Cafe Bucky

…two vices …

[summary: March 28th marks two years of blogging - first on JavaJoint.com, and now on "Cafe Bucky" (daniel.org/blog). This post definitely strays into the territories of metablogging. There's also a bit of being my own critic. But along the way, I get into some comparisons with other forms of online chitchat. I don't pull out a bunch of links of my favorite posts. I'll wait for #300 to do that. This is more in the vein of "what I think about this stuff"] — more after the jump.

Wow, two years, and I haven’t given up.

In a way, that nicely sums up what I think about blogging. I don’t want to wax nostalgic about favorite posts. It’ll be more fun to bob and weave around the basic topic of how online stuff has become increasingly splintered.

Quick History:

I’ll quickly rewind to 1981. That’s when I first traded email with a friend. 1984 - started reading and posting to Usenet, both on The Well, and from school.. then from Island Graphics, and so on. 1992 or 93, started using Gopher. 1994, started using Mosaic. Oh, and I was using a BBS or two from my Atari 400 in 1980 :-)

So I’ve been online for a long time. Blogging hits me differently than, say, someone in their 20’s, because I have so many other forms of online communication to compare it to.

It’s all so different now than the Wild West days of the Arpanet.

Even IM is different. In 1986, my wife and I used the Unix talk command to chat with each other [1] The difference with doing it that way is that you could see every single keystroke the other person typed. Somehow, that conveys an extra layer of emotion or meaning than the “line at a time” IM’ing we have now.

[1] yeah, we met in the Science Computer Center at College of Marin. It was love over the terminals. Sometimes she’d be in Kentfield, and I’d be way up in Novato, 15 miles and 300 baud away.

Of course, now my wife, daughter, and I do the full-on videoconference thing.

So, for instant messaging, as the number of users has increased, it’s become that much more useful. The side comment is that some of the most interesting people still haven’t figured out instant messaging. You don’t want to get me started on that.

On to Email… In some ways, Email is less useful every year. It’s nice that we have rich text, and graphics, and embedded HTML, and so on. Email is great for having a documentation trail, but it’s not realtime. It’s great for having a discussion with a group of folks, but some online BB’s are better for that purpose. The usefulness of Email is being chipped away from all sides. And I haven’t even mentioned the spamming aspect.

And Usenet is waning in influence, being chipped away by a thousand paper cuts of “one web site at a time” bulletin boards. None of them can ever compete with the “one topic, one place netwide” aspect of Usenet. But maybe that’s ok.

That lets me segue into blogging. The great thing about blogging is that you have your own forum to write whatever you want. The not so great thing about blogging is that the first impression made on any first-time visitor is “whatever post you did most recently”. I suppose that if you are a blogging one trick pony, endlessly staying on the same topic, that’s no big deal. There are a bunch of OTP’s out there. Maybe they could start a ranch or something. They could all eat plenty of nice oats, drink from the idea trough, and then relentlessly post the same damn thing, over and over and…

Ah, but the great thing about blogging is that is a sort of personal Usenet. You don’t have to ask permission from anyone to start a newsgroup, you just start posting to new categories. Well, come to think of it, I started alt.toolkits.xview a long time ago without asking permission, but I digress (even further).

A not so great thing about blogging is that most of us are off on a cul-de-sac. On Usenet, people see what you write, and if you’re halfway coherent, they’ll follow up. In blogdom, you’ve got to be at the alpha or beta level before people will see you. Clay Shirky did a good bit on this: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

So I miss Usenet. It had focus, camaraderie, and it was worldwide. That’s another of its strengths: instead of having 30 different places to look for, say, iTunes helper apps, Usenet (in years past) would have been the most likely place where you could find a watering hole for that.

You could say “oh, but Usenet is still there”, and you’d be oh so correct. But so many have moved on from it. Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded… (Yogi Berra)

So now we have all manner of specialized web sites, and they’re somewhat easy to find.

And tons of blogs, which can be great, if you find the right ones.

… and another vice …

The Frikken Point

Too much splintering …

See, I’ve been circling around a point. Let’s get a little closer to it… It used to be that you would look for info on something in one of, say, 5 different newsgroups. Now you might look for that same info in one of 25 different web sites. Or, you may want to visit one of 250 blogs written by the folks that know that info (let’s say it’s “people who go to high performance driving schools”, or “people that know a lot about PHP”)

So, although we have Google, and Feedster, and all sorts of fun search tools, and blogrolling, and so on, the truth is that the real info out there is more dispersed than ever. Blogging has played a big role in that.

Yes, I know RSS readers are wonderful for having a personal view into all things web. I love NetNewsWire.

More on the point: it used to be that people would “go somewhere” where there were a lot of people, and there would be a large online community. Now people still go somewhere, but it’s more personalized. Going to someone’s blog is more like going to their house or office. You might be the only one there at that time. Or the pixels might be bursting the browser borders, chock full of witty, insightful comments.

Going to Usenet was like going to a conference. Going to a web bulletin board is like going to a Meetup in a cafe. Going to someone’s blog might be like going to a kegger, or a ghost town. It’s an online roulette.

I am sure I just beat that point to death :-)

And that makes a nice segue to my next thought…

Professionalism, Responsibilty, Accountability, and other ism’s and ility’s

When I first started blogging, I had a background of many years of Usenet participation. However, I knew that posting on my own site would be “different”. I figured that since “anyone could drop by, at any time”, and that it wasn’t a newsgroup, I had to be on some sort of “best behavior” all the time. You know, try to be an upstanding professional, and not say anything that could offend anyone, and so on. Perhaps if I expressed an opinion about Jazz, or did one of my free-form comments on travel to this or that city, I’d be cutting myself out of some future lucrative opportunity…

Well, fuck that! :-)

At some point it dawned on me that it would awfully boring to write a blog that would be PC all the time, or someone’s idea of “career advancing”. It would be better to find a balance of having some fun writing, but more or less staying out of trouble. So that’s my aim. Another bit is shying away from getting too personal, because, after all, I don’t know who’s dropping by. I think that one of the hardest parts about blogging is: the sometime pushing or pulling at the line of what I’m comfortable writing down. If I were writing a diary or personal log, I wouldn’t even think about that (and I wouldn’t put it online, either)

Maybe it’s age. You get to a point where you don’t care if you’re cool. It’s more important to be comfortable. This, of course, ruffles Hipster feathers a little. That’s good. They’re taking themselves a little too el seriouso…

There are some “on-message, on-topic” personal blogs out there that are straight-laced all the time. Some are actually pretty good. It’s just that sometimes I wonder that those people are like in real life. Are they always like that? Perhaps they are very good at compartmentalizing, and they’re complete animals offline.

Another segue, on the “dropping by” aspect: readers. Ya know, I would love to be read by more people. On the other hand, there are a lot of blogs out there, so I’m lost in all of the noise (and I’d wager that my posting quality can be uneven, all over the place, etc.) I made a decision early on that I wouldn’t get into a game of trading a bunch of links with random bloggers, because it seemed more important to point to stuff I actually read. It’s kind of a rep thing - I won’t point at you unless I’ve enjoyed your site for a bit (or if I haven’t gotten around to it just yet. which is quite the case with my newish WordPress setup). Maybe I will be a big hit in the Main Library on some Altaris Prime Space Colony in 300 years - a mildly amusing historical athletes footnote.

So the reader thing does occur to me, but on the other hand, it’s good to have the all of the stuff I’ve been writing within reach. I can go to any browser, search, and have the “backup brain” aspect of blogging kick in.

I’ll say this though - I think I will still be blogging in two years, or whatever we call the equivalent at that time. There are a lot of folks just starting now. What percentage will give up within the first 6 months? 50%? Blogging takes more discipline to keep at it - you know… more discipline to keep posting, than, say, participating in a newsgroup, bulletin board, or email list.

It’s been 24 years since I got my first email. The online world has changed dramatically, and continues to splinter (can you keep up? huh punk? How many RSS/Drupal/CC/etc buttons were on that sidebar? was it 5, or was it 6? Feeling lucky, punk?! - imagined from the blog of Clint Eastwood). Got your mind around Flickr, and orkut, and all the other social networking stuff? Now we have ourmedia.org, which pushes the splinterism yet again.

I’ll attempt to wind this up somehow (or I’ll be at this post for another 2 years). I just picked up “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ll boldy make a prediction, based on watching net.history. I think we will continue to have an explosion in the splintering behavior of communication on the Net for about another two years or so, and then we’re going to hit a big Tipping Point - people will get fed up with the myriad of online avenues, and many of them will quickly die out (uh, not the people). We’re still in the “cool, gee-whiz” phase, and that will get replaced with the “ok, we don’t want to have 50 different online identities anymore” backlash.

But blogs will still be with us :-)

Date: Saturday, March 26th, 2005 at 2:54 pm | Category: Tech | RSS Feed: RSS 2.0 feed.

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