As an additional plus, Tracer adds, "Our data shows that those pages that users engage with most are not necessarily those with the most page views." With Tracer, publishers can find out their most sought after information and increase the relevancy of their resources to readers. Creative Commons is already using Tracer to see what readers are highlighting, copying and redistributing.

As well, Creative Commons' Fred Benenson encourages members to consider using the tool. He says, "As a creator and contributor to the commons, you have the right to attribution (all six of our licenses require it), so why not make it easy for your audience to automatically provide it?"

To test Tracer, members can register at Tynt.

Read more:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/16060#ixzz0MCiF2lSE
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
http://tracer.tynt.com/features-and-benefits-of-tracer#ixzz0MCg9SuUl
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution No Derivatives

It's worth noting that WordPress isn't just any chunk of software: it played a formative role in the early days by giving millions of people a voice online. It's still one of the best examples of an open source ecosystem which has been made infinitely more rich for users by involvement of outside developers than the company could have created by itself. And it's a system used by some of the biggest publishing firms in the world at a time when the publishing industry is undergoing one of its biggest periods of change ever. CNN, Time, the New York Times and millions upon millions of bloggers are all using WordPress. Helping test the next version of this software is a pretty big deal.

WordPress interface and experience designer, Jane Wells, wrote about opening the testing process this morning and said that she's spent years responding to people who reference a nine year old article by usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen argued that usability tests only needed 5 participants in order to be effective:

"As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.

After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new."

Wells writes in response that, "While I've found that to be generally true, when your user base is as diverse in experience level, usage, platform configuration, language (right to left languages have a pretty different experience) and demography as the WordPress community is, 5 users really isn't enough to get a clear picture."

If you'd like to participate in this usability testing, professional usability test moderators are encouraged to contact Wells and eager guinea pigs are told to watch this space.

It's really hard to create content while at a conference. Doing it in real time, artistically, is very impressive.

Hon's vision of the future is sci-fi influenced, cross-platform and web-native. He mocks the "urban games" of online hipsters but believes there will soon be a layer of "Harry Potter ether" that we can dip in and out of while we're walking to work.

Making Books a Different Animal

The Telling Stories project transformed the work of six UK book authors into six different web experiences. Hon said the authors were mainstream writers whose reactions ranged from indifferent to bemused when they were first approached. After participating, all six are now enthusiastic to do more on the web, he said.

Hon's favorite of the six parts was a mystery thriller written about the streets of London that his company transformed into a Google Maps overlay; the map marker became a flying first-person narrator for the bird's-eye readers. Book chapters unfolded as map annotations.

Another author's book was serialized into 140 character abridged lines and delivered over months to followers on Twitter.

The whole Telling Stories project has been applauded as a great example of book publisher Penguin boldly stepping into a new medium. Hon says the authors were assured that visiting emissaries from the internet had not come to destroy them.

The project has brought the authors creative opportunity and substantial exposure. Personalized social serendipity service StumbleUpon has brought in half of the traffic to Telling Stories, Hon says; sometimes up to 10,000 people will Stumble on to the site on a seemingly random day.

Those visitors are encouraged to jump media and buy the full dead-tree version of the web-ified stories. Hon says though that he thinks the division between media types will become much less clear in the near future.

The Future of Stories

This CEO and I didn't talk much about monetization - emergent forms of creativity shaking up the old are more exciting. We didn't tackle the debasement of literature by Twitter because Twitter's awesome potential is more interesting.

We talked just hours after the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement was made and Hon was excited that the new Bluetooth connectivity could mean a vastly improved interface for glucose monitors, for example. He said that developments like this could be the stepping stones toward a future of ubiquitous computing.

"Soon people will realize that there is no 'mobile internet' - there is only the Internet," he says. "And stories are everywhere." Hon says web content today is like the early days of TV, when all anyone could think to do was broadcast actors from the theater in the new medium. But new types of media enable fundamentally new types of content and experiences.

