Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Hi Rafe! Rafe is one of the original webloggers: he has been
maintaining his weblog, http://www.rc3.org, since before that first
community came together in early 1999. I highly recommend his site. He
covers programming (which I just ignore, since I'm not a programmer)
mixed with current events and politics. Rafe is doing something I see
almost nowhere else: reading about and linking to the hot-button topics
of the day, then--and this is the part that is so rare--really
considering varying points of view. Rafe exhibits an open-mindedness
that I just don't find on most other weblogs. He seems to deliberately
seek out points of view he doesn't share, and then thoughtfully
consider their merits as he weighs his opinion of the thing. I'm
continually impressed with his work. So, yes, I'm a fan-girl. :)

I had forgotten about the law blogs, or "blawgs" as they like to call
themselves. It seems that one person will start a topic-specific weblog
and then others quickly follow. The blawg ring now has 178 members
http://www.ringsurf.com/netring?ring=Lawblogs;action=list. I know there
are more than this: Larry Lessig, for example, hasn't joined
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/. In some ways, the law is the
perfect subject for a weblog--there are so many specialties, you could
find a niche very easily. 

In my book I talk about using weblogs to establish professional
reputations. I saw it first in programming and web design, but the same
strategy can be applied to lots of other professions. Start a site
that focuses on your profession (or hobby, for that matter). Make it
the one place other professionals go to, to find all the news of the
day that might apply to your field, or focus on providing thoughtful
commentary on a few pertinent issues every day. Within a year, you'll
be regarded as an expert in your field--and you will have gained an
extra measure of expertise just by focusing so strongly on your
subject.
  

    
Been thinking about that... focusing more on subjects that are relevant to
my consulting practice. I'm conflicted, though, because I like to use
blogging as an excuse for websurfing and discovery. We do so well with 
information, couldn't we master time, as well, and add more hours to the 
day? <grin>

Do you consider your blog part of your business, now, following the 
release of the book? What else do you do with your time?
  

    

>  Hi Rafe! Rafe is one of the original webloggers: 

whoah, the Well strikes again. i didn't know Our Rafeco was one of the
first! i am all impressed & stuff.

anyway, hi there, i'm tiffany a.k.a. magdalen, and i maintain a newish
weblog called Magdalen Sez at www.magdalen.com. i guess it's a mishmash of
filter and notebook, with a few too many pointers to events that i'm
putting on or speaking at or singing at or whatever. what's really fun is
being part of a group blog (Incunabula's STARE)... i first got hooked on
this when Cory Doctorow invited me to be a guest blogger on BoingBoing.net
last summer.

having browsed your book and spent a chunk of time the last six months
trying to suss out the whole weblog thing, i'm not sure that blogging is
really all that distinct from anything else online --  *unless* you allow
that the technology itself makes it different. 

i mostly hear about how blogs let anyone publish themselves. well, that's
what we got so excited about when the first graphical web browser knocked
us down in the early '90s. blogs immediately and magically somehow put
bloggers into a great and wonderful community -- this part of the hype also
sounds very familiar, and that is exactly what happened to me when i
started shooting my mouth off on The WELL in 1992. blogs allow for a
diversity of voices and opinions -- darn tootin' they do, and it rocks! but
hey, so did Usenet. so did regular home pages. 

it's funny. reading your book, reading articles about blogs in which
old-school bloggers are interviewed, listening to blogger friends of mine
(like Mitsu, who does Synthetic Zero), i have definitely been intrigued by
and eventually won over by weblogs. but all those old-school tidbits of
goodness sound like people who got in on a neat thing early, enjoying the
success that they got primarily because they got in early. it sounds very
much like how i and people i knew used to pound the pulpit in favour of
online communication, the web, and even just email, in the early '90s (can
i get a witness?). we got in on a community partly because there were so
few of us at that time. the media interviewed us about our experiences. it
was all very exciting. 

what really makes blogs so much different from those phenomena? 

the greatest thing i see about it is the technology. "push-button
publishing for the people" may not be as cool as coding yr own in Notepad,
but it's what genuinely changes the landscape. now *anyone* can publish in
reverse chronological order. Blogger and the like are the equivalent of the
Mosaic browser. you could browse the web before its invention, but only the
ease of point and click brought The People to the Web.
  

