Month: April 2003

Low on my list, but high on my family’s, is getting more pictures of the boy on his website. I’ve been letting it go for at least 6 months now. In part, this is due to iPhoto disrupting my old process, and me not pushing through to find a new way. I forget where I just came across ImageWell, but I had bookmarked the site, and I’ve now downloaded the application. We’ll see. My only annoyance during the investigation and download process was not knowing whether the software is freeware or not. I will pay for software if I find it really useful, but before I try something, I prefer to know whether it’s fully functional, a demo, etc.

Via Jon Udell’s comment on overlapping scopes, I found and read Chris Anderson’s essay titled “What is a blog?”. I’m glad I did. This topic could be dismissed as more navel-gazing here (blogging about blogs, etc.). But I think this public distillation of the benefits and uses of this form of communication will help clarify what’s important, useful, and effective about blogs. Without waiting to explain what’s going on, most of us are just jumping in. If it’s rewarding, however you define that, you continue. I have been trying to explain why more people at work should be publishing blogs, and why we as a company should consider public-facing blogs, too. When I run into skepticism, I want to have direct answers. The phrase “publish and forget” is one memorable benefit. Here’s the context:

One reason I believe that blogs are great for corporation internal communication is the question of distribution lists. Inside of Microsoft we live and die by email. However the constant spam of email to large distribution lists ends up drowning out the important information. For many types of communication (but not all) blogs provide a better way of communicating. There are many cases where you as the publisher of a piece of information don’t know who would be interested. Blogs are a way to “publish and forget” – you fire the information out there, and interested people will find it. Once I add our internal blog server to the corporate search service, suddenly I could find people that worked on products that I wanted to communicate with. Amazing. [Chris Anderson, SimpleGeek.com]

While I love the phrase ‘publish and forget’ — it underlines the simplicity — I don’t like the word forget… because often my point in blogging something is not to forget it. If I blog it, I want to remember it, at least. I also want to share things, but first and foremost I’m sharing with myself.

I appreciate the digital form because you can say the same thing (without repeating yourself) to many, many people. When I publish something to my blog, it’s at least in part because I don’t want to have to repeat myself the next time the subject comes up. Of course, that requires introducing people to your blog. At work, with my internal blog, I’ve been doing that slowly… once you’re public, you have a reputation to maintain!

Back to the main point… email is the #1 application on the web, with instant messaging nearly as popular (anyone know if/when it will catch up to email?). The reason blogs are continuing to grow is that it’s yet another form of communication, not ‘just’ publishing. (I work for a media company. My father worked for a book manufacturer. My grandfather was a textbook publisher. I like publishing.) Also, blogs are growing, in part, because those most dependent on email are finding it harder and harder to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. I wonder if we solved the spam problem, would blog growth slow? I don’t think so, but interesting idea.

One challenge to part of Chris Anderson’s quote… “you fire the information out there, and interested people will find it.” I don’t believe it will always be found. In fact, I think that’s blogging’s greatest weakness — it’s not good at opening up to non-bloggers. If you’re within one of the various circles of influence, you’re often aware of the general meme of the day/week/month, and these circles of influence don’t require participation beyond regular reading. For example, I’ve been reading the well-known bloggers a lot longer than I’ve been blogging. But what if you don’t blog? What if RSS is an acronym you don’t understand (let alone debate what it stands for)? There are plenty of smart people who don’t (yet?) blog, but having them as part of the audience, if not the conversation, is important in the long run. Maybe the explosion of RSS-reading applications, some of which introduce the concept under the guise of familiar applications like Outlook, will bring blogging that much closer to transparent/mainstream in the next year. I think it’s going to take longer than that.

I’ve been up for over two hours already, and at least one hour of that was spent on a work project. Then I had breakfast with my son. Now I’m headed off to the office. The point? Where do I draw the line between work and home? It’s a wavy, thin line, to be sure. I’m not connected to all my work resources at home because MacOS X is more of a challenge for the work VPN… and that, ironically, sometimes makes me more productive. I have to focus and am less prone to the distraction of the newest problem (of whatever importance). I certainly send myself a lot of email between home and work. What does that mean? Other than the fact that my memory has become digitally dependent?

I received an email this morning inviting me to submit a video about my blog for possible inclusion in a television pilot about blogging. Quote:

“We want to bring this phenomenon of personal expression to television for the very first time, and have been scouring the web for appropriate sites. Your web site seems like a potentially great fit for the show.”