For example, we're just beginning to learn how to leverage the web's social connections, Hon says. He points to the first iteration of "urban games" as something rudimentary that won't last: groups of people organizing online to meet in person dressed, let's say, as Pac-man characters, running through city streets and posting videos of their adventures on YouTube. "Those games ask people to get up and do something they don't really want to do," Hon says.

Instead, he believes that the future of interactive story telling will be pervasive - it will be available throughout your typical day. Walking to work, even while at work.

"I have no idea what we can produce in this medium," he said, "but I think it's going to be like turning the whole world into Disney Land."

Just remember, Dan, how much free time you said you discovered when you quit playing World of Warcraft. Turning the whole world into Disney Land is nothing to take lightly. That said, I'll see you when we meet up in the Harry Potter ether. I won't be surprised if you and your team help build it.

What blogging was to publishing, a simple tool that made far more people able to participate, Twine's new ontology writing and hosting service could be to the act of teaching machines about new topics.

Twine Could Surpass Delicious in a Matter of Months

Twine's public product lets people bookmark items like web pages and videos into topical collections. The service then analyzes the contents of all the bookmarks to identify the key concepts, people, places and other information automatically. It's like tagging in Delicious but automated and, in theory, more thorough than any human being would be in assigning tags.

Compete.com says Delicious gets about 2 million unique visitors a month and has stopped growing. Twine just passed 1 million uniques and is growing fast. Spivack said that 40% of that traffic comes from Google, and sure enough those Twine pages look awfully juicy from a spider's perspective. Spivack expects Twine to hit 2 million uniques in a matter of months and that looks like a credible claim to us.

The number of saved items is far greater in Delicious than in Twine - about 150 million vs. 3 million. Spivack says though that the company will soon turn back on its system that crawls all the links on bookmarked pages. Those linked-to pages will be automatically bookmarked and analyzed too, quickly expanding Twine's total archives.

So by this summer, Twine could be bigger and more visited than Delicious. We wrote a scathing review of the Twine user experience when the long-awaited service began to launch last year. The site has changed a lot since then and we're excited about the company's plans for the future. We are still concerned about the company's ability to make its interfaces really usable -- but if they can, then look out, internet.

Twine and the Semantic Web

The semantic web is a paradigm that adds standardized, structured markup to web content so that savvy applications can comprehend the key topics of any web page. Publishers can do that when they publish, or services like Twine can create the semantic markup from the outside. The automatic tagging Twine does is actually semantic markup.

For example, you can't ask Google today to show you all the book reviews around the web that were written by friends of yours who live in New York - but semantic search engines could make such a query trivial and use that information as the ground level for building more sophisticated features on top. It's a form of standardized metadata. It turns free text into data that can be mashed up.

Semantics Plus Ontology Equals Meaning

Spivack says that his existing product, Twine, is just one of a number of applications that only extract key concepts (people, places, key terms) out of a web page. Placing those concepts in context is the next step.

Twine can tell you that a web page is about goat cheese, for example, but it doesn't yet know how to infer that the page is also about a dairy product - the larger category that is not explicitly stated in the article. An ontology is that context, be it a dairy ontology, a cheese ontology or a new node in the existing accepted ontology of food.

Those new ontologies can be created using Spivack's simple, open source authoring tool and then hosted on his open source community site for ontologies. It's open source authoring like Wordpress and code hosting and discussion like Sourceforge.

Either Twine or a third party will then combine the extracted "entities" (people, places, key terms) with an appropriate ontology and that company's "inference engine" to build a full picture of what a web page is about and where it stands in relation to everything else.

Busting Out of the Tech Ghetto

The limited number of ontologies that have been authored to date are largely centered on technology topics. An easy ontology authoring tool could change that radically. A standardized, accessible ontology can shine a light on a whole new part of the world. Once that topic has been illuminated for the eyes of a semantics reading machine, web developers can build services that intelligently make use of the new information.

