Category: Technology

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Earlier in the week I made a statement about Radio being centralized that caused some interest and reaction from the Userland folks and others. A lot of back and forth and intense discussion in the comments associated with the postings here and here and continued at Backup Brain (here and here) as well as at Doc Searls and, of course, Userland — both John Robb and Dave.

A lot of cross-posting and cross-discussion. Some confusion. More discussion.

Other than pointing out the links I don’t want to go back and rehash the old stuff. As a point of clarification I did want to say that Radio doesn’t have a dependency on Userland’s or any other RCS (Radio Cloud Server) if you choose the FTP option to upload your files, and don’t use the Radio comments or upstreaming. That’s not to say that there isn’t connectivity between the Radio application and the server, Userland’s by default. There is a handshake that occurs when your Radio application starts, and when you shut it down, and there is no way to disable this as far as I have been able to find out by going through all the associated script. If there is a way, Userland will have to point this out.

Dave also wrote his views of the more popular weblogging tools and how they compare from a centralization point of view. And this essay is something I do want to talk about. However, I’m going to try and talk about it in such a way that I question the views not the person. I guess my comments will tell me if I’m successful in this or not.

In his essay, Dave writes that Blogger is centralized for editing and decentralized for reading. I agree with this assessment. If you host your Blogger weblog on Blogspot, then the tool is centralized for editing and reading; but you don’t have to host your weblog on this server, you can easily use your own.

I had a Manila site from Userland before I switched to Blogger and, again, I agree with Dave’s assessment that Manila is centralized from both an editing and reading perspective.

Where I disagree with Dave’s conclusion is his interpretation of Movable Type being “centralized” because the tool and the posted content rest on your own server.

If Blogger’s posts are decentralized because they can reside on your server, then the same logic must, must apply to Movable Type. And if Movable Type’s posts are decentralized then the tool, which resides in the same location, must also be decentralized.

Finally, I agree with Dave’s assessment of Radio in that the posts can be decentralized (hosted on your own server), and the tool itself for the most part is decentralized but there are some aspects of the tool that aren’t autonomous (I grabbed that from Doc, it is a better fitting word). It does communicate with the RCS — Userland by default, though this can be replaced by your own RCS if you wish to host it.

One other aspect of Dave’s Essay that I thought was interesting and perhaps explains where we have such different viewpoints is this concept of community services. In my own opinion, a weblogging tool is just that — a tool to create a weblog. Associated with this is the ability to archive postings, add other content, and faciliate comments.

To me, community enters the picture through the people rather than the technology. People link to a weblog posting, or add comments or both. Eventually, you can get a chained sequence of communication going, as was demonstrated with the postings earlier this week related to this topic.

I think, though, that Dave sees a more important role for technology in this process, through community servers providing services such as chat, technologies such as news aggregator, OPML outlines and so on.

Neither of our viewpoints are wrong — they’re just different. But they do color our perspective on other aspects of “weblogging”. However, this can add interest to the whole discussion.

After all, if we all thought alike, then we wouldn’t need weblogging, now, would we?

Update 5/5/02 Thread continued here.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Considerable discussion related to my assertion that Radio and Blogger are centralized web publication systems.

First, a caveat — the use of decentralization that I made yesterday had to do with web publication without dependence on a centralized tool-specific server that you can’t, personally, control. It had nothing to do with the P2P concept of decentralization, and it had nothing to do with the fact that you can host your individual pages on your own server. It was specifically related to the web publication tool, itself.

Based on this, further clarification on my statements from yesterday:

Any publication system that requires that one aspect of it be centrally located — such as Blogger — is a centralized publication system. Yes, you can host your published pages on your server, but you still have to use the centralized Blogger system to publish these pages. This makes Blogger a centralized rather than a de-centralized solution.

From my understanding, Radio also requires access to what Userland refers to as a “cloud” to manage part of the publication process. And my understanding is that all or part of this cloud exists on the Userland servers. It is very simple to post pages to an individual server using Radio; I’ve done this myself. However, you’re still dependent on a Radio cloud.

Am I incorrect in this understanding? In other words, if I host my Radio pages on my own server and Userland’s servers all go down, will any part of my publication process be impacted? I’m not talking about weblogs.com — that’s not the point. The point is, is a centralized Radio cloud necessary at some point for the publication process?

