Category: Internet

It looks like Doc Searls’s slow descent into hardware hell continues. After several mangled laptops and a lost (and returned) AirPort base station, in the last few days he has had his laptop and glasses stolen from his car and an Ethernet failure on his backup machine. Someone had better sacrifice a chicken to Murphy, quick.

WriteTheWeb: The writeable web: lather, rinse, repeat (an interview with NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons). I’m a few days late picking up this item; the last time I went to look at it I couldn’t reach the website. But it’s still good reading on a bunch of levels: application developers, bloggers, Internet philosophy, and on.

I do want to call attention to Brent’s last statement:

Ideally writing for the web should be about as easy as writing something in TextEdit. Create it, write it, save it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Compare to this statement, made in these pages in October 2001:

I write this blog from an unaccustomed place: Apple’s TextEdit application. That I’m doing it from a text processor isn’t in and of itself unusual; normally I write my blog in BBEdit before uploading it to the web. The unusual part is that this blog will be published to the web without my opening a web browser.

This is what I started writing about in July when Apple quietly announced that they would make support for web services–web applications that can be addressed using either XML-RPC or SOAP–available in the operating system and accessible via AppleScript in Mac OS X 10.1. Yesterday I wrote a short AppleScript (available for download) that uses SOAP to call web services belonging to Manila, the publishing system that hosts this blog. The script takes the content of the topmost TextEdit window and makes it a story on my website.

Brent is right that writing for the web should be easy. That was the vision that drove me down the path of my first scripts, which allowed blogging from that simple text editor. Somewhere, though, it got complicated again. My Manila Envelope is not the most friendly writing UI I’ve ever seen. NetNewsWire’s blogging interface is the best so far I’ve seen, but it feels like an interface. Writing in a text processor feels different. Are we always doomed to have this layer of separation between us and the process of sharing our thoughts?

Rogers Cadenhead does some snooping in Alexa and discovers (along with graphical comparisons of blog traffic) some interesting things about some of our favorite blog hosters:

• Five weblogs receive one-third of all visits to EditThisPage.Com: Familie Berg (13 percent), Hack the Planet (8 percent), Phil Wolff’s Dijest (5 percent), Cyberdaily (4 percent), and Flangy News (4 percent).
• Top five on ManilaSites.Com: Caversham Booksellers (17 percent), J.D. Lasica (14 percent), CHAINguardian (8 percent), B.A.’s Weblog (4 percent), and Heroes and Villains (4 percent).

Adam Vandenberg (aka Flangy) thinks his prominence is less due to merit than the fact that a lot of people are moving off EditThisPage. Au contraire. (Although there are certainly people moving off EditThisPage.)

And Dave wonders why his Slashdotting looks like 5000 reads, while Joel Spolsky’s looks like 400,000. Well, I can’t explain two orders of magnitude, Dave, but one order might just be a difference in methodology. The stats in Manila and Radio (and SiteMeter) present summaries of visits and page views, and don’t count things like graphics loads as hits (though Manila, at least, counts RSS downloads). I don’t know about Joel’s software, but if he’s looking at more raw web traffic data, he’ll see a hit for every image on his page in addition to the page view itself.

I have meant to blogroll Ross Mayfield’s weblog for a while, but it took his linking to me a second time (after I jokingly compared him to Gibson’s Gentry) to get around to it. Ross’s site is the best around for pointers to publicly accessible data about the shape of the Internet. These days if I have questions about how fast the Net is growing, how its users are distributed, what its mechanism of growth looks like I look to Ross first. This morning, for instance he points to a paper by NEC researchers that says that the old “power law” explanation for the popularity of web sites (the most popular attract more links than the newer entries) doesn’t hold across all categories. He goes on to suggest that the falling barrier to entry for web publishing may also be a factor.

Example #1: William Gibson, blogging his book tour. Gibson is on track to blog his entire book tour, which is shaping up to be a grand sweep through America, modern blogging culture, and his back catalog, not to mention super-rare hardcover first editions of Neuromancer.

Example #2: Julie Powell of the Julie/Julia Project, bravely bouncing back from a near total meltdown on Sunday to not only save the recipes she was working on but move ahead with total brave dedication.

Example #3: Moxie, aka Madison Slade, coming out of another unfortunate relationship and turning the angst into a really good short story.

There are a ton of other examples, including my family and friends. But I sometimes think that blogging is a metaphor for the larger human struggle: to reverse entropy, to make sense of the disorder that each of us face in our own lives, and to use the disorder to tell stories that explain it all.

Just saw the link to my page from Tony’s blog (warning: NOT work safe, at least right now). It’s hard to miss, being in the top left corner right above Anna. I guess that’s confirmation that I don’t always need to write about software to write something interesting… Thanks, Tony.