Scouring? More like scraping, it seems. A potentially great fit? I’ve been blogging for two weeks this round. Somehow I’ll bet every single person who received this email is a ‘potentially great fit’ — call me cynical, but…

Here’s the full text of the email. Judge for yourself. Have others received the same email? I’m guessing hundreds if not thousands of these unsolicited emails went out to any bloggers who happen to use Radio Userland, or who post their plaintext email on their site.

I didn’t start a blog to become famous on TV. I started a blog as a personal record, a chance to practice what I preach, an opportunity to add my voice to the conversation going on between the dozens of interesting bloggers I read now. I would like to be ‘famous’ for my words and ideas, or way of expressing them. But I think of that as ‘locally’ famous, among a small community of people whom I know and respect for their ideas, even if I’ve never met them.

If they were going to send spam, why not at least show the sophistication to point people back to a blog? 😉

Scoble comments on how hard it is to get people to accept something new. He’s certainly on target, speaking from experience: his job title, often enough, has been evangelist (and he clearly thinks of himself as one, regardless of title). He mentions the Mac, digital cameras, and Tivo — I certainly am waiting on that last one, despite the resounding testimonials of several personal acquaintances. Personal proof of his main point.

“It’s the evangelist’s core problem to overcome. How do you change the world when so many don’t want to change?”

Earlier, I wrote that products are easier than services, but that’s only relative. Anything new is a challenge. If something is an order of magnitude better than the current state of affairs, it still takes time. If something is entirely new (is there anything entirely new?), it takes even more. If it’s not that different than the current alternative… then push on style and design and cool. What other options are there?

It’s either a business or it’s not. F*** the model. Either you provide a service or product that you get paid for (in one form or another) or you don’t. Enough ranting… I do care about this area. I want to learn lessons from other businesses that I can apply to the business where I work. I just don’t want to pretend it’s academic. I’m trying to watch a presentation Vin Crosbie made a few weeks ago at Berkeley on paying for content, but the QuickTime is timing out. Maybe another time.

Anil Dash’s vision of the personal panopticon strikes a chord with me. I care little for his fascination with capturing the audio of our lives, although I do think I need to get a few snippets of Benjamin’s funny comments now and again. But I find myself believing that events are not real, or easily memorable, unless I record something in digital form. Part of jotting down these notes (public, but not much of an audience) is to pin down specific thoughts in time. My memory is faulty and poorly trained. I’m very visually oriented (another way of saying I don’t listen very well). By opening up this conversation with myself, and eventually with others, I can note my passage through time by a metric other than my slower running times.

Back to the digital doppelganger… I always hoped that David Gelernter’s LifeStreams software would take root, because I love the concept of timestamping your life (sad?).

Thinking in video — which I rarely do — consider The Transparent Society David Brin brings to mind. He sees Big Brother, and advocates… go with the flow, and overwhelm the system, turning it to the advantage of individuals rather than just corporations and governments. I’m vastly oversimplifying, and perhaps misstating, since I’m relying on my memory of hearing him speak in early 2000. I have not read his book, nor his website, beyond grabbing this quote: “For the cameras are on their way, along with data networks that will send a myriad images flashing back and forth, faster than thought.” Seeing all the video cameras protesters carried during the recent anti-war protests here in San Francisco made it clear that Brin’s thinking is almost common knowledge/practice. All lots of video makes me think is… where are the editors?? (I want someone to save my time, and find the good stuff.)

My writing is too full of on the one hand, on the other hand type comments. I re-read this post from last night and was overwhelmed by parenthetical statements. To cleanse the slate, I should really rewrite it. But, I won’t. That post should really have been a short essay, where I resolved the contradictions and covered all the bases in logical order. Instead, I squeezed every thought into too few sentences. Practice makes perfect?!

“So a good fast Internet connection is not, after all, a cure-all for life’s problems. But it’s awfully nice to have.” from Tim Bray’s ongoing, at the conclusion of an essay about a weekend lost to regaining connectivity

That feeling that you didn’t get enough done this weekend, and tomorrow you jump back into the fray, and all those little tasks you had in mind will wait until next weekend. Not so bad tonight, but I can rattle off several projects I’d like to bring to completion. But if you let this ‘syndrome’ disrupt your sleep going into the week, it’s a bigger problem. Good night!