    
 Thanks for the great compliments, Rebecca.  

 I don't think weblogging is any different than any of the other
"revolutions" mentioned in the previous post.  It's just an evolution
of the homepage, I guess.  The great thing about the tools is they let
people who are interested in writing, but not learning to code to put
their stuff up and find an audience really easily.  

 I can say for sure that I've benefitted from that, not only as a
writer (I wrote my own blogging software), but as a reader.  There are
tons of people writing on many interesting topics who'd be posting to
private mailing lists or just keeping their mouths shut were it not
for things like Movable Type, Blogger, and Blogspot. 
  

    
Magdalen, you've nailed it. And it's what I say over and over again.
The technology *is* the revolution. It is now possible for anyone with
a web browser and an Internet connection to create a space for
themselves on the Web. Weblogs are, for many people, the promise of the
Web fulfilled.

However, I do think it's important to keep definitions separate from
discussions of the technology. The technology has brought the form to
the masses. But it doesn't make sense to limit definitions to the
software itself--the form pre-dates the software. 

Weblogs were interesting enough to warrant a few articles (including
this one http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/1999/05/28/weblogs/) before
they became a push-button phenomenon. There are interesting
possibilities inherent in the Web, in personal publishing, in
self-selecting online communities, in filter-style weblogs, in
self-revelation, and many of the other things that weblogs enable or
amplify. All of these topics are related to weblogs, and none of them
has everything to say about the phenomenon. 

So, I agree with you, there's lots to be said about weblogs that can
be said about many aspects of online life; and people new to weblogs
definitely go through the same stages of awe and enthusiasm and
contagion that many of us went through when we discovered usenet or
BBSs (my introduction), back in the day.

I don't agree that it's weighted to the older weblogs, though. There
are plenty of old-school bloggers who are just not widely known--and
I've seen new weblogs (BoingBoing is a perfect example) go from unknown
to must-reads in a matter of months. 

> rafe: The great thing about the tools is they let
people who are interested in writing, but not learning to code to put
their stuff up and find an audience really easily. <

Absolutely. And I've seen people who are primarily interested in
writing become interested in web design and coding, and people who are
designers and programmers become more and more interested in writing.
Weblogs are a gateway form for lots of people who then cross over into
"harder" disciplines. :)
  

    
> jon: Do you consider your blog part of your business, now, following
the release of the book? What else do you do with your time? < 

I do consider my weblog to be a professional responsibility at this
point, at least to some extent. Since I started my site, I've made it a
policy not to talk about myself on my site on the theory that nearly
everything else I could write about would be more interesting. It's
been quite a change for me to start linking to articles I'm interviewed
for, mentioning my book and appearances, and the like. 

I'm still focused on linking only to the things I find interesting and
compelling--there's no point in maintaining the site unless it's fun
to do. But I have, on more than one occasion in the last year, wished
that I didn't have to update the site. When I finished the book I was,
frankly, completely sick of thinking about weblogs. It would have been
nice to go somewhere without a computer for a month.

What I'm doing this month is preparing to give the keynote for the
first weblog conference: Blogtalk http://www.blogtalk.net/, to be held
in Vienna, Austria, May 23- 24. I'm trying to learn enough German that
I can find the words people say to me in my dictionary, writing the
speech, and practicing it. I've also been working on proposals for
various projects and lately I've been spending a lot of time talking to
the press. That plus the usual day-to-day stuff. My father tells me
that it's better to have a few too many things to do than too few--by
his standard, I'm sitting pretty. :)
  

    
The technology (Movable Type in my case) greatly has enhanced my
weblogging, and I'm a pretty technical user. I'm experienced with web
design (since 1995 or so) and programming. I even wrote a couple of
different pieces of software for myself that could be called "weblog"
software. But my weblogging didn't really take off until I decided to
install Movable Type and see what it was all about. I didn't think it
would make a big difference, but it did.  Movable Type came with
several features I never had gotten around to implementing in my own
software. But, more importantly, it put me in a position in which I
could concentrate on the content instead of screwing with the software
all the time.

