On Twitter.

For those who have wondered where I’ve disappeared to, it’s not very far, and yet, it’s a million miles away. I’ve started to use Twitter to record my short, arcane, and otherwise ridiculous arcania. It’s a fast, immediate, and simple rush to be able to write a thought, or even two, and post it to a small, self-selected group who have “subscribed” to this feed. In fact, “rush” is an appropriate word in more ways than one; posting a thought or two is much like a kind of philosophical “hit” to the brain, and, when it’s over (a minute or two later), the temptation to post another thought arises, quickly.

There’s an adrenaline- (and, for me, sugar- and coffee-) fueled behavior associated with Twittering (or Tweeting) that isn’t anything like writing longer, more complex, more detailed, and more elaborative narratives that typically belong on blogs. Whereas Twitter posts are quick (at 140 characters or less) and their posting immediate, blog posts are generally long and their posting immediate; this means that, after writing a longer piece and posting it to a blog, the blogger is either exhausted or elated, or perhaps, unsatisfied.

I write this in the context of a number of well-known and respected blogs now going out of business. The latest casualty, sadly, is Speak Up!, a blog that focused on the objectives, trends, and function of design. Armin Vit, today, posted his goodbye entry, and, with that, the site will rest. Armin, always a diplomatic and intelligent analyst of all things Web, wrote:

I also strongly believe that the kind of general-topic and long-form writing of Speak Up is just not as appealing as it used to be. With so many web sites devoted to quick bursts of visuals and the proliferation of short-message communication enhanced by Twitter and Facebook, it becomes increasingly hard to hold the attention of anyone. But this could all be debated.

And, it will be. The history of Western literary culture has moved from long Talmudic texts, produced and arranged and re-arranged by thousands of students to Gutenberg’s movable-type production of biblical texts to the proliferation of massive books like the Encyclopedia Britannica and novelistic forms like War and Peace. It sauntered along to well-researched articles in newspapers and magazines and academic dissertations of hundreds of type-written pages and then to shortened entries in Wikipedia and multi-paragraph posts on weblogs. And now, within the few months of Twitter’s existence, we’ve started to shutter books, newspapers, and now blogs in order to follow the disparate, tiny, yet seemingly content-rich 140-character posts of thousands of individuals.

(I do recognize that the economic models of news and news-gathering are changing quickly. But the logic of Twitter fits handily into the free-for-all of the Web’s user-driven, celebrity-focused current trajectory.)

If we continue down this path, it’s not hard to see what future, original text content will look like. Gone will be editing and editors, the smell of paper and ink, collaborative formats, multiple authoritative voices, and indexing of further reading topics. Gone will be investigative journalism, academic contextualization of events and ideas, and the production of complex thought pieces.

I don’t see the end of books or magazines, or blogs, per se. And I’m a big fan of Twitter, despite my massive reservations about its implications. But, with less long-form content being produced and digested, I can only assume that our brains will seek to emulate less the mind of gods and more the organs of birds.

Hands.

I think we’re back.

Yes, we are. Tremendous thanks to Michael Barrish and William Dodson for their problem-solving and technical expertise. And thanks to Tilted for their customer support.

And many thanks to everyone who checked in with me, asked what was up, and otherwise worried for the site’s minor existence.

Andrew Olmstead.

I hadn’t been a reader of Andrew Olmstead until today, when I learned about his posthumous post on his blog. As a soldier in Iraq, he had a frontline view of the war from both a personal and political perspective and I think his death makes the reality of his observations far more poignant than they would be otherwise. We’re all, of course, only moments away from our last blog post, but Olmstead had the wherewithal and the good sense to write something up before his death in Iraq as the likelihood of his passing was a bit higher than for us readers. My only final note about this is that this posthumous post makes the mystery and ether of the Internet that much more extreme, in that it lives on in some kind of bit-drip perpetuity, unlike us.

My Ads Suck.

Over the past year or so, I’ve used Google’s AdSense in the left-hand column of this here blog. Others do it all the time and they seem to do very, very, well, financially.

To date, I’ve had a small ad or two up and I’ve made a grand total of $53.00. Why would a three-or-two-times-per-week blog only make about $3.00 per month with the most powerful advertising mechanism in the history of the 21st century? Because my content is all over the map. If I write a review of a book or a movie, I get one kind of ad. If I write some armchair philosophy piece on the relationship between technology and death, I get another kind of ad. And what are those ads for? Pretty much nothing.

<—- Take a look.

What is there to learn from this? If you want to make money via Google’s advertising network, make sure that your blog is focused, logical, and regular. If you want to post your personal thoughts about blogging, expect ads about 311 systems or studying seven months from now in India.

Postscript: I’m in good company, as usual. Trent Hamm, who writes the unusually good weblog The Simple Dollar, has just forsworn AdSense ads for very different reasons. He wrote about it today.

Long Time.

It’s been too long since I’ve written. I’ve been enjoying getting work done and having time with my daughter, who started Kindergarten recently. I figure, hey, others are busy, too. More sooner.

Out Quiet.

I've been having trouble writing and reading online lately. Thankfully, it's not my eyesight, keeping my head up, or anything else of a physical nature. Rather, it's that the sheer number of blogs, websites, and online material has officially overwhelmed me. When the number of blogs in the world possibly reached 100 million, it all came together for me. Even my most favorite blogs, which are mostly of a technical nature and are lovingly written and thoughtfully presented, overwhelm.

