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Sunday, November 11, 2001
Independencies 
| | Independent seems to be a hot adjective lately, for a lot of reasons. We have independent designers, developers, moviemakers... I think what Andre's suggesting wth Project IAME, below, is in the same spirit. |
PersonPort
| | Andre Durand has just published a very interesting document: Project IAME. I see it as the people's alternative to Microsoft's Passport. Read it and see what you think. |
Industry Standard
Born, 1996
404'd, 2001
| | I report with great sadness that the late Industry Standard's Web archive of articles is missing and, for now, dead. Attempts to load anything from the magazine's old site now fail. There isn't even a match in the Whois database. (Could it be somebody just forgot to renew the thing? I hope so.) |
| | This sucks because The Standard's archive, which was unusually well organized and maintained through it's entire existence, has (or had) enormous value in the Web's reference library. It also contained the first published hunks of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Now all that remains is this (probably temporary) Google cache page, and a handy quotable pointer from Tomalak's Realm (thank you, Mr. Lee). |
Dear Everybody...
| | A site is a magazine; a blog is a diary. A site is for The Public; a blog is to your friends. A site presents explicit, from-scratch context for the casual browser; a blog assumes its readers are friends. A site is polished; a blog is jotted down. A site is revised, erasing its history; a blog is archived. |
| | I tend to like "journal" more than "diary," partly because that's what the medium feels like to me, and partly because I'm pretty sure blogging software authors, especially Dave (whose software I'm using here) are providing tools for writers and publishers, including writers who are also publishers. |
| | There is something inherently private about a diary that modifying it with the word "public" doesn't change. Whether you're writing your diary by hand or with a word processor, there is no expectation that your save command is going to post the text for all the world to see. With a blog that's the very idea. |
| | (For example, I just saved this entry for the first time today, even though I'm not done writing it, because I thought it was close enough to being done, even though it's probably not, as we'll soon see.) |
| | That said, there are plenty of blogs that look and feel more like diaries than journals. This suggests that a blogger is a cross between a diarist and a journalist, but that cheapens the original nature of blogging, because neither of those metaphors cover what's going on here. Blogs are too new, too different and original. In the long run, which we're not even close to starting, blogs will be understood mostly on their own terms. |
| | That's another interesting thing about metaphors, by the way. In Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff says metaphor is embodied. That is, every metaphor we use expresses our experience in the world. We say more is up ("stocks rose") and less is down ("stocks fell") because that's how we experience the world. He says, "In more is up, a subjective judgement of quantity is conceptualized in terms of the sensorimotor experience of verticality." He also says, "Living systems must categorize. Siunce we are neural beings, our categories are formed through our embodiment. What that means is tht the categories of form are part of our experience! (The italics are his.) |
| | My point: the experience of writing a blog is a bit like writing a diary and a bit more like writing a journal (or writing for a journal); but it's so far beyond both (in my experience, anyway) that it creates a new category that is more like itself than like anything else. |
| | In Cluetrain we wrote "The first markets were markets, not bulls, bears or invisible hands. Not demographics, eyeballs or seats." The somewhat subtle point here is that the first markets — the noisy places where people went to buy and sell stuff — were not like anything else. They were prototypical. Other things might be like them, but they were not much like anything else. |
| | Blogs aren't prototypical — yet. While they're young they're still more like other things than like themselves. But here's the really important point: while they may be like diaries and journals, they cannot be fully explained by them. And the delta between these handy metaphors and what we're really doing here will only increase. |
| | There is another critical difference here, and that's the one between the software we use to make blogs and the software we use to publish printed documents and Web sites working on the same printed-document model. |
| | Publishing is an extremely mature concept. It's been prototypical since Gutenberg. Personal journalism has been prototypical since Franklin started cranking out Poor Richard's Almanac. Desktop publishing software is no doubt difficult to write, but it's helped by stable and long-standing publishing metaphors. Web publishing is still publishing. When we write with GoLive or DreamWeaver, we assume the result will be "put up" on the Web like a poster on a wall. The results are conceived as finished works. Easily modifiable, perhaps, but still a lot like the printed works on which they are conceptually modeled. |
| | Blogging is different. Lately some of us have been debating whether topical volleys between blogs is "conversation," serial monologue, both or neither. To me the questions are more important than the answers, and the involvement of blog software authors is more important than the questions. |
| | I don't know the people who wrote PageMaker, GoLive or DreamWeaver. I do know the people who write Userland's and Pyra's software. I know some better than others, but it's possible (I'm not sure) that I know all of them. And I'm pretty sure they all know me. I don't say that to inflate my importance but rather to illustrate how new this category is, and how personal as well. |
| | Back in May I said blogging for me was a lot like being on the radio used to be, and that radio at its best is personal. Even if you don't have personal contact with everyone in the audience, sitting at that mike and talking or spinning records is a profoundly personal activity (okay, so is jerking off, but stay with me on this). The difference is that bloggers are highly involved — not only with their readers, but with the people who create the writing and publishing tools. There are some very complicated and sometimes deeply contentious relationships involved here. The blog fight that started the other day between Dave and Chris has been pretty wrenching for everybody who got in on it. I hope the relationships are deep enough to withstand it. |
| | The arguments might be personal, but so is the software. And I want to thank its authors for that. |
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