Category: Weblogging

I was asked once about why the Kitchen effort had to end. Much of the reason is that the tools are such as to intimidate those who might like to get involved, and in this case I’m referring to the wiki; or too cumbersome to allow a truly open, community-managed weblog. As it stands now, both are too dependent on an individual, which means too vulnerable on that individual’s continued participation.

Marius Coomans wrote a relevant post related to these issues today. He talked about how he wanted to combine his interests in sailing and group software with a mailing list for his sailing friends, but couldn’t generate enough interests–that critical mass that has been mentioned elsewhere.

Why? As he writes:

So why couldn’t I get a enough people to join? Well, I’m part of a minority – those in their late fifties with a intense on-line habit. Most of the people in my age group don’t get it, they didn’t grow up with computers.

That’s much of the problem with the technology associated with the Kitchen. Many of the people who wanted to participate had never had anything to do with a wiki before, and wikis are intimidating. They require not only understanding of how the wiki technology works, but also the culture of the wiki, which is very unique.

As for the weblog, true the contributors were all webloggers. However, most of them have never weblogged in a group environment, or used WordPress for weblogging. Again, there was an intimidation about whether the person’s writing was good enough (all of the writing was more than good enough by the way); and then there was the concern about breaking something in WordPress.

What I’d like to see is a combination of power between the two, wiki and weblog; either through carefully adjusted modifications in code to both while still allowing separate products; or combining the two into one product. A super wiki-weblog.

To start, a good group WordPress modification (perhaps a version of Wordform for Groups) would be to have a ‘newbie’ checkbox next to the person’s name that means when they access the tool, it opens into an editing page that is very simple and very easy to comprehend that doesn’t have tabs at the top and odd fields such as “Post Slug”. Then once the person is over their newness, they can be promoted to a more experienced user and given access to the greater power of the tool.

Another good change would be to allow people to ask to be given administrative capability, and have the other members vote on this. If enough members agree, this person would then have the ability to do things such as pull a post (i.e. set it to a ‘pulled’ status – no post should be deleted), and help new users. With this, several people could have administrative capabilities and the weblog could exist without the direct intervention of any one person. That’s the power of the wiki, openness, but incorporated into the power of weblog, authoring specificity.

It would be an interesting experiment to see what one could do with an open source weblogging tool and a wiki that would lure people out of being passive consumers into active participants. Perhaps the Kitchen can be brought back to life at a later time, and we could try something like a Wiki Wordform for Groups.

Still, technology can only go so far. Or as Marius concludes, we have to get people to want to participate:

Social Software, like weblogs, wikis and yes, mailing lists generally need a two way conversation and many people still see themselves as consumers rather than participants.

We could also consider giving away free toasters. I’ve heard that helps.

The Tutor wrote a beautifully eloquent post about the nature of giving, and in particular, the giving heart of the person who funded the Kitchen.

I happen to know the person who funded IT Kitchen, and a little about his motives. I will not betray his confidences, but would like to present this a model of grassroots giving. The donor does not have big bucks. He is a reader of Wealth Bondage and Gift Hub where we discuss giving as an antidote for too much getting and spending, too much consumerism, branding, and propagandistic manipulation. He gives blogs anonymously and gives anonymously, dropping a few bucks here and there into paypal buckets for blogger friends in need. When publicly thanked, as he has been at least once, he cringes. He feels that he has given so little, why should he be publicly thanked? I think he may have thought of Shelley when I blogged my gratitude for all the help she gave me in moving my site from Radio to MT. I suspect he wanted not only for Shelley to share her expertise, but to keep alive the spirit of giving, of solidarity and common purpose that had been so characteristic of the early days of blogging, when we all found one another as neighbors in cyberspace, and hung out in each other’s world’s as we might in one another’s living room or kitchen.

I agree with Tutor about the person who donated money for the Kitchen. I hope in the end that he’s happy about the effort, though I feel I’ve let him down. Not because of the results–as someone reminded me gently yesterday, the Kitchen was a success. People did come together and contribute interesting bits, and we did have a chance to experiment around with the concepts.

