Tuesday, January 15, 2002

G'night. I Dream of Style Sheets. Soon I'll be ending my first day of blogging.  By spending all day posting and editing and goofing around with Radio, I managed to keep my blog near the top of www.weblogs.com much of the day.  People found me there and were curious and dropped by to see.  Result: I've had the satisfaction of finding that I was the 48th-most-visited Radio 8 Blog today!  I'll have sweet dreams tonight, of turning up more excellent features in Radio and of perhaps being granted a 5-minute extension on my 15 minutes of fame.  Notice how at both top and bottom of the page my name is a mailto: link.  If while I'm sleeping anybody should email me and tell me how to use cascading style sheets on my Radio site I'll be a very grateful man. And the first person who can explain the allusions in my very first Radio post ("What hath..." below) wins a cookie.  They're not hard allusions if you know anything about the history of communications technology. 10:19:57 PM

So, What's the Story? Here's my first story created in Radio.  It's not new.  It's one of the "Maxims" I wrote when I was covering the short-lived incubator bubble in 2000.  I pasted it here to test out how stories work. 9:44:40 PM

Radio Hints From the Helpless I've heard it said that anything worth doing is worth doing badly.  For this reason, I've launched into Radio with reckless abandon.  I am learning some things as I go.  In perfect confidence that Radio will make new converts every hour, I'll record some of my lessons while they're fresh, and leave these hints for those who come after.  Even if you're only three hours newer than I, still I might have something to offer. Hint 1: Do it online:  Type and post, then edit. I really don't like to publish rubbish.  So I worked on the 400-odd words of "Hockey Puck" in Word, then in my ascii editor, planning to cut and paste into Radio's editing window only when it was ready.   Bad plan.  My machine crashed with no copy of the piece anywhere, except a very incomplete copy autosaved by Word.  Once back online, I just pasted what I had into Radio's edit window, posted it, and then edited the already posted piece.  This conduced to frequent saving.  Life became better.  And if you're going to blog with the big kids, you'll have to learn the mantra "just do it." Another advantage to editing your work after you've posted it is that, early on in your blogging career, there are only two ways (that I'm aware of now) that people are going to notice you: 1) by learning from Radio that your blog has refered to theirs -- they'll delightedly come see what you wrote about them, and 2) by seeing on www.weblogs.com that your blog has been recently updated.  If you've given your blog an attention-grabbing title, you will get some hits. Now, if you want people to come visit your blog, and www.weblogs.com is where they'll find out about you, don't you think you want to appear near the top of the list of recently updated blogs?  Of course you do.  Well, to count as having updated your weblog, you needn't have created a new post.  Every time you edit an old post, even if it's to kill an aberrant apostrophe, you move to the top of the list.  Cool, huh?  8:09:12 PM

Told You So As I said... A couple of minutes after posting "Hockey Puck" I clicked the referers link and found that www.weblogs.com had sent three people to look at what I'd just written.  I think I'm going to love this! (A couple of minutes later the number of people referred was five, but two of them were me.) 5:40:15 PM

Hey Mom! I'm Riding a Hockey Puck! Okay, so I'm not among the first 20 people to discover this killer app.  At least I'm not going to wait to be the zillionth.  (If there's any debate about the killerness of Radio, I vote with Scoble - see "If I died tonight.") The very speed of Radio Userland is what has delayed my getting started.  And I'm not just talking about ease of use, which Radio has and for which Winer and Co. are much to be commended.  Rather, it's the fact that when I publish this, my second weblog entry, there's a guaranteed community of people who will come find it.  And quickly, too.  If I understand the product at all, I guess that at least a handful of people will read these words by this time tomorrow.  I will not have to submit it to 30 search engines and wait a few months to become public.  What I mean is, it's not just the software that makes things happen fast, it's the community.  Unlike the old web, the people behind Radio have designed it so that the user community is an organism.  When it stubs its toe, its brain knows instantly, its knee jerks, and it continues its life smarter.  So, when I say its speed put me off, I mean that I was afraid of becoming a sore toe on my first post, instantly looking like an idiot in front of a community that is going to grow phenomenally within the next few weeks.  Who wants to be made an example of? This concern was heightened by the failure of Radio itself, the Radio website, Scripting News, and every other source I could find, to address the first question of cautious minds--"how do I undo mistakes?"  Specifically, as I read the docs and contemplated using the tool, I wondered how I'd be able to obliterate my first few imbecilic blogs.  Even if I could erase a whole weblog the day after creating it, would Google have archived it forever?  Would my great-grandkids have to know what an ass I made of myself the day I discovered this new toy?  The reason this matters to me is that in fact I don't view Radio as a toy.  I write about technology and about technology business.  I manage and distribute knowledge.  And I believe that Radio will be to knowledge management what the auto loan was to Detroit.  It's a serious tool, and unless there are booby traps in here, I intend to wield it in the manner of a serious craftsman.  4:39:47 PM

What Hath God Wrought?     Mr. Watson, come here.  I need you! 2:07:52 PM