Recently in Web Society and Community Category

If this is the case, and most people are now focused on communicating through weblogs instead of being wowed by their novelty, then perhaps low threshold links are one of the best examples of a mature new weblog realm, focused on discovering new ideas instead of discovering new technology.

Anil has a post over at Sixapart regarding "low threshold links" and what they mean in relation to the maturity of weblogs. It's an interesting read.

Anil says, "We see in mature media like magazines that, though design elements differ and layouts change, standard components like a table of contents and an engaging back page remain fairly consistent."

This is true, however I think it's a poor comparison. Magazines have very little room for innovation compared to weblogs. Sure you have the perfumed advertisement, or the bonus CD, but other than that you're forced to stand on your content alone, created with either words or photos. Weblogs can gain a loyal following by aggregating links to other people's content, or by constantly exploring new layouts, or by creating a new type of metadata. Not only can we improve our content, we can improve our delivery as well as the ancillary components that go along with it. We can work in text or pictures or audio. We can manipulate time and rhythm. Our medium is much more vast than print.

This is evident in the growth of photo blogs. It's evident in the number of services that form connections between blogs. It's beautifully apparent in the way that just when you think weblogs are settling down and we'll improve our current methods instead of creating new ones, moblogging appears. Weblogs are still developing and growing.

I believe maturity is not equal to or required for success. Like software that forks and has a production branch and a development branch, parts of the weblogging puzzle are getting more stable (firmly established) and (I hope) not mature (completed natural growth and development, or a condition of full development).

Maybe the kid in me rebels against the word maturity or maybe it's the fact that mature technologies seem boring and dull. What I do know is that the fast paced growth and excitement of weblogs is what keeps me watching and has me hooked. I hope we can keep "discovering new ideas" and keep "discovering new technology".

Today I realized that any given blogger is much less removed from the A-list than they really think. It's true! I'm telling you!

Pick some people who you know are popular. Do they link to someone who's linked to you? Are you sure you have the right answer?

Someone told me the other day that they read an article that claimed the solution to the Curse Of The Bambino (of course it's supposed to be capitalized) is to trade Bill Mueller and Pedro to the Cubs. I laughed and said "Yeah right, that's crazy." Today I discovered the source of that column was Tony Pierce over at Fox Sports New England as he guest posted for Edward Cossette. Tony Pierce has linked to Cory in the past, who I just so happened to have graduated with and managed to get started blogging. How weird is it that meatspace people are reading the same things I read? Is it possible that they read my stuff and I just don't know it and they've yet to make the connection?

This little blogosphere of ours is pretty tightly tied together, a fact that although I know is true continues to amaze me. Here's to more revelations, friendships, and good blogging.

Have you been following the Winer/Pilgrim saga? I'm a geek. I admit it. I like geeky things like new formats and new standards. Hell, I was using Mozilla back around Milestone 4. Like I said, I'm a geek.

That admitted, I couldn't help but be interested in the development of the new syndication/API/format being worked on. Running through the whole process though is undeniable tension between Dave Winer and others. Someone said the whole thing was about as interesting as a soap opera.

Anyway, here's the deal: Winer has made some disparaging remarks about Mark Pilgrim. Pilgrim responds most recently by collecting Winer's posts via RSS and creating what equates to a change log, visually showing where Winer has edited his posts. Enter the feces throwing monkeys as hilarity ensues.

You can find Dave's comments on the matter here and here. You can find the actual page here. Look around, absorb some of it. It's funny. Then, when you're done, check out the technorati link for what other people think. That's funny too.

In the past I've criticized Mark a little, but the bottom line is that I respect his technological prowess and his knowledge. I could criticize Dave as well, but I also respect his experience and accomplishments. This little exhibit is an extremely powerful example of the strengths of syndication formats and scripting. What gets me is that the negativity keeps going on. Dave can't leave it alone and threatens copyright violations (look how well that's gone for RIAA) and Mark keeps throwing more wood on the fire.

