Who Let the Blogs Out?: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs
256
Who Let the Blogs Out?: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs
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Overview
Blogs--or weblogs--are a huge phenomenon on the internet. From ultra-personal diary entries to specialized information on a wide variety of subjects (teen ranting to presidential campaigns), blogs are the new way to create a virtual community that can effect real-world change. It's not hard to set up a blog, but it can be difficult adjusting to life in the "Blogosphere."
One of the first blogging experts, who helped found the weblog community Xanga, Biz Stone will help readers:
--learn the origins of blogging
--discover why blogging is so popular
--explore the etiquette of the blogosphere
--bring traffic to a blog
--make money by blogging
--use a blog to become influential in any industry
--maintain a blog and keep it fresh
With internet heavies like AOL, Microsoft, and Google already providing weblog software, blogging is moving out of indie geek culture and into the mainstream. Who Let the Blogs Out? is a next generation blogging book for anyone who wants to get started or anyone who wants to keep their blog blooming.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466865785 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/11/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 303 KB |
About the Author
BIZ STONE is the author of BLOGGING: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content. He is a senior blogger specialist at Google, Inc. He lives in San Francisco, California.
Read an Excerpt
Who Let the Blogs Out?
A Hyperconnected Peak at the World of Weblogs
By Biz Stone
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2004 Biz StoneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6578-5
CHAPTER 1
Who Let the Blogs Out?
Long ago in a castle built into the side of a hill a particularly important sect of Buddhist monks lived and worked. This was not a very big castle. More like a ranch house in the world of castles, really. Still, toward the back of the castle near the mudroom was an extremely important collection of documents. Arched wooden doors opened outward to permit entrance to this room — not inward like they usually do in hallowed Buddhist temples such as this. This arrangement was by design because the room was very special. It was a repository of collected works. A library, but not just any library.
Upon entering the Room of Knowledge, visitors were immediately confronted with an elaborate web of strings crisscrossing throughout the space. The arrangement seemed to be random; it looked like a ridiculously complex and giant game of cat's cradle. One string would go from a book high on a shelf, across the room to a scroll, once around a table leg for tension, span the distance of the floor, and stretch to the other side of the room, where a map lay open on the bottom shelf of an oak desk. From there the string would continue to thirty other manuscripts, drawings, and the occasional small statue or wood carving.
There was more than sixty thousand feet of string in the room and more giant rolls of it out in the shed waiting to be used. In the morning, sunlight would highlight the string, reflecting enough white to give the room the fluorescent glow of the future. Only monks were allowed in the room, but passersby would occasionally catch a glimpse of this illuminated enclosure from the outside and wonder if some kind of divine light was emanating from the castle. What were those monks up to in there?
They were busy creating a rustic model of an intelligent Internet. Those strings connected a passage in an arcane text to the most current map of the area mentioned within it and back to the scroll that contained the only known biography of the man who named the mountain mentioned in the text. They tied relevant selections of content together in a way that organized the information in a new, hypercontextualized way. By following the strings, young monks could study the intellectual journey of their elders and understand the interpretation of those whose initials were flagged on the strings.
Those ancient monks developed a physical manifestation of hyperlinks — the lifeblood of the web and, by extension, blogs — or they would have if they had existed. The story told of the ancient forefathers of hyperlinks is a myth. However, the point is made. Hyperlinking is rooted not in technology but in our desire to make connections, learn, and share knowledge. The world of blogging would not exist without the strands that hold it together. A glance back at some of the people involved and the events that had to happen in order for the blogging phenomenon to take place makes it seem eerily obvious that we would all one day participate in the creation and interpretation of the web.
Origins of the Hyperlink
In the 1930s visionary scientist Vannevar Bush first started writing about a machine he envisioned that would change the way we think. Bush finally wrote about the concept in an essay published in 1945 in the Atlantic Monthly. The essay was titled "As We May Think," and Bush called his theoretical machine the Memex, short for memory expander. Bush's concept involved touch-sensitive monitors and a scanner. The idea was that people would store all their books, records, and communications inside the machine so they could all be accessed with "speed and flexibility." He proposed that people would use the machine to connect information in a "trail":
When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name into his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. [...] The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. [...] Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button [...] Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly [...] It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book.
Douglas Engelbart first read "As We May Think" in a Red Cross library while stationed in the Philippines during the late 1940s. Good old Doug became an instant believer. The idea of a machine that would enhance knowledge, awareness, perception, and reasoning captivated his attention; he would later develop the basis of our current computer interfaces.
Engelbart and his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute created the On-Line System, legendary today as the prototype of what would become hypertext. But Engelbart was focused on collaboration between people and teams distributed throughout the world. Toward this goal, Engelbart et al. ended up developing the personal computing tools we take for granted today, including hypertext linking, word processing, e-mail, a mouse-like pointing device, and a windowing software environment.
