Tuesday, October 8, 2002 
Ben and Mena Trott today released version 2.5 of Movable Type on the one-year anniversary of its initial release.
Some of the changes include:
- An integrated version of Jay Allen's mt-search plug-in, called public search
- More accessible default templates that follow Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Accessbility guidelines
- A new default stylesheet (it was the date on the sample that made me realize something had changed!)
- A "Keywords/Metadata" field added to the edit entry screen
- Improved update and trackback ping features
- Optional TrackBack "auto-discovery"
categories: metablog
3:06:55 PM 
say what []
Seems like today is all about followups and conversations among blogs. (For example, Mark Byron noticed my unfisking yesterday and wrote about it in his blog. My response to his response to my response to his original post can be found in his comments.)
So I wanted to elevate an interesting thread from my comments. The interesting part is provided by Dylan Tweney, responding to my post about the Shirky article. Tweney suggests another viable precedent for this type of mass-amateurization in the open source movement.
My response to that was, "hmm, not sure i'm swallowing that analogy just yet... there are parallels, but... hmm, tricky stuff. must think on it." A cop out! Perhaps I was distracted by the differences (the whole "tinkering" aspect of open source) instead of noticing the similarities that seem to relate to relieving certain activities of the requirement that they "pay their own way" for the time involved.
I used to call this the power of low thresholds. Because Enterzone never planned to make money, we outlasted many ambitious webzines that failed to make it over the higher thresholds they set for themselves. And yet, anything that does not sustain itself must be subsidized by something else. (For the blogger, this price may simply be paid in terms of less time and attention available to spend on other cherished pursuits.)
Tweney elaborates on the analogy:
Well, think about what Linux has done to the market for enterprise server OSes: It's reduced the price to zero. (Even Sun gives away Solaris for free now.) The beauty of open source is that anyone can contribute; their contributions are accepted only to the extent that the community rolls them up into the next release. Comparably, with blogs, people's posts get swept up into larger conversations or else they get ignored. The ugly side of this is that it can destroy commercial markets, if the free stuff gets good enough.
He also picks up on the music analogy (in my original post, I wrote "I would wonder whether this same form of mass-amateurization will also sweep through the music world?"):
Kazaa, Morpheus, etc. — all have the potential to do the same kind of thing for the music world, because they put artists in direct contact with their fans. Get enough fans, and you might be able to build a market for CDs, concert tickets, special goodies, etc. However, the emergence of this market is being thwarted by the legal attacks on P2P as a whole. The record labels are scared of P2P, and they have good reason to be. It's not just that fans can violate copyright and get free music — it's that P2P networks could change the entire economic system of music production and distribution.
The dynamics are different in the software, writing, and music worlds, but in each case it seems like there's a powerful sort of "mass amateurization" happening.
categories: memewatch
10:28:47 AM say what []
In The Death of the Newspaper at Teal Sunglasses, Chuq Von Rospach takes on some recent commentary about the online publishing, editors, and professionalism, responding to my post over the weekend prompted by C.W. Nevius's Chronicle column (whew! tracking these threads is hard work!).
But that argument is like arguing that because McDonalds has automated fry cooking, we don't need pastry chefs any more. The word "editor" spans as many sub-specialties as "writer" or "chef" does. The argument that because they (and most writers, myself included) are better after having had our work massaged by editors, and therefore news.google.com isn't a threat to editors is a bad one — because fry cooks and pastry chefs aren't interchangeable.Chuq notes that copyeditors are not the same as the kind of editor who decides what article goes on the front page:
Google News [is] not replacing the copy editors who massage and clean up our priceless prose — it's automating the process of deciding what goes into the paper (the copy desk) and how it's portrayed in the paper (the layout guys). Those, too, are editors — but their function is a lot different.... Google proves they are [replaceable]! ... but ... only to a degree, because Google is lying. The content WAS generated with the help of human hands, and human editors. It's the layout of the page that was done automatically, and in all honesty, that's really the easy part. Before Google could figure out what to put on that page, writers had to write it, editors had to edit it, copy desk guys had to decide it was worth publishing, and layout guys placed it on web sites around the world.He finishes up by tackling the recent Shirky article on mass amateurization: [W]hat you're really doing is not putting editors out of business, but breaking down the hegemony of the copy desk — right now, decisions on what you see and hear are in the hands of rather few people, and by using the consensus voice, returns it to democracy (instead you get the hegemony of who can generate word of mouth, and the power of viral marketing). And he thinks that Shirky is overstating the impact of amateur publishing on the writers at the top of the heap:
[The fact] that anyone can play journalist and columnist doesn't mean that there won't still be professional journalists or columnists. ...What this really does is start to break down the barriers that prevent that valuable material from being found. It re-enables, in a big way, word of mouth. It democratizes the way quality is discovered, taking it out of the hands of the few in power and brings that process back towards the people.Chuq detects defensiveness on the part of those currently in control of the bottlenecks:
[T]his change scares the hell out of those who currently hold a choke hold on the neck of these processes — because what is really changing here is that the role of the person that makes that decision. Right now, they have an effective veto power. ... If they don't [make good decisions], these new technologies allow their audience to go around them, render them irrelevant.
categories: metablog
9:53:42 AM say what []
A writer for Pigdog Journal disagrees with most of Rebecca Blood's advice in her Handbook, lampooning it in an over-the-top way:
And then there are all the bits where web writers are cautioned to never insult a blogger. "Even relatively mild criticism of another weblogger or her site design will reflect very unfavorably on you," admonishes Miss Blood. ... Your brand of mealy-brained, fraidy-cat niceness has never in the entire history of humanity resulted in prose that's worth a fat crap....Ironically, a tossed-off slam at the end of the article has driven a lot of traffic to the blognovel hosted here at Salon.
categories: metablog
9:29:48 AM say what []
Hylton at Blogging News continues to do a wonderful job of rounding up interesting commentary from the blog world.
