Category: Weblogging

Categories
Weblogging

Fork at the Road

Congratulations to Matt Mullenweg for the a (job/contract?) with C/Net and the Houston Press article. Looks like C/Net wants to tie itself into the weblogging golden goose, and has grabbed a talented member of the community as a start.


Matt has an agreement with the company that 15% of his time can be spent on WordPress. In a normal 40 hour week, that less than 8 hours, so I imagine that Matt will still be spending lots of his off-time on the weblogging tool, too. And I imagine the WordPress development team will also start growing with new members.

It wasn’t long after Matt made his announcement that the questions started coming about the independent state of WordPress. However, WordPress is GPL, and though commercial variations could spring up right now, he’s correct when he assures people that C/Net can’t swoop down and gobble WordPress up.

Dorothea raised a good question on Matt’s continued freedom as regards IP, and Matt said he’s satisfied with the contract on this regard. I am curious myself about what other ‘open source’ projects C/Net is getting into, per his aside on this. As he says, C/Net is news and media, not software.

WordPress will most likely continue it’s development as it is, so folks shouldn’t be worried about this. For myself, though, after the release of 1.3, I’ll be forking off from WordPress and maintaining my own codebase from that point. This isn’t because I’m pissed at the WordPress community or Matt (jealous, heck yes); or am picking up my cookies and leaving in a huff. No, I’ve reached a point in my customization of of WordPress that after I incorporate what I want, and it’s a lot, in 1.3, I’m going to be diverging too much from the direction the weblogging tool is taking. In addition, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to merge my code and the team’s, and it has reached a point where it’s just easier for me to maintain my own code.

I’ll provide links to my version of the code, and updates and fixes, but I’m not going to try to establish an empire as competitor to WordPress. It will also be open source, and I might throw it up on SourceForge, but I’m not promoting the product, or starting a support forum. I imagine I’ll be the only person using the code.

(And truthfully I think most weblogging tool vendors would rather I not be a customer. Heck, I wouldn’t want me as a customer.)

It will be disappointing to not provide tidbits of help to people using a common tool, but I’ve become less interested in this over time. And I have different things I want from my weblogging tool than what the WP developers want, and that’s a goodness. Thanks to the GPL, I can be happy, they can be happy.

Congratulations again to Matt. I hope C/Net works out nicely.

Categories
Weblogging

Correction

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

Excuse me.

The Delta Airlines flight attendant was not fired for blogging. She was fired for posting photos of herself in a rather provocative pose, wearing her uniform, on one of her company’s planes.

She was fired for posting the photo, and that specific photo I have no doubt – not for blogging. If she had posted the photo outside of the weblog, guess what? I have no doubts she would have still been fired.

Categories
Weblogging

When Beauty becomes the beast

Another significant event that webloggers have participated on is the discovery that documents used on a CBS 60 Minutes were most likely fake. These documents were purported to be written by a young George Bush’s commanding officer, where he complains about having to bow to pressure and give Bush preferential treatment.

Webloggers went into full cry immediately, primarily focusing on the font used in the papers, saying that it couldn’t possibly be from a typewriter of that time — it looked more like the work of a recent Word document, instead.

Unlike the Lott event, the CBS Documents Event is still fresh, and I believe it was PowerLine that cast the first doubt on the veracity of the documents, as did other webloggers, as noted in this NY Sun article.

(Note, it may have been Little Green Footballs, according to this story.)

Also unlike Lott, there is some contention that the instigation into the investigation of the documents was derived primarily from weblogger focus. Articles also appeared almost immediately about the documents, such as this article at CNN. (Like the Trott event, we hope to get a page up at the wiki listing all relevant weblog posts and articles.)

Almost from the start CBS had to defend itself, and eventually retract their support of the documents, and Dan Rather, who led the story, acknowledged that they had made a mistake, and apologized.

The whole event was over in a little over two weeks, but while it lasted it became a firestorm within weblogging, dominating discussions so much that it was difficult to find sites that weren’t weighing in with an opinion.