Don't get me wrong, I don't know the whole story, and last time I made a comment to Mark about something he said he told me until I do things like he does I had no room to talk. I don't deal with Dave and RSS the way Mark has, so I can't comment on all the other things leading up to this. All I know is that from this side of the interweb, I think this whole thing is quite a laugh. Check it out. Maybe you will too.

I've been reading Sam's site for a while now, and over the time I've been reading it, I've grown to appreciate his commentary and knowledge. His latestmove has caused quite a stir.

If you leave a nasty comment on Sam's site, he has started to mark them as flame bait, even going so far as to mark up certain portions of comments.

Did you ever do something you knew was wrong, only to have someone catch you and chastise you later? Ever do something that afterwards you didn't feel so great about? Well now, Sam is marking it up and pointing it out to the whole world (or at least to everyone who reads his site). Can't think of something nice to say? You better now say anything at all then, because otherwise Sam may memorialize it in red struck text. Take that!

Sam has every right to do whatever he please on his blog, however maybe there should also be a way to retract statements that are inflamatory as opposed to branding them and drawing attention to them. At least give the commentor the ability to admit their mistake, apologize, and take it back. I mean hell, doesn't google cache enough trash as it is?

I got a great comment yesterday, and some neat email ensued. A couple of days ago I wrote a little piece of code that pings weblogs.com. It was for my friends who use homegrown systems. After implementing it they noticed an increase in traffic, as a weblogs.com listing inserts your blog into a lot of other people's software.

As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that the way blogs grow is interesting. I've been working on mine for a few months now and I've seen more and more traffic. My friends started theirs around the same time or slightly after me and their traffic started to grow. As we get better , we increase each others audience; our links to each other create a small network. We live vicariously through each other, each being a little geeky, sharing strange user agent strings and celebrating as a group when important people show interest in us.

What's interesting is how small groups like ours fit together. Collectively we all read different types of blogs. We form links between different communities, and then we bounce ideas off of each other. The sad thing is that not all of this happens on our blogs, a lot of it happens in instant messenger. It disappears into the ether after that.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Just wanted to throw it up here for future thought provocation.

Sampling networks accurately (kottke.org)
Extremely interesting thoughts from kottke. I've been thinking about how blogs all fit together in blogaria myself, and I can't come up with anything that makes sense.

I'll be thinking about this. In the meantime, feel free to comment.

EmptyBottle.org: Dirt Stick Stone

And today, as weblogorrhea reaches epidemic proportions, Dr Pepper's soulless, clue-deficient marketing shills are actually giving it a go, boys and girls.

The Wonderchicken has some extremely interesting things to say tonight about blogaria and advertising. Definitely worth a read.

First of all, let me just say I'm glad ole Stavros is back and writing things like this. Secondly, let me say that I think he didn't just hit the nail on the head, he put it through the board.

For this to work, it won't require the top bloggers to participate. It'll only take the millions of teeny-boppers to post a link. By sheer volume they'll get to the top. The people will start to bitch about the phenomena getting more attention and more links. Based on the way google works (see the post two back about PageRank) the ad monkeys will rejoice.

Blech.

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report
Zeldman has a few thoughts on discussing how many readers you have. The voice of wisdom.

Jason Kottke has another post up about Power Laws. Interesting read. To summarize, links in blogaria graph as a power law curve. The power law is basically the 80/20 rule in disguise ("80% of the wealth is controlled by 20% of the population").

