Weblogs

Old media vs. New media

Weblogs / /

Allright, so I’m going to milk this subject for everything it’s worth. ArsTechnica continues their coverage of the subject as well, posting an excellent summary of the debate.

Overall, the picture that emerges has two sides to it. First, top-tier bloggers themselves are better educated than top-tier newspaper columnists. So one of the main attractions of blogging and other forms of online-only publishing is that you get topical commentary from trained specialists and insiders, instead of from people whose only professional training is journalism school and whose very job description is that they’re professional outsiders.

The other part of the picture is the audience, which is more media savvy and is more interested in being treated as a peer by news sources. Blogs and other online news sources treat their readers as peers by allowing them to post comments that are directly attached to stories and by adopting a more personal, conversational tone. Thus the audience can participate directly in the newsmaking process, as high-profile blogs manage the collective efforts of their readers and work to influence reporting higher up the media food chain.

Interesting observations, but perhaps we’re making a bit too much about this. Old media isn’t going away anytime soon, it just needs to adapt to the existence of the new media. It’s a symbiotic relationship (both sides need each other), even moreso than past media shifts. Historically, these sorts of shifts happen when a new medium presents itself. Newspapers had to adapt to radio and television, just as they’ll have to adapt to the internet now (and so will radio and television). In Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World, the character Daniel Waterhouse ponders how new systems supplant older systems:

“It has been my view for some years that a new System of the World is being created around us. I used to suppose that it would drive out and annihilate any older Systems. But things I have seen recently … have convinced me that new Systems never replace old ones, but only surround and encapsulate them, even as, under a microscope, we may see that living within our bodies are animalcules, smaller and simpler than us, and yet thriving even as we thrive. … And so I say that Alchemy shall not vanish, as I always hoped. Rather, it shall be encapsulated within the new System of the World, and become a familiar and even comforting presence there, though its name may change and its practitioners speak no more about the Philosopher’s Stone.” (page 639)

In his Slashdot interview, Stephenson applies the same “surround and encapsulate” concept to the literary world. And so perhaps the new media will surround and encapsulate, but never destroy, the old media.

The Mainstream Media

3 Comments / Weblogs / /

Matt Haughey is sick of the singling out of the monolithic MSM, and he’s right:

I’m usually not one to throw around ultimatums, but here’s a new personal rule: If you use the term “MSM” in a unironic way to denote the “Mainstream Media” I will write you off as a quack, unsubscribe from your RSS, and stop reading your blog.

There is no “mainstream” media that is well-defined as Them, nor are webloggers suddenly Us. The term “The Media” is so nebulous that it includes us all. The line between the imagined “Us” bloggers and “Them” media outlets is so gray that it can’t be drawn.

A few things to note here in relation to my last post on weblogs. I used the term “mainstream media” in that post (and have used it before as well) because it seems to be a common term that separates professional, broadcasted (i.e. mainstream) media (i.e. newspapers, television, radio) from informal, on-demand media (i.e. blogs). However, Haughey has a point: the line between is blurring by the second. Blogs are becoming mainstream, so the term is losing value.

As such, Haughey is essentially calling bullshit on me and everyone else who uses that term, which demonstrates another point I was trying to make:

It is true that some blogging proponents are preaching triumphalism, but that’s part of the charm. They’re allowed to be wrong and if you look closely at what happens when someone makes such a comment, you see that for every exaggerated claim, there are 10 counters in other blogs that call bullshit.

I haven’t actually looked into it, but I’m positive that there are tons of other blogs out there that have expressed distaste at the use of the term “mainstream media.” And they’re right, to a degree. I was being lazy. It’s easier to say “mainstream media” than it is to write a few extra paragraphs explaining what I mean, just as it’s easier to issue arbitrary ultimatums than it is to make a comprehensive value judgement of a blog.

What is a Weblog, Part II

2 Comments / Best Entries, Computers & Internet, Weblogs / /

What is a weblog? My original thoughts leaned towards thinking of blogs as a genre within the internet. Like all genres, there is a common set of conventions that define the blogging genre, but the boundaries are soft and some sites are able to blur the lines quite thoroughly. Furthermore, each individual probably has their own definition as to what constitutes a blog (again similar to genres). The very elusiveness of a definition for blog indicates that perception becomes an important part of determining whether or not something is a blog. It has become clear that there is no one answer, but if we spread the decision out to a broad number of people, each with their own independent definition of blog, we should be able to come to the conclusion that a borderline site like Slashdot is a blog because most people call it a blog.

So now that we have a (non)definition for what a blog is, just how important are blogs? Caesar at Arstechnica writes that according to a new poll, Americans are somewhat ambivalent on blogs. In particular, they don’t trust blogs.

I don’t particularly mind this, however. For the most part, blogs don’t make much of an effort to be impartial, and as I’ve written before, it is the blogger’s willingness to embrace their subjectivity that is their primary strength. Making mistakes on a blog is acceptable, so long as you learn from your mistakes. Since blogs are typically more informal, it’s easier for bloggers to acknowledge their mistakes.