Like Greg, I’ve gone into syndication. While Greg is a contributor to the Political State Report, I’ve joined Blogcritics, Eric Olsen’s collective blog for reviews. I’ll continue to publish my reviews here, but they’ll also appear on Blogcritics, where they’ll get a wider audience. My first posting is an extended version of my review of the Cheeselords’ album from earlier this week. Maybe, if I can find a site that offers referer bounties, I can post my beer reviews there too…

The Age, the newspaper of Melbourne, Australia, published a link to my blog in a listing of “home improvement weblogs” back in December. The fact that I never saw the referral suggests some things about their readership’s web literacy; still, it was funny to see my name in print on an .au site. God only knows what the readers made of the description:

Just reading about Tim Jarrett’s Christmas decorations is enough to make one go politically correct and not “do” Christmas….Jarrett’s blog is not all about settling into his new house but he has window contractors to deal with, boxes to unpack and plenty of plans to look forward to. The rest of the time he’s singing nonsense carols and wondering where his funk went.

The quotation was in reference to a post from December 1 about getting the Christmas tree in place. Apparently the article showed up in a few other sites, all Australian as far as I can tell, including the Sydney Morning Herald. The author, Jenny Sinclair, apparently writes a column called Blogon that reviews a handful of weblogs each week.

Along with the annotations to the Nirvana lyrics below, I really should have given a shout out to Tony Pierce, from whom I shamelessly swiped the format. After all, Tony just got back from a month in hell with Kurt. At least I didn’t try to make it a photo essay (though I was tempted).

Oh for crying out loud: just go to Tony’s site and permalink him. Or flow him a buck. Or leave him comments. Or something.

Lots of stuff on the plate today. While I work, a few quick pointers to things going on elsewhere:

• Thanks to Dave and Doc for the linkage on yesterday’s open-data release of the Weblogs.com data growth measurements. I was going to offer a clarification to Doc calling this “the diameter of the blogosphere,” but on reflection he’s right. This measures the total activity of the blogosphere, the growth of the content being given back to the web by its users. The fact that this is both existing bloggers being very chatty and new people blogging is important; being able to break down those percentages is probably less important. —I like Doc’s characterization that this is the diameter of the blogosphere rather a lot. This is why he’s a marketing professional and I… well, I am too, but one with a lot less experience. 🙂
• Craig is back from vacation and blogging his cruise experience. It sounds like even the memory of the cruise ship food is enough to make him lethargic.
• George reports that the Big Dig proceeds apace, with the I-90 extension, at $6.5 billion and 3.5 miles the most expensive road ever built, scheduled to open this weekend (connecting the Mass Pike to the Ted Williams Tunnel and making it possible to quickly get to Logan from the rest of the state). George, we expect a driving conditions report when you get the chance.
• Finally, Esta is blogging her ongoing process of applying to the Presbyterian seminary. While there are plenty of b-school admissions bloggers that I know of, I think hers is the only one to blog about seminary.

A week ago I thought that we might see an uptick in the slope of the growth of Weblogs.com activity, as measured by the high water mark, in coming months. All it took was one little Supreme Court case to do it. The site hit a new high water mark yesterday that was more than 100 weblogs higher than the previous mark (during the MacWorld SF 2003 keynote; this is a hint that increased activity on existing blogs is a major driver of the high water mark). The figure of merit is now 2.8, back to where it was in October.

I thought this was a good time to make my source data available. I will continue to post comments as new high water marks are reached, but I think it will be more useful if people can get to the data themselves. It’s now downloadable in Excel format from this site. (The spreadsheet is under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. Feel free to use it wherever you like, just give me credit and make any changes and additional research available.)

The Supreme Court voted 7-2 against Larry Lessig’s challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Justices Breyer and Stevens dissented, saying that the act makes copyright “virtually perpetual” and “inhibit[s] the progress of ‘Science’—by which word the Framers meant learning or knowledge” (Breyer dissent). Justice Stevens dissented more narrowly, arguing that just as states lack the right to extend individual patents, so Congress has no right to extend the term of copyright, and that the majority opinion of the court “rests on the mistaken
premise that this Court has virtually no role in reviewing congressional grants of monopoly privileges to authors,
inventors and their successors.” The Trademark Blog has additional coverage. Doc Searls weighs in to argue that this is the start of a long road, not the end of one. Ernie the Attorney thanks Lessig for his hard efforts. Slashdot has a discussion underway. Meanwhile, the Associated Press calls it “a huge victory for Disney,” laying the blame squarely at the feet of the companies who lobbied so vigorously to protect their monopolies.

Francisco Toro was apparently asked by his editor, Patrick Lyons, at the New York Times to stop blogging, as it apparently raised the specter of conflict of interest. I suspect the real issue, as he suggests in his open letter to Lyons, was his activism. At any rate, he has quit the paper and unshuttered his blog, and I think it will continue to prove to be the best way to understand the chaos that continues in Venezuala.

Not a lot of time today, but here’s the latest from around the keiretsu:

• Esta is back online, after an outage inspired by some soul searching. Self criticism certainly runs in the family.
• Greg is continuing his brilliant run chronicling Georgia politics with this note: “Democrats are categorically ruling out taxes, while Republicans are putting the brakes on sprawl. Ladies and gentlemen, these are strange days indeed.”
• George is enjoying the snow and dealing with telemarketers. (Sympathy from me, George: we’ve been getting as many as four or five calls an evening.)
• Brent is back from MacWorld and is looking at what Safari has done to his web pages.
• Dave is heading back to school—as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Dave, it’s ironic that now that I’ve moved from grad school in Cambridge to the west coast to work on software, you’ll be heading east to a university in Cambridge. Maybe one of these days I’ll get to do lunch with you.