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kottke.org posts about weblogs
Nice to be mentioned on BBC News,
Nice to be mentioned on BBC News, but what’s up with the disparaging “peppered with annoying links”? Especially when Boing Boing is mentioned as “cool” in the same sentence…their links are at least as annoying as mine. And in May, four of those “annoying links” went to the BBC News site. Up yours, BBC!
Nice little profile of Language Log in
Nice little profile of Language Log in the NY Times. “There is a group of very smart and very well-read people out there who like to read about language and who can put together arguments based on evidence from sources and background knowledge which is not made up or nuts.” Hey, that doesn’t sound like blogs!
Screencast showing how you can post to
Screencast showing how you can post to your blog from TextMate. Wow.
Design Observer redesigns…looks a bit smarter
Design Observer redesigns…looks a bit smarter than before. They joined The Deck too.
Vox’s Question of the Day
Six Apart recently launched a preview version of their new Vox blogging service. When you log in to Vox, one of the first things you notice on the front page is the Question of the Day followed by a quick posting box. Answer the question, press “continue”, and you’ve got yourself a blog post. I asked Six Apart president Mena Trott how the feature came about.
Jason: Everyone loves the Question of the Day feature on Vox. The QotD cleverly formalizes the memes that travel through LiveJournal and the blogosphere at large, making it OK for the kind of people who hate email joke forwards to participate collectively in something on a regular basis. Who is responsible for generating these questions? Are they recycled memes from LJ or do you have some meme genius working for 6A?
Mena: Question of the Day actually started in a design comp I did — meaning it hadn’t been specified in any product requirements docs. I was creating the Vox dashboard and realized that the one thing really missing from the page was a call to action. So, I tried to think what would be the one thing that would make me want to post and the Question of the Day made total sense.
You’re exactly correct in saying that we’re wanting to legitimize the behavior we’ve seen in email (forwards). It’s all about trying to figure out the behavior that would make my mom feel comfortable posting or make someone not feel overwhelmed by a big white posting box.
If you remember the Four Things meme that floated around a couple months ago, you’ll recall that this simple meme got people (like me) to post on their blogs after significant absences. We wanted to capture that sort of motivator.
And of course, LiveJournal is the inspiration for all of this.
As far as who creates the questions, we have a scratchpad that is generated by various members of the staff as well as suggestions that come in from our feedback forms. We’re still in such an early stage of Vox that these questions are evolving daily. One thing we’ve seen, however, is that the two topics that people most like to answer questions about are nostalgia (favorite childhood candy, childhood fears, etc…) and media-based (favorite movie, song that makes you happy, anything television).
Some questions, surprisingly bomb in an unexpected way. In April, I posed the question “If you had a time machine and could travel anywhere in time, where would you go and why?” It’s a difficult question for those who don’t obsess about time travel as much as I do. And, I have to admit, I made it question of the day since *I* had my own answer. Still, I’d love to try this one again now that more people are in Vox.
—
Thanks, Mena. Sometimes it’s these little things, tiny addictive hooks, that make the difference between a product taking off, and Vox’s QotD is a nice hook indeed. (Also, I’m totally with you on the time travel question.)
kottke.org isn’t a “particularly confessional site”,
kottke.org isn’t a “particularly confessional site”, so I’ll let the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead fill you in on what Meg and I have been up to for the past 6 years or so. Here’s the illustration that appears with the print version of the article. Rebecca’s original article from November 2000 (mirror). Here’s a small interview I did with Rebecca in 2001 concerning her take on weblogs. Oh, and I quite liked Gawker’s piece on what you’ll be reading in the New Yorker for the next 40 years.
This has got to be in the
This has got to be in the running for the strangest blog post ever: “Our hearts are aching as we have learned that the young woman we have been taking care of over the past five weeks has not been our dear Laura, but instead a fellow Taylor student of hers, Whitney Cerak.” It’s a case of mistaken identity; Laura died 5 weeks ago and was buried as Whitney. I can’t imagine what that would feel like for either family.