Lexington Green from ChicagoBoyz recently wrote about blogging to a writer friend of his:

To paraphrase Truman Capote’s famous jibe against Jack Kerouac, blogging is not writing, it is typing. A writer who is blogging is not writing, he is blogging. A concert pianist who is sitting down at the concert grand piano in Carnegie Hall in front of a packed house is the equivalent to an author publishing a finished book. The same person sitting down at the piano in his neighborhood bar on a Saturday night and knocking out a few old standards, doing a little improvisation, and even doing some singing — that is blogging. Same instrument — words, piano — different medium. We forgive the mistakes and wrong-guesses because we value the immediacy and spontaneity. Plus, publish a book, it is fixed in stone. Write a blog post you later decide is completely wrong, it is actually good, since it gives you a good hook for a later post explaining your thoughts that led to the changed conclusion. The essence of a blog is to air things informally, to throw things out, to say “this interests me because …” From time to time a more considered and article-like post is good. But most people read blogs by skimming. If a post is too long, in my observation, it does not get much response and may not be read at all.

Of course, his definition of what a blog is could be argued (as there are some popular and thoughtful bloggers who routinely write longer, more formal essays), but it actually struck me as being an excellent general description of blogging. Note his favorable attitude towards mistakes (“it gives you a good hook for a later post” is an excellent quote, though I think you might have to be a blogger to fully understand it). In the blogosphere, it’s ok to be wrong:

Everyone makes mistakes. It’s a fact of life. It isn’t a cause for shame, it’s just reality. Just as engineers are in the business of producing successful designs which can be fabricated out of less-than-ideal components, the engineering process is designed to produce successful designs out of a team made up of engineers every one of which screws up routinely. The point of the process is not to prevent errors (because that’s impossible) but rather to try to detect them and correct them as early as possible.

There’s nothing wrong with making a mistake. It’s not that you want to be sloppy; everyone should try to do a good job, but we don’t flog people for making mistakes.

The problem with the mainstream media is that they purport to be objective, as if they’re just reporting the facts. Striving for objectivity can be a very good thing, but total objectivity is impossible, and if you deny the inherent subjectivity in journalism, then something is lost.

One thing Caesar mentions is that “the sensationalism surrounding blogs has got to go. Blogs don’t solve world hunger, cure disease, save damsels in distress, or any of the other heroic things attributed to them.” I agree with this too, though I do think there is something sensational about blogs, or more generally, the internet.

Steven Den Beste once wrote about what he thought were the four most important inventions of all time:

In my opinion, the four most important inventions in human history are spoken language, writing, movable type printing and digital electronic information processing (computers and networks). Each represented a massive improvement in our ability to distribute information and to preserve it for later use, and this is the foundation of all other human knowledge activities. There are many other inventions which can be cited as being important (agriculture, boats, metal, money, ceramic pottery, postmodernist literary theory) but those have less pervasive overall affects.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with the notion that these are the most important inventions, it is undeniable that the internet provides a stairstep in communication capability, which, in turn, significantly improves the process of large-scale collaboration that is so important to human existence.

When knowledge could only spread by speech, it might take a thousand years for a good idea to cross the planet and begin to make a difference. With writing it could take a couple of centuries. With printing it could happen in fifty years.

With computer networks, it can happen in a week if not less. After I’ve posted this article to a server in San Diego, it will be read by someone on the far side of a major ocean within minutes. That’s a radical change in capability; a sufficient difference in degree to represent a difference in kind. It means that people all over the world can participate in debate about critical subjects with each other in real time.

And it appears that blogs, with their low barrier to entry and automated software processes, will play a large part in the worldwide debate. There is, of course, a ton of room for improvement, but things are progressing rapidly now and perhaps even accelerating. It is true that some blogging proponents are preaching triumphalism, but that’s part of the charm. They’re allowed to be wrong and if you look closely at what happens when someone makes such a comment, you see that for every exaggerated claim, there are 10 counters in other blogs that call bullshit. Those blogs might be on the long tail and probably won’t garner as much attention, but that’s part of the point. Blogs aren’t trustworthy, which is precisely why they’re so important.

Update 4.24.05: I forgot to link the four most important inventions article (and I changed some minor wording: I had originally referred to the four “greatest” inventions, which was not the wording Den Beste had used).

What is a Weblog?

2 Comments / Best Entries, Computers & Internet, Weblogs / /

Caesar at ArsTechnica has written a few entries recently concerning blogs which interested me. The first simply asks: What, exactly, is a blog? Once you get past the overly-general definitions (“a blog is a frequently updated webpage”), it becomes a surprisingly difficult question.

Caesar quotes Wikipedia:

A weblog, web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic time-stamped posts on a common webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order. Such a website would typically be accessible to any Internet user. “Weblog” is a portmanteau of “web” and “log”. The term “blog” came into common use as a way of avoiding confusion with the term server log.

Of course, as Caesar notes, the majority of internet sites could probably be described in such a way. What differentiates blogs from discussion boards, news organizations, and the like?

Reading through the resulting discussion provides some insight, but practically every definition is either too general or too specific.