I believe this is part of the inherent overwhelm many of us are now feeling because of the 24 hour onslaught of media motion. I can now see how some of the best early bloggers decided to throw in the towel at a certain point; writing requires a discipline that is only outwardly rewarded these days by either money or fame. Without these, internal motivation must be very strong. It's not like the Hemingway days, when writing was a risky passion fueled by artistry and self-examination because the educated were fewer and farther between. The art and craft of writing these days seems to be slightly misplaced, lost amidst HTML clutter and the urge to reveal without analysis.

But this does nothing to make me feeling better about writing and reading online, at least for now. So, I'm pulling it back together, rethinking my writing strategies, and preparing for it all anew. I'm not giving up. I'm just thinking out loud.

Kinks.

Ah, a few CSS and RSS kinks in the deckworks. More soon.

Yeltsin.

I was speaking with a client today and talking about blogs. I was explaining to her that smaller blogs today tend to cover less globally-relevant information while the mass-media continues to cover mass-relevant news, "like Boris Yeltsin."

I don't know why I mentioned even Yeltsin to her. It came out of nowhere. I hadn't listened to the news all day. (I'm on a morning news fast.) I'm neither a huge fan of his nor do I think about him regularly. I sure hope I wasn't the cause of it all.

Feeling Boring.

Because I feel very boring today and, well, this past week what with the war in the Middle East and company over and a party and general workflows, I'm going to provide a series of links to interesting fare I've noted during this same, sworn time. (I'm writing up some pieces on Microsoft's Entourage and that's boring, too.):

• The [Not So] Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.
• One red paperclip guy buys a house in Saskatchewan, the next province over from here.
• Clusty [not the clown] is a pretty interesting search engine, grouping links by relevant category.
• OmniGroup is coming out with some project management tool called OmniPlan in 3 days, 2 hours and 32 minutes, which is nice of them.
• I don't play computer games but if I did, it would be this one, Call of Duty 2.
• Unrelatedly, the ADL has a good list of FAQs regarding Israel's hellish and partly unjustified war in Lebanon.
• No one ever talks about the Vatican's website, which looks like it was designed by the Da Vinci Code author.

End of a Time

It looks like Jason Kottke has called it quits to his year-old and brilliant micropatron experiment. It's too bad. I was really rooting for him and hoping that collecting small individual contributions would be a kind of antidote for advertising on blogs. Not that Kottke is going to go ad. But no sadness here - Jason will prevail.

It is quite interesting that nearly 100% of his funding came during the first three weeks of his fund drive. It goes to the issue of novelty, of course, but, perhaps more importantly, it highlights the importance of clearly communicating "marketing" goals from the outset, particularly on the Web. I'd love to see Jason do a "case study" or a "lessons learned" analysis. I'll follow up this post with lessons learned about another kind of Web experiment.

Making Sense of AdSense.

I'm thinking of something inscrutable: Google AdSense.

I can honestly say that I have one of the longest running weblogs out there. I started after seeing Jason Kottke's blog back in 2000, when I featured him on my old art website (which is up but no longer living). His site was a huge inspiration for starting a weblog and he continues to impress and, on occasion, astound. In any case, I was an early advocate for blogging and Deckchairs on the Titanic has become a mildly exciting thing for me. Some days I hate it, others I'm in love with it. I started redesigning it three years ago and then again three months ago, but it's still, pretty much, unchanged for the past 4 years. I really started blogging in a very serious way right before 9/11/01. And, after witnessing the Twin Towers on fire, it felt a little more urgent to write.

I know that Deckchairs isn't the best written or nicely designed blog out there. It works. I try to keep the content diverse and informative and personal without it dragging into a complaint box, an information machine, or a leather couch. I like to write about different subjects because that's what my experience has always been and that's how I definitely try to live - learning and explaining are key to my personal survival.

I know this blog isn't updated as often as I'd like; I'd prefer to post every other day. Most weeks, I'm lucky to post twice. I guess this is the one thing we all have in common - the same number of minutes in a day.

Here's the rub: I'm flirting with AdSense. I'm looking into using (small) ads on my site because, well, I'm fascinated by the fact that, possibly, my site does enough traffic now (approximately 1000 unique visitors per day) that others might benefit. How is traffic and the benefit of others related? The more and better content featured on a weblog and the more visitors one gets, the more relevant the ads are being served on a site.

The other reason I'm thinking about ads is that, if I find ads on the site are popular (and, possibly, useful, which Google hasn't yet measured), I'll write more and more often. Who knows? Maybe I can even get around to finally redesigning the site which has been on deck for over six months now.

It's weird, no? You may think I'm being disingenuous, coy, or even dishonest. Don't get me wrong: if I could make $10 per month on Deckchairs on the Titanic, that's fantastic. It will pay my hosting costs and a soda. (They call it "pop" around here, though.)

What I actually think is that taking small advertisements might actually direct some readers to useful information. I know I've often clicked on many ads on others' blogs and, on occasion, I've been lead to relevant technology, political, or design information. The blogger was paid four cents but, more importantly, I gained eight cents of knowledge.