Meg blasts the NY Times for keeping
Meg blasts the NY Times for keeping blogs behind the Times Select paywall. “Michael Pollan is doing some of the most interesting and important writing about food right now. He’s doing it frequently and it’s being published in the easiest possible manner for massive distribution and influence. But only the Select few can see it. Even if I paid to access it, I couldn’t share it with my readers. So much potential unrealized.”
Captain Picard’s blog. With guestbloggers Seven of
Captain Picard’s blog. With guestbloggers Seven of Nine, Will Riker, Worf, and Data.
World Cup fever, who has it? World
World Cup fever, who has it? World Cup Blog has it; they’ve got a blogger covering each team in the Cup and even one covering just the referees.
Ben Saunders and Tony Haile are in
Ben Saunders and Tony Haile are in Greenland training for an Antarctic expedition later this year. Here’s how they’ll be sending photos and blog posts back to their server along the way.
Megnut redesigns and refocuses full-time on food.
Megnut redesigns and refocuses full-time on food. I helped with the design and I can’t wait to see how the site evolves over the next few months as Meg finds her stride.
What’s the best way of handling blog
What’s the best way of handling blog comment threads? I *hate* threaded comment interfaces, but with flat displays, multiple conversations are hard to track and 100+ comment threads become difficult to read.
Fleen, a blog about webcomics, examines IndieKarma
Fleen, a blog about webcomics, examines IndieKarma with an interview with the founder of the company and an analysis of its potential viability. Here’s my post on IndieKarma.
The NY Times article by Steven Levitt
The NY Times article by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner about talent is still on the most emailed list a week after it went up on the site…and it’s the second-most emailed story over the last month. Also of note is how politically oriented the most blogged list is compared to the most emailed list.
Advertising/Design Goodness is a blog that
Advertising/Design Goodness is a blog that tracks the best and worst of advertising from around the world. (thx, cap’n)
BannerBlog highlights creative and interesting banner ads
BannerBlog highlights creative and interesting banner ads from around the web. Today’s ad is pretty darn clever.
I could give two craps about Sphere,
I could give two craps about Sphere, but I loved these two lines: “it’s eyecandy for Web2.0 retards” and “Designing for the TechCrunch crowd is a mook’s game. Designing for users means making things straightforward, lightweight, and uncluttered.” (via bbj)
Stardust Holiday is a blog written by
Stardust Holiday is a blog written by a woman who’s spending three months in bed as part of a NASA study. (via cyn-c)
IndieKarma. Micropayments that work?
I got an email weeks ago urging me to look at a new micropayment system called IndieKarma. Pretty much every other micropayment scheme I’ve seen is too clunky to actually be useful, but I was pleasantly surprised with IndieKarma when I got around to checking it out. Here’s how it works.
If you’re a blogger or web site owner, you sign up, put a bit of JavaScript code on your site, and whenever a reader who’s signed into IndieKarma visits your site, you get a penny. Seamless and easy.
If you’re a reader, you sign up, put some money into your IndiePass account (with PayPal), and then as long as you’re signed in, whenever you visit a site that’s using the IndieKarma JavaScript, a penny is deducted from your account and into the site owner’s account. Again, fairly seamless and easy.
What I love about this system is that it’s passive and based on actual usage. The reader doesn’t need to decide that they want to support a certain site, just that they want to support the IndieKarma-enabled sites they read often. For a reader who doesn’t necessarily want to support a certain site, if they happen to click through for a visit, it only costs them a penny and then they never come back.
Financially, if a reader visits a site 60 times a month (which is not that unusual for weblogs), that’s $0.60/mo. or $7.20/yr…the price of a couple lattes at Starbucks. If you’ve got 1000 people who read your site that are signed up through IndieKarma, that’s $7200 per year, a sizable chunk of change.