No, I felt I let him down because I was disappointed that the Kitchen didn’t achieve global acclaim, especially from those who partake of the royal nod of favor and approval. In the end, I betrayed the concepts underlying this event.

So I have to disclaim the kind words that Tutor said about me in the rest of the missive, because I haven’t been as generous or gracious as either the donor, or others who spent time doing Kitchen Duty.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

When I first started planning the Kitchen, I mentioned the fact that it was being funded by a person who wanted to be anonymous. When I tried to attract more women into contributing, in order to balance the gender gap that is present in most activities, one of the first responses I received was: what was the motivation behind the person’s involvement? Why did he or she prefer to remain anonymous? And how much was I making from this effort?

I remember being taken aback by these questions, particularly when the assumption behind them was that the person had a right to know. My first reaction was to ask in turn: did you also ask how much David Weinberger makes for his work at Harvard? Should we begin to ask Scoble how much he earns at Microsoft, or Tim Bray at Sun? Do you also ask the person who works at the Red Cross how much they make? Or the person at Goodwill? How about the bell ringer outside of your local store?

I responded with details of what I was making but wasn’t happy about doing so. What I wanted to write was: does it really matter what I made for my effort, if the effort itself is good and worthwhile? I didn’t follow my first inclination because I hesitated to offend the person who questioned the motives behind the funding. I shouldn’t have hesitated, though, because whatever I wrote wasn’t satisfactory to the person, anyway, who never responded back.

We have become a rather rude group of people at times, and too much of it is associated with weblogging and dollars, and weblogging and whuffie. We demand accountability, but it’s not enough to mention that you’re supported in part by one organization or another — we want full details. I am rather expecting a move next year to demand that people scan and put their IRS (or national equivalent) tax statements online, and wonder how one can fit this into our FOAF (Friend of a Friend) files?

Possible monetary disclaimer:

I made 23,000US dollars last year, of which 2000.00 was from weblogging; the other 21,000 came from selling myself on the street corner at 5.00 a blowjob. I regret this, though; I feel so cheap for taking money for weblogging.

In addition, I was surprised at the level of distrust directed at the effort because the person who was providing the funding preferred to remain anonymous; especially in light of charity in society outside of weblogging, when those who contribute anonymously are considered more giving than those who demand that their name be plastered all over an effort. How odd that in this genre that the opposite is true: if someone doesn’t deliberately seek to get whuffie for an effort, somehow their actions are considered suspect.

Personally if a person can make money from their weblog, more power to them. If they get glory for their weblog, more power to them. I do agree that it’s probably not a bad idea to know if they’re funded by an outside agency, but I don’t need to know the details–that’s private. What matters to me, and should to you, is if they begin to change what they write as a result of it. If they do, it’s then up to us, the readers, to decide if we want to continue reading that person or not. If enough readers quit perhaps the person’s funding will end and they’ll go back to writing however they want. Regardless t’s the value of the words and how much trust we have in the weblogger that should matter–not the value of the Google Ads, and whether they make enough money from their weblog to ride the bus or drive a Lexus.

I have never seen it fail yet: weblogging routes around damage, even damage created by the almighty buck. However, I’m not sure if weblogging can continue to route around rudeness.

In response to posts written by several weblogging women, including Jeanne of Body and Soul, about closing their weblogs or putting them on hiatus because of the re-election of George Bush, Culture Cat wrote:

I know it’s awfully melodramatic, but images of self-immolation on a pyre of virtual burning books keep coming to my mind. I might as well say it — suttee — because I can’t pretend not to notice that these are all bright, eloquent women. It should be obvious that I have nothing but respect for all of the bloggers I’ve mentioned, I certainly understand the desire to retreat and reflect for a while, and I’ll support any decisions they make about their blogs, but it’s precisely because I hold them in such high regard that I must object to the decision to stop blogging (in the case of Rana and Jeanne, that is).

