From the Margins of the Writable Web Meg Hourihan (http://www.megnut.com) April 24, 2003 - O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference Santa Clara, California Westin Meg's going to post the slides to the web, so don't sweat the green color. [or our poor transcription (but rich texture!)] The Plan: Look at edges See what's happening Bottom-up view of where we might be heading [Is a bottom-up view even possible - does the cutting edge stuff get translated into the middle really quickly? Ah. Right.] Reality: this is hard! Tightly coupled nature means valuable stuff leaves the edge quickly Navel gazing as a way to pull the edge to the center. Standard Schpeel: Two sides, writing side:reading side Things have really progressed on the writing side. 2nd generation tools are enabling production 100,000s of weblogs Huge problems with reading. [Tom Coates - " I've written a lot of stuff recently on this that I haven't published on my site. Maybe after this would be a good time..." Go!] Searching, updates, trust, new stuff, conversations across blogs Areas of Activity: under the reading side of things interacting with the new content geographic developments search developments social solutions antisocial solutions [this is RSS stuff she's talking about here. Mark my words. (no doubt)] Geographic Activity: Gawker Beastblog [is there space around this stuff for financially rewarding weblogs? does focus tend to mean commercial (gizmodo and the like) ] Region based groups: DFW, Chicago, NYC, Paris, ... Conferences as temporary geographic groups Many splinters in the blogosphere GeoURL, meta for lat/lon NYC bloggers The Daily Commuting metablog Aggregated by subway stops [cf. www.londonbloggers.co.uk - cal henderson was talking about doing something like this in the UK as well. The tube map site he built here is pretty similar.] World as blog (Mikel Maron) People don't use RSS / GEOURL or ping weblogs.com (but they WILL if there's a reason to do so - in my opinion - TEC) Chicago reader sticks to local blogs only, which he claims is enough and encourages friendships Blogosphere is balkanising into hundreds of different communities tension between localisation and desire to be part of the community as a whole... Now advancing into a multilingual community (lack of diversity among smaller language groups) [Is this more of a function of English-speaking world's insularity?] Getting explicit Social relationships Micah Alpern's "Trustest Blog Search Tool" FOAF [I'm not sure this is the future - too much configuration. I'd be interested in seeing if people go for a kind of site that works around a centralised principle of editorial decision-making...] [I agree, FWIW --TFS] [I think there's more going on here than meets the eye - this social relationships thing is really really interesting, but at the same time doens't seem to me to be something that can grow through non-embedded users - they have to be already engaged in the community for that to work. There's an element to weblogging which is viral - you see your friend's site and you get interested in it, but that doesn't mean that new users have those pre-existing social networks to work with...] [FOAF's configuration confusion will assure that it is not adopted widely - keep it simple, stupid] Conversational relationships Trackback More Like This From Others (MLTFO) a technique to the lazyweb to have a button on browsers for "more like this" Topics metadata Easy News Topics 1.0 Cory Q: Is there any problem with people not judging who their online friends are (and linking to them)? [This is to do with his incredible frustration with friendster! Cory was telling me the other day how annoying he found the site and the stuff that came off it.] Meg A: Didn't really have a prepped answer, and didn't think about the negative. Doesn't go to friendster to avoid pendig rejections. Beyond the power law: Supposedly the problem is the top few percent with most of the readers [This is also bollocks by the way - not Meg's comments, but some of the anxieties around that area. The network helps people find the good stuff - hence preferential linkage etc. There is an element where GOOD content over a long period of time gets traffic and a hint of authority...] [no joke!] Antisocial Software: RSS Feeds Individualistic "I'm going to pick the things *I* want" insatiable/greedy [bandwidth / pings etc.] Dave Winer refused by slashdot RSS feed loss of personality "combustion engine device" some bad headlines inconsistent syndication not designed for weblogs but good enough, for now [Interesting choices - she talked of RSS .91 and 2 but not RSS 1 - very Winer-centric - I wonder why... I thought the RSS/RDF community were quite anti-Winer - we need Hammersley in here] [Hammersly is in here] [Meg Winer-centric...not likely] "More Social" software: Daypop word bursts Technorati newcomers Lafayette Project [want new input! new input! *smile*] Expanding existing ideas collaborative filtering suggestions