At a time when computers were operated by punch cards, a visual environment for developing ideas was revolutionary. The concept of a "desktop" and "windows" as part of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) seems obvious now, but sixty years ago it was only for the raving minds of visionaries. Engelbart's progress influenced research at Xerox, which became the inspiration for Apple Computers. (Quite fitting because just as the Macintosh made personal computing available to everyone, so blogging opens web publishing to the masses.)
In 1960, Ted Nelson was a master's student at Harvard. Influenced by Engelbart, Nelson came up with an idea for his term project. He thought it'd be cool to build a text-handling system that would allow users to easily write, edit, undo, and save their work. Keep in mind that this was years before word processing had been invented. This project never was finished, but five years later, after presenting a paper at an annual computing conference, Nelson coined the term hypertext.
Ah, hypertext. How you have changed our lives. The next guy to pick up the hypertext torch and run with it was Tim Berners-Lee in the 1980s. Berners-Lee was working on a problem while consulting at a particle physics laboratory in Europe. Specifically, his task was to figure out how they could keep track of all the information in a really large project. Tim's proposal introduced the idea of linked information systems. Building on the idea of hypertext, he suggested a solution for creating, viewing, and editing documents for both individual and collective understanding.
In 1990, Tim's boss said he could go ahead with this "global hypertext system," so he started building a visual hypertext browser with a built-in editor. That way people could create documents as well as browse others. He called his project "WorldWideWeb." It's vital that we take note of the fact that Berners-Lee envisioned a system that was equal parts readable and writable — the latter part of his genius was essentially forgotten until blogging came along.
So suddenly it's 1995, and we have what we're used to calling the World Wide Web. In the years that follow, people start building home pages and getting AOL accounts. More and more individuals and businesses get online and a world of free e-mail, portals, and online shopping is suddenly generating billion-dollar incomes and dot-com start-ups everywhere, and it becomes a whole big new economy thing. The new economy nurtures a few good ideas and smart people as well as lots of dumb ideas and lots of dumb money.
The Birth of the Blogging Industry
Blogging as we know and define it today began in 1999, when Blogger and other simple tools were released to the public. Some would say that at that time and in the few years that followed, you'd be hard pressed to call blogging an "industry" since the most popular tools were provided by tiny start-ups and usually given away for free. Add to that the fact that the majority of blogs were individual, personal efforts — not commercial endeavors and things really didn't look like they'd amount to much. Blogging now includes photos, sound, and video and is incorporated into web development, networking, enterprise systems, portal offerings, continues to exists as a stand alone service, and also creates fertile soil for ancillary products and services that feed off blogs. Today, blogging is shaping up to be a full-fledged industry but the landscape of this technology between 2000 and 2003 was still forming. Let's go back to when blogging tools were still emerging and see where their creators ended up.
Userland Software
Dave Winer is the tenacious fellow who founded Userland. Much as it is today, Userland was a small software company in 2000. Winer was a Silicon Valley veteran, well known in geeky circles for creating the MORE outliner and the Frontier scripting environment for Macintosh in the era of feathered hair — the late '80s. MORE was outlining software originally intended to be used as a simple hierarchy editor for people to plan, organize, and present ideas; and Frontier was a programming tool that Winer considered a continuation of his work with outlining. As much as he's known for his contributions to software development, Winer is known on the web well, let's go to the web and see how he's known:
Ten prominent Google search results out of about 762 with the exact phrase "dave winer is a":
Dave Winer is a jackass
Dave Winer is a pompous ass
Dave Winer is still a dick
Dave Winer is a loser
Dave Winer an asshole
Dave Winer is a nut
Dave Winer is a weirdo
Dave Winer is a bastard
Dave Winer is a pretentious asshole
Dave Winer is a hypocrite
It's easy to dig up dirt like that on a well-known web personality. The results seem more fair if we use Googlism — a website that leverages Google to find out what the web "thinks" of a particular person. Here's a sampling of the many results for "dave winer":
dave winer is exhausting
dave winer is in bad taste
dave winer is one of those genius entrepreneurs
dave winer is is an arse
dave winer is a software developer
dave winer is one of the pioneers of the online weblogging community
dave winer is striding forward with his latest version of rss
dave winer is an asshole
dave winer is perhaps the single most prolific contributor to the blog community
dave winer is a loser
dave winer is insuring that he will get a lot of attention
dave winer is the villain in the story
dave winer is right up there with luminaries like tim berners
dave winer is an online legend
dave winer is one reason why a number of people have left
dave winer is a leading figure in the development of the internet
dave winer is maker of various nerd devices that i don't understand
dave winer is one of the web's best
dave winer is evil
dave winer is a fanatical blogger
dave winer is entitled to express his opinions
dave winer is dave winer
The web can be a harsh mistress. Dave Winer is a pioneer and he's as opinionated as he is outspoken. This is very frustrating to many people — especially when you add smart and fiery to the mix. People who try going toe-to-toe with Winer (online or off) usually end up flustered and have to walk it off. However, even his harshest critics will not deny that Winer has made significant contributions to the success of the web.
