging ecology. No, I don't think ads affect the integrity of a blogger or of the blogosphere (not if you, the reader, judge content qualitatively).
Content is King and it presides over both Marketplace and Ecology.
As a follow-up to my previous post, I decided to take the plunge and sign up with Feedburner (hat tip to Cristian!). Feedburner is a third-party service that generates an enhanced RSS feed for you. What's enhanced about it? For starters it enables you to track RSS statistics for all RSS Aggregators (not just Bloglines). Feedburner does much more too - e.g. it has a "browser-friendly" option that hides the XML code from users and it lets you splice in Flickr photos or del.icio.us links to your RSS feed. Feedburner is a great service, packed with features, but there is a trade-off...
Basically I've handed over control of my RSS feed to a third party, mainly so I can get some decent stats. I'm not overly comfortable with a third-party hosting my RSS feed, but then the decentralized content model is getting more and more acceptable on the Web (I use Flickr and del.icio.us now too).
I want to reiterate that Bloglines subscriber stats has a pretty large margin of error. As I said in my previous post, some people have a variety of RSS/Atom feeds associated with 1 blog. Bloglines only tracks each feed individually. In fact I myself have some subscribers on a little-known RSS 1.0 feed I have - and those subscribers don't show up in the Subscriber stats for my main RSS 2.0 feed.
Now that I have a Feedburner RSS feed, that situation will get worse because now I have a third RSS feed associated with this blog. I configured it so that Feedburner tracks them all as 1, which is the correct way to do it. Bloglines, by tracking each of my 3 feeds separately, is fragmenting my reader statistics.
Put another way - Feedburner takes a blog-centered approach to stats-tracking, while Bloglines takes a feed-centered approach. I much prefer blog-centered, as it's a fairer reflection of how many people subscribe to your content. I've emailed Bloglines Support to ask if they can fix this situation and provide an aggregate count of subscribers for any one blog - no matter how many different feeds it has.
It's too early to discuss what my trends are in Feedburner, but I will write about it later. If you want to try Feedburner out, MT users can follow the instructions here and here. For Radio users, Cristian sent me a couple of very informative emails that hopefully he'll post on his weblog.
Update: Great minds think alike. Jason Fried also has a post about Feedburner today and he lists some other benefits - including that it requires no change on the reader side and it takes the RSS load off your web server. Plus Dick Costolo from Feedburner points in the comments to a handy FAQ.
Remember my post 3 months ago that analysed Bloglines subscriber stats? Well I thought I'd review the numbers. You can blame Seb Paquet for this ;-) Why? Because he's just posted something on his weblog for the first time in over 3 months, which got me thinking about how his time away from blogging affected his stats. It turns out his Bloglines subscriber numbers have increased by 25% over the last 3 months, despite him not posting a single new entry! A similar story for Mark Pilgrim, who has all but turned his back on blogging - yet his stats are up 31%.
You'll notice my own stats have increased by 73%, but that's only the rose-tinted view. My subscriber numbers in Bloglines have increased by 58, which may sound good (and it is!) but it's the second-lowest number in this group. So in terms of raw numbers, the rich are getting richer. I'd term myself a working class blogger struggling to lift himself up into the middle classes. ;-)
Some provisos about these stats. The biggie is that some bloggers have a variety of RSS feeds and so the one I am tracking here may not be their primary feed. Or an alternative feed to the one I'm tracking may be the one getting all the new subscribers. So the numbers below are by no means authoritative.
I really wish Bloglines would aggregate all of a person's RSS feeds into 1 combined feed, for subscriber-tracking purposes. Or even better, open up their API to tracking subscribers.
There are other provisos - e.g. the number of subscribers says absolutely nothing about the quality of a blog's content. I must stress this, because it's something I always keep in mind when deciding whether to subscribe to someone. i.e. I don't subscribe because they're popular, I subscribe because I want to read their content.
And of course, Bloglines is not the only RSS Aggregator in town (I found out the other day that I have 8 Yahoo! subscribers - you can pick that info up by looking at your server logs).
Bearing in mind then that these stats are not authoritative and may in fact be misleading, there are still some interesting trends. The fact that Seb continued to grow his subscriber base despite not posting during the last 3 months is one of them. And it's also possible the folks with 0-150 Bloglines subscribers are growing at a better rate than those bloggers with 1000-odd subscribers - e.g. myself, Dina, Paolo. One way to counter the 'rich getting richer' theory perhaps? I don't know...