In my lazy way I wish to respond to a few of the comments here without bothering to track down the original posts, bookmarklet them, and respond invididually.
Richard Poe on why blog-politics may skew to the right: "Talk radio, webzines, list servers, message boards, and now blog sites have one thing in common. They are interactive." Meaning, he continues, "it is physically impossible for new media to do what old media did—that is, to shove unpopular ideas down peoples' throats...."Our political spectrum has gone through some kind of mobius twist where idealists often see liberalism as an authoritarian elitist philosophy and conservatism (or libertarianism, which often seems to boil down to conservatism plus sex and drugs) as a scrappy underdog liberation movement.
Arnold Kling agrees with Clay Shirky: "In the world of mass media, Britney Spears or Paul Krugman can achieve market shares and compensation relative to amateurs that far exceed the differences, if any, in talent and ability. As the Internet takes over, the huge concentration of rewards relative to abilities probably will disappear."I'm not convinced that the Internet is going to rationalize and smooth-out all reward/talent ratios. I think there will still be chokepoints and pricepoints, rewards and success for those at the top with perhaps a richer "farm team" of writers inhabiting formerly nonexistent perches in the blogosphere.
Does peer-to-peer music sharing give unknown musicians a chance to be heard? Yes. Does it undermine the ability to make money on the part of famous or hugely talented musicians? Probably not. Does it endanger parasitic middlemen, absolutely. Does that mean there is no longer any role for middlemen and aggregators? No.
Shelley Powers on her nostalgia for the earlier days of blogging: "Too many weblogs I've visited recently haven't updated in days, weeks, even months. Perhaps we're going through a maturation process — posting less frequently, but with more care. Or perhaps, we're all burning out.""What do you mean 'we'," white man?" But seriously, I think there is a natural lifecycle to blogs and blogging. Maybe some will start today and continue to post daily for the rest of their lives, but most will not. Instead, most will become enthusiastic and find reserves of energy for blogging but will eventually run into conflicts of time or dry wells of inspiration. It does seem like many longtime bloggers tend to post less than daily, although the best make each post count, so as always it's quality and not quantity that matters.
Mike Golby on a sentiment others are sharing about their blog-fatigue: "We work [for that is what it is] from within a rigid framework. Blogging is subject to perhaps more devices, conventions, artifices, and rules than I at first imagined. It is an enormously restrictive medium."I disagree, except insofar as the restrictions are internalized. You can blog however you like. No one says you need to post every day or add a blogroll or whatever.
Tom Shugart: "I'm constantly reassessing my relationship with blogging. It's kind of like being a lovesick teenager. One day it's exhilarating. The next I'm nearly bent over with the pain of doubt, insufficiency, and abandonment."Yup, sounds like a crush to me.
categories: metablog
9:26:51 AM say what []
A sample chapter from the new O'Reilly book on blogging. [Scripting News]Yes, I am still planning to review this book!
categories: metablog radioactive
8:58:54 AM say what []
A positive front-page review of Rebecca Blood's Weblog Handbook at Slashdot generates a range of responses, most of which we've seen before from this quarter (weblogs are over, the writing is terrible/self-indulgent, who cares what you think, what's so hard about updating webpages, etc.).
Some choice comments:
Why would I care to read your stupid rantings? Why would I care to get my daily news from someone with as much authority on the 'news' as myself? Are we so in need of entertainment that our ravenous hunger for material has necessitated the development of individual publishing?Suggested riposte: Why should I care about your opinion on Slashdot?
Same commenter:
Don't get me wrong, that individual publishing exist[s] is a beautiful, beautiful thing. However, the blog phenomenon is about as interesting as reading other peoples checkbooks.Make up your mind! Is it beautiful or boring?
Another:
Um, I was under the impression that "blogs" (what a stupid name that is) were trendy and cool four years ago, but are just derivative sources of meaningless drivel these days. Do people actually still read and write these things?No, Virginia, they don't.
This one made me chuckle:
Hey everybody - I'm working on a new book. It's called "The Slashdot Handbook: Practical Advice on posting comments and submitting stories to Slashdot". Please buy it. Thank you.I always appreciate a good instance of the cat meme:
The point is, blogging is simple. Its not more difficult than back in 1995 when we all posted our first kitty-kat pictures using notepad or VI. Writing good content for blogs is the hard part.
But this post I think best exemplifies the viewpoint of a technically savvy person who can't understand why the less technically inclined might benefit from tools, shortcuts, and advice:
I edit my weblog with nano. Granted, I also edit it live, which bothers people as a concept, but I ssh into my data area for my web site, "nano -w weblog.html", and type away. When a month's worth of entries are generated (on the calendar change) I roll the old weblog over to weblog-archive-year-month.html, and start a new weblog with a template for the headers, page formatting, etc, using cp. I then link the new weblog.html to the archive, link the archive to the new weblog.html, and add an entry to the archive list page. It takes ten minutes per month if I'm drunk off my ass and can't type. I know that I'm not necessarily doing it the standard way, but HOW can one write a full sized book on weblogging? Better yet, how can someone justify paying more than $0.50 for said book?
categories: memewatch metablog
8:45:30 AM say what []