Many people like to refer to Weblogs as a medium in itself. I can see the point, but I think it’s more general than that. The internet is the medium, whereas a weblog is basically a set of commonly used conventions used to communicate through that medium. Among the conventions are things like a main page with chronological posts, permalinks, archives, comments, calendars, syndication (RSS), blogging software (CMS), trackbacks, &c. One problem is that no single convention is, in itself, definitive of a weblog. It is possible to publish a weblog without syndication, comments, or a calendar. Depending on the conventions being eschewed, such blogs may be unusual, but may still be just as much a blog as any other site.

For lack of a better term, I tend to think of weblogs as a genre. This is, of course, not totally appropriate but I think it does communicate what I’m getting at. A genre is typically defined as a category of artistic expression marked by a distinctive style, form, or content. However, anyone who is familiar with genre film or literature knows that there are plenty of movies or books that are difficult to categorize. As such, specific genres such as horror, sci-fi, or comedy are actually quite inclusive. Some genres, Drama in particular, are incredibly broad and are often accompanied by the conventions of other genres (we call such pieces “cross-genre,” though I think you could argue that almost everything incorporates “Drama”). The point here is that there is often a blurry line between what constitutes one genre from another.

On the medium of the internet, there are many genres, one of which is a weblog. Other genres include commercial sites (i.e. sites that try to sell you things, Amazon.com, Ebay, &c.), reference sites (i.e. dictionaries & encyclopedias), Bulletin Board Systems and Forums, news sites, personal sites, weblogs, wikis, and probably many, many others.

Any given site is probably made up of a combination of genres and it is often difficult to pinpoint any one genre as being representative. Take, for example, Kaedrin.com. It is a personal site with some random features, a bunch of book & movie reviews, a forum, and, of course, a weblog (which is what you’re reading now). Everything is clearly delineated here at Kaedrin, but other sites blur the lines between genres on every page. Take ArsTechnica itself: Is it a news site or a blog or something else entirely? I would say that the front page is really a combination of many different things, one of which is a blog. It’s a “cross-genre” webpage, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less effective (though there is something to be said for simplicity and it is quite possible to load a page up with too much stuff, just as it’s possible for a book or movie to be too ambitious and take on too much at once) just as Alien isn’t necessarily a less effective Science Fiction film because it incorporates elements of Horror and Drama (or vice-versa).

Interestingly, much of what a weblog is can be defined as an already existing literary genre: the journal. People have kept journals and diaries all throughout history. The major difference between a weblog and a journal is that a weblog is published for all to see on the public internet (and also that weblogs can be linked together through the use of the hyperlink and the infrastructure of the internet). Historically, diaries were usually private, but there are notable exceptions which have been published in book form. Theoretically, one could take such diaries and publish them online – would they be blogs? Take, for instance, The Diary of Samuel Pepys which is currently being published daily as if it’s a weblog circa 1662 (i.e. Today’s entry is dated “Thursday 17 April 1662”). The only difference is that the author of that diary is dead and thus doesn’t interact or respond to the rest of the weblog community (though there is still interaction allowed in the form of annotations).

A few other random observations about blogs:

  • Software: Many people brought up the fact that most blogs are produced with the assistance of Weblogging Software, such as Blogger or Movable Type. From my perspective, such tools are necessary for the spread of weblogs, but shouldn’t be a part of the definition. They assist in the spread of weblogs because they automate the overly-technical details of publishing a website and make it easy for normal folks to participate. They’re also useful for automatically propagating weblog conventions like permalinks, comments, trackbacks, and archives. However, it’s possible to do all of this without the use of blogging specific software and it’s also possible to use blogging software for other purposes (for instance, Kaedrin’s very own Tandem Stories are powered by Movable Type). It’s interesting that other genres have their own software as well, particularly bulletin boards and forums. Ironically, one could use such BBS software to publish a blog (or power tandem stories), if they were so inclined. The Pepys blog mentioned above actually makes use of wiki software (though that software powers the entries, it’s mostly used to allow annotations). To me content management systems are important, but they don’t define so much as propagate the genre.
  • Personality: One mostly common theme in definitions is that weblogs are personal – they’re maintained by a person (or small group of people), not an official organization. A personality gets through. There is also the perception that a blog is less filtered than official communications. Part of the charm of weblogs is that you can be wrong (more on this later, possibly in another post). I’m actually not sure how important this is to the definition of a blog. Someone who posts nothing but links doesn’t display much of a personality, except through more subtle means (the choice of links can tell you a lot about an individual, albeit in an indirect way that could lead to much confusion).
  • Communities: Any given public weblog is part of a community, whether it wants to be or not. The boundaries of any specific weblog are usually well delineated, but since weblogs are part of the internet, which is an on-demand medium (as opposed to television or radio, which are broadcast), blogs are often seen as relative to one another. Entries and links from different blogs are aggregated, compared, correlated and published in other weblogs. Any blog which builds enough of a readership provides a way connect people who share various interests through the infrastructure of the internet.

