BurningbirdFew things could have cheered me up more this week then to hear from my old friend Chris, otherwise known as the great Stavros the Wonderchicken, terror of weblogging and MetaFilter, both; and to read that he’s started his weblog again.
Welcome back my friend. We Birds need to stick together. Kick butt, and take no prisoners.
AKMA has been having problems with his MT installation on Windows NT 4.0. My first reaction was to say, “Dump the trash and get a real OS, Linux”, but I realized that could be less than helpful.
Reading the discussion thread where AKMA found his solution highlights how difficult it is to write about technology. Believe it or not, it isn’t all about “First, write code. Do so without error”. There is a balancing act to the coverage, and a requirement of tone and clarity for an effective technology book.
If you make incorrect assumptions about the other person’s skill level, you frustrate them and force them into a position of having to ask and re-ask questions. Never put your audience into a position of having to ask the same question more than once.
However, if you assume too low a level, then you annoy them and they usually respond with “I know that. I wasn’t asking for___. I was just asking about____.”
Mind reading helps.
I’ve authored, co-authored, or contributed to 13 books on computer technology and have written for several online and offline magazines; it never gets easier knowing what to say and how to say it. In particular, with the “Practical RDF” book I’m just now finishing (and which I should be working on, but I’m taking a break to do laundry and a little weblogging), I had to question my interpretation of how much to cover more than once. There’s a lot of material for one book — what to put in, what to leave out. Who is my audience?
(Of course, it also helps when working with a book to have excellent editors, which I do with Prac-RDF.)
I find that the best approach to tech writing is to write to a certain level, a bit lower than the book’s assumed reading audience; and then write in a matter-of-fact voice, using a casually professional manner. Whatever I do, I avoid cute. Humor is okay (why else would I call Reification “The Big Ugly” in the book?), but never talk down to your audience, and don’t get caught up in your own cleverness — your audience will cut you at the throat.
A technical writer also never, ever makes the audience feel stupid. My job as a writer is to make you excited about the techology, interested, to answer your questions before they’re asked. My job is never to make myself seem more intelligent than I am by discussing complex topics in obscure phrases. Tech writers who write to build themselves up should be forced to eat their unsold stock.
After this book is done, I mean really done, I won’t have a professional writing assignment. For the first time since 1995, I won’t have a professional writing assignment. In the almost two years I’ve had this weblog, this is the first I’ll be able to devote all my writing and my creativity to this weblog and my web sites.
I’ll be able to finish my online C# book. I’ll be able to finish my web site makeover. I’ll be able to have some fun with my photographs, and enjoy other’s photographic endevors (which are much better than my own). More time for hiking, and driving Golden Girl around the country.
I have so many tech toys I want to create. I want to create a desktop application that incorporates WYSIWYG editing and posts to MT on my server — all using the Mozilla toolkit. There’s my PostCon system and the new Quotes. And I have dozens of other things I want to create, and new technology to explore, just for fun.
There’s so many things I want to write, and so many conversations I want to have. People to meet, too. In the flesh even. Maybe I’ll even find time for romance (which I will NOT write about).
Finally, I want to become a bigger pain in the butt then I already am with the powers that be, in weblogging and in the world. I may be broke (aren’t we all?) and I may not be writing professionally, but I still have my edge, my keyboard, my weblog, my mind, and my audience. One can do a lot of damage with all that.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Steve Himmer asks some good questions about weblogging community and sticky strands. In particular he writes:
What do we [have to] do with the blogger uninterested in linking, or more specifically to this conversation, uninterested in joining a wider web of community?
…
The blogger who writes, even cites, but does not link (Andrew Sullivan, maybe) is doing something very different from the blogger who actively develops conversation and community. And yet, Sullivan at least may not be working to enter or forge community, but is very much involved in it nonetheless: whole communities/conversations cluster and orbit around what he says, whether he acknowledges/links those conversations or not.