So, if you start seeing quiet ads on the site from Google, don't hate me. I'm thinking about serving my visitors. Or serving myself more bullshit.

Postscript: In a bout of synchronicity, I see that one of my fave bloggers, John Gruber, is signed on to take visual ads as of yesterday through the elite and pretentious The Deck. Gruber previously took on text ads from a variety of customers and they were beautiful, in part because, well, he designed them.

Comment: Spam

After not a lot of trial and tribulation but a lot of ridiculous time-wasting in deleting ridiculous amounts of comment spam from Deckchairs, I found the perfect solution for me: Disable all Commenting!

It turns out to be quite wonderful solution in my case. Deckchairs, as you'll see from the image above, is technically "A monologue on art, technology, history &c." It's been named that since October 2001. And it continues to be and should be a monologue. Other people's comments, in particular that of V.S., H.W., D.B., and C.K., have been alternately provocative, brilliant, helpful, thoughtful, clarifying and inane but, for now, there's no more commenting on Deckchairs.

Here's the logic:

1. No commenting means spammers can't waste my time pasting garbage on my precious blog.
2. No commenting means that I'm more than ever responsible for content, putting more pressure on me to write better and more regular posts.
3. No commenting means that I feel personally liberated from the daily dread of wondering who is commenting, why no one is commenting, and why I even have commenting on the site.
4. Really good writers, like those listed above, are focusing on a new blog called Amphetameme.org. The spelling is horrendously cool and I hope to even post something on it soon.

My sincere apologies to all those who have posted invaluable information to the site, only to see it placed in archive heaven. If you would like me to pull out any specific comments to specific posts, please email me and I'll blockquote your comment within the main post.

Even more unsavory Deckchairs.net changes are afoot!

Blog Independence

Jason Kottke, weblog writer par excellence, has taken the quietly loud step of going indie. It means that he's quit day job to focus on the content and coding of his site. It means that blogging has taken a new turn as a vehicle for communicating complexity to a mass audience. It means that Jason's gonna work his tail off to keep frozen pizzas on the table in his new Brooklyn digs. It means that, without advertising, Jason's going to need a lot of contributors. I'm supporting his efforts with the same spirit that I support Salon.com. Independent, constructive, and mildly funny commentary is, regardless of what anyone else says, hard to find on the Web or in print.

I just got back from a long trip to Canada and I'll write more about that soon.

Spaces of Air

More to the point of blogging, an interview yesterday appeared on CNET called [Bill] Gates taking a seat in your den. Gates, in this article, mentions something I've heard very little about: MSN Spaces.

What is Spaces? Essentially it's an online "Show and Tell" in which individuals can create a personal blog and put up photos and links and other digital ephemera. Sounds like what Blogger.com did a few years ago? Indeed. Take a look at some of these "spaces." They're not inherently any worse than most of the Blogger.com Blogspot sites out there but there's something chilly about the way these "spaces" are (un)organized, the way the cookie cutter cuts jagged lines around the icons and the curved bars, the way that Microsoft commoditizes the top-most part for its business practices. I feel, looking at these "spaces," that blogging is now, more than ever, a democracy of the lonely.

Sidenote: In 1999, I and many others at my former employer, OVEN, were building complex Flash-based "spaces" for broadband clients wherein movies, music, video, text, and documents could be shared online. It's too bad those design and software assets are in the ether as Microsoft could have bought them wholesale from the company for about $500,000 back in 2001.

Postscript: Just for comparison's sake, here is a list of Microsoft employee bloggers. Each one is as ugly as the next. I especially like this one.

Hey, when did good, customized design count for anything anyway?

Grading Upgrading MT (A+)

Hi.

I'm going to upgrade Movable Type, the platform that this thing whole edifice is rocking on, in the next few days. If we go away, we'll be back soon.

[Revision: That was easy. G-d bless the folks at MT and my host. If you're interested, I upgraded from the rather good but few featured MT 2.64 to the powerful, new and rebranded 3.14. The latter allows much better management of posts, more sophisticated filtering, and more serious monitoring of comment spam, which has been a problem these days for Deckchairs.net. If you have questions about upgrading MT, let me know. Moreover (and now I'm sounding breathless, dear oh dear, Movable Type released a 24 page document on killing comment spam yesterday thanks to the brilliant hiring of smartypants and all around good guy Jay Allen, who has, on multiple occasions, helped me out of a comment spam jungle.). For the record, Deckchairs is getting about 500 unique visitors per day. And for the record, thank you, reader!]

Favorite "Favorite Weblogs of 2004"

The Year 2004 was the year of the weblog. More people understood what a blog was, more participated in an individual or community blog, more used blogging technology in some form or another, and more people looked up the word "blog" than any other.

In lieu of actually coming up with my own favorite blogs where you'll find tremendous overlap with others, here are the top favorite weblos of 2004, in no particular order but my own:

• Kottke.org: A good list of great reads.
• Fimoculous.com: I've not seen this blog before (it is ugly) but I didn't quite realize how good waxy.org is.
• 2004 Weblog Awards: Nice categorization and the picks were based on over 350,000 votes cast.
• Intelliseek's BlogPulse 2004 Year in Review: Their Top Blogs Cited in 2004 graph is fascinating. Who the hell is Huge Hewitt?
• Sheilla Ann Manuel Coggins of About.com: This is actualy a listing of top 10 weblog tools, but they look nice on one page.
• eye weekly's reader's choice awards: Torontonians have their fill here.
• Deckchairs.net: Hey, if Jason can recommend his own blog at #0, I can recommend this as my favorite "Favorite Weblogs of 2004"!

