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| Wednesday, August 8, 2001 |
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Another one shakes the dust 
| | I like his take on the demise of Webvan, and also some of the stuff we've been corresponding about by email. I expect Steve to add substantially to many of the conversations that have been going on around here, and start a few more as well. |
Bulls ear!
| | You don't get a ricochet when you hit a bulls eye, do you? |
| | That seems to be a metaphorical lesson from the death of Ricochet, the wireless Net service from Metricom that together became today's New Dead Thing (thank's again to Grady Hannah for that label). |
| | Nice to know there's still a market for the service. Wonder why they didn't just put it all on eBay? (Can that be done? Anybody know?) |
| | It's a shame. I was a Richochet user and Metricom customer for years (and last wrote about that here). On the whole I liked them. I didn't mention this before, but one of the things that kept me a customer in those days was Metricom's customer support service. It was really good. Much better than the product itself, unfortunately. |
Radio kills the Webio star
| | If commercial radio and the DMCA don't each creep you out on their own, read what Howard Greenstein writes about the evils they commit together. |
| | By the way, if you want to see how one commercial radio station (the only one, far as I know) gets around legal and technical bottlenecks at the same time, check out the peerless KPIG. Better yet, listen. It's amazing. |
Thlinking deeply
| | The other day I asked ya'll to tell me what you thought about my relatively linky writing. With two exceptions, the overwhelming response (I lost countr of how many) favored a linky (or more linky) approach. The first exception was my wife, whose instincts and judgements are often almost supernaturally right-on. The second was John Waterson, who wrote this to me yesterday (which I just ran past my wife and she agrees with completely): |
| | Usually people tell me they appreciate the linky way I write, but yesterday I heard a different view: that I put too many links in my text. It all gets too distracting, too complicated (like I'm Mr. Simple, right?). Anyway, just wondering what ya'll think. |
| | On the whole, I like linky writing (although I prefer the term linkful). On the whole, I like *your* writing. But as with all good things, I think that linkfulness can be taken too far. Now I feel terribly rude for just coming out and saying this to a complete stranger, but - well, you *did* ask for comments, so say it I will: I think that you take linkful writing too far. |
| | (Er, just in case that does sound rude nonetheless, can I quickly point out here that my objection here is modest, and that it doesn't stop me from reading and enjoying your weblog regularly. To be honest, I only raise the issue because I'd been thinking about this recently, and like I said - because you asked.) |
| | To be clear though, my objection isn't based on the number of links that you drop in your writing - I think that your high link-count is to be praised. Instead, my problem arises when you include links like this one: |
| | It's easier to give bull than to take it. See here. |
| | ...where the word "here" is a hyperlink. Another example would be your very recent entry: |
| | Not if you don't buy into it. |
| | ...where the word "it" is similarly linked. |
| | Now there are some well-documented scanability problems with links like these, where the eye is drawn to generic words with little semantic value because they are highlighted by the browser as hyperlinks, but that's not really what I'm objecting to (at least not in today's sermon). |
| | Nor am I disabled (mercifully), so I can't claim be put out by the fact that generic link words like "here" and "it" are completely meaningless when taken out-of-context (as is done for example by the screen reading software that blind users rely on). This is also a humane and well-founded objection, but it's not the one that's bothering me right now. |
| | My real objection is more abstract: I object to incomplete texts, and these links are not only part of an incomplete text, they are quite literally the enablers of the incompleteness. The text has deliberately been left unfinished by the author (er, you), on the assumption that the user will mentally complete it themselves when they click on the hyperlink. Therefore the links do not augment the text; they detract from it. The text has *less* meaning because those links are in there, because the reader cannot make sense of the text without following them. |
| | There is an argument to say that all texts are incomplete anyway, hypertexts especially so, and that writing of this kind exploits the nature of the medium. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that hypertext makes this kind of writing *possible*, but not necessarily *wise*. It presents a little puzzle for the reader to solve - click the link and find out what the author is talking about - and that can be used to good effect sometimes, for added impact, or for the punchline of a joke. But I think that this technique can also be used simply because it has novelty value; because we were never really able to write in this way before we had a widely accessible hyperspace to play with. |
