There seems to be a lot of thought being invested in understanding the dynamics of the blogging world. For many, the blogging community can be seen as an echo chamber by which ideas are repeated and re-enforced by the “walls” of the chamber. I’ve discussed this topic in a previous post, “Echo Chambers and Blogging”

That discussion led to a comment from Kevin Jones that characterized the effect more as a “wind tunnel”. This has some interesting ideas behind it when the nature of a wind tunnel is considered. A wind tunnel is a research device that allows forces (generally wind) to be applied to a model. In this regard, it could be said that the blogoshpere provides the wind via which models are tested.

More recently, Seth Finklestein commented on the subject and concluded that the effect may be seen more as a “choir”:

As a simple technical statement, cheaper communication makes it easier to form “choirs”, groups of like-minded people. There are two opposite ways in which one can go wild with this, in terms of filling column-space:

1) Utopian - The happy little blogging bears will “self-organize” into an, err, Regurgitant Pundocracy, where The People will defeat The Special Interests, as writing about one’s cat will make George Bush vulnerable (and Howard Dean president).

2) Dystopian - The dregs of society will be able to form gangs as never before, and other groups will become isolated and polarized, leading to the wholesale breakdown of commonality necessary for a functioning democratic civilization (The book Republic.com is perhaps the most well-known example of this genre).

Again, these “choirs”, groups of people coming together for a common purpose, can be positive or negative. Crucially, everyone involved is assumed to understand the purpose, and in theory is passionately committed to it (though the practice often falls short).

In contrast, an “Echo chamber” is more the illusion of many voices, but in actuality, each voice is just the same thing, a reflection of the initial statement. Most blogs and most reporters simple do echoing of authority.

Source: infoThought, “Echo Chamber vs. Choir”

The major idea here being that despite the “sense” of harmony and consensus, the actual “sound” is a blending of many distinct voices.

Personally, I think all three opinions are correct and very worthy of further consideration and investigation.

Yesterday’s snafu was a certainly unexpected and definitely a little bit embarrassing. I’m a reasonably intelligent person and and super-nerd to boot, so I don’t generally expect to fall pray to most forms of online deception. Luckily, the organic web and it’s little darling the blogosphere are quick to react and the information was corrected quickly enough (mind you I am surprised anyone knew to tell ME!).

The problem is the lack of context for the recipient which opens the door to misinformation and deception. In this case, I believe there are two primary factors that make a “hack” or any other maligned activity possible, Incomplete Comprehension and Incomplete Evaluation.

Incomplete Comprehension

This really is a reflection on the recipient’s ability to digest the information presented to them. The other day I recieved a spoofed e-mail from some spammer that claimed to be from Citibank. They indicated that some information was required of me and that I should click the link in the message. This is not a new hoax, previously it was Ebay, PayPal, Insert Major Entity Name Here, etc. When I received the message, I immediately looked to see where the link went to. I also recall wondering how many people get caught by this — wouldn’t your average person just click on the link (assuming their SPAM filters had let this message through already)?your average.

And such is the nature of a Comprehension Hack. Lacking the domain of knowledge to discern how something “should” work, it’s easy to fall victim to a betrayal of this nature. This is, naturally, not limited to online trickery but also to a thousand other real-world scenarios, from the office to the car lot. The problem is there isn’t a solid solution beyond the tyipcal “Awareness” campaign that warns of “suspicious” behavior and provides details of previous hacks. But where does the average person find this type of information? Why aren’t there more pages like the this one at CraigsList?

Some might argue that we fight deception with education. I would argue that’s quite possible the opposite of the solution. Comprehension is too expensive and sometimes impossible. We could never assume to reach enough people to educate them on the eide subject matters that open the doors for this type of activity. Alerts are simplified and summarized — two critical traits of anything easy to understand and immediately actionable.

