kottke.org posts about weblogs
Heather Armstrong purchased a new washing machine which promptly broke. After several attempts to get it fixed failed, she registered her displeasure on Twitter to her 1,000,000+ followers. The rest of the story is amusing but I enjoyed it for more inside-baseball reasons, i.e. this is how you fucking blog. Take notes.
This is where some of you are all, WTF? You spent how much on a washing machine? Don’t you know that some of us don’t even have washing machines? Don’t you know that some of us have to drag our five loads of laundry AND our three kids down to the laundromat every week? HOW DARE YOU EVEN WRITE AND/OR COMPLAIN ABOUT YOUR PRECIOUS LITTLE WASHING MACHINE.
And you can give me a goddamn break. It’s not like we said, you know what? Let’s just go spend fourteen hundred dollars today! It’ll be fun! Where can we go? An appliance store! Hurry, let me change into my diamond-studded panties and climb into our golden chariot! Have the local police shut down traffic so that we don’t have to maneuver around the little people! Also, where is Clive Owen and that blow job I paid for?
Seth Menachem takes his video camera out on the streets and collects Life Advice From Old People. Menachem is in the movie biz so he even got advice from Jon Voight and Errol Morris.
The Best of Wikipedia blog collects interesting entries from Wikipedia. Some recent entries include Lawsuits Against God, Missing White Woman Syndrome, and Dead Cat Bounce.
This may be my favorite new blog of the year: The Footnotes of Mad Men. Sample footnote: The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, the tentacle porn hanging in Bert Cooper’s office. (via sandwich)
Gothamist’s Jake Dobkin attended a public discussion of “Rules for City Issued Press Credentials” in NYC today and took some good notes. The proposed new rules address some inconsistencies in the city’s issuing process…in particularly the denial of press passes to bloggers and other online publications.
Restrictions limiting press passes to certain mediums will be removed — in the future, online, offline, on-air, etc. will all be treated equally. To qualify for a press pass, the journalist or journalism organization will need to provide six clips from the last 24 months showing news-gathering activity that would merit a press card — that would include live reportage from police and fire scenes, public assemblies, government press conferences, or similar events.
Sweet Marvin Candle! How come no one told me that Hurley from Lost has a blog?
Sveinn Birkir has been collecting images from 1976 and putting them on his blog in order to create a visual anthology from the year he was born. Neat idea.
Living in a big city, you get to hear other people’s conversations all the time. These are private conversations meant for the benefit of the participants but it’s no big deal if they’re overheard on the subway. And you know what people talk about most of the time? In no particular order:
1. What they had or are going to have for breakfast/lunch/dinner.
2. Last night’s TV or sports.
3. How things are going at work.
4. The weather.
5. Personal gossip.
6. Celebrity gossip.
Of course you’d like to think that most of your daily conversation is weighty and witty but instead everyone chats about pedestrian nonsense with their pals. In fact, that ephemeral chit-chat is the stuff that holds human social groups together.
Ever since the web hit the mainstream sometime in the 90s, people have asked of each new conversational publishing technology — newsgroups, message boards, online journals, weblogs, social networking sites, and now Twitter — the same question: “but why would anyone want to hear about what some random person is eating for breakfast?” The answer applies equally well for both offline conversation and online “social media”: almost no one…except for their family and friends.
So when you run across a Twitter message like “we had chicken sandwitches & pepsi for breakfast” from someone who has around 30 followers, what’s really so odd about it? It’s just someone telling a few friends on Twitter what she might normally tell them on the phone, via email, in person, or in a telegram. If you aren’t one of the 30 followers, you never see the message…and if you do, you’re like the guy standing next to a conversing couple on the subway platform.
P.S. And anyway, the whole breakfast question is a huge straw man periodically pushed across the tracks in front of speeding internet technology. There is much that happens on Twitter or on blogs or on Facebook that has nothing to do with small groups of people communicating about seemingly nothing. Can we just retire this stupid line of questioning once and for all?
(Would you like to post this link to Twitter?)
Update: From Twitter, two pithier reformulations of the above:
@phoutz: If Twitter is banal it is because you and I are banal (It’s called social norming)
@thepalephantom: The “no one cares what you’re doing” proclamation is a solipsists way of saying “i don’t care”
Update: Three related articles. How the Other Half Writes: In Defense of Twitter by Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG (thx, @secretsquirrel):
Again, I fail to see any clear distinction between someone’s boring Twitter feed - considered only semi-literate and very much bad — and someone else’s equally boring, paper-based diary — considered both pro-humanist and unquestionably good. Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It’s a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.