I don't really know what to say about this. It seems, lately, that people are concerned over how little blogs will get traffic. Everyone only has so much time to spend online, so people can only read so many sites a day, and if five top sites get the most links then they'll be the most read and no one else will be able to break onto the A-list. I completely disagree. With tools like weblogs.com, google, and dmoz it's becoming easier and easier to discover blogs that you like. To me, this seems like common sense: more blogs equals more recognition for the "medium", google likes fresh content, which most blogs have, more blogs become mixed in with google results, more people look for blogs in their google results, and more blogs get found/read. I'll admit, when a good blog search engine is written to take advantage of the realtime nature of blogs (current indexes, links to specific posts, categorizing, etc) this whole thing will become easier, but for now, it seems to be working. Since I've started, my traffic has slowly increased, and not because I beg for people to link to me. Instead, it's because occasionally people find things here that interest them and they come back for more. If you truly have something to offer people, whether it's witty insight, color commentary, or information they can't get anywhere else, they will find you and they will come back. It's as simple as that.

Maybe the graphing of weblog links says something more basic about people: in general, 80% of us are boring and have nothing interesting to say. In that case, it's no wonder the same twenty people who are friends and family read our blogs. Guess we'll just have to suck it up, eh?

For me, that's what it all boils down to. If your blog/website/journal/photo diary/etc is good enough, people will find it, and they'll tell their friends, and share the link, and you'll become popular and get lots of traffic. If you're average, though, your traffic will be average. I don't draw because I'm not good at it, despite the abundance of paper and pencils in my house. If you suck, find a new hobby.

At another level, though, it really comes down to your own expectations as well. I'm quite happy with the traffic I get here at BTB, but I'm sure there are other small-timers who think they deserve much more. Maybe they do, and if that's the case, it'll come with time. Stick with it. However, there's also a good chance that you're not any good and no one wants to tell you. I think many residents of blogaria fall into this category.

The barriers to entry for creating a blog are pretty low. This means the quality of blogs will vary greatly. Maybe instead of crying about how the a-list gets all the traffic, we should spend more time writing and sharing things that actually mean something. Show me why you deserve more traffic, don't tell me. Otherwise, enjoy your average traffic: it could be worse.

kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches

It hasn't happened yet, but I see a "reckless linking" lawsuit where someone sues Slashdot or another site for causing monetary damages.

Good call. Short article, but worth the read, and a legitimate concern for a lot of people. Someone asked me if they could link to my site today, not a big deal since neither of us get traffic on the scale of a site like slashdot, so I replied that information wants to be free, so go ahead, yada yada. That's the thing, though, I pay a hosting fee already, and that's as free as my information gets. I don't want to pay a bandwidth bill. Definitely an interesting subject.

OpenP2P.com: Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution
An extremely interesting article by Tim O'Reilly. He has some excellent ideas about P2P, or peer to peer for those of you not in the know, and why people might pay for filesharing services. He also has some excellent ways of looking at P2P filesharing, for example, as the title says: piracy as progressive taxation. Excellent read and worth the length.

reservocation: Briefing for a Descent into Heck
A thoughtful essay about receiving compensation for your writing on the independent web. I think about sites like littlegreenfootballs that provide a service to the community: current news about an important topic and a place to discuss it. That to me is something worth paying a few bucks for. Then I think about my site and others like it, and no matter how much I enjoy them, they don't provide enough of a service to be worth much. Fresh links? Sometimes. Well-written prose? Once in a while. Basically it comes down to this: the amount of work you put in is directly proportional to what you get out of it. If like Mark, you're constantly writing software and giving it away or publishing great little essays about new technology, you're probably worth something. If on the other hand your blog is a glorified personal journal, you'll probably get nothing.

Now, to prove me wrong, there are sites that are nothing more than diary sites that make small amounts of money. They ask for donations, a few dollars, and people give it to them. It's my opinion that you can only do this in the blogosphere. Picture going out with a few of your friends, ranting about some television show you watched the other day, and then asking everyone to give you a few bucks for it. Yeah right.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to make a few bucks just like the next person, but you only really deserve it if you earn it. Good luck and best wishes, fellow blogarians.

'The Web's Missing Links'
I really dig the whole community aspect of the web, so this kind of stuff gets me all fired up. I'm constantly checking my referrer logs to see where people are coming from when they visit as well as checking through my raw Apache logs for other fun information such as where in the world my visitors live.