Some time ago, Derek Powazek asked What the Hell is a Weblog? You tell me. and published all the answers. It turns out that I answered this myself (last one on that page), many years ago:

I don’t care what the hell a weblog is. It is what I say it is. Its something I update whenever I find an interesting tidbit on the web. And its fun. So there.

Heh. Interesting to note that my secondary definition there (“something I update whenever I find an interesting tidbit on the web”) has changed significantly since I contributed that definition. This is why, I suppose, I had originally supplied the primary definition (“I don’t care what the hell a weblog is. It is what I say it is.”) and to be honest, I don’t think that’s changed (though I guess you could call that definition “too general”). Blogging is whatever I want it to be. Of course, I could up and call anything a blog, but I suppose it is also required that others perceive your blog as a blog. That way, the genre still retains some shape, but is still permeable enough to allow some flexibility.

I had originally intended to make several other points in this post, but since it has grown to a rather large size, I’ll save them for other posts. Hopefully, I’ll gather the motivation to do so before next week’s scheduled entry, but there’s no guarantee…

Comment Policy

Weblogs / /

In the past few weeks, I’ve been waging all out war with spam (both on the blog and elsewhere on the site). I’m pleased to report that my efforts appear to be paying off, with the exception that Trackback Spam appears to have picked up in the absence of comment spam. So I’m sure this won’t be the last time I need to do something to combat spam.

In any case, many changes have been made and it might benefit everyone if I posted a formal comment policy. I’ve always had a very permissive attitude towards interaction on the site. I usually don’t require most fields and try to allow interactivity with little to no barriers to entry. This won’t change much, but there are some things that will no longer be allowed, so I figured I’d lay out my comment policy:

  • Most comments are published immediately. Sometimes, a comment will be put in moderation and I’ll need to approve it before it will show up. This sort of thing usually has something to do with the number of links you submit in your post. If your comment is moderated, you should get a message indicating this.
  • In order to post a comment, your browser must have javascript enabled. Sorry about that, but one of the anti-spam measures I use requires javascript.
  • On rare occassions, my anti-spam measures may think you’re a spammer and will mark your comment as spam. Now, I don’t generally check stuff marked as spam, so if you think that may be the case, feel free to email me and I should be able to find the comment and publish it…
  • Wildly off-topic comments will be removed.
  • Flames and personal attacks will be removed.
  • Duplicate comments will be removed (well, not the original comment, just the duplicates).
  • Spam (links to commercial sites not relevant to the entry in question) will be denied at time of posting or removed if it isn’t caught by one of my anti-spam measures.
  • In some instances, I may edit a comment. In such cases, an explanation will usually be appended to the comment (i.e. “[profanity removed by editor]” or some such message).
  • The only required field is the “Comments” field, though I prefer you also supply a name. Some places on the site may supply a default name and I may be facetious in choosing such a name (i.e. “[Anonymous Wimp]”).
  • Entries before May 2007 have had their comments closed. One of the ways I dealt with Spam in the past was to close older entries. However, I have new methods now (plus, uh, the plugin I used to automatically close old entries stopped working), so most entries since that date still allow comments.

Repeated failure to comply may result in blacklisting, banning, or various other screwing around as I see fit. Most of this also applies to trackbacks and other areas of interactivity on the site (i.e. the Forum and Tandem Stories). Trackbacks are less moderated as of now, but I’m sure they will eventually fall under stricter regulation as time goes on. The forum now requires registration before you can post (the old forum was having major performance issues in addition to spam woes, so I replaced it).

All rules are applied at my discretion. As such there may be exceptions or changes to this policy without notice. It’s also possible that a legitimate comment will be deleted by accident or just because I feel like it (this section henceforth to be referred to as the ass-covering clause). The biggest difference is that you are no longer able to comment on older entries. Since older entries are seen less often, and since they attract more spam (because older posts have higher search engine rankings), it’s only natural that comments be closed on those posts. Otherwise, nothing has really changed, other than the fact that my unspoken policies have now been explicitly articulated.

Update 12.15.07: This page was a little out of date, so it’s been updated to keep it in line with the various anti-spam measures I actually have in place.

An Exercise in Aggregation

Computers & Internet, Weblogs / /

A few weeks ago I collected a ton of posts regarding the Iraqi elections. I did this for a few reasons. The elections were important and I wanted to know how they were going, but I could have just read up on them if that was the only reason. The real reason I made that post was to participate in and observe information aggregation and correlation in real time.

It was an interesting experience, and I learned a few things which should help in future exercises. Some of these are in my control to fix, some will depend on the further advance of technology.