Alerts are already growing in importance to our lives and technologies like RSS will only make their effectiveness more pervasive. Just think, we have alerts for everything from virii (biological, computer), to missing children (Amber Alert), to terrorists (Homeland Security). Unfortunately, most of this information is hidden away and if you stopped your average person on the street you would hard pressed to get actionable information. But what about the Social Virus? Where’s the alert? How do we protect ourselves?

So we’ve got two homework items I think: 1) design a system that streamlines the creation, location and distribution of Alerts to the world audience 2) start to catalog and expose the wild social hacks that are flourishing in the wild and look more seriously at how these things are spreading. I’m interested in starting this now at socialalerts.com, who wants to help out?

Incomplete Evaluation

Whereas comprehension addresses my ability to understand the information presented to me, my evaluation of that information is often tied to the source. Information received from a suspect source is easier to dismiss than information from a reliable one. Information from a trusted, insider source is almost always evaluated.

The problem here is two-fold. On the one hand there is a compromise of your authority figure, on the other there is a corruption of context.

In terms of your authority figure, if they receive information that they deem to be true, they may report, publish or otherwise distribute that information to their audience or network. As your respect, confidence, and trust for the source increases, our tendency to accept information as factual increase. The system then cycles and the behavior is replicated, annotated, or otherwise disseminated over and over again.

In terms of the corruption of context, this is a side-effect of our delivery mechanisms. Often we are rushed or otherwise harried as we deliver new information. We have devised many ways to get this information from one place to the next, not limited to phones, voicemail, e-mail, web sites, blogs and rss. The problem arises when information is shorted or concatenated into a more digestable form. During this process, compromises are made and, often enough, the end product does not wholly convey the same meaning. RSS generators are especially responsible for this as they often generate excerpts on the fly. However, the technology alone is not to blame as it is us, the reader, that fails to investigate the information further. As Scott Allen notes in the comments of the Orkut post:

Add to that the whole RSS summary issue, and, well — I imagine that many who saw this headline in their RSS reader didn’t come read the article, so no telling how many people are going to quit using orkut simply because they didn’t investigate the story any further than a headline and a one-paragraph summary.

Source: User Comments, “Orkut.com turns out to be a master’s thesis project?”

Yesterday’s Orkut fiasco could be classified mostly as an Incomplete Evaluation. I originally read the entry on Many 2 Many and was quickly excited at the news. Trusting the authors of the site, I chose to then post my own view on the matter. As we have found out, of course, the entry I posted on was based on some information from another party. I had visited the source pointed out by Seb, however, that source was also incomplete. Only later would I find out that a very important last sentence was missing indicating the press release was meant to be humor and not real.

In many many industries and enterprises, there are a wide number of failsafes and precautions in place to prevent potentially damaging actions from occurring. In the blogging world, at least, there are far fewer constraints for the time. As Scott asks later in his comment, “So, what’s our responsibility in this sort of thing as blogger/journalists?”. I don’t know either, but responsibility is the key and it’s up to us not to be wolves.

A recent round of discussion has been going on about the “echo” effect of the blogging world and other social phenomena. A great deal of this discussion spawned from the Internet efforts of the Howard Dean campaign. For anyone unsure of the implied meaning:

Echo chamber is a colloquial term used to describe a group of media outlets that tend to parrot each other’s uncritical reports on the views of a single source, or that otherwise relies on unquestioning repetition of official sources.

Source: Disinfopedia

More recently, the term has been used more and more frequently outside of the political context. For many, it has become a catchall for a “collective” thinking model — possibly even amortized self-righteousness ala “I’m right, you say the same thing, therefore I’m right (and you are too). David Weinberger comments on this:

I’m a little confused about the meme du jour, “echo chambers” — those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them. Here are three places I frequent that seem to fit the bill:

First, I’m on an invitation-only mailing list for moderate lefty Democrats interested in the intersection of ideology and technology. We are all committed to dumping Bush and there’s no real possibility we’re going to change our minds. Want to argue about it? Not here. We have other things to talk about.