As the web has grown and matured, information has become easier to get and collect, but we still don't know what we're looking for when we have it. So you're on a bunch of people's blogrolls. So what? I think there's a lot of interesting things in the answer to that question, I just don't know how to find them yet.

dive into mark:Club vs. Lojack solutions
This is a great read. Mark has a way of using (or at least pointing out) some wonderful analogies.

I haven't been hit by the spammed comments, however, I have been gotten by the spam referrers (I think). I get a good number of referrers, but very few comments, which may be the reason.

Mark is a big fan of conversation on the web, and comments are a good way to drive that, however, the people he "converses" with mostly do so by posting on their own blogs, creating things he can see. However, what if you don't have your own blog, but still want to be part of his conversation? You could try email, but that might not be very permanent, which is something Mark likes. Comments on a blog, for me, are just like posts, and if done correctly (ie, look elsewhere because I haven't gotten that far yet) can even be permalinked, just like a post, with anchor tags and all.

I don't know what I'm trying to say here besides the fact that I personally feel like comment systems are a big part some web communities, and are a necessary and important part. I'd hate to see the spammers get them. Maybe the lo-jack solution for this is some legal action: place some really blatant warnings about what can and can't be posted in your comments, wait for a spammer, and then nail them in court as loudly and publicly as you can. This isn't a good solution for those of us who can't afford it, but might set a lo-jack like precedent. Some people have already won on the spam front (such as the guy who got nailed for faxing people junk). Might work here as well.

O'Reilly Network: Building Online Communities
This is a great article. It points out many thngs that we assume or understand implicitly about web communities (such as people's sense of owenership of the community) but never say outloud ans sometimes forget.

Helping with a community just about to get off the ground, thinking about restarting an older one, and being part of the one that exists in the blogosphere, I'd have to say I'm a pretty active community participant, at least as far as building them. My contributions after that leave a little to be desired, but as long as others get something from the experience, it all works out.

Doonesbury Town Hall and Web Presence- Daily Dose
Via Mark

Cory recently wrote about blogging. The greatest part of the whole thing is his comparison of blogging to high school. Unfortunately, I think he's right.

When I think about high school, I get sick to my stomach. I hated it. I was the skinny kid with the big thick glasses, the new kid (I moved just before starting 9th grade), the smart kid the teachers liked and the shop kids hated because their ignorant parents told them the man was smart and the man was the reason they lived in a trailer.

High school was all about cliques. The aformentioned shop kids were a clique, just like the honor roll students and the jocks.

In high school, you don't know who you are. You think you know, but you don't know. Hell, in high school, you're just beginning to figure out what the hell you use your penis for and why girls don't have one. If you can't figure out your hardware, how the hell are you going to understand the software?

In high school, the search for one's identity leaves you confused, angry, and at the same time occupies all of your time, meaning you're confused and angry all the time. Why don't people like you? How come the cute girl dates the stupid kids? Why does your mom always make you do the right thing when the other kids don't have to? What the hell's the point of life? All of this is swirling around and you're trying to cope, trying to grow up, trying to become a real person who contributes to the world.

For me, I grew up at college. I found myself there. For many of my high school classmates, they didn't get to look for themselves anywhere beyond high school. In fact, if you go back to my high school for a sporting event or for band practice, you'll find many of the same kids trying to crawl back into their size 6 air jordans in order to relive those college years where they could bully other people around, eat dinner their mother cooked, and watch tv or play outside after they finished their homework. It was a simpler life after all.

What does all of this have to do with blogs? Well on the web, no one knows who you are until you tell them. With a blog, they figure it out by what you write. You can be anyone, reveal whatever you wish, find whoever you'd like within yourself. All of a sudden you're in high school again, fighting with the popular kids, saying mean things to each other, and trying to figure out who the hell you are and what you contribute to the world besides carbon dioxide.

