What are the choices we face in the midst of an explosive phenomenon?
Dave Winer started urging me to do a weblog when The Cluetrain Manifesto went up on the Web in March of 1999 and quickly got a lot of attention. Dave insisted that weblogs were essential to what he later called Cluetrain's "implementation phase". He also believed my writing style (light in manner and heavy in links) was ideally suited for blogging -- and that it wouldn't require much energy for me to start or keep up.
That summer we wrote the Cluetrain book that would become a bestseller the next year. Soon after that I began to realize that Dave was right: weblogs were delivering on the original promise of the Web, turning it from a set of static "sites" to a growing library of constantly updated and inter-linked journals. To make this happen, Dave and his company, Userland, were doing more than just creating weblog software (some to sell, some to give away); they were also creating and pushing standards such XML-RPC, SOAP and RSS, which enlarge the category for everybody and make possible all kinds of fun hackery.
So in November, 1999 I created The Cluetrain Weblog, with the tagline "The Continuing End of Business as Usual" -- which added "continuing" to the subhead of the upcoming Cluetrain book. The first post contained some instructive notes from Dave to me. The second one, two days later, promoted what the various Cluetrain authors were up to (in my case with Linux Journal).
After several months it became clear that this group effort was mine alone. Blogs, I discovered, are fundamentally personal things. My Cluetrain co-authors, Chris "RageBoy" Locke and David Weinberger, found they would rather do blogs of their own. So I retired the Cluetrain Weblog brand in May 2000, and changed the name to Doc Searls Weblog. That's what it's been ever since.
On most days I don't put much more than half an hour, total, into my 'blog. Sometimes more, sure; but often less. I see my blog as a kind of fireplace. Each post is a log I throw on top of the fire to keep it burning. Most of those logs are public responses to private emails. The rest come from visits to my blogroll (a list of public bookmarks on my blog), or from pointers on other pages.
In spite (or perhaps because) of the private and personal nature of my blog, it has given me a much larger public persona. Google finds 76,900 documents on the Web that contain my name. The majority point to my blog. That's a rather spectacular ROI.
Blogs succeed, I believe, because they are extremely native to the Web as Tim Berners-Lee conceived it in the first place. In fact, Dave Winer credits TBL with writing the first blog:
The first weblog was the first website, http://info.cern.ch/, the site built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. From this page TBL pointed to all the new sites as they came online. Luckily, the content of this site has been archived at the World Wide Web Consortium. (Thanks to Karl Dubost for the link.)
Linking sources and crediting them is an ethical and journalistic practice that has been standard from the start on the Web, but largely forgotten or ignored by bigtime broadcasters, publishers and wannabes who see the Net as nothing more than a plumbing system for distributing "content" to "consumers".
This is why weblogs are journals and not just "sites". It's also it's why Google, which ranks its findings according to the number and quality of inbound links, appears to favor blogs.
Google is a commercial company whose services have become de facto Web infrastructure. This is especially true for blogs, which make liberal use not only of Google's search engine, but also of its APIs, which allow automated queries from programs.
Google's services and APIs are part of a growing infrastructure of sites and services, mostly hacked together by enterprising independent developers. Technorati, for example, pays attention to fresh links between blogs (going a bit farther than referer logs) and organizes the information into "watchlists" and other useful listings. If I want Technorati to tell me who's currently linking to my blog, I can ask on the site, or pay a whopping $5 per year for a "watchlist" sent to me by email.
Technorati is the creation of David Sifry, a cofounder of Linuxcare and Sputnik. It's a good example of a LAMP program -- one based on the de facto platform of Linux, Apache, MySQL one or more among three Ps: Python, PHP and Perl. And it's already an indispensable source of logs for my blog fireplace, even though it's only a few days old. Yesterday, Google found 526 mentions of Technorati on the Web. Today it finds 1080. I'm sure the number will be many thousands soon, just as it is for Phillip Pearson's Blogging Ecosystem, which keeps two Top 300 lists: one for the most linked to blogs, and one for the blogs that do the most linking. Mine is currently #13 on both.
Both Technorati and the Blogging Ecosystem are made possible in large part by RSS, the XML dialect whose acronym means Really Simple Syndication. Thanks to RSS, every story you read on the Linux Journal Web site (including this piece) is syndicated automatically to anyone who wants to read and point to it. RSS not only lets publishers feed Google News, but also lets Google News feed anybody else who wants to read what's posted.