Twitter: Industries of Banality by Struan McRae Spencer of Vitamin Briefcase:
Living with friends and colleagues would be a cheap alternative to living alone. People generally don’t do it because it’s not a good thing for humans to do. We are genetically predisposed to need time in solitude occasionally. So instead of living with your friends and colleagues, try living with their disembodied thoughts floating around on your computer and popping up on your desktop every fifteen, thirty, sixty, (manual refresh), minutes. Fellowship exists to provide us with relief from solitude and our individual pursuits. Living in a state of constant fellowship with hundreds, if not thousands of people who have known you (or not) across various stages of your life becomes an insurmountable problem the longer you try to do it.
To Tweet or Not To Tweet by Maureen Dowd of the NY Times, the essay that finally set me off in the first place:
Do you ever think “I don’t care that my friend is having a hamburger?”
Mark Penn, a former Clinton pollster, writes in the Wall Street Journal that:
In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers.
Understandably, Penn’s catching a bit of flack for that and statements and the numbers he uses to back them up. From Waldo Jaquith at VQR:
Penn’s thesis is that average American citizens are becoming professional bloggers, offsetting the loss in journalists, with millions enjoying a revenue stream from blogging and nearly half a million making a living at it. That’s wrong on its face. There’s simply no way there there’s more than, say, 10,000 Americans are paying for their basic life expenses purely through blogging.
Scott Rosenberg, who has done all sorts of research about blogging for his forthcoming book, reacted similarly:
Technorati’s are the longest-running and most valuable, and consistent, series of blogging studies over time, but like any study’s numbers, they can be easily misrepresented: here, Penn relies on them for the datum that bloggers who reach 100,000 uniques a month can earn $75K a year. But if you read the source, you find this:
“The average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower - $22,000.”
In other words, the $75K average is skewed by a handful of outlier successes, but the great majority of bloggers who get 100,000 uniques/month earn more like $22,000. Here, the median is far more relevant than the average. Penn, of all people, knows this.
From my perspective as someone who does make a living blogging, Penn’s numbers, especially this 100,000 uniques —> $75K business, are misleading at best and a complete fucking lie at worst.
Schools are finally taking the end of print media seriously. Professor Robert Lanham is offering a class called Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era that will be graded on the “Raised by Boomers, Everyone’s a Winner” system.
Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.
OMG, this class is totes HFACTDEWARIUCSMNUWKIASLAMB.
Keith Starky’s blog examines tweets as “part of his ongoing research in humor propagation and fluid reputation dynamics”.
The central conceit of the “tweet” in this case is the idea that Ninjas, which are black-clad martial artists who employ tactics of stealth to both defeat their opponents and avoid waking people up at night when they go to the bathroom, could partake in some of the worldy pleasures of the non-Ninja world (e.g., crunchy snacks) if that non-Ninja world consisted entirely of people wearing noise-canceling headphones. Henceforth we refer to this world as Headphone-World.
Sorry for the two “explains Twitter” posts in a row. I’ll make the next two extra special (i.e. “explains Facebook”). (via jim ray)
Long-running design blog Speak Up will cease publication later this week.
Earlier this year, Bryony and I made the decision to close Speak Up. Seeing weeks and weeks go by where we have only two or three posts (and one of them being the Quipsologies round-up) has become too painful for us. It’s also like watching Ozzy Ozbourne today, still holding on to that rock glory but he can’t really rock no more, not like he used to.
In the past week, both Joshua Schachter and Matt Haughey published articles that were excerpted in the Voices section of All Things Digital, a web site owned by Dow Jones and run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of the WSJ. Each excerpt was accompanied by a link to the original articles. Schachter and Haughey both reacted negatively to All Things Digital’s posting of their work. Andy Baio has collected responses from Schachter, Haughey, All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher, other writers whose stuff has been excerpted in the Voices section, and a couple other long-time online writers. Merlin Mann’s comment on Twitter sums up what the independent writers seem to be irritated with:
Republishing online work without consent and wrapping it in ads is often called “feed scraping.” At AllThingsD, it’s called “a compliment.”
It does suck that ATD’s linking technique makes it appear as though Schachter and Haughey are in the employ of Dow Jones and that DJ has the copyright on what they wrote. ATD should make the lack of affiliation more clear. Other than that, is the ATD post really that bad? In many ways, All Things Digital’s linking technique is more respectful of the author of the original piece than that of a typical contemporary blog. For comparison purposes, here are screenshots of Schachter’s original article as linked to from a typical blog (in this case, Boing Boing) and by All Things Digital.