Spivack says that heavy-duty ontologies that require computationally intensive logic navigation will still need to be built using heavy-duty desktop apps. But web applications that just need data served up smartly will work well with the kinds of ontologies that can be written with Spivack's new authoring tool.

Ready for the whole, diverse internet to be contextually understandable by web applications? Ready to contribute to the creation of those contextual explanations yourself? Keep your eye on Nova Spivack because that's what he's aiming to make happen.

Personally, I experienced a similar reaction when I saw Coltrane demoed in front of the WordCamp Portland crowd in September. Jaws were dropping. I swear there were "Oohs," "Ahs," and spontaneous applause. (Which I guess is appropriate for a release named after a jazz legend.) Everyone - from new user to WordPress developer - was downright giddy.

WordPress 2.7 delivers an interface that is nearly impossible to hate - because each user has ultimate control over the way the interface is arranged. Practically anything you can touch on the interface can be changed. Don't like something? Put it away. Drag it somewhere else. Resize it.

The new release also offers features that users have been requesting, including things like "sticky posts" - posts that remain stuck as the first post on a blog even as additional posts are published - and the ability to do more from the dashboard. If the first word to describe Coltrane is "customizable," then the second word is definitely "thoughtful." Across the board, users can complete more activities with fewer clicks.

All the shiny newness on top hints at changes to under-workings, as well. There have been several changes to APIs, bug fixes, and inline documentation added to assist in development and support.

But for as impressive as the new release is, I'd offer that the positive reception has less to do with the technology and the functionality. I think it's far more visceral than that. I'd say it has more to do with the fact that users felt that the WordPress interface team - led by recent Automattic addition Jane Wells - listened to their concerns and worked to resolve them. What's more, they allowed users to be involved throughout the development process.

With WordPress 2.7, WordPress users feel like they're part of the team again. And that goodwill could gain WordPress far more ground than any of the new features.

To read more about the new release, see the WordPress blog. Or take our word for it and download WordPress 2.7.

There's so much content online every day that it's totally overwhelming. That's where good recommendation technologies and media outlets come in handy. As a blog that seeks to share the most interesting web technology and trends with readers, automated help with the discovery process is of great interest to us. Below, we discuss some tools we wish we had and the closest makeshift substitutes we've been able to come up with. Maybe you'll find some of them useful or have even better recommendations to offer us and other readers.

This list is written from our perspective, as technology bloggers, but we suspect that many of the links and ideas below will prove useful in other contexts, as well.

Two tools that do exist that we like a lot are the FriendFeed Best of Day feature and the MyBlogLog recommended posts widget for WordPress.

First Finders

There may or may not be any such thing as a tipping point or a mysterious group of otherwise random market influencials online, but we're pretty sure that are people who consistently find cool things before other people. We'd like to know who they are so we can look over their shoulder.

This is something that social bookmarking tool Furl.net at least used to do really well - they'd recommend users whose archives are similar to yours and you can choose which ones to subscribe to.

Nowadays we're not sure if there's any service that really does what we're looking for, so we're muscling through some data crunching by hand. This is the one work-around on this list that we can't tell you about for competitive reasons - but we will say that if you want to find out what's cool in web tech, early, you should pay attention to user experience designer Angus Fraser. We've never met Angus but the numbers we're running say he's our kind of guy. (Hi Angus!)

We'll introduce you to more of the people that our experimental system is telling us to watch when we credit them for stories and cool websites they helped us find before our competitors have.

What You, Our Readers, Might Like

We'd like to have have, as one of our sources of story leads, an automated system that could suggest links that our community of readers would likely enjoy given their similarity to other things that we know you like already.

We know what some of you are interested in, anecdotally, through systems like MyBlogLog's BlogJuice (right) but we'd love to get systematic access to that kind of data. We probably could if we decide to dedicate the resources to it.

Touchstone Sharers

Everyone wants to know who the big influencers are in social networks. Unscrupulous types want to buy them off but we'd just like to make sure we're in the orbits of the relevant ones. They find good things and they are good to be found by.

