Blogging

Overheard: In blogging, it’s not the individual — it’s the network

Individual blogs are not very interesting in themselves. What is important is how they link to each other to create a massive network. Professor Henry Farrell, as quoted in In which I muse about what “Oracle blogging” means

Overheard: The Sandbox is not child’s play

“I didn’t write this to become famous; it was just to capture what I was going through.” Sgt. Troy Steward

In summer 2006, the online magazine Slate, Doonesbury creator GaryTrudeau and editor David Stanford launched a military blog called the Sandbox. According to a recent Washington Post article, the project began with one of the more bizarre solicitations in publishing history — an invitation from a cartoon character.

Trudeau penned the words, “It was a dark and messed-up night,” in a “Doonesbury” Sunday strip, imagining a soldier blogging. In the next panel, B.D.’s cartoon comrade Ray Hightower announced the debut of “our command-wide milblog,” where troops could vent and rhapsodize, and folks on the home front could learn what is going on from their point of view.

This is quite a beautiful blog in a very sad way. The writing is quite moving, and as in Michelle’s emails, I’m struck by the juxtaposition of normal and surreal.

Overheard: Social software and group dynamics

“People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers.” Clay Shirky, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Clay writes: We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn’t know what we were doing.

One was a bad idea, the other turns out to be a really good idea. It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern.

Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse.

The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.

That’s part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of community — community leads to content, which leads to commerce — never worked. Because lo and behold, no matter who came onto the Clairol chat boards, they sometimes wanted to talk about things that weren’t Clairol products.

“But we paid for this! This is the Clairol site!” Doesn’t matter. The users are there for one another. They may be there on hardware and software paid for by you, but the users are there for one another.