Bullets and Bloggin'

I've been thinking a bit about the relationship between bullets, those unordered lists you find that are marked at the beginning by a circular and typically black shape, and blogging.

The aphorism, which was professionalized and academicized by Friedrich Nietzsche over 100 years ago, is the real antecedant to the web log, and by extension, the bullet. (Martha Nussbaum, my Nieztsche instructor in college, used to love floating these little one- or two-line stanzas over our heads during class and they always seem postively puzzling and incisive at the same time.)

A blog typically takes a single idea, condenses it into its few lines of simplicity, and hopes that a reaction will inhere within a reader or among readers.

The bullet (a.k.a. "•") is an example of an even further reduced thought. It takes the place of a complete idea or parses a complete idea into separate but related strands and creates an easy-to-digest and all-encompassing means of displaying a bit of tightly wound information. At its best, the bulleted item will run only one or two lines which will in turn allow a reader to make immediate association to another bulleted item below or above it or both. Bulleted lists are least helpful when the bulleted items are many sentences in length, because then they look like paragraphs with dots in front of them.

[HTML has always had a very simple way of creating bulleted items. You allow each bulleted item to be defined by a something called an "li" which is short for a list item; further, these individual items then get wrapped in a "ul" tag that allows a Web browser to understand the items as series within an unordered list.]

In any case, recently I think I've successfully used bulleted lists in this blog and this fact is, upon reflection, sad. Because bulleted items can be seen as an abbreviated version of a blog itself -- because bulleted items are reduced entries of reduced information -- a bulleted list is essentially a blog of a blog. There's nowhere else to go to make things pithier. We've arrived at the final sub-atomic state of blog entries.

Of course, one could create a weblog that consists of one word entries, perhaps modified by check-marks, arrows, or some other dingbat. But at that point, the dingbat would be the one writing the damn thing.

Blogs.ca

It's sad (and now safe) to say that "blogging" became synonymous with writing political commentary during the lead-up to the 2004 U.S. Presidential campaign.

During the heat of that political fray, I couldn't quite put my finger on why I resented the fact that the major media associated such bloggin' with right-wing or left-wing online commentators. Now, I think I understand my resentment: for almost ten years, bloggers have created incredible technology, funded it out of the sweat of their own armpits, and created a mass movement of online typists -- and the only bloggers that can get street cred are political hacks, some of which happen to be talented writers and journalists. (Nothing against political blogging, but it probably represents only 10% of the "blogosphere." (I hate that word even more than "blog."))

In any case, Canada is in the news these days for so many reasons: immigration and emigration, outsourcing, Bush visiting, protests, bookstores coming to America and I came across an excellent resource: Canada's Best Blogs. Thought I would share.

Blog

Merriam-Webster has declared that the most searched term on their site in 2004 is the word "blog." The top ten list includes a word that I had not heard or read before: "peloton."

What is the meaning of people looking up the meaning of the word "blog" online? Three possibilities:

1. The word "blog" is so incredibly undescriptive that readers need to figure out its derivation, meaning or even pronunciation.
2. Blogging is so popular these days (apparently there are now 4.8 million blogs) that newcomers to the word "blog" are curious.
3. Bloggers, who are not always the most scrupulous group of folks in history, set up a program to carefully deluge the Merriam-Webster website with requests for the definition of the word "blog."

NNW 2.0

A short but salvating post about Ranchero Software's new NetNewsWire application for Mac OS X. If you haven't downloaded it and you read news, weblogs, digests, or other somesuch or somethings, you must try it.

The application, even in beta, works quickly, allows you to browse websites without opening Safari or Firefox, and has an integrated (if buggy) one-click subscription button. In other words, if you like a blog that you're reading, one click of the "Subscribe" button in NetNewsWire and the appropriate RSS feed is bookmarked for your continual viewing pleasure. It even has that special three-paned interface that iTunes users know and love. Although it's been out for a few months, congratulations to Ranchero. And thanks!

Revelatory

Every so often, it's good to get out of the blog ruts. I've found a few new titles, to me, that are fascinating, well designed, and fundamentally far-reaching. But this is the best one of the lot. Published by NYU's Department of Journalism, The Revealer is a "daily review of religion and the press" and is, well, pure brilliance. Take a look at the slide shows, the crazy long columns of article after article, and the Movable Type-driven categories and you'll see the future of Web journalism and writing. Only drawback: it ain't anywhere near Web standards compliant and the code behind it looks like it was built with a shovel, a sledgehammer, and an axe -- surely not the tools of the future Web.

Commenting on a Monoblogue

I love MovableType, the blogging/content management software that is used on Deckchairs and many other blogs. Before I deployed MT, I was a bit of an early devotee of Blogger, which had a very simple interface and the ability to control only limited amounts of content. But one thing I really liked about Blogger, at the time, was that it did not have an inherent capacity to allow other people to comment.

I fancied writing Deckchairs as a monologue, or rather, a monoblogue.

