I don't agree with Cameron; I don't think the quality of Metafilter has fallen much, if at all. There are certainly more front page posts on MeFi then there were a year ago. It is more difficult to read everything, and if I don't check everyday, it takes awhile to catch up. Comment posts are another matter. I do feel the signal to noise ratio has gotten worse, but that doesn't mean I won't read comments on a post I have an interest in, like this one.

I am also reminded of Usenet in 1993. I was an active poster to a particular group that will go unnamed. There were only a few posts a day, and the great majority of them were well thought-out and fairly well written. Then, in September of 1993, a number of new voices began to be heard in the newsgroup. They were university students with no knowledge of net culture and little knowledge of what they were writing about. There was much flaming, and many of the new posters left. However, some stayed, the number of daily posts went up, and there was a definite change in the feeling of the group.

Over the next few years the newsgroup grew with the addition of more and more undergrads, and then AOL users, and then net punters, and it changed from an exclusive club for well-educated white men to something with a lot more diversity. Many oldtimers people didn't like the result, and left the group. A few of them started Web sites, and the community reformed in a more controlled, diffuse setting. The conversation went on, but the interaction was harder to find.

Weblogs have been another change again. The conversation has become more explicit, and bloggers seeks out connections with others in new ways. Now, you can select who will be part of your online community, and exactly that is happening on the thousands of weblogs that link to like-minded sites. But we want the immediacy of back and forth conversation, and come full-circle to sites like Metafilter.

Posted by John at 3:00 AM | Permalink

Casey Marshall has created a very interesting Java applet that creates a map of Weblogs. Or perhaps not a map, but a sociogram showing the relationships between various bloggers listed at eatonweb. Blogs are a continuation of online collaberative speech that started at least with SF lovers and human-nets mailing lists on ARPANET in the 1970s. Yes, I'm doing some writing about it.

Posted by John at 3:00 AM | Permalink

Tempting as it is to call a family meeting and lay down the clutter law, think again.

Posted by John at 6:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Woke up this morning very early for me after a very early crash due, I suppose, to the uncharacteristic Valentine's Day red meat meal.

Posted by John at 6:32 AM | Permalink

And then is all froze, so I haven't been able to walk on the sidewalk since Friday. But that's winter in Ottawa. For some reason, we still live here. And Keith Jarrett makes it all much better.

Posted by John at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Walker has put up a precis of Forrester Research's "Content ManagementHypergrowth" report. Writes Walker:

Forrester has examined a dozen commercial CMSs, including well-known solutions from Vignette, Broadvision, nCompass and Interwoven. Forrester's winner, Open Market Content Server, scored a mere 3.0 out of five ... Forrester concludes that today's CMS offerings are "immature", that none adequately addresses all needs, and that the vendors all have very different visions of how the CMS will evolve. It also warns that organisations that have bought CMSs are going to run into problems maintaining and customising them - and that they are likely to discover nasty mismatches between their CMS and other software, such as application servers and outside systems. 'Owner satisfaction will be short-lived', Forrester concludes...

Posted by John at 7:44 PM | Permalink

If there is one word today, it is this one: slush. Perhaps those of you, my fans and friends, who live in the Bay Area of California are not familiar with this. Let me tell you what it is.

Slush doesn't just happen. It isn't like rain or snow, which fall from the sky. Slush requires special and, one would think, rare conditions to come into existance. Slush happens when there is snow on the ground, and the temperature increases to just around freezing. Rain, like what we had today in Ottawa, helps a great deal, as do cars driving around and people walking around.

This morning, we had freezing rain, and it covered everything with ice. This afternoon, we had cold rain, and it mixed with the snow, people drove on it, the drains in the street got plugged, and we have slush. A lot of slush.

Slush is a soup of snow, ice, salt, and dirt. If you tasted it, you wouldn't like it.

The slush brought out the worst in many drivers, I noticed. I walked home today, like the stud I am, and for some reason folks in cars thought they were late or something, and splashing people, did Ueys, and generally went too fast. I saw one lady in a long black coat yell at a Uey-doing driver when he almost hit her.

It is times like this that I understand that we do not belong in this god-forsaken country.

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Posted by John at 4:04 PM | Permalink

Finally! Relief from the Orbital Mind Control Lasers EMF-induced cancers getting you down? Are aliens eating your brain? Aren't you tired of regular, fabric-based clothing? These folks have the latest in tinfoil hats and so much more.

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Blog Rolling Competitions, Brian Jepson: Comparing weblog softwares Slash Squishdot, Thatware, phpweblog, and Nope.

Posted by John at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Inside.com, Salon, others look for new formulas in the online content game: "[INSIDE.com] launched to great media buzz last May, due largely to its founding troika — Spy and New York magazine editor Kurt Anderson, ex-Spin editor Michael Hirschorn and former Brill's Content publisher Deanna Brown — and the stellar talent snagged from publications that range from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair to The Wall Street Journal... The original idea behind Inside.com was simple enough: a Web site that covers film, television, books, newspapers, magazines, and the convergence of technology with the entertainment media. While the content was cool enough, the start-up had analysts scratching their heads over its business model, which forecast 100,000 subscribers — at $19.95 a month or $199 a year — and profitability within three years... Welcome to the real world of cyberspace, where information, no matter how useful, yearns to be free."