Needless to say, I'd be interested in your comments on these stats.
| Blogger | 18-Jul-04 | 15-Oct-04 | Subscribers Gained | % change |
| Richard MacManus | 79 | 137 | 58 | 73.4% |
| Dina Mehta | 134 | 211 | 77 | 57.5% |
| Talking Points Memo | 1964 | 2841 | 877 | 44.7% |
| Instapundit | 1737 | 2452 | 715 | 41.2% |
| Jon Udell | 1619 | 2257 | 638 | 39.4% |
| Jason Kottke | 2184 | 2985 | 801 | 36.7% |
| Lawrence Lessig | 2794 | 3777 | 983 | 35.2% |
| Paolo Valdemarin | 149 | 201 | 52 | 34.9% |
| Mark Pilgrim | 2100 | 2764 | 664 | 31.6% |
| Tim Bray | 1517 | 1989 | 472 | 31.1% |
| Anil Dash | 884 | 1142 | 258 | 29.2% |
| Sébastien Paquet | 563 | 705 | 142 | 25.2% |
| Dave Winer | 2652 | 3299 | 647 | 24.4% |
| Marc Canter | 417 | 512 | 95 | 22.8% |
| Lilia Efimova | 744 | 852 | 108 | 14.5% |
| Mitch Kapor | 924 | 1054 | 130 | 14.1% |
| Daily Kos | 1361 | 1475 | 114 | 8.4% |
Update: An hour after I posted this, I've noticed what looks like a correction to the Bloglines subscriber database. Most of the bloggers in the table above have dropped 4-5 subscribers just in the last hour - including myself, as I'm now on 137 (was 141). And e.g. Dina has dropped to 209 (was 214), Paolo 200 (was 205), Lilia 851 (was 857), Seb 704 (was 708). This is all just in the last hour! Hmm, I wonder if Bloglines does semi-regular "cleaning" to remove duplicates and other anomalies?
Update 2: Because the Bloglines subscriber database was seemingly cleansed an hour after I published my number-crunching (see Cesar's comment below for the probable explanation), I decided to re-do the numbers today. Most of the people in the 0-1000 range lost 4-5 subscribers, so our percentages have dropped. But interestingly I noticed a few of the political blogs increased, I suppose due to the presidential debates. Anyway, more food for thought...
After my Dave Snowden grokking last week, I've been reading up on storytelling in KM. Bill Ives has some fantastic reading on this subject and I intend to read Steve Denning too. I was thinking this morning about how people have different niches and specialist talents. For example, I'm a better writer than I am a programmer or designer. And there are a lot of people who are better programmers or designers than writers. Or better talkers than writers. Or better artists than talkers.
I've always maintained that blogging isn't for everyone and that applies inside corporate walls too. Blogs and wikis are not going to suit everyone in an organisation, so they're not the perfect KM solution by any means. One way around this is to look for those 1 or 2 people in a team or group who are natural writers or have an interest in Web writing - and encourage those people to take responsibility for their team's content. This is also the approach most companies take when running their Content Management Systems.
But I was thinking about an alternative approach. What if organisations hired a specialist writer, whose job it is to go around the different teams and elicit stories from people. That person would be a kind of journalist (but forget about the whole "are bloggers journalists" debate, that's not important). The person I'm describing would interview team members and coax stories from them. Those stories would then be transcribed onto a team weblog - with all team members encouraged to comment on or add to the stories. The point is that there needs to be at least one person who knows how to spin a narrativeÖ write compelling content.
Once that narrative is "up there" on the blog - it acts as a springboard for the non-writers to contribute bits of content, eventually adding up to a store of knowledge about the organisation. Think of the writer's narrative as a star, with the resulting contributions being planets that are created around the gravitational pull and life-giving energy of the star.
Just as there are specialist programmers and designers on Web teams, I think there is a need for specialist writers or storytellers to act as a Knowledge Management nexus for organisations. This is an idea I'm exploring for a business - where I set myself up as a consultant KM StoryWriter.
And yes it uses the same skillset that I'd need to write a biography of Web 2.0. I guess I'm exploring ways to fulfil my ambition to write stories for a living. The future of fiction is non-fiction - there's very little market for novelists these days. I think there is a market for non-fiction stories - for example in the form of non-fiction books, or as a Knowledge Management tool in organisations. I feel I'm getting closer to finding my nicheÖ
