Solipsism Gradient

Tim Appnel responded at length to my post about weblogs and bulletin boards:

Rainer Brockheimer recently made a post on recent developments to utilize TrackBack and other related technologies. I’m in general agreement with Rainer and Tom Coates, whose writings he also cites in his post.

Thanks for the reply, Tim. And I’ve got one more item for my lengthy list of mispellings of “Brockerhoff” .

The following quote I believe requires some clarification on my part being a proponent of this cause:
Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…the whole trackbacks are comments movement is an attempt to make weblogs more like bulletin-boards.

I can say this is not my primary motivation nor do I believe it is for others involved in this discussion though certainly these notations descend from its lineage. Furthermore, I don’t see these efforts as a desire to claim a territory unexplored when its patently not. To me this work is only an evolution or a reformulation of past.

It’s often hard to tell about things like motivation from outside. I’m certainly happy to learn that you favor the evolutionary approach, and I agree a 100% with that.

First, I think it worth noting again and in more direct terms that the history of bulletin boards are not lost on me in the least. I have not specifically mention it and perhaps I should have. (I suppose I’m changing that right now.) The fact of the matter is that my experiences with bulletin boards drive my interest in TrackBack, weblogs and the convergence of these related technologies.

Offering a historical perspective on things is always welcome. I have many younger friends who have a weblog and are often surprised to hear about parallel developments in ancient history (meaning, for them, pre-1999). When I started an ISP back in 1993 the most important service we offered was bulletin board software (in our case, FirstClass) to use for support and community-building.

My personal opinion is that bulletin boards (as Mark Pilgrim would put it) suck. They are generally an unfocused collection of threads that, until RSS becomes commonplace, require me to come to it and use its interface to comment. The threaded display makes it even harder for me to grok particularly when it’s a highly active conversation.

I agree with you here, but this is usually just a consequence of the lack of restraint from the boards’ administrators, than simply the software’s fault. The software I use here (phpBB) has great configuration and modification capabilities, but it also has more features enabled by default than the average administrator can cope with. Avatars, ratings, on-line messaging, e-mail, indiscriminate topic starting, and so forth. Just look at the phpBB Support Forum: there are over 44000 topics! This is unbrowseable, and even searching is hard to do.

On the other hand, I found that adding weblog features to phpBB is possible and unwanted features can be turned off, while keeping the really useful stuff. So I have very few topics – which I regard analogous to Movable Type‘s categories. Only I can generate new topics, and inside a topic posts, comments and trackbacks are handled equally. I’m working on an option to display just one thread inside a topic, and with that I think my implementation will be quite useable.

Weblog comments only slightly improve on this by organizing the conversation to a single thread and quite often (and thankfully in my opinion) display them in a flat rolling manner. These discussions are also started by one or a select few individuals that typically increase their quality. While many are beginning to take advantage of the RSS generation functionality found in weblogs tools, weblog comments still require that I use their interface. Furthermore those comments are limited to that one weblog unless I cut, paste and post them elsewhere.

The standard MT implementation is, for me, quite unwieldy. From the main page, one often must click on a link to see the full post. To read and post comments, a second link must be clicked, and to read and post trackbacks, a third one. So, my point regarding your trackbacks are comments thread is that this makes weblog posts as readable as bulletin board topics: the original post and all pertaining comments are on the same page. By the way, one important note on usability (which can be applied to both weblogs and bulletin boards) is Joel Spolksy‘s article Building Communities with Software. I disagree with some of his points – for instance, I favor quoting and previewing, while he’s against it – but it’s a great article.

A key differentiator is that TrackBack-enabled comments have a standardized remote API. It’s my belief that this capability could give rise to tools that allow prolific power commentators to work from one interface. They also allow for me to comment from a post to my weblog. It’s also noteworthy that the distributed loosely coupled nature of TrackBack-enabled comments (quite a mouthful) can be organized and grouped by the individual. (This of course assumes that individual is so inclined. I would because I think some of my best thoughts are not on my weblog.) Bulletin boards and weblog comments alone are constrained to a specific site and grouped by a certain topic or theme.