However, for those of us who are comfortable with who we've become, at least at a base level, the blog becomes more. We become journalists with our own little newspaper to publish our findings, or programmers sharing our knowledge.

A perfect example of this is Dawn. She's comfortable with herself in real life, got her blog, and recently had some issues with other bloggers. She realized something wasn't right, and her posts lately have reflected that. She sounds like an intelligent, sexy, smart woman; she's a mother who loves her daughter, her husband, and her whole family. That's why people read her, and why the've read her all along: they can relate to what she has to say because they're people who fall into the same categories who are looking for themselves, looking to grow as people.

The web's an interesting place, and we still don't understand how it will affect us when all is said and done, but we do know that its changing us, revealing our flaws, and showing our strengths. I'm glad to be a part of it.

So... You might not be aware, but blogging has become quite popular. Books have been written, people have contemplated how to make money doing it, software was developed to make it easier, and it continues to grow.

Recently, Dawn wrote that the blogosphere was controlled by a group of elitist men and she wants to change that (I paraphrased that). People posted comments, someone else posted a response, a troll appeared and vomited on her site, and then she responded. It was a typical web transaction.

Let me describe typical. There's this kid. He's not very bright, and he has some technical skills. I won't link him because he's a tool, but if you look hard enough you'll find him. He created a page, wrote some trash about Mozilla (a web browser that is open source and worked on by a combination of Netscape engineers and volunteers). Most of what he wrote was untrue. When the Mozilla developers found out, they refuted his claims point by point. He threw a tantrum, called them names, and preached about how great Internet Explorer is, again repeating his false claims about Mozilla.

Dawn's situation is similar. She posts about elitist men, an elitist man reads her blog, trolls around trying to piss people off, she gets angry, falls into the trap, and volleys back. I like Dawn a lot; I enjoy her writing, her sense of humor, and her use of profanity. However, I feel strong in my belief that to respond to a troll is a waste of one's time. Having small minds, they are eager to continue their behavior, as soon as they realize it's gotten the response they were after. Consider a small dog. It barks, you pay attention. You turn away, it barks, you pay attention again. Suddenly you've reinforced the behavior: barking gets attention. Your average troll has the same intellectual capacity.

Stupid trolls.

By the way, I'm working on a response to the actual post she made. It's taking longer than I expected, so I'll publish it tomorrow. I want to make sure I do my $80,000 degree justice.

kottke.org :: James Gleick on What Just Happened

I thought this was an interesting piece. The other day I spoke to Dawn (via email) and she mentioned helping a friend get his blog set up. Last week I helped Cory get a blog running, and today I convinced a friend to start one (I'll link him when he does).

I find the whole thing fascinating. The communication networks that are formed are amazing to me. When I came across Dawn's page and started exploring the blogs linked in turn from there, I found myself stumbling into a whole other network of people. If you click around though, you'll find the blogs on her site aren't more than three clicks away from getting to the blogs linked on mine (such as kottke, and zeldman). When I found her site, I was like "wow, this is a group of people who discuss a whole different set of things from technology." However, it only takes one person in each group to understand the other group, and a connection is formed... It's really exhilirating...

What's the relation? I need to reread, but the people who link the networks might be socializers...

eatonweb portal :: the original weblog directory

I registerd with the eaton web portal tonight. I wonder if it'll bring new traffic?

In other news, I posted a comment at blogroots regarding professional bloggers. I think its a good idea, however, I think a better argument needs to be created to support the idea financially.

O'Reilly Network: Blogging for Dollars: Giving Rise to the Professional Blogger [Aug. 12, 2002]

Meg's new column is up over at the O'Reilly network. I enjoy reading her articles. This one got me thinking about how I could make my blog better by focusing more directly on content and actually doing something.

Towards that end, I sent another email to my provider asking that the perl packages that I need for the searching stuff be added... Hopefully they'll do it soon, but we'll see...

