Ministry of Intrigue

Eric Rice recently wrote this post wondering, “How can I stop being called a ‘blogger’?” To summarize, his issue is that it is ridiculous to be labeled by a single medium, especially when the medium is so prevalent that the term becomes meaningless as a categorization tool.

I just feel that label is more a curse than a blessing. While that mind sound drastic, there’s nothing unique about it anymore if everyone does it. (Which is my beef with social media not really being an industry if everyone supposedly does it– maybe we need a ‘breathing industry’?)

For those of you just joining us, the term “blogger” arose for two reasons, the first of those being medium confusion. Blogs aren’t really anything that radical, essentially they consist of a website with dated entries as opposed to a static site that is rarely changed. Some people have added other qualifiers like suggesting something is not a blog with an RSS/Atom subscription feed, which is actually more of a standard practice rather than a requirement. The point is that the idea-form of a blog is essentially just a site composed of dated text that is regularly updated and archived. You could just call it an online journal, as many did back in the day, except that blogs aren’t always personal, nor are they always a column or essay. We had to call it something, after all, it was new, if not exactly an amazing conceptual leap, and “weblog” (shortened to “blog”) was the one that sticked. Obviously, people who wrote to blogs were called “bloggers” because it’s a hell of a lot easier than saying “person who writes on the Internet.”

The second and the biggest reason that it caught on was the fact that since in the beginning there were so few people writing blogs it became an easy way to stitch together some notion of community, and in its own way, blogging began to consider itself a subculture. This worked out well for professionals and others not involved in maintaining blogs because it provided a convenient label for this group that appeared to be forming. Some used it with derision, others confusion or ambivalence, people who called themselves “bloggers” used it with pride. Thus the term “blogger” received a significance that may not have been deserved.

Because here’s the thing: the community doesn’t exist.

That’s right, there is no such thing as a “blogging community”, just like there is no such thing as a “podcaster community”. It’s not real, it’s like saying that all writers, or all television producers (also a group classification based solely on a type of media), or all electrical engineers are a community working together, which is bullshit. Sure there are communities of bloggers, and communities of podcasters, as well as communities that are composites of every group on the map. Those communities form around shared interests, because that’s how people form communities to begin with.

During the whole O’Reilly “Blogging Code of Conduct” hoopla, there was a lot of talk of “preserving our blogging community” or “how terrible bloggers must be” considering how the whole ruckus got started. And it was all ridiculous. The so-called “community” as a whole didn’t exist. People writing blogs are people, and a significant percentage of people (I choose to believe the minority) are assholes.

So, now that I’ve essentially agreed with Eric Rice that the term “blogger” is an outmoded, and somewhat bullshit classification, where does that leave us.

Nowhere.

Let me explain: like Rice, I don’t necessarily relish being called a “blogger.” First, it’s essentially a meaningless term, having more to do with the type of software I use to publish, than any real connection to my content. Secondly, it adds an unnecessary and weird esotericism to what I’m doing, which means people attach additional rider values with that, either positive or negative, that I don’t particularly want or need. If someone asks me, I say that I am, among other things, a writer. Like Rice, I do have /blog in my URL, because that’s what it is, but in conversation I often just refer to it as “my site.”

All that being said, if people decided that what I should be referred to as a “jackass”, there isn’t anything I can do about it. You can ask politely, you can stop using the terms yourself, but honestly, people are going to call you whatever they want to. All you have a choice about is how you define yourself.

Now, blogs are starting to become more mainstream as they enter pop culture, although if you believe that everyone understands what a blog is you are seriously deluding yourself, and should spend more time with people who aren’t on the Internet all the time. However, there is still a major disconnect between print/broadcast media and online media for the overwhelming majority of people. Until Internet connectivity and consumption of content becomes so ubiquitous that people don’t have that disconnect (which will happen but is a long way off), the term “blogger” or something like it is going to be here.

Which brings us to Eric Rice’s final point and question:

And out there, in scary, scary normal people land, explaining this takes time away from talking about content and talking about definitions.

How can I (or you) talk about the next great idea if we have to spend so much time explaining the lingo?

I think it’s pretty clear that I think the lingo is here to stay regardless of what people want, but honestly it doesn’t help that when bloggers (see I use it too, ha!) attach such importance to it. And, just to be fair, that includes writing posts about whether or not you want to be called a “blogger.” If you have a problem with it, don’t make it important. You can change the terms you use, or not, it honestly doesn’t matter, and things won’t change until this imaginary community identity begins to leave the public’s association with that word. Identify yourself however you feel most comfortable, but remember that arguing the point either way just strengthens the term’s hold in the minds of your readers/viewers. Labels only have the significance that we (people) are willing to give them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to take a shower as all this meta makes me feel dirty. 

Just a quick post to let you know that I appeared on the latest episode of the Creepy Sleepy Show Podcast, where DHP, Greg and myself discuss the new Radiohead album, titled In Rainbows. In particular we focus on Radiohead’s digital distribution, what this means in the music industry and our experience as music consumers.