And I did. I felt that visitors commenting on my silly charades of posts was an insult to them and a useless exercise of vanity.

Then I moved the weblog to MT and, well, I allowed comments to occur on most of the posts. I somewhat regret it for two reasons: First, because I'm still creating silly charades of posts. But second, comment spam has become a major issue. I probably spend about 5 minutes of every day just killing off comments that have automatically been generated on my weblog. These spam posts are invariably poorly written links to non-existent or porn sites. Comments spam is an evil form of using Google to get your site recognized because more links = better site. For all of its brilliance, Google plays into the dirty hands of those who use "majority rules" to gain in the search engine optimization race.

I'm tired of it, and I thought about killing all of the comments on the site in order to save it.

I'm still not sure I'm going to do it, and I know it doesn't matter a whole lot. I'm putting together a list of comment spam resources which I'll post sometime soon.

Postscript: This is not to discount the many generous contributions many commentors (commentators?) have made to this site. Whether Deckchairs on the Titanic is a monoblogue, as it was originally stated, and whether comment spam is worth my while is at issue.

Where RSS Is

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, seems, to little old me, to be at a bit of standstill. It's not clear why as RSS has the potential to change how we read (and someday, respond) to websites. There are a few advances, such as the amazing little PulpFiction for Mac OS X, which is way sweeter than the old school and (someday updated) NetNewsWire also for Macintosh.

Essentially, RSS allows a user to quickly scan and read news reports, weblog posts, and other updated content on the Web that rely on an XML format. Like faxes, email, websites or other massively collected and distributed information medium, RSS will not be valuable until it reaches a tipping point where more people use it than not.

Here's what I believe could kick-start RSS:

1. Web browsers need to find a way to integrate RSS into their interfaces. Apple's Safari is slated to do this, but until Microsoft works out a way to do it, RSS will fail.
2. Companies like NewsGator need to take a more aggressive approach to pushing RSS to email clients like Microsoft Outlook. (They have a great looking product.) This would mean advertising in mainstream technology magazines but also offering support on other mail clients.
3. RSS readers need to allow some style sheet formatting to be picked up so that reading within an RSS reader is more like reading on the Web and a separate Web browser becomes unnecessary. Technically, I'd imagine that the style sheets of a site would need to be exported to the RSS reader as part of the feed. Some folks have suggested ways to do this.

Spam Censorship

Over the past five days, Deckchairs.net has been hit with a massive amount of comment spam, which is mechanically implemented spam placed in the comments sections of a blog. It's awful and there's only one good tool to get rid of most of it, Jay Allens' excellent MT-Blacklist plug-in. I generally use this little program to get rid of spam that has already been identified by others which means that the spammers are on the blacklist.

Somehow, though, this time I am part of the avant-garde and was hit by approximately 1500 spam comments. In order to destroy the unwarranted spam, here's the regex [sp. correct] or series of words I had to use: rape|sex|incest|videos|collection|rpe|illic it|porn|pics|eager. Alas, if someone now actually wants to post a comment about rape, sex, incest, videos, porn, or they are perhaps "eager," Deckchairs will knock that comment out. Censorship? Yes. Preservation of sitehood? Yes. Another sign of spam pushing us all to the wall? Yes.

Grouping

I'm seriously considering whether to start a new group weblog that can take a on a variety of subjects and gain a more critical view of the online design world than either the relatively boring SpeakUp or the new and horrendously designed template called Design Observer. The object would be to build site that focuses on some of the critical, strategic, philosophical, and more importantly, the commercial, practical, and future-bearing ideas of Web design and development. There's a huge, gaping hole for this kind of work.

There are a few good examples of small, successful group blogs out there, including Daily Gusto, a cultural and political NYC blog, but most suck very hard and none deal with online design. The goal would be for it to replace the defunct eDesign magazine, psyche out the badly-URLed Speak Out, and focus on Web standards and design approaches the way Zeldman does and his fairly technical A List Apart do.

If you're interested in this project in any way, please let me know. Thanks.

A Few New Blogs

It's that time of year (or rather, that time of the morning) to post some new blogs that have come into my purview:

• Very well written new blog by old OVEN Flash design whiz Greg KennedyEsther Dyson's nice but slightly boring blog
• Web standards awards site that's really a review blog

Bloggers That Aren't Men

Congrats, not so much to the women writing excellent posts and providing great resources online, but to the Daily News for having the smarts to cover the story.

Now, if only some of these bloggers would actually put some effort into customizing their sites, that would be cool. "Template," regardless of what I said earlier about blogs, begins with the word "temp."

Blogs Look Nice

It comes via Michael Barrish via Zeldman so you know it has to be good: Lars Holst's excellent compendium of nicely designed blogs. There are many beautiful blogs out there and Lars has done us all a huge service in providing a comprehensive gallery of blogs that are setting new design standards for the Web.

But I would argue that it's still text content that is driving the real beauty of blogs and not design -- at least not quite yet. I know that this, coming from a design guy, a person that crunches images for a decent living, seems somehow wrong, funny, defeatist. But if you look at some of the most interesting, relevant weblogs out there, they're not all that well-designed.

