Flutterby™! : 2000-05-27 20:10:10+00

2000-05-27 20:10:10+00 by Dan Lyke 14 comments

Alright! who sold Big Blue a clue?? I love fads like Linux :)

We need a better way to highlight independent content, 'though I'll be damned if I know what it is.

A-freaking-men! I've been ranting about this for some time -- as you know, I think, Dan -- and Mike Stutz (of dsl.org fame) and I spent a good bit of time on IRC earlier this Spring talking about it seriously.

I don't know if the answer is FYAG ("Found Yet Another Group"), say, an Independent Web Content Association (or somesuch), create a independent content only search engine/portal/whatever... It's a perplexing issue, especially for someone like me who suspects that all the radicalness of the Web is just going to fade away...

I know you may be talking particularly about 'blogs; but it's a genre-busting, Web-wide problem, IMO, and it's no longer sufficient to say, simply, 'there's all kind of alternative, independent stuff on the Web, you just have to find it.' I've more and more come to the conclusion that given the commercialization of the Web, just having a site isn't enough.

Hmm... maybe the first step might be to get a smart group of people worried about this on the same IRC channel -- or in the same room -- together to do some brain storming?

Kendall, Monkeyfist

I know this may sound derivative, but maybe some kind of unified 'Blog, ala Slashdot. One of the problems with Blogs is that there are too many of them and there is too much duplication among them. Adding comments to Flutterby made it less of a 'let's see what Dan's thinking about today' thing and more of a community discussion led by Dan. Maybe even a MetaBlog of sorts. If you like the idea of a community centric web, then maybe Flutterby should be extended to include direct postings by community members. Then Flutterby becomes the Community Blog for those folks who share values that drew them to Flutterby to begin with. There will likely be even more duplication among the blogs, but the idea is to include enough of the postings from other blogs that the locals are interested in to reduce the amount of time spent at other blogs. Something to avoid, however, is acheiving the magnitude of Slashdot. Slashdot really has no sense of community. They try to create it through moderation but that really doesn't make all members feel equal (and enough members that the only way to make them all equal is to reduce the input capabilities of those who can add value to the point where they are equal to those who don't). Just some things to think about...

I don't think it's FYAG, I've seen at least three mailing lists form to try to do new distributed weblog software or other cool things, and fail. I think that someone's going to come up with "the idea", implement it, and let other people hack on the code to improve it. There were plenty of projects to do open source operating systems before Linux, it was only when one person did enough that people could start toying with it for giggles that it took off. I think that a part of my boredom is that I'm not running into any new ideas recently. All my friends are either implementing yet another web site (the path I'm going right now) or trying to write the software to start yet another animation studio (tried it back in '90-91), the country in general is out pursuing yet another B-to-B opportunity, I'm in a lull and I don't see a way out. As for applications, I'm playing with some ideas for a search engine built to look for dynamic content. One of the things that's made weblogs so useful is that humans are doing all the filtering, but there's a lot of filtering and microsyndication that can be done without human intervention that we're not doing right now. But in some ways it seems that Python is the right language for doing that on a distributed basis (because of some of its safe execution model abilities) and I darned well don't want to learn another bleedin' language right now.

On community blogging, I've tried reading some of the meta blogs and they rarely work for me. Todd's posted a few entries here, Larry figured out the secret with Newwwsboy and posted one or two when I had that system up and running, but a few people noticed the difference in editorial voice. It wasn't necessarily a complaint, but I'm not sure. I think Eric's got interests close enough to mine that he'd probably make a good addition, maybe I'll tweak his account to let him post and see where that takes us... Here I've let Todd post a few items, although he hasn't posted any in a long time, and if Eric's interested I could enable it for his account too, but people comment to me about the lack of the strong editorial voice when

Oh yeah, one of those failed FYAG attempts is "toolbuilders@flutterby.com", you can use majordomo to subscribe.

It,s all out there. Just keep turning over the stones and avoid the blog intra-scene. Like a big library with no cataloque and all the books scattered on the floor, you just start reading. And anyway walking and reading (real smell-good books) are timeless-get them back in your life. There are so many stories out there to learn and people of all ages to share with. happy trails:) riley stevens http://riley370.pitas.com/

It,s all out there. Instead of linking to a reuters news article dig deeper and find the people. A news item on sun spots can lead to an opening to so much about the world and yourself. Just keep turning over the stones and avoid the blog intra-scene. Like a big library with no cataloque and all the books scattered on the floor, you just start reading. And anyway walking and reading (real smell-good books) are timeless-get them back in your life. There are so many stories out there to learn and people of all ages to share with. happy trails:) riley stevens http://riley370.pitas.com/

The reason that blogging is boring is that self-referential meta-discussion is no substitute for real life, and that includes real computing life. People are doing interesting things on the Net every day, and most of them have no time for weblogs. Every so often you have to stop describing the finger pointing at the moon and start looking at the moon again.

Now I'm scared... Dan claims that my interests are close to his... Yikes!!! (maybe he wasn't talking about me...) Anyhow, I've found that I have three or four different sources of

I've noticed a couple of problems with 'blogs. First off, many people put very little effort into commentary. They post a link with a one-line wisecrack. Second, many weblogs simply link to other weblogs, creating a horrible web of circular references. I guess a more general problem is cohesion - there's nothing to tie together all these thoughts.

I'd like to propose a slightly different model. The weblog becomes a community site, attracting articles of reasonable length from community members (moderated by individual or committee). This is more like a zine than a 'blog, since it's focused more on articles than links (though links are certainly important).

A variation on this is to model this site as a meta-blog, but instead of just links, catalog all the related links and present some summarizing article as context.

Jeepers, Eric, we both like sex, technology, and inline skating. That covers a good portion of my waking hours... What I've found with attempts at creating a more multi-contributor vibe in a longer article or magazine type format (how I interpret "articles of reasonable length from community members") is that people who have the energy to write lots for free are as happy to publish on their own site. A way to aggregate those articles is good, but that's part of what I try to do here, linking to the regular authors I like when they update. This, incidentally, is one of the things I've been promising to automate for two years. I guess what I really need to do is go write some more code. And it's a gorgeous day outside and I've no pressing client work this afternoon. Time to drag the laptop down to the coffee shop, sit in the garden and code...

This is a sweeping generalization, of course, but most people with their own sites never put time into content of substantial length. If they do, they only appear occasionally, and aren't highlighted in an appropriate manner.

A magazine-type format could take articles from different sources and present them in a cohesive manner. A meta-blog, but with a different focus -- articles, instead of lists of links. Imagine a forum where you can read articles by Cam, Peter Merholz, and others. As individuals, they've created some great content, but it doesn't appear very often, and never at some common location.

I think the point is that I, and probably most of the other old-school bloggers, have been asked to participate in several such endeavours, and it always ends up that when we put the energy into writing something longer we end up at least putting a copy on our own site, and most often end up putting that precious writing time into our own site. And a few people who put tremendous energy into their own sites with longer pieces have gone to writing shorter bits (I'm thinking of sites like mouthorgan here). A 'blog that tracked longer pieces on a given topic might have a place, as would an automated way for an author on a site like mine to indicate that such a piece is up.