I do have to apologize for an error I make in the show. I mistakenly described the LAME mp3 codec listening tests as a comparison against vinyl, when I meant to say it was a comparison between a 320 kbps mp3 against the original CD. In my defense, I had just foolishly clicked on a link that Warren Ellis had put on his blog, which was so horrific that I had to restart my brain in order to retain my sanity. Just a word of advice to all of you, when you see a strange looking link on his site, think carefully before you look.

Anyway, it was a fun show and hopefully I’ll have chance to join DHP again soon. You can download/listen the show here.

Just a quick post to mention that I’m a guest on today’s episode of the Creepy Sleepy Show Podcast. We discuss the recent HDDVD Digg Storm controversy, Digg’s incompetence at proper PR and the differences between traditional media and social news. I’m always a little uncomfortable being presented as a tech expert, but it was a fun show and a really interesting conversation.

You should check it out. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these issues, particularly to the way social news sites like Digg are changing the way we consume information.

This weekend I went to the Body Worlds exhibit at The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

For those of you unfamiliar with this particular exhibition, Body Worlds is the brainchild of anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who developed a process called plastination, that allows him to preserve bodies and tissues by replacing water and fat with certain types of plastics. The end result is that the specimens do not smell or decay, allowing detailed study for an extended period of time. Body Worlds is a series of traveling museum exhibitions of primarily human bodies that have been plastinated in such a way to reveal their anatomical structure and thus highlight how the body functions. In most cases, the skin has been removed to reveal the musculature underneath, and in many cases different parts of the body are opened or removed in order to expose or illustrate a particular function. In more extreme examples, the plastinate is reduced to a single system, such as showing just the nervous system or just the vascular system. More dramatic cross-sections also appear to better demonstrate how everything in the body goes together.

I am fascinated by biology and anatomy in particular, and quite happily spent two hours wandering through the exhibit. I was enthralled with getting an opportunity to see the human body up close in this way, being able to see the complex striations and texture of muscle tissue and how the flesh differs in the various parts of our body. It was also a treat to see the brain and nervous system up close, and how they connect to the rest of the structure that is the human form. It is funny how we have a tendency to hold an image of the brain as being far larger than it actually is, such that it is a bit of a surprise when you actually see an open skull. You look at the exposed brain and think, “Wow, that’s it? It’s so small!”

There are three roving exhibitions at the moment, and as I understand it there are plans for even more. Currently they are in Chicago, Dallas and Phoenix, and you can always find out where they are going next at the official site. If it comes near you, don’t miss the opportunity to go. It is really one of the most incredible things you will ever see.

Adrian Holovaty, one of the creators of Django (which you will read my raves about again and again), has posted a wonderful meditation on how online newspapers need to change. He centers his thoughts on one central point:

One of those important shifts is: Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview.

Holovaty explains quite succinctly how journalists gather structured data every day, and instead of focusing on composing this information into a static story, they should be focusing on storing this data into a machine-readable format that allows the information to be used again and again for a variety of uses, and provides concrete examples why this would be such a powerful and useful change.

For example, say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire — date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive — with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.

That’s what I mean by structured data: information with attributes that are consistent across a domain. Every fire has those attributes, just as every reported crime has many attributes, just as every college basketball game has many attributes.

Now, if you read his post, Holovaty is really focusing on the ability of the newspaper to “repurpose” their data in order to rapidly develop new and powerful features for their own services, but what excites me about this idea is the potential for marketing that kind of information. Let’s say newspapers take his suggestion and begin specializing in what they do best, the rapid collection of structured data. The journalists will still produce stories (it’s necessary, as Holovaty explains), but the focus of the organization is to fill their servers with as much granular data regarding the event as possible. What if then the newspapers provide an API for other applications or organizations to access that raw data?

I’m not saying that they would give it away for free, quite the opposite. That information in its structured form is worth far more than the articles that it generates due to its re-usability. Charge organizations a subscription fee for direct access to data, and then those subscribers can use the API to develop powerful products and services that the news gathering organization does not have the resources to pursue. Rather than focusing their business on the final presentation of news (although there will still be plenty of that), share the focus with the aggregation of the source data, and then serve as a supplier of that information to other vendors. The possibilities it would open for development are really staggering, and I suspect that data-subscriber revenues for the newspapers would be substantial.

As our demand for online services increases, I suspect this type of model will become absolutely necessary, and it is thus inevitable. If the newspapers don’t go for it, some other business will rise to fulfill the same function. Newspapers have the advantage though, since each newspaper is admirably suited to provide highly specialized data for its location. In fact, it is likely that most of those external developers will need to subscribe to several companies’ data streams in order to get the totality of information needed to meet the demand of a diverse online user base.

Don’t get me wrong, the role and importance of traditional journalism, providing analysis and organizing that data into a meaningful story, will always remain. However, I think if newspapers are to survive this New Media transition, it will be essential to pursue this as a parallel business model. With today’s emphasis on rapid development, the early adopters are likely to net a large number of start-ups as subscribers, and I for one think the sooner they get started the better.

Via Boing Boing:

Just a quick post, but if you are at all into comics you will get a kick out of blogger Kevin Church’s hilarious reimagining of Alan Moore’s Watchmen as if it was written by Stan Lee. It really captures the over-the-top ridiculousness of Lee’s style, which fills me with nostalgia even as I recognize how terrible it really is.

Read the parody here.