And in other news, a friend's company website was hacked... Something about leaving the public ftp access on and a cgi being uploaded... It's wicked sucky.

Kottke on Andrew Sullivan

Although thoroughly amused by Kottke's "lemming-isms", I'm not so sure I agree with him completely. Some weblogs do make a lot of noise that no one listens to. Others, however, are very informative and useful. Just like anything else, there are always exceptions to the rule.

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report

Zeldman has a mini-review of Mark's post about font sizing on the web. He also adds some commentary based on his business site, Happy Cog.

At Kottke's site, you'll find a post a running discussion about styling links so they don't end up breaking up sites designed to be read.

At the bottom of both these discussions are points about doing what is necessary to appeal to your audience. Kottke makes a comment about user oriented design being "design with the user in mind (as opposed to design by committee or design by whatever the vice president's favorite color is)". He justifies his design decisions based on the theory that he is doing what is necessary to provide the best user experience for his readers.

On some level I agree with this, since each site serves a unique audience that must be satisfied. However, having family members with disabilities, I firmly believe that accessibility must be built in. Now if you're designing a site and you watch your logs and you never see a user agent string from a voice or text based browser, I can understand how you would automatically discount those users as not part of your user base. However, what if they're not visiting because they've given up on the idea; they have heard there are no accessible sites, so what's the use?

As I sat in a dinky little pizza parlor today, I heard a family talking about visiting sprite's web site to see if they had won a prize. The web has become an integral part of our lives, in an extremely fast amount of time (a topic unto itself). Here's my point: unless we create an environment where everyone can assume that the web will be easily available to them, how can we expect to see their traces in our logs? It seems like a catch 22.

It's a little cliché, but gees... What a twisted web we weave.

Google Search: blogchalk United States

Ok, so that's way cool. I seriously have goose bumps. Hey, Tim Berners-Lee? Are you out there? After reading your book Weaving the Web, I'm pretty sure this is right up your alley.

Let me begin this by saying that I'm not exactly sure if the title of this page is a good one. Let me continue by explaining why I chose it.

I recently (as in a few minutes ago) read Meg's article, What We're Doing When We Blog. It's an excellent article, discussing blogging and what it means and looking at the actual way we do it.

A weblog is a series of posts that are updated frequently (that's my definition; read Meg's article for a more thorough one). Now back in the day (don't forget: I'm not that old, so we can't go back too far) a homepage used to be a page that someone made to express their dislikes and likes, and to publish themselves. Maybe you posted frequent update, like a "blog" and maybe you didn't. In any case, it was yours to discuss whatever you liked however you wanted. For people who posted frequently, technology was developed in order to facilitate their work. Content management systems were developed as well as personal publishing tools. The word blog, derived from weblog, was created to describe frequently updated homepages. So what's the big deal? The first comment after Meg's article seemed a little hostile to me. The writer, richard of bennett.com, claimed that blogs were a solution in search of a problem, and that 9-11 helped them find their reason for being. I think without 9-11, web logging would have found many important uses including technical support, sharing information between employees on corporate intranets, etc.

I don't know. I don't think I'm making much sense anymore. What I do know is that when a group of people, however small, is connected to another group of people, and so on and so on, like the numerous webloggers of the world are, they form a powerful network. Information is shared, spread, thought about, and commented on in a way that never was possible before. Google-bombing is a perfect example of this phenomenon. What a wonderful world.

Ah, the magic of the web...

So I was at movable type and I was surfing around some other people's blogs. It's really interesting how the web works. The gentleman who runs boing boing managed to get into a commercial for Apple computers. Kottke and Zeldman get interviewed. The people at movable type contribute to O'Reilly books. Its strange how merely writing online can change your life.

And that, to me, is what the web is about. All of a sudden, way more people than ever before can be "published". Suddenly, networks form of people with different tastes than their local friends, but similar tastes to distant unfound friends. Instantly, it turns into a small world. Technology: a wonderfult thing.