Second, I used to participate occasionally in the Dean weblog comment boards. If you went there to argue that Bush was more deserving of our votes, people would either ignore you or brand you a troll — and then ignore you.

Third, this fall I went to a baseball game and cheered the Red Sox more loudly than if I had been the only one yelling. My bleacher mates were surprisingly unwilling to talk with me about whether the Sox were deserving of our collective support.

Are any of these really echo chambers?

Source: “Is there an echo in here?”, Salon

Last week, Joi Ito added to the mix with a commentary, “Communities and echo chambers”. The topic initiated was about group membership and a question about how well individuals materialize out of a community versus the community materializing out of the individual. Not surprisingly, this has been a problem historically (History: Fact vs. Interpretation, Publishing: Truth vs. Advertising) and it is difficult to come to any real consensus on the matter considering the contexts they must be evaluated from. As Joi states:

Shelly asks the question “What part of you, the writer, is part of a community? Where, within yourself, does community leave off and you begin?” and says, “But I guess we’re accountable to each other, and that’s the most dangerous censorship of all — it’s the censorship of the commons.” This is an interesting question that Shelley has pointed out to me and I have been thinking about. In the comments on Shelley’s blog, Doc ties it to the notion of the “echo chamber,” the effect where we’re all just talking to each other oblivious to the outside world. Many people blame the failures of the Dean campaign to this “echo chamber” and point to this “echo chamber” as a problem that is prevalent on blogs. I do see the risks, but I don’t think criticizing the existence of communities or friendships is the solution. I think that communities and friendship are the foundations of trust and love and I do not agree that an aggregate of facts and single voices are the solution to finding the “ultimate truth” in writing.

I believe that communities and the feeling of community are an essential part of the equation, but that the goal is to bridge many communities and try to expand one’s notion of community the largest possible size.

Source: Communitues and echo chambers, Joi Ito

Yesterday, both Kevin Jones and danah boyd both chimed in on the matter. Kevin provides an interesting reflection on the blogging world from an experience with a “intelligent, articulate tech industry guy”:

I’m going to be looking into the commercialization possiblities of the blogosphere, specifically the events, software and services components, so the fact that an idea is already being deconstructed before it reaches outside the inner guard world (echo chamber) is significant. Will the blogosphere be a victim of failure to launch?

[…]

So what are the commercial possibilties of the blogosphere, and will they survive excessive and continual redesign and creative meme canibalization, or maybe just creative consumption and repurposing?

Commercialization is not what bloggingt is about, but this world has demonstrated its political power. So, what are the limits and extents of its commercial power?

And in what way does asking this question taint the space as a whole? Is this like putting up a billboard in a park or could it be a step to a conscious commerce where we regain control of the economic system and create an economy that, I don’t what should I say, that we can be proud of, or in a nod to my more reflexively leftist friends, that we don’t have to feel about, that mitigates the environmental and social costs it externalizes while creating more opportunity?

“Outside the echo chamber”, Kevin Jones’ Blog

danah questions if we’ve settled on the right context for evaluating blogging as an echo chamber at all. I believe she rightly identifies that the conversations have somewhat degraded and turned into more of a contest than an analysis. As she states:

In social networks literature, there’s a concept called homophily. The basic idea is that birds of a feather stick together. There’s a good reason for this. The more we have in common with someone, the more points of context, the more capable they are of supporting us. We are more likely to gain social and emotional support from people who are awefully similar to us. Our strong ties are usually very similar to us.

One approach for considering the echo-chamber question would be to analyze the strength of relationships between bloggers. If we’re going to talk about a notion of “community,” we have to think about what the focus of the community is. Often, the focus involves activity. Some might argue that blogging is enough of an activity to link the community together. But if this were the case, there would be a random probability that any blogger would link to any other blogger. This is not the case. My hunch would be that a blogger is more likely to link to other bloggers who share multiple points of context in common. This does not mean that two people have to share political values in common, but this is a completely valid context to share. Furthermore, the more contexts two people have in common, the more likely that they will know each other. Thus, it is more likely for two like-minded bloggers to know each other than two diverse people.