Posted by John at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is some talk about Disney World. To put it in context, we haven't been there in two and a half years.

Posted by John at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Writes Michael Wolff of New York Magazine: "I think it's dead. I think it's over with; it's gone. There is no long-term prognosis. The patient has died. There is no future." That's the Web as a content medium he's talking about.

What bothers me about Wolff's comments is that he, and many others, are now running to the other side of the boat and stating that there aren't any Internet business models that will work. That seems just as wrong as suggesting that everything will work, which was how things seemed two years ago.

Typically with a new medium there is a period of wild experimentation before a business model of choice is applied. I don't think we're going to see the exact same thing with the Internet because it is more of a carrier than a medium. Nonetheless, what is happening now, with companies and business models failing, is what happens.

Don't forget that there are companies that either are, or can, make money on the Web, not the least of which are Yahoo, eBay and Amazon. I don't think that anyone should be suprised to see 80-90% of the Web-based media businesses that existed last year to be gone by 2003.

The Internet is far from dead and far from being in some sort of "final" form. If we see real broadband to the curb, the whole equation changes again... though I don't know if broadband will ever hit in the way that a lot of people want it to, as essentially an unlimited pipe that can deliver full motion, full screen video and so on, on-demand.

As a side note, I'm surprised that Wolff talks about a "three-network model" and "90-plus percent share of the market" for the networks. Maybe he is talking about the network mindset here, but the networks haven't had 90% of viewing for many many years now.

Posted by John at 8:40 PM | Permalink

In the early days of the Web, O'Reilly's HTML: The Definitive Guide was the reference for HTML. It's still the best available, but now in its fourth edition, HTML & XHTML is beginning to show its age. While I would still recommend it for Web professionals who need a reference, I'm not sure I would suggest it to folks just starting out.

The art and science of Web creation are going through fundamental changes. HTML is slowly being supplanted by XML, and structure and presentation are finally and irrevocably being separated. I would suggest that within the next three years this book will need to be replaced with a similar broad introduction to Web authoring, something that covers the basics of XML, CSS, XSL and JavaScript, with little mention at all of HTML. But we will see. In the meantime, this is still the book to grab when you have an HTML problem to solve. The appendices, in particular, are invaluable.

Posted by John at 8:54 AM | Permalink

Writes Zack Exley of whosealphabet.com:

I put up an obviously fake version of CNNfn.com with the date set to a year in the future. The point was to show (in a sad but humorous way) what a huge financial crash would look like. Warren Buffet was buying up the last dot coms to run as non-profits for the public good, money managers were getting body guards, and Bush had raised taxes. I changed the CNNfn logo and called the site CNNdn ("down"). Soon, CNN employees were emailing the site around to each other. Immediately CNN threatened to sue and then sued when I didn't take the site down... Yesterday [Feb 1st, 2001] CNN got a restraining order against me... The restraining order says that I have to take down the parody site. Yesterday the site got 50,000 visits. This morning it had already gotten 60,000 when I got the order to take it down.

Posted by John at 2:20 PM | Permalink

Disturbing news today that Pyra, the creators of Blogger, has been forced to lay off its staff. And I make it sound like it's some company somewhere, when it's Ev having to let Meg, pb, Matt, and Jack go. I don't know any of these folks personally, but the energy that emanated from the Blogger project was obvious. It was an enthusiasm for making the world over, and in a small way, despite this setback, they did it.

Blogger is what the Internet has always been about to me: a place of community and all sorts of personal expression. A place to explore, to face the challenging ideas and experiences of others. Things like Blogger and Metafilter made thw world a little bigger for everyone who is part of them.

It is annoying now to read in the business press that the Internet is a "troubled industry" filled with silly ideas that make no money. When something new comes along, no one knows how to make money with it. The imposition of a profit-making system on what had been a publicly funded institution is not all that easy, if one wants to keep something akin to that institution intact. The Internet was not created and did not exist for twenty years to make someone money; it had other, more esoteric goals involving research and military infrastructure.

Very similar things happened to radio in the 1920s. Here was this medium, filled with the enthusiasm of hobbyists, with someone standing in front of a microphone in some barn somewhere playing the violin, and people all over the country were listening. People saw dollar signs, but no one knew how it was going to happen.

It's no different now, except that perhaps we avoid ever leaving that wonderful time of experimentation. The cost of publishing on the Web is low and isn't going to get any higher in real terms. We can all play our violin in the barn, and anyone can listen if they want.

I was always uncomfortable with the dot.com hype. It never made sense to me, but at a certain point in 1999 I stopped questioning it. I think it was the weight of all that money that made it seem possible to reinvent the wheel. Some of the business models that seem to have failed will no doubt return. Blogger should survive.

Posted by John at 10:44 PM | Permalink

My eyes are bugging the hell out of me. But someone is threatening to sue me for slander! I'll bet in a million years you will never be able to find the page in question on my Web site. Even I had forgotten about it. It makes me worry that I am nasty... but that was the old me, right?

Posted by John at 8:55 AM | Permalink