What's your primary content?
I felt a bit guilty about dissing Jason Kottke's new design yesterday. I didn't mean to be negative, actually I admire that he's put all his content in one feed. It has its merits - for example readers only need to subscribe to the one RSS feed. The drawback though is 'info overload' for that RSS feed and readers may have difficulty seperating out the different content types. In any case I read some of the 100-odd comments on Jason's re-design announcement post and it helped clarify my thoughts on what I want to achieve in my own re-design. Anil Dash made the point that Jason's ancillary content (reviews, links, etc) are merely "page components" and are "subordinate to primary posts". This is the view I hold too. Jason's reply was: "But everything is my primary content." I thought a bit about this and as I wrote an email to Greg Gershman about weblog re-design, the following rule-of-thumb occured to me:
We all have 1 primary type of content that we focus on. For me, my primary content is story writing. And by that I mean both non-fiction articles about web technology and fictional writing like my novel. It's what I most enjoy doing. So my weblog Read/Write Web is based around my original writing. If I want to add other things like links, reviews, lists (which I do want to add here), then I'll add them as ancillary parts - I'll call it side content.
But other people are different. Programmers may use their blogs primarily to make technical notes for their development projects. Some people may use blogs as their personal diary. A lot of people use their blogs primarily to collate links. Others may use their blogs mostly for political rants. Some may just want to write music reviews of their favourite bands. And maybe some people, such as Jason Kottke, really do consider their written thoughts to be of equal value to their links and reviews etc. That's all fine and noble. It all comes back to something I wrote a couple of months ago and it turned out to be my most popular article: Why would normal people want to write weblogs? And the answer is: they don't. Normal people want to create content that allies with their interests, that complements their niche in life. One person's primary content is another's ancillary.
So anyway, my weblog re-design... I guess I'm saying that the design I come up with must primarily support my story writing. Secondary is my links, music reviews and so forth. I suspect this is different to Jason Kottke's motivation for re-designing his weblog. Or for that matter different to Dave Winer or Mark Pilgrim. Everyone has a different primary content.
Comments
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Exactly. The point is that the blogging tool should NOT limit us in the way that we express or convey that content. What works for Jason Kottke doesn't necc. work for me or you.
Blogging tools today tend to focus on a single form of content (writing, and/or possibly linked articles). I'd like a blogging tool that is a bit more flexible, that allows me to create different kinds of content and display them in different ways. I'd like metadata associated with those specific kinds of content to be available in some easily readable way, so that my content can get shared and distributed.
Posted by: Greg | December 2, 2003 6:11 AM
I'd like to think that the _reader_, not the writer, should be the one that decides what is primary and what is not. The presentation of the blog on the HTML page can reflect what the writer wants, but the underlying structure, such as RSS or whatnot, should be able to be massaged into what the reader wants. It is there more for the reader to work with, where as the HTML page is there more for the writer to enforce whatever valuation of the content is chosen. The problem is, and it always has been, enabling the reader to massage/strip/beat data into what the reader wants.
So yeah, a vote with Greg for sufficiently rich RSS feeds and/or a sufficiently rich variety of feeds (I probably offer too many feeds myself, and have often thought I should have a "feed configurator" to help people get/create the feeds that they want - but that's a project for another time).
Posted by: Andrew | December 2, 2003 3:13 PM
I was talking specifically about the presentation of the webpage (which I labelled as "design" in my post) - and *that* I believe is the author's call as to what is primary and what is ancillary. This is what's causing the discussions over Jason Kottke's design - he is telling people (through his design) that ALL his content is primary. And he has every right to do that, it's his site. Maybe this is where the "weblog as personal avatar" concept comes in...which Tom Coates has blogged about and mentioned in my comments before. The weblog design will reflect what content its author wants to emphasize. hmmm, just a thought.
Greg you make a good point that the *blog authoring tool* should support what the author believes is their primary content, which as we see varies among different people.
The third and trickiest point is the one Andrew you brought up - RSS feeds. Pito Salas made an interesting observation on that theme which I linked to this morn (via Dave Winer): "what are the relative roles of the web rendering and the rss rendering(s) of a blog?" Like you say Andrew, maybe the RSS rendering/configuration should be in the control of the reader and it is up to the author to present options. Whereas the HTML presentation is the "avatar" for the author - a web representation of the author and their "primary content".
Posted by: Richard MacManus | December 2, 2003 3:49 PM
For my purposes (and you're absolutely right in asserting that this should be considered on a case-by-case basis), my primary content isn't based on what I'm writing about (movies, books, links, etc.), it's based on what the most recent** item on the site is...what I, the author, would like the reader to know when they next browse the site (using a generic browser or a specialized browser like an RSS reader). The first time someone comes to the site, they might want to poke around a bit, kick the tires, drill down and get a sense of who I am and where I'm coming from. The 10th time they come (many of my visitors are repeats), they just want what's new. I put everything that's new in the same spot. No matter what I've got to say or how I present it, it's in the "new" spot. In my view, that matters more than how the content was presented previously (i.e. remaindered links in the sidebar), what type of content it is, or how each type of content is presented visually.
** Not strictly "most recent"...more like "most important". The phrase "reverse chronological" makes it into most definitions of a weblog, but what that means is that for most people in most situations, what the author has said most recently is the most important he/she wants the reader to see. But, it's not hard to think up situations where an older post would be more important than the newest one, especially for people who may want to revisit/rework/refine older content (or if their older content is "timeless" in a way that most weblog content isn't). The tools reinforce this newest-is-most-important behavior, so it's hard to get around it or even see why you would need such a thing. I've added a rank to each of my posts so that if I want to, I can override rev-chron and jump a post straight to the "new" spot. It's not a perfect solution (ranking+rev-chron order, once you start doing it, is a sticky mess) and I've only had the desire to do it once, but we'll see how it goes. It's all a big experiment, which is what makes it fun.
Posted by: jkottke | December 2, 2003 6:41 PM
Honestly, I think we are growing a bit beyond the usefullness of RSS as a single technology. We really need to just represent everything as markup. Then we can have an HTML page that displays it how the author wants, and the XML version will let readers reorganize the data into whatever form they want.
Posted by: Greg | December 2, 2003 7:46 PM
I've heard of sites that just use an RSS feed and an XSL file (or something like that) to describe how to render it in a browser, and have no actual HTML per se. A bold move, but something worth considering perhaps.
Posted by: Andrew | December 2, 2003 8:12 PM
Yep I agree Jason, experimenting with weblogs is half the fun! Putting the most important (judged by the author) content in the "new" spot is an interesting way to look at it...pardon the pun. I will watch with interest to see how your experiment develops.
Greg, agree. Jon Udell has some good things to say on this and his experiments with X-Path are a step in that direction. Have you played with Syncato at all?
Andrew, can you give me an example of such a site? So they're basically using the RSS as the platform for the presentation?
Posted by: Richard MacManus | December 3, 2003 1:09 AM
I havent played with Syncato. I recall reading some stuff by Sam Ruby that he was playing with it.
I'm moving to a new server next week (my very own!), so I'll have more freedom as it comes to playing around with blogging tools.
Posted by: Greg | December 4, 2003 6:22 AM