Part of the problem with having this discussion surround blogging is that blogging is relatively new. Only a few years ago, there were very few bloggers. As such, i would suspect that political views were less important because the fact that the person was a blogger (a rare thing) made them interesting enough to connect to. As there are more bloggers, blogging doesn’t end up being as strong a context point as before.

Source: “echo-chambers and homophily”, danah boyd

As for me, I don’t have too strong of an opinion on the matter. As I most intuitively know, people tend to aggregate around centers that develop and promote similar conceptual models. We are often reluctant to place ourselves in a defensive position. I believe in Barabási’s “Linked” he makes note of this phenomena as it impacts “Preferential Attachment”. I’ll find an excerpt later to add to this. I also know that in terms of blogging, I have worked to inform and update as many people I can regardless of affiliation or pre-disposition — as I see value in the technology and the community. So yeah, maybe there is an echo, but it’s moving fast.

The new syndication format, Atom, was developed by a collective group of instituions and individuals. One of the larger supporters of this effort was Google, now owner of the very popular Blogger service. This new format is somewhat controversial for many bloggers — many are still sitting on the fence regarding support on their own blogs.

Google gave one very strong wave of support a few days ago by officially switching the syndication format used in Blogger from RSS to Atom. As ZDNet notes:

Google’s Blogger service is bypassing Really Simple Syndication in favour of an alternative technology, in a move that has sparked more discord in a bitter dispute over Web log syndication formats.

[…]

The battle between RSS and Atom has divided the blogging world since the summer, when critics of RSS came together to create an alternative format. Since then, a raft of blog sites and individuals have lined up behind Atom, while Yahoo has thrown its considerable weight behind RSS.

The Blogger decision to offer Atom only has angered supporters of RSS, who accuse Google of helping to splinter a wide network of RSS-using bloggers.

Source: ZDNet

For most blog owners, it’s simply a matter of choice. All developers have their own reasons for supporting one format or the other — this decision seems to go against that spirit. Despite all the fuss, though, both standards will survive and thrive.

Technology has been working its way into the minds of almost everyone it seems these days. As a developer, it’s particularly encouraging to see many of the technologies I work with and develop for rising to the top. In particular, I am a new convert to blogging (formerly known as Content Management where I did lots of work) and Social Networking (formerly known as Instant Messaging, Blogging, Contact Management, etc.). The core acknowledgement is that technology is providing a new level of enablement from the “Geeks to the Greeks” to quote the old college saying.

Macromedia has coined the phrase “Occassionally Connected” in relation to the push for “Rich Internet Applications” — applications that leverage dynamic, flexible user interfaces, network-aware, service-oriented architectures, and connected “consumers”. Ironically, Macromedia has released a new “platform” of sorts called Macromedia Central. According to their site:

Macromedia Central gives people the ability to interact with distributed information in a more meaningful and relevant way. By managing your personal information outside the browser Central enables a more responsive, immediate, and convenient way to interact with the sources you need on a daily basis. Central is a personal interface that can be downloaded and customized based on the information that matters to you. Regardless of whether you are online or off, Central allows you to access, filter, and interpret content and share data across applications in meaningful ways.

Central provides Macromedia Flash developers with a pre-built infrastructure for creating, distributing and selling applications. Developers can use their existing skills and the ability of Central to store and share data locally to build a new class of responsive Rich Internet Applications. The consistent Central deployment environment, support for payment processing, and ready availability on any computer empower individual developers to distribute applications directly to end users.