  • Format – It seems to me that simply posting a buttload of links in a long list is not the best way to aggregate and correlate data. It does provide a useful service, it being a central place with links to diverse articles, but it would be much better if the posts were separated into smaller groups. This would better facilitate scanning and would allow those interested to focus on things that interest them. It would also be helpful to indicate threads of debate between different bloggers. For example, it seems that a ton of people responded to Juan Cole’s comments, though I only listed one or two (and I did so in a way that wasn’t exactly efficient).
  • Categorization – One thing that is frustrating about such an exercise is that many blogs are posting up a storm on the subject throughout the day, which means that someone like myself who is attempting to aggregate posts would have to continually check the blog throughout the day as well. Indeed, simply collecting all the links and posting them can be a challenge. What I ended up doing was linking to a few specific posts and then just including a general link to the blog with the instruction to “Keep scrolling.” Dean Esmay demonstrated how bloggers can help aggregation by providing a category page where all of his Iraqi election posts were collected (and each individual post had an index of posts as well). This made things a lot easier for me, as I didn’t have to collect a large number of links. All I had to do is post one link. Unfortunately this is somewhat rare, and given the tools we have to use, it is also understandable. Most people are concerned with getting their voice out there, and don’t want to spend the time devising a categorization scheme. Movable Type 3.x has subcategories, which could help with this, but it takes time to figure this stuff out. Hopefully this is something that will improve in time as more enhancements are made to blogging software.
  • Trackbacks – Put simply, they suck for an exercise like this. For those who don’t know, trackbacks are a way of notifying other websites that you’re linking to them (and a way of indicating that other websites have linked to you). Movable type has a nifty feature that will automatically detect a trackback-enabled blog when you link to it, and set the site to be pinged. This is awesome when you’re linking to a single post or even a handful of posts. However, when I was compiling the links for my Iraqi election post, I naturally had tons of trackbacks to send. I started getting trackback failures that weren’t really failures. And because I was continually updating that post with new data, I ended up sending duplicate pings to the same few blogs (some got as many as five or six extraneous pings). I suppose I could have turned off the auto-detection feature and manually pinged the sites I wanted for that post, but that is hardly convenient.
  • Other notes – There has to be a better way to collect permalinks and generate a list than simply copying and pasting. I’m sure there are some bookmarklets or browser features that could prove helpful, though this would require a little research and a little tweaking to be useful.

Writing that post proved to be a most interesting exercise in aggregation, and I look forward to incorporating some of the lessons learned above in future posts…

Chasing the Tail

1 Comment / Computers & Internet, Culture, Weblogs / /

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson : An excellent article from Wired that demonstrates a few of the concepts and ideas I’ve been writing about recently. One such concept is well described by Clay Shirky’s excellent article Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. A system governed by a power law distribution is essentially one where the power (whether it be measured in wealth, links, etc) is concentrated in a small population (when graphed, the rest of the population’s power values resemble a long tail). This concentration occurs spontaneously, and it is often strengthened because members of the system have an incentive to leverage their power to accrue more power.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

As such, this distribution manifests in all sorts of human endeavors, including economics (for the accumulation of wealth), language (for word frequency), weblogs (for traffic or number of inbound links), genetics (for gene expression), and, as discussed in the Wired article, entertainment media sales. Typically, the sales of music, movies, and books follow a power law distribution, with a small number of hit artists who garner the grand majority of the sales. The typical rule of thumb is that 20% of available artists get 80% of the sales.

Because of the expense of producing the physical product, and giving it a physical point of sale (shelf-space, movie theaters, etc…), this is bad news for the 80% of artists who get 20% of the sales. Their books, movies, and music eventually go out of print and are generally forgotten, while the successful artists’ works are continually reprinted and sold, building on their own success.

However, with the advent of the internet, this is beginning to change. Sales are still governed by the power law distribution, but the internet is removing the physical limitations of entertainment media.

An average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; that’s essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; that’s the rent for a half inch of shelf space. And so on for DVD rental shops, videogame stores, booksellers, and newsstands.

In each case, retailers will carry only content that can generate sufficient demand to earn its keep. But each can pull only from a limited local population – perhaps a 10-mile radius for a typical movie theater, less than that for music and bookstores, and even less (just a mile or two) for video rental shops. It’s not enough for a great documentary to have a potential national audience of half a million; what matters is how many it has in the northern part of Rockville, Maryland, and among the mall shoppers of Walnut Creek, California.

The decentralized nature of the internet makes it a much better way to distribute entertainment media, as that documentary that has a potential national (heck, worldwide) audience of half a million people could likely succeed if distributed online. The infrastructure for films isn’t there yet, but it has been happening more in the digital music world, and even in a hybrid space like Amazon.com, which sells physical products, but in a non-local manner. With digital media, the cost of producing and distributing entertainment media goes way down, and thus even average artists can be considered successful, even if their sales don’t approach that of the biggest sellers.

The internet isn’t a broadcast medium; it is on-demand, driven by each individual’s personal needs. Diversity is the key, and as Shirkey’s article says: “Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.” With respect to weblogs (or more generally, websites), big sites are, well, bigger, but links and traffic aren’t the only metrics for success. Smaller websites are smaller in those terms, but are often more specialized, and thus they do better both in terms of connecting with their visitors (or customers) and in providing a more compelling value to their visitors. Larger sites, by virtue of their popularity, simply aren’t able to interact with visitors as effectively. This is assuming, of course, that the smaller sites do a good job. My site is very small (in terms of traffic and links), but not very specialized, so it has somewhat limited appeal. However, the parts of my site that get the most traffic are the ones that are specialized (such as the Christmas Movies page, or the Asimov Guide). I think part of the reason the blog has never really caught on is that I cover a very wide range of topics, thus diluting the potential specialized value of any single topic.