This is a very important point. phpBB has a somewhat complex posting procedure, which I’ve simplified to implement trackback. But it’s reasonably RESTful, which is positive. I won’t go into the REST vs. XML-RPC discussion here, though. But posting comments to someone else’s weblog usually throws me into a different interface, as you say. Not to speak of the various ways of writing links, styling text, seeing a preview (or not).

I see some hope in the convergence of tools like, for instance, NetNewsWire and Feedster. Hopefully in the future we’ll be able to post an article on a weblog/bulletin board, and the next day see aggregated responses to it in a single window, write a comment or rebuttal right there, preview how it will appear, and have it redistributed (as posts, comments, trackbacks or whatever is appropriate in each case) to the interested parties. It would effectively be a distributed bulletin board architecture, among other things. I’d be very interested in discussing how this might be done…

Posted by tima thinking outloud.:
tima thinking outloud. linked to this post

Elaborating on TrackBack-enabled Comments.

Rainer Brockheimer recently made a post on recent developments to utilize TrackBack citing Tom Coates’ essay on the excesses of “social software.” While I’m in general agreement with both, we see the same circumstances differently. As a proponent of TrackBack-enabled comments I attempt to elaborate and perhaps clarify my thoughts on the matter.

Kevin Marks at Epeus’ Epigone is posting about a very important subject: anti-links or vote-links:

I propose that we add an optional attribute to the (link) tag in HTML. Its name is ‘vote’. Its value can be “+” “0” or “-“, representing agreement, abstention or indifference, and disagreement respectively.

An untagged link is deemed to have value “+”.

Additional human-readable commentary can be added using the existing ‘title’ attribute, which most browsers show as a rollover.

The motivation is, of course:

I’m all for this. In the past I’ve either deliberately avoided linking to some sites I disagree with, or linked to them with strong misgivings.

Joi Ito has picked up the subject; read the comments on his site, very interesting. Some people there are advocating FOAF or RDF solutions, which I think are way too complex for simple page-to-page links.

Let’s hope this will be implemented in some form…

Adam Atlas is modifying phpBB to support trackback:

Eventually, other TrackBack-compatible programs will be able to ping posts on phpBB forums with this mod, phpBBs with this mod will be able to ping other TrackBack-compatible programs, posts on phpBBs with this mod will be able to ping other posts on the same forum, and posts on phpBBs with this mod will be able to ping posts on other phpBBs with this mod.

Adam, I’m curious how you went about this. Let’s exchange code and publish the merged result? What’s missing on my side is only autodiscovering trackback ping URLs for post that I’m referring to.

In related posts, Tom Coates at Plastic Bag is campaigning for trackback autodiscovery. I’m amazed how many Movable Type weblogs don’t have this turned on; trackback is certainly a hard feature to grasp, even though MT does make it quite easy.

Tom also has a great article, the excesses of social software, where he says (among many other things):

But there’s something about the abandonment of concepts of ‘online community’ and the complete rejection of familiar terms and paradigms like the message board that worries me. There seems to be a bizarre lack of history to the whole enterprise – a desire to claim a territory as unexplored when it’s patently not. And more importantly a remarkable lack of implementation and experiment around the place

I must agree. I’ve been following the development of bulletin boards like phpBB, and of weblog software, and it’s interesting how they proceed to discover similar things in (mostly) complete isolation. For instance, the whole trackbacks are comments movement is an attempt to make weblogs more like bulletin-boards. On the other hand, phpBB hackers are now discovering that it would be nice to respond to trackbacks, to offer RSS feeds, and do other things that weblog software is doing.

Certainly I don’t advocate a complete merger here, but as I need (admittedly simplified) forums to support my shareware users, and I also need a weblog, this convergence is only natural for me.

Dave Winer’s Scripting News pointed me at Ole Eichhorn‘s article, The Tyranny of Email:

I maintain that programming cannot be done in less than three-hour windows.  It takes three hours to spin up to speed, gather your concentration, shift into “right brain mode”, and really focus on a problem.  Effective programmers organize their day to have at least one three-hour window, and hopefully two or three.  (This is why good programmers often work late at night.  They don’t get interrupted as much…)

…One of the key attributes of email is that it queues messages.  Unlike face-to-face conversation and ‘phone calls, people can communicate via email without both paying attention at the same time.  You pick the moments at which you pay attention to email.  But many people leave their email client running continuously.  This is the biggest baddest reason why email hurts your productivity.  If you leave your email client running, it means anyone anytime can interrupt what you’re doing.  Essentially they pick the moments at which you pay attention.  (Even some random spammer who is sending you a crappy ad for a get-rich scheme.)  This is bad.