Here are a few (and please, no offense to those who own and publish them):

• Anil Dash's ugly but often prescient blog
• Seth Godin's timely and useful commentary
• Doc Searls crappily designed but superbly researched notations
• Paul Ford's fugly but influential Ftrain
• Heath Row's template-driven, well-written weblog
• Glish's relevant but sad looking commentary

Would good design make any of these more valuable Web properties? Yes, I believe it would. Interface and interfacing makes a difference, particularly in the way one initially approaches a website. On the Web, first impressions are not everything but they do come close.

But a blog is about second impressions, and then third, fourth, and fifth. In fact, it's the impressionistic quality of blogs that makes them alternately satisfying, off-putting, and provocative. And those impressions are indeed driven, with occasional exception, by text content alone.

Content

I'm always looking for good news as there seems to be so little of it these days. I found this hard-to-believe report today, demonstrating that 44% of Americans who are online contribute their thoughts to the Web. (The report can also be downloaded from this link at the wonderful Pew Internet and American Life Project site.)

This is a truly astounding statistic and its meaning is both deep and broad. Here are some other stats:

17% have posted written material on sites.
10% have posted comments to newsgroups.
21% have posted photos to websites.
13% have their own website.
2% have blogs.
49% of content creators are women.
48% are between the ages of 30 and 49.
20% of content creators are, yes, students.

If we do the math, this means that, of the approximately 120 million people online in the U.S., 2.4 million have weblogs. This is a sign that the Internet's vitality is maintained not by corporate interests alone but my individual human beings. It's a sign that the health of American democracy and speech may not be as dire as one might think. It's a sign that communication technologies are just now becoming ubiquitous. It's also a sign that there is a lot of online dating going on.

What Google Sees

I always wondered what the world looks like from a spider's point of view. Here's Stargeek's very cool Search Engine Crawler Simulation tool and the results from this page as of yesterday:

Deckchairs on the Titanic February 16, 2004 Egg A few weeks ago, Salon.com publicly released, in serial form, Dave Eggers new book-in-composition The Unforbidden Is Compulsory, Or, Optimism. I'm not as big a fan of Eggers as I once was, but I appreciate the fact that an online magazine is finding a new appropriateness of serialization for distributing new fiction. It's a great and inexpensive approach to releasing new material and perhaps it will fuel online subscriptions at Salon and elsewhere. Serialization, as I learned with the late Professor Roger Henkel in college, was a new way for publications in the 19th century to realize earned income gradually while at the same time introducing new writers' work -- or new work by writers. It contains a built-in PR machine and the feedback gained while a writer is serially publishing is often critical to the eventual narrative and economic success of the book. Is it worth subscribing to Salon? I think yes. .: posted by Andrew at 10:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) February 15, 2004 Cannon After much research (e.g. talking with friends and scouring websites), I purchased a little Canon PowerShot Elph, and the thing is a wonder to behold -- others. Its small size, its ability to take very vivid, beautiful photos of even unextraordinary events is fine. It's a wonder because it so easily captures life, the passing glimpses of active faces and bodies, in digital video. With a push of one top-mounted button, the default memory card records about 1.5 vainglorious minutes of moving sights and synchronized sounds. To me, it's as if the Lumiere brothers had come to visit, with their great-great grandchildren in tow. Here's a gratuitous link to the Canon Camera Museum. .: posted by Andrew at 10:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) February 13, 2004 Not worth reading unless, that is you're a blogger: Why your Movable Type blog must die. I have to say I agree with one part of this unfair but uniquely passionate rant: that Google is becoming overwhelming influenced by weblogs and their often incorrect and misplaced thoughts, ideas, recommendations, and suggestions, including this one. Thanks, V! .: posted by Andrew at 04:53 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) February 12, 2004 Car Chase I was at the laundromat just now and had the opportunity to watch a live car chase on television. A guy in an SUV (what else?) was driving very scarily around trucks, into cars, into pedestrians (apparently) and across median strips. The driver then flew down small streets in small neighborhoods in Jersey City, New Jersey as a few bright white cop cars followed in tow. My heart pounded while I watched the inanity because I feared for a poor inadvertant kid crossing the street to get a misplaced soccer ball. In truth, I worried that I would be the inadvertant witness to a live death on television. The whole thing came to a slightly riotous end as one policecar smashed into the tail of the SUV as it slowed and forced the driver into a driveway, whereupon the driver ran and was overrun by a swarm of police. The helicopter that filmed this escapade focused on the maelstrom from above. (I looked for a link but there are no stories posted yet -- the chase ended at 5:07 p.m.) Time to go for a walk. .: posted by Andrew at 05:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) February 11, 2004 Dizzy For so many years, folks complained that it was the Walt Disney Company that unselectively was homogenizing the cultural space of the world. It turns out that Disney is a shrinking violet and that the new corporate love is going to be Comcast. If they purchase Disney, that means that the one company would have a market capitalization of about $125 billion. Wouldn't that be cool? Back in 1980 or so, Comcast started rolling out cable television in our neighborhood in suburban Philadelphia. I loved watching Triumph and Billy Squier stroke their instruments every hour on the half hour on MTV. Little did anyone know that Comcast, the pipsqueak delivery boy of Buggles videos, would come to outlive and outlove big, heartless Disney. .: posted by Andrew at 05:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) February 2004. Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29             SEARCH SEAS. What fell overboard? 10 RECENT WRITINGS. Egg Cannon Not worth reading Car Chase Dizzy Swords into Shares A Watch Crappo Intentionality eGone RECORDS REGULARLY ROTATING. B. Gibbons: Out of Season Stereolab: Margerine Eclipse Grandaddy: Sumday ARE ARCHIVES. February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002 January 2002 December 2001 November 2001 October 2001 WHYS AND WHEREFORES. Why Deckchairs? About Andrew Boardman Contact RIGHT REGULAR READING. MANOVERBOARD Gothamist Bluejake kottke.org Oblivio Zeldman Gapers Block Coudal Partners Heather Champ The Morning News Loobylu Mena EmptyBottle Charles Hartman Technorati GeoUrl NYC Bloggers Deckchairs on the Titanic: A MANOVERBOARD monologue on art, technology, history, etc. XHTML 1.0 | CSS 2 | RSS | XML A text ad for Movable Type 2.64. © 2001-2004, MANOVERBOARD, L.L.C. All Rights Reserved.