I have found, though, that this reaction isn’t limited to just women, as I’ve read several male webloggers who have talked either about shutting down for a time or permanently, or drastically changing the nature of their weblogs. In some cases, like Jeneane’s, the reasons are fairly easy to understand: they started a weblog purely to write against George Bush during the election. Now that the election is over, and especially now that Bush has won, they don’t see a reason to keep it going.

Yet for those who have quit in anger, or even those who continue in anger, I have to wonder how much of the anger is due to the re-election of George Bush and how much to other aspects of their lives that they can’t write about?

The election of George Bush, or the loss of John Kerry, was not anyone’s personal responsibility– each person had a vote and a voice and was free to exercise both. But once the election was over, we can’t point a dart on a map and tell the people where it lands that it’s “all their fault”. Neither should we react as if those who didn’t vote the way we wanted, or didn’t write as angrily or work as passionately, have somehow personally betrayed us.

Yet I have seen this reaction in weblogging and I have to admit that I don’t understand it. The only thing we have control of is our immediate environment, if that; to push others away, to hit out at them, and to disdain them because they don’t share your grief or anger is to lose that one aspect of all of this that you can reach out and touch. To do so willingly, seems to me to say that there is more to the your anger than George Bush winning–because he’s not impacted by the actions, only the person hit, rejected, and dismissed.

Maybe closing down one’s weblog or taking a long break is the best course; to prevent destruction rather than embrace it.

I had promised an essay on the so-called syndication wars–those battles between the proponents of RSS .9x and RSS 1.0 and the later battles between the proponents of RSS 2.0 and Atom. However, there is something sad about this little war now; old warriers have quietly faded away, in exhaustion and indifference, and the winners can’t wear ribbons as their chest have grown too big.

As for the rest of us, well we fight other battles, either indifferent or perhaps more likely burnt out by the constant friction associated with syndication feeds. Yes, those simple little feeds that let people know that you’ve updated and what you may or may not be saying — so that Scoble can read 100,000 feeds a day and scare the newbies.

Yet there is one more gasp to this war, though it’s a sad one, and more in the nature of a funeral mass or perhaps a wake. Who are the winners? No one really, not even those who fought so strongly. In the end it is just so much technology, and the rest of us have moved on to knitting and trying to overthrow a president.

Tim Bray suggests that Atom is almost finished and ready to be called, what, done? Well, as done as can be without foundering into the realms of inventiveness of RDF and OWL and all that Semantic Webness stuff:

I’ve been involved in several different standardization projects across the years, of which one was overwhelmingly successful: XML. And in the process of designing XML, we invented more or less nothing. We took an existing standard, SGML, parts of which worked well and other parts of which were klunky, or expensive, or incomprehensible, or all three. We threw away everything but the pieces that were known to work and added pretty-good Unicode support, i.e. something else that had been proven to work. We tightened up some definitions and added some convenience features and threw away lots and lots and lots of options.

Ever since then, I’ve been convinced that standards organizations shouldn’t try to invent technology. (The W3C, which is jam-packed with super-smart people, has produced some horrible, damaging standards when they’ve tried to get too inventive.) The right role for a standards body is to wait till the implementors have deployed things and worked out the hard bits, then write down the consensus on what works and what doesn’t.

He goes on to say that Atom really took the best bits of RSS 2.0 and added a few more good bits and dropped the bad bits. This is all technical talk, you see, for saying that Atom really isn’t much different from RSS 2.0 in the great scheme of things.

But I notice something else as I look around — the loss of the original spirits behind Atom. Sam Ruby is still there, but in a quiet secondary role. And Mark Pilgrim left a cryptic note about other hobbies, and vanished into that netherworld of a weblogger who may, or may not have, quit.

Perhaps they are all tired, and who could blame them? This topic is nothing but contention, but now the brangles have grown dusty and the thorns dulled from use. I read through the entries at the Atom Syndication mailing list and see ones like this where the author, Dare Obasanjo writes:

I’m not trying to convincing anyone of anything. Come
to think of it I’m not even sure why I’m still
bothering to read or post to this list.