The worst thing that can happen with sticky strand technologies, such as Trackback, comments, and Quotes (which is what I’m calling my blogroll replacement at this time, for want of a better name), is to allow it to become “group think”, forcing it’s use on everyone. I know I’ve been pushing it, but that’s because I want people to think about connectivity and what it means when they don’t connect with the community. If they still choose not to deliberately connect with the community, more power to them.
If a person makes a choice to not connect with the larger weblogging community, that’s their right, and our obligation is to respect that. It’s then up to us if we want to a) continue reading them, and b) link to them and/or individual posts. The former isn’t the issue as much as the latter is.
Steve uses an analogy based on his classroom experience, and equates the ‘lone blogger’ with students who don’t want to be part of the ‘classroom community’. While I agree with Steve that classes should allow for the non-community students, I don’t necessarily agree with his analogy. The reason is that it isn’t necessarily difficult to allow a student to withdraw from community, by not forcing group assignments or partnerships. There is never an issue, then, of the student not being part of the community.
The same space can also be given to webloggers. If there’s a person who wants to write in splendid isolation, no one is stopping them. To do so would be to create a tyranny of the commons, and that thought is repugnant to me, and most likely you, too.
But when we blogroll the person, or link to one of their postings and write our responses of the same, aren’t we bringing them into the community, whether they want it or not? The only difference is that the blogger at the heart of all this doesn’t acknowledge the community.
No, the Lone Blogger exists like the 2 ton elephant sitting in thecorner, except every one is talking about him or her and only the elephant hears the conversations.
“All your words are belong to me.”
However, the outstanding grace, the wondrously seredipitous beauty of sticky strand technology is that it’s counterpart — dumb-link technology if you will — is then the most effective tool to discover those conversations.
Steve uses Andrew Sullivan as an example (as do many) about the blogger who doesn’t choose to be part of the community. Andrew Sullivan has no comments, shows no referrers, barely has permalinks much less trackback, and doesn’t seem to ever attribute to anyone — heck, I’m not even sure if the man reads webogs. You can’t find a better poster child for Lone Blogging than Andrew Sullivan.
Perfect dumb-link fodder.
Want to find out who reads Andrew Sullivan? Search in Daypop under Sullivan’s name and you’ll usually get the blogrolls of all the people who link to him. You can also find this at Technorati or Blogging Eco System, or through Blogging Street.
How about finding if a person has quoted a specific Sullivan piece? You can use the “link:” option with both Google and Daypop, as well as Blogdex to find out who has linked to that specific post. (That’s how I found the quote “… have studied the likes of Reynolds, Denton, and that horrible Sullivan boy” from Mike Golby.) Or you can search on keywords, such as “Andrew Sullivan North Korea”.
Bloggers are a part of the community whether they will or not — the only difference is their acknowledgement of the community. The community will flow around them regardless of the dams they build.
Is this a condemnation of the Lone Blogger? Not at all. The whole reason behind sticky strand technology is to enable community for those interested, not disable community for those not. It’s not a replacement for dumb-link technologies, but is, instead, a refinement for those of us more interesting in mining knowledge, conversation, and community, than just following along with the crowd.
Truly, as much as I would like to shut Andrew Sullivan up at times (“How do you annoy me? Let me count the ways…”), to do so would be counter to everything I believe, utopian little dreamer with big techie stick that I am.
However, if I’m not trying to strip away Lone Blogger’s isolation, I’m also not promoting the status quo on weblogging popularity. I said in comments at Jonathon Delacour’s:
My only hope is to allow voices to be heard other than those at the top of the charts. We say ‘Wow, weblogs allow everyone to have their say!” and then we all read the same list of 100 people. Or only the few on our blogrolls.
In response, Mark Pilgrim wrote:
I think that any community, left to its own devices, naturally creates celebrities, because people want celebrities. Given unlimited choices, many people apparently just want to do what everyone else is doing, read who everyone else is reading. Why not let them do it?
…
If you let people define themselves, some (many) will define themselves as followers of the crowd. Some people *like* following the crowd. Some people like advertising their social circle. Why the big push to make them something they’re not?