…There are three stages to this badness.  Stage one is configuring your email client to present alerts when you receive an email.  Don’t do this.  Stage two is configuring your email client to make noise when you receive an email.  Don’t do this.  Stage three is running your email client all the time.  Don’t do this, either.  To be effective, you must pick the moments at which you’re going to receive email.  I know this goes against common wisdom.  Just about everyone I know runs their client all the time, has it configured to make noise, and may even have it present alerts when an email is received.  Don’t do it.

Thanks, Ole! I needed that. The same is true of RSS news aggregators, but even more so. I’m quitting Eudora and NetNewsWire right now, and will leave them off for at least four hours. Just one more update, and I’ll quit. Yes. I swear.

Shelley “BurningBird” Powers asks:

Question to the thousands who saw the World of Ends as a new definitive answer for the foolish masses who don’t ‘know’ the Internet: Exactly what will you do differently, today, after reading this essay, then you did yesterday before reading this essay? Just curious, is all.

Well, I’ve spent part of two days translating WoE, and alerting friends and the press to it. Obviously, I think it’s an important piece of work; not that I agree 100% with it, but its most important function – reawakening discussion of what the Internet is all about – is being well-exercised. I wish I had something like WoE in 1993/4, when I built one of Brazil’s first ISPs, and tried to:

1) Convince the academics that there was a place for the commercial Internet:

Me: I’d like to operate a commercial Internet provider.

They: The Internet is tuned to research and education! Commercial messages will sully its sacred purpose!

2) Convince Embratel – the state company which at the time had a monopoly on international communications, with two 9600 bps lines coming into São Paulo and one 64K bps line into Rio de Janeiro – that the Internet wouldn’t be just a TELEX replacement:

Me: I want a data line to my office.

They: OK. It’s US$500/month for a 2400-baud line, plus US$0.01 per 64-byte data packet.

Me (scraping my jaw off the floor): But what if a client wants to download a 1-megabyte file???

They: Don’t worry, this will never happen.

3) Convince companies that they should have an Internet connection:

They: Install a trial connection on this computer here, please.

Me: It will need a modem and a phone line.

They: What? That’s impossible. We pay enough phone charges already!

4) Convince companies that they should have a web page:

Me: So people can just read you page and see your product catalog.

They: And how will our salesman know who they are, so he can visit them?

Me: You won’t need traveling salesmen anymore; and you’ll get customers from all over the country!

They: Why would we want to?

5) Convince people (people over 18, that is) that they need an e-mail address:

Me: You’ll be able to write to anybody in the world; in Japan or the USA, for example, and get a response on the same day!

They: But I don’t know anybody in Japan or the USA!

The reactions to WoE on the Web have been very interesting. Obviously there’s been a lot of mindless, me-too on-the-bandwagon jumping, which can be discounted. Equally discountable are the kneejerk reactions against “technohippie” ravings, and the worldweary bullshit-business-as-usual dismissals.

Although I’m proud to consider myself a technohippie – in the sense that I believe that in the long run, and with proper caution, the Internet and technology in general will be a positive force – I don’t think that WoE is all naïvely idealistic and therefore impractical. Perhaps this part is the most naïve:

The government types who have confused the value of the Internet with the value of its contents could realize that in tinkering with the Internet’s core, they’re actually driving down its value. In fact, they maybe could see that having a system that transports all bits equally, without government or industry censorship, is the single most powerful force for democracy and open markets in history.

In my experience, only politicians campaigning for reelection praise democracy and open markets. Any other “government type”, down to the lowliest clerk, is usually deathly afraid of both democracy and open markets, and making these people aware of the Internet’s power in this regard may well have the opposite effect of what WoE intends.

Technical people seem to mostly take issue with specific points: disagreeing with calling the Internet’s complex infrastructure ‘stupid’, arguing for priority mechanisms for audio/video streaming, pointing out exceptions for mechanisms that can’t be end-point implementations, calling attention to non-discussed issues like spam and virii, and so forth. Many of these objections are valid, but such concepts have to simplified (perhaps even oversimplified) so non-technical people don’t stop reading too soon. It’s telling that many a tech’s comments considered WoE both obvious and unnecessary.

