Andrew Barnett: the web and blogging and stuff

I'm Not Dead Yet

Mon, 02 Jun 2003 11:49:29 GMT

OK. I'm not going away. I shan't stop blogging.

I did think of it because... well, because for me what I want out of blogging is to have a bit of a conversation. I don't need to do it just to work my thoughts out or for any other reason. But right now, my brain is mush. I have bugger all to say, and would struggle to articulate it if I did. The thing with blogging is that it creates in your mind a pressure to deliver. I feel that were I to stop for a few weeks or more, I'd lose what few readers I have. I don't care about recognition, but I do care about the conversation and contact. So, I figured that if I stop for a few weeks, might as well just throw it in completely.

Silly me.

Anyway, I may or may not go quiet for some time, until I get back some of what motivated me to start in the first place. I may even trash this blog and start again. Or not. But I think whatever I do, I'll do it openly as myself. I've tried before to wear another persona, but it doesn't sit so well. I need to be me. That kinda puts some constraints on what I write, being mindful of immediate and extended family. But it can't be any other way.

And I really appreciate the comments. Thanks people.

Later.

andrew

I Want

Thu, 22 May 2003 08:27:54 GMT

What I want, what I really, really want, is a WYSIWYG (X)HTML editor for my Powerbook. It has to run under OS X natively, be simple, lightweight and gorgeous. Or, better still, it could be browser based. But it'd hafta work in Safari. It also has to generate clean, preferably XHTML-compliant, unadulterated markup. I'm kinda sick of having to either type tags, or manually insert them from drop-down lists and menus, and neither can I quite bring myself to accept the markup that MS Word produces. Any ideas?

Lost

Mon, 12 May 2003 12:05:48 GMT

Heh! This blog was supposed to be the next stop on my way to creating a new, web-based business, *not* an extended, asymmetric counselling session.

Must do better; there's a world to change.

Read This

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 13:29:30 GMT

Pay it forward: by way of a recommendation from Stavros the Wonder Chicken, I dropped in to read Skot's blog, the fetchingly entitled Izzle Pfaff!

Skot is funny. So funny that I think I should give up trying to be funny, as should many others. And it's accessible too, meaning that I can read the thing in one pass and not have to squint and frown and screw up my forehead.

A sample, hopefully representative:

Well, the wedding is less than two months away, so I'd better give fair warning that the entries here might get a little more sparse. I mean, we've got everything more or less under control, but of course there are more and more little shitheaps to trip over along the way. Holy shit, we've got to get a marriage license! Also, a banquet license so our friends can drink! Definitely a banquet license so we can drink! (Thoughtful pause.) JESUS CHRIST! Do you realize how much people are going to drink?!

...

Tomorrow we go to meet with the nice 'n' clenched mansion people to talk about meal options (my votes for corn dogs and fries have been loudly shouted down)

...

I have never written a check this big. I've never bought a house; my car cost $450; and my student loans are paid whenever the jar of pennies fills up. So it's a big deal for me, especially since I'm handing it over to people who, while again, are very nice, seem on occasion to be made of extruded plastic.

And you know, for extruded plastic animated entities, they sure have a lot of snitty fucking rules (not that I am conversant with other lilac-scented, money-snatching plastigolems, but I'm just saying).

"Plastigolems!" Why didn't I think of that one?

He Hates Us All

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 11:31:04 GMT

Rageboy notes that:

...I am getting very fucking little email from you people. Perhaps it's because I've been sending so little. Is that the way this Internet thing works? Shit, how come nobody told me? OK then, listen: Be that way. I hate you all.

Link

Well, yeah, perhaps: you don't send it, you don't receive it. But even if you did, we're not replying because now we want to blog it instead, with a nifty hyperlink back to your good self. Then, having leveraged Rageboy's massive fame and mind share to lend some illusion of authority and dignity to our own, spotty, little blog, we can count our Technorati links and trackbacks (tracksback?) and watch the site meter ticking over.

Anyway, no point hating us; we'll just be nice.

Ceci n'est pas une "blog entry"

Sun, 16 Mar 2003 05:16:06 GMT

but this is

The Art of Writing

Fri, 14 Mar 2003 12:01:10 GMT

Something odd is at work here. I like to write, I really do. You see, I have the tortured soul of an artist, the need to express and create -- as do most of us I suspect -- but I also have all the artistic ability of a gnat's left bollock. This causes me unbelievable amounts of misery and frustration. If only I could paint or photograph.

The only arenas in which I ever manage to successfully express a little art are programming, and writing. Just, just, oh-so occasionally, I manage a paragraph or two that I feel proud of.