First, a minor clarification — I’m not trying to stop anything. The sticky strand technology exists independent of dumb-link technology, and I’m not advocating anything other than to encourage people to draw outside the lines of the hypertext-linked box. To not follow the crowd.
Oh sure I’m advocating that we burn down the house that Google built, but that’s because our increasing dependence on this service puts us at some risk. And I’m tired of people finding my weblog because they search on “cat urine”, “cat clothes”, or “gemco li l scrubber” (new ones this week — Sorry, you want Jonathon for the scrubber).
(Ask yourselves something — what happens if Google decides to charge for sarching?)
I’m not advocating the ‘overthrow’ of the current Kings and Queens of weblogging — I’m just suggesting that there are others who have something to say about topics we’re interested in, and wouldn’t it be nice to find out who they are without them having to be in Daypop Top or linked to by Scripting News? I don’t want my connectivity filtered.
In today’s weblog post, Jonathon writes:
This is what I suspect Burningbird is getting at, that popularity only occasionally correlates with quality. She’s passionate about auto-discovering new, unheard voices. But then so is Mark Pilgrim. And although I could be completely mistaken, it seems to me that they’re employing different technical strategies to achieve a similar outcome: by analyzing inbound links and/or trackbacks, find other weblogs that represent a shared interest in the topic(s) under discussion. Kind of like establishing new friendships, or matchmaking, where the objective is to find someone who’s both comfortably familiar and intoxicatingly different. Except that you get to fish in a deeper pool.
While I agree with Jonathon’s assessment of my being …passionate about auto-discovering new, unheard voices, the reason isn’t because …popularity only occasionally correlates with quality. Hell, I’m one of the so-alled sifted few, among the top 100 bloggers in most rank system (not all). I hope I write quality material, and I hope that’s why people link to me. Same with most of the others on the top 100 — many are wonderful writers.
But, they’re not the only ones. If I limit myself to only the top 100 bloggers, or to my little blogroll, I will never discover the hidden beauty, blistering wit, or technical excellence, that exists outside of this small circle.
However, randomly going through links at weblogs.com just doesn’t work for me. What does work is meeting people in others comments, or because they chat in mine, or because they trackback link to me or others I read.
A case in point is wKen, whom I’ve been linking to this week because of his photo show. Do you know how I found his weblog? It was in a comment over at some warbloggger, whom I can’t even remember anymore. I liked what wKen had to say in the comment, and followed him back to his home, where I found that he talks about sex. A lot. And he also seems to share my interest in community and connectivity (ahem, pun not intended), and is an exceptionally good story teller.
The wKen Show weblog isn’t currently (yet) among the sifted few of the Technorati or Blogging EcoSystem rolls; and he isn’t in my blogroll (though he will be in my Quotes system). And I don’t know if he’s ever been in Daypop Top or Blogdex. I discovered wKen through sticky strands.
By allowing sticky strand technology — trackbacks or comments, or at least linking and attribution — you’re allowing people to continue along a path of discovery. You may only be a stepping stone in this path, and you may not like viewing yourself as such. But consider that others are acting as a stepping stone to you, and all things equal out in the end.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
It wouldn’t be fair of me to push both comments and trackback without mentioning the downside of both. Well, the downside of comments primarily.
It’s funny, but people think that comments are nothing more than a way for yay-sayers to stroke the weblogger, and this can be true with some weblogs, but not most. The stronger the weblogger’s writing, the stronger the comments. The more controversial the opinion, the more controversial the comments, usually. But if you write a certain way and say certain things then a bit of magic occurs and you can get some phenomenal debate within your comment threads. Some of the best writing at this weblog was from my readers.
However, comments are also a way for people to dump their passive-aggressive nastiness behind the cloak of anonymity. This happens occasionally in my comments, but not often. I’m lucky in that regard. Most people, regardless of what they say, leave their name and usually a web site link. Sometimes I’ll get an anonymous person, but that doesn’t mean they’re nasty — just that they prefer to be unknown.
But if the circumstances are right, comments can become your worst nightmare.