For example, you may know that super networker Robert Scooble is coo-coo-for-cocoa-puffs over FriendFeed. (As are we, it's great.) But you may not know that there are apparently more influential people there than Scoble, too. In one 8 hour period recently we counted the number of other people who "liked" the same items that Scoble liked on FriendFeed and found 254 people clustered around his promoted items. During that same period items liked by Mona N. were liked by 357 people! That's why some people in the know call Mona the Queen of FriendFeed.

We'd like a tool that introduced us to those types of people in various social networks we participate in.

Comments That Need Immediate Attention

Spam filters are great but they aren't so good at determining subjectively important or controversial comments on blog posts. For example, we put up a post about Barack Obama's social media strategy right after the election. Our lead editors were all on flights back from the Web 2.0 summit and so we didn't notice that some of the comments on that post were really offensive and needed to be dealt with right away. Some technology to highlight and prioritize delivery of those comments in particular would be really nice to have.

This kind of automated prioritization of emails was something that Yahoo! was talking about a year ago in terms of an Inbox 2.0 concept but we still haven't seen it. The closest substitute we can think of is setting up a list of non-spam but high-priority keyword filters in GMail, then grabbing the RSS feed for that filter and subscribing to it in an app that we watch high priority feeds through.

Related Companies and Websites

When we write about companies, applications and concepts here, we try to provide some context by linking to related websites. That's just good blogging, we think, but it's much easier said than done.

This is the kind of technology we've fantasized about ever since seeing Austrian startup SystemOne at the DEMO conference in 2006. For now we rely instead on a collection of Google Custom Search Engines and that works very well.

Best Unknown Related Blog Posts

Speaking of linking, we try to link out to other blogs as much as we can and we'd like to be linking to smaller blogs writing about concepts similar to our posts. Automation of that kind of research tool would be really nice and is something that SystemOne or BlogRovr could help with. Evri looks great from a publisher's perspective too, though it doesn't look as valuable from a research perspective as we'd like.

This author is just now checking out Zementa (see Sarah Perez's review this spring), which recommends related blog posts as you compose, but it's not clear that the recommendations are granular enough to be useful. We'll reserve judgment for now.

The best solution we've found to date is taking a Google Blogsearch feed for related keywords, changing the num=10 part of the URL to num=50 and then running that feed through PostRank. PostRank will take awhile to process it, but in the end you can see which recent posts about your keywords around the web got the most comments, inbound links, etc. That can help surface quality posts from sources you've never seen before.

Best of Our Own Blog Posts

We'd love to be shown related blog posts from our own archives as we compose new posts. We don't know if there is technology that can help do that better than the system we've already got. We simply bookmark the link to a google search for "site:http://readwriteweb.com," then visit that and add search terms to the query box. It works pretty well but relies on Google's algorithm for relevance. That may or may not be helpful.

Best Blogs on a Given Topic

This has been tried many times before and there are new people trying it now - but when someone creates a killer ranked, categorized and extensive directory of topic blogs around the web, they'll have the world at their door.

For now we've got a number of systems (six, actually) that work pretty well for us. Our favorite methods involve delicious and ask.com blogsearch.

Best Sources to Contact

It's a real good day around here when we get to incorporate some expert opinion in an article we write. We love doing that. We'd love to know which of our existing contacts or people we don't know would be best to contact regarding a story.

There is Help A Reporter Out and we should probably give that a try, but queries only go out a few times a day and we're looking for immediate contacts, preferably by Instant Messenger.

We've used Twitter for this a lot, actually, and in some ways it works better than we can imagine almost anything else working. If you're interested, check out our post How We Use Twitter for Journalism and see our favorite post written this way, APIs and Developer Platforms: A Discussion of the Pros and Cons. It's pretty amazing that nearly every quote we got for the story was sent to us on Twitter.

How About Your Wish List or Recommendations?

We love recommendation technology because used selectively it can make us smarter and more effective. The field is just in its infancy, though, and we expect that many of our dreams will come true soon.