Go read both posts (ATD, BB) and then come back. With its short excerpt and explicit authorship (i.e. there’s no doubt that Joshua Schachter wrote those words), the ATD post is clearly just an enticement for the reader to go read the original post. On the other hand, BB’s post summarizes most of Schachter’s argument and includes an extensive excerpt of the juiciest part of the original piece. The post is clearly marked as being “posted by Cory Doctorow” so a less-than-careful reader might assume that those are Doctorow’s thoughts about URL shorteners.
[Metaphorically speaking, the ATD post is like showing the first 3 minutes of a movie and then prodding the viewer to go see the rest of it in a theater while BB’s post is like the movie trailer that gives so much of the story away (including the ending) that you don’t really need to watch the actual movie.]
What ends up happening is that blogs like Boing Boing — and I’m very much not picking on BB here…this is a very common and accepted practice in the blogosphere — provide so much of the gist and actual text of the thing they’re pointing to that readers often don’t end up clicking through to the original. To make matters worse, some readers will pass along BB’s post instead of Schachter’s post…it becomes, “hey, did you see what Boing Boing said about URL shortening services?” And occassionally (but more often than you might think) someone will write a post about something interesting, it’ll get linked by a big blog that summarizes and excerpts extensively, and then the big blog’s post will appear on the front page of Digg and generally get linked around a lot while the original post and its author get screwed.
So I guess my question is: why is All Things Digital getting put through the wringer receiving scrutiny here for something that seems a lot more innocuous than what thousands of blogs are doing every day? Shouldn’t we be just as or more critical of sites like Huffington Post, Gawker, Apartment Therapy, Engadget, Boing Boing, Buzzfeed, Lifehacker, etc. etc. etc. that extensively excerpt and summarize?
Update: I’m pulling a couple of quotes up from the comments so that the opinions of the people involved aren’t misrepresented.
Joshua Schachter:
I really just objected to the byline on the ATD thing. It made it appear that there was a relationship when there wasn’t. If there is curation, the curator should be the one noted as making the choices.
Andy Baio:
All the complaints stem from the affiliation issue. Running ads and having comments on an excerpt are only an issue if it’s presented as original content, instead of curation. Put an editor’s name on there, remove the author photos, throw it in a blockquote, and all these complaints go away.
80. Wear a sportcoat when traveling by plane. It has easily accessible pockets.
1001 Rules For My Unborn Son is a poignant idea that’s well-executed.
The Vintage Web blog consists of screenshots of sites whose current design appears to have not been updated since the 1990s.
Nerd Boyfriend breaks down the wardrobes of the fashionably nerdy male, including those of Peter Sellers, Alistair Hennessey (from The Life Aquatic), Buster Bluth, and Sir Edmund Hillary. (via lonelysandwich)
The Lone Gunman is one of my favorite new sites. Proprietor Lloyd Morgan doesn’t update super often but each post is solidly within the 40- and 50-point zones of my interests (this is likely the first and last skee ball metaphor you’ll read today). Morgan celebrated the site’s first anniversary with an entry reviewing the last year of posts…lots of good liberal arts 2.0 stuff in there.
Dan Lyons, who wrote and tried to monetize the now-defunct Fake Steve Jobs blog, on the business of blogging:
Blogs can do many wonderful things [but] generating huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.
As businesses go, blogging is a lot like shining shoes. There are going to be very few folks who own chains of shoe shining places which make a lot of money and a bunch of other people who can (maybe) make a living at it if they bust their ass 24/7/365. But for many, shining shoes is something that will be done at home for themselves because it feels good to walk around with a shiny pair of shoes. Everyone else will switch to sandals (i.e. Twitter) or sneakers (i.e. Facebook) and not worry about shining at all. (via fimoculous)
Eye On Springfield celebrates Simpsons moments from seasons 1-9, when the show was “still funny”. If you’re around me for more than a few minutes, it’s likely you’ll hear “freshen ya drink, govenah?” at some point.
Several readers have noted that The White House Site has already been refreshed to the now-familiar Obama look-and-feel. It’s even got a blog on the front page. Will there be a Twitter account? The Wikipedians have been busy too: Obama is listed as the current President on the President of the United States page.
Update: Oh, and all of the third-party content on the WH site is licensed under Creative Commons. Wow.
Update: Oh, there’s a Twitter account. Pair with THE_REAL_SHAQ for maximum fun! (thx, brian)
Update: This appears to be the official WH Twitter account, former updated by the Bush administration but now helmed by the Obama folks.
Fun new blog on Superuseless Superpowers. So far, they’ve got 13th Bullet Bulletproof (aka Eventual Kevlar Skin), Achieving 99% Opacity (aka The Slightly Invisible Man), and Ultra Short-Range Teleportation:
This unamazing power lets you teleport up to one inch away. When done in rapid succession, it gives that old-timey stop action feel. It can also really push your “popping & locking” routine to the next level.