So that’s the good part. Here are some problems with IndieKarma and some suggested features:
- The “dock” that’s placed on the site is way too intrusive and inflexible. Ad banners and boxes are well-established as a way of delivering this type of information…why not use that format? When a reader isn’t logged in to IndieKarma, the ad banner/box prompts them to do so and if they’re logged in, they get a “receipt” message for their micropayment (e.g. “thanks for supporting the site). Optionally, as a site owner, I should be able to not have the banner show at all for a truly seamless experience for the reader. The easier you make it to pop into a sidebar for bloggers and site owners, the better.
- Lack of variable pricing. As a reader, I might want to give more or less money per visit to certain sites. I may decide to spend ~$20/yr on my Waxy.org habit and so opt to give three cents per visit instead of one. As a site owner, I should be able to set a suggested and/or minimum cost/visit for my site. If I’ve got 1000 people giving 3 cents/visit, they each visit 60 times per month for a whole year, that’s $21,600, a living wage (depending on where you’re living).
- Alternate payment methods. Readers could buy “subscriptions” to sites for a “buy now” price determined by the site’s owner. Or an option for “gosh, that post/video/comic was really good today so here’s an extra $5” payments.
- You could even incorporate advertising into the mix. An advertiser could come along and say, “I’m going pay for unlimited free visits to this site for IndieKarma members for 60 days” and in exchange, the IndieKarma banner is replaced with an ad for that advertiser.
But the big problem with IndieKarma (which I hope they can overcome somehow) is that it’s one of those things that’s only useful when there’s a lot of people using it. As a reader, if only 1 or 2 sites I read are using IndieKarma to generate revenue, I don’t have much incentive to go through the sign-up process, but if there are 30 or 40 sites I read that are using it, I’d be much more likely to sign up. Same goes for site owners…if 10 of my readers are using IndieKarma, that’s not good, but if 1000 of them are using it, that’s something.
It’s a chicken and egg problem…you need users to get sites to sign up and you need sites to get users to sign up. This would work much better for someone who already has tons of signed-in users and payment systems (Amazon, PayPal, Google, etc.), established networks of sites that have lots of potential users across many similar sites (Gawker, BlogAds, 9Rules, The Deck, etc.), or really big sites that could sign users up in 4+ digit quantities (Slashdot, MySpace, LiveJournal, Drudge, HuffPo, etc.). Like I said, I hope IndieKarma can overcome this problem because I think the basic idea has a lot of promise to provide an alternative to advertising-supported media, both from the standpoint of readers and web site owners.
John Gruber steps in front of the
John Gruber steps in front of the bus that is making a full-time living from your weblog. As a supporter of DF for the past two years, I wish John the best of luck.
The Junk Charts blog searches for example
The Junk Charts blog searches for example of crappy graphs and charts in the media. (via do)
Writers and editors
Upon my return to civilization last week, Greg Knauss wrote up some thoughts he had after doing the remaindered links here for two weeks. His thoughts, reproduced in full:
Over the past two weeks, David Jacobs, Anil Dash and I have attempted to reproduce (in some halting way) Jason Kottke, while the actual Jason Kottke was
in rehabon his honeymoon. The attempt, on my part at least, has been an abject failure. Or haven’t you noticed all the crappy links with “GK” at the end of them? Go-kart magazines? What the hell?Like most of the disasters I’ve had a hand in, I’ve got a theory that both explains what happened and exonerates me. Ducking responsibility sounds better if you put on academic airs about it.
The theory: There are two kinds of bloggers, referential and experiential. Kottke is one. I, now two weeks too late in realizing this, am another.
The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at this. Referential bloggers are reporters, delivering pointers to and snippets of information, insight or entertainment happening out there, on the Intraweb. They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth — extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes — but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.
The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion: How about this. They are storytellers (and/or bores), drawing whatever they have to offer from their own perspective. They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.
There’s nothing here to imply that one type of blogger is better than the other. There are literally thousands — OK, hundreds… OK, at least a dozen — of both kinds that are valuable additions to the on-going conversation/food-fight/furry-cuddle that is the Internet. My point is that Jason Kottke is a very, very good referential blogger and I am a very, very bad one. And I’m sure I wouldn’t have trouble finding a link that expresses this sentiment (many, many times over, with varying degrees of vehemence), but I’d rather say it from my own experience:
Welcome back, Jason. You’ve been missed.