The same can be said for online music sales. They still conform to a power law distribution, but what we’re going to see is increasing sales of more diverse genres and bands. We’re in the process of switching from a system in which only the top 20% are considered profitable, to one where 99% are valuable. This seems somewhat counterintuitive for a few reasons:

The first is we forget that the 20 percent rule in the entertainment industry is about hits, not sales of any sort. We’re stuck in a hit-driven mindset – we think that if something isn’t a hit, it won’t make money and so won’t return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. But Vann-Adib�, like executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, has discovered that the “misses” usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

The second reason for the wrong answer is that the industry has a poor sense of what people want. Indeed, we have a poor sense of what we want.

The need to figure out what people want out of a diverse pool of options is where self-organizing systems come into the picture. A good example is Amazon’s recommendations engine, and their ability to aggregate various customer inputs into useful correlations. Their “customers who bought this item also bought” lists (and the litany of variations on that theme), more often than not, provide a way to traverse the long tail. They encourage customer participation, allowing customers to write reviews, select lists, and so on, providing feedback loops that improve the quality of recommendations. Note that none of these features was designed to directly sell more items. The focus was on allowing an efficient system of collaborative feedback. Good recommendations are an emergent result of that system. Similar features are available in the online music services, and the Wired article notes:

For instance, the front screen of Rhapsody features Britney Spears, unsurprisingly. Next to the listings of her work is a box of “similar artists.” Among them is Pink. If you click on that and are pleased with what you hear, you may do the same for Pink’s similar artists, which include No Doubt. And on No Doubt’s page, the list includes a few “followers” and “influencers,” the last of which includes the Selecter, a 1980s ska band from Coventry, England. In three clicks, Rhapsody may have enticed a Britney Spears fan to try an album that can hardly be found in a record store.

Obviously, these systems aren’t perfect. As I’ve mentioned before, a considerable amount of work needs to be done with respect to the aggregation and correlation aspects of these systems. Amazon and the online music services have a good start, and weblogs are trailing along behind them a bit, but the nature of self-organizing systems dictates that you don’t get a perfect solution to start, but rather a steadily improving system. What’s becoming clear, though, is that the little guys are (collectively speaking) just as important as the juggernauts, and that’s why I’m not particularly upset that my blog won’t be wildly popular anytime soon.

State of the Blog

Weblogs / /

Yet another year has ended, and I’ve found that it is good to periodically step back and take a look at what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and where I’m going from here. I’ve been blogging for over 4 years, but what I do now is much different than what I did when I started. About a year and a half ago, the blog wasn’t doing well, so I changed some things. Things have progressed reasonably well since then, but there are a number of things I do (or don’t do) that pretty much ensure that this won’t become a huge blog. This doesn’t particularly bother me, for reasons I’ll get into later.

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has been posting about how to start a blog and how to make it successful:

These posts aren’t perfect, but they are a good start, and they got me to thinking about why my blog isn’t particularly popular, and why it doesn’t bother me that much.

  • Posting Frequency: The big change I made a year and a half ago was to improve consistency by setting a schedule. I vowed to post at least once a week, always on Sunday. This is good, because consistency is important. However, once a week probably isn’t enough to attract a regular readership. I often write very long entries, which could make up for some of that, but long posts can be a barrier in themselves. I prefer to write longer posts, rather than a series of small posts, so this will probably stay the same. I will occasionally make a post or two during the week, but the lack of consistency there doesn’t help.
  • Breaking News: The Sunday posting schedule means I’m rarely on top of the latest news. I can think of one occasion when news was breaking on a Sunday, and I was able to pick it up and run with it. Otherwise, I’m usually commenting a few days afterwords, if at all. Perhaps because of this, I tend to gravitate towards writing about more general issues. This means that when news breaks, nobody comes here to see what I have to say about it. On the other hand, it also means that my content is still fresh and worth reading after a week or month or a year (not always, but usually).
  • Time and Motivation: I don’t especially have much of either. One of the reasons I write here is to learn. Many of the subjects I write about here are unfamiliar to me, and I use the process of writing about them to learn. This usually means that I will need to familiarize myself with a bunch of material, or spend a lot of time thinking about something and figuring out what it means and how to write about it. This usually takes a lot of time and effort, and I prefer to have a few uninterrupted hours to compose something like that. This is why I post on Sundays, because I have the time then. I honestly don’t know how other bloggers do it, especially the really popular ones who still manage to have a large output of original material. As I mentioned above, I tend to view blogging as an exercise in thinking, a way to learn, and a way to have fun. As Carter mentions in one of his posts:

    Blogging can be a form of enjoyment or relaxation just as jogging can be used as a means of relieving stress. But just as there is a difference between the casual jogger and the competitive runner, there is a difference between the average blogger and those destined for success.

    My posts on Self-Censorship and Arranging Interests in Parallel expand on this subject a bit more.