Source: Macromedia Central Product Page

Interestingly enough, here in is the hidden promise: “Build It and They Will Come”. Macromedia has released version 1.0 of its platform under the guise of a “Developer” release. With this moniker, MM has been able to excuse itself of the majority of the marketing responsibility embedded in this promise as it gears up developers. This is a Catch-22, of course, so one can’t blame MM entirely. Without applications, there will be nothing to attract consumers to Central and without consumers, developers won’t have a desire to develop. Fortunately, developers are easily hyped and have in many ways taken the bait and jumped on the bandwagon.

So what’s the problem? Well, the major concern is illustrated by a post from a Flash Developer today titled “Earning $120000 with a Macromedia Central app?… more? (wtf???)”. For the most part, actionScriptHero (asH) does a quick profit analysis on the development of an AIM add-on application that could be marketed to AIM users utilizing Central’s unique integration API. asH and I have had a little back and forth on the matter, but I think he does prove that there is a good potential for this market. Of course, this may be based on three potentially overlooked forces`:

• Build the Community, Not the Members — although the Macromedia Central application will undoubtedly reach a large audience to say the least, Macromedia Central, as it currently is implemented, markets the Central Community more so than the Central Developer. This sounds incredibly close to the design of, say, Google. The hub generates the majority of the traffic for itself, stakes a claim by selling eyeballs or platform-specific “service charges”, and in exchange introduces consumers to Developer X’s content (or application).
• User Behavior Is Difficult To Change — it seems that many people think consumers think in terms of “applications”. Macromedia’s design of the system seems centered on the notion that users have an inherent need to “find” applications. But are we that easily shaped? If I wasn’t a developer, would I really be nearly as concerned about the applications I run? I’m not sure. Most end users I know are need driven, not function driven. I need a way to send Instant Messages, I ask my friends, they tell me get AIM. I need to write documents, I ask my friends, Microsoft Word is the leader. As opposed to “I need to be able to track message history” so I search for Instant Messengers with this function and find Trillian. And don’t forget what Danah said about “Configuring the User”.
• Virii Are Hard To Create — as Seth Godin has identified, and as I have written about previously, the world is now full of marketing messages, value propositions, and hollow promises. Standing out in a crowd requires nothing short of a Purple Cow, a remarkable concept executed at unseen levels from start to finish. Developer zeal can often lead to myopic views of many situations simply because of their closeness to the content and its execution. As the wealth of applications grows, how exactly does one create anything more than a simple listing if not through marketing?

So I guess that’s one context of the “Casually Connected” and its implications on two audiences, developers and consumers. Interestingly enough, Anil Dash recently commented (“While We Weren’t Looking” ) on another context for “Casually Connected” — public awareness of Internet technology, specifically blogging. As Anil notes:

I’ve been arguing for a long time that, for all the hype, weblogs have barely made an impact with regular people in any appreciable way. Most people have still never heard of them and don’t know what the word “blog” means. But watching TV last night made me think that perhaps we’re finally making some progress.

[…]

The word blog was only barely mentioned once in the intro for the show, and only as part of the introduction to Sullivan, but the presence of the medium was undeniable on the show.

[…]

I suppose none of this is news, we’ve never yet had a time in the weblog realm when the medium has been getting less popular, but it seems worth noting that, while we weren’t looking, we started to cross over to that other 95% of people that have never heard of blogs. I can’t help but be excited to find out how they participate and what they think of our medium.

Source: Anil Dash

The crux of this discussion was that the overall awareness of blogging has grown and spread to an ever-increasing audience. Currently, it appears to be gaining more and more momentum and lacks only a few “official” endorsements before moving to the next level of acceptance by the Early Majority.

However, I was most enlightened by the series of comments that flew out after Anil’s post. They fell into two major categories: Markedly Against vs. Sorta Supporting.

In the Markedly Against category, this quote seems representative:

In all honesty, I don’t think blogs will grow in popularity much more than they already are. Look at us, blog users. We’re all “technical types.” To put it another way, we’re geeks, nerds, dorks, etc. Before we had our blogs we ran dial-in modem bulletin board systems (BBS’s) years back.