What about you? Do readers here have recommendation fantasies, favorites or tips on getting done what we aim to do with the hacks and workarounds above? Drop those thoughts in comments and we'll all be smarter for it.

Photo credit: "I Love The Idea" Creative Commons by Flickr user apesara

It's a big deal, it's awkward, it's frightening, it's brave, it's already both loved and hated - but it's not a wiki. As Ward Cunningham, the man who invented wikis, told us in our initial coverage of SearchWiki, "Collectively editing thoughts is what leads to the unique wiki behavior..." Days into the experiment it's clear that this feature is more like a forum, and it's not a particularly well architected one at that.

There's no way to reach consensus, or stasis, in SearchWiki. You can't see the past history of anyone who contributes. Documents don't change, they just get bigger. There's no discussion of the "wiki" document, just the document itself.

The Two Biggest Problems With SearchWiki

There are two major problems with SearchWiki, beyond the fact that it's not a wiki. First, the usability is awful. It's really bad. Users have the visual UI of Google, famous for being clean and clear of disruptions, but if they want to view the markup from other users they have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the search results page. Then, in many cases, clicking that button just tells you there are no wiki results. It's a terrible user experience.

Second, there's no changing, challenging or hiding anything that's been posted. Try a search for McDonald's, for example. There are two notes - one from some random web designer that's spamming the "wiki" with a link to his page, the other from some joker testing the obscenity filter. Neither can be removed, edited, nothing. We presume that the McDonald's PR department has seen this - but is there anything that even they can do about it? Apparently not. Wait until it's you that has things you don't like appended to the page just one click away from page 1 Google for your name - what are you going to do about it?

This Could Be Big

Wikipedia has a big, engaged community that's worked out some practices and tools to make it all work as well as it does. Google, on the other hand, threw hundreds of millions of people into a forum, called it a wiki and left everyone to their own devices.

Wikis are something very special. They are one of the first types of social software that many business users are introduced to at work. Wikis are used for every kind of collaborative effort you can imagine, from tracking the history of politicians, to sharing best practices for librarians to categorizing every living species on earth. Wikis are not forums for dropping comments, spam and thumbing up your favorite web pages.

There's a whole lot of potential here - but as it is Google SearchWiki is an absolute train wreck. Maybe when larger and larger numbers of people wash over it things will get better. We're not so sure, though.

As MySpace develops, so develop the next generation of mainstream web users and thus the web at large. Whether you're a MySpace user or not, it's worthwhile to keep an eye on what the company is doing - especially in terms of user experience.

Fully aware that major changes often cause a major backlash, MySpace has made Profile 2.0 fully opt-in and is saving a copy of their Profile 1.0 of any users who switch, for 90 days. That's smart.

These changes are important. Granular privacy controls on MySpace can help raise the expectations of mainstream users for increasing sophistication regarding privacy in particular and control over their data in general. That means we can all hope for increased vendor support for user control over data - the excuse that mainstream users don't care may not hold up much longer.

W3C standards compliance is good news because a standards compliant web is a web where site rendering doesn't stand in the way of economies of scale for developers. If your code for displaying, rendering, searching or otherwise interacting with websites isn't going to work across all sites - that's a major disincentive for large-scale innovation. W3C compliance is nearly complete for the new MySpace profiles and that's great news.

Though MySpace doesn't get the respect that Facebook does, we still believe that from MySpace is the social networking leader in a number of important ways. Granular privacy controls, for example, Facebook? We'd like that.

In this post we look at the work of four of our favorite screen casting freelancers. We think you'll enjoy their work and we hope that you can point us to some still undiscovered people making this kind of magic.

Jon Udel, who used to work at Infoworld and is now at Microsoft, is widely considered the granddaddy of the screen cast. Another strong old schooler is Don from Screencasts Online, a site that has free and subscription tutorials about how to use a Mac. Don uses ScreenFlow, a wonderful Mac app you can buy for $100. We've been using Screenflow lately to make some screencasts ourselves.