And those times that I do manage it, I did it without trying; the words simply flowed onto the screen, almost without conscious thought. By contrast, the harder I try to write, the more contrived, turgid, dysrhythmic it is. Bleagh!

Which is all perfectly in order and in accordance with our human nature. I remember an article in New Scientist some time back on the superior reflexes and decision making of the unconscious self. I think that when we achieve that state known as flow, we must lose the conscious self to a large degree.

So, for a few nights' running now, I've sat up late and read blog after blog. And as midnight approached, and I was so fuzzy of eye and brain that I could neither read nor comprehend very much anymore, I started to write. And the words flowed, even if I had to squint out of first one eye, then the other, to read them. I even flew without a spell checker.

OK, it ain't art. BUT I WROTE. And one or two people have even been moved to praise.

And here's the great hope: if I do enough of this, relentlessly day after day, and go back and read it later which, strangely, I quite enjoy, perhaps it'll become easy. Perhaps, just as I can now rattle off in minutes the kind of Oracle SQL that one sees in advanced sections in texts and has support dudes quietly reaching for the manual, perhaps I'll be able to do the mechanics of writing quite without conscious thought. And then perhaps I'll be able to express the ideas flashing through my chaotic mind as they come to me, not spend an entire day trying and failing. Like happened today with my idea for a killer disruptive technology.

Stay tuned.

I Wrote It, and They Did Come

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 12:54:02 GMT

Oh dear. Last night I decided that for once I'd sip gently from the bottle so that I might be in a decently alert state to write my blog -- moderate indeed. And moderate I was. 10:30pm arrived and I was still wide awake and clear of head. So of course I celebrated my excellent discipline by opening a new bottle. Which I drank from happily and freely. And then I started to write...

You can read what I wrote in the post prior to this one.

Well, it catalysed a response. A number of clever and groovy souls wrote kind comments here. Liz was particularly practical and sweet. Seeing as she's 3 years' older than me, I'll gracefully accept the guidance. And my site meter is now close to double figures. Woo hoo!

And then Gary Turner did this. (I'm assuming that this kind of recursive linking won't cause Radio to disappear up its own port 8080.) Which is very lovely, in a gruff and rugged, manly fashion, but it's been there for A WHOLE DAY NOW and I'm starting to feel self conscious. So Gary, thank you, but maybe now you'd like to write something long and clever and push me one step back from the limelight? Yeah, I know I asked for it, but I think it's going to take me a little while to get the hang of this extrovert thing.

Talk to me

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 13:27:39 GMT

Gary Turner, in the manner of all Men of a Certain Age, has been agonising over his writing ability, and the social interactions afforded by blogging.

I've been blogging small time for a month or 2. So far I've made contact with precisely no one, although I've scored an entry on the Emptybottle blogroll along with about 873 others. My own site counter sits somewhere around the background-noise level; if I discount my own frequent and anxious visits looking for comments -- 3 so far, all some kinda automated response offering domain hosting or chickenpox cures -- we're close to zero.

But yeah, I hold out hope that 1 day there'll be a response. Perhaps I'll get linked to. Why not? I don't have the brains of Doc Searls or Joi Ito or any of the others I read, can't write like Chris Locke can, but I write OK. I can be funny-ish. I make people laugh, and think.

I don't need to blog for myself. I can happily or, more usually unhappily, work through things in my own, chaotic mind. That's me mumbling out loud on the train or in the street as I conduct my own little Socratic dialogue about whatever it is that's bothering me most today. That's me with the embarassed look as I realise I've been mumbling out loud.

But I read Doc, or Gary Turner, or Halley, and I want to talk back. To say, "Right on!", or, "Er?"; to converse, to swap ideas, to be recognised. I recall seeing a letter in the newspaper, rebutting some article from the day before. Except the article was syndicated from another country, maybe months' old, and no way was the author going to ever see that letter. "You fool!", thought I. But with blogging, I CAN talk back, even if none of these people have time to reply to my emails.

And so I plod on with my square, stodgy prose, grammatical terrorism, and the rest of it. I'm sure someone will talk to me. One day.

World of Ends

Sat, 08 Mar 2003 04:50:33 GMT

Doc Searls and David Weinberger have created an article, World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to stop Mistaking It for Something Else.

Doc Searls explains here, and David Weinberger explains here.

Casting around the usual blogs sees a mostly positive response, though Burningbird pushes back some. I'm not sure yet; I read the thing through a haze of red wine and Friday-night tiredness. I also take a little while to process these things in background and work out what I think. So I'll write a proper response later, perhaps in a day or two.