As opposed to this:

There’s no doubt that bloggign started out as a techie playground, but the biggest growth I can see is in the literary world where every frustrated writer gets instant publication and gratification. If they’re anyway good they might even find that signing up for Adsense will buy then a whisky at the end of the month. The polical and social commentator also has a public. Like everything else, time will filter out the dross, and those with a loyal public will survive. There’s always space for someone who captures the zeitgeist

Clearly, there’s some other forms of “management” required in the process, .. be it process or reputation to ensure that things don’t go awry too soon and collapse the entire effort. Either way, this context has show “Casually Connected” as seen from the eyes of three audiences: The Users (bloggers, content creators, etc.), The Officials (press, media, public opinion), and Anti-Users.

Indeed we’re growing to be a “Casually Connected” community. I’m not sure anyone is aware of how many moving parts and divergent opinions that really requires wrangling.

For the last week or so, I have been quite evangelical to my network of peers on the power of blogging. As is common in life, this discussion found its way into a discussion of how to deal with some knowledge management issues for a client.

When the notion was first raised, my first thought was to add blogging internally to the organization as a driving force for this series of activities. My opinions on that matter have not dampened, but the approach was made somewhat broader (read better) by one of my co-workers here.

Initial thoughts were to have a single blog for each working entity with multiple authors contributing. Of course, I’ll probably never know why this didn’t occur to me to start at the employee level, but someone reminded me. The proposed implementation now has each employee with their own blog. Simple RSS feeds and a dirty little aggregator will provide all members in the organization with an instantly customizable, and therefore digestable, entry to the content generated by the organization.

This is significant when you think about the nature of though development. A large number of iterations and background “noise” is required in the formulation of ideas, concepts, and other mental experiements. A difficult task to bestow on any individual is to collate a wild mass of data into usable information. This selective filtering process endowed by custom aggregration provides a method to remove as much noise as possible. In this case noise in the form of extra-departmental content in addition to works-in-progress can all be removed, hence providing a pre-publication distillation of the most usable information. It’s quite empowering.

Apparently, I am one of many that are recognizing the potential of this system. Lee LeFever, of Common Craft has posted an interesting article titled “The Role of a Weblog Inside an Online Community”. As he notes:

The combination of a weblog and normal community tools (discussions, member profiles, etc.) makes for an impressive set of resources for the members. The weblog can act as a filter for the various discussions occurring on the site and provide members an easy way to find the most interesting or provocative discussions. Plus, being recognized on the weblog could be a incentive for thoughtful participation.

Another way to look at this is making an online community’s weblog a public resource, but making the community private. In this way, the weblog pulls members into the community membership based on what they see on the weblog. I guess you could call it weblog-based PR for the community.

Source: Common Craft via Many 2 Many

There are some great commentaries and some new discussion born. I definitely recommend a quick pass.

Interestingly enough, the previous entry discussed a positive spin on the growing role of technology to “index” our states-of-mind at various points in time. Clearly, there are benefits to a system this organized and effective at consuming raw content.

Naturally, not everyone share’s this zeal. James A C Joyce entry titled “Why your Movable Type blog must die”,a topic that will surely become famous post for the next week to come, about his main issues with Blogging as a whole and those that perpetuate them. Surely, it is worth the read. One should be warned that the nature of his presentation is somewhat rough and one-sided which tends to weaken the majority of his points, but nonetheless there’s some truth to what he has identified.

To summarize the highlights, here are the headings and some comments on them.

You are all pretentious twats

You’re all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we’re lucky.

Although there is undoubtedly a glut of blogs that exist solely to promote one individual and their opinions, I don’t know that it’s fair to say that all sites fit into this category. Even if personal sites that serve solely as diaries, is this actually a problem? Leaving out the value-judgement, these diaries provide a unique and personal look into the thoughts of many people. Surely, reading any blog is voluntary, allowing anything questionable or objectionable to simply be ignored.