I'm sure that if I put enough effort into writing my own weblog software,
I could get it to a point where I'm not constantly messing with it and
could concentrate on the content. But I have a lot of other things to do
and most days I don't feel like coming home from work and sitting down
to program. Movable Type allowed me to avoid that and gave me a very
usable system in less than an hour, rather than days, weeks or months of
tweaking my own stuff.

It's made a huge difference for me.
  

    
 If I were starting out today, I'd probably be using Movable Type.
When I started, it was some Userland product or something you wrote
yourself, and I wrote something myself.  That's not to disparage
Userland, I just wanted something server based.
  

    
re book covers, ultimately the publisher always controls that. it's
part of marketing, like the wrapper on a candy bar. in my literary
agent guise, i try to help my authors understand that they won't
control the cover and may not get to use the title they want, either.
  

    
I didn't mean to harp on the book cover.  From a color standpoint, it 
definitely stands out.  It's just the design ON the cover is not very 
friendly... But enough of that...  :o)

One of the things about blogs (and I have to say that I pronounce it 
"bEE-log" and not the one syllable "blog")  is the concept of audience.

I do my blog <http://www.quahogs.blogspot.com> primarily for me. But I do 
have some outside audience in mind. Now my blog isn't very personal (It's 
about Rhode Island, and I wrote a book about Rhode Island, so I see it 
kind of as a way of getting people coming back to my site) and it's not 
like I have hundreds of readers.  

Still, I do it for myself, and as long as I'm having fun, I'll probably 
continue....
  

    
> xian: in my literary agent guise, i try to help my authors
understand that they won't control the cover and may not get to use the
title they want, either. <

I think your publisher (and editor) has a lot to do with this, too. My
editor (John Rodzvilla) was extraordinarily helpful, even though we
were under such a time limit. I really felt he went out of his way to
help me understand the process and to see that I had a good experience
and was pleased with the final result. For example, he had me send him
examples of typography from books I admired visually, to give him an
example of what I meant when I said I wanted the page to "breathe".
Then he had the book designer send me samples of her choice of typeface
to make sure I approved. I was very pleased with the level of input I
had in the final look of the book.

My husband and I noticed a big difference between my book-writing
experience and his, which was for a computer book publisher. From what
we have gathered from our own experiences and those of our friends,
computer book publishers seem to be about finding someone with
technical expertise, and wrangling that knowledge onto the page. His
schedule was set up with regular deliverables, he had two "tech
editors" and the whole thing just had a different feel to it.

I negotiated a deadline, and then didn't hear a word from anyone until
I delivered my manuscript. My editor sent back notes, I did another
rewrite, and then the manuscript went to (an excellent) copy editor (my
husband didn't have one of those). I could add and subtract copy all
the way up to the galleys. 

He had about the same amount of time as I did to finish his book. The
difference was in process and in the fact that, for his publisher, they
were on a normal schedule, and everyone at Perseus kept talking about
how we were working "at the speed of light". :)
  

    
> kafclown: I pronounce it 
"bEE-log" and not the one syllable "blog <

does bEE-log mean anything to you, or are you just being perverse? it
was that kind of perversion that got us "blog" in the first place, I'm
just sayin.

> kafclown: I do my blog primarily for me. But I do have some outside
audience in mind. <

I honestly think that's the only way to do it. I know that writing in
public instantly made me a better writer. It sharpened me up. Writing
in a notebook that no one will ever see has its advantages, but it
won't put the fear of an audience in you. :) The combination of writing
daily and in the open is a great combination if you want to write
well. (The only better combination would be to add a good editor to
that mix.)

And you have to write about what interests you--you're spending so
much time at it, it has to be enjoyable. Weblogging appears to be
effortless to many people. I remember one journalist who got very
interested in the form a few years ago, started his own, and then quit
shortly after. A few months later he wrote in a column that it was a
"demanding form." Well, it is, if you take any care with it at all.
Finding links, in and of itself, can take a lot of time. Writing
clearly about those links (or telling a good story, or articulating a
thought) takes more time, still. I think you *have* to be engaged in
your subject.
  

    
Do you think of weblogs as 'conversations'?
  