I take some issue with WoE’s form while understanding somewhat why they wrote it that way. Using short words, short sentences, trying to make each sentence quotable, making lists of 10 points, making the same point repeatedly; these are well-known techniques to write for the great unwashed public. At the same time, this often comes off superficial and patronizing for people who do have more than two neurons to knock together. Personally, I wish the piece were longer and went more into philosophical points. Perhaps we need different versions for journalist, record company executives, politicians and techies? Hmm…

M. at the excellent Whuffie website comments on my recent post:

Following a trackback, I found this post by mac software developer Rainer Brockerhoff…

It appears that he sees links as a form of Whuffie, “hey ‘huckleberry thats a mighty large blogroll your hefting theya”. His large list of links gets him a ranking of 108th most prolific linkers at The Blogging Ecosystem.

…To borrow from wordsmith Tim Oren at Due Diligence : I am not sure if blogrolls are “fungible”. Meaning it is not a goods or commodities that is freely exchangeable. Really anyone could just take an entire top 500 (of 101,617) links and blogroll them onto a page. This would likely build some traffic.

I hasten to add that my primary intent in publishing my blogroll wasn’t to attract traffic as such; after all, it’s the actual list of feeds I’m reading, and therefore of interest to whoever analyses such connections.. When I said:

In the neverending quest for whuffie… I was checking who’s linking to me…

this was partly tongue-in-cheek. Appearing on someone’s blogroll is of course flattering per se; readers are always welcome. But of course current link-counting schemes such as TechnoRati don’t yet map accurately to real Whuffie.

M. goes on to say:

But to me when I scope a blogs ‘linkum, I expect it to have some relevance to the content. I especially like when they categorize or define the hyperlinks. My blogroll is a small list of blogs that I regularly visit and that seem to share some of the interests that I have.

…While, I try not to blog about blogging as too many sites exercise this masturbatory behavior, I think the idea of social networking and it’s complex application in the blogosphere is worthy of study. Check out this cool graph and indepth study from Ross Mayfield’s Blog.

Although my NetNewsWire subscription list uses groups to further categorize the subscriptions, unfortunately this is not reflected in the exported .opml file, which I’m mechanically converting to the form seen on the left. It would be very interesting to define standard keywords to add such value judgments to .opml files, and have everybody’s site reference those files in a <link> tag.

Ross Mayfield’s article is indeed very interesting and I had skimmed it (and some related ones) previously when the “power law” discussion came up. He says that “not all links are created equal”. I agree; first of all, blogroll links are more valuable than casual one-off references, as they represent people who read me every day. Also if someone whose weblog I read regularly, and whose opinions I respect, links to me, I feel more flattered than if it’s some random unknown… and of course, a casual link may even express disapproval of whatever I wrote, which should count as negative, not positive, Whuffie.

If I understand Mayfield’s articles correctly, he’s saying that simple non-weighted link counts chart “political networks”, which have power-law behavior. On the other hand, if links are weighted to properly show the make-up of “social networks”, a bell-curve distribution should show up, with a maximum network size of 150 people (that being, supposedly, the maximum number of people one can interact with on a daily basis without frying one’s neurons). Meg speculates that weblogging tools may possibly help us to go beyond the 150-person limit. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, 150 people were invited to Joi Ito‘s recent weblog party, and he rebuilt his blogroll afterwards to reflect that.

The whole Whuffie, group-forming, reputation-rating, community-forming, socializing-at-a-distance thing is fascinating. Writing this post yielded dozens of interesting references, which I’ll read and analyze later…

In the neverending quest for whuffie (see also this), I was checking who’s linking to me according to TechnoRati. I was surprised to find the most recent link coming from the blogging ecosystem, listing me at rank #108 (of 501) in “Most Prolific Linkers”. Not sure yet whether to cry, commemorate, or ignore it… 😯

Update: not too coincidentally, this happened just after I posted the Links&Subscriptions column to the left… but I’ve seen people with larger blogrolls around… more things to ponder, all right.