You make up irritating jargon for the sake of it

The word ‘weblog’ is acceptable. ‘Blog’ is just about tolerable.

There are certainly a great deal of terms that have been created. I can definitely admit that some of the terms identified have been used here from time to time. However, it is human nature to name that which is not named, so it seems only reasonable that new terms flow from our interaction with a “new” medium..

All of your blogs talk about the same crap

It is clear that power laws are in effect when it comes to the distribution of links in the blogging network. This arrangement tends to expose a great deal of individuals to a similar series of information. The entry points out a number of topics that are covered continuously by a variety of blogs. Unfortunately, the majority of those items are newsworthy beyond the blogging topology.

You are ******* stupid

The idiocy of Movable Type bloggers is most evident when they become emotional about a topic. When this occurs, they tend to make all kinds of massive, grating rhetorical faux pas such as false analogies.

Emotion is part of the topic, which I think is a large part of the problem with this interpretation. Of course, people will always make mistakes in their use of prose and judgement. Conjuring analogies and illustrating other concepts literally can be difficult for almost anyone. Considering that the blogging world is not subject to the editorial process common in journalism, a certain degree of flexibility must be allowed. In fact, the chosen tone and implications of the original rant could be viewed as “problematic” for the same reasons.

Your blog is ******* up Google

This is what makes your blogs worse than useless. Previously, they were merely bundles of listless rambling scattered around the Web. Now their effects are positively toxic, choking search engines as they grow continuously and invasively.

The position taken here is one purely of utility. The belief of the author seems to be that Google must be “protected” from pollution. This is a very troublesome position considering the fundamental purpose of the search engine: to index the web. Many people have come to rely on Google asa central resource for locating information. In this regard, the growth of Google to incorporate a wider array of data can lead to issues locating information. Unfortunately, thiswas bound to happen and the responsibility lies in Google’s hands to make its search algorithms more efficient at filtering data that can be considered redundant or extraneous.

It seems that my recent rant on Cruft has generated some feedback, and surely it is welcome. Oli Studholme has posted a nice response, to the points that I have laid out relating to Cruft. Note that Oli’s entry can be conveniently located at http://oli.boblet.net/2004/01/29/cruft, which I agree is both readable and self-describing.

Before I address Oli’s points directly, I think that it’s important that I make it clear that I am not opposed to developing Cruft-Free URLs from a systematic point of view. I am, however, addressing the consumer issue of the matter, specifically the individual end-user’s concern about long URLs and their “ability” to digest these matters to generate naming conventions on their own.

(more…)

The world we know has quickly changed from one of 10-digit phone numbers to significantly longer URIs, URLs for us common folk. For some members of the web community, especially the blogging and web standards aficionados, this outgrowth of the URL as a universal identifier has lead to a new feeling of urgency to protect the sanctity of the URI.

What is Cruft?

Generally speaking, cruft refers to “Excess; superfluous junk” (see Dictionary.com). In the web purists world, however, a slightly more specific definition has been applied — “all that junk the average web user doesn’t care about that makes URL’s long and annoying” (as defined by Mark Pilgrim, a respected gladiator for the cause.

To make this somewhat more relevant, let’s take a quick look at an example of a crufty URL and an un-crufted one:

Crufty

http://cnn.com/news/2004/0004.html

Cruft-Free

http://cnn.com/news/2004/4/

Why Cruft Matters

I tried to formulate my own respectable list of reasons why Cruft was a bad thing, but I found a valuable, clear definition over at Oli Studholme’s blog, Boblet.