  • Ambition: I don’t particularly have much for this blog. I would like a few more regular readers and commentors and perhaps a few links, but it really doesn’t take much to make me happy. At one point, Carter says “Blogging is easy. Anyone can start a blog. Having a successful and popular blog is difficult. Incredibly difficult.” I’ve written before about how I don’t particularly want to deal with all the baggage that comes along with running a “successful” blog. There is just too much that needs to be done, and I don’t have the time or motivation to do that much.
  • Marketing: I have a hard time marketing the blog. The concept of “link whoring” does not appeal to me at all, so my methods tend to be a little more subtle. This means hoping people notice a link from me in their referrer logs, or posting a bunch of comments on others’ blogs. This is somewhat problematic because of the next subject…
  • Reading and Linking: This has become a major problem for me. I have a difficult time reading a lot of other blogs (more on why below), and thus it follows that I don’t link to a lot of other blogs either. Combined with my infrequent posting schedule, this is quite problematic. This also makes my preferred way of getting noticed (see marketing above) a bit more difficult.

As of right now, I actually do read a lot of blogs. In fact, I’ve been stumbling around the blogosphere looking for new and interesting blogs for a while now. Unfortunately, this tends to induce some bad side-effects in me, and it’s happened before. This was the cause of the last lull in blog posting a few years ago. I described it thusly in a post about information overload:

I used to blog a lot more often than I do now. And more than that, I used to read a great deal of blogs, especially new blogs (or at least blogs that were new to me). Eventually this had the effect of inducing a sort of ADD in me. I consumed way too many things way too quickly and I became very judgemental and dismissive. There were so many blogs that I scanned (I couldn’t actually read them, that would take too long for marginal gain) that this ADD began to spread across my life. I could no longer sit down and just read a book, even a novel.

This is more difficult to diagnose than it sounds, but I’ve decided to curtail my blog reading in favor of activities which allow me to focus. I don’t think this will change much, though. To a large extent, this is the sort of thing which has already shaped my blog to be what it is (warts and all, as described above), and I don’t think it’s going to change much. It’s not the act of writing the blog which is the problem here, especially since I tend to write on more general subjects. This is more of a small calibration, along the lines of re-setting a clock when it begins to go awry (as even the best made clocks eventually do), than a major change (or defiant posturing).

In any case, this means that the blog will continue much the way it has, but that it won’t become particularly successful anytime soon. As always, I hope to gain a few new readers here and there, and I see no reason why that couldn’t happen. In a future post, I’ll be talking about why I’m continuing despite my lack of ambition (which will, in turn, tie this post in with my recent posts regarding self-organization and the blogosphere).

Everyone Contributes in Some Way

3 Comments / Computers & Internet, Weblogs / /

Epic : A fascinating and possibly prophetic flash film of things to come in terms of information aggregation, recommendations, and filtering. It focuses on Google and Microsoft’s (along with a host of others, including Blogger, Amazon, and Friendster) competing contributions to the field. It’s eight minutes long, and well worth the watch. It touches on many of the concepts I’ve been writing about here, including self-organization and stigmergy, but in my opinion it stops just short of where such a system would go.

It’s certainly interesting, but I don’t think it gets it quite right (Googlezon?). Or perhaps it does, but the pessimistic ending doesn’t feel right to me. Towards the end, it claims that a comprehensive social dossier would be compiled by Googlezon (note the name on the ID – Winston Smith) and that everyone would receive customized newscasts which are completely automated. Unfortunately, they forsee majority of these customized newscasts as being rather substandard – filled with inaccuracies, narrow, shallow and sensational. To me, this sounds an awful lot like what we have now, but on a larger (and less manageable) scale. Talented editors, who can navagate, filter, and correlate Googlezon’s contents, are able to produce something astounding, but the problem (as envisioned by this movie) is that far too few people have access to these editors.

But I think that misses the point. Individual editors would produce interesting results, but if the system were designed correctly, in a way that allowed everyone to be editors and a way to implement feedback loops (i.e. selection mechanisms), there’s no reason a meta-editor couldn’t produce something spectacular. Of course, there would need to be a period of adjustment, where the system gets lots of things wrong, but that’s how selection works. In self-organizing systems, failure is important, and it ironically ensures progress. If too many people are getting bad information in 2014 (when the movie is set), all that means is that the selection process hasn’t matured quite yet. I would say that things would improve considerably by 2020.

The film is quite worth a watch. I doubt this specific scenario will play out, but it’s likely that something along these lines will occur. [Via the Commissar]

Stigmergic Notes

1 Comment / Best Entries, Computers & Internet, Culture, Weblogs / /

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about the concepts discussed in my last post. It’s a fascinating, if a little bewildering, topic. I’m not sure I have a great handle on it, but I figured I’d share a few thoughts.

There are many systems that are incredibly flexible, yet they came into existence, grew, and self-organized without any actual planning. Such systems are often referred to as Stigmergic Systems. To a certain extent, free markets have self-organized, guided by such emergent effects as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. Many organisms are able to quickly adapt to changing conditions using a technique of continuous reproduction and selection. To an extent, there are forces on the internet that are beginning to self-organize and produce useful emergent properties, blogs among them.