    
In a sense, everything that has been published is part of a large
conversation. There is a long tradition in books of authors talking to
one another across centuries (Karl Marx paging Adam Smith!). Magazine
articles and news opinion pieces do the same thing, in something closer
to real time. Weblogs do, too, but hypertext can make those
conversations explicit with links and trackback. Commenting systems
allow readers to directly join the discussion. Even sites that don't
have commenting systems and rarely engage in cross-blog talk are
putting their thoughts out there, and so are part of the mix. 

And sites like the Daypop Top 40 http://www.daypop.com/top/ and
blogdex http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/ give a snapshot of what is most
compelling to two (overlapping) slices of the weblog community from day
to day--what people are talking about to their readers. As tools like
trackback are more widely deployed, each of us can potentially maintain
our own clipping service, right on our sites.
  

    
Have you read (and can you comment on) Clay Shirky's _Power Law, Weblogs, 
and Inequality_?

http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

He starts with

"A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of 
weblogging is to note (and usually  lament) the rise of an A-list, a small 
set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog 
world. This complaint follows a common pattern we've seen with MUDs, 
BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system 
starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the 
existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. 
Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to 
be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so 
on...."
  

    
Hi Rebecca, I just wanted to chime in and say that I really, really 
enjoyed the book and thought that it had as much to do with netiquette as 
with anything else.

My own website evolved into something webloggish in the late '90s, such 
that I started saving the main page accumulations from '99 on. Moveable 
Type has made it much easier for me to return to what I had intended, 
which is to make the page a filter for things that I think my audience 
might like.

It is somewhat fascinating to be in an area where there really, really 
don't seem to be other webloggers. I run a site devoted to klezmer, and 
not only aren't there other klezmer sites, but there don't seem to be 
related balkan music or ethnic music or whatever sites. It seems curious 
to me how many weblogs seem to focus on politics, say, and a few broader 
subjects (technology, of course), and how few seem to get into a place or 
a specialized field. Or maybe it just takes time.
  

    
> jon: Have you read (and can you comment on) Clay Shirky's _Power
Law, Weblogs, 
and Inequality_? <

It's a very smart article. I'm glad he wrote it--it puts to lie the
two ideas: that there is no A-list, and that the A-list is somehow
self-selecting and deliberately exclusive. What the article misses, in
my opinion, is the fact that in the weblog universe is still a system
in which individuals can rise to the top very quickly. Instapundit,
BoingBoing, and Dive Into Mark, three currently popular sites, were
completely unknown two years ago--in fact, Instapundit and Dive Into
Mark didn't exist two years ago. I've seen this happen over and over
again--a new or unknown weblog suddenly shoots onto everyone's list of
links, sometimes in a matter of weeks. I don't know how long this will
be the case, but because of the highly personal and interactive nature
of weblogs, my feeling is that the system will remain more fluid than
traditional media for some time.

The other thing Shirky misses is the highly selective nature of the
data he used to construct his graphs. Each of the weblog popularity
systems tracks around (I believe) 10,000 weblogs (out of something like
500,000) and each of them is weighted to certain clusters. Andrew
Sullivan and Instapundit are completely unknown in certain weblog
clusters, and the stars of those clusters are completely unknown to the
wider weblog universe. I wish I could remember who said that in the
weblog universe, everyone will be famous to 15 people (anyone
remember?). It's true. There are little stars in a thousand clusters,
and then there are a very few people who have gotten enough media
attention--and whose sites cover topics that are of sufficient interest
to a large number of people--that they have audiences that are
relatively large.
  

    
> ari: I just wanted to chime in and say that I really, really 
enjoyed the book and thought that it had as much to do with netiquette
as 
with anything else. <

Hi Ari, thank you very much. You're right: a large portion of the book
is devoted to general netiquette and weblog-specific applications
thereof. How to make yourself known within the wider community, how to
engage other people constructively, how to get your weblog in front of
an audience.... I think there's so much that seems natural when you've
been online for awhile, but that really is learned behavior (DON'T USE
ALL CAPS!). I hope (and have heard) that the book offers some value to
those who have been online or maintaining their own weblogs for a
while, too. I tried to look at the dynamics of the weblog community and
to inspire people to think about what they really want to do with
their sites--and to think about how it is this community functions. 
  