An important but overlooked aspect of websites is the URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. This is the ‘web address’, usually of a page on the internet. While it seems minor, this is part of the page’s interface, and some simple rules can make a big difference in ease of use. Important ease-of-use elements for people are the URL should be:

• easy to type
• easy to remember
• short if possible
• ‘hackable’ ie predictable enough to guess
• and permanent

Source: Boblet

Why Cruft Doesn’t Matter (IMHO)

All this being said, I understand the merits of the process, but I certainly don’t understand the need for it from a strictly “consumer” point of view. Let’s look at the different aspects of a truly cruft-less URL.

(more…)

When this blog was first conceived of, a couple of months ago, I really had no idea what to expect and surely hadn’t played extensively with the exisiting blogging packages to see what was really involved.

Ironically enough, as a well seasoned Cold Fusion developer and entrepreneur, I have been working on my own blogging software for some time, but delayed the launch of my blog hoping to work within my own software. But everyone who’s ever written software knows that things take longer than expected, however, the flow of ideas and things I wanted to comment on did not. So I bit the bullet and went with one of the pre-existing packages.

Needless to say, this has been fun so far and I only hope I can keep up with the pace required to make something meaningful and lasting. It is definitely not hard to come up with ideas for content, just taking the time to write them down and provide the context is challenging with my schedule.

In the past two weeks, I have seen the blog grow slowly and surely. Seeing traffic slowly grow in such a short period of time is really an amazing thing and there are hardly enough experiences I can dream up to compare it to at this time. Naturally, there are many other things to get done, but I thought I would recount a few of the things, silly as they are, that have happened so far.

Template Re-Design

In a past life, I was a graphic designer. I’ve held on dearly to those values and attention to presentation and detail throughout my career as a developer as well. Naturally, I was not prepared for the trials of imagining an identity for this blog.

Fortunately, my daily trials of the blogosphere took me to The Mossy Blog to read up on some Flash work and I was struck by the design of their blog. Of course, I was also taken aback as I realized I couldn’t whip this up in any time flat. As fate would have it, though, I found that they used a great template as their starting point created by the fols at Leorex called the Aura Web Page Exoskin. A couple of hours later, I was on my way with a new design to boot.

Trackbacking

This may sound crazy, but it’s a pretty scary thing the first time you actually Trackback to someone else’s entry. I can say that butterflies did indeed form that first time I hit Publish. I think it boils down to fact that at that moment you are not just blogging your thoughts, but you are actually letting another node in our world know. The blogging world is far smaller than might be expected and once you put your flag out, people do indeed find it.

Getting Trackbacked

Of course, once you are writing , you are hoping that someone else is seeing what you say and finds it interesting enough to share that with their own circle of friends. I got my first Trackback from Ben Hammersley to an entry that I had made. Granted, this wasn’t the sort of mention I was anticipating, but it was exciting nonetheless.

Getting into the Goog

Now I must admit, I’m a programmer geek at heart. I read Full As A Goog on a regular basis. If you don’t know, it’s a blog dedicated to “Rich Internet Application Goodness”. For me, it’s one of those sites you hope some day to be a part of. Of course, I knew when I set out that, despite my coding skills and experiences, I didn’t want to make another blog exploring coding techniques and issues.. and with that, relinquished that I would not be an ideal candidate to ever show up on the Goog in any capacity.

That all changed today and I’ll admit I was actually confused at first! When I dialed in to check out the latest postings, I came across an entry titled Social Twister. At first I thought to myself, “Wow! Someone else is using the name of my blog, and it was John Dowdell, a Macromedia employee and the author of a blog that I visit almost daily. So I read the description and found that John actually was talking about me! I realized that I had pointed back to one of his entries and he must have found out about my site as a result. All I can say is, pretty neat!

In response to John’s comment.. I feel the pressure.. but I’m on the job.

That’s about all I can report on to date, but it’s been a great feeling so far. I actually do hope that as business and consumer adoption of blogging blossoms that the marketing folks don’t forget to deal with what it means to you, the owner of the blog.

And by the way, Gothamist.. I do like to use “I” in all my posts. Not sure how else to do it ;)