The first freelance screencaster available for hire that we discovered was Molly McDonald, whose work at DemoGirl has made her the go-to screen caster for hire for many startup companies of late.

Here's a sample of her work, a screencast demo of mixtape site 8tracks.

The Up and Comer

Colin Sproule at InternetJogging has been making a number of great screencasts lately, most of them about using the Mac single app browser Fluid. We discovered his work when he made a great video about Muxtape in Fluid.

Here's another one he made about using Fluid and Threadless together.

You Just Missed Him

Michael Pick was one of the inspirations for this post, but now that we take a look we find that he's no longer available for freelance work! Pick's been hired full time by Automattic, the makers of WordPress. While we are happy for him, we are dissapointed that we won't be able to see his work around the web about apps in general. His departure from freelancing leaves a big hole in the market.

The Champs

The reigning champs of freelance screen casting have to be Common Craft. This Seattle consultancy found a hit formula in stop-motion line drawn illustrations telling stories about web apps. Their first, RSS in Plain English, is still the best way to explain RSS that we've seen yet. The production value is downright quaint compared to the more professional work they are doing now.

Common Craft's charming storytelling skills have lead to jobs from a list of companies, including Google and Twitter.

Here's Our Best Effort So Far

We just bought ScreenFlow ourselves and it's so much fun to use! Here's one video we made for a post this week. We're just starting to learn how to do this, but ScreenFlow makes it really easy.

There's Huge Demand

Proficient screen cast producers should be cleaning up right now. There is so much untapped demand for this kind of service. Who else do you know that offers this kind of service?

Want to be that person? Check out Beth Kanter's fantastic screen cast tutorial wiki. (See this awesome screen cast of Beth's, in fact.) The future of screen casting is wide open, but we sure are glad there's some great examples already for all of us to take inspiration from.

The thing about web technology - and computing in general - that continues to frustrate me, is that it forces me to rely on hardware and software that is often outside of my direct control. It's all very well embracing the server side and using browser-based products like Movable Type and Bloglines, as I do. But it does mean I rely on the people who control the servers I use. For example, I've been trying to contact my web server hosts for the past week. They're based in the US and I've sent them a flurry of emails... but no response. It's holding up the release of my new topic-focused blog. And then this morning I notice that my website is down due to a server issue. And I'm helpless, because I don't control the server.

The moral for living on the server side is always to Back Up Your Data. Even so, when you rely on services - it's about more than data. It's almost like the servers I rely on are a part of me. Like extra limbs. Except in the back of my mind, I know the limbs can go dead or start twitching uncontrollably at any time. Or even fall off!

Anyway there is a point to this macabre little rant (besides venting my frustration at my web hosting company). Radio Userland's just appointed Steve Kirks as Product Manager and Steve has written a promising letter outlining the actions he'll be taking to improve the Radio Userland product. This is great news for Radio users, even if it's at least 2 years late. Like Marc Canter, I used to use Radio - a desktop application - to publish my weblog. In May I swapped to Movable Type, a server-side app. The big advantage of a desktop app is that it gives you more control, or at least it is one step removed from the reliance on a server. If the server goes down, you can at least continue to run the product on your desktop even if you can't publish your content. So your extra limbs continue to work, albeit in a restricted manner if the server is down.

I liked Radio, but decided to undergo a weblog transplant operation in May - opting for a more flexible blogging limb with enhanced functionality. I wrote a long post at the time that outlined why I moved from Radio to MT, which would be a useful reference to Steve now.

But the flexibility I got out of my new blogging limb came at the cost of increased reliance on my web server, which I sometimes feel isn't attached to me as closely as I'd like. Radio used to be marketed as a "personal web server" (not sure if it still is), which implies that the server is attached to you personally rather than being something you remote control from afar via an Internet connection. I have to admit, sometimes living on the desktop makes your extra limbs feel more naturally a part of you.

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).

<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.

Each post references R/WW, KC & TC

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.

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!)

Penniless Writers

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 ;-)

It's all about the Whuffie

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.