Still, as Rather had apologized, and CBS had issued a retraction, what other course was there to follow? It would seem that people would have to decide if they wanted to trust CBS News, or Rather, but mistakes do happen and even professional journalists have been known to stumble a time or two. Still, what was wrong was corrected.

But the issue didn’t die out. Now that webloggers had prevented dubious material being accepted as fact the assumption might be that the topic had run its course, but this wasn’t so. Now the webloggers focused on punitive actions against CBS, generally, and Rather specifically–calling for him to be fired. It’s here when weblogging moved from prevention to punishment; from Beauty to the Beast.

Roger L. Simon was one who called for the firing of Rather saying:

Currently Drudge is reporting: Rather, who anchored the segment presenting new information on the president’s military service, will personally correct the record on-air, if need be, the source explained from New York.

What a pathetic response. Even with a correction, can you imagine ever trusting a word out of Rather’s mouth again? Can you imagine respecting CBS, “Sixty Minutes”?

Not me. If Rather does not resign, those institutions will wither with their anchorman.

The term Rathergate was coined to talk about Dan Rather’s error and what the webloggers perceived was to be a CBS company cover-up. The Blog Herald considers something like this site to represent the promis of weblogging. A weblog was created from it, to urge people to write to the advertisers and let them know that they should pull their ad money from the station. Others started sing-a-longs mocking the term and Rather and CBS News. Most, though, just called for vengence. Fire Rather, eliminate CBS readership.

Tthe anger wasn’t just confined to Rather and CBS. When a Professor at a Utah university wrote a paper about how the documents could be legitimate, he came under fire from webloggers who began to see in him a part of the Conspiracy, whatever the Conspiracy was. They didn’t just discredit his writing; they discredited him, trying to get him fired. When he edited his document, they pointed to this as an example of his duplicity; him being unaware of weblogger’s almost manic obsession with never editing material after posted (an obsession not adhered to by yours truly, by the way).

Eventually a new scandal came along, and the webloggers have moved on to other topics, where far too many swarm on issues, like bees on particularly juicy flowers. This leaves us now in a room full of tattered yellow tape, trying to decide if that pulped matter on the floor is the remains of Dan Rather, or just the remains of so many tossed rotten tomatoes.

We’re also left with questions, such as why did webloggers feel compelled to continue the clamor against CBS once the company admitted its error, and apologized for it, as well as broadcasting a correction?

Many would say because we all have a moral right to ensure that the press knows that we’re always there, fact checking them, and that the free and biased ride they’ve been on is over. Others would say that the punishment of Rather did not fit his crime of broadcasting fake material critical of George Bush so close to an election.

But there is an element of links and power to this story; that many jumped on the Rathergate bandwagon because that’s where the buzz was, and like blood attracting sharks, webloggers, particularly political webloggers, are attracted to buzz. The more buzz, the more links, and the more power a weblogger obtains — we only have to look at PowerLine’s swift rise in the ego lists to see the combined effect of a hot issue and careful handling. This explains continuing with the story as long as possible–not just to exact retribution, but also to extract the maximum amount of links and power from the story as possible, before moving on to something new.

Many people point to the webloggers involvement in exposing the CBS Documents as fraud, as an example of one of our finer moments, and there is some justification for this pride. But there’s also more than a little about this affair that should make all of us pause; to take stock of the power of the link, the danger of a mob, and remember old sayings about ultimate power corrupting ultimately.

Categories
Weblogging

Wiki etiquette

Jeneane responded with her opinion about the statement that many more men weblog than women. I think that we can safely assume that she doesn’t quite agree with this statement.

Jeneane is also one of the happy, hardy volunteers for Kitchen duty, and is coming up with some interesting sounding ideas. Damn interesting in fact. She asked about where to focus her writing, and whether to write to the wiki or the weblog, and I thought a comparison between the two might be good for a weblog post.

Of course we know what a weblog post is. It’s a long-form, short commented link, featuring photos, not having photos, written, spoken, seen, commented, not commented, about one’s cat, and about anything but one’s cat. Well, maybe if we’re really honest, we don’t know what it is; other than I think we can all agree that it has a unique author, and it’s rarely edited after publishing. These are the key differences between a weblog and a wiki.

