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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Kennedy</
• Esther Dyson’s nice but slightly boring blog
• Web standards awards site that’s really a review blog

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.”

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.

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.

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.