Having said that, a couple of things occur to me:

Any "article" that gathers enough mind share to demand its own web site was likely a strong statement of position to start with, a manifesto if you will. Think of Cluetrain and The Cathedral and the Bazaar. And World of Ends was launched on its own site. Are Doc and Dave expecting big things from this one? Are they deliberately trying to engineer a movement? I do hope so ;-)
In the context of our western, middle-class, privileged existence, Statement 8: The Internet's three virtues, and in particular 8b: Everyone can use it, is true. And so are statements like "Everyone has enough to eat". Yet, we don't have to look too far from our comfortable situation to see that for a very large part of the world, these things aren't true. OK, I'm hardly being original pointing this out, but for now it's still a real, and uncomfortable, obstacle to aligning with the movement.

Except, except, I don't think Doc and Dave meant it this way. For a couple of related reasons:
1. Think 42 years from now, to an age of ubiquitous, pervasive, wireless connectivity -- a true global net -- and 3-a-penny computing devices of all kinds, especially ones that let people talk or "pict" instead of read and type: the barrier to participation might be so low as to be effectively non-existent. Think of transistor radios today. OK, not a great example because they receive only, but I'm trying for the image of dirt cheap and globally available.
2. "Using it" doesn't have to imply a PC, broadband connection, etc.: just as with a simple radio receiver where an entire village might cluster around to hear the BBC World Service, a single device might serve an entire family, or village, or community.
I think while the Net right now is not able to be used by everyone, that's almost all about its current state of evolution, not its true and ultimate nature.

Finally, for now, I'm wondering about something else related to all of the above: Cluetrain told us about what the Net was doing to markets and marketing; The Cathedral and the Bazaar told us about what open-source was doing to software development; and now World of Ends talks further about the Net itself. All good stuff. What I'm curious about is this: what does all this have to say about the business of business itself? To clarify, if everything naturally moves to decentralisation, to a distributed model, are large organisations as we know them ultimately doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs? And then, from a personal perspective -- personal, because I want to create a business and make some money -- how exactly does one make money in this brave, new world? You see, I have this uncomfortable feeling that capitalism, at least large-scale capitalism, just doesn't fit in. I'd love to get rich, but I think it's mutually exclusive with the truths that these movements have revealed to me. Yet again, I've come to the party after the booze ran out.

Seriously, the way I think it can work is that while behemoths are indeed doomed, there's still money to be made. Not billions of dollars, but certainly enough to be comfy. This money can come from helping a few tens, or hundreds or thousands, of people get connected in some way, allowing them to find a way to express themselves. And we'll be doubly comfy because of the knowledge that the money has come from making a real difference to the lives of people. (Hmmm, haven't phrased any of that very well but the battery is running out and I want to get out for a walk. I'll try again a bit later.)

All of which is kinda funny, because the Net was going to let the few businesses that got there first and had enough money behind them to build markets of billions of people. And now it looks as if what it's really going to do is let billions of people develop their own markets of just a few people. It's not really commie, more like in fact the small-scale capitalism that China has been slowly allowing to happen.

Writing is a Private Thing

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 07:14:54 GMT

I've already commmented on Halley's inspired piece, though perhaps adding my clumsily expressed thoughts on art like that does nothing to praise it. Whatever.

Anyway, for a few days now I've been pondering why I'm so reluctant to pull the Powerbook out on the train and write. I won't do it when the person sitting next to me might be able to read what I write. Not even when that person is my dear wife, though I fully expect her to read the finished piece. Recently at work, I was typing a chatty email to a colleague when she wandered around to see me. My reaction was to quickly hide the open window so she wouldn't see the very words I was about to send her. Why?

Well, I know this seems utterly obvious and unoriginal, but I think it's because the act of writing is a deeply private experience. This is not something I'd ever really thought about. Here's the bit Halley wrote that let me see:

...in a friend's back room on a Saturday early evening when everyone else was drinking beer, but you politely explained to your already tipsy hostess that you'd pass on the beer, but was there anywhere you might slip into a private room and ... Christ it was dirty and hot and almost as fun as stealing her husband for a few hours to fuck while no one was watching ... could you please BLOG a little in private?

We pour out our feelings, express our emotions, for an audience, be it one or many, but we don't want them to see us doing it. Are painters similarly sensitive? And potters and sculptors and architects? Or is it just me that's sensitive?

Bye now

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 12:17:25 GMT

wKen has left the room.