Such systems are difficult to observe, and it’s hard to really get a grasp on what a given system is actually indicating (or what properties are emerging). This is, in part, the way such systems are supposed to work. When many people talk about blogs, they find it hard to believe that a system composed mostly of small, irregularly updated, and downright mediocre (if not worse) blogs can have truly impressive emergent properties (I tend to model the ideal output of the blogosphere as an information resource). Believe it or not, blogging wouldn’t work without all the crap. There are a few reasons for this:

The System Design: The idea isn’t to design a perfect system. The point is that these systems aren’t planned, they’re self-organizing. What we design are systems which allow this self-organization to occur. In nature, this is accomplished through constant reproduction and selection (for example, some biological systems can be represented as a function of genes. There are hundreds of thousands of genes, with a huge and diverse number of combinations. Each combination can be judged based on some criteria, such as survival and reproduction. Nature introduces random mutations so that gene combinations vary. Efficient combinations are “selected” and passed on to the next generation through reproduction, and so on).

The important thing with respect to blogs are the tools we use. To a large extent, blogging is simply an extension of many mechanisms already available on the internet, most especially the link. Other weblog specific mechanisms like blogrolls, permanent-links, comments (with links of course) and trackbacks have added functionality to the link and made it more powerful. For a number of reasons, weblogs tend to be affected by power-law distribution, which spontaneously produces a sort of hierarchical organization. Many believe that such a distribution is inherently unfair, as many excellent blogs don’t get the attention they deserve, but while many of the larger bloggers seek to promote smaller blogs (some even providing mechanisms for promotion), I’m not sure there is any reliable way to systemically “fix” the problem without harming the system’s self-organizational abilities.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

This self-organization is one of the important things about weblogs; any attempt to get around it will end up harming you in the long run as the important thing is to find a state in which weblogs are working most efficiently. How can the weblog community be arranged to self-organize and find its best configuration? That is what the real question is, and that is what we should be trying to accomplish (emphasis mine):

…although the purpose of this example is to build an information resource, the main strategy is concerned with creating an efficient system of collaboration. The information resource emerges as an outcome if this is successful.

Failure is Important: Self-Organizing systems tend to have attractors (a preferred state of the system), such that these systems will always gravitate towards certain positions (or series of positions), no matter where they start. Surprising as it may seem, self-organization only really happens when you expose a system in a steady state to an environment that can destabilize it. By disturbing a steady state, you might cause the system to take up a more efficient position.

It’s tempting to dismiss weblogs as a fad because so many of them are crap. But that crap is actually necessary because it destabilizies the system. Bloggers often add their perspective to the weblog community in the hopes that this new information will change the way others think (i.e. they are hoping to induce change – this is roughly referred to as Stigmergy). That new information will often prompt other individuals to respond in some way or another (even if not directly responding). Essentially, change is introduced in the system and this can cause unpredictable and destabilizing effects. Sometimes this destabilization actually helps the system, sometimes (and probably more often than not) it doesn’t. Irregardless of its direct effects, the process is essential because it is helping the system become increasingly comprehensive. I touched on this in my last post among several others in which I claim that an argument achieves a higher degree of objectivity by embracing and acknowledging its own biases and agenda. It’s not that any one blog or post is particularly reliable in itself, it’s that blogs collectively are more objective and reliable than any one analyst (a journalist, for instance), despite the fact that many blogs are mediocre at best. An individual blog may fail to solve a problem, but that failure is important too when you look at the systemic level. Of course, all of this is also muddying the waters and causing the system to deteriorate to a state where it is less efficient to use. For every success story like Rathergate, there are probably 10 bizarre and absurd conspiracy theories to contend with.

This is the dilemma faced by all biological systems. The effects that cause them to become less efficient are also the effects that enable them to evolve into more efficient forms. Nature solves this problem with its evolutionary strategy of selecting for the fittest. This strategy makes sure that progress is always in a positive direction only.

So what weblogs need is a selection process that separates the good blogs from the bad. This ties in with the aforementioned power-law distribution of weblogs. Links, be they blogroll links or links to an individual post, essentially represent a sort of currency of the blogosphere and provide an essential internal feedback loop. There is a rudimentary form of this sort of thing going on, and it has proven to be very successful (as Jeremy Bowers notes, it certainly seems to do so much better than the media whose selection process appears to be simple heuristics). However, the weblog system is still young and I think there is considerable room for improvement in its selection processes. We’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg here. Syndication, aggregation, and filtering need to improve considerably. Note that all of those things are systemic improvements. None of them directly act upon the weblog community or the desired informational output of the community. They are improvements to the strategy of creating an efficient system of collaboration. A better informational output emerges as an outcome if the systemic improvements are successful.

This is truly a massive subject, and I’m only beginning to understand some of the deeper concepts, so I might end up repeating myself a bit in future posts on this subject, as I delve deeper into the underlying concepts and gain a better understanding. The funny thing is that it doesn’t seem like the subject itself is very well defined, so I’m sure lots will be changing in the future. Below are a few links to information that I found helpful in writing this post.