Not worth reading

unless, that is you're a blogger: Why your Movable Type blog must die. I have to say I agree with one part of this unfair but uniquely passionate rant: that Google is becoming overwhelming influenced by weblogs and their often incorrect and misplaced thoughts, ideas, recommendations, and suggestions, including this one. Thanks, V!

In Sum

Thankfully, this is the last day for me to post a post about posting weblog posts.

In case you didn't pay attention to last week's ramblings and shortcomings, here's the long and short of it (mostly short):

Yesterday, I talked about the fact that every weblog or blogging in general is a kind of shorthand for something else. There's a code, see.

The day before that, I was so tired and then it was sundown and I posted nothing. This is in and of itself interesting to me, though, because I generally do not post on Sabbath as I feel it's somewhat abhorrent and I realize that most people would think this silly, foolish, or otherwise overly religious. It could be said that posting to your blog is not "work." But I think it's a kind of work, a slightly easier, more playful form of work, yet still work. I don't know.

The day before this one, I was in New Jersey and had highway-brain and so barely blogged.

The day before that was some kind of pablum on death and blogging, which was good, if not sad.

The day before that, I wrote about the relationship between contemporary art and the activity of blogging and how blogging was the latest form of contemporary art. I'm not sure I said that, but that's what I should have said.

The day before that, I revealed how many/few visitors I actually get to Deckchairs on the Titanic and implied that this revelation was meaningful because it was sad.

That brings us to the first post in the series, the one that started this ballgame, and there were some great comments posted about the idea of audiences, blogging, and peacefulness. Since then, no comments have been posted and that, too, is a bit sad.

Weblog Code

A while back, maybe six months ago, someone sent me a link to the blogger code, at which you answer a few questions about your blogging habit or habits and the site provides you with a relatively unique code that you can place on your site that tells the select few what you think, know, love, and detest about blogging.

It's a nice experiment. My code is this: B9 d++ t+ k s u f i- o+ x-- e- l- c-. Not very elegant; I wish that it would be all d-plusses. (There's a decoder for this thing as well.)

But in thinking about the logic of the above blogger code, I think that weblogs speak in their own, very specific and more easily decipherable, code. For instance, there is code around all of the following elements that make up blogging:

- The external links you provide on your site is akin to knowing who is in, who you like, who you don't, and why.
- The type of blogging tool you use has its own classification system -- with the list in order of best to worst, though tremendously unspoken, probably being: Movable Type, Greymatter, TypePad, Radio UserLand, Blogger, and Blog*Spot. All kinds of classism goes along with this codification.
- The quantity of posts one does per week. Those who post two or three times per day get extra credits typically.
- The exactitude and quality of the design tells one how interested the blogger is in relaying their sense of the world uniquely.
- The language of the blog, English being the best, of course.
- The uniqueness of the name of the blog and one's ability to purchase a domain name of unique meaning and origin.

I understand that this sounds all cynical and yucky, but I don't mean it to. I'm just thinking about the new bloggers on the block, those who don't have a domain name yet, who don't know how to install Movable Type (MT), who only know how to type and need an audience. I wonder what they do, how they get in and I wonder if there will increasingly be tools to allow the blog-cream to rise to the misty heavens of a dedicated readership.

New Jersey

Today, I have nothing to say about blogging. Nothing to say at all. I spent an interesting day at a client's shop learning about the biological sciences in New Jersey. It's going to be a cool project. And all I can think of now is that I need to post. I desperately need to post. This is what I need to do. Post. Now posting...

Death and Blogging

I can't help but think about the relationship between writing, blogging, and death. Not to get all gnarly (my daughter's new favorite word, which I think is so funny), but traditionally, it is often difficult for others to locate the work of artists and writers who die. In fact, it can take years and years of research, discovery, and sweat to figure out the location and locale of artworks, the dates they were produced, and the methods used in producing specific pieces. Not an easy task, but it does accomodate many academics' employment opportunities, which is nice.

But, and here's the but, blogging makes this all so easy. There is no difficulty in finding a bloggers' work -- it's all sitting on a server somewhere, perhaps and hopefully in a pretty MySQL database. Death makes the writing or postings of a blogger final, yes -- but also solid, organized, total. It's this totality that kind of makes me think that blogging is the ultimate life-in-death. It's so hyper-organized, so data-driven, so efficient that rather than laughing at death and its ultimate finality, it equates itself with it, cozies itself up to it, makes death seem nice and tidy. In other words, what I'm thinking is that blogging makes others' lives easier but it also makes the death of an individual easier to read and understand as the cataloging is done, pre-facto.