Applied Cluetrain

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 04:23:07 GMT

I did something a little silly at work yesterday. Well, perhaps not so much silly as risking colleagues thinking even more than they do now that I'm a wild nutter. Mmm, not sure about the structure of that sentence, but let us move on. What happened was that an email popped into my inbox. Digression: an email message is referred to as a "Note" where I work because we use Lotus Notes, a particularly awful, arse-backwards piece of software. My brother, a clever middleware dude, was first required to use it a little while back and sent me an unhappy, confused Note asking if Lotus Notes was for real, or simply an elaborate practical joke. I told him I wasn't sure. I'm still not.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah, this email pops up and it's from a handful of colleagues who have the task of improving departmental communications. Good stuff. So, natch, they're looking at our departmental intranet page which, I should explain, is hosted on the centrally-controlled, deodorised corporate intranet. Updates are effected, I think, by providing the intranet group with raw content once a week or so, which it then publishes on "our" page. Something like that. Anyway, they wrote, in part:

What do we do?
Our role is to improve Communications within the Department, in particular to review, monitor and increase use of the existing Department Intranet site.
The new Department web site
We will shortly launch a new Intranet site, containing more useful, relevant and up to date information. Whilst the existing site has been operating for some time now, the information on it is not updated regularly, and we believe it is not being used as well as it could be, by all members of the Department, for Communication purposes.

My brain, being what it is, instantly thinks of Cluetrain and a number of the 95 Theses in particular. I've been itching to put some of this stuff into practice, and this place is the most likely I know of to be receptive. So, I dashed off a scrambled response. I quoted the following of the 95 Theses:

As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.
Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.
Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.
Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.
A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.
While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to "improve" or control these networked conversations.

And then I wrote:

You can see where I'm going with this. If the Department site is going to be somewhere that people are keen to visit, it should have content generated by the people themselves, it should provide facilities for commenting, feedback, self-publishing. It should be a space where people can contribute to a discussion.
The corollary is that if it's a once-a-week update via an approved channel, its appeal and usefulness and potential will be substantially compromised, evidenced I would suggest by the state of the current website.

Well, I came in this morning to find the following wonderful response:

Thanks for your feedback re the intranet site, the points made seem very valid to me. We are having a team meeting on Friday, and will discuss this concept further.

It may come to nothing, but who knows. One advantage of getting older is that people have begun to listen to what I say and sometimes don't burst out laughing. We shall see.

Why blog (revisited)?

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 12:38:56 GMT

Halley wrote this about writing and blogging. It reads in part:

And everything I ever learned about writing didn't matter anymore. Everything I ever thought about writing went out the window as the breeze blew through my hair and the words poured out of me. I didn't have to take writing seriously. I didn't have to take words seriously. I didn't have to sound like anyone else. I didn't have to sound like The New Yorker -- which weirdly, I sometimes sound like a little by NOT TRYING TO SOUND LIKE IT. So it showed me that I had a lot of hang-ups about writing and it showed me how to get over them fast. It showed me how to sound like myself. It gave me back my voice, which surprised people and surprised no one as much as it surprised me. Blogging was a place I could go and be me, completely, totally, unapologetically me. And if people didn't like it, screw 'em. And I could write the hell out of the screen and if it blew up and disappeared, it didn't matter anyway, because I could always come back and try something else again later. So despite all my inclinations towards bottles of ink and pads of paper, I started to blog and blog and blog and blog and there was no stopping me.

Now, I can't write like Halley does -- too square and stodgy me. But that's kinda the way I've felt writing email over the last 6 years or so. I found a voice. You see, deep down I have scant regard for rules, normal notions of what and what not to say and how to say it. But I've not had the courage to really be myself in person. In email I could let it out, write long, rambling stream-of-consciousness stuff, outrageous stuff, share my inner feelings with a friend, whatever. I could insult the entire department in a single email, then sit back and watch the heads pop up (prairie dogging) as people read it, giggling to myself. I love it, I do. I found a place where I could be me.

And I'm still wondering how the blog fits in. I admit, I started this thing not so much to express myself as to get "out there", be heard. I want to start a business that focusses on communication and knowledge sharing, and I thought, felt, that in some unknown way, blogging might give me some insight and inside edge into the next technological wave. So, it was going to be a blog by me, the corporation.

But it's becoming personal. It's becoming a blog by me, the person. The thing is, I don't know how far I can go. Halley and wKen and others display bravery in baring themselves to the world. It's easy to read personal stuff and enjoy it, but have you ever thought about writing it? I'm middle-aged, uncomfortably square, married with young children. I can write a laddish email to a single, male friend but this is different. Colleagues, children, family may read it. Unless one is unattached, without young children, there are limits. The voice has to be toned down a little, censored if you will. Is that a lack of courage on my part? Probably.

Anyway, it's late and I'm under the influence of Chivas Regal, so I'm rambling. This was just an exploration of how I feel.