(And that anyone can usually sign up for a wiki user account, but most weblogs only have invitation only author list. The Kitchen, however, is completely open – anyone can sign up for their own account, and start writing as soon as they do.)

In a weblog, you identify the author of a post. The author may be writing under an alias, but there’s still (usually) one author. A wiki, on the other hand, actively discourages identification of an article with a specific person. In fact, following traditional wiki protocol, names are usually removed from contributions to a main wiki article page.

(They are, however, encouraged within discussion pages associated with the article, if the software supports this. The software we’re using does. To sign your name, sign up for a user account, login, and then when you want to add something to a discussion page, just type in four tildes: ~~~~. This puts in your username, a link to your user page, and the timestamp of the edit. )

In addition, the writing in a wiki article page is open to editing. Weblog posts are edited by their author, but usually not edited after posting. Wiki articles are continuously edited, and usually not by the original contributor.

Now, wiki discussion entries are not edited, or in my opinion, shouldn’t be edited; because these are comments and notes made by contributors, or readers, about the contents of the ariticle. If you want to see a good example differentiating between material in a wiki article, and the discussion associated with an article, check out Wikipedia’s George Bush page, and it’s related discussion pages. Right now, the article is ‘protected’, and under mediation to discourage vandalism (see Wikipedia’s fascinating discussion about protecting pages).

I will be following the procedures and guidelines established by Wikipedia because, frankly, this site and the people who maintain it know what they are doing. Which means encouraging multi-author contributions in the articles, discouraging editing of comments in the discussion, and protecting pages that get too hot to handle, until the participants cool down.

For the Kitchen clinic, I will be writing essays daily to the weblog, and most likely will be copying the contents of the essay to the appropriate page in the wiki, in order to hopefully jump start topics not already started. If a topic has been started then I may only add a link to the essay in the weblog.

Now, my enthusiasm for this wiki in this circumstance, doesn’t mean that I’m enthusiastic for wikis in all group efforts. In my comments, Sean Conner brought up the obvious enthusiasm I have for the Weblogging Wikipedia as compared to my oft stated reluctance and criticism of the wiki-driven effort with Atom.

I felt, and still feel, that the Atom effort didn’t suit a wiki. In fact, it didn’t take long before most of this effort left the wiki and became focused in the mailing list associated with the Atom syntax.

Atom was seeking to create a new specification in an environment that had been heavily contentious in the past. As such, it tended to attract fairly aggressive participants who would barely wait for the ink to dry on the paper before going in and editing whatever was written all to heck. Wikis should encourage editing, but not at the expense of each person having a right to have their voices heard. If a wiki is dominated by a small group of very aggressive editors, much of the beauty of the community participating in the wiki is lost.

In addition, the Atom effort was to form a specification, not necessarily to document existing information. In my opinion, and people can and probably will disagree with me, that a wiki is better suited to documentation and dissemination of information, than resolution.

In addition, as I’ve said previously, a wiki is a great way to document the ebb and tide of this very transitory medium we call weblogging. In fact, I had an email today asking for a summary of the weblogs.com contretemps that happened earlier in the year; the person wanted this for an article he is writing. This is the perfect demonstration of the benefit of the wiki for weblogging because once the event is documented, and all links scouted out and linked in, in cases like this, we just point the person to the relevant wiki page.

Only thing now, is I have to decide if I should add a new category to handle it: weblogging warfare.

Categories
Weblogging

Popularity is not synonymous with respect

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

I like the questions Gina raises on the New Words event, and my previous post about it–especially the question, What if being visible isn’t the value that weblog authors (especially women) glean from their sites?.

This really gets to the heart of this issue, doesn’t it?

Do we want weblogging popularity? Or do we want respect? Though the two have been linked in this environment, thanks to ego lists like Technorati 100 and the Blogging Ecosystem, they are not synonymous.

Maybe the power of being a woman in this environment is that we don’t have to be part of the game, unless we want to be. And by continuing this fight of equal visibility for women, I’m fighting against women being truly free.

That’s like throwing a party and no one comes, isn’t it?