*unsubscribed*

But this was initiated by another writer, Robert Sayre, who contributed this gem:

A plausible theory, but you have no way of substantiating it. You’re posting on a mailing list full of people who want Atom to exist for a variety of reasons. I’m not sure why you think you’re going to convince them otherwise. You’re just wasting our time with this trash. Over and over and over again.

To which thread Danny Ayers writes:

challenge, perhaps?

Quoting Dare from earlier in the thread:
[[
On the other hand, there isn’t much I want from an XML
syndication format that can’t be done with one of the
existing flavors of RSS (1.0 or 2.0) and extensions.
So I won’t waste your time listing the features I’d
like to see in a syndication format.
]]

That is exactly what I found exasperating, that his sights were set on
what could be done already, not what could be fixed or *improved* over
1.0 and 2.0. People like Dare, Don Park and others are unlikely to see
much benefit as long the group aims merely for
lowest-common-denominator RSS 2.0, patched and rebranded.

Ok, I think it would take considerably more than a months of Sundays
to say, persuade Dare of the benefits of the RDF model or whatever, he
has a strong naysaying streak. But if at the end of the day this WG
doesn’t come up with a deliverable that Dare could confidently take to
MS and say “this is much better” then we’ve missed something.

At the end, though, there are those who seek to unite and smooth waters, and one such is Henry Story (who I think authors this weblog) who writes:

It may be weird, but I think everyone here has been looking at different parts of a huge elephant, and we are just about to see the elephant.

All it requires is a little compromise, a little flexibility of mind, a little openness to the new, and we will have something that is truly great. The RSS wars will seem funny when looked at it from the other side.

And speaking of elephants and great guffaws of laughter, Dave Winer joins in with:

Tim Bray suggests that Atom might nearly be finished. I read his comments carefully, and find the benefits of the possibly-final Atom to be vague, and the premise absolutely incorrect. Unlike SGML, RSS has been widely deployed, successfully, by users of all levels of technical expertise. There are many thousands of popular RSS feeds updating every day, from technology companies like Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Sun and Oracle, big publishing companies like Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Newsweek, Time, BBC, Guardian, etc, exactly the kinds of enterprises that his employer serves. It’s also widely used by today’s opinion leaders, the bloggers. Where SGML was beached and floundering, RSS is thriving and growing. So to conclude that RSS needs the same help that SGML did, is simply not supported by facts.

But then Dave wants one and only one syndication feed: his syndication feed, RSS 2.0, which is what started all of the wars in the first place. Which is odd, really, when you consider in the same day’s posts is a wrist slapping to Microsoft for their search engine rollout (something about bloggers not being able to talk to reporters) where he writes:

We desperately need a two-party system in search, because search is proving to be the key technology in the software platform of the future, and unless Microsoft shows up with something differentiated and competent, we’re all hosed. The last thing we need is to trade one monopoly for another.
…
Now what would be amazing is if you regrouped and LEARNED from this, and let’s get some killer features into this product, things that really disrupt the market and get people thinking that search engines could be much more than they are today. We talked about them, and for now I’m going to do you a favor and not talk about them publicly.

But before you can disrupt the market you yourselves need some disruption.

Let’s revisit that last line, shall we?

But before you can disrupt the market you yourselves need some disruption.

Which rather takes us back full circle to the start of all of this. But you all don’t really care these syndication battles much anymore, which just shows that you all have grown up and moved on to other things–such as digging in dirt of one kind or another. But I had promised to write an essay on the syndication wars, and here it is.

More reading at:

Ken MacLeod’s pull together post

Ben Hammersley article at the Guardian

My own site has too many entries, which you can find by searching on Echo or Atom, though you’ll get other, probably more interesting writings amidst the syndication posts. Same can be said for Sam’s, Mark’s, Dave’s, Tim’s, Danny’s, and others who have been brushed by this thin, sickly pale, former shadow of itself pachyderm.

Cross-posted at The Kitchen