And RSS is just one cause of growth in the size and depth of the blogging phenomenon. The Blogger API is another one. It's used not only by Blogger (the most popular weblog system, at least in terms of sign-ups), but by Radio Userland and Moveable Type, the other two leading systems. Thanks to this API, David Sifry was also able to hack methods for posting to various breeds of blogs through email or Jabber.
There are many other hacks, just as there are many other blogging systems. Sourceforge alone lists dozens of weblog systems in various states of completion. In the LAMP vein, Geeklog and CafeLog are PHP based and use MySQL. In fact, both PHP-Nuke and PostNuke are flexible enough to serve as weblog systems. So is Rusty Foster's Scoop, which is written in Perl (as is Moveable Type). Roller is written in Java for J2EE environments (in fact there is a whole community of Java bloggers). Slashcode also qualifies as weblogware. The list goes on, and it's a long one.
To be a blog, the threshold of publication has to be low. Same goes for correction. If a writer learns (usually from readers) that a link is broken or something is misspelled, he or she needs to be able to change things easily and quickly.
The ideal model for ease is email. One should be able to write in a blog as easily as in email -- or even more easily, if that's possible. In fact, email should be available as an authoring option. (Even though it isn't in most cases -- though there are some workarounds.)
While it's hard to nail down a definition of weblogs, it isn't hard to list a few basic characteristics no blog can live without. If you can answer yes to these questions, your blogging system qualifies for the label:
The Big Three qualify on all those grounds. So do most of the others mentioned so far. One that doesn't yet (it won't produce RSS feeds) is Noah Grey's GreyMatter, widely considered the original open source blogging system. Noah decided to stop working on the project in 2001, but the source is still out there, if anybody wants to pick up on it. It's written in Perl, and licensed under the GPL.
"Markets are conversations" is Cluetrain's first thesis, and by Google's measure there is a long distance between the Big Three and the rest of the blogging systems out there.
Look a few up (name + weblog) on Google and you get these results (as of December 1) -
But links tell a different story. In the Blogging Ecosystem, the results look like this -
GreyMatter, Geeklog and Roller aren't mentioned. In other words, they don't crack the Top 300. But that's not a knock on them. The Weblog phenomenon is still very young. We're talking about opportunity here.
Which is one reason we've been experimenting at Linux Journal with various weblog systems, hosted on a server kindly provided by Penguin Computing. Specifically, we're working on an article about weblogs for the March 2003 issue of Linux Journal, written by Dave Sifry and myself. (Technorati, in fact, is one outcome of that experimentation.)
Most of our efforts have been focused on Moveable Type, which is the only one of the big three that hosts on Linux, and the one that appears to have the most momentum currently in the Linux development community. The source code is available to the end-user, though not under an open source license. MT offers two licenses of its own: a free (as in beer) one for noncommercial use; and a $150 one for commercial use. While this disqualifies Moveable Type as an option for many writers and publishers who prefer to use free software (including Linux Journal), many others who support the open source and free software movements (such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons) consider MT the best available choice -- at least for now. Again, it's still early.
The finished article will focus on issues and choices for two groups:
The choices blur in both categories. For example, neither Radio Userland's nor Blogger's client software runs on Linux (both run on Windows, while Radio Userland's also runs on OS X); but both allow you to blog from any server to which you can FTP data and serve HTTP. For example, to do a Blogger blog, you just go to Blogger.com, set up an account, make it point to your FTP server with your username, password and web server html directory. In Debian the default is /var/www. On Redhat, it's /home/httpd/html. This is a simplest, easiest-to-set-up blog system, and an easy choice for anyone to make. Even a hacker who doesn't want to be bothered setting up everything from scratch.
But for situations like our own here at Linux Journal, the choice becomes a lot more complicated. Do we stick with PHP-Nuke, which we use now for our own site? Do we hack on something like GeekLog and make it our own? How do we differentiate between (and organize) individual and group blogs within the same organization? To what degree do we want to get involved in blogware development, as well as use?
We know many of you are facing the same kinds of questions. That's why we'd like to hear about the kinds of choices you face in your situation, and what you're doing about them.
Add your comments here or write to me directly at [email protected].
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.