When I wrote Parable of the Languages and it was Slash Dotted, I knew my server was going to get hit, and it was. Over 100,000 unique visitors hit the server in a two-day period. Parable is still one of my most heavily hit posts, and I’ve lost track of where all it’s been linked. I do believe it has been linked now by every major college IT department in the world.
I also had close to 600 comments with Parable (300+ here plus additional 234 comments at Slashdot.com), the vast majority of which were complimentary, or downright hilarious. But there were some nasties.
I used to have HTML enabled for comments but Parable changed that when a person embedded HTML and a little custom CSS that basically disfigured the page. Made me realize how utterly dangerous it is to allow HTML, and I don’t care what kind of sanitation plug-in you use. End of HTML in my comments.
When that failed, a hacker — a real one — added C code to my comments that was a virus. An honest, genuine piece of code that would allow anyone to crack into a system and do damage. Why? I don’t know, it’s a Slash Dot thing.
Oh, don’t bother looking; I deleted the code.
Now, this weekend, wKen, who is running a monthly photo contest, was FARKed from fark.com. This is worse than being Slash Dotted, believe me. The reason he was FARKed is because some of the photos are nude studies of sensuous, beautiful women. And they are lovely photos and not deserving of the events that transpired. In fact, all of the photos submitted with the contest are excellent, because they’re all pictures representing each submitter’s love.
I didn’t see the comments that were left. I guess wKen’s server eventually crashed under the hits, but not before every juvenile idiot left what sounds like the worst form of demeaning weblogger graffitti.
wKen writes:
I was (and still am) trying to make a point about the increasing level of meaningless anger and hatred that I see on some web sites. It’s like an angry mob that seems to feel justified in not only stating their opinion, but damaging other people in the process. There are real people with real feelings in the photos on the wPhotoBlog, and the things that a group of idiots not only said but also did to ridicule and debase those innocent people is very sad.
I won’t get rid of comments — the good exceeds the bad by a wide margin. And I’m willing, as wKen is, to take the risk in order to foster communication and connectivity with my readers. To make this experience richer for us all.
But, oh, I wish sometimes there was enough AI in the world to detect when someone is being a passive-aggressive coward and writing nastiness into my comments. I could then catch the person in the act, while they are still linked to the IP address of their connection. Because, you see, I still have that little C code application that hacker wrote….
I received a trackback ping from Jonathon Delacour who writes about tracking and lies:
I have no idea—to be honest, I don’t really care—whether TrackBack will enable us to establish a more “truthful” web but it does seem to hold out the promise of allowing us to create more nuanced and inclusive relationships than a web based on links and PageRanks. Who knows? It might even reveal more of the very different thoughts that lie hidden, deep in our hearts.
I also received a trackback ping from David at SiteLog who calls trackbacks “remote comments”. He’s just recieved his first ‘remote comment’, attached to a posting he wrote titled, ironically, “Lies, lies, and more lies”:
There are many types of love and if you are not careful, you can tell many lies. For the love of money, you will tell the lie that it is ok to sacrifice anything to get it. For the love of sex, you may tell the lie that love is not important. For the love of country, you may tell the lie that war is good.
I followed David’s trackback ping to Whispering Words who wrote “Lies and war” and who said:
That, to my mind, is the greatest lie, the most terrible lie. When a whole nation justifies its actions by the tired mantra, “They made us do it. We’re the victims here.” In war, we’re all victims. One way or another. I have family members who fled Vietnam, who were carried away in crude, leaky boats to uncertain futures as refugees. All of them still have the scars of that time….
I wonder if there are enough people in the United States who realises how much, under George Bush, they are beginning to resemble Nazi Germany.
Which uncannily connected with an earlier conversation from the weekend, associated with my post, Mein America where I compare the Ad Council’s Freedom Campaign with the propaganda techniques used by Adolf Hitler. And this was trackback pinged by There is no Cat, who talks about an article that looks at the parallels between Nazi Germany and today, and who links…
Webs are best built with sticky strands.