| | Used carelessly (ie, without some suitable value-add when the link is visited and the puzzle solved), the technique just puts an additional and completely unnecessary burden on the reader. It is author-centric, not user-centric. A related danger is that the reader decides not to bother clicking on the link at all, because they are given no indication as to what kind of stuff lies at the other end, no clue as to whether it will interest them, and therefore they have little motivation to find out. When this happens, everybody loses. The reader doesn't complete the puzzle, the author doesn't get to communicate his idea, and both parties are left slightly the poorer. |
| | Dipping lightly into the conversational metaphor that is central to much of your own writing, I think that good links should open up the conversation; they should present participants in the discourse with *options* which they can follow up on, if they so choose. This technique on the other hand, closes the conversation down: it presents an *obligation* that must be fulfilled if you want to keep up, if you want to hear the whole story. I think that unless you are offering a suitable reward for meeting that obligation, this is a mistake. |
| | Would be interested to hear any thoughts you have on this subject. |
| | Thanks, John, for letting me know what I was doing. I had no idea. Or maybe some idea, but not much of one. |
| | What I do here is a mix of many things. I'd go down the list, but there wouldn't be any news in most of it. What may be news is that this is an experiment. I'm trying stuff out here, all the time. Linkiness (or linkfulness, whatever) is just one variable. Profanity is another. Joking around is another. Layout is another. Those are relatively easy. A hard one is disclosure. How much should I disclose, and of what? On the one hand I'm a very disclosing kind of guy. On the other hand I work in a profession where one has to keep many confidences, in the literal meaning of that word. I experiment relatively little with the confidence others put in me, and in what I write. That's why I got John's permission before publishing his email. If I weren't still a traditional journalist I might feel differently, but the journalistic tradition is still where I come from, even when I'm fooling around. |
| | We're creating a new form of journalism here. I think it's related — and not just coincidentally — to a new form of economics. Both involve fresh mixes of egotism and altruism, but it's the latter that matters most. I believe the most fundamental principles we're re-discovering in the nascent post-industrial age involve altruism: doing for others. Or for ourselves: the first person plural. I believe both journalism and commerce have always had fundamentally altruistic purposes, and that the selfish aspects of both, so highly enabled in the Industrial Age, continue to upstage the unselfish, even though the unselfish does the most work, creates the most good, and gets the most done. And always has. |
| | Markets are relationships, my friend Sayo says. A couple weeks ago when I shared that observation with Eric Raymond, he hot only agreed, but thought about it awhile and came back with this very useful three-layer abstraction: |
| | Relationship
Conversation
Exchange |
| | Markets are each and all of those things. [I'd tell you more about it, but I don't want to upstage the piece in Linux Journal I'm working on right now where I'll go into it a bit. You can be sure I'll link to it when it's ready.] |
| | Journalism is relationships, too. The relationships here are much closer and more involved than they are in traditional journalism. Put in Eric's layered context, it's down mostly at the exchange level. It's something you pay for. Content, as it were. What blogs do is move journalism up the market stack, through conversation and into relationship. At this level there is no contradiction between those who like my linkful self-expression and those who want me to pay more attention to the work it requires of readers. What each of us writes give us all more to talk about, and we learn what we're doing together. |
| | This is true even when both conversation and relationship involve head-butting. This is often the case where programmers are working together to create technical infrasturcture, which is fundamentally atruistic: it's here for the good of everybody. Look at the conversations around RSS, SOAP and XML. These kinds of subjects always seem to involve highly original and talented people who sometimes drive each other crazy. I sometimes imagine them chewing on wet towells while they write. My mother used to say she had to "bite my tongue at the tonsils" to keep from saying something that would damage a relationship (or introduce a lot of pointless conversation into a relationship that would be better off without it). Some of us do that in relatinships. Others don't. But what matters is what happens at that top level. Because it isn't just about me. It's about us, and more importantly, about them. |
| | Here's a rag to chew on: The great original user interface work was done at Xerox PARC, but hardly saw the light of day until people with real good commercial instincts built UIs into products. I submit that commerce is fundatmentally about them. It's about scratching other people's itches. And that's what the open source movement needs to more openly embrace. To draw any kind of useful distinction betwen open source and free software, they'll have to. For the good of everybody. |
| | Anyway, enough of that. Back to work. |
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