Blogging: The First 20 Years

Twenty years ago, today, the father of blogging, Dave Winer, published his first blog post. Back then, it wasn't called a blog or web log. That came later. But its original purpose hasn't changed. Winer, more than anyone else, has preached and practiced that the purpose of blogging is to narrate one's work.

Blogging is fundamentally different than journalism, but there's also an overlap. There's so much of an overlap that Pulitzer awarded the Huffington Post its National Reporting prize in 2012. The prize was awarded for journalism coverage. The coverage was posted on a blog that grew into a news service. News services have blogs and blogs provide news services. Twitter, more than any other company, has seized this opportunity as a micro-blog, news service, and communications platform.

There's both a human and technical element which causes high-tech services to reach the masses. On the technical side, webifying a technology makes it more accessible. Twitter webified RSS, Hotmail webified SMTP, and blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger have webified FTP. But it's the human element that's key. These services, plus Podcasts, social media, and comments, etc, allow people to express themselves. It's the very act of expressing ourselves that is our passion. Plus, these webified technologies are truly innovative. Innovation is something that reduces the cost of a transaction. And well designed technology will get out of your way to enhance your productivity. 

Without realizing it, we've seen these changes over the past two decades. Adam Curry, a former MTV VJ, once explained to me how he persuaded Winer to solve the Internet video broadcast problem. Fifteen years ago, video didn't stream, it downloaded due to slow bandwidth. It might take five minutes to download a sixty-second news broadcast that was the size of a postage stamp. Winer had no interest in this user experience until Curry suggested "channels." These channels would download news broadcasts in the middle of the night, while you slept. A light went off in Winer's head when he realized that these channels should be RSS feeds with MP3 or video links. This was the birth of the podcast feed format. What's beautiful about this example is that Winer recorded it for the world to see. He didn't document it only because it was a breakthrough, he documented as just another day at the office.

Winer narrates his work on many levels. Sometimes it's on a human level, like his description of how he and Curry came up with the idea for podcasting. Other times, it's on a technical level such as his step-by-step guide, EC2 for Poets, which demonstrates how a non-technical person can get a server up and running within an hour.

Whether you agree or disagree with Winer, don't simply tweet him, "You're wrong." Instead, write a blog post and point him to it. You'll be amazed how much you'll learn in the process. Winer's been wrong many times. And he's been wrong about being wrong. Winer initially said the iPad had too many shortcomings. He was on Facebook, then off Facebook, and now he's back on Facebook because he's realized its potential as a publishing platform. He's not afraid to publicize his thoughts for debate and discussion. If the sign of strength is adaptability, then the sign of intelligence and humility is the ability to recognize when we're wrong. Now go forth and narrate your work. 

Pulitzer Prize for Coding and Blogging?

I've debated whether coding is art.

Writing prose has a lot of similarities to writing code. Both activities require a lot of time spent inside a text editor. The key difference is the final product. When writing prose, the audience sees the final written letters. When writing code, the audience sees what the software does, not what it is in its raw form.

Coding seems more like a craft than an art when you consider that it's one key part of software engineering. This difference is even more pronounced when considering the Pulitzer Prizes.

The Pulitzer Prize board usually awards a prize in each category to a single person. Yet, there were a lot of people on the team who contribute to the winning book, news report, or editorial cartoon. Compare that to making movies or software which require large teams. Software released today is not written from scratch, like a book or poem. This is obvious when you consider the OS and code library dependencies.

Blogging, on the other hand...

The Question is Begged

Why is there no Pulitzer Prize category for blogging?

I wholeheartedly believe there should be a Pulitzer Prize category for individual blogging. After all, Pulitzer awards their prizes to individuals. Some of their prizes are for journalism and some are for art. Are the Pulitzer's about the content or the medium? Meta-blogs have won Pulitzer Prizes, such as the Huffington Post. But I would no longer consider Huff Post a blog, like, say, TechCrunch. Rather, HuffPo is an online journalism news source. There's a distinct difference.

Bloggers are doing important work. The Pulitzer Prizes should formally recognize this with its own category. When it is, I shall nominate the Scripting News blog. Not just for being around for 20 years, next month, but rather for defining what the true essence of blogging is.

If you agree, then please let the board of the Pulitzer Prizes know:
pulitzer@pulitzer.org

'What’s the Big Deal About Outliners?'

Balboa Park, 7 AM: The perfect place to think about outliners and this blog post.

Two years ago, while having lunch with Dave Winer at Carnegie Deli, I embarrassingly confessed to him that I didn't fully understand outliners. He told me, "That's OK, you will."

Fargo

While I'm a big fan of writing down tasks in flat to do lists, I never took the time to structure my to do lists into an outline. Since the beginning of last year, Dave has been working on a very interesting web based outliner that runs and stores your outline inside your web browser with the ability to also save it to your Dropbox. While saving data to Dropbox isn't a big deal, the ability to save data using a web browser's local storage feature seems underutilized by developers. The overlooked beauty of Fargo is that Dave's web based app can scale, big time. The Fargo web app is served up as a static HTML web page with dynamic Javascript (Node.js) so all the heavy "thinking" and storage is done in the client's browser. Since the outline is saved either locally or to Dropbox that means Dave doesn't have to worry about customer storage requirements if he gets a billion users, overnight.

Little Porkchop and Happy Friends

Alcazar Garden and the California Tower

Two weeks ago, Dave launched Little Porkchop which lets Twitter users send out a tweetstorm. As I played with it, Dave hinted that he had something bigger on the horizon. That "something bigger" came a couple days ago when he released Happy Friends.

Happy Friends is an outliner that let's you embed a Twitter user's feeds into an outline. And, since it's an outline, you can indent, outdent, and rearrange Twitter users while archiving individual tweets. Twitter and Facebook are very flat formats consisting of a post with comments threaded to it. Happy Friends, on the other hand, turns a flat Twitter feed into a mailbox style reader. Once again, the beauty of Happy Friends is it can scale to the moon and back without any load on Dave's servers.

So, after all of Dave's arm waving, I'm starting to get it. Slow and steady wins the race.

Linsanity: Missing the obvious

How did the NBA miss out on Jeremy Lin's talent? It's not as if he hit his head and then, suddenly, he could play.

This afternoon, I watched the Knicks play at Madison Square Garden - along with Kevin Costner and Mark Zuckerberg (they had better seats).

Three things will stick in my mind about today's game: The Knicks won an exciting game while I watched with new found friends, Linsanity played a great game, and I witnessed a spectator win a car by making a half court shot during a commercial break.

Post Game

After the game we were discussing our observations. How did Lin go overlooked for so long? Probably because he simply didn't fit the profile. About 55 years ago, two guys named Joe and Harry came up with the four quadrant Johari window which helps people better understand mental instability (what I know about myself, what other's know, what I don't know about myself, and what other's don't know).

While the Johari window applies on a personal level, it can be expanded, in a somewhat related way, to the group level, better know as selective attention. Sometimes, things appear right before your very eyes and you completely miss it until someone points it out.

How good are you at counting? Today, at dinner, Dave Winer pointed out how, when kids are asked to count how many people are in the room, they overlook themselves.

In the spirit of today's Knicks game, try your hand at selective attention and count how many times the basketball is passed in the following video.

You'd be amazed how many people miss it. I certainly did the first time I watched this video.

Big Thank You

I have to send a big thanks to Dave Winer for coordinating today's event and buying the tickets. I haven't been this excited over a game in a long time. Perhaps my wife and I should move into the city.

Adjix Server Problems

It's been a busy weekend for Adjix. I'd love to describe the details, but Dave Winer does an excellent job in the first two paragraphs of today's post.