Friday, January 10, 2003

Not just for journalism. Reactions to Dave Winer's First Essay of 2003. Dave Winer just posted his "First Essay of the Year" on scripting.com.  I always enjoy Dave's thinking and passion, so this is a good new year treat.  In his essay, he ponders how far we've come with the Two-Way Web through advances in XML-based content publishing and syndication, the growing role of weblogging for everyone, new approaches to digital sharing through mobile blogging, and questions about the role of commercial software and personal data. The question it really provoked for me, and one that has been lurking in my mind for the past few months, is whether weblogging as we know it will truly become a mainstream form of personal communications and sharing, rather than it's current perceived niche as form of personal or independent Internet journalism. Often, when smart people hear about weblogs/blogs/blogging they really ask -- isn't this just the web?  Isn't this just web publishing?  Indeed, it is, and as Dave responded to someone in his essay, it's the promise of the web but just made easier (and more sharable).  So what makes it different and how could it be transformed into a mainstream phenomenon? From my perspective, weblogs are revolutionary because: They make publishing to the web really simple --- they are very simple, consumer-level content management systems.  No HTML, no scripting, no knowledge of web servers, page layout, etc. They fulfill the promise of the semantic web (partially) by ensuring that your content is well structured (it's all XML!), and shareable (through RSS) in a standard way, and even well-described so their content can be harvested (RSS 2.0 in action will take is there) But they're also very constrained in terms of what consumers will ultimately want if they are to become mainstream forms of personal communications, equivailent to email and the written word.  For weblogs to become mainstream they need to: Break out of the calendar journal or narrative metaphor.  While the time-based approach to personal content makes sense often, it shouldn't be the only one.  Weblog software should harness the power of RSS 2.0 category metadata and namespace extensions to enable weblogs to store and render a much wider variety of content -- Dave gives some great examples of what some of these might be (medical histories, family trips, meeting minutes, etc.). Embrace richer forms of expression through graphics, audio and video.  While it's quite possible to do these things today by hyperlinking to media assets, it's not deeply integrated into the creation and publishing experience.  Content creation and communications tools need to support the MetaWeblog API, and these tools need to provide simple means for someone to share thoughts and expereinces with voice, or plug-in their webcam or camcorder or digital camera and transmit real life visual experiences into their personal spaces.  Aren't photosharing applications just bitmap-based weblog tools?  There's an invevitable collision here and in that weblogs can become much more valuable to consumers. Like Dave, I look forward to 2003 and what it brings for the two-way web. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio] Jeremy is singing my song. It's great to hear Dave talk about weblogging beyond just journalism. I recently sent a proposal to Jeremy which hopefully will blossom into another implementation of the 'two-way' web.  2003 sure should be an interesting year. New kinds of tools will change the world we know today when they take these assumptions into account: - virtual file systems that enable you to keep your media, email and other personal data - at your fingertips - wherever you travel - persistent digital ID - which will enable you to share your media and conversations with prvate clouds (of friends, family members and colleagues) - shared public servers - which will host multimedia conversations, shared databases of reviews and a topics registry - new ways for on-line communities to be created and maintained - without EVER having to worry about HTML, sys admin issues or servers - at all! - mesh-line inter-connections between blog tools, on-line communities (like Ryze, Brainstorms, the Well, eRooms, etc.) and existing islands of influence (like the worlds of messaging, media management and digital identity) - standard compound document architectures - that multiple vendors's tools all support [Marc's Voice] 6:59:46 PM    comment []

Trackbacks and Pingbacks II. Wari sent me an e-mail this morning explaining trackbacks and pingbacks, the key distinction being that trackbacks are client-server and pingbacks are peer-to-peer between servers.  So Hep could support trackbacks, but not pingbacks. Wari even outlined how trackbacks could work in Hep: Trackbacks are very possible, all a user needs to do is to enter a trackback url somewhere somehow in a message (mail header works nice for mutt) and hep will try to ping the entry when an outgoing mail is sent.  There'll be variables you need, so after sending the blog entry through XMLRPC, you need to keep the blog ID, request it again for it's full URL, then you can really send the trackback, but you must make sure that when sending, the main message must be stripped off HTML and be less than 255 characters. This is, as we say in New England, wicked cool.  If (and this might be a big if) people are using the Trackback RSS module, the flow of information could work like this: Hep fetches an RSS feed.  It parses the feed, and converts each entry into an e-mail message.  It also saves the messages, and some metadata (including the messages' trackback URLs) in its cache. Joe User gets the messages in his e-mail client. One of the messages is particularly interesting to Joe, and he wants to blog about it.  So he hits "Reply".  Because this message came from Hep, the reply-to address is already set to "MyWeblog@hep", which is a special address that tells Hep to send the message to Joe's weblog.  Joe's e-mail client automatically inserts an "In-Reply-To" header, containing the ID of the message he's replying to, into the outgoing message. Joe sends the message.  Hep sees that it's an "@hep" address, so it knows that instead of delivering it as a regular e-mail it should be posted to Joe's weblog.  It also notices that the In-Reply-To header references a message that it has in its cache, so it looks up the trackback URL for that message.  Hep posts the message to Joe's blog, and retrieves the URL for the newly-posted message.  Then it sends a trackback to the website where the original message was posted, notifying it that Joe has replied to the post at such-and-such a URL. The result of all this is that Joe is able to have a publicly linked, blog-to-blog conversation, all from his e-mail client, without doing anything different than he would in having a regular e-mail conversation. So, is anybody using the RSS Trackback module yet? [Abe Fettig] 6:20:19 PM    comment []