Winer had been trying for years to figure out a way of merging Frontier's automation capabilities for the web, and finally, in 1999, he released a low-end content-management system called Manila. Additionally, for years he had been working with raw HTML to produce his website or "hand-coding" what would come to be known as a blog, and it had become fairly popular and influential. Now, powered by his own content management system, Scripting News became a kind of demonstration of his software as well as a peek into his life.
Userland enhanced Manila and converted it into a robust blogging tool that could also be used to support other parts of a full website. In 2001, Winer's company released a product called Radio Userland in an effort to directly serve a growing demand for blogging. Radio is a combination of server-based software and a desktop application. The code that powers the blog editing runs on a user's personal computer. Radio automatically applies a design template to the blog and uploads it to the web when the user is connected to the Internet. The cool thing about Radio is that it ties into some centralized aggregation and tracking services. So in addition to providing blogging features, Radio allows users to subscribe to news sites or other blogs — it also automatically generates a feed for every one of its blogs, so there is a seamless flow of information to and from the web, right there in the desktop application.
Userland, at that time and now, was a full-featured blogging application. So much so in fact that it can at times be a little confusing. Users have a wide array of choices and preferences, as well as other customizable features that are very useful but at times overwhelming for the average blogger. It also costs $40 a year, which adds just enough of a hurdle to dissuade many users.
In 2002, Userland had around two thousand corporate and educational clients and somewhere near ten thousand individual users. Some of their big-name clients included Apple Computer, Motorola, the US Navy, Nokia, and Harvard University, so they were doing something right. Even with a bunch of big-name companies and a large individual-user base, Userland remained a small software company and became Winer's playground for ideas and products rather than a serious knock'em dead company. In 2003, Winer stepped down from Userland and took up a fellowship at Harvard, where he stayed until June 2004, spreading the gospel of blogging, especially as it pertains to politics — with Radio Userland as the preferred tool.
Pyra Labs
Evan Williams grew up on a farm in Nebraska. Some of his primary chores as a boy were mowing vast fields, harvesting sunflower seeds, and irrigating copious quantities of corn. Those big sunflowers can get lousy with seeds. It's no wonder that he decided to found a company with the goal of making work easier.
In 1999, Williams's San Francisco–based start-up was building Pyra — online software that would help groups collaborate on projects via the web. All they were trying to do was build a project management application. Pyra would eventually be abandoned in favor of a wildly successful spin-off experiment. Userland was around at this time and so were some other blogging services like Diaryland, but they were not destined to spark the blogging revolution. Williams does, however, credit Winer as an inspiration in the creation of Blogger, as he says below in the transcript of an audioblog recording published by Noah Glass, creator of Audblog:
I was reading Dave Winer's Scripting News from ninety-seven on and heavily influenced by that I started publishing Evhead the blog. Being a web application developer I thought, "Well this is tedious, so I'm gonna write a script to automate this for me." That was sort of profound. When I did that, all of a sudden I could go to a web page, type in a form, and it was on my site. Arranged in this way [it] completely changed the nature of publishing a Web site. I thought, "Well that's pretty interesting." I had an Internet startup at the time and we were doing pretty much unrelated things but internally we started a blog and the people who were working with me all had personal sites and so we just basically had written the script, a very primitive version of Blogger, to automate them and we thought, "Well that's handy." And that's were the idea for Blogger was born. A few months later we actually built it on a whim.
That whim set off the blogging revolution. It also touched off some gossipy buzz when it launched because Blogger was released while Pyra cofounder Meg Hourian was visiting family near Boston. In fact, a glance at her older blog entries from 1999 reveals some archived snippiness.
tuesday, august 24
Blogger. (I didn't help build it.)
Buzz and gossip only fueled growth. Blogger was fun and simple to use. With it, users could publish to a website they already maintained. But if they didn't have a website, no problem — they could use Blogger's free hosting. That came a little later. A web interface for adding and editing posts plus free predesigned templates meant users did not need to know HTML and they did not even need to own a computer, just have access to one. This meant people could frequently update a site, which was unusual given the normal hurdles for doing so. Blogger is a server-based system, which means users do not need to install anything on their own machines. Ease of use and a strong, early-to-market brand made Blogger ground zero for the blogging revolution.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Who Let the Blogs Out? by Biz Stone. Copyright © 2004 Biz Stone. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Foreword: Where Is My Mind? by Wil Wheaton,
Introduction,
1. Who Let the Blogs Out?,
2. Blog This! A Cultural Style Guide,
3. Why Would Anyone Want to Blog?,
4. Geeking Out: Starting a Blog, Playing with HTML,
5. Blogging in Business,
6. Politics and Pupils: The Impact of Blogging on Society,
7. Living in the Blogosphere,
Afterword,
Resources by the Fives,
Blogging Glossary,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
Also by Biz Stone,
Copyright,