on taste, access, interest making them more accessible to the general public (as media, instead of as a hobby) So much else too! MEG POSTED FOR INNOVATIVE IDEAS FROM THE WEBLOGGING COMMUNITY AND THIS IS WHAT SHE GOT ( http://www.megnut.com/weblogs/006862.asp ): personal KM approach public KM, pointer to all web contributions non-human conversations "my server talks to me every day, why can't they have a weblog?" server logs in RSS adoption in professional audiences lawyers, academics, educators, politicians beyond blogs vlogs, audblogs, photoblogs, moblogs, mophoblogs, etc. moved away from "blog == chunk of text reverse-chronologically ordered" to "blog == easy to publish" "broadcast" weblogs, mostly output loss of intimate conversations comments on a site like Instapundit (200,000 page views a day), how different is it from a Yahoo news story with 4k comments? When marketers attack Raging milk hub-bub [This publicising thing - getting sent things to comment about - has NEVER happened to me... SHAME! TEC] [Is it time to sell out, yet?] [I'm really anti-selling out, but I'd like to be ASKED. TEC] [if you always do it for the money, then you never have to worry about morals] [I'm not worried about morals, I'm worried about undermining my 4real image :o) TEC] Themes too much information find what's best for us as individuals extending into the offline relationships tension between small/local/trust and broad/large/breadth geek overload - lots of acronyms ( losing non-geek audiences [we need the non-geek audience] [we do!? TEC] [yeah, if you want the medium to expand] [user-centered, not top down, right?] [correct, at the level that you don't have to know anything other than how to type and write to be able to take advantage of this stuff] The future? More ways to enable local sharing and connecting ludicorp demo + geourl + indyjunior + GPS @ post level (web services?) Post RSS readers [trying to find better ways to fix the currrent problems] centralization [Concerns about Google? It's weird that Orlowski's hysteria has taken any root, but it seems to have done.] what happened to P2P Post-geek writing hard, now easy how to make reading as easy? [I GOT THANKS! Woo! Yo mama! Yo mama! TEC] [ Silly man :-) -- TFS] Q: relates story of how a post lead to a paper news story (problems of how to track people down, privacy) A: Good question. Ref Tom C's geo-encoding and privacy (I've put the slides up for my paper if anyone wants to compare on my site [ref below?]). Suggests anonymous posts. Ben Hammersley Q: What about journalism 2.0 for individuals who get really popular? Webloggers and journalism. A: individuals don't scale, interested in seeing what happens with gizmodo style blogs (micropublishing individuals) [EW. Nick Denton - difficult man. TEC][oh tom, come on....easy on the snark] Rusty Q: Did you start with a working definition of what it means to be on the margin? A: In my mind, it was stuff I didn't know about. Considered really connected, so she wanted to find the edge of the megosphere. Cory Q: How about trolls as a cap on scale? Eventually message boards become overwhelmed (overrun, even) with trolls. How does that fit into the picture of popularity as a scaling factor? [Comment - we're not really talking about communities, are we? Although there are elements here which make sense to me - meg from notsosoft.com gets a fair amount of aggro, but nonetheless the comments aspect isn't necessarily core to the weblogging experience. IMHO, anyway. TEC] A: it depends on the site. There are sites that have comments that are hateful, but the site encourages it. Others have 100s of me-to's, but like it. Q. Doesn't Identity solve these problems- knowing someone says who they say they are. [Comment - I think this is really true. ] barrier to entry is low, so anyone can show up A: depends on the commun aity... [are there ways to raise the barriers of entry?] Thanks everyone! I'll email this out in a bit. Going, going, gone.... =================================== References (sites, docs, people): [Spaces useful around URLs - stops them being broken by stuff] Meg Hourihan ( http://www.megnut.com ) Gawker ( http://www.gawker.com ) Beastblog ( http://www.beastblog.com ) GeoURL ( http://geourl.org ) Mikel Maron's World ( http://www.brainoff.com/geoblog ) IndyJunior ( http://www.bryanboyer.com/indyjunior/ ) ==================================== Copyright to everyone involved, no restrictions: 2003 Add your email here to receive a copy of the text after the session: Trevor F Smith - tfsmith parc.com | http://trevor.smith.name/ Allen Murray - allen murray.net | http://allen.murray.net Richard Gayle - richard_gayle excite.com Tom Coates - tom plasticbag.org | http://www.plasticbag.org Richard Soderberg - etcon crystalflame.net | http://www.crystalflame.net/ Cortland Haws - pixelcort mac.com | http://homepag Mark Graham - mgraham mail.ivillage.com Jason May - jmay pobox.com Robert J. Berger - rjb ibd.com Jason Kottke - jason kottke.org