After reading Greg’s thoughts, Meg reminded me that Rebecca Blood had made a distinction between filter-style and journal-style bloggers in Weblogs: A History and Perspective. If you want to generalize outside the realm of weblogs, they’re both talking about the difference between writers and editors1.
At a party a couple of years ago, I was talking to Nick Denton and he was puzzled by the number of bloggers who were getting book deals and told me that “the natural upgrade path for bloggers is from blogging to editing, not to writing”. As Greg and Rebecca note, that doesn’t apply to everyone, but it sure describes what I do here. kottke.org has always been more edited than written. I’ve never particularly thought of myself as a writer (I get by, but I wish I were better), but I do pay a lot of attention to how the writing is presented and contextualized…how the overall package “feels”.
[1] And if you want to go even further out on the metaphorical gangplank here, the writer/editor dichotomy compares well to that of the musician/DJ. ↩
Book blog starts Fibonacci poem fad, i.
Book blog starts Fibonacci poem fad, i.e. the writing of poems where the number of syllables in each line is dictated by the Fibonacci sequence. “Poets are very, very hungry for constraint right now.”
Kevin Ray Underwood, suspected of killing 10-year-old
Kevin Ray Underwood, suspected of killing 10-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin, wrote an entry on his blog the day after Bolin disappeared and the day before he was discovered and arrested. His Blogger profile is here: “If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?”
Update: Here’s Underwood’s Amazon wishlist.
Update: His MySpace page is “undergoing routine maintenance”. Riiiight. (But a recent post survived.)
Update: Some speculation in the comments on Underwood’s latest post that his interest in atheism and evolution was a contributing factor in the killing.
Over the past two weeks, David Jacobs,
Over the past two weeks, David Jacobs, Anil Dash and I have attempted to reproduce (in some halting way) Jason Kottke, while the actual Jason Kottke was in rehab on his honeymoon. The attempt, on my part at least, has been an abject failure. Or haven’t you noticed all the crappy links with “GK” at the end of them? Go-kart magazines? What the hell?
Like most of the disasters I’ve had a hand in, I’ve got a theory that both explains what happened and exonerates me. Ducking responsibility sounds better if you put on academic airs about it.
The theory: There are two kinds of bloggers, referential and experiential. Kottke is one. I, now two weeks too late in realizing this, am another.
The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at this. Referential bloggers are reporters, delivering pointers to and snippets of information, insight or entertainment happening out there, on the Intraweb. They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth — extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes — but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.
The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion: How about this. They are storytellers (and/or bores), drawing whatever they have to offer from their own perspective. They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.
There’s nothing here to imply that one type of blogger is better than the other. There are literally thousands — OK, hundreds… OK, at least a dozen — of both kinds that are valuable additions to the on-going conversation/food-fight/furry-cuddle that is the Internet. My point is that Jason Kottke is a very, very good referential blogger and I am a very, very bad one. And I’m sure I wouldn’t have trouble finding a link that expresses this sentiment (many, many times over, with varying degrees of vehemence), but I’d rather say it from my own experience:
Welcome back, Jason. You’ve been missed. — GK
Guests
I’m going to be away for a couple of weeks, but my pal Greg Knauss is taking over posting some remaindered links while I’m gone, aided by special guests David Jacobs and perhaps even Anil Dash.
Greg was the very first guest blogger here on kottke.org (and perhaps the first guest blogger ever anywhere) back in March of 2000 when I went to SXSW and they didn’t have wifi at the conference (nor did I have a laptop). Good times, back then.
When I get back, house on fire.
Even with the encroachment of blogs, craigslist,
Even with the encroachment of blogs, craigslist, and online stock listings, James Surowiecki says the newspaper business is actually not a bad business to be in these days. “Newspapers are classic cash cows: solidly profitable businesses in a stagnant industry.”
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