I have to think it is when I read something such as this:

Radio UserLand implements a powerful feature called upstreaming which mirrors the contents of the user’s www folder in a folder on www.ourfavoritesongs.com, which is a 24-by-7 public Web server at a fixed location. When a file is changed it’s automatically copied to the server through XML-RPC. This makes it easy to publish static content to the Web even if you don’t have a full-time net connection, or if you move around. The url of each user’s folder is included as an attribute in the users.xml file.

and:

When Radio UserLand launches and as it’s quitting it sends a hello or goodbye message to OurFavoriteSongs.Com. This sets the user’s signed-on flag true or false and records the users TCP/IP address and port, so that it knows how to communicate with Radio UserLand. (The chat facility is an example of the use of the IP address and port.)

However, perhaps all these centralized aspects of Radio — aggregation, upstreaming, logging on, etc — can be turned off to the point where you can totally decentralize your publication process from Userland. If this is so, then I apologize to Userland for making the statement about Radio having centralized tool dependencies.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

If you’re a Radio weblogger then you’re aware of the problems that Userland is having with its static server (see this brief mention). You’re probably pretty frustrated at this time because you can’t post, and even if you could post, your weblog isn’t accessible.

Those of us who have used Blogger can empathize with you because we faced daily frustrations with problems in Blogger and server problems with Blog*Spot.

Personally, I’m very glad I made my move to Movable Type, and I imagine that Jonathon is glad he’s moved, also. And now I’m hearing rumors that other folks will be making the move to self-hosted weblogs sooner rather than later.

Centralized weblogging. The concept sounds good — have others handle all the hosting details and all you have to worry about is writing something worthwhile or posting your recent “I’m a _____ quiz”. However, as we’re finding, what sounds good on paper isn’t necessarily effective in implementation, especially with the increasing numbers of people who are joining the weblogging ranks.

If you want control over your weblog you have to decentralize not only the postings, but the tool, itself; and this means hosting your weblog publication process. However, the problem with this is that it invalidates the principle behind weblogging — a personal publication system that enables the non-techie to publish content without having to fuss with the technical details.

What can a weblogger who just wants to have fun do?

Well, you can start by asking yourself if the centralized weblogging system downtime is a problem. In other words, how truly frustrating is the experience for you? If you find you can live with the system, the problem really isn’t that bad or doesn’t re-occur that often, then keep your weblog where it is, continue posting, and have fun. Here’s a hint for you: there is no such thing as problem-free technology.

(There’s a rule all technologists are required to follow stipulating that we can’t create perfect technology. If we do, everyone will think techies are inhuman and either start worshipping us or stone us to death.)

If you’re frustrated with the centralized systems, but it really doesn’t matter anyway because you’re finding you’re not having as much fun with weblogging as you thought you would, then consider stopping. Unlike a book, dear boys and girls, weblogging doesn’t have a final chapter other than the one that says “I’m sick of this shit. I quit”. And if you do quit, we’ll miss you but we understand.

(However, this doesn’t doesn’t apply to my Plutonians. If you quit, I’ll hunt you down and run you over with Golden Girl)

If you fit the third category of weblogger — you hate the frustrations associated with a centralized weblogging system such as Radio or Blogger, but you love to weblog — then you should consider moving to a self-hosted system such as Movable Type or Graymatter or other similar systems.

My choice was to move to Movable Type because I’ve found it provides exactly what I want and is intuitively easy to use. The kicker, though, is that Movable Type isn’t necessarily the easiest system to install. Especially if you’re unfamiliar with web site hosting.

So back to the question: What can a weblogger who just wants to have fun do?

You can ask for help. You can pay a small amount of money and get loads of help from Ben and Mena at Movable Type, a contribution that also helps to fund their continued efforts on behalf of MT. In addition, talk to the people who’ve made the move. If webloggers truly are the happy band of brothers and sisters we say we are, then we should be willing to help each other.

If you have a question about hosting companies, server types, weblogging tools, installation, whatever — ask. Ask at other weblogs, in comments, at your own weblog.

Send emails. Call a person on the phone. Chat in person. Ask about a person’s karma, and then, when they draw breath to answer, slide in a MT technical question. Remember that human axiom: there’s nothing we love more than to respond, successfully, to a question about how something works. It gives us a warm, cozy, smug glow.

Whatever you do, don’t sit there fuming in silence, getting more and more frustrated. If you do, eventually the pressure will build to the point that steam will come out of your ears, your eyes will bulge, your face will turn beet red, and the top of your head will blow off.

And that will scare your cat.

Update Discussion of Radio’s centralization — or not — is continued here