    
Readers who aren't on the WELL can send comments and questions to 
inkwell-hosts@well.com, and they'll be posted here.

Rebecca, here's a really easy question... what are the very best weblogs 
you know?
  

    




to: Rebeca Blood:

Can you point to locations for basic and more than basic introduction and
understanding of what RSS is and how RSS works.  Same for linkbacks.  (And
perhaps their limitations too?)

Thanks,
Mark J
  

    
> jon: Rebecca, here's a really easy question... what are the very
best weblogs you know? <

That's a hard, impossible question, not an easy one! There is so much
wonderful work out there that it's impossible to choose a "best". But
here are a few I think offer consistently excellent work, and all of
them are as different from each other as can be:

rc3.org http://www.rc3.org  
   mentioned previously 
nobody's doll http://www.nobodysdoll.com/
   an engaging, entertaining notebook--what a good writer!
quark soup
   focus on science, particularly the physical sciences
viviculture http://www.viviculture.org/weblog/
   weblog as meditation
earth info net http://earth-info-net.blogspot.com/
   sustainability, environment, and analysis (he's threatening to go
on hiatus to finish his phD, but so far, so good.)
miscmedia http://www.miscmedia.com/
   popular culture with a seattle slant
wood s lot http://www.ncf.ca/~ek867/wood_s_lot.html
   art and culture thinklog

I think all of these writers have tremendously strong voices,
including Mark Woods, who rarely posts any commentary at all. I often
say that link choice is voice, and I think one look at wood s lot is
ample evidence of the truth of that sentiment.

what are the "best unknown" weblogs on your list?
   
  

    
> mark j: Can you point to locations for basic and more than basic
introduction and understanding of what RSS is and how RSS works.  Same
for linkbacks.  (And perhaps their limitations too?) <

phil gyford has written a wonderful little introduction to weblogs and
weblog technology here:
http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2003/01/05/an_introduction_.php

in it he explains both RSS and trackback in very understandable terms.

Search Engine Watch has this extensive explanation of RSS that
includes further references at the end:
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175271

I don't provide an RSS feed for my site, mainly because I haven't
figured out a way to generate one automatically. (Admittedly, this
isn't something I've been working on; it's on the list of "if I ever
learn Perl, I'll...") 

In the last year, RSS has really gained traction. With a good reader,
people are following hundreds of weblogs instead of the dozens they
used to visit by following links. Some people are sending out entire
entries and others are just sending out the first 100 characters of an
entry, or the title of the post. 

The limitation of sending out an entire entry is, obviously, that
people can read your work without actually visiting your site. If you
are a designer or if you measure your "payment" through traffic to your
site, this has obvious drawbacks. I don't believe you can get any idea
of how many people subscribe to your RSS feed, so you can't measure
traffic to your feed. (Rafe, or someone else, please jump in a correct
me if I have this completely wrong.)

The upside is that you are pushing your content to whomever wants it,
potentially reaching many more people than you would if you relied on
them to come to see you. 
  

    
oops!

Quark Soup! http://www.davidappell.com/
  

    
You can basically tell how many people subscribe to your RSS feed because
their clients fetch it from your web server to update it. So, it ends up
looking just like any other web site hit, but it's a hit on the RSS file.
That is, of course, made somewhat more complicated if people read the feed
on some other website that fetches it and displays it, like I believe
NewsIsFree does. But I find that it's pretty easy for me to keep track
of RSS feed readership.

I include full entries in my feed, but most of my entries these days are
photos with only a little text (or none at all), and the feed has only
thumbnails. So if people want to see the full image, they have to come to my
website. This isn't so much to force people to come to my site (I don't care
a lot about that), but I think it looks a little better in some of the
RSS readers, and it seems more appropriate for the format. There was also
an annoying caching issue with some of the RSS readers that pushed my hand.
  

    

i don't really understand RSS. can someone point me to an example of a site
using RSS? 

oh wait, i just read that link and downloaded the NetNewsWire software. NOW
i get it. too bad my xml feed isn't working.