It's messy stuff, though. You might ask what about those people who don't only use the weblog for aesthetic expression - say they use the computer, the typewriter, the canvas, or the video screen. And I would way that you're right -- blogging may be life-in-death but it's also only one component of the soul's divine shedding of self to the world. A researcher of an individual's life would still need to collect the odd detritus of a life lived, the old corn flakes, the CD collection, the crumbs of crap that once accumulated under the paper files, in order to understand the life of a blogger.

Old Art, New Blogs

Trying to think about thinking about blogging every day, as part of this week's calisthenics, has given me a headache.

Having said that, I'm heavily reminded of, per Jake's comments two days ago, 90s artists like Barbara Bloom and Fred Wilson who attempted to break apart the exhibition space and the traditional means of observation from the art and artifacts that are part of an exhibition. In typical post-modernist parlance, the two artists, along with many others, recontextualized objects to show us the "true" or "truer" museumological associations of our aesthetic past.

Perhaps it's a stretch, but this bone-dry exercise in thinking about blogging publicly pushes me as to what the audience expects from a blog (or my blog) and what kinds of worlds come to mind through the exposition of a post. I do feel that artists who make art about art are either fundamentally boring or fundamentally prescient, or both. But what I do see is that blogs have become a means of communication, a mode of transmitting information and knowledge, not unlike the museums and galleries of our recent past. Here are some similarities:

1. Blogs and artistic institutions hide their technology from their audiences. The software of blogs is invisible as are the hardware of paintings, the lighting and electricity from above, and the Sherwin-Williams paint beneath the painting.

2. Money flows around blogs and artwork constantly and neither artists nor bloggers actually make much money. Well, most of them do not -- the 1% that do support the respective markets for the rest of us.

3. For the most part, posting your blog and making art are essentially solitary ventures, except for group efforts like Metafilter or Tim Rollins' Kids of Survival. The museum or gallery allows a group of interested individuals to observe an individuals's generally solitary musings.

4. Audiences gain prurient pleasure from following an artist, an actor, or a blogger. This public-oriented aspect of blogging is why I think blogging is in and of itself a new artform -- one that tickles the feathers of those who live vicariously (many of us) through and with others in public.

One other note: in doing research for today's piece, I found that the artists I've mentioned above do not have major presences on the Web. All of them rely upon their benefactors, the art institutions, to showcase their work and keep their names and productions alive -- barely. It's as if blogging has taken over the mindscape of art's presence on the Web, there never being very good art portals online and artists never knowing whether to embrace or hate the Web.

99

Day 2 of blog revelations: I took a good, hard look at my webstats for Deckchairs on the Titanic and, after much hand-wringing and deliberation, decided to post the numbers of visitors I've been getting. They're pretty small, about 1/2 the number I had once thought I had, but they're growing steadily. I'm a big believer in transparency when called for and this exercise in thinking about audiences publicly is fascinatingly choice.

Here's the short scoop on what kind of audience I'm receiving at this blog:

Average number of daily visitors: 99 (up 30 from October)

Average number of pages visited daily: 276

Top 5 referring websites: Google, Yahoo, Gothamist, Blogosphere, and blo.gs.

Top 3 search strings: titanic, google wack, deckchairs

Interest spiked on the following days in November: 9, 20, 24, and 25

Hourly usage increases between the hours of: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. to 12 a.m.

To Blog or Not or What

Boy, it sure has been nice these past four days to not post an entry into Deckchairs. I spent the past four days doing very little work, thinking a lot about work, spending some calm time with the family, trying to get my daughter to eat, and see old and good friends. Lovely.

But I have three thoughts about why it's been so nice not to blog:

1. I think blogging, for all of its gorgeousness, is a horrendously time-sucking affair that can add up to little at the end of the day. Questions like "Who the hell is reading this?" and "Why the hell am I doing this?" necessarily enter the brain of the blogger if that blogger really has a brain. It's just that few like to ask these questions publicly and let on to the fact that ambivalence is as much a part of blogging as is typing.

2. Blogging is an inherently transitional affair of the heart. It's not documentary writing per se, nor is it publishing, nor is it diaristic, purely. It's a combination of all of these, filtered through the limited means of electronic forms and databases and constructed so as to appear whole, unified, cogent to the outside world. Blogging is not one thing, it's never done, and it's never fully satisfying because, like the medium it relies upon, it's replete but never complete. The Web is always about the next big thing, the next thing, the next.

3. The questions I'm raising are not accepted, nor celebrated, by bloggers the world over because they go right to the heart of the experience of blogging. I'm also not raising them because I want to end my "affair" with Deckchairs and blogging, nor because blogging has become dull, tiresome, and trite. (It has not.) Rather, I wonder what would happen if every blogger could write about the vagaries and ambivlances of blogging itself -- the activities, the thought processes, the improbable forays on the Web and off for information and synthesis -- for one week and one week only. Only then could we see what blogging is truly about.

That's what will happen here this week -- an experiment in living blogging.