Update: David O’Doherty possesses Very Mild Superpowers. (thx, tom)
People Who Deserve It is a blog listing people who have earned a punch in the face, including Office Food Thief, Traveler With Giant Backpack On Subway, Loser Who Pisses on Toilet Seat, and Sexual Innuendo T-Shirt Guy. My NYC pedestrian-related submissions: Cab Driver Who Honks Excessively From Three Cars Back Just As the Light Turns Green and Bike Messenger with Whistle. (thx, casey)
Ze Frank has started a blog of notes and advice about fostering online participation. Lots of good stuff so far.
Usually there will be a few contributions that are outliers in technical merit and scale. There is a temptation to reward these contributions by drawing specific attention to them while the project is running. This can sometimes have the effect of damping the project as a whole, since potential contributors will measure their work against an artificially high standard. Alternatively, only displaying the most recent contribution allows the tonality of the project to be at the whim of the last contributor.
Instead of only focusing on technical ability, draw attention to qualities that can be expressed by anyone: simplicity, individuality, and humanity. Allow there to be a feeling of “Hey, I could do that too”.
(via snarkmarket)
I made a slight addition to the kottke.org archives page the other day: a StoryMap from outside.in’s GeoToolkit.
[I removed the map temporarily because it wasn’t loading.]
To construct the map, outside.in scrapes kottke.org’s RSS feed, looks for names of specific places, and plots the related blog entries on a map. There’s not a lot of local content on kottke.org but the results are still pretty good; it works a lot better on a local site like Gothamist. [Disclosure: I am an advisor to outside.in.]
The Daily Routines blog collects stories about interesting people organize their days. For instance, Thomas Friedman “can’t wait to get [his] pants on in the morning”. Neither can we! Reminds me of rodcorp’s How we work. (via snarkmarket)
The Economist reports that experimental tests of the controversial “broken windows theory” of social behavior indicate that the theory is correct.
The most dramatic result, though, was the one that showed a doubling in the number of people who were prepared to steal in a condition of disorder. In this case an envelope with a EUR5 ($6) note inside (and the note clearly visible through the address window) was left sticking out of a post box. In a condition of order, 13% of those passing took the envelope (instead of leaving it or pushing it into the box). But if the post box was covered in graffiti, 27% did. Even if the post box had no graffiti on it, but the area around it was littered with paper, orange peel, cigarette butts and empty cans, 25% still took the envelope.
Here’s the 1982 Atlantic article in which the theory was first discussed in a popular forum. (Great article, BTW.)
At the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.
Reading these articles, I wondered: how does the broken windows theory apply to online spaces? Perhaps like so:
Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to “own” their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same. Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves. More likely, they’re discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether.
Unchecked comment spam signals that the owner/moderator of the forum or blog isn’t paying attention, stimulating further improper conduct. Anonymity provides commenters with immunity from being associated with their speech and actions, making the whole situation worse…how does the community punish or police someone they don’t know? Very quickly, the situation is out of control and your message board is the online equivalent of South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, inhabited by roving gangs armed with hate speech, fueled by the need for attention, making things difficult for those who wish to carry on useful conversations.
But what about a site’s physical appearance? Does the aesthetic appearance of a blog affect what’s written by the site’s commenters? My sense is that the establishment of social norms through moderation, both by site owners and by the community itself, has much more of an impact on the behavior of commenters than the visual design of a site but aesthetics does factor in somewhat. Perhaps the poor application of a default MT or Wordpress template signals a lack of care or attention on the part of the blog’s owner, leading readers to think they can get away with something. Poorly designed advertising or too many ads littered about a site could result in readers feeling disrespected and less likely to participate civilly or respond to moderation. Messageboard software is routinely ugly; does that contribute to the often uncivil tone found on web forums?
Pictures of Numbers is infrequently updated, but the subject matter is timeless and the archives are worth a look.
Pictures of Numbers is a book-project-in-progress, consisting of practical tips and techniques for busy researchers on improving their data presentation.
The College Scholarships Foundation is offering a $10,000 blogging scholarship.
Do you maintain a weblog and attend college? Would you like $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs? If so, read on. We’re giving away $10,000 this year to a college student who blogs.
Here’s the 2007 winner’s blog (and the two runners up). The application deadline is October 30. Get blogging!
James Surowiecki, who writes the biweekly financial column for the New Yorker, has